In January of 2021 a writer named Kaitlyn Benally interviewed me about why I had started a magazine. I told her it was to bestow knowledge, story, uplifting articles and community innovation on our people. I called it Tribal Prestige. The logo was a horse drawn in a single line with two eagle feathers in its mane, and under it six words: Success, Honor, Health, Lifestyle, Commerce, Motivation.
I ran it the way you run a thing you have no business running. I read constantly, found pieces worth passing on, and set them next to whatever I had written that month. There was no strategy underneath it. There was an instinct, and the instinct was this: our people were being handed a daily diet of what was wrong with us, and nobody was counting the cost of that diet.
What I did not understand then
I thought I was publishing encouragement. I was not. I was doing something narrower, and I only have the language for it now because of the doctorate.
A body that reads catastrophe every morning spends the day braced. Braced is a physiological state, not a mood, and it is expensive. It narrows what a person can see. It shortens what they can plan for. It makes them worse at exactly the long, patient, unglamorous work that building a community requires. You cannot organize a water system from inside an alarm response. You can only react to one.
So the magazine was never about being positive. It was about what the reading does to the reader. That is a different claim, and it is testable, and testing it is now most of my life.
What happened in between
Four things, and they turned out to be the same thing.
The novels. Stone Breath went into worldwide distribution this September — Apple Books, Kobo, booksellers from Berlin to Sydney, the library catalogs. It carries twenty-two tools inside a story, because the old people never delivered a teaching as a lecture. The Council Fire followed: twelve keepers from twelve peoples, each raised by a nation that had already lived through the end of a world, sitting down around one small fire they built on purpose. Two more are coming.
The doctorate. I am a PhD candidate at Prescott College, writing on human and organizational performance through three ancestral lenses — Diné, Lithuanian, Japanese. The dissertation is, in plain terms, an attempt to show with evidence what my great-grandmother demonstrated without any.
The teaching. I hold a faculty appointment at 1440 Multiversity, and teaching this work is the center of it now rather than something alongside it.
The communities. The economy work never stopped. Four-capital ledgers. Governance that fits the people it serves. The honorable trade that ran across this continent for thirty thousand years without a contract law.
Every one of those is the same argument in a different room. A person, a family, a company and a nation fail the same way, and they recover the same way, and the recovery starts with what the nervous system is fed.
So: the Abundance Mindset Magazine
The horse is back. The original logo was still sitting on an old server; I pulled it down at full resolution, and it leads the page again.
What is new is the engine underneath. Every morning it goes out and gathers good news from the world — not cheerful news, which is a different and emptier thing, but news of people building, restoring, healing and remembering. Community lighthouses where neighbors help neighbors through a storm. Indigenous communities in Peru holding a forest. A search engine that put its own ownership into a trust so the profit could not be pulled out of it. Then it sets my writing beside what it found, the way I did by hand in 2021.
It gathers in four languages now, and each language has its own engine reading its own sources — because a reader in Guatemala should not be handed a translated English headline. Spanish comes from Agencia Ocote, Climática and Ethic. Japanese from IDEAS FOR GOOD, greenz and Sotokoto. Lithuanian from Bernardinai, Kaunas pilnas kultūros and the National Museum. My own pieces are carried across one at a time, this one among them.
There is one rule the engine cannot break, and I wrote it the day it brought me a war report and a shooting because they both matched on the word peace. Violence and catastrophe never qualify, however well they score. This magazine has one job, and that job is what it does to the person reading it.
What I would ask of you
Read it in the morning, before the other thing you read. That is the whole experiment, and you can run it on yourself inside of a week.
The old people had no word for any of this. They had an order of operations. Say thank you before your feet touch the floor. Speak only what you want built. Then go out and do the work.
A magazine is a slow instrument. It was in 2021 and it is now. But the measure was never how many people read it. The measure is what kind of morning a person has, and what they are able to see afterward, and what gets built out of that.
Tony Skrelūnas writes The Ancestral Watch — Stone Breath, The Amber and the Stone, The Council Fire and The Far Messengers — and the working reader, Living as a Far Messenger. He is a PhD candidate; his dissertation looks at human and organizational performance through three ancestral lenses: Diné, Lithuanian and Japanese. He holds a faculty appointment at 1440 Multiversity, where teaching is the center of the work now. He runs at dawn and hikes with a corgi named Roper.
Last reviewed October 2026.