Grandmother’s Wisdom: Living Portrayals from the International Council of Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers

Grandmothers’ Wisdom is a vibrant tribute to the lives of the International Council of Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers, an unprecedented global alliance of elders who came together in 2004 to protect our planet in crisis and envision a future for the next seven generations.

With a foreword by Vandana Shiva and tributes to the grandmothers who have passed on, this special work is a living portrayal of the grandmothers’ upbringing, their encounters with the violence of colonialism and forced assimilation, their awakening to fierce activism, and the ceremonial practices they carry forward from their lineages with tenacity, grace, and devotion.

The thirteen remarkable women portrayed in Grandmothers’ Wisdom are keepers of traditional medicine and Indigenous spirituality, preserving ancient wisdom traditions and traditional ecological knowledge that have served our planet earth for millennia. Their stories come from the Amazon rainforest, the Central American highlands, the Sierra Madre of Oaxaca, the plains, deserts and canyons of North America, the Himalayan mountains of Tibet and Nepal, and the forests of Central Africa. The award-winning photography depicts the grandmothers making offerings to all of creation and stewarding earth-based medicines through their practices of divination, energetic cleansing, gathering herbs, and performing initiations with plant medicines.

The grandmothers have gathered each year for two decades to pray together in their homelands, promoting deep peace and interconnection through Indigenous ancestral knowledge, cultural preservation, and a reverence for the four elements: earth, air, fire, and water. In a time when contemporary life has left many young people bereft in the rifts between us, these spiritual activists constitute an intercontinental union across differences in culture, language, and ceremonial practice. They are icons for future generations, representing a worldview that honors the richness of our differences as we unite to protect our shared home on planet earth.