I am deeply fascinated by how an oral culture retains the core of the communicative act. How can a deeply interactive framework of expression based in shared experience survive, when faced with translation into a written public sphere? The effort is characterized by the possibility and necessity of advocacy – an advocacy inclusive of disenfranchised peoples, animals, and the spirits of the land.

There is an intense practicality that resides at the core of indigenous perspectives. Across a diversity of tribal nations, policy and spirituality prove inseparable: duly informed by deep, cultivated awareness of our utter dependence on the land and ecology. Critical thinking and writing are sharpened when natural resources are understood as the contextual constant, revealing how the land determines the American cultural past and present. The constant, interactive presence of the land inescapably determines our survival, despite any tendency to remain distracted and removed from awareness of the fact.

Perhaps  any given act of communication is and is not grounded in “the commons,” the inescapable yet often ignored aspect of a country as the actual, tangible, living places that enable shared experience.