Walking in
Right Relationship
These are the compass points I return to — the ways of being that root my work in care, reciprocity, and reverence for all we’re connected to.
What Grounds My Work
At the heart of my work is a commitment to reciprocity, relational accountability, and community-rooted transformation. I believe environmental and social change efforts must begin with respect for people, place, culture, the web of life itself, and the nature of cyclical existence.
I recognize that all life is connected. Healthy systems — natural or human generated — require mutual care, shared responsibility, and recognition of our roles within this complex, connected ecosphere.
Interdependence
I uplift long-marginalized cultural knowledge systems as vital to human healing, survival, and regeneration. I believe in restoring voice and power to once-silenced people living within these natural systems.
Cultural Continuity
Demonstrated by great leaders in today’s societies of First Peoples across the world, ‘right relations’ refers to considerate engagement, taking responsibility to act with kindness, reverence, and reciprocity.
Right Relations
I believe that stories are a form of care. They connect generations, teach ethics, reveal truths, and nourish relationships. Sharing stories, especially those rooted in lived experience, is central to how I work.
Stewardship Through Story
I will always be accountable to the communities I have served. That requires transparency in funding, humility in partnerships, and an eagerness to aid visionaries on their path toward aligned leadership.
Integrity in Practice
What Right Relations Means to Me
Right relations is a life practice that involves showing up again and again for people who have been historically unseen or purposefully hidden. It means checking your actions for respect and honor of everyone you encounter.
Reality is that most people are still recovering from centuries of harm to our families — harm that has trickled down through family relations and antiquated bureaucratic structures to affect us personally in very sensitive, hurtful ways.
Revere the Oldest Ways
A discipline of right relations demands that we all listen more than we speak. It requires us to slow down, pay attention, and build trust over time. At every step of the way we examine the power we hold and use it responsibly and honorably, sometimes even operating by another culture’s definition of what is honorable.
In my own path, right relations has meant:
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Respecting Tribal sovereignty and prioritizing Indigenous-led leadership
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Advocating for land return or indiscriminate land access where possible
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Supporting healing practices that honor culture and community autonomy
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Creating funding and engagement strategies that flow from lived and inherited wisdom
A Personal Note
My great-grands protected themselves by destroying their connections to Indigenous America but they privately kept the values and traditions. In my childhood that looked like stories with cooking and weaving, observing our larger familyhood with nature inside the home or in special places in the country.
My school friends told me I would go to hell for interpreting dreams, knowing that animals have spirits, and many more wholesome beliefs about existence.
Lacking a clear identity, I sought and was given self-defining insights from friends in tribal communities, from Indigenous Elders, and tribally connected professional mentors.
I take seriously my responsibility to uphold the teachings of all of these, my relatives. I also support the return of rightful decision-making authority over land for the communities whose lifeways protect all of us.
I welcome accountability, and I remain committed to learning good ways, unlearning less helpful ways, and practicing right relations every day.
This work is never finished. Every day is another chance to choose respect, to listen well, and to show up aligned with the truths I carry.
When I speak of ancestral lands, I speak in collaboration.
I believe land acknowledgments are most meaningful when they’re delivered with context, responsibility, and direct connection to past and present peoples — not as a one-off performance, but as an intentional recognition of journeying.
For that reason, I don’t offer a general land acknowledgment on this website. Instead, I offer them in person when invited and when I’ve taken the time to learn whose ancestral lands I’m on, what that means today, and how to encourage right relations with traditional people who still carry the weight of care.
I support any effort to move beyond acknowledgment into action, including full autonomous land return, Indigenous leadership, and respectful co-stewardship of Mother Earth.
