“By investigating the ways of the lineages of Lands and Ancestors, we learn to listen to the language of Mother Earth and realize that we are warped and weft and wed in life with all living beings and phenomena, our blood- and earth-lines.” -Yuria Celidwen
“Rather than cutting off our roots because we are ashamed or afraid, we can reimagine the relationships we have inherited, and we can take up our responsibilities to each other.” -Patty Krawec
Join us on Saturday, August 29th for Threads of Belonging: Ancestry, Story and Sacred Responsibility with Indigenous Maya Tseltal and Nahua scholar Yuria Celidwen (author of Flourishing Kin) and Anishinaabe/Ukrainian writer and speaker Patty Krawec (author of Becoming Kin and Bad Indians Book Club).
What becomes possible when we remember belonging not as something fixed or inherited, but as something we can actively practice, repair, and reimagine in relationship with one another and the living world?
In this wisdom conversation, Yuria Celidwen and Patty Krawec meet at the intersection of Indigenous relational ethics and story as a living, generative force—where responsibility, memory, and presence become pathways for transformation rather than only sites of rupture.
Yuria Celidwen brings her work on Indigenous ritual ethics and relational belonging through what she names an “ethics of belonging,” grounded in kin relationality and interdependence among all human and more-than-human life. Her framing invites a shift from isolation toward participation, where identity is shaped through reciprocal relationship. In this view, belonging becomes a lived practice of care, reciprocity, and co-responsibility with the living world—opening possibilities for ecological and collective renewal rooted in deep relational awareness.
Patty Krawec brings a grounded and unflinching engagement with story, settler responsibility, and Indigenous presence, asking how narratives shape what we inherit, what we refuse, and what we are still capable of becoming. In her work, she reminds us that “grief is the persistence of love,” naming grief not as an ending but as a continuing form of relationship—one that holds memory, accountability, and care across time. From this lens, story itself becomes a site of possibility: a place where we can face complexity honestly, stay in relation across difference and history, and open toward deeper forms of responsibility and repair.
Together, they invite us to explore vital questions:
How might belonging become something we practice and cultivate, rather than something we assume or lose?
What becomes possible when we understand ourselves as already in relationship with land, history, and one another?
How can story serve as a living practice of accountability—reshaping what we inherit and what we are still becoming?
In what ways do grief, relational ethics, and Indigenous frameworks of presence open pathways for collective healing, repair, and transformation?
This conversation opens a space to engage belonging as something alive and evolving—where Indigenous frameworks of relationality and story not only help us name what has been broken, but illuminate what we are still capable of becoming together.