The Writing
A few questions I have not let go of.
I have been writing this down since 2019, mostly early, before anybody needed anything from me.
It is not a blog. I do not post to keep up. I write when a question will not leave me alone, and then I keep writing about that same question for years, from different sides, until I understand it a little better than I did.
So these are grouped by the question they belong to, not by the month they went up. Inside each one they run oldest first, because the interesting part is watching a thought change its mind.
Some of it was written by other hands — my nieces, my family, people I sat down with. Those say so.
Latest Wisdom
The newest three.
The Ground Is the Argument
Regenerative agriculture is the future The Council Fire describes, already measurable. The four accounts, on a farm. Groundswell, Tom Blue Wolf, and eighty-six years of one family on one piece of ground.
Read it
One in a Trillion
Five days at Rancho La Puerta, and an hour under the papel picado with a Muskogee Creek elder who does not carry a phone.
Read it
Twenty-Five Years to That Podium
I started this doctorate more than twenty-five years ago. What happened in between, and what I found when I arrived early.
Read it
Start here
If you only read one from each.
- Honorable Trade: What the World’s Oldest Economies Teach a Planet in Transition The whole argument in one place: whole continents ran on economies built for honor, and the map still works. Ancestral Economics →
- The Ancestral Code for Living to 100 The peoples who reach a hundred are not lucky. This is the code, written out in full. The Body, and Long Life →
- Seeds of the Ancestors The future we keep trying to engineer is already sitting in a jar of seed corn. What Gets Carried →
- The Warrior’s Path Out of grad school with an MBA and a plan to change a nation, and what the road actually taught me. The Long Ride →
- Twenty-Five Years to That Podium Kerosene lamp to commencement podium, and what I found when I finally got there. The Doctorate →
- Stone Breath: Born on the Solstice, On Purpose A man carries his grandfather’s book of old melodies home and finds the old ways were only waiting. The Novels →
Stream
Ancestral Economics
The oldest economies on earth were not built for shareholder wealth. They were built for honor, for kinship, and for the great-grandchildren. The question underneath all of these is the same one: where does the money go after it leaves your hand, and what would it take to keep it home. The autumn of 2020 sits in the middle of this stream, when the coal plants were closing and the roads were shut, and I went looking for the people who were still open for business.
2019–2026
- Trading Goods and Services Worldwide, Safely
- Three Pillars of Good Customer Service: Woshdee, Bahozho, K’enidzin
- Keeping the Tribal Dollar in Our Local Communities
- Extra, Extra: “We’re Running Out of Sand” by Shelby Skrelūnas
- How Do We Keep Our Dollars in Our Community?
- To Thrive, a Business Must Pivot with Care
- A Seven-Point Tribal Review of the National Economic Transition Platform
- Buy Navajo, Buy Local: A Conversation with Marvin Lizer
- A Magazine to Uplift Our Community by Kaitlyn Benally
- From Sheep to the Customer by Kaitlyn Benally
- Honorable Trade: What the World’s Oldest Economies Teach a Planet in Transition
- The Wealth That Cannot Be Spent
- The Final Council: Building a Post-Extraction Future
- The Silent Theft
- The Machines That Could Help Us Come Home
- The Ground Is the Argument
Stream
The Body, and Long Life
Our people ran. They rose before the sun, prayed facing east, walked the flock, and a great many of them lived past a hundred. I have been tracking what the long-lived peoples of the world actually do, and what it would cost a community to build the places where a body can still move and eat well.
2019–2026
- In the Mind of a Bull Rider by Shelby Skrelūnas
- Success with Harmony: Rise Early, Pray, Grind, and Grow Always
- Refueling Our Souls with a Tribal Dacha
- Helping Young Tribal Runners Achieve Their Olympic Vision
- The Highest Success Takes Discipline and a Strong Life Partner
- What Waking Up Early Did for Me by Shelby Skrelūnas
- Exercise, and the Many Benefits by Shelby Skrelūnas
- Inspiration for a New Kind of Grocery Store
- In a Spa State of Mind by Kaitlyn Benally
- Time-Tested Tribal Tools Against the Coronavirus with Kaitlyn Benally
- Long Lives as Modeled by Our Ancestors with Kaitlyn Benally
- Roots of Resilience: What the Fire Taught Us at Wisdom Week
- Wealth Wisdom from the Sheepherders of the Planet
- The Ancestral Code for Living to 100
- The Body Is Infrastructure
- The Man Who Raced Hills Into His 70s
Stream
What Gets Carried
A people is not its territory. It is the thread — the seed, the song, the language, the way of raising a child. Some of these are about peoples who were supposed to vanish and did not. Some are about my own family, and what was handed to me before I could read.
2019–2026
- Creativity Is What Makes the Planet Go Round by Shelby Skrelūnas
- Being Tribal Means Ensuring the Passage of Cultural Knowledge
- Did Your Ancestors Have Arranged Marriages?
- Shizhé’é: A Father’s Day Letter to the Man Who Chose Me
- The Old Farmers Are Right
- Facing the Changing Climate: Global Lessons and Navajo Strength
- The Water Remembers: My Grandfather’s Song at the Sacred Lake
- Weaving a New Dream: What Is the World Dreaming Through You?
- Seeds of the Ancestors
- They Tried to Erase a Whole People
- Tibet, and the Unbroken Thread
- What the Cottonwood Sings: A Poet’s Afternoon in the Roots Workshop
- One in a Trillion
Stream
The Long Ride
My cousin brought motorcycles to sheep camp when I was a boy, and I have never gotten over the feeling of flying down a dirt road. These are about my own road: the machines, the fear you have to ride through, and what it takes to step out front when nobody hands you the lead.
2020–2025
Stream
The Doctorate
I started this doctorate as an extension of my MBA more than twenty-five years ago, and the work never slowed down enough to let me finish it. These are the addresses given from podiums along that road, and the statements of purpose I wrote to remind myself what the work is for.
2020–2026
Stream
The Novels
What the essays argue, the fiction carries. Stone Breath came out on the solstice, on purpose. Book Two, What Masan Taught Me, arrives in the fall.
2026
Everything, newest first, with its date and its stream.