Our Purpose and Principles

Purpose

Through the lens of culture as first medicine, we work to strengthen the cultural identities of children, youth, adults, and elders by creating spaces to maintain and practice indigenous spirituality, including ancestral medicines, languages, art, and land-based traditions.

Core Values and Principles

Despite the attempts of colonial forces to erode history and truth, it is known that Indigenous Peoples around the globe had established livelihood systems that fostered relationships between land and its inhabitants, that not only were regenerative and innovative, but that sustained thriving ecologies, families and communities for thousands of years.

Therefore we must design systems to replace the current systems in place that are not working well, and learn and expand on the scientific advancements of our ancestors.

The center and its collective of youth and elder are working to design projects/programs that are:

(1) systemic and multigenerational;
(2) cultural/spiritual and;
(3) decolonial

Culture as First Medicine

Cultural/spiritual: all of our projects and collective members are grounded and embody indigenous values, cosmovisions, paradigms, and lifeways.

We uphold a cultural strategy as part of our core strategies because we believe that the health, safety and healing of our communities comes from the strengthening of our cultural identities and the re-establishment of our indigenous ways of being. Our indigenous spiritualities also guide us to develop in a way that is integrated with our cultures, systems, paradigms, and our Original Instructions. These traditional philosophies guide us on how to live in right relation with Land, with our families and communities, with our bodies and cells, with all natural ecosystems…with all our relations.

De-Colonizing

We have a commitment to hold each other accountable to whether we are operating from colonial values and life ways or whether we are truly in alignment with our indigenous values, ways of life, and cultures.

Our individual and collective transformation requires of us to show up as our true authentic selves. Truth requires that we be honest about who we are, as opposed to how we have been conditioned to be, to think, to behave, to live. Our elder Tat Balam reminds us: every moment we are navigating colonial systems, beliefs and ways of life, therefore our commitment to decolonize is a constant practice of reflecting and asking ourselves if we are living truthfully according to the original teachings of our Grandmothers and Grandfathers. Our elder JR Laiwa reminds us: “how we take care of ourselves is by DOING,” so we must not only talk, but also embody what we speak of, in our day-to-day, as individuals first, with our own families, and with community.

Systems and Multi-Generational

Our projects are designed using systems thinking, and with a vision for the future generations, so not just the impact we can have 3 years from now, but the impact we will have 300 years from now.

Using systems thinking allows us to consider how systems interact and influence each other; something our ancestors were experts in. This is because our cultural and spiritual ways teach us to have visions for the future that go beyond one generation.

When we reflect on the impact that our work can have, we think like our ancestors did: we consider how our actions in the present will impact our future generations hundreds of years from today. And we also understand that multigenerational work is SLOW on purpose, so we continue to plant seeds that our future relatives will see bloom.

Looking to the future

For the future we envision a collectively-owned and governed land space, grounded in our ancestral values, cosmovisions, and spiritualities, including an indigenous medicine laboratory, an art center, an education center, and place to grow our traditional foods & medicines and cultural land-based practices.