TribeThe Writing · since 2019
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 Work Only My Grandmother Knew About The voice that says you are missing out, and the older question underneath it: who will this hold up? Read it → 
The Day Everything Went Right Remember a day when everything just went right. A simple exercise from a leadership day in northern Arizona, and the one question that excited the room most. Read it →
What Does Your Heart Say
An evening at Prescott College. A greeting in Tzotzil, a navigator who gave away what he was told to keep, and a small stone that teaches a body how to run.
Read it →
Start here
If you only read one from each.
A Home Calm Enough to Teach InYou cannot think bad about others and keep a regulated nervous system. What a calm home was built to raise.Intergenerational Healing- Honorable Trade: What the World’s Oldest Economies Teach a Planet in TransitionThe 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 100The peoples who reach a hundred are not lucky. This is the code, written out in full.The Body, and Long Life
Seeds of the AncestorsThe future we keep trying to engineer is already sitting in a jar of seed corn.What Gets Carried
The Warrior’s PathOut 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 PodiumKerosene lamp to commencement podium, and what I found when I finally got there.The Doctorate
Stone Breath: Born on the Solstice, On PurposeA man carries his grandfather’s book of old melodies home and finds the old ways were only waiting.The Novels
Stream · 2026 · 11 pieces
Intergenerational Healing
My great-grandmother raised me in a hogan on Big Mountain where almost nothing came as explanation, and what I took in there, the calm of that house, the watched word, the joke told before the hard thinking, turned out to be the method I have been teaching ever since, at Twin Arrows, at 1440, and in the meditations I have been recording since Labor Day. These are the newest pieces, and they circle one question: how a nervous system is handed down a family line, and how a person, then a home, then a community gets it settled again.
- The Work Only My Grandmother Knew About
- The Day Everything Went Right
Speak Only What You Want Built
Wanting Narrows the Eye
Why I Started a Magazine, and Why I Am Starting It Again
Little Piles of Rock- A Home Calm Enough to Teach In
A Joke at the Dry Spring
Why I Call the Sheep Camp a Retreat
Building Long-Term Resilience With an Ancient Culture
What Does Your Heart Say
Stream · 2019–2026 · 17 pieces
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.
- 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 Communityby Kaitlyn Benally
- From Sheep to the Customerby 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
The Coach Who Borrowed the Circle
Stream · 2019–2026 · 16 pieces
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.
- In the Mind of a Bull Riderby 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 Meby Shelby Skrelūnas- Exercise, and the Many Benefitsby Shelby Skrelūnas
Inspiration for a New Kind of Grocery Store
In a Spa State of Mindby Kaitlyn Benally- Time-Tested Tribal Tools Against the Coronaviruswith Kaitlyn Benally
Long Lives as Modeled by Our Ancestorswith 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 · 2019–2026 · 16 pieces
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.
- Creativity Is What Makes the Planet Go Roundby 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
One in a Trillion- They Tried to Erase a Whole People
- Tibet, and the Unbroken Thread
What the Cottonwood Sings: A Poet’s Afternoon in the Roots Workshop
The Winter That Didn’t Come
The First Fire
Where Hope Was Built This Week
Stream · 2020–2025 · 6 pieces
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.
Stream · 2020–2026 · 5 pieces
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.
Stream · 2026 · 4 pieces
The Novels
What the essays argue, the fiction carries. Stone Breath came out on the solstice, on purpose, and The Council Fire is out now, with a family walking the red path on its cover.
Everything, newest first, with its date and its stream.