Our Language & Terms
Understanding the language we use to describe our relationships, knowledge, and collective work.
Words carry histories, assumptions, and different meanings across cultures. Some of the terms used by Indigenous Commons have emerged through our collective work, while others have meanings that extend beyond conventional definitions.
We offer these explanations to support understanding and dialogue, while recognizing that language continues to evolve through our relationships and lived experiences.
KinHub
A community-rooted, place-connected collective participating in a wider network of kinship, learning, and shared stewardship.
A KinHub is a community-rooted collective connected to a particular place, territory, or lasting network of relationships.
Each KinHub carries its own knowledge, ways of governing, priorities, and responsibilities. Its authority comes from the community it represents, to whom it remains accountable.
Indigenous Commons created the term KinHub to recognize and connect communities whose lived practices reflect shared principles of kinship, care, reciprocity, and responsibility to Life.
KinHubs are identified through a participatory process that explores community relationships, legitimate authority, compatibility with our community values, and readiness for collective learning and stewardship.
Each KinHub maintains its own identity and local authority while contributing to the wider Commons through shared learning, mutual support, and collective governance.
Two community-authorized Guardians represent each recognized KinHub in the Indigenous Commons Great Circle, helping steward the collective's shared direction and resources.
Indigenous
A term whose use within modern political and institutional systems cannot fully encompass the diversity of peoples, histories, and lifeways it describes.
Indigenous is a term developed within Western systems of classification to simplify and categorize the immense diversity of peoples and communities whose lifeways resisted assimilation into dominant Western systems, or who were forcibly excluded from them.
The term has become a means of recognizing and engaging these distinct peoples collectively within political, legal, and economic systems that often cannot adequately accommodate their differences.
Yet the category can obscure profound differences in worldview. Dominant Western institutions have tended toward separation, sameness, standardization, and the classification of Life into discrete and manageable parts.
Many of the peoples categorized as Indigenous have cultivated lifeways grounded in oneness, infinite differentiation, reciprocity, and adaptive emergence.
Within Indigenous Commons, we use the term while recognizing its limitations. We seek to honor the infinite diversity of peoples and lifeways it attempts to encompass, without reducing them to a single identity, worldview, or political category.
Margin-Centered Design
Beginning inquiry and design with the knowledge, experiences, and innovations arising at the margins of dominant systems.
Margin-Centered Design begins with the recognition that within systems of human making, power tends to consolidate at the center, where it becomes resistant to redistribution.
At the margins are those with the least access to that power, who often develop meaningful alternatives to meet their needs, sustain relationships, and continue their lifeways.
Unless agreements, practices, and structures intentionally interrupt this concentration of power, the same dynamic tends to reproduce itself.
Rather than seeking only to bring marginalized people into existing centers of power, Margin-Centered Design asks what we can learn from the alternatives they have developed.
These alternatives may help inform fundamentally different systems of relationship, resource sharing, and collective life.
This approach has been influenced by the work of social critic and philosopher bell hooks, alongside other collaborative design frameworks.
BioKultural Sciences
Living bodies of knowledge developed across generations through deep relationships, observation, collective practice, and experience with the living world.
BioKultural Sciences are bodies of knowledge developed over millennia through deep relationship, observation, collective practice, and lived experience with land, waters, and more-than-human beings.
They emerge through ongoing interactions between human communities and living systems. They encompass ways of knowing that may not qualify as legitimate evidence or scientific practice within dominant Western frameworks.
These include experiences of spirit, revelation, intuition, and other forms of relational knowing.
Over generations, these knowledge systems have sustained entire lifeways, informing art, dance, cuisine, healing, ceremony, ecological stewardship, spiritual practice, and social organization.
BioKultural Sciences are infinitely diverse, rooted in place, and continuously adapting through reciprocal relationships between human communities and the living systems of which they are part.
They possess their own forms of rigor and authority. They should not be required to conform to Western assumptions about what constitutes knowledge, evidence, or truth.
Within Indigenous Commons, BioKultural Sciences are not simply cultural expressions to document or traditional practices awaiting external validation. They are living and evolving knowledge systems that can inform how we understand Life, cultivate relationships, and design economies that support aliveness.
Our language is part of an ongoing collective inquiry. As our relationships and practices evolve, so too does our understanding of the words we use.