To understand why I trust the way I do, why I believe in how I'm guided and the information I've been given, it's helpful to watch this.

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These integrations with the Natural World and those unseen are the second foundation from which I work. (I talk about the first here.)Anything related to Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women cannot be separated from my relationship with Ground, Water, Bones, Wind, Horse, and The Memories.

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Though I call these 'The Memories' as if they exist as individuated pieces of knowledge floating within me, they are not just that. They are contained within the souls of those that were blown into me in 2011 and 2014. I don't speak metaphorically when I say, "I contain multitudes." In the same way they taught others in their 'breathing time', they teach me and  what I have to pass on is the memory of song, of ceremony, and most importantly of relationships with the Natural World that we can and cannot see. It is those loving relationships that are The Medicine and they are specific to place and culture that has grown around that place.

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Someone asked me, after I posted this on Facebook, if I know of anyone else who has had these experiences. To my knowledge, the only other person who has received memories is an Old Ojibe-Cree named Pat Kennedy who received Anishinnaabe and Cree specific memories and  spent decades traveling Sourthern Canada and Northern US tribes reintroducing ceremony, songs, dances and medicines that had been lost during colonization.

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Part of my job is the same thing, though I can't know how that is going to happen. The responsibility is so huge that I can't wrap my head around it, especially when I'm unwelcome in many of the communities I'm meant to serve.

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These memories are specific to place and I cannot know when or to whom they are to be received until that information arises. However, I do know from where these memories have been received: the Americas, the 'central belt' of Africa (with a sprinkling  from Namibia and South Africa), West Asia (not East) and sub-continental India, Australia, New Zealand and a smattering of still-occupied islands in the Pacific Ocean. In addition, because there is such a deep tie to breathing people and culture, the diasporas to which they've migrated is also important.

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These integrations have made it impossible to ignore when Earth moves through my spine pushing the bodies of women through me, when lakes say, "She's here!" or when the wind in coordination with sand to say, "Please. Take them home."