Just as land can hold memory of what happened on its soil, so too can the human body. We all hold the capacity to collect stories and house them in a unique narrative that is written both in our minds and in our bodies. Whether we know it or not, as we tell ourselves stories and pass those down to our children and their children, a sort of literary DNA is created over time: a tapestry of tales that we take with us, like wallpaper on the inside of our souls.
Just as wallpaper layered over time can create its own texture and map of the lives housed in the walls it adorns, so too can our elders, through their wealth of experience, provide a deeper understanding of where we’ve been — and, hopefully, help guide us to where we need to go. To that end, powerful stories from eight Native female elders, all from different tribes, were captured and written in the book Worlds within Us: Wisdom and Resilience of Indigenous Women Elders, from Spirit Aligned Leadership and published by Guaní Press. Braiding Sweetgrass author Robin Wall Kimmerer calls the narratives in this book “rich and varied, gentle and fierce at the same time,” and notes that the elders’ lives “offer guidance on a path of healing, resilience and courage.”
Indigenous women have always held our communities together. We grow tall individually, but like elder trees in a forest, we maintain a deeply entwined thicket of roots under the surface. It is a world of our own, where we organize our offshoots and their seedlings, and visualize the future of our common children. It is from this vein that we wondered what could happen when Indigenous women elders intentionally align our spirits and together represent a connected circle. A whole movement of spiritually aligned Native women elders has grown from this question, and a first wave of legacy women, always the core of our Indigenous resilience, emerged.…