Indigenous Commons & Kinship Currency
We are a growing planetary collective of Kinship with a shared aim:
ReImagine wealth through the collective care and enjoyment of an Indigenous Commons.
80% of the world’s remaining biodiversity is stewarded or protected by indigenous peoples, who make up just 6% of the population.
Kinship Currency
A 600 year-old story, called a "theory of value," drives our global economy.
This story dictates who/what is valuable and who/what creates value. We all play parts to survive this story. Many people no longer believe in our economic system, we long for new story for the planetary commons.
Indigenous Commons is creating a new story within a global network of Connectivity Catalysts, long surviving Indigenous-led systems of relationship and regeneration, rooted in cyclical and nature centered value systems.
Why Indigenous? We embrace the term with attention to its limitations. Ultimately, as our advisor and co-creator Tyson Yunkaporta tells us, the word was created to enroll land-connected peoples in systems of exploitation and extraction. To give us the pretense of being able to negotiate mining contracts, etc.
Now we reappropriate the term Indigenous from one to advance goals of an extractive system, into one that can bridge across endless difference, engaging land-connected peoples to dismantle the harms of the systems of extraction and harm that affect all of us.
As Tyson shares, “[Indigenous] knowledge endures because everybody carries a part of it, no matter how fragmentary. If you want to see the pattern of creation you talk to everybody and listen carefully. Authentic knowledge processes are easy to verify if you are familiar with the pattern: each part reflects the design of the whole system. If the pattern is present the knowledge is true, whether the speaker is wearing a grass skirt or a business suit, or a school uniform.” (Yunkaporta, Sand Talk, 2019)
Here is our counterpoint, reparative theory of value, SSTREAM.
46% of the world’s money is controlled by just 1% of the population.
Return to Commons
We are all indigenous to somewhere. And none of us will escape the coming changes on planet Earth. We are in a time of great uncertainty, the ways to navigate such times are found in each of our Indigenous traditions.
Alive in themselves, all cultures adapt with the landscape and the lives that pass through them. For folks of Western ancestry, connecting with one’s own indigeneity is a critical step to repairing self and community.
Re-member-ing Indigenous ways of relating can short-circuit patterns that are no longer viable for our lives, our families, our earth. This process of fixing fragmentation is both intimate and civilizational.
We revitalize important bio-cultural technologies such as dance, song, medicine and story as part of global Indigenous networking and ritual mapping. We are tracking biodiversity flows across intercontinental and trans-oceanic systems, for collective care and enjoyment of a global Indigenous Commons.
These Commons will consist of shared relationships, technologies, knowledges, ceremonies, embassies, lore, built environments and new classes of assets and investment.
These future-proofing mechanisms are hoped to become part of the system that will replace much of the current financial marketplace, as real estate becomes increasingly difficult to insure, turning 2/3 of the world's capital into compost. A soft landing for those with a stake in that capital could therefore mean a soft landing for all others as well, human and non-human.
Kinship funders and allies join us in all of this and more.
Meet the Guardians
Join in Kinship
Support Catalysts
“Indigenous Commons is a circle for healing; for power. We can identify medicine of consequence in our local context and initiate it to the world.”
— Emem Okon, Indigenous Commons Guardian, Kebetkache Women of the Niger Delta