Women-driven and Indigenous-led Earth Economics with Jyoti Ma
Following Mother Law’s original instructions to restore sacred reciprocity.
Jyoti Ma is an internationally renowned spiritual teacher dedicated to fostering global unity and honoring Earth and all its inhabitants. She is an original co-creator of The Fountain, whose mission is to restore an economic model that is based on reciprocity and collaboration and guided by Nature and the Sacred. For decades, she has cultivated deep relationships with Indigenous elders and spiritual leaders, ensuring their voices and traditions are honored in the collective work of planetary renewal.
She also co-founded the Center for Sacred Studies, serving as its Grandmother Vision Keeper, and helped establish Kayumari, a spiritual community spanning America and Europe. Through The Fountain, she continues to forge alliances between Indigenous guardians, traditional medicine ways, and conscious stewards working toward a thriving future for the web of life.
The following interview has been transcribed from audio.
INL: Many wisdom traditions speak of prophecy and cycles of change. From your perspective, what is being asked of humanity right now?
Jyoti: What a good question. It's a loud question that I'm not sure many have heard, so I'm going to address it that way.
I've been walking with our original people around this planet for almost four decades. I'm about to turn 77 years old as the West counts my life and 78 as my elders count my life. Most of that time has been dedicated to this Mother Earth—learning, being initiated by, and instructed by our original people. So, I'm a lucky girl that way because they came up a 14-mile logger road to find myself in our community. The elders did—from many medicine lines, from different parts of this beautiful Earth—to instruct us in a way of life that was original in the original days, a way of life that’s based on original principle.
Those original principles being heart, reciprocity, collaboration, love, unity, tolerance, compassion, all life is sacred. As they came and began to initiate us, we as a community began to remember for ourselves. We began to come back to and restore connection with this Mother Earth that had been cut so many years ago.
When we were cut away from nature—as being a part of it—we began to move down a trail of materializing and economizing it, making things a commodity, going after Mother Earth without understanding that she is alive, that she is a being. She has given us a way of life, and when we care for it in that way, when we honor the original people who hold that formula for care, balance returns. Reciprocity begins to flow, and all of life is cared for. There is no more thought of scarcity—only an understanding that as we give, we receive, and as we receive, we give. That reciprocity is one of the first original principles that creates the foundation.
So, we were fortunate that they found us in this way and that they began to initiate us so that we could raise our children walking this kind of life—where all life is sacred, where we honor and respect one another’s diversity, embracing the unity of us as all nations to come together during this very prophetic time, as you've mentioned.
A few years into that, some of my community and I were in Brazil. We had taken the peyote—the Native American Church—over to sit with the ayahuasqueros there. When we came out of that first teepee, we held two in honor of this connection between the Eagle and the Condor. It was at that point that the elders began to tell us about the Eagle-Condor prophecy.
The way they spoke about that prophecy—and I'm giving a short part of the story, I mean no disrespect to it at all—was that the Earth was once one being with a landmass that we call North, South, and Central America as one continent. Big Earth changes took place, and that land got split apart into what we now know as North, South, and Central America.
It was at that time that this process of prophecy began to flow, called the Eagle-Condor prophecy. They said that after this split, when the people were torn apart, the North—the Eagle—would begin to work with the elements of fire and air, becoming a very intellectualized kind of process. The Condor, they said, would activate the heart. And that at one point, the Eagle would almost take over the Condor, and right at that moment, they would begin to fly together. And when they began to fly together, we would be moving into the new era, the new dawn. That’s how the prophecy was set in motion.
When they told us about this, we suddenly awoke inside this prophecy, and had been called in service to it. We've been walking and listening to it ever since. There are prophecies from many spiritual lines and nations around the planet that all agree on this moment we’re standing in now. This time has been foretold for generations, and it is on time with that prophecy.
That’s how we came to be pulled into service to prophecy. Ever since that time, we receive instruction from the prophecy—it helps to prepare us for the moment we're standing in right now. Now, they give us the instruction for how to walk through this tumultuous time of turning and change, where, as the Eagle-Condor prophecy says, "the ending will fall into the beginning" in 2026.
They give us the instruction for how to walk through this tumultuous time of turning and change, where, as the Eagle-Condor prophecy says, "the ending will fall into the beginning" in 2026.
In 2013, they called us together and said that the prophecy was about to open the next door to a 13-year great cleanse. Look back from 2013 until now. You can see each year becoming more severe in the cleansing process. This is the 13th year of that great cleanse.
It’s a pivotal year—the year when the ending falls into the beginning. They said it was very important for us to watch the ending as it fell down, so that we could stay informed and make mindful steps, bringing the light of the new dawn into this new cycle of time for the Mother Earth herself.
They said when this moment happened that we must listen—to stay informed about that which is falling down—but we must stay focused on that is breaking through. And that which is breaking through is carried by those individuals, organizations, and movements that are based on those original principles I spoke about. That is the kind of moment we're in right now.
I am also a delegate with the Mother Earth Delegation, which was put in motion in 2019—that’s a much longer story. All of my elders—28 delegates, including myself, and four youth ambassadors—are part of that delegation. We are mandated to declare sovereignty and mandated to return the original caretakers to their territories.
Mother Earth needs them there now because she is giving us instruction on how to bring about healing so that more of the human species can move into the new dawn. She has given us a time frame now. We are in the second year of a warning she gave a little over a year ago, saying she could no longer hold the maladies we were placing upon her and still do. She had to make a movement in her own ascension process, in her own healing, to bring about this next 26,000-year era. We’re right at the end of an era you see.
When I was in India, when I was on pilgrimage, I would go into some of their sacred places and see a clock on the wall. It showed cycles: from 12 to 1 was 2,500 years, from 1 to 2 was another 2,500 years, and so on—around the clock for 26,000 years. The very last part of that cycle was dark. They called it the Kali Yuga. This is another line of process and prophecy that is spoken about. In India, they call it the Kala Yuga—the time when the ending falls into the beginning.
It’s not that we did something wrong. Not at all. We are at the end of a cycle. If we can understand that and embrace it, then we can begin to hear the instruction of this creation and know how to walk through it in a good way—to be the light of that new dawn.
INL: As you’ve said, this is a pivotal year in these prophecies and in your work. Can you share more about the pilgrimage you’re undertaking this year from Stonehenge to the Pyramids?
Jyoti: I’ve been working in Colombia with the four original people there—most tribal people, most tribal nations would call them their elder brother. There's a film you can go see called Aluna1. It's on Netflix, and I think it's on YouTube. It was made many years ago, but it tells you why the elder brother is seen that way—because they're still way high up in the La Sierra Nevada in Colombia. They call it the heart of the world. There are still many living up there in an original way of life that's never changed.
At great sacrifice, many years ago—a few decades ago—the Mother Earth herself told them that they needed to go off the mountain and come down to help their younger brother because their younger brother was getting lost. So they came down to us at great sacrifice and are still doing so today.
I'll share a little bit so you have an understanding of the relationship they have with this Mother Earth and the cosmos. Every nation that I know, that I've had the privilege to sit with and learn from and be instructed by, carries their own cosmology story, their own creation story. The original principles of their nations for that territory that they live on, that is found inside and travels along with this creation story. It's how they know how to care for that part of the Earth, how to tend to her sacred sites there in that sacred part of the Earth.
And so, the Mamos are the male leaders in Colombia, and the Sagas are the female leaders. There are four original lines of people there—these elder brothers. At this point, I've worked with three of those four: the Wiwa, the Arhuaca, and what many of you would know as the Kogi. Today, they prefer to be called the Kagaba.
I came to know them because the Fountain2 came along. I was instructed by spirit to hold this sacred seed of the Fountain, whose mission was to restore an economic model that was based on reciprocity and collaboration, guided by nature and the sacred. When I started to catch this vision—because I had met some of the original people for the first time the year before—I contacted Saga Carmen, whom I met at a gathering, and told her about what was coming. She said it's very important that you continue to walk with this; it has the feminine principle reawakening in it.
When I got to the next level of what I needed to do, I contacted her and arranged to go to Colombia and meet with her. I wanted her to see what I was catching—was I listening correctly? Was I hearing the vision of what the Earth was really needing to be put in motion? If not, then I would know and go home.
My dear sister, Loretta Afraid of Bear Cook, who's Lakota Sioux, went with me. Darlene Hunter, who is Executive Director and Spiritual Director for the Center for Sacred Studies—one of the other organizations that has grown out of our community of Kayumari—also went with me.
When we got there, we were quite surprised because they had representatives from all four original peoples come together. We went into long dialogues: What was the vision? Where did it come from? At one point, I had a template that I had drawn from the first instruction of this vision, and one of the Kogi said, "Where did you get that?" I said, "In my meditation. Why?" He said, "Because that's one of our oldest symbols. That's exactly where the Fountain should sit, and we need to sit on it too."
Ever since that time—which was in 2012—I've been going to Colombia and have been instructed and learning about the protocol of Colombia and the La Sierra through the instruction of those four original peoples.
Now, the Mamos are seen as individuals who are being born with the seed of consciousness that can fully open itself. When they're caught at birth, they're taken into the caves and do not see the light of day until they're nine years old. When they're nine, they're brought out and go through a set of exams, if you will, to see if that consciousness has fully opened. If it hasn't, they go back into the caves until they're 18. I've worked with some that were in there for 28 years.
You can imagine being grown in the womb, getting your instruction—the acknowledgment of the intelligence of it all being your teacher. That's the level of consciousness they have and the deep relationship they have.
From the beginning, when they said it's time to put this in motion, they called it then, the Fountain for the Natural Order of Our Existence. I didn't know what that meant, but I'm beginning to learn it after 13 years of walking with them.
They would go into consultation. When they go into consultation, it can be for different periods of time, up to 10 days or more sometimes. When they're in consultation, they do not eat, sleep, or drink water because they're fully absorbed in that source that grew them. They then come back with the instruction from that consultation. They brought it to our team; our team walked out the instruction, and then we held a ceremony of gratitude for what we learned. We went back for the next set of instructions, and we've been doing that for 13 years.
The Fountain has literally been constructed by this process I've just described. It is the Mother Earth's instrument poised here in some work that she's calling up and activating. We are what they say there in Colombia—we're the Fountain's filter to the younger brother—for them to bring messages that will educate the awakening, but also to make collaborations at this point, collaborations that will allow the awakening process to move itself globally following this level of instruction.
With all that said—as I wanted to paint a little more understanding—I haven’t brought in, all of these years, many proposals. But in this last year, I was guided to bring two proposals to the Mamos. The one in question is the Pilgrimage.
In November of last year, I met with a young community of people in their 30’s and 40’s. They are turned on by Mamma Earth. They want to serve her. They get that things are happening out of order. She can’t heal, and neither can we, until we realign ourselves to that natural order of Mother Law. They know all about these new systems that are coming into play. They started to receive instruction about a bicycle pilgrimage that would start in Stonehenge.
So, some of my team and I will be there with the Mamos to launch this pilgrimage from July 31st to August 4th. In the in-between, the Mamos are working. They are doing ceremony, they are laying down prayers. They are bringing us what I like to call the golden thread to weave inside this pilgrimage and this global movement that is being inspired. They will move from Stonehenge, following a route that you can see at pilgrimage.love3. You can follow along with us or jump in and join us on the bicycle pilgrimage. They will be stopping at other holy sites around Europe, ending in Giza at the pyramids in November.
As we go along to each place, we want to model the original principle. We want to go to each site they’re going to go to before they get there and meet with the elders of that land. Many people are struggling with who the original caretakers of the land are—everywhere—but particularly in Europe. But I’ve had many good meetings with the Druids4, and the Sámi5 people, who are some of those original people in some of the territory there.
We want to at least model that it's important that we start to do our homework: Who are/were the original caretakers of this sacred land I’m sitting on? We always recognize them first. And then we make relations. We ask them, “What is the protocol of this territory?” so we can come into their house, and honor and respect their ways there. When we do, we begin the restoration and regeneration that is necessary to bring Mother Earth into good health. We want to model that all along the way.
Who are/were the original caretakers of this sacred land I’m sitting on? We always recognize them first. And then we make relations. We ask them, “What is the protocol of this territory?”
INL: The work of unifying people with the Earth is at the heart of The Fountain’s vision. What are some of the most important lessons you’ve learned from the Indigenous elders you walk with?
Jyoti: Humility. I think it's the most important teaching that weaves itself through all their teachings. I think that we've lost our humility. We got caught in our mind, and we separated from the intelligence of heart. We started to craft something that was not sustainable. Our egos got rather involved in that crafting and structuring. So we've got to come back to ourselves. We have to remember ourselves, and we do it through the doorway of humility. Humility is a strength. We've been taught about it differently in the West. It's not seen as a strength, but it is such a strength, and you can activate your humility. Some of these ones that bring these ways right now are remarkable people who have helped their people through many different challenging situations—sometimes life-threatening to them.
You know our history here in North America, but that history is all around the planet with our original people. They are fighting to save our forests in the Amazon, not for themselves and their village. They are doing this because they know that if those forests go, the lungs of the earth go, and all of us will suffer. That's humility.
I guess the next piece that I think is an important teaching that I've come to remember is protocol. Protocol comes out of Mother Law. Protocol comes as a way of instruction from the earth about how to care for something—say, a ceremony. It has its own protocol, given by the earth, so that when we follow that protocol, the strength of that prayer comes up through a line unbroken to the moment we're standing in right now, to offer that ceremony or prayer. And all the strength of that prayer comes into the room that we are in for that ceremony, or into the space we have gathered.
You know, that protocol isn't like rules. It's a living formula for life. Once you understand that, you begin to realize that every line of life in this creation is unique upon itself—each thread weaving the tapestry we call life. And in that tapestry, as we acknowledge that thread, that line—as we sit at this world table the way she’s shown it to me now—each of us has a line that goes back to our root. If we bring that up, and it has been healed, and now it is time to be acknowledged, it sits at that world table. The gift is that thread of our original people that came from that original time, unbroken till now, bringing the wisdom—the ancestral wisdom—necessary for us to weave our threads in a unified nature and reveal the new dawn.
That’s been a very important teaching for me—protocol. It is in everything: in the ways that we sit with one another, in the ways we practice, in the diversity of practices. Protocol helps maintain the authenticity of our diversity as I know it.
Coming back to traditional ceremony—earth-based ceremony—has been very significant, not only to me, my family, and my community, because it brought us into that understanding of protocol. It brought us into an understanding of original people and their role as original caretakers of this creation.
It brought us into a memory of those original principles: that we must sit and respect one another, and listen to one another. They say, "Don't do crossfire talk." That means, don’t talk over someone. So when you sit in a circle, when you are sharing and working on something, each person has that moment where their voice is heard—uninterrupted. If I am listening—truly listening—I won’t be in my mind trying to gauge what I really want to say back to them, because then I am not listening anymore.
So these practices, as I’m describing them, have taught us how to listen again to one another. And then, to do what we call deep listening. Deep listening is when I am able to sink down and hear the earth—the multitude of her diversity, the divine within the earth, and how that cosmos dances and dialogues every day with us. That’s what we call deep listening.
What’s been exciting for me is to take these applications—some of these pieces I’m talking about—and to have an organization like Tree Sisters, who for five years went into a deep listening process with elders from many different nations. Many of them from the Mother Earth Delegation and The Fountain. They began to remember, to understand, and knew that the call was not just to intellectualize these original principles. We must embody them now. We must embody them.
They reorganized their entire organization based on those principles. They are a model for how to bring their trees, to do the reforestation work that they do so magnificently around this planet. They follow those original principles: Who are the original caretakers? How do I enter your territory? What protocol do I need? And you immediately give that place of instruction to the original people of that land. You don’t go in with good intention and say, "Now let me show you how we can fix this." You don’t go in with good intention and then step on protocol that breaks things instead of restore or regenerate. You take the time and the humility to really sit and listen and get an invitation to the territory. Then something different takes place.
The empowerment of these original cultures—their language, their place in all of this—gets restored. And that’s why I’m on fire. Because I feel that is one of the most significant things we must do. And we must hurry up in our doing, because we’re in an urgent moment of the mother’s making. We can participate in that.
Those are some of the things that I would say.
INL: How can we reconcile the current economic systems, which often disregard sacred reciprocity and the economics of the land, with the prophecies that speak of a return to balance?
Jyoti: That's a question we would need much more time to truly answer. So I'm going to give a brief one in response because of our time element.
When this prompting first started coming to me, that I must restore an economic model based on reciprocity and collaboration, guided by nature and the divine—I really had a lot of resistance in me because I'm not an economist, nor do I pretend to be. I'm a woman. A prayer. I'm a woman that helps grow communities. I'm a woman and a healer who works not only with individuals but with parts of this collective soul to do healing work—to be informed by it and in service to it. But economy? After all these years of walking with it, I'm really getting it. I'm starting to realize that what she's doing is bringing us back to an original economy, and that original economy was based on value—that all were valued.
I'm starting to realize that what she's doing is bringing us back to an original economy, and that original economy was based on value—that all were valued.
That everybody in the village that came to sit around that fire carried something of value that made the village what it was, and they were recognized and respected for that. A lot of what I do is carry this message so that seats in the boardroom will be held by those who carry the voice of Mother Earth. She needs to be in the planning and the thinking. She has good wisdom to share with us—if we will but listen.
When we come back to a table where all life is sacred and all is valued, then a natural reciprocity occurs because everything is shared. There is no surplus. If I have surplus, I'll share you my surplus, and what was a need for you was a surplus for me. When we all turn and allow things to flow like that, reciprocity emerges naturally. That process creates the original foundation where all life is taken care of, all life is seen as sacred, and all life is respected. It moves in the nature of that motion.
Right now, I'm working a lot with many circles that are activating flow funding6. Marion Weber Rockefeller—is someone who caught this vision and activated it many decades ago. She's an amazing, beautiful woman with such a clean heart, strong intuition, and listens deeply. She is dedicated to this earth and to all the forms of how creation presents itself—the two-leggeds, the four-leggeds, the one-leggeds, the creepy crawlers, those that fly, those that swim, those that smell good—all the different forms of this creation.
What she sees with flow fund is that if we break the dam that holds it all together, abundance will be allowed to flow into the hands of the many. I've been working with flow funding now for over two decades, and I've learned a lot from that principle. I believe it is a catalyst and a seed that we are trying to strengthen now into co-funding flow funding so that we can collaborate as these flows take place.
Eventually, these flows can move into creating a flow fund where each of my delegates, in their own home territories, would have access—so they can dip into the flow as needed, to tend to their people, the earth herself, and the projects they have in motion. For me, I call it my mother pond. I want it to stay full so that when the elders call, I can dip and send. Then I'm on mother's time. I'm no longer on man-made time.
For so long, nonprofits have been at the bottom of the list of what is valued. So when cuts happen, when an economic crisis happens, the first things that get cut are the nonprofits. And those nonprofits are the ones taking care of the people—they take care of the health of the people, the education of the people. They take care of the people who take care of the land.
We've got our economic system upside down from what it was originally. Through the Fountain and the motion she has us in, we are flipping that back—we're restoring it to its natural way. When that pond is full and shared by all, we dip and send as needed.
When I first started walking this way 40 years ago—trying to resource and find the right funding for all these different projects with many different nations—it was like uphill, uphill, uphill. But now, it's starting to shift and change. The value and wisdom of ancestral wisdom are beginning to be seen and better understood. We're just at the beginning of a true, deep understanding of what can fully be empowered once we bring our hands together in a prayerful way and in service to life itself.
That all stems from the economy, huh? It all comes back to how we value—where we send that flow, how we grow that flow, how we share and reproduce that flow. It all comes back to either damming it up out of fear—fear of not having enough, or the need to compete and be bigger or better than—rather than coming out of our silos and offering it to the mother pond, allowing it to move more naturally through the people and to the earth.
When that natural state of reciprocity is fully restored, we will have restored our connection with Mother Earth. We will be walking differently on this planet. We won't talk about blowing her up—we will be talking about love and care for her, with ceremony, with special days of celebration, with ways to bring the village together so we can acknowledge her and celebrate our differences as the power that unification can bring into the light.
INL: The Center for Sacred Studies emphasizes 'protecting ways of prayer.' Could you tell us more about this?
Jyoti: Well, I'll tell you how it came to be, and I think that will demonstrate the answer to your question. Because as I mentioned earlier, we started our original intentionalized community called Kayumari7 that was on top of a mountain in the Sierra foothills of California, about an hour away from Yosemite. It was a 160-acre ranch, and it's still there. Now, we've passed that caretaking on to a Mayan elder timekeeper, and we're still working in collaboration with him and everything happening on what we love to call our crystal mountain. The elders found us. They somehow found us. They came up our 14-mile logger road, and they found us. They said they wanted to pass some of their very old ways on to us, and that's how we began to be initiated into some of these very old oral traditions.
That transpired over a decade. Before we would then start, we had a ceremony with about 80 people, and the Mother came during the ceremony. She said, "I'm going to give you one of my most precious baskets. And in that basket are some of the jewels that represent lines of prayer that go back to the original time. "Do not mix them, do not change them, protect and keep them safe. Walk them through the doorway of the Millennium. Hand them back to me. We have something we're going to do."
We didn’t understand any of that when it came, but that was in 1998. As more information came through the community and more promptings arrived, we would later come to know that it was time to walk through the doorway of the Millennium.
In 2004, we reconvened what has now become known as the International Council of 13 Indigenous Grandmothers8. It became a walk of peace with these grandmothers, whom we served for almost a decade—helping them resource, organize, and take their meetings globally to each of their own home territories. We wanted to see the differences, the diversity of these nations, and begin to understand that each nation had its own protocol. So when we went to those territories, we had to empty ourselves, listen carefully, and learn the protocols, so we would walk with good respect inside that culture, inside that sacred place of the earth. That’s how we learned all this.
During this time—right before 9/11 took place—we received instruction that we needed to start a church to protect our earth-based ways of prayer and that sacred basket we had been mandated to care for. At first, I thought, "You want us to start a church? I don’t know if our community—or myself—are mature enough or strong enough in our spiritual selves to take on a shadow of something that has caused great harm because they left the core of their teaching." The time when we took a detour away from what was original.
But we did. We took it on. We listened as we received the instruction on how things should come together. Kayumari was the name of our community, and this action I’m describing would become the Center for Sacred Studies. It is a church that has been in motion now since 2001. We followed the instructions on how to bring it into a recognized religious structure—I believe is what they call us—so that we could protect these earth-based ways of life and prayer. In that manifestation of bringing it together and getting it qualified that way, by our federal government, we had to create a ministry.
So, they wanted a picture of where our ministry was occurring. We were on our land, on our sacred mountain. That land had been mined in the early days—that’s where some of the original gold came from. I’m sure we were there also to help bring some healing to the earth and to the Miwok people9, who were chased off their territory when those events happened long ago.
We were building a house for the Mother, made by our own hands. We dug out stone from a creek bed that had been altered for hydro-mining, and we built a house for her. I took pictures, sent them back, and said, "This is one construct that will honor the ministry we’re talking about here. But I must say, Mother Earth is our chapel. We move as she calls us." That was accepted.
Then they said we needed ministers. So we had to create an online program, which has now been running for about a decade. It’s a two-year, very intense alchemical process that continues the awakening of oneself, the healing of personal wounds, and often, these days, generational wounds that have taken place.
The goal is to fully actualize one’s own authenticity. When people ask, "What can we do in these times?" I say, "Fully light yourselves up. Fully allow your full authenticity to be revealed. We need you." We need all the light-bringers to fully light themselves these days and carry that light through dark times. Many of us put our skin on right now so we could do this work—this work we’re being called to do.
When people ask, "What can we do in these times?" I say, "Fully light yourselves up. Fully allow your full authenticity to be revealed. We need you." We need all the light-bringers to fully light themselves these days and carry that light through dark times.
The ministry doesn’t do a lot of marketing. It spreads mostly by word of mouth and through our small network. But it has grown, and now we have over 305 ministers around the planet.
A couple of years into this work, the Mother came and said, "I will continue sending you those I need to anoint and awaken into their full work, their full ministry, their service." That’s really what ministry is about—to minister, to serve. She went on to say, “These points of light will be established around the planet because there will come a time when you can no longer travel and I will be able to continue moving these waves of light and consciousness—the awakening—out to be caught by those points. We didn’t really know what that meant until the pandemic. She gave us this several years before.
The Center for Sacred Studies served to bring those that are called in full authenticity and to full work of service. They come from many different backgrounds and many different prayer lines—all are welcomed at the table. The emphasis is on earth-based ways of life and prayer. From the different prayer lines we were initiated into, instruction came with life protocols on how to work with the Earth, live with the Earth, and collaborate among ourselves so we can better serve the Earth.
This is part of what the Center for Sacred Studies offers. It also provides ceremonial work, and beyond the ministry, it offers different tools we were given by the Great Mother—tools to help awaken people, heal people, open their hearts again, and still their minds.
That is some of what the Center for Sacred Studies does.
INL: How did the Mother Earth Delegation come to be, and what is its purpose?
Jyoti: I will try to share the heart of it.
The Mother Earth Delegation came together when, in 2019, we were over in London. There was a group of delegates that had been gathered there for the Flourishing Diversity Summit. The summit lasted three days, and I was asked to curate the second day, dedicating it to prayer—starting the day, the middle of the day, and closing the day. So, I brought grandmothers, and some sent their granddaughters. We spent the day honoring Mother Earth and the mother in her multitude of forms—she who brings life, makes life, and cares for life.
There were about 30 delegates, mostly Indigenous people from around the planet. In total, only about 350 people attended, because the others present had been invited to listen to what the original people needed and to help resource that work in some way. The intention was to create collaboration between the Western world and the natural world. We've been working on that for years, and now the bridge is really starting to be constructed—through people like yourself.
On the third morning, we started very early. The place where we held our main gatherings, with everyone in attendance, felt like a bit of a cup—with the main speakers down at the base. That morning, we heard that two and a half tons of radioactive water from Fukushima had been poured into the ocean. Since then, I’ve been told that about that much is poured daily.
One of the grandmothers participating in that day of prayer and honoring of the sacred was Māori. She was in her full regalia. She stood up immediately and made a traditional call to action. As she did, it felt like a lightning bolt struck with a very clear mandate:
Declare your sovereignty and return the original caretakers to my territories.
That was the mandate. The days were already very full, and we were trying to meet with each other because it was our last day—most were flying home the next day. We went late into the night, into the early hours of the morning. Out of that gathering, the group asked Florida Afraid of Bear Cook, myself, and Irena Rose—the Māori woman who made the call to action—if we would continue on with this prayer and see how it wanted to unfold.
Irina got sick shortly after that and wasn’t able to continue with us, but she received three instructions:
Go to the North and call for the spiritual leaders and healers to come and sit with the delegation.
Go to the South and do the same.
Go to the eastern door of Turtle Island and knock.
Those were our three instructions.
The first invitation we made to the delegation, with all this new information, was sent to all the delegates who had been in London. Some of them joined the Mother Earth Delegation, some did not.
We were on our way to Stockholm to call upon the Sámi, the people of the North, when the pandemic struck. A few of us were deeply dedicated to making this happen, so we managed to get through all the constraints of border crossings and arrived in Stockholm. The rest of the delegates joined via Zoom.
During that meeting, we became the Mother Earth Delegation of United Original Nations10. We declared ourselves to be in service to the mandates that Mother Earth had given us. Since then, we have gone to the North and then to the South, where more came to sit at our table.
Last year, we knocked on the East door, which, as shared with me through the Mohawk—is the door where you enter Turtle Island. We brought our storytellers there and held a storytelling festival. It was filled with light, good humor, good heart, and beautiful stories. The elders say it is time now for the storytellers to come forward, because within their stories are instructions—a way to keep our hearts open and our minds still, so we can flow more gently.
The Mother Earth Delegation is still marching. We continue to bring in new delegates from time to time. We have been invited to go to the Vatican this October. We’ve been there before. In our first meeting, the delegation made a proclamation to rescind the papal bulls11. If you don’t know, the papal bulls were created in the late 1400s when the Church was sending people into territories they had never been to before. The Pope instructed them that when they arrived, they would find people who were considered less than human. If these people refused to be assimilated into the Church—if they refused to give up their original way of life and language—then they were to be killed, and their land was to be taken. That was the beginning of land being "owned." That was when the connection to nature was severed.
For many years, people have gone to the Vatican, knocking on the doors, asking them to rescind this letter because it has been used—and is still being used in courts today—to take land from Indigenous people.
Though the Pope has gotten closer to addressing this, and though he repudiated the papal bulls, and though he went to Canada to apologize after the children’s graves were found, we hope that in this trip, he will finally rescind the letter and take it off the record, so it can no longer be used to justify harm.
Another part of the work of the Mother Earth Delegation is the return of land to the original caretakers. We hold this as part of our mission and work in collaboration with many other nations engaged in similar efforts. There are 28 delegates, plus four youth ambassadors.
One last thing I will add: In my world, in our community, because these things have grown out of direct instruction from the Earth herself—from the divine mother that cares for life—the community holds all of this. In our village of Kayumari, one of the constructs that emerged was the Center for Sacred Studies and then The Fountain. Now, the Mother Earth Delegation is held between these two hands, because we listened and followed the instructions coming from our elders.
I like to say: We are women-driven and Indigenous-led.
INL: Given the significance of 'protecting ways of prayer,' would you be open to leading us in a prayer?
You can learn more about Jyoti Ma and The Fountain here, The Center for Sacred Studies—where Jyoti is founder and Grandmother Vision Keeper here, and the Mother Earth Delegation here.
Aluna is a documentary by the Kogi people of Colombia, created as a warning to protect the Earth’s balance. You can watch Aluna here.
The Fountain is dedicated to restoring an economic and ecological balance through Indigenous wisdom and collaborative action.
The Druids are ancient religious leaders, philosophers, and legal authorities of the Celtic peoples, primarily in Ireland, Britain, and Gaul, known for their deep connection to nature, oral traditions, and sacred rituals.
The Sámi are an Indigenous people primarily inhabiting the northern regions of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and the Kola Peninsula in Russia.
Flow Funding is a philanthropic approach that decentralizes decision-making by empowering trusted individuals to distribute funds in alignment with regenerative and community-driven initiatives.
The Kayumari Community is a spiritual village providing a synergistic environment, aligned with Mother Earth, for the mindful integration of cross-cultural practices and the commitment to the achievement of the highest human potential.
International Council of Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers, also known as the Grandmothers Wisdom Project are committed to supporting all people in reclaiming their relationship with Mother Earth, advocating for a shift toward a more conscious and harmonious connection with nature and all living beings.
The Miwok people are Indigenous to what is now central California, with ancestral lands spanning the Sierra Nevada, the Bay Area, and the Central Valley.
Mother Earth Delegation of United Original Nations is a global alliance of Indigenous leaders and elders dedicated to restoring the sovereignty of original caretakers and following Earth’s mandates for stewardship and healing.
Papal bulls are official decrees issued by the Pope. Among these, the Doctrine of Discovery—originating from 15th-century papal bulls, such as Dum Diversas (1452) and Inter Caetera (1493)—was used to justify the seizure of Indigenous lands and the subjugation of their peoples by European powers. These documents continue to influence legal frameworks regarding land ownership and the treatment of Indigenous peoples.