New! Returning Communities Project for Intentional Communities

We are excited to offer a new project called Returning Communities that seeks voluntary acts of reparative justice and land return from intentional communities, communes, ecovillages, and land projects.

The project comes about as a result of multi-year experiences with various land projects who offer strong ideals of Indigenous support and decolonization, but who often fail to meet these values in real-world relationships.

Returning Communities (home page on ATHP) offers inspiration and resources to help bridge this gap between ideals and reality.  Join us!

We Don’t Know the Stories Here

This land does not belong to us. It is not ours.

We don’t know the stories here.

Our ignorant bliss offends and desecrates.

We remain an enemy to all life.

This is a hard understanding because it asks us to stop and consider how blindly we walk on stolen land that is not ours. We are newcomers to lands that have been lived and loved on for many thousands of years and since creation itself. Continue reading

Ancestral Recovery Yields Pre-Neolithic Calendar

seasonalcalendarpublic

Download the calendar poster (21 in x 28 in) in PDF format.

This image represents an annual cycle of deeply held, seasonal activities and movements (lifeway) for at least one band of moon-worshiping,  Aquitainian (proto-Basque) speaking hunter gatherers of the Atlantic margin of France (see map) prior to their displacement by neolithic cultures.  This information has been gathered over the last fifteen years through a process of ancestral recovery. Continue reading

The Uncomfortable, Unavoidable, Troublesome & Totally Inconvenient Understanding About Indigenous Language, Culture & Identity

Our language is like a pearl inside a shell. The shell is like the people that carry the language. If our language is taken away, then that would be like a pearl that is gone. We would be like an empty oyster shell.
Yurranydjil Dhurrkay, Galiwin’ku, North East Arnhem Land

whitepeopleshellsThe understanding shared in the quote above spells trouble for spiritual seeking settlers, neo-pagans, and those pursuing ancestral recovery work.

Indigenous knowledge about the living power and presence of Indigenous languages creates visible boundaries that give us insight into what we have lost as individuals from a people, from a place – and how modern equivocating of spiritual practices or cultural re-imagining based in english are missing an integral component to their wholeness, connection, and honesty. Continue reading