convening Agenda

Tribal Affiliation: Otomi- Toltec
Representing: The Fountain
Residing in: New York

I’m Mindahi Bastida from the Otomí Toltec peoples, Mexico. Wisdom ancestral and modern wisdom keeper.

Representing: The A Team Foundation - https://www.ateamfoundation.org/
Residing in: North Carolina, USA

Anna Van Der Hurd is the chief executive officer of The A Team Foundation, a U.K. based philanthropic organisation that invests in food and land projects that are ecologically, economically and socially conscious, contributing to the wider movement that envisions a future where real food is produced by enlightened agriculture and access to it is equal. Anna has been responsible for the Foundation’s strategic direction since its inception in 2009.

Tribal affiliation: Mohawk, Bear Clan
Representing: I am involved with the Waterfall Unity Alliance, which is based in the Mohawk Valley in central NY. www.waterfallunityalliance.com
Residing in: Akwesasne Mohawk Nation

Sekon (Greetings), I have been a land defender, protector of our mother earth since I was a young man. I was involved with the White Roots of Peace and travelled all over to promote the message of Peace. I am involved with stopping the pipelines from happening and still live and uphold my traditional sovereign rights and duties.

Tribal affiliation: Beaver Clan, Tuscarora nation, Haudenosaunee Confederacy
Representing: Collective Wisdoms; collectivewisdoms.org

Kristine Marie Hill is a member of the Beaver Clan, Tuscarora nation, Haudenosaunee Confederacy. As part of her lineage within the Confederacy, she takes her responsibility of peacekeeping and respecting the land and waterways of her peoples seriously. She has been practicing indigenous peacekeeping for over 25 years in the context of the educational and familial systems of her home community on the Tuscarora reservation, serving the next generation’s re-acquisition of their language, traditions, and ceremonies. She is the proud mother of four adult children and six grandchildren, several of whom are speaking the Tuscarora language that her grandmother was forced to forget in the Carlisle boarding school.

Representing: The Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights

Attorney working with tribal governments, municipal governments, and community groups to create binding local laws recognizing the rights of nature, ecosystems, and species. Also working on projects creating ecosystems that "own" themselves in Nova Scotia, Canada; and in Spokane, Washington; and on land easements that recognize the enforceable rights of nature. Wrote the first rights of nature law, and author of almost all of the three dozen rights of nature laws in the U.S., assisted with the drafting of the Ecuadorian constitutional rights of nature provisions.

Representing: One Small Planet; onesmallplanet.org

Hello, my name is Brad and I look forward to building relationship with each of you. Remembering and exploring right relationship to Land has been a life long journey. Presently I support the operation of the One Small Planet fund, a philanthropic fund supporting largely front line and indigenous organizations to preserve and care for what is vital. One area of exploration within this fund is asking the question, how can we facilitate Land out of extractivism and into long term regenerative stewardship? We are working with a number of communities exploring this question and learning as we go. Some of my background includes urban and rural Land trusts, local government sustainability and resilience, environmental education and literacy, rites of passage, community liaison, bridge builder, death doula, and a variety of spiritual lineages I gratefully walk within.

Representing: Kalliopeia Foundation, https://kalliopeia.org/
Residing in: Los Angeles, CA

I serve as a board member of Kalliopeia Foundation (whose mission is reconnecting the threads of ecology, culture, and spirituality). I am also an attorney with a private practice in Los Angeles, California where I focus on Immigration and Civil Litigation. I am interested in the rights of nature, particularly in the intersection of rights of nature and land back/land access. On a personal level, I carry within me a deep-seated heritage of reverence for the land. My interest in this convening is borne out of a desire to gather with, listen to, and learn from kindred spirits as we contemplate a shift from the fiction of private land ownership to a relational model rooted in stewardship, equity, and reciprocity.

Tribal affiliation: Winnemem Wintu
Representing: Indian Cultural Organization and Sawalmem
Residing in: Redding CA

My name is Michael Preston and I grew up on the lands of the Mechoopda Maidu (Chico), Wintu (Redding, Mt. Shasta), and the Ohlone (Bay Area.) I’ve been connected to sacred site protection and restoration my whole life via Panther Meadows on Mt. Shasta and numerous other sites in our Winnemem Wintu cosmology. We are in alliance with all other peoples working to protect their sacred sites, culture, and water systems. I do the best I can in continuing the work of those who came before me in maintaining spiritual protocols on our homelands and water protection/sacred site restoration efforts. I come here to share our work and how it has evolved and to meet like-minded individuals. Hi Chala Beskin

Representing: www.highhope.eco
Residing in: High Hope: A Sanctuary for Retreat

As a child of immigrants in exile, I have lived the destiny gene of wandering to deepen connections of belonging. Growing up in a combo of vast wilderness and/or cement jungles in 3 different countries, the wisdom of nature became home and sanctuary.

As co-founder and steward of Fossil Rim Wildlife Center, a wildlife preserve for endangered species; Eco-Naturaleza, a trio of coastal rainforest micro-enterprise projects with the Noble peoples of Panama and, High Hope: A Sanctuary for Retreat, each of these earth relations have Guided me to Listen ever more deeply. In partnership with these land-based teachings, their direction has been the Guidance towards conservancies-in-perpetuity.

I am fueled through curiosity about realms that exist parallel to and beyond the visible world of physical matter while building healthy associations of relations of mutual reciprocity between spirit and matter.

I am responding to this invitation, through long relations with Commonweal and Cassandra, as well as Guidance to participate. I look forward to collaborate and delve further into the nature of our collective human “story,” and the nature of possibility for mutually reciprocal living systems through the philanthropy of Spirit.

Representing: I'm not officially representing the Dominican Sisters of Mission San Jose but I do so in heart and spirit. www.msjdominicans.org
Residing in: East Bay, CA

I am a Dominican Sister who began her religious life 58 years ago in Mission San Jose at our Motherhouse that resides just behind the original Mission. The spirit of the Ohlone Indians continues to bless us and our land. How to honor this truth continues to be a question I hold in my heart. We have been inspired by Pope Francis and his profound reflection in Laudato SI calling us to hear the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor. We have grown in our consciousness and care for Mother Earth--honoring our 100 -200 year old olive trees, our 16 bee hives overseen by our sisters, the creation of a community garden and a strong commitment to solar energy, drawing from our wells to water the gardens, attentive composting etc.. My journey with the Nuns and Nones has awakened me to see the precious gift of land not as a commodity but rather a gift to be held/honored responsibly and shared. I come longing to have my mind and heart stretched and to explore ways to expand and deepen our Congregation's relationship with our Ohlone sisters and brothers. I am so grateful for the opportunity to join you and learn from and with you.

Representing: Co-Founder & Director of Movement Building for the Nuns & Nones Land Justice Project
Residing in: Tiwa Territory in Albuquerque, New Mexico; previously Ramaytush and Chochenyo Ohlone lands in the Bay Area,CA.

Sarah Bradley is a community organizer, educator, and renegade theologian committed to structural and cultural transformation in service of Life. In her work in the Nuns & Nones Land Justice Project, she works to support a 'Just Transition' on lands owned by Catholic sisters; that is, creating new land legacies rooted in racial and ecological healing. With technical and movement partners, her team is building the political and spiritual will for the return, decommodification, and regeneration of land in service of racial justice and climate resilience. Sarah comes to the the work of land justice through years of cultivating relationship within religious communities and movement spaces; supporting multiracial, multi-lineage community building in service of collective liberation; and examining her own roots and journey with "unsettling" / belonging to place. She is still very much early on in this journey and is grateful for the opportunity to continue learning with comrades along the way. Her past work was focused on cultivating connection and power through learning community and popular education, first through Open Master's and then Alt*Div, a 2-year experiment in a grassroots alternative to divinity school for artists, activists, and community builders.

Residing in: Sebastopol and Redding

Greetings, I am honored to be among you in this convening. I am an Askeazi and Scandinavian descent non-Native guest in primary relationship with Winnemem Wintu Lands and leadership. I am committed to the rematriation of Indigenous time and land as a spiritual and ecological imperative. I am part of a team working on and learning about the development of appropriate legal structures and creative funding methods for the transition of lands specifically to tribes without federal recognition.

Representing: The Fountain https://thefountain.earth
Residing in: Northern California

Jyoti Ma is the founder of The Fountain (https://thefountain.earth) Its' mission is to restore an economic model that is based on reciprocity and collaboration guided by Nature and the Sacred. Currently, as a Delegate of the Mother Earth Delegation of United Original Nations, a collaboration with the Fountain has grown, creating a global movement for and with the Earth that is ready to activate the New Day. The Fountain is working closely with elders in Madagascar, Colombia and the Black Hills. In these efforts models are being created. Part of its mission is to restore the Original Caretakers to their territories. To protect and restore, regenerate the Earth's Sacred Sites following the original protocols of those territories. The Fountain model sees sacred economy flowing into sacred territories and into the cultures of the Original Peoples that care for those territories.

Representing: Sustainable Economies Law Center, theSELC.org
Residing in: El Cerrito, CA

Hello everyone! My name is Alejandra Cruz Olveda. I’m a staff attorney at the Sustainable Economies Law Center focusing on land return, food and farm, and our Radical Real Estate Law School. I have a background in providing free legal services to poor and working people and community organizing. I am learning from leaders in the movement for land justice while providing legal support to tribes, collectives, and black and indigenous land stewards.

Representing: ilali.global and commonweal.org
Residing in: Sebastopol, CA

I don’t know exactly when my story began.

My body remembers brown women from a long time ago, up to their waists in water, softly moving to the rhythm of the ocean. My body also remembers leather-faced, towheaded men, equidistant from mountain and sea, preparing the kill so the kin could eat. All of these nameless ancestors knew the elementals, spirit plants and animals, and celestials – some intimately. These beings were offered song and food and blood and shells. All of this my body remembers.

I believe this is where I was first dreamed into being.

First grade was a significant year in my life. I pester my parents to take me to learn how to meditate – I watch them as they sit and I want to learn. They relent and I bring offerings of flowers, fruit, and one of my precious silver dollars to my godfather who then initiates me. Later, when walking to and back from school, I gently float my new mantra throughout my being.

Shortly after this initiation, I am reciting a Christmas poem at the Daguhoy Hall, a Filipino boarding house and community center in downtown Stockton, CA. The Daguhoy Hall is affiliated with the Legionarios del Trabajo, a fraternal organization with roots in the southern islands of the Philippines, and it provides a much needed space for migrant farmworkers, laborers, and Filipino families to come together. It’s Christmas Eve, and my grandmother and another community elder stand behind me encouraging me to speak. Children are expected to perform. I am in front of a microphone looking out at over a hundred people situated about the perimeter of the room. I forgot the copy of my poem in the car, but I am lucky that I have it memorized. This performance is formative for me: The community listens closely, cheers, and throws money. It is here that I learn the importance of lineage, story, and the sacred movement of community. All of this is valued.

It is, of course, the migrant farm working elders, the poor bachelors who live above the hall and save their coins in glass jars, who throw the most money. Always.

I come from a lineage of organizers, storytellers, educators, and healers. Land-listeners and land-tenders.

As I grow older the change agent, educator, poet, mystic, and healer in me finally agree to align and mutually amplify each other. Perhaps they tire of the subtle and not-so-subtle violence of modern day compartmentalization. Perhaps they act out of due respect for my lived experience as I am now in my forties. Or perhaps this move has little to do with me at all and more with what is being called forth by our current existential crises. I am at once big and powerful as well as tiny and fragile. Perhaps it is my soul in conversation with the cosmos that aligns all these dimensions of who I am because it is time for bold, heart-felt, collective experiments. Perhaps all of this is what will enable me to become a venerable ancestor someday. I believe so – my body remembers this, too.

Tribal affiliation: tongva and ajachmem and rarámuri
Residing in: santa rosa, ca

miiyuyam, hollywood ndn, considered extinct because our homelands of los angeles are fabulous. we are working hard to carry mandate of creator to care for our homelands. that is the sovereignty i live for. here to listen to like minded peeps.

Residing in: Rome, Italy

Greetings. Very happy to be joining you as the graphic recorder for this event, to have the opportunity to use my skills and experience to capture the conversations and ideas that will arise during our discussions, to present those ideas visually in order to help move our work towards concrete outcomes.

Representing: Sustainable Economies Law Center, theselc.org; Co-Director of the Radical Real Estate Law School
Residing in: Oakland, CA (Huichin)

Hello, my name is Dorian, and I am a burgeoning attorney so-to-speak. I was born and raised in an agricultural valley in the Chihuahuan Desert, where a border conscripted much of our relationship to land. I later went on to work in agriculture (which I ironically never had much of a relationship to coming from a landless family), where I managed land projects for years before undertaking a legal education to better understand the entanglement of settler land regimes. Today I dedicate all my work in ushering life-affirming BIPOC futures underpinned by land. I live in Huichin (Oakland, CA), by way of coming to work in the country’s most “productive” agricultural state.

Tribal affiliation: Pipil Nahua
Representing: Director—Decolonize Race https://www.alliance4felixcove.org/
Residing in: Coast Miwok Territory, Point Reyes

Ámate Cecilia Pérez is a decolonizing Pipil Nahua from Kuzcatlan (El Salvador) and the founding director of Decolonizing Race and a member of the advisory council for the Alliance for Felix Cove(A4FC). A4FC advocates for the protection and restoration of the only remaining 19th century Tomalko (Coast Miwok Tomales Bay)-built home at Point Reyes National Seashore. The Alliance aims to re-indigenize the ancestral homelands of the Felix Family—the last Tomalko family to live on the western shores of Tomales Bay at Felix Cove known as Laird’s Landing. Ámate is an anti-racism, equity and liberation trainer and healer, social justice warrior and a writer. Ms. Perez has directed multiple organizations and held senior positions, including executive director, in civil rights, national and international organizations. Prior to her social justice experience, Ámate worked as a print and radio journalist. Ms. Perez and her family fled the Salvadoran civil war in the early 1980s. Ámate Perez is queer, a martial artist and mother. She now lives in Inverness on unseeded and occupied Coast Miwok and Tamal Indian territory.

Representing:

Residing in: Hudson, NY

Christopher Lindstrom is the co-founder of CyclEffect Regenerative Ventures, a multi-stakeholder venture cooperative that invests and funds systemic change, regenerative community, agricultural progress, and the evolution of consciousness. In addition to Kiss the Ground, Christopher serves on the board of directors for Solar CITIES and the Foundation of Agricultural Integrity, and formerly volunteered with the E. F. Schumacher Society, and served on the board of the David Rockefeller Fund, and Slow Money.

Tribal affiliation: Yoeme & Ashkenazi
Representing: Philosophy of Universal Beingness within the Whole
Residing in: Moriarty, NM

I come to this because I look at my work in the world as being healing and teaching about working with land and water and all of nature in a sacred way and to be in alignment with that sacredness in a good way. I've long been a supporter of helping peoples from many different backgrounds with peaceful cooperation between humans and nature. I help them come into sacred alignment with the elements of nature, such as earth, water, air, and fire. I look at the long term effects when we are in consumptive relationships. The dominant culture is currently addicted to consumption, not only of nature, but of humans as well. I help people restructure and realign their relationships to be ones of reciprocity. All of this is to help people fall back in love with Earth Mother for the long term.

Tribal affiliation: Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian)
Representing: Royal Family of Hawaii, crownofhawaii.com
Residing in: Honolulu, Hawaii

I have actively been involved in restorative justice issues related to native Hawaiian rights for over 40 years as a cultural practitioner, academic and professional facilitator.

Representing:
Residing in: Sebastopol, CA - Lands of the Southern Pomo, Coast Miwok

Prayer and activism are woven together in my love for the land and my dedication to a healing relationship with place. My life's path has led me to work at the threshold of land transitions and to cofound an organization called the Center for Ethical Land Transition where I am able to bring a two decade long real estate career to bear in the land justice movement. The deeper questions of indigenous repair and reconciliation have always been with me and I am honored to be in solidarity with Native friends and allies where we learn to trust each other on the front lines of systems change. I also work shoulder to shoulder with Black, Latinx, Queer and other multi-racial led land justice movements bringing culturally affirming real estate support as together we seek to unravel colonial patterns expressed through commodification of land and displacement of people. The Center for Ethical Land Transition brings a land centric approach to land transition that centers equity, justice and repair for communities generationally displaced from secure access to land.

I am honored to be one of the facilitators for this event and to learn more deeply from this diverse group.

Tribal affiliation: Ashkenazi
Representing: One Light Global www.onelightglobal.org
Residing in: Stamford, Connecticut (Unceded Sinawoy Land) and Southern Vermont (Unceded Wabanaki & N'dakina Land)

My work in the world centers on reconnection of humanity to our authentic nature prior to societal domestication, our family of all species, and to place. This vision of a world in which the majority of humans remember how to live in collaboration and equity with all life has led to years as a Buddhist nun, a decade working with the incarcerated, veterans, bereaved, dying, and others in individual and collective trauma healing work, and for the last 7 years founding a humanitarian organization and working with refugees internationally and indigenous communities in the USA in direct aid and infrastructure capacities as well as collaboration that integrates technology with cultural wisdom to co-create regenerative models for how humanity can thrive in our rapidly changing world. It seems clear the root of much suffering in the modern world is a direct result of the dominant culture's disconnection from mother earth and misguided relations with all life. I am honored to gather with this community to learn and seek ways of liberating all life from an ownership paradigm, fostering reparations and reconciliation, and planting seeds of a better future for our beloved planet. I am honored to be one of the facilitators bringing together this inspiring community of people and to witness what comes of our shared time together. Thank you for being here.

Representing: Regenerative Earth - regenerativeearth.org
Residing in: Boulder, CO & Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico

My work focuses on helping humans to heal their relationship to the natural world, inclusive of my own, and to find pathways to heal environments that have been negatively impacted. I also work to protect ecosystems that are in danger of unsustainable development. I collaborate with communities, governments, and foundations in taking a systems approach to conservation, so that both the ecosystem and communities thrive together. I believe that one of the main drivers of environmental destruction is a belief that we are separate from nature and that we own and can do whatever we want with it. I would like to be part of a movement that inspires an understanding of our interconnection to all life and deeply respects and honors all species as sovereign. I am one of the facilitators and curators of this event.