Our Roots rest in a wellspring that is a STREAM for life
Sankofa: Go Back
and Fetch it.
From the Akan people of Ghana.
Reviving a Matriculture means remembering humanity’s original way of organizing life through care, reciprocity, and kinship with all beings.
It is not about reversing patriarchy or placing one gender above another—it is about restoring balance and coherence between the feminine and masculine, human and beyond-human, giving and receiving.
A Matricultural society centers the mothering principles of creation, nurturance, and protection, recognizing that love and relationship are the true foundations of governance and economy.
By revitalizing these Indigenous ways, or returning to them, we repair the rupture that severed people from Earth, community, and spirit, and evolve our systems toward a future of work, life and pleasure we all deserve.
Reviving Matriculture is both remembrance and evolution—bringing forward the ancestral wisdom of how life flourishes in balance, and reimagining it for the world being born now.
GrandMothering,
from an Elder Guardian
Dear Kin,
We human beings are a mothering species. In taking lands and waters to colonize, we also took mothers and children to be owned. These children became the next fathers, brothers, uncles—and upon these heartbroken generations raised in scarcity and separation, our kinship worldview was lost.
As we removed ourselves from our original mother’s wisdom—our Mother Earth—we withdrew from kinship with beyond-human life. We discarded and desacralized the wisdom, intuition, and guidance of mothers and grandmothers.
Now Mother Earth is beckoning us to return. We ask: what would it look like to live in matricultural practice—placing heart intelligence at the center of how we govern and give? What if we re-learned how to love like a mother: unconditionally, radically, and protectively?
This is our birthright and our work: to steward from love, to protect life with fierce generosity, and to remember our ancestral future.
Indigenous Commons’ GrandMothering Movement is not only spiritual but structural—guiding how we create power with our brothers, fathers, and grandfathers in service of love and life.
Skeena Rathor Kashmiri,
Elder Guardian of Indigenous Commons
STREAM, an
Indigenous
Axiology
The STREAM was born from years of collaboration and radical imagination among Indigenous Elders and knowledge keepers who carry the living memory of how life organizes itself through relationship and reciprocity. Their collective wisdom arose in response to decades of failed development models—projects where money flowed in without community engagement, deep listening, or accountability, creating new divides between those who have and those who do not.
The STREAM offers a different way forward: a living system where resources move in harmony with community wisdom, ensuring that wealth, care, and decision-making remain connected to the people and places they are meant to serve.
We Make Meaning and Value in a STREAM:
(S) Sacred Space - through ceremony or spiritual practice we revitalize ways of healing, relating, dreaming and knowing in the collective
(T) Time - we look beyond quick fixes to see what is important now and over longer time horizons, we track and understand the seasons and ages of the Earth
(R) Respect - we strengthen relationship with the human and more than human world, Kinship
(E) Energy - an indescribable force - folk soul- emerges from the collective, unleashing new potential
(A) Attention - We gain the ability to see what is mine, yours and ours, we can succeed without a boss
(M) Matter - What are the elements - materials, money, technology, that need to be offered back into the STREAM to keep it flowing?
