Hi Friend,

First: thank you to everyone who downloaded our Thanksgiving resource guide!

Second, a quick announcement: We are starting our annual Wonder and Preparation: An Advent Series for Winter Solstice this Wednesday. Come to one or all three sessions. We gather around sunset (east coast time) and move between song, silence, sharing, and reflecting on preparing for winter via learning about how our fellow creatures prepare for winter - and let that speak to us as we ourselves prepare for the darkest day of the year!

And now….

I am delighted to introduce you to Strawberry Wisdom. We could say that Krissy is launching this new non-profit - but it would be more accurate to say that she is following this particular energy, one which has a life of its own. A life that she and others are tending, and have been tending, for years, for generations, for millennia.

A super short introduction might go as follows: “Strawberry Wisdom is uplifting, supporting, and furthering ‘heart medicine.’ This first strawberry patch, so to speak, is aiming to reach those close to Krissy, especially in her Tuscarora community. The first three primary programs are 1) Culture Keepers Care Circle, 2) Both Ends of Life and 3) Indigenous Insights, which furthers the work of her late son, Dr Montgomery Hill. Reciprocity, support, and moving with an appropriate rhythm and enabling the heart medicine to work internally to the organization as well as externally are all important dynamics. We think you might find this work meaningful and want to engage in various ways.”

And while that is probably a decent-enough introduction, we also want to invite you into at least some of the nuance and the deeper thinking within it. Both to understand Strawberry Wisdom better and because in thinking alongside us into some of these nuances, you might be prompted to think of these bigger questions that lay within the nuances for yourself. Such questions include: ‘what is heart medicine’; how do we engage with intergenerational wisdom’; ‘how do we engage with the legacies of colonization’; ‘how do we move between traditional knowledge and the conventions of the non-profit industrial complex’; how do we revitalize land and people without creating further burn-out; what do we do with (righteous) anger and injustice, etc. And - what is the medicine of the heart-mind?

To do so in a way that is both nuanced and in every-day language that is easy to read led to a long piece. In some ways it is more of a front-porch conversation than a casual hello as you are passing by. You need to sit for at least the length of a cup of tea.

But that’s how a decent introduction often is, especially if the being is actually quite different from you, operating under a set of assumptions about the world that are not the same as many conventional non-profits.

I think many of you are interested in such approaches - in thought, in practice and via culture.

I also get that the moment you are receiving this email might not be the best time to read this. There may be many other pulls on your time. So we are going to find a way that you can easily find this in the near future (besides searching your email for ‘strawberry wisdom’.)

Whenever you read this, I hope you enjoy it.

- Sara Jolena and Krissy

Introducing Strawberry Wisdom

To explain what Strawberry Wisdom is and is becoming, let’s start with positioning strawberries themselves within Krissy's Indigenous community: The Haudenosaunee Confederacy, composed of six Nations, one of which is the Tuscarora Nation.

To say that strawberries hold a special place in the cosmovision of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy is a bit of an understatement.

There is a tremendous respect/reverence/adoration of strawberries.

If you've done much work with Krissy, or with Krissy and I, especially if that work has been grounded around “The Words Before All Else”, sometimes referred to as The Thanksgiving Address, you've heard reference to the first to ripen strawberries as "the leaders of the plants."

Strawberry drinks are common in the summer and enjoyed as dried fruit all year long. Today, as in many other places, strawberry shortcake is a favorite dessert. Their roots, flowers, berries and leaves are valued for various medicinal purposes. Some refer to them as “anger medicine”. (Here’s a longer article from the Greenbelt Indigenous Botanical Survey.)

Their medicine is often experienced in the collective: rarely does one eat strawberries alone.

Strawberries regularly grace traditional Haudenosaunee designs, and especially within raised beadwork patterns Raised beadwork is one of many traditional artforms still practiced today throughout the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, and during the early 1900s was a valued source of income and fame for many members of the Tuscarora Nation who, living just a few miles away from Niagara Falls, used to commonly sell their much-prized beadwork to tourists in what quickly became one of the most popular tourist destinations in the so-called United States and Canada.

Strawberries also play a significant role in Krissy's own family history.

In 1897, Krissy's great-grandmother, Clara Miller, was entered into the Carlisle Industrial Residential School. While experiences at this infamous "school" varied, we know there was a substantial degree of forced loss of language and inculturation. Five years after she graduated in 1902, the School sent a 'how are you doing'/data collection inquiry to their former students. Clara took the time to sit down and write a letter in response.

Four generations later, in 2018, Krissy found this letter whilst in the midst of other research.

It was an unexpected find. She did not even know that Clara had been at Carlisle. The letter connected her to her great-grandmother, and to a generation of Indigenous people who were forced into the horrific forms of separation, violence, and multiple forms of abuse that the Indian Boarding Schools enacted. Krissy has spent a long time - years, really - digesting that letter, going over it, sitting with it, letting her own inner guides help her understand what her grandmother was saying in words coded by the necessities of her time.

Of the many lines that have shaped how Krissy has come to understand her maternal ancestor, this line, in particular, has stood out to her:

"I wish all my Carlisle friends were here to share our fruits when they become ripe enough to eat. If nothing prevents, I shall send you some of our strawberries."

There is so much in this line. Clara is saying that she survived. She is reconnecting with the (literal!) fruits of her people and their land. She is wanting to share the bounty of Earth with the young people still stuck in that horrific system. She doesn't say it was horrific, and we don't really know exactly what she thought, but given what else we know from other sources, we can hazard such a guess. And she is offering medicine to those young people who are still stuck in the system.

You see, in the understanding of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, strawberries aren't just the 'first fruits'.

Strawberries are medicine.

Specifically, for many Haudenosaunee: strawberries offer heart medicine.

There is much wisdom in strawberries. In how they grow in community. In how they explore - gently. In how bright and beautiful they are. In how they are spacious in the middle. In how they remind us, visually, of hearts.

In how happy they make us when we eat them.

Strawberry Wisdom is here to offer heart medicine.

Now what does heart medicine mean?

In addition, mind you, to the actual act of eating strawberries. And yes, we are already thinking to that moment, sometime in May, when it is no longer so dark and dreary and gray and cloudy and cold, that moment when strawberries will once again come up, as they did this year, all over our land, delighting us with beauty and deliciousness, that we hope to have some kind of circle where we just sit around and eat strawberries and talk about eating strawberries and in other ways share our great gratitude for this amazing fruit which, in the wild variety that grows, of their own accord, outside of Krissy's window, is quite, quite small.

Part of the work of Strawberry Wisdom is to redefine - even rematriate? - what 'heart medicine' and 'heart wisdom' means.

To keep it out of the siloed boxes of 'medicine' as defined by western culture:

"psychology," and "restorative justice," and "culture," and "mental health," and "education," and "community," "nature connection," "traditional ecological knowledge," and "care." To recognize the meandering connectivities that grow of their own volition from Earth herself without any help from us humans, and which can, and do, delight where they go. Which includes but us no way only in institutions and cultures of oppression, bringing with them the possibilities of something different.

In the West, phrases like "coming from the heart" emphasize empathy, compassion, presence, and emotional resonance. It does not tend to elicit things like systemic thinking, analysis, diplomacy, and management. Much less working with forests, animals, and traditional ecological knowledge. But those categorical divisions derive from variations of cartesian mind-body, head-vs-heart, land vs people separations. Which are hardly innate to being human!

From what little I understand of the Great Law of Peace, one of the core understandings is that it is designed to help people (whom might have harmed one another in the past) come together “in a good mind.”

The "mind" here is not purely in the brain/intellect. Nor is it seen as entirely separate from nature. To come together in a "good mind", as the Haudenosaunee say, engages the heart… and evokes other living beings

Heart medicine, thus, is also stuff that engages the mind.

While the first thought is that this is an initiative that arises from and is in service towards her own community, the heart medicine of Strawberry Wisdom is also for many other Peoples. And we are trying to get away from the notion that this is only about responding to harms caused by colonization or something else. Heart medicine is also about being and living in the right relationship. Spreading and living within strawberry wisdom requires its own tempo and rhythm and intention. Like a heartbeat, it directs the flow of connectivity.

In this way, Krissy is, on some level, following in the wisdom pathway of her great grandmother, who found ways to choose kindness and beauty and relationality amidst (and despite of) systems of ongoing oppression.

That healing arises in large part from what western societies tend to call "culture".

In contemporary mainstream development thinking (for example in attempts to "help poor communities develop"), we tend to see "culture" as an "extra", and tend to prioritize projects for "under-developed" communities (including many Native nations within the United States) that address 'serious' things such as clean water, WiFi connectivity, scholarships, basic education (the three Rs - ‘reading writing and arithmetic’), access to financial institutions and economic development, including entrepreneurship.

Yet the American colonists who sought to destroy "Indian Country" were very clear that the way to do so was through outlawing and breaking down Native culture. For Native peoples, culture - some scholars say ‘bio-culture’ - is tied to land, waters, hunting, fishing, tending eco-systems, etc. The colonial attack on Native lands, culture, and family systems was intertwined.

For generations, dances and many social gatherings were outlawed. Practices of religion were forbidden (in a country that supposedly upheld religious freedom, too!) The primary point of the Indian Boarding Schools, which were often run by Christian (including Quaker) institutions, was to "kill the Indian and save the man," through an "educational" system that literally beat out the people's language, cut the children's hair, and turned them into "good workers" in industry, the military, and other forms of labor that supported the building of the country (the U.S.) that was founded on their own people’s homelands and the premise that they, and their culture, were easily eradicated.

The colonists understood that if you take away the culture of the Haudenosaunee and other Indigenous peoples, then they would no longer be a threat to systems of white domination and extraction.

So went their thinking at the time. Hence, the so-called "schools" such as Carlisle.

That in itself seems to be very good evidence that "culture" is critically important. That dancing and singing are not an "extra" to be practiced after a community gains Wi-Fi connectivity. Or that it is less important than getting a job .... supporting what socio/cultural/economic system?

Which Indigenous peoples, of course, have always known to be true. For the Haudenosaunee, critical lifeways are embedded within cultural practices. There, they can be honored, protected, and passed to succeeding generations without interruption.

And it seemed, for a while there, that the American/Canadian white dominant culture was successful in forcing these acts of dismemberment. Split the family and the people's connection to land and you do split the culture. Tear apart the culture, and the energy/will/ability to fight back and offer alternative approaches (for themselves ... and possibly for the disgruntled white/Brown/Black folks who did not like where the U.S. was going as a country) falters.

Except that the land keeps speaking to the Peoples and the Peoples keep listening to the land. And the waters ReMember. And the strawberries keep growing. Including outside of Krissy's window, just underneath the lilac bush that she has been tending whilst we live far away from the Tuscarora Nation. And it has been here, near the banks of the Mahicanttuck, the big river that flows both ways, aka the Hudson River, that those strawberries have been looking at her. And she’s been listening to them.

I could get into a long history of how things have changed. Another time. For now, we can recognize in that history further strong proof that culture/spirituality is a powerful place of healing. And from that place of healing, other things - entire movements - can and do emerge.

So Krissy's interest in focusing on bio-cultural revitalization (to use a slightly academic term) in a systemic, supportive, cohesive, and ongoing way is hardly random. It stems from something I've seen in many places around the world: we must revitalize what colonization stole from us: through that healing, other knowledge/wisdom will arise.

Part of what Krissy brings is what she (and increasingly myself) think of as "Auntie" energy. Auntie energy differs from western forms of management. It often entails broad thinking about different forms of relationality, which in western-thinking we might call something like systems-thinking, but is much more evocative than that. In the western system, when people are poking at accountability, it might evoke shudders. When you are talking with an Auntie, it can be, well, fun. Interesting. Provocative in the most supportive way. Filled with getting the low down. Infused with laughter. Within that wider spectrum of Auntie-ness, Krissy also brings skills in practically engaging with western organizational 'structural' work - accounting, administration, management, directing, compliance, time management, prioritization of tasks, etc - all of which are really helpful to the many people who turn to her for support. So Strawberry Wisdom offers a strong component of Auntie energy as well. Not quite business development - at least not at the moment. But a kind of practical advice, networkings, and know-how that gets things done.

Let me briefly switch to a body metaphor: the heart is deeply structured and enables structure: it is the rhythm that enables blood to flow. Heart medicine is that which enables the blood to flow. Taking down blocks that can enable greater connectivity between parts of the body that are, on some level, already inherently connected.

What enables the different parts of the body to work in our current system? Care. Connection. Financial stability. Support. Reciprocity. Right-timing/good tempo/rhythm. Support in navigating structures (compliance, deadlines, etc.) that can be obtuse, overwhelming, and an impediment to creative work when people try to tackle them alone.

Strawberry Wisdom is developing in such a way to enable this. It's happening already within the organization (currently three BIPOC women board members and Krissy) as well as between Krissy and potential donors and the early-stage core partners.

There are, at the moment, two main programs and several potential projects/programs/initiatives.

1. What I think of as a Circle for Culture Keepers. It would provide stable funding, emotional support, and administrative oversight (for those who want it) for a circle of different people who are already and are themselves growing different aspects of culture. They are dancers and beaders and singers and medicine-makers and plant-medicine people and language speakers who are all working on teaching and supporting the revitalization of these practices within the community. They would greatly benefit from regular financial support (which is part of what we are fundraising for). We are aiming for 5 years of predictable steady funding for each person (around 10-15K/person per year).

2. Both Ends of Life: supporting elders who themselves are being supported by parents with young children.

3. Indigenous Insights: furthering the thought and work of Dr Montgomery Hill (1990-2025)

Other possible programs and pathways are emerging Given that providing funds-plus-managerial-support-as-requested to people who are 'already doing the work' is a significant part of what's emerging, should Strawberry Wisdom aim to grow into a Foundation? That's a potent possibility.

So that's a little bit about the story behind and the early dimensions of Strawberry Wisdom. Here's the early-stage website. I hope you can see some of why I'm excited about it, and why I'm donating some of my own resources (time, energy, financial) towards it.

I invite you to join me.

GIVE NATIVE

Finally: I didn't actually plan for this email to come out right at the end of Native American Heritage Month and right before Giving Tuesday.... it actually just flowed that way. Which I thought was pretty cool.