Welcome to Dragon Letters, No. 3
June 25th, 2021
Hola my dear ,
In this Dragon Letter I want to share all things Tech + Culture: my website colophon, ethical and feminist marketing strategies and a few other juicy shares for you.
Backstory:
You might be curious to know I’ve been online since 1988, when I worked for Grateful Dead Ticket Sales (an Apple Computer test site).
Working online from home since 1992, I was putting college newspaper stories to bed at 3am (on an Apple Macintosh II 40MB hard drive hand-me-down from GDTS) from my apartment while my toddlers slept. 1200 baud modem sounds are still soothing to me…
I’ve always been an early adopter. It was a trait my dad passed down to me. He loved gadgets and for a brief time was a successful real estate broker, the youngest Latino broker in California.
In 1976 I was tapping away at my first personal device, the Little Professor math teacher. That’s pretty close to being a Gen-X digital native. Soon came Speak & Spell and Dataman. Later the Agfa Optima 935 camera that had a light meter and retracting “electronic winder” lens. If only Instagram had been around back then…
The fleeting privilege (from proximity to whiteness) I had growing up was pretty temporary. By 16 I had tested out of high school, left home, lost my dad, was homeless with both mom and step-mom foreclosed on, and pregnant at 17.
But in adulthood my tech knowledge drew me into environments where I was a first and only Mestiza. Early edgewalking became second nature survival skills.
John Perry Barlow’s Electronic Freedom Foundation was on my radar since my days at GDTS. He was a regular visitor to the Dead office. After my dad was killed he gave me signed a printed version of “I Will Take You Home,” penned with Grateful dead keyboardist, Brent Mydland.
While I didn’t agree with Barlow’s politics, his views on internet freedom were foundational in my technological activism, including co-founding the Technology and Telecommunications Advisory Committee for Petaluma with Bill Hammerman (a telecomm valley tech elder that took me under his wing) in 2005.
But after being able to serve on city council and run for congress, in 2013 I faced extreme exhaustion and suicidal depression. That collapse became my foundation for teaching myself how to thrive in a digital world. This month I’m sharing resources that may help you expand your consciousness in your relationship to Tech and Time.
Please reply and let me know your favorite things from this Dragon Letter and your reflections. Enjoy!
Walk in beauty. Live your magic. Go wild.
xo Ixchel
P.S. I’m doing another list purge, for real. If you open this Dragon letter after July 1st, you’ll have to resubscribe. I am reducing energy consumption on my list being sent over servers only to land in your dust bin. It’s a waste of electricity resources during a slow-mo climate collapse. So, if that happens and you still want to be subscribed, please visit my homepage and resubscribe. Ok, on to the good stuff…
Cultural Safety Planning
In recent months I’ve been in dialogue with other feminist business owners in Kelly Diels’ Flora Business coaching. For BIPOC businesses in particular, having a cultural safety policy seems to be very helpful in laying ground work for client interactions.
This week I learned of this mini-course bundle from Nahanee Creative in how to create a cultural safety plan and enlist empathy and respect for my indigenous traditions and ways of knowing in my work.
As a coach, I’ve been building my business practices with embodying anti-racism in mind as I go. And so, as we dismantle and decolonize, we also need to reconstruct new systems of justice.
You can read my Anti-Racism in Coaching Statement for my business that includes accountability to myself and my future employees. (This was the most clicked link from last month’s Dragon Letter, so if you missed it, I’m sharing it again.
Do you have a cultural safety plan, a statement and practice anti-racism in the workplace? I’d love to see other examples of #CultureMaking. Let me know your thoughts.
Citing is a Feminist Power Move
(h/t Kelly Diels)
My work is resonating with people. People I love are applying it and sharing it, which has meant the world to me. And I have every reason to fear that I may be stolen from and/or capitalized off my insights without compensation as a Mestiza.
Sadly, I see people write about their insights that don’t cite their sources or people that inspired them. That aspect of individualism is a characteristic of White Supremacy. Caution is advised if you see patterns like this in others.
If I share something that’s not novel and forget to cite, please remind me where I learned it.
In the spirit of becoming shoulders to stand on I’ve adopted the Creative Commons Licensing: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). The insights I receive are for others. Please cite me when inspired and link back to me.
“You are free to:
Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format
Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material
The licensor cannot revoke these freedoms as long as you follow the license terms.
Under the following terms:
Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.
NonCommercial — You may not use the material for commercial purposes.
ShareAlike — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.
No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.”
This is an example of the Redaction font. But my website colophon shows how it bitmapped as it gets larger, just like legal documents in the schools to prison pipeline. #PrisonAbolition
WTF is a Colophon?
Oxford defines:
col·o·phon
/ˈkäləfən,ˈkäləˌfän/
/noun/
1. a publisher’s emblem or imprint, especially one on the title page or spine of a book.
* HISTORICAL
2. a statement at the end of a book, typically with a printer’s emblem, giving information about its authorship and printing.
I recently published my website colophon after discovering the Redaction Project font, which I adopted as my website heading font.
In the Colophon I share my web development resources and also make the strong case for more dark mode websites because white backgrounds use more energy. More energy means more colonization. White backgrounds = colonization.
Work In Progress
I’ve got some work to do on ensuring my site is accessible. I guess my Accessibility overlay plugin may be more harmful than helpful. Thank you Dawn Serra for the heads up on that.
THE CONTRIBUTION OF BELL HOOKS AND PAULO FREIRE TO THE CONSTRUCTION OF COMMUNITY NETWORKS
Whenever I find a really radical thought or space, I love to share it. I discovered GenderIT.org this week and this article is a great introduction to looking at tech from the Global South perspectives. I mentioned white backgrounds = colonization, and unfortunately, colonization is happening in Indigenous spaces in the Global South at an alarming rate. (YES, COLONIZATION IS ACTIVELY HAPPENING TO INDIGENOUS PEOPLE AND LAND TODAY.)
This article looks at community networks, access to technology and how child labor in the home interrupts access to knowledge. I mentioned leaving home at 16. As the oldest of 5, and a female, my labor was a given, and it was farmed out to other families (but global north labor is very tame compared to how hard it is living south of the US). This practice locks girls into servant roles from a young age. Let’s teach them how to build networks and code, or what ever lights up their curiosity instead.
Tons of great articles on feminism and tech on this website. And, side note, Get a translation plugin and open yourself to the minds of feminist women of the Global South writing in Spanish online. Your feminism is lacking if you aren’t diversifying your mind.
Design a Feminist Chatbot
I found this gem of a free course on creating a Feminist Chat bot. “Learn how to design and prototype a chatbot that doesn’t reinforce harmful gender stereotypes.”
The course was referenced on The Ethical Move’s resources goldmine. The Ethical Move is all about ethical marketing. The tagline is “How We Sell Matters”.
In the course they discuss the 2016 Microsoft face plant after releasing Tay, an AI chatbot. This article goes into that massive learning experiment and failure into how 4chan trained a racist bot in less than a day.
Alex Bot
Catch insensitive, inconsiderate writing with Alex Bot. You can find a ton of additional ethical tech resources at ethical.net.
Buster Benson’s Pocket Biases
This is a cool web app that Buster made in Glide using a spreadsheet. I’ve also signed up for Glide app, but am still in idea creation mode on what to use it for.
Buster posits that biases are how we survive and thrive in culture. A bit of a mindset bend, but he’s listed 200 biases that show their merits as we seek to become conscious of our biases. He calls that “honest bias”
“Some tips on how to use this app to develop honest bias:
1. Focus on the strategies more than the biases
You don’t need to remember all 200 biases, because you can look them up here any time if one’s on the tip of your tongue. Instead, it might be easier to remember the 13 strategies. They represent the shortcuts we take in order to make decisions and take actions.
2. Consider what causes the anxiety that leads to bias
🧠 Information in your head: there’s too much information in the universe to process, so we filter most of it out.
❤️ Beliefs in your heart: everything is confusing until we make sense of it by telling a story. This is where we get our meaning from.
🖐 Plans in your hands: time is short and we have to get things done, so we jump to conclusions and take actions with what we have.
3. Notice bias in our brains and in everything else around us
These biases existed first in our brains, but you can also find them in the technology we use, in the institutions we’ve built, and the cultural norms we practice. They’re everywhere. The best we can do is develop “honest bias”. I think of this as a dedication to remaining open to our own limitations, listening to evidence that contradicts our beliefs, inviting diverse perspectives to the table, and being willing to be uncomfortable with the fact that the universe is big, we are small, and there’s no ultimate solution to any of this.”
This month I have an ask:
I’m looking for clients in need of more Flow and less exhaustion. I am raising funds to fly to the US for my vaccine and some critical medical attention I must do there. If you know of someone that needs some shifts in their live, please share this 1/2 day retreat with them (but only after you nudge them to take some time off away from their devices while rubbing their feet).
THE BOUNDLESS VISION RETREAT DISRUPTS THIS EDGEWALKERS DILEMMA:
How do we make miracles and get epic shit done without reproducing systems of brutal productivity on ourselves or our people?
Experience the seasonal retreat ritual that effective changemakers always turn to for regeneration so they exponentially grow their impact: Boundless Vision.
A Boundless Vision Retreat Day is a half-day, virtual 1+1 retreat (preferably at the end of 3-4 four days offline) to Reclaim your Flow Time and create your seasonal Boundless Vision for liberating your Flow, so you can skip the collapse that so many leaders experience.
Walk Away With
• Flow Cycle Strategies
• A Shift in Relationship to Time
• A consistent, daily Flow practice
• More capacity for these times.
• Ways to nurture body + soul
• The intuitive plan for your next 90 Days
• Accountability to your vision
• Built-in Rest for the Revolution
I’ve opened 4 retreat days for July, $1500 for 2 sessions + 1/2 day retreat. Find out more here…
Website
🌒 Get your Moon Phase (free calculator) →
✍🏽 Meet OoSo Studio →
👩🏽🤝👩🏾 Ways to work with me…
🎙️ Book me for your Podcast, speaking event, or program…
Walk in beauty. Live your magic. Go wild.
Your Sanctuary to Cultivate Wild Presence for Thriving with a Planet in Transition
I was raised and bore children on the traditional, unceded, and stolen lands of the Coast and Central Valley Miwok (colonized as Petaluma, CA) and Nisenan (colonized as Sacramento and Fair Oaks, CA), past, present, and future. I also write, work, and live in the highland forest of the traditional, unceded and stolen lands of the Totonac, Nahua, and Mexicah, past, present, and future, in what is known as Coatepec, Veracruz, Mexico.
P.P.S. I do not live or consent to the colonial impositions regarding the construct of Time. I also practice honoring rhythms of work, play, and rest so that I can serve you with embodied presence and with loving care. This means I may take several days to respond to your requests and questions. (h/t Eva Glamaris)
P.P.S. A mention is not necessarily an endorsement of someone. It’s an acknowledgment, a citation, of the origin of information in my process of understanding. (h/t Kelly Diels)
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Copyright © 2026, Cheyenne, WY, and Veracruz, Mexico, All rights reserved. Sharing your lineage of knowledge is decolonial. When iterating, please cite me. Not citing is epistemicide.
