Exciting news! Thanks to the generosity and love of friends who share a common vision, in September of 2023, Tapestry was able to buy property that secures a Place of partnership and gatherings for our work. We will post more information soon!
This is the Pine Ridge of northwestern Nebraska. This Land, and the shortgrass prairie and badlands to its north and west, the Sand Hills to its southeast, has called us home. Look at this picture thoughtfully, and you’ll know why the titles on each page of our website are the particular color of blue they are, and why the page backgrounds are the precise shade of tan you see.
The Land is the ground of everything Tapestry does — and is.
The colors we’ve used on our pages embed a mythic way of knowing about this Land into our website. In doing so, they help plant a seed of relationship between you and the Land itself. That is, after all, one of our goals: to help people experience the world within Indigenous worldview. Simply seeing a photograph like the one on this page doesn’t take most people outside the box of their normal experience, but adding the element of mythic ways of knowing makes that experience shimmer just a little, floating you right to the edge of something new. That’s the place — that little sense of the tiniest shimmer you might feel when you think about what we’re saying about the relationship between these colors, you, and the land of Pine Ridge — that’s the place where there’s a little doorway into Indigenous worldview. It’s subtle, which is precisely the problem people of the dominant culture have when it comes to understanding Indigenous Knowledge the way so many want to. The path to Indigenous Knowledge goes through the doorway of Indigenous worldview. We help you find that door by intentionally combining the Land and different ways of knowing in designs that help forge a relationship between you and Indigenous Knowledge itself.
The photograph on this page is static, and the color system to which we’ve connected it is a very simple way of knowing. But it provides an introduction to the work we do in Tapestry. Projects such as the IKhana Fund and Indigenizing Environmental Law support Indigenous people working to re-stabilize environments that are seriously out of balance and protect places that are still healthy. At the same time, we help people of the dominant culture learn enough about Indigenous worldview to be allies who understand the importance of putting Indigenous Knowledge into action. The Land is essential to this work of weaving a healthy world of balance in which every person can once again sense the very real, deeply profound connection that binds us to one another and to the Land.