On sovereign logic: a re-Indigenizing practice
I went to Rajasthan, India a couple of years ago now. My beloved spouse asked me to accompany her on a trip home right after her father passed away. The trip was complicated and I struggled while there as terror of being targeted for not fitting in to gender dynamics there got a hold of me and would not relent. It was a difficult trip for me until I reached Jodhpur. There I met Kuldeep Kothari and his wife Anita Kothari of the Arna Jharna, the Desert Museum of Rajasthan.
Kuldeep asserted that culture can come back, that it is never truly lost. This is also an orientation shared by my teachers. So although the Honduran people had original languages, ontologies, and rituals and ceremonies stripped from them to later become who we are now, it is possible that we have not lost all that knowledge but rather that we can unlock it, grow it back, and fundamentally bring into being who we have been all along as indigenous peoples. I realized also that the sense of grief and displacement we ingest from the very early descriptions of the birth of the Honduran nation imprint us with an acceptance of loss that I had not really questioned until I stood on the desert grounds of Arna Jharna. Culture can come back from a state of hibernation triggered by genocide.
Ancestral memory shows up in the body. And so when I was in the presence of Harold Gatensby as he taught a bunch of us about circles, these teachings landed deeply and resonated in ways that have forever altered me, not because I had to learn them through earnest study but rather because I discovered parts of myself I thought might be there but had not really connected to before then. That path was felt. Neurons were connected to pathways that were laid in my brain before birth but had not been activated yet. They waited there to be charged into consciousness and laid before me a path for the rest of my life. I came out of hibernation.
Sovereign logic diagram
A decade later, I wanted to teach some of these principles in ways that would encourage people into practice and came up with the idea of sovereign logic, a tool for the project of re-indigenizing ourselves. Thinking through my various relationships with indigenous peoples from the United States and Canada, I mapped out the process of making introductions to create a structure through which to support folks to understand the nature of their personhoods and to connect with their relationship to themselves, their ancestors, land and their journeys.
Much can be understood from the way people introduce themselves to new individuals and communities, networks of relationships, and these understandings can create pathways to connection or close them down. I also understood that being in right relationship to one’s story is critical in being in right relationship to ourselves, others and throughout our lives. I began to do this practice as part of the process of creating circles with people from all kinds of paths of lives working across all kinds of sectors since 2015.
Sovereign logic is the filter through which you see and understand the world. It is composed of the cumulative information gained through early experiences of the land (natural world) you were born in and are from, your lineage (ancestors and family stories and ways of being), your experiences, and all the learning you have done. This filter shapes how you understand the reality you are in and also serves as a location from which you create through thoughts, actions, feelings, behaviors, spiritual practices, language, creativity, imagination, and relationships.
The instructions are very simple:
Write a 2 minute introduction of yourself based on the idea of sovereign logic. The impact of this practice is complex and at times complicated. After four or five years of practice, I have never seen this practice fail to engage people in their own story differently, and listen better to other people’s stories. As a result of our social structure, this is a practice that invites us to step out of the shadows and be seen in the full light of who we are by community so that we can feel and be in community’s warm embrace.
A couple of years ago, I collaborated with Kaylynn Sullivan TwoTrees on the creation of an article that would speak to the relationships between the process of decolonization and the sacred. We wrote about sovereign logic for the first time through an article named “A Landscape of Sacred Regeneration and Renewal,” a bit of writing that begins to shed light on a re-indigenizing process meant for young indigenous people walking along a path and who are hungry to fully experience who they are. This article was part of Decolonizing the Spirit in Education and Beyond: Resistance and Solidarity edited by Njoki Nathani Wane, Miglena S. Todorova, and Kimberly L. Todd (2019).
These days I teach the idea and practice of sovereign logic at the University of Vermont’s Master’s in Leadership for Sustainability program and the Thousand Currents Academy.
