As the calendar year comes to an end, it’s a good time to reflect on both the successes and challenges of the past 12 months. Carving out time to sit quietly and consider expectations that were set and met, as well as those that were not reasonable, can be eye-opening and motivating. As you contemplate the past year and prepare for a fresh start in 2025, remember your roots — where you are grounded. We leave you with the inspirational words of Dr. Henrietta Mann, AISES Council of Elders Emerita.

To understand the challenges of our contemporary world, let us look to our grandparent generations to ascertain their thinking and coping strategies as they confronted new experiences. They, too, contracted unknown diseases that the strangers brought to their encampments, villages, pueblos, and homelands. They, too, saw their populations decline, and mourned their losses. Ultimately, they accepted their changed circumstances as the ongoing nature of life. What sustained them was their unwavering hope for the future. 

We love this Earth, and Indigenous thinking teaches us to embrace each day. We are expected to acknowledge the continuity of our kinship obligations every day: one to another, and to all life. Those relationships include the Earth, four winds, sun, and water. Our ancestors in their systems of traditional ecological knowledge view this Earth as a comprehensive, interconnected, interrelated, and interdependent complete whole. They existed within one environment and treated this Earth and all that exists within it as beloved and honored relatives with whom they were to live in respectful reciprocity. They were to live in mutuality with all life and to walk lightly upon this much-loved Earth. 

This cursory look at American Indian history is just a glimpse of traditional ecological knowledge, an extraordinary legacy that advances the basic principle that all life exists within one Earth. Human beings are but a single small part of our Earth, which is made up of a network of egalitarian relationships.