Eagles, Condors, and Earth Regeneration

In this article, we explore two prophecies — the Eagle and Condor alongside that of the 7th and 8th Fires — as they relate to living into the design pathway for regenerating the Earth. If you are passionate about collaborations between Indigenous and Western approaches, this one is for you!

It has been an honor in the last several years to come into contact with many different Indigenous cultures — each holding wisdom about universal patterns of human life as well as for how to live in a specific bioregional context. During our multiple visits to the Greater Tkaronto Bioregion, we have held space within the Two-Eyed Way of Seeing that brings Indigenous and Western perspectives together in the same realm.

It is a complex endeavor and has many challenges that I won’t go into today. For simplicity, you can think of it as if there are two very different ways of seeing the world that each has something to offer the other. They share purpose around caring for life on Earth. And just like with human eyes on a face, there is a space between the perspectives that Mohawk scholar Dan Longboat describes it as the ethical space between the different worldviews.

Watch this conversation that Dan and I had a few years ago to get a deeper feel for the Two-Eyed Way of Seeing:

What I want to do today is share how I have become an embodied expression of this ethical space between worldviews. I am an incarnation of the Prophecy of the Eagle and Condor — which means I help bring together knowledge from the Western scientific lens with the embodied wisdom practices of Indigenous cultures. It also means I help weave connections between North and South America where 500 years of colonization have wrought tremendous harms.

A brief history: I was born in the Ozarks in 1976. This is a place in the heartland of America. My parents descended from Italian, British, and German immigrants who moved to the St Louis area and surrounding countryside a few generations earlier. Throughout my childhood I never really fit in. I was too sensitive, too intellectual, and too empathetic for the harsh cultural setting of Southwest Missouri. Decades later I left the United States to live for a brief period in Costa Rica and have now been in Colombia for nearly seven years.

During my time in the Northern Andes, I have held deep tensions in my body from the extreme violence that scars the Ozarks and that of colonial and post-colonial violence in Colombia. The area where I grew up was a hotbed of conflicts during the US Civil War. It was the birthplace of fundamentalist Christianity and the Ku Klux Klan. The threads of extremism and violence run very deep there.

Similarly, I arrived into the Colombian department of Santander and the small town of Barichara. This is a place with ferocious clan-based violence in its recent history. It is also the origin of Colombian independence from the Spanish crown because the people here were fiercely opposed to outside domination. There is a lot that these two places hold in common with each other — including that both are deeply traumatized and have their own forms of entrenched corruption today.

I have lived in both places as a kind of spirit medicine. My family arrived in Barichara with the dreams of reforestation and large-scale regeneration with our young child playing in the middle of the work. Bringing children and alternative learning pathways together with the restoration of dead rivers and the recovery of native ecosystems. What I found in Barichara has been a blend of deeply colonized local people, profound forms of corruption and cultural pathology, and a crucible of healing within myself.

Yet most of the time I’ve lived in Colombia — a span from November of 2019 up to the present day in 2026 — has been outwardly focused on weaving a planetary tapestry of bioregions for the regeneration of Earth. This is what we do in the Design School that we founded in 2023. My life in Colombia has been a conduit for holding bioregional activations and pilgrimages throughout Turtle Island (the Indigenous name for North America) and also in other parts of the world. For example, we are enacting pilgrimages in the Mississippi Basin, Mediterranean, British Isles, and Western Europe this year that you can read more about here.

I embody the Eagle and Condor because I bring deep scientific knowledge from the fields of cognitive science, cultural evolution, complexity studies, and Earth System sciences to the design practices that we promote. At the same time, this is a deeply spiritual path that is guided by profound relationships with Indigenous cultures and knowledge systems.

A visceral example of this took place on our recent pilgrimage through the Mississippi Basin when an Oneida medicine man blessed our journey. He offered me a goose feather and instructed me on how to lead a cleansing ritual of gratitude for the waters we were going to visit along our path. It was this same feather that I held ceremony with yesterday in a recently damaged area of the community forest we had been supporting in Barichara.

As I sat in Bioparque Móncora — land that has been stewarded for restoration of native forest since 2009 — I could feel how a corrupt local leader had full power to destroy the forest a few weeks ago because the local culture does not stand up to the kinds of abuse that are so typical in this part of Colombia. What I also felt as I sat in the place where forest had been removed was the presence of the spiritual being the Ojibwe people of Turtle Island call Mississippi - the Father of Water.

In our recent pilgrimage, we visited sacred headwaters and major confluences of rivers throughout the Mississippi Basin. Now I hold the signature of these energies in my body. I can feel them and be guided by their wisdom. The ability to integrate Western and Indigenous perspectives in my being is part of another prophecy — what the Anishinaabe call the 7th and 8th Fires. In brief, the prophecies go like this:

There will come a time when humanity realizes that we are in trouble. This will be the lighting of the 7th Fire and it roughly corresponds with the 1960’s and 70’s when the global ecological crisis seeped into human consciousness across the entire planet. Later will come the time of the 8th Fire when humanity must choose between the charred path that leads to our destruction or the green path that acts in service to the continuation of life. We are in the time of the 8th Fire now.

This year in the Design School for Regenerating Earth we are hosting a learning journey called Regenerating the Earth Through Collapse that is a Two-Eyed practice of holding deep grief while also planting seeds for a flourishing future. We birthed the Dandelion Strategy for creating at least 1000 bioregional learning centers in the next decade as part of this learning journey. We also hold integration sessions for the heavy emotions that come with living through continual social and ecological disruptions.

All of this is related to the prophecies of the Eagle and Condor as well as the 7th and 8th Fires. Humanity must come together and heal our relationships with ourselves, each other, and the planet. Discover that all of us are descended from Indigenous cultures. Gather the knowledge and tools from both ancestral lifeways and the best of modern science. Weave these capacities across the planet through bioregional organizing. Navigate the collapse that is already underway. Continually return to acting in service to life.

In my own work, this includes all of the bioregional organizing in Turtle Island alongside our efforts to create a bioregional learning ecosystem for the Northern Andes. We have had many Earth Regenerators visit us in Colombia throughout the last seven years. Cultural exchanges that also represent the Eagle and Condor in many ways. This path has not been easy. It isn’t graceful and sometimes is not very pretty. But it is deeply restorative and healing as we bring our learnings out to the world continually through the planetary network.

I am writing this article today because I want to invite us all into the deep brokenness of humanity. And the profound need for us to go back into our personal and cultural histories so that wisdom might be brought forth into this moment of planetary change. Now is the time for lighting the 8th Fire. Now is the time to choose life and its continuation. We do this by discovering the Indigeneity within each of us together with the serious cultural traumas that we all hold in our bodies — that get expressed as contaminated rivers, destroyed ecosystems, and massive die-offs of other species.

I invite you to ponder how you might be part of these prophecies too. What can you do to heal your ancestral lineage and contribute to regenerating the Earth? Perhaps you will become part of our BLC Action Network as we deepen into this spiritual path.

Onward, fellow humans.

P.S. If you feel moved, please consider donating in the Earth Regeneration Fund to support all these efforts.