Recognition

The ancestral homelands of Indigenous peoples were not willingly ceded to colonial or United States governments. Treaties were made in bad faith, and many were broken. These strategies were designed to alienate Indigenous peoples — both women and men — from their homelands, spiritual legacies, ancestral inheritance, and intergenerational wealth.

Women’s Spiritual Displacement

Across the United States, Europe, and beyond, women’s spiritual inheritance was systematically destroyed. The rise of patriarchal religions and colonial empires erased reverence for the Goddess, outlawed women’s rites, and persecuted midwives, seers, and healers as witches.

Over thousands of years, women's spiritual and energetic bonds to their homelands, the Earth, Nature, Cosmos, and Ancestors led to the destruction and erasure of women's spiritual identities, cultures, and communities — their beliefs, practices, and histories. It was a systemic destruction and erasure of the goddess and Divine Feminine within the bodies and consciousness of women. It was a deliberate tactic to dominate by colonizing the bodies, emotions, minds, and Souls of women.

My Spiritual Displacement

My spiritual lineage and displacement includes the Irish — persecuted and displaced from their homelands by the English, who honed their tactics of colonization by starving the Irish and calling it a famine. That suffering drove many to the Americas, and the tactics themselves were later exported across colonized lands.

My Volga Germans were persecuted in Germany, displaced to Russia, and later fled to the Americas. My Mormon ancestors experienced religious persecution and fled westward across the U.S. frontier.

These spiritual lineages carry deep wounds of their own that continue to exist today in the form of lost identity, disconnection from indigenous lands, and the erasure or outlawing of ancestral spiritual practices in the U.S. — some of which remain today.

Disempowerment

Displacement leads to individual and collective disempowerment — and with it, addiction to achievement, substances, and consumption, to name a few. It also causes spiritual, social, and cultural bypassing and cultural appropriation (i.e., misrepresentation and exploitation).

These are distorted attempts to grieve and reground to the Earth, Land, Nature, and one’s own Soul. It’s an attempt to belong. We see them echoed across cultures, in both European-descended and Indigenous peoples.

Colonization

Mass European immigration was used to increase settler population and land control. Upon arrival in the Americas, the Irish and other European immigrants became complicit — knowingly or unknowingly — in the very systems that had once oppressed them. They were assimilated into the settler-colonial structure and became agents of displacement themselves.

Personal Accountability

As the founder of The College of Women’s Ecology™, I recognize that my birth and presence here makes me complicit in the historic and ongoing oppression of Indigenous peoples. Since childhood, I have carried a quiet knowing that this is not my true home — a feeling of being out of place, both in spirit and in soil — as though I was born in a land not my own. May I strive to contribute to the wellbeing of Indigenous peoples while walking softly upon this Land.

Dr. Rose Pere

Dr. Rangimarie Turuki Arikirangi Rose Pere — of Tūhoe, Ngāti Ruapani and Ngāti Kahungunu (Aotearoa/New Zealand) — was a renowned Māori wisdom keeper and global spiritual teacher. She once said, "There is no cultural appropriation because we are all one people."

Even so, responsibility, accountability, and reciprocity are essential in all relationships — with others, Nature, the Land, and with our Ancestors.

May this project walk with humility and reverence upon the Land from which it rises.