Dragon 🐉 Letter #100: Sacred reciprocity, walking-stick dreams, and ancestral practice that returns burden, workshop available on-demand through Sunday.
Hola! I’m Ixchel Lunar (they/them), an Indigenous-Time Ecologist, ancestral medicine guide, and rhythm witch for creative rebels, decolonial dreamers, and neuroqueer visionaries. This Substack is dedicated to weaving business, body, and belonging into something no empire can replicate. Still punk as fuck. Still cozy in the chaos.
Beautiful Wildlings,
This week, I got to send out an affiliate payout, and it felt sacred.
If you’ve felt the shift, the way reclaiming Time as kin ripples through your body, your creativity, your belonging, then you already know this work isn’t just transformational, it’s medicine. If you’ve enjoyed my work and love sharing it, become an affiliate.
Sending the payment was money flowing as reciprocity, not extraction. It was a reminder we are re‑carving how value moves, together, generatively, outside empire.
It got tangled with a dream: I’d been listening to Tyson Yunkaporta’s Right Story, Wrong Story, where he “yarns” narratives by Aunties, Elders, economists, woodcarvers, and Vikings. Story, he says, belongs in the hand (like a carved boomerang), in land, in ceremony, not only in our heads. And I’ve also been watching Chief of War on AppleTV+ with Jason Momoa, awash with craft, presence, and story woven into survival.
In my dream, I was at an overnight camp, learning from and receiving a beautifully carved walking stick from an elder. It was heavy with meaning, each curve a story. When I woke, the stick felt like a map, an anchor for how I can walk differently in the world.
Yunkaporta reminds us that memory lives in objects, in physical practice, in weaving story with body and land, not endless scrolling or surface performance. Right stories root us in kinship. Wrong stories isolate us in spectacle.
A few of his key ideas I keep turning back to:
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“Right stories” are relational, told in yarning circles, grounded in land, reinforcing collective memory.
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“Wrong stories” fixate on control, cutting us off from context, spectatorship over participation.
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Story becomes wealthy in making, in carved sticks, shared memory, and the slow unravelling of spectacle.
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Our way out of fragmentation is ritual, presence, and remembrance held in body, in objects, in gathering.
In Right Story, Wrong Story, Tyson also outlines six elements of Indigenous memory. Like a carved staff, each facet holding a way of remembering that empire has tried to strip from us, yet remains recoverable:
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Locatedness: “I am located, therefore I am.” Knowledge is place-based, mapped along the routes we walk.
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Relatedness: Memory lives in kinship, human and more-than-human, held in relationships.
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Embodiment: Story is tangible, carried in bodies, objects, landscapes, and skies.
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Orality: Rhythm, rhyme, repetition, taboo, and bawdy humor make language unforgettable.
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Narrative: Knowledge travels through story. It is how we process, transmit, and store life.
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Image: Symbols and patterns recall vast teachings, not as abstractions, but as living entities.
When I witnessed people cutting down elder trees because they were “a problem” or simply unwanted, I felt it in my body. Trees are part of my locatedness. Serving on the Tree Preservation Committee was never just policy work; it was also identity preservation. It was part of my own story map, my relatedness to the oaks and redwoods who hold memory and belonging.
That part on women’s wisdom and legal pluralism stayed with me. Yunkaporta shares yarns where Aunties, elder knowledge keepers, and women academics speak about Indigenous law/lore existing alongside settler legal systems. Not absorbed, not erased. Integrated. Held side by side.
I felt that in my own bones as a former vice mayor, writing ecological policy by committee. Legal pluralism wasn’t abstract for me. It was sitting in chambers, embodying the wisdom of heritage trees, arguing that protection should include the oaks and redwoods out back, not only the ones in front yards. It was trying to carve space where law could recognize land and trees as kin (lore).
And it was heartbreaking. I didn’t win that point. A senior council member, now county supervisor, wanted to remove a heritage tree on his own property, and policy bent to serve empire, not tree kin. That loss still echoes, a reminder of how wrong story shows up in the smallest, most local decisions.
The Aunties also sketch a practical path for those of us living outside deep kin-based systems. A way to begin again:
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Map the routes you move through each day and inscribe them as story maps.
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Encode what you need to remember into those maps through story.
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Use rhyme, repetition, or taboo phrases to anchor recall along the path.
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Create or inscribe objects and images that tie back to the maps.
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Do it in relation with others, so memory belongs to kinship, not isolation.
This isn’t a performance of ancient technique. It is a way to return our cognition to land, relationship, and practice. It is how we carve meaning into the things we carry and the paths we walk.
That is what we will be tending in the Ancestral Wayfinding Practice Circle, beginning September 10. Four weeks of guided practice, ritual safety, and trusted Source connection. A circle where you do not have to carry what is not yours, and where protection becomes a daily practice.
If you missed my live Ache Is Ancestral: Open the Door Safely workshop, the replay is available on-demand through tomorrow. At about 20 minutes in, I guide a 20-minute practice for ritual protection with a trusted Source. It can shift how you hold the unseen.
The replay also includes my invitation to the 4-week Practice Circle. It is a living spiral of ritual protection, daily practice, and trusted Source connection. A carved container where what does not belong to you is returned, and steadiness becomes lineage.
Like the walking stick in my dream, this circle holds memory, protection, and belonging in your hands.
Watch the on-demand replay and join the Circle here →
Stay wild, love fiercely. Your presence is golden.
Maltiox! xo Ixchel
P.S. Empire’s stories fracture us. Right story, ritual protection, and collective presence return us. Come learn how to carve more ancient ways of knowing and being into your days. Watch the replay →
P.P.S. Maltiox pronounced mall-tee-osh means with gratitude in K’iche Mayan.
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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.
