"Not only do seeds come in this whole prism of colours and flavours and shapes, but they are intimately connected and intertwined with story, and lineage and place and people... shedding light on this beautiful co-evolutionary dance that humans and plants have been engaged in for millennia."
~ @rowenwhite , Seed Keeper
The quote above appears in Issue 356 • May/June 2026
Restorying the world > /magazine/issue356-restorying-the-world.html
'Order a print or digital issue' > Visit our Linktree (see bio)
Alternatively
Gift membership or Treat yourself > Visit our Linktree (see bio)
Receive 6 print or digital issues a year' plus you will gain online and/or app access to 50+ years of timeless, thought-leading Resurgence & Ecologist articles in our digital archive with @exacteditions .
Your membership will support the work of The Resurgence Trust, an #educational #charity working to promote ecological #sustainability, #SocialJustice and #spiritual values through the publication of Resurgence & Ecologist #magazine, @theecologist_org news website, and an inspiring programme of events, both online and in person.
#Story #Seeds #People #Plants #Interconnectedness
Only Indigenous ways prevent catastrophic wildfires.
The reason why California and the larger West is facing ecological catastrophe of this size, scale and proportion around fire is NOT just 100+ years of fire suppression by a colonial culture imprinted with thousands of years of undigested trauma of war which has made nearly everything they touch become destructive.
It is the outgrowth of horrifying genocide of settler colonialism, which slaughtered the people of this land and severed the people's capacity to uphold time honored agreements with the land, where fire, land, plant, humans and a million other beings worked together in complex seasonal renewal and co-evolutionary dance.
No matter what we do, how many acres people clear with chainsaws and equipment, how many FireWire communities emerge, how many panels of experts and roundtables are hosted, it's all for nothing if we don't focus on the deeper, enduring cultural solutions to this current problem, which is that most Western people have no idea how to be of Place, to be woven into a cosmology of healthy relationships where we are truly interdependent.
Right now you have fire officials finally speaking the praises of prescribed burning while simultaneously participating in Indigenous erasure.
We've worked hard to organize our community to come together collectively; Moved by the ever present inquiry:
How do we move with the land so the land doesn't move us?
How do we live in a way where we renew and resprout the living agreements held in the soil and seeds beneath our feet. Here in these hills, perhaps those seeds must be cracked open by fire.
This is about being home here, guided by the lands and agreements.
If you are not moving with the land the land will move you.
How do we go from prescribed burns and controlled burns to cultural burns again?
What does it take for us to grow into a community of people who can hold the responsibility of knowing fire as friend on this land? Fires are the renewed, ancient and continued ceremony here on the land.
By nature, fire is both immensely destructive and also incredibly life giving and healing.
( Part two in comments 👇🏽)
Three months ago I lost my mama. I was catapulted into the matriarchal seat in my family on an ocean of tears and heartache.
I have laid with my grief in ways the women before me weren't able to, and have done my best to continue to hold the special bundle of medicines that I have either inherited or called back to our bloodlines through seed song, earth song and prayer.
Some days I feel strong in this third rite of passage, the first was coming of age, the second was becoming a mother, this third cycle is about stepping into the early steps of growing into elderhood. The plants have been my teachers in the cycles of life, and I cherish the wisdom they whisper to me when my knees are weak.
Some days I just long to talk to her about the little things in life like we always did; there are just some things you can only talk to your mama about. I am learning to speak to her in different ways now, but it's still not the same and I surrender to the way this grows me.
Grief still catches me behind the back, in big and small waves at the most unexpected hours. Sometimes it's a hard swallow and sometimes it's a raging flood. My mom often comes to me in song, a fisherman on a beach playing a radio with a song she used to sing to me when I was a baby, a haunting harmony line while driving the river canyon, the impulse to turn a random phrase heard into a lyrical line.
Despite being a twin, I was the only girl, who birthed an only girl and she and I walk and carry our families medicines and memories in the best way we know how, with a sea of ancestors at our back, we are the love of thousands, human and not.
So thankful for these beautiful humans who I have the privilege and honor of working alongside 🪶🦋✨
So thankful for the collaboration between @magic.cabinet and @nativevoicesrising_org to help mobilize resources to our grassroots Native community movements. It's been an honor to provide facilitation to guide a process built from trust and relational brilliance. 🌱🦋🪶
Just back from a heartwarming inspiring trip to SoCal to be with my incredible fam of Indigenous visionaries at Native Voices Rising, for our strategic retreat and then to the @nativegiving conference in Riverside.
Maizie traveled along to cater our strategic retreat with nourishing healthy meals, and as a remote team we got the in person relationship building time needed as we work alongside each other in this movement work.
We hosted several sessions at #napcon26 about relational learning in Indigenous philanthropy with @magic.cabinet and also facilitated a session about Strengthening Solidarity to help mobilize more resources to our grassroots Native community efforts.
It was so good to be in native community all week, and see long time friends and also meet some new folks as well. To hear stories rehydrated of the radical seeds of vision that birthed these grassroots groups, to be amongst intergenerational brilliance that is the foundation of native organizing.
Came home with a bundle of medicines from Acjachemen territory and a spirit strengthened by spending time with the ocean and with movement people I deeply admire and work alongside.
When we move and rematriate stolen resources back into native community and the grassroots and frontline organizations doing critical work in this time of polycrisis, the beneficiaries are EVERYONE on the Earth, including humans and our more than human kin. Native communities are sanctuaries of life and vitality and are doing crucial work in service to live, our ancestors and future descendants. It's an honor to work alongside you all as we embody the prayers and stories of a thriving Indigenous future.
29 years ago, I left home at 17 after graduating as a junior to attend a radically different college than any of my family and friends had ever heard of; an liberatory school where grades and requirements and majors were reimagined, where cross pollination of disciplines and studies was encouraged, where I was encouraged to see relational connections between topics and studies instead of keeping them in boxes. I was one of only a couple of Native students who had ever attended Hampshire College at that point, and it was the fertile soil of this place, the farm and land, the collective of creative top notch weirdos and emerging visionaries where I truly felt liberated and free to grow into the person I am today. Hampshire College Farm was where I first planted my ancestral Haudenosaunee seeds, first stepped into the unconventional rite of passage of being a seedkeeper and story weaver. The interwoven basket of my studies was ethnobotany, and I learned so much, not only at Hampshire ( classes and farm) but with my beloved friends, many of whom are still inspiring me today with their radical visions taken root.
My Div III thesis ( on a floppy disk!!! 😱) was all about the inextricable connection between seeds and culture, and that was the Taproot of the following decades of Indigenous land-based community organizing and movement building alongside so many incredible humans.
Hampshire College was one of several incubators for my courage to live a life outside the box and in service to life, to ancestors, to our communities, to Indigenous futurisms.
Hampshire College announced it would be closing its doors at the end of the year, and we are all devastated and rallying for the Hail Mary to ensure the land and archives at the very least are protected. If there are any other Hampshire alumni out there, sending you all biggest of hugs, I've been so nostalgic and so sad this week since hearing the news. Especially to my F97 comrades. Also I have nearly zero pics from this era!
The world needs more fertile places like Hampshire to re-seed our imaginations.
May our memories and grief sprout new places for this type of radical liberatory learning 🌱✨🪶
My baby boy, my son is 19 today ❤️
Carrying the names of three great grandfathers, Moss Alexander Tehonikonrate was born at home in the early morning hours of 4/7 19 years ago. My goodness, the days were long but the years were short! Hard to believe you're an adult now, having your own adventures away from this open nest.
My Spring baby, tenacious spirit, he has been through a lot in his young life, including learning how to walk again as a teenager after an intense accident put a titanium rod in his leg.
He is gentle but also adventurous, thoughtful and caring in an era where emotional intelligence is rare in young men.
He's been away this last season, working down in Mammoth Lakes, so it's our first birthday apart.
He said as a toddler that he was glad that he " picked me out at the mom store in the sky world" and I couldn't be more thankful for his choice ❤️
Eso tsi Kanoronhkwá Mossy! We love you! Happy birthday! @moss_hellegers
In these troubled times we are living in, my faith lies here, on the edge of the field, where the spirit of the wild is still bursting from the fecund edges
those fertile swaths of resistance, the feral bursts of color and vibrant life emerging from the ditches. Just beyond the Milpa field, a tangle of corn and beans and squash and tomatillos and melons, I hear the enduring song of the deeply wise and resilient native plants who defy the imperial straight and measured rows, the constraints of so many adversities delivered at the hand of colonization and capitalism.
This creative Indigenous essence of this land cannot be extinguished. She rises, sprouts, unfurls, stretches, a celebratory bursting from the seams of wild Mariposa lily, St John's wort, elderberry, milkweed, soaproot, Ceonothus, grindelia, yerba santa and more.... where She sings her seedsong of reclamation, redemption, reconciliation, Rematriation... the restoration of a valiant interdependent way of living where Her glory can celebrated, honored, revered, respected for the Lifegiving sustenance the land so generously offers all.
As I sit here kneeling down, inhaling her fragrance, with knees that bend in hopes to give more than I take.
Co-regulating with Mama Yuba River and the gentle calm of the underwater red newts who are busy laying eggs in the riparian plant life as the days lengthen and warm weather returns. Thankful for their grounding company ❤️
In these dark times, so thankful for our more than human kin, who radiate such a beautiful brilliance to remind us that despite all the harms done by those with broken spirits, that life will always prevail.
In our everyday ceremonies of tending life, we stand strong in our collective refusal to be conquered.
With brave hearts leading, we still remain tender when the world demands hardness. We weave lifeways of connection against all odds where for generations we've endured violent forces that sever, exploit and manufacture division.
We sow seeds into hidden and marginal places, trusting that life will always find the cracks to grow through. We stay close to the earth and to each other, knowing that this is the only way to survive this post-apocalyptic collapse.
This nightmare of modernity was never sustainable and will collapse into the compost pile of the ages; We will tend to that compost and conjure up new life with our songs and our ceremony.
Our Indigenous communities carry the roadmaps forward- we are the living embodiment of ancestral brilliance and resilience, fierce intergenerational revolutionaries tending the gardens of tomorrow.
The revolution is in the fierce and determined insistence that another world is not only possible, but already growing.
In solidarity with the Earth and each other, we are the seeds our ancestors planted.
We are the future they loved into being.
Well those who know say that dark humor is the 6th stage of grief, and I'm eternally grateful for my friends and family who send me funny memes and videos to keep me laughing in this heavy season of grief.
My mom was one of the funniest humans, and so this meme drop is for her, and for all of us dissociating and dreaming our way through intense times🦋 Laughter is medicine.
This man sent me a beautiful love letter today, even though he's hundreds of miles away for work. He knows my love language is rooted in these sorts of timeless gifts ❤️
We have birthed babies and buried loved ones together, across 25 years, he's been my best friend, my forever human, practicing a type of liberated love that allows us to be completely who we are, supported and cared for. These last few years have been deeply healing for us and I look forward to many more adventures, even amidst the challenges of this season of life.
"The point of marriage is not to create a quick commonality by tearing down all boundaries; on the contrary, a good marriage is one in which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude, and thus they show each other the greatest possible trust. A merging of two people is an impossibility, and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development. But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvelous living side-by-side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky.”
-Rainer Maria Rilke
He's been there for me in my darkest of hours and thankfully also born witness to my best moments as well. I wouldn't be who I am without his love. Kanoronhkwá my love 💕
