While my ideas are my own, I do not come to them alone. Every being I have encountered — from the beginning of time until now — has had a part in shaping who I am today.

When I reflect on who I am now, I feel immense gratitude for all the blessings, nurturing, and encouragements I've received along the way.

I also appreciate the experiences that have taught me humility and resilience and revealed my inner strength and courage.

I am grateful to my ancestors, healed and unhealed, and the ones I was blessed to know.

I am grateful to my parents (bio and bonus), my immediate and extended family, my dear friends, and all my relations who walk with and support me during this embodied journey on earth.

Thank you to all my teachers, human and more-than-human, the ones who taught me intentionally as well as those from whom I've learned valuable lessons without you even knowing it.

Knowing Our Place is my sacred work. It is what I feel I was born to do. It is a co-creation between myself and my ancestors and the lineages of wisdom, of both language and spirit, that found me.

And since Knowing Our Place is about relationship, reciprocity, and remembering, I wish to take a few moments to name the teachers who have influenced my work.

I have been searching for a long time. In the dark, with a flickering candle.

For my ancestors. For the languages they may have spoken. For a spiritual home. For a land to call my own.

The search has taken many forms.

Genealogical research. Spiritual inquiry. Inner exploration. Attempts at belonging. Trying to fit in – culturally, historically, geographically.

There have been many twists and turns. I’ve relit the candle numerous times. Every time I reached a brick wall built by historical intention. When I battled fears of cultural appropriation. When I encountered rejections, perceived and real. Or existential doubts. Frustration. Grief. Rage. A vicious cycle, which, when often repeated, could squelch the most ardent flame. And sometimes it did.

But somehow, the ember inside still glowed, and I kept searching. And eventually I realized that what I was searching for wasn’t necessarily what I needed. What I needed was continuity. Connection. A way of being in relationship with the earth and with my ancestors that felt alive, not archival.

Knowing Our Place is the fire sparked from that ember. And the teachers, traditions, and communities on this page are the ones who helped me gather the fuel so it could burn.

I share the names and work of my teachers with deep gratitude, and with the intention that they receive the recognition and appreciation they deserve.

Too many Black, Brown, and Indigenous teachers and Elders are exploited and extracted from without recognition or compensation — their wisdom taken, their labor unrewarded, their names unspoken.

I do not wish to collude with that harmful practice.

Naming my teachers is an act of sacred reciprocity.

AODA - The Ancient Order of Druids in America

The AODA was the first threshold I crossed into intentional earth-centered practice.

I joined in the spring of 2022, and the candidate-year curriculum got me paying attention — really paying attention — to the ecosystem around me.

I also spent time learning about the Ogham, an old Irish writing system, which inspired me to study Gaeilge (Irish) through the Irish Pagan School.

Learning the indigenous language of Ireland got me curious about the indigenous languages of the lands where I live… and that's what led me to Western Abenaki.

Abenaki Online and The School of Abenaki at Middlebury Language Schools

I've been a co-learner of Alnôbaôdwawôgan (Western Abenaki, one of the indigenous languages of the northeast woodlands of Turtle Island) with language keeper Jesse Bowman Bruchac (Nulhegan Band of the Coosuk Abenaki Nation), the nanawaldagik (caretakers/instructors), and our language community since the fall of 2022.

Learning Abenaki isn't just teaching me a language — it's rearranging how I think.

In Abenaki, and other Algonquian languages, people aren't gendered, humans aren't the only "ones," and the names of "ones" and "things" carry their relationships inside them: mikowa, squirrel, means "the one who remembers."

Co-learning in community here shows me that language learning can be about more than acquiring a skill or achieving mastery.

It's about communication and being in relationship with a community supporting and sustaining a living being, a language that holds the worldview and memories of a people and a place.

Jala Simpa, Afro-Indigenous Yesą on Turtle Island

In 1993, I sat with my grandmother and asked her to tell me her life story. She mentioned that her father was "half-Indian." I wrote it down and moved on.

Thirty years later, in 2023, that note took me down a rabbit hole I'm still trying to reach the end of — trying to figure out the parentage of a great-great-grandmother who was indigenous and enslaved, whose history and heritage were almost entirely erased from the record. In the midst of that research, I came across Jala (Jay-la)/Miyątipi:wa Simpa's podcast, Afro-Indigenous Yesą on Turtle Island, and also had a chance to chat with her, and other Afro-Indigenous folx trying to trace their genealogies, in affinity groups online.

Through the conversations and podcast episodes I began to understand why those erasures happened, and how deliberately. The obscuring wasn't accidental.

Realizing this — in community with others who were working on the same research and living through the same grief — was both enraging and clarifying.

Jala's podcast, and the knowledge she's shared, helped me see myself more fully, and gave more context to what my ancestors had to deal with. It also showed me, with great clarity, how much has been lost.

Dra. Rocío Rosales Meza

Dra. Rocío is a decolonial healer and medicine woman in the Q'ero Inca tradition. When I was introduced to Dra. Rocío's work in the latter half of 2023, I immediately resonated and felt inspired.

Dra. Rocío met me where I was — sensitive, intelligent, yet deeply disconnected from my own knowing.

She helped me understand that those qualities and the disconnect weren't liabilities; there was medicine there waiting to be recognized.

Through her teachings at the intersection of decolonial psychology and indigenous spirituality and healing, I began to trust my intuition and build confidence in my gifts — which opened the door to everything that followed.

Marilu Shinn, Kawak Energy Medicine

Marilu is a mesa carrier in the Apaza lineage of Q'ero Inca energy medicine from the high Andes of Peru, and I began studying with her in this tradition in the spring of 2025.

What I didn't expect was how much this lineage would help me reclaim my own — that learning to tend the earth through the Andean cosmovision would help me find my way back to the land and to ancestors I had thought were lost.

The Q'ero share their teachings as an act of prophecy. I receive them as an act of homecoming.

Deborah Blake Dempsey, Human Being Human

Deborah has been my life coach since the spring of 2024, and her accompaniment during a pivotal and demanding stretch of my life has been quietly essential to Knowing Our Place becoming real.

She has helped me hear my own voice more clearly, trust what I know, and move toward what I'm called to do — even when the path wasn't obvious.

The work we've done together has been some of the most clarifying of my life.