Donald Trent Jacobs - Restoring the Kinship Worldview: Indigenous Voices Introduce 28 Precepts for Rebalancing Life on Planet Earth

Humans have a particular ecological niche, a role as the custodial species of this earth. We must return our species to this niche within the next decade, or perish. This book is a perfect place to startthe foundation is good relations, making kin both human and nonhumanand here we have story from a gathering of some of the finest Indigenous thinkers on the planet. Four Arrows and Darcia Narvaez have a particular way of bringing the right people together for such purposes.

Tyson Yunkaporta, author of Sand Talk, senior research fellow at Deacon University, woodcarver, and poet

This collection of ideas and clarity fills my heart! Feeling Spirit in the worldview of Native peoples and hearing the mutual emergence of two friends in dialogue is quite something! Tears well up thinking of our future, our children scrambling over stones and climbing trees and learning of the sentient nature of all things. To love again in this way! Mahalo Four Arrows and Darcia Narvaez for this collection, this eloquence and grace through time so we can recognize and honor the common sense and purpose of continuity. All of it is needed now. We are all meant to wake up together.

Manulani Aluli Meyer, director of Indigenous education, University of HawaiiWest Oahu

A richly creative approach to teaching Indigenous wisdom. Lending their ears to a diverse array of mostly contemporary Native voices, Four Arrows and Darcia Narvaez take each brief quote as the seed for a conversation regarding one or another element of the kincentric worldviewa vision of our earth not as a collection of objects and objective, mechanical processes, but as an interactive community of sensitive and sentient powers: a communion of subjects.

David Abram, author of Becoming Animal and The Spell of the Sensuous

A glorious prism of voices calling out to us to imagine a more inclusive and sustainable way of being. I ache for the kind of world that is invoked within these pages.

Hillary S. Webb, PhD, cultural anthropologist at Goddard College and author of Yanantin and Masintin in the Andean World

This book is like brilliant sunlight from the past that reaches us now and illuminates our way forward. Its Indigenous wisdom and more. For we also keep company with Four Arrows and Darcia Narvaez in conversation on how to change the worlds trajectory from one of domination over people and nature to relation, kinship, love, and bounty. To Life itself.

Peter H. Kahn Jr., PhD, professor of psychology at University of Washington and author of Technological Nature

This sourcebook is unique in its presentation of a shared worldview that sees humans as part of a living fabric of earth and sea, flora and fauna, rather than its occupiers and owners. These voices speak from ancestral traditions ranging from northern Arctic shores to Central America, with a notable contribution from Australia. As it becomes starkly obvious that our future, and life on and of the earth, are in peril, ancestral Indigenous voices are speaking the only words that can save us. The Kogi Mamas teach that everything is a manifestation of thought and that to listen is to think. Understanding ancestral eloquence is our last and best chance, and these pages can only help.

Alan Ereira, founder and chair at Tairona Heritage Trust and producer and director of From the Heart of the World

Restoring the Kinship Worldview provides a much-needed and well-stocked medicine cabinet to begin healing how we think and talk about the suffering of our planet and its struggling inhabitants. Open your mind and heart to its multi-Indigenous balms that are administered through the psalms of elders and a dialogue that leaves us ready to begin anew.

Hillary Keeney, PhD, and Bradford Keeney, PhD, founders of Sacred Ecstatics

I have long known Four Arrows (Don Jacobs) to be at the forefront of understanding and articulating the culture, legacy, and (in)justice issues of First Nations. His latest thinking and compilation of spiritual, cultural, and political insight pairs him perfectly with fellow scholar and ideal coauthor Darcia Narvaez. Whether one is a long-time champion of Indigenous rights and social justice, a lover of the deep wisdom and aesthetics of natural cultures, or a neophyte seeking just the right orientation to this field and to our hosts on this continent, this is just the right book for you.

Tom Cooper, PhD, professor of ethics and visual and media arts at Emerson College and author of A Time Before Deception

I can think of myself, bound by my skin, as a separate being that uses all around me to survive and thrive, or I can think of myself as an integral part of all around me, doing my bit to help it all survive and thrive. Objectively, both ways of thinking are equally true. But if we think the first way, we destroy all around us, including one another. If we think the second way, harmony rises, and loneliness and fear decline. Four Arrows and Darcia Narvaez are wonderful guides, using the wisdom of Indigenous thinkers to teach us how to think the second way (which historically is really the first way).

Peter Gray, PhD, research professor of psychology and neuroscience at Boston College and author of Free to Learn

A dialogue between psychological science and wisdom tradition of the Indigenous populations is long overdue. This book marks an important step in this direction, which will open up a new horizon for research on Indigenous psychology.

Louise Sundararajan, PhD, founder and chair of Indigenous Psychology Task Force

Four Arrows and Darcia Narvaez draw from and integrate essential insights from diverse traditions and disciplines to help us see and feel ourselves and our human place in creation in ways from which most of us have been too long excluded. A very special and important book for our time.

David Korten, author of The Great Turning and Change the Story, Change the Future

If we are to thriveor even surviveas a species, we must shift soon from the life-destroying, domination-based worldview of industrialized societies to a life-affirming, relational, and animistic worldview as embraced by intact Indigenous cultures. Darcia Narvaez and Four Arrows have gathered an inspiring pastiche of wise Native American voices woven together by their own insightful and heartfelt dialogues to gift us with an invaluable bundle of tenets and templates for the urgent project of decolonizing and rewilding our minds and communities.

Bill Plotkin, PhD, author of Soulcraft,Wild Mind, and The Journey of Soul Initiation

I read this book every night. The cited quotes express so clearly how we can live in the world more lovingly. The reflective dialogue between Darcia and Four Arrows is thought-provoking. This book must be read again and again. Theres so much to remember. It gives a perspective that most people have never considered. The authors deserve an eagle feather for this one!

Harriet Hantaywee Greene, sculptor, artist, and author of Crossing the Boundary

Restoringthe Kinship Worldview will make you think, laugh, cry, and perhaps do more ceremony. And, if you take heed of the wisdom of the precepts it gathers from Indigenous leaders, it may enable you to achieve a good life. Four Arrows and Darcia Narvaezs reflections on these quotations are wise and profoundly important for this era in which we must rebalance the world.