rekindling appalachia
Restoring land, relationships, and traditions through Indigenous-led care and collective vision.
our
story
The Appalachian Rekindling Project is a region-wide initiative that began to establish and sustain an intertribal Indigenous center where Native people can physically return and gather in central Appalachia as well as to care for and protect land collectively.
This intertribal center will be a free space to be reserved, shared, and engaged with by Indigenous communities and individuals. By nature of being intertribal, involving more than one Tribe, we invite Indigenous people from any tribal community to use the space when it is fully constructed. We particularly look forward to Natives who have been removed from the region to be able to return to their homelands.
ARP has been gifted over 15 acres in Appalachian Virginia where the center will live. Construction has not yet begun. We are designing the center with accessibility and cultural demonstration in mind.
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Outside of the design and building of the center, our focus is land restoration through the practice of rematriation, an Indigenous women-led practice of restoring a people to their rightful place in sacred relationship with their ancestral land.
We work to care for land with Indigenous knowledge systems and to restore any land from industrial and environmental harm.
We create and share popular education programming related to this work. We also begin and support initiatives bringing Indigenous people together artistically, culturally, and socially. We know this work happens in deep relational engagement and only in the collective wealth of all of our communities’ knowledge, care, and intention.
This project is led by Indigenous women and supported by a multicultural team.
Rematriation
Rematriation for us is important because
Native women are land and water defenders.
We also embrace this framing because of the turn towards removing a patriarchal colonial view of the extent cultural return can take. Repatriation is essential, but does not speak to the return of land in the relational way that rematriation does.
Rematriation allows us to speak of the land as sacred and our relationship with it as sacred and essential.
Many Indigenous nations are matriarchal or had women in governance, and we know that was true here in these mountains.
our vision
ARP exists to bring any land into restorative ecological care and to restore cultural access to Native communities.
We envision this space as a place of joyful community, of cultural revitalization, and of intertribal collaboration. There are many desires for what the center will hold, expressed by our team and our communities, including:
a learning camp on the land for inter-generational knowledge sharing, language program intensives, a Native artist in residence/ artist retreat space, garden usage for food and traditional medicine, appropriate foraging education, beading as healing and cultural care workshops, pottery studio space, event space, film and photography training for young people on the land, pigment foraging, traditional paint making, fabric dying, workshops on making salves and teas, quilting and sewing (ribbon skirts/shirts,) artist exhibition space year round, land and water care, harvest work and celebration, art installations and murals, and pow wow grounds.
our values
This work is for regional repair.
It is for the ability for repeated return of Native people. For the rebuilding of relationships and the collective preservation of the land, our relative. We know that real ecological safeguarding has always been rooted in Indigenous wisdom and defense.
This work is for the dismantling of barriers. For kinship. For the restoration of wellbeing, personal and collective.
This project aims to rekindle relationships with homelands, one another, and with our traditional practices/arts.
Be Part of the Rekindling.
Your donations directly fund essential needs including contributing to the building costs, land stewardship expenses, and daily operations
One-time gifts can be made through our land tax portal by selecting the "one-time" option
For those preferring traditional methods, checks can be made payable to our fiscal sponsor, the Appalachian Community Fund, with a clear notation that the donation is intended for The Appalachian Rekindling Project.
