Just as land can hold memory of what happened on its soil, so too can the human body. We all hold the capacity to collect stories and house them in a unique narrative that is written both in our minds and in our bodies. Whether we know it or not, as we tell ourselves stories and pass those down to our children and their children, a sort of literary DNA is created over time: a tapestry of tales that we take with us, like wallpaper on the inside of our souls.
Just as wallpaper layered over time can create its own texture and map of the lives housed in the walls it adorns, so too can our elders, through their wealth of experience, provide a deeper understanding of where we’ve been — and, hopefully, help guide us to where we need to go. To that end, powerful stories from eight Native female elders, all from different tribes, were captured and written in the book Worlds within Us: Wisdom and Resilience of Indigenous Women Elders, from Spirit Aligned Leadership and published by Guaní Press. Braiding Sweetgrass author Robin Wall Kimmerer calls the narratives in this book “rich and varied, gentle and fierce at the same time,” and notes that the elders’ lives “offer guidance on a path of healing, resilience and courage.”
Indigenous women have always held our communities together. We grow tall individually, but like elder trees in a forest, we maintain a deeply entwined thicket of roots under the surface. It is a world of our own, where we organize our offshoots and their seedlings, and visualize the future of our common children. It is from this vein that we wondered what could happen when Indigenous women elders intentionally align our spirits and together represent a connected circle. A whole movement of spiritually aligned Native women elders has grown from this question, and a first wave of legacy women, always the core of our Indigenous resilience, emerged.
– Katsi Cook, in her Introduction to Worlds within Us
To celebrate the national release of Worlds within Us, Mohonk Consultations is hosting a book launch/presentation on October 6 at 3 p.m. at the Mountain House Conference Center, which will feature several of the distinguished Native elders who have offered to share some of the stories in the book that give an intimate look into their lives and the worlds and histories their lives encompass. Program speakers include Loretta Afraid of Bear Cook (Oglala Lakota), Wakérakats:te Louise Herne (Bear Clan, Mohawk Nation) and Tekatsi:tsia’kwa Katsi Cook (Wolf Clan, Mohawk Nation, New York). Those in attendance will be able to hear stories from these respected elders and also purchase copies of the book.
Asked why Mohonk Consultations chose this particular book to highlight, board member Patty Matteson says that the answer “is multilayered and driven by our understanding of the ways in which Earth is under siege, from the ways people treat it and create extreme environmental stresses to all of our ecosystems as well.” She notes that the “book itself is groundbreaking in terms of its focus on the wisdom of Indigenous women elders and the way it provides them a doorway to expressing their voices and telling their life stories.”
These stories are wide-ranging and include how different Native nations have fought to protect their land and way of life from hostile government and corporate forces, as well as how women pass down the art of herbal healing or weaving to the next generation. There are powerful stories about survival in circumstances where Native children were forced from their homes to attend government and church boarding schools in an effort to fracture these clans and nations. But love and resistance returned them to each other and to the Earth.
In her introduction to the book, Cook writes, “Being from a place and living in place, as Indigenous elders, we know how strongly we are formed by the natural world. We are embodied in those roots, which have been cut and scarred but have not been severed.” She says that weaving is the way of embodiment for Yvonne Peterson, Toon Nee Mu Sh, a Chehalis elder dedicated to continuing her people’s traditional weaving.
Peterson’s story highlights how weaving is a cultural knowledge, linking current generations to the past and to the future, connecting both their history and their language. She discusses her nation’s fight for fishing rights, which took them all the way to the US Supreme Court. “I see us moving forward within my lifetime to protect our plants, the way we eat them, use them for medicine and ceremonies, industry and weaving,” she says. A professor at Evergreen College in Washington State, Peterson knows that the roots of her educational work are in the consciousness of that relationship. “We begin with a prayer to recognize the teachings of the tree people. In our area, the trees are seen as the first teachers. For every tree, there’s a teaching that they give to us.”
Another story in Worlds within Us centers on Sara James, a Gwich’in leader from Arctic Village in northern Alaska who is now internationally recognized for her advocacy on behalf of her people in their struggle against oil development of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the breeding grounds for the caribou herds. “We have been a strong people, because we could live on the land,” she says. “We are more settled now, but we still live with the land. I remember with my mom back when I was growing up out in the land. We had everything there. And today we’ve still got everything there.”
James was sent out by her elder chiefs to represent their concern that oil development would destroy their caribou herds. This was James’ quest for three decades, and her inspired advocacy and supporters have helped to keep corporations at bay.
“The Porcupine caribou herd is my life. It makes me who I am. My people grew up with caribou, depending on them for everything. In return, we also take care of the caribou and the environment so that our caribou are healthy. Our elders always say that we’re in the caribou’s heart and the caribou is in our heart, which means that they take care of us and, in return, we take care of them. We are proud of who we are, the caribou and us.”
The stories woven through this narrative all point to one central theme: that we are connected, to each other and to the Earth. We are of the Earth, and there is both power and fragility in that, if we do not act responsibly. The wisdom offered by some of these Native elders is a precious resource in and of itself.
Louisa Finn, Mohonk Consultations board chair, says that it was the organization’s mission to support the interrelationship of all life on Earth, and practical means for sustainability. She adds that “Keith Smiley, our founder, felt an urgency about communicating that humans were just a part of the whole ecology of life, not central to it. Indigenous people the world over view all beings as interrelated, including animals, birds, insects, trees, plants, rocks, land. They have practices that maintain the balance of all creation and preserve life on Earth. In North America, they endured the end of their world many times over, yet survived. These elder women and mothers bring the wisdom of hope, healing and transformation. Through their worldview and their lived experiences, they can help us shift into a more felt and sacred relationship to our own lives, offering guidance that speaks to our own fears about our world.”
Both Finn and Matteson are excited about the upcoming program and book launch and believe that it will be an empowering event for all that attend. “I hope that our audience will find new and healthy ways of understanding and living our lives: ones that are deeply connected to and important to our times and the society in which we live,” says Matteson. “It’s an honor for Mohonk Consultations and Mohonk Mountain House and our audience to be able to listen and to ask questions of these strong women leaders.”
The book will be hot off the presses and available at the event and in the Mohonk Mountain House Gift Shop, and also on Amazon beginning October 7. To learn more about the event or to purchase a ticket, go to https://mohonk-consultations.org/conferences-and-forums/resilient-communities/worldswithinus. To learn more about Mohonk Consultations’ work, visit https://mohonk-consultations.org.
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