Breaking Up with the Patriarchy: Decolonizing Our Lives and Returning to Kinship Worldview
Chapter Three: The Return to Wholeness (A Book Excerpt)
Editor’s Note: The following is an advanced, and exclusive book excerpt from the forthcoming book, Breaking Up with the Patriarchy: Decolonizing Our Lives and Returning to Kinship Worldview. Presented with the author and Open Spiral Publishing’s permission is Chapter Three: The Return to Wholeness.
Chapter Three: The Return to Wholeness
On my mother’s word only, I grew up knowing that I had Apache ancestry. Her father, someone neither she nor I had ever met, had belonged to a band in New Mexico. But she told me that the government building with our family’s only records had burned down so there was no way to verify our story.
I have always felt deeply connected to Indigenous ways of being. Even as a child, I felt drawn to the natural world in ways that went beyond simple appreciation. I would speak to trees, feel the consciousness in animals, and sense connections others dismissed as imagination. Throughout my life, I’ve experienced moments of knowing that couldn’t be explained through rational thought alone. I had dreams that later proved meaningful, intuitions that guided important decisions, connections with places that felt like recognition rather than discovery. I wanted to believe that these inclinations were inherited—a natural part of who I was.
But without the experience of growing up in an Indigenous community, and without tribal enrollment or ties to an extended family I had never met, I learned to keep quiet about this aspect of who I was. When I mentioned my Indigenous roots to people, the responses were often predictable. “So, you get free college, right?” or “Seems like everyone claims to be part Indian these days.” The implication was clear. Without proof, I had no right to acknowledge my ancestry. These interactions went beyond raising doubts in my own mind about my heritage. I began to question my own motivations and even my very sense of self. Was I deluding myself? Was I somehow being disrespectful by even thinking of myself as having Indigenous roots?
It felt important to set these questions aside when I started working on my doctorate degree, and that was a relief at first. Academia rewards analytical thinking and empirical evidence—things I could do well enough. For as long as I was immersed in the academic world, what I knew through observation, through relationships with the natural world, and through dreams and intuition had to be carefully partitioned away.
Still, I found myself speaking one language in seminars and writing another in my private journals. This division became increasingly uncomfortable. At times, when I presented my research and responded to the queries of my instructors and fellow students, I scarcely recognized the voice that came out of my mouth as my own. Deep down, I knew there was more to life than what academia could validate, and it bothered me to be cut off from the fuller experiences of life that I knew were mine to be had.
The walls I had built between my academic self and my deeper ways of knowing began to crack during a fellow student’s presentation in class one afternoon. The speaker, also named Suzan (but spelled differently), was discussing her research on integrating Cherokee frameworks with internal family systems therapy. When she began explaining the “within direction,” something inside me woke up and celebrated. I thought, Oh my gosh, you know about that too!
I imagine all readers will be familiar with the north, south, east, and west directions that can be found on any Western map. People with an Indigenous worldview also speak of going above, below, and within. Hearing my colleague Suzan talk about the “within” direction was the first time I had witnessed anyone treat Indigenous knowledge as valid instead of as an anthropological curiosity. I was in awe of this woman who showed that it was possible to bring her whole perspective to academia. I made a beeline for her as soon as class was dismissed.
A faculty member saw us talking and later pointed out that our program had not just two, but four doctoral students named Susan. “You should get to know one another,” he suggested. We did, and we discovered that each of us had Indigenous backgrounds. This simple observation led to regular meetings that became a source of healing and clarity for me.
We call ourselves the Four Susans. The three other Susans had formal tribal affiliations, while I did not. Yet in this circle, the question wasn’t whether my heritage was “authentic” enough. Instead, we explored what it meant to carry Indigenous ways of knowing in a world that has systematically attempted to erase them. I learned that I could honor these understandings without overstepping boundaries or making false claims.
During this time, we Four Susans encountered the work of Four Arrows, a former professor at our university who had written more than twenty books on Indigenous wisdom, education, and worldview transformation. His fearless advocacy for Indigenous perspectives in academia and beyond made him a natural guide for our journey.
When I first heard Four Arrows talk about the Kinship Worldview, I recognized it as something that had always been a significant part of how I saw myself and the world. I just never knew what to call it. Finally, here was a language for the experiences and understandings I had carried throughout my life but struggled to express in academic settings.
Four Arrows describes people like us Four Susans as “border crossers.” We navigate our lives between worldviews, not fully at home in either. Understanding myself as a border crosser helped me see my experience in a new light. What I had perceived as lack—an absence of official documentation or community recognition—I now recognized as a distinctive vantage point with its own clarity. Border crossers develop a kind of peripheral vision. We see patterns that might be invisible to those firmly rooted in a single worldview. We translate between ways of knowing, not as tourists but as people who have lived in multiple territories.
Four Arrows teaches that while cultural practices belong to specific peoples and places, worldview itself is our shared human inheritance. Specific ceremonies, songs, languages, clothing, and foods rightfully belong to the peoples who developed them through generations of relationship with the places where they live. These shouldn’t be items in a spiritual marketplace for anyone to claim.
But the underlying principles that shape how we see reality belong to all of humanity. The recognition that we are related to all life, that reciprocity rather than exploitation guides healthy relationships, that wisdom comes through many channels beyond rational thought—these understandings sustained all human societies for millennia before the relatively recent dominance of patriarchal systems.
Regardless of whether my Indigeneity will ever hold up in any kind of court, I learned that I could honor these core principles without appropriating specific cultural practices that weren’t mine to claim. I was beginning to recognize these patterns within myself, nurture them, and bring them into conversation with other ways of knowing.
This wasn’t about “playing Indian” or claiming an identity I hadn’t lived. I was remembering what lives in all of us beneath layers of patriarchal conditioning.
The Four Susans continued to meet every month after that first introduction. At first, we rotated in pairs where two of us would have an hour-long conversation, then we switched partners for the next month. After about a year of these dyadic exchanges, we began gathering as a complete circle. These meetings became a space where I could bring my whole self—all the complexities and uncertainties included. In this circle, my spiritual experiences weren’t dismissed as unscientific, my connection to the natural world wasn’t romanticized, and my questions about identity weren’t judged. We did serious scholarly work together, presenting at conferences and publishing papers. But more importantly, we created a circle of belonging that transcended conventional boundaries of identity and academia.
When my husband, Ken, was diagnosed with terminal cancer seven years into our marriage, this circle held space for both of us. The Indigenous worldview understands death not as medical failure but as transition, not as ending but transformation. Honoring this understanding within one another allowed me to experience my grief without being defined by it.
Later, when Susan Quash-Mah’s husband died suddenly and then Susan herself passed away in 2019, our circle continued. We still refer to ourselves as the Four Susans, acknowledging that relationship continues beyond physical presence. This is a very different understanding of connection that patriarchal thinking doesn’t have language for.
Understanding the Kinship Worldview
Four Arrows has articulated a comparison of forty dominant and Indigenous worldview patterns, each of which he places on a continuum. At the heart of the Indigenous worldview are principles that represent humanity’s original relationship with everything else in existence.
This worldview is fundamentally nonhierarchical. It sees humans not as superior to or separate from the rest of nature, but as relatives in a vast family that includes plants, animals, mountains, rivers, and stars. It recognizes that we’re embedded in complex webs of relationship that sustain our existence. In Indigenous communities worldwide, this understanding is expressed in different ways, but the core recognition of kinship with all life remains consistent, which is why we often speak of this as the Kinship Worldview or kinship thinking.
Kinship thinking emphasizes community welfare over individual gain. It recognizes that our well-being is inseparable from the well-being of the communities we’re part of—both human communities and the broader community of life. This doesn’t mean erasing individual needs or gifts, but it does mean seeing them in a relational context rather than elevating individual achievement above all else. It recognizes individuality and uniqueness.
Perhaps most fundamentally, this way of seeing perceives Earth and all its systems as living and loving rather than as inert resources. Mountains, rivers, forests, and prairies aren’t just scenery or sources of raw materials. They’re living presences with their own integrity and consciousness.
When I speak to clients about Indigenous worldview and kinship thinking, I sometimes encounter hesitation. “I’m not spiritual,” they tell me. Sometimes their tone is apologetic; with others there’s a note of defiance. Either they’ve been taught that spirituality is irrational superstition, or they’ve been wounded by religious institutions that used spiritual language to control rather than liberate.
But it’s impossible to talk about the Indigenous worldview without bringing spirituality into the room. This is because kinship thinking doesn’t separate spirituality from everyday life. There’s no distinction between “sacred” and “mundane” activities. Every interaction with food, water, shelter, other humans, plants, animals, and elements involves relationship with living consciousness.
Know that I’m not referring to any particular set of beliefs when I talk about spirituality. I’m simply talking about our innate capacity to experience wonder, to sense meaning beyond what can be measured, and to feel connection with something larger than ourselves. This capacity lives in all of us, regardless of our religious background or lack thereof.
Spirituality based in the Indigenous worldview doesn’t require belief in any religious doctrine. It doesn’t require us to reject rational thought or scientific understanding. Although these tools are not the only ways of knowing what it is possible to know, they still have value.
The Indigenous worldview simply asks us to pay attention to the experience of being alive in relationship with everything else that lives. We are invited to expand our understanding of how we know what we know to include direct experience, bodily wisdom, dream knowledge, and the revelations that come through deep relationship with the more-than-human world. Indigenous or Kinship Worldview does not privilege anthropocentrism (human centeredness). We recognize that humans are one of the youngest species on the planet, and we listen deeply to our elder siblings in the web of life.
Many Indigenous traditions take an experiential approach to spiritual understanding. Rather than demanding adherence to specific beliefs, they invite participation in practices while allowing each person to discover their own meaning through direct experience. Elders might teach how to conduct a ceremony or practice, but they rarely dictate what you should feel or learn—those insights emerge through your own relationship with the experience.
There’s something liberating about recognizing that you don’t need special training or membership in a particular group to honor your spiritual nature. You don’t need to use any specific language or follow prescribed rituals. You simply need to notice what already lives within you—those moments when your awareness expands beyond your personal concerns to encompass something larger and more profound.
Reconnecting with Our Whole Selves
Many of my clients who start out insisting that they aren’t spiritual later go on to speak with profound reverence about their gardens, describe transcendent moments while hiking, or tear up when witnessing acts of genuine kindness. What they’re lacking isn’t spiritual capacity but the permission to recognize and value their own inherently spiritual experiences. They’ve been taught to dismiss the aspects of life that make it meaningful.
Practices like greeting the morning sun, expressing gratitude before meals, and acknowledging the life in plants and animals around us are accessible to everyone, regardless of how spiritual you consider yourself to be, and regardless of how disconnected you may feel from Earth-based traditions. All our ancestors, if we trace our lineages far enough back, lived in relationship with the land that sustained them.
I invite you to try simple practices like these and notice what happens when you allow yourself to experience direct relationship with the world rather than reducing your experiences to labels, categories, or explanations that fit neatly into the dominant culture’s limited understanding of reality.
Be gentle with yourself if this is difficult. Perhaps you’ve had negative experiences with religion that make spiritual language feel threatening. Or maybe you value rational thinking and worry that acknowledging spiritual dimensions of experience might require suspending critical judgment. These concerns deserve respect, and healing may take time. Know that your spiritual nature hasn’t disappeared, even if you’ve been disconnected from it for years. Breaking up with the patriarchy means giving yourself permission to reclaim it.
The healing I found through my work with the Four Susans and Four Arrows isn’t unique to people questioning their Indigenous heritage. Nearly everyone in our society struggles with fragmentation of self. From early childhood, we’re taught to compartmentalize different aspects of our being. Consider how young children are taught to sit still in classrooms despite their bodies needing movement, or how they’re told “big kids don’t cry” when expressing emotions. As adults, how many of us have felt forced to separate our “professional” selves from our emotional, intuitive, or spiritual ways of knowing? How many have set aside parts of our personal truths because they don’t fit neatly into accepted categories?
The patriarchal worldview thrives on these divisions—mind from body, human from nature, reason from intuition, individual from community. These separations aren’t natural, they’re taught. And what is taught can be unlearned.
Each of us lives with layers of conditioning that tell us what is “real” versus what is “imaginary,” what constitutes “evidence” versus what is “merely subjective.” We learn which parts of ourselves are valued and which must be hidden away. Most painful of all, we internalize these judgments until we no longer recognize the violence being done to our wholeness. We become our own compartmentalizers, our own silencers.
This fragmentation shows up differently for each of us. Perhaps you’ve dismissed intuitive knowings that later proved true. Maybe you’ve felt a mysterious connection to specific places or non-human beings but learned to keep quiet because when people asked why, there was no rational explanation. You might recognize the dissonance between what your body tells you and what your rational mind insists is possible. Or perhaps you’ve felt caught between cultural identities, never fully belonging in any single community.
These experiences aren’t signs of psychological weakness or “failures to adapt” to the stresses of modern life. They are evidence that the Kinship Worldview continues to live within us despite centuries of systematic suppression. What gets pathologized as “magical thinking” or dismissed as “primitive superstition” often represents ways of knowing that have served humanity extremely well for most of our existence and are still a part of everyday life in Indigenous communities all over the world.
The dominant culture tells a story about human evolution that portrays our current way of living as the pinnacle of progress. Yet what we call progress has brought us to the edge of ecological collapse, epidemic levels of loneliness and mental illness, and profound disconnection from the sources of meaning that sustained our ancestors. What if this narrative has it backward? What if our most urgent task isn’t moving “forward” but remembering what we’ve forgotten?
This remembering isn’t about romanticizing the past or appropriating specific cultural practices that have been handed down through generations of relationship with particular places and communities. It’s about recognizing patterns that live within all of us—patterns of relationship, reciprocity, and reverence for life that have sustained human communities for millennia.
I’ve witnessed remarkable transformations when people reconnect with their innate ways of knowing and being and begin to honor their bodily wisdom alongside their intellectual understanding. People who have struggled with chronic anxiety find relief in recognizing themselves as part of natural systems rather than isolated individuals responsible for controlling every outcome. Those who have felt ashamed of their intuitive or spiritual experiences discover validation in learning that these represent valuable ways of knowing rather than defects in rationality.
When we begin to reclaim our spiritual nature, the world becomes more alive, more responsive, more meaningful. We discover that we aren’t isolated individuals in a dead Universe but participants in a living community. The anxiety that comes from feeling responsible for controlling everything eases as we recognize that we’re held within larger patterns and relationships.
The shift from patriarchal to kinship thinking doesn’t happen through force of will. You can’t “get there from here” simply by accepting these ideas on an intellectual level. It happens through practice, through direct engagement with the living world around us.
Start small. Notice what draws your attention. Pay attention to moments when something wakes up inside you—curiosity, wonder, reverence.
Think about a moment when you stood under a vast night sky filled with stars, or witnessed a sunrise that made your breath catch, or held a newborn and felt overwhelmed by the miracle of new life. That sensation of awe is the opening of awareness beyond the boundaries of ordinary perception. It’s your spiritual nature making itself known. Acknowledging that there are great mysteries opens doorways to profound connection by dissolving the artificial boundaries between self and world. It brings a sense of belonging that no material possession can provide, and often sparks a deep commitment to protecting what we recognize as sacred.
This is a practice I’ve borrowed from Four Arrows. Find a tree that you feel particularly drawn to. It could be in your yard, in a nearby park, or even a tree you pass regularly on your commute. Approach it with curiosity and openness. Stand before it and ask its permission to give it a hug—either out loud or silently.
Then wait—truly wait—for its response. This isn’t merely symbolic. It’s an exercise in recognizing that communication happens through many channels beyond human language. You might notice subtle shifts in your body, feelings of welcome or hesitation, or changes in the quality of your attention.
If you sense permission, gently embrace the tree. Notice the texture of its bark, its smell, the feeling of contact between your body and this living being. If you don’t sense permission, respect that boundary, and simply sit nearby, offering your attention and presence.
This simple practice invites us to remember that we exist in relationship with other forms of consciousness. It challenges the conditioning that tells us trees are merely objects, incapable of communication or preference. It opens us to ways of knowing that extend beyond what the patriarchy recognizes as valid.
Many of my clients, even those most resistant to anything “spiritual,” report profound experiences with this practice. One corporate executive described feeling “seen in a way no human has ever seen me.” A skeptical scientist found herself weeping as she recognized “the loneliness of believing I was separate from everything else.” A young man who had been disconnected from his body through trauma felt “safely held for the first time since childhood.”
These moments of connection reveal our natural state—the wholeness that has always been there beneath the patriarchy’s conditioning. The Kinship Worldview isn’t something foreign we need to learn or achieve, after all. It’s what emerges naturally when we let go of the exhausting effort of maintaining separation. It’s coming home to our true selves.