Public schooling in this country (Turtle Island) began with the kidnapping of Native children from their families.
Day after day, the work was to strip culture, language, and wholeness from Indigenous children — months away from family, enduring beatings and every kind of violence.
This is documented history.
Do not turn away from it.
Let it land in the chest, the weight of it, the grief these acts still carry.
We all have the power to be part of the healing.
What began in those schools never fully ended. It became a method: a systematic cutting away from the body’s knowing, from the land’s rhythms, from the ancient intelligence that lives in the bones — the same intelligence our ancestors used to track seasons, tend the village, read the sky, survive.
The severance was the point. A child severed from their own body is a child who can be told what they are.
You can feel the method still running in how a classroom is built.
Speak, act, and think a certain way. Follow rules you had no voice in making.
Meet standards with no grounding in how children actually learn — and if you fall outside the narrow norm, be punished, shamed, sorted.
The body learns early that it doesn’t belong to itself. It belongs to the bell schedule, the dress code, the discipline matrix.
The system breaking down around us isn’t failing.
It’s working as designed — strip the light from the child, and build a society too exhausted, too scattered, too small to remember another way was ever possible.
Here is what the method can’t reach: the remembering already living in us.
Everything that matters returns.
The seasons spiral.
The moon cycles.
Healing spirals too.
We’ll meet the rage again. We’ll meet the shame again.
We’ll meet the place where we learned to make ourselves small, again.
And each return is not the same ground — it’s a deeper turn of the same path, where deeper medicine waits.
We were taught to fear this. To read repetition as failure. If I’m revisiting this, I didn’t heal it right. But return is not regression. Return is deepening.
The tree doesn’t apologize for growing rings. The snake doesn’t shame itself for shedding skin. The moon doesn’t think she’s failing because she wanes.
Why do we?
The “progress” we’ve been chasing — straight line, ever upward, never back — is another measuring stick handed to us by the same hands that built the schools.
What if we’re not behind?
What if we’re exactly where the spiral has brought us?
We all feel the exhaustion of these times.
The shame loop of why am I still dealing with this.
The performance of having it together when really we’ve gotten good at masking, pretending, holding our breath.
We are not broken. We were never broken.
We were severed — and now we’re remembering.
Letting yourself cry in the parking lot instead of pushing through.
Speaking your truth even when your voice shakes — especially then.
Resting without earning it, because the body asked.
Saying no and feeling the ground hold you anyway.
Making something ugly and wild because it wanted to be born.
Meeting a pattern with curiosity instead of shame.
This is embodied education. Not in the head — in the bones.
Feel into the return of treating food as medicine.
The return of joy, rest, creativity, play as things worth treasuring rather than things to be earned.
Feel into whatever your body is ready to reclaim.
And then practice it. In repetition. In devotion to the remembering.
My Rarámuri ancestors — my mother’s people, from the canyon lands of Chihuahua — practice this to this day.
The name means those who run on foot, and they run ceremonially: to feel the earth, to return to the body, to let rhythm restore what the mind forgot. I name them here because this teaching isn’t a concept I arrived at. It’s a living practice, belonging to a living people, that I carry as their descendant.
You come from people who knew how to spiral too — even if colonization told you to forget, even if school taught you the body’s wisdom was primitive, savage, wrong.
The body remembers. The DNA remembers. The nervous system remembers. The land beneath your feet remembers.
All we have to do is practice returning.
Not to who we were before the wounding — to who we’re becoming because of it.
Stronger.
Medicine born from the pain.
One breath.
One choice.
One return at a time.
This is what we mean by learning as repair.
If it supports you, there’s a free guide that takes the spiral into daily practice, a return to embodied learning and how to hold these re-indigenized experiences with the young people in your life.
The history named at the top is worth sitting with directly. For those ready to go there:
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