Five Cultural Frameworks at the Heart of the Certificate

The Sacred Wound Framework™

A concentric-circle model of wounding and medicine

In the Chiricahua worldview, wounds are not simply damage to be repaired; they are teachers with their own spirit.

Four concentric rings map the ecology of healing. We will look at:

• the Original Wound (colonial rupture: loss of land, language, ceremony, and kinship)

• what is Carried Forward (neuroepigenetic imprinting and survival adaptations)

• Manifestations Today (lateral violence, burnout, trauma-organized systems, internalized oppression), and

• the Medicine Path (ceremony, kinship repair, land-based healing, storywork, and collective restoration).

Healing ripples outward through self, family, community, and systems.

The Medicine Wheel of Regulation™

A ceremonial map for restoring intin’ hozoni — balance, the beauty path

Nervous system regulation mapped across four directions.

• East/Mind (clarity, orientation, storywork). Represented by the color black, the time just before dawn through sunrise.

• South/Body (somatic awareness, grounding, movement). Represented by the color blue/green, the time of youth, warmth and growth.

• West/Emotions (honoring feeling and flow). Represented by the color yellow, corn pollen light, the Gahn Mountain Spirit teachings.

• North/Spirit & Relationships (co-regulation, kinship, ancestors, land). Represented by the color white, snow, cold, and the ancestors.

The four phases of Indigenous regulation: Settle, Sense, Shift, and Sustain, position regulation as communal and ceremonial, not merely a clinical technique.

Depending on your Tribal lineage and cultural teachings, we will revise this map to fit your needs when taught in person in your community, and you can teach us what is appropriate for your settings.

The Indigenous Healing-Centered Regulation Framework©

Indigenous teachings as the primary lens; western science as supportive evidence. Each Tribe, Clan, community, and culture has it’s own teachings. There is no one “Indigenous” way of being, doing, teaching or healing, but many.

The Indigenous Healing-Centered Regulation Framework that we use in all our offerings, is an integrative framework that bridges polyvagal theory, the window of tolerance, and neurodecolonization research within an Indigenous worldview of embodied, relational, land-based, and ceremony-rooted regulation.

It draws on the Quero Apache understanding that the earth speaks a “silent language as a dialogue of formlessness” — a voice that does not use words — and that our bodies carry messages from ni’gosdzán (Mother Earth) that many of us are still learning to translate.

This connection to land, spirit and cultural identify underlies all our interactions.

The Fire Alliance

An Indigenous-informed framework for healing-centered leadership

In Chiricahua tradition, the fire circle, kuu’ , is where alliance is forged, gifts are exchanged, and responsibility is made visible.

Four interdependent Fires must be tended in rhythm:

• Fire of the Self (“Tend your own fire first”)

• Fire of the Story (“The stories we carry become the stories we create”)

• Fire of the Community (“We rise and fall together”), and

• Fire of the Collective Future (“Our work must honor the faces yet to come”).

These Fires calibrate each other; balanced leadership requires tending all four in rhythm. Together, our cohort forms a Fire Alliance, to support, teach, encourage, and uplift one another.

The Two-Row Medicine Approach™

Two sovereign knowledge systems traveling the same river

Inspired by the Haudenosaunee Two Row Wampum Belt Treaty (Gaswendah), this approach positions Indigenous medicineways and western trauma science as two sovereign, parallel knowledge systems, with each retaining its integrity while traveling the same river of healing.

The space between the rows is a relational river of reciprocity, translation, and integrity.

Practitioners learn when to walk in each row, when to braid them, and when to stand in the river between.

Month 1 · bik’ehgo’iindzin · Remembering Where We Come From

Returning to the Root · Historical Trauma, Neuroepigenetics & The Sacred Wound

The foundational session.

In Chiricahua thought, to heal we must first remember where we come from, including the roots that hold us, even when they have been damaged or cut.

Participants are introduced to the Sacred Wound Framework and learn to understand historical trauma not as a past event but as a living, relational process carried between people, between generations, and between humans and land.

The cohort establishes circle agreements and begins the trust-building and kinship formation that will sustain the work ahead.

Month 3 · kuu’ bits’os · The Fire That Binds Us Together

Fire Alliance Leadership · Healing-Centered Leadership & Collective Wellness

The move from individual regulation to collective practice and kinship-based leadership.

In Chiricahua (and Cayuga) tradition, when a gift is offered and accepted, a fire alliance is forged — a bond that radiates outward like a neural network, binding givers and receivers into a circle of mutual responsibility.

Participants learn the four Fires, explore how kinship-based leadership replaces hierarchical, trauma-organized patterns, and practice lateral kindness as the Indigenous antidote to lateral violence.

Month 5 · ni’gosdzán bik’eh ná’oodzáál · Returning to the Earth’s Way

Rematriating Healing · Grief, Loss, Addiction, Cultural Reconnection & Pathways of Return

The sacred territory of grief, ambiguous loss, and the soul loss that follows when names, languages, ceremonies, and kinship bonds are severed.

Participants learn that addiction in Indigenous communities is rooted in the loss of connection to land, ceremony, identity, and belonging, not individual moral failure.

Through Two-Row Medicine, the Four Doors of Healing, and Ways of Knowing, Connecting, Being, and Doing, participants explore pathways of return and begin designing healing-centered interventions grounded in the understanding that ni’gosdzán is not merely a backdrop for healing; she is a relative, a teacher, and a healer.

Month 2 · go’zhoo bii’ Ńaagot’éél · The Body Remembers the Way to Balance

Indigenous Neurobiology & Cultural Regulation

Regulation as a sacred, relational, land-based practice.

The Quero Apache teach doohwaa-gon’ch’aasa — entering the silence — as a daily spiritual practice combining meditation, breathwork, and prayer.

Through the Medicine Wheel of Regulation, participants map their nervous system patterns across the four directions and discover that Indigenous peoples carried sophisticated regulation technologies long before western science named them.

The session braids polyvagal theory, the window of tolerance, and neurodecolonization within an Indigenous worldview.

Month 4 · nagólchíd biyátí · The Story That Heals Between Us

Storywork & Community Healing · Collective Trauma, Belonging, Identity & Narrative Repair

In many Indigenous traditions, there is no separation between story and medicine; a story told well can begin to reweave the fabric that trauma tore apart.

This session deepens storywork as both ceremony and healing methodology.

Participants explore how colonization disrupted community narratives and practice story-listening, witnessing, and healing-centered re-storying as relational arts.

The session also examines neurodecolonization research and confronts the malicious compliance that takes root when organizational systems absorb the trauma of the relatives they serve.

Month 6 · bik’ehgo’ihi’na’ · Walking in a Good Way

Integration & Continuation Ceremony · Carrying the Medicine Forward

Over six months, participants have traveled from the Sacred Wound through regulation, fire, story, grief, and reclamation.

Now they weave it all together through Kim Anderson’s four stages — Unpacking colonial trauma, Cultural Reclamation, Rebuilding, and Survivance (the term coined by Anishinaabe scholar Gerald Vizenor: survival plus resistance plus creativity as active presence).

Participants name their legacy burdens and claim their ancestral gifts through the Hands Back, Hands Forward ritual, design three-layered Survivance Plans, and close with a Continuation Ceremony. This is not an ending. It is a sending forth.