2017 Invoking The Pause Grant Partner DANCING EARTH's Indigenous artists and cultural carriers have been hard at work creating danceworks about ecological issues as advised by Native elders. Starting in 2006 with Indigenous perspectives on water issues, leading us to roots and seeds, food sovereignty, sacred sites, and treaties - including the First Indigenous Women's Treaty Defending Mother Earth.
 
This summer, we gather inter-tribal culture carriers along with an African-American Environmental Biologist, for a healing and restorative gathering that considers the cultural and spiritual source of 'renewable energy', as well as sharing the integrative and regenerative experience of embodied  arts as instruments of healing, visioning, and transformation.

Indigenous people as stewards of the earth, waters, sky, since the beginning of time, are living on 80% of the earths most bio-diverse areas, even post-colonial relocation and attempted genocide. There have been considerations of preserving the planets bio-diversity, but not the protection of these peoples. As these people are pushed from their lands, the bio-diversity and inherent knowledge of the ecology is diminishing. They hold the knowledge and are willing to share it, but now must simply advocate for people to know we exist, that we are still here...

With heavy responsibilities in communities as well as in the outside world, we are pleased to have a chance to gather and take a pause to be able to listen, sense, feel, and dream together.

In gratitude...