Stories and Wisdom shared in The Old Way
Mission Statement
In The Old Way, the Institute exists to preserve cultural memory and restore a lived relationship with the Earth. The Institute gathers and shares knowledge rooted in land, place, and responsibility. This work includes Indigenous voices and extends to earth-based spiritual traditions, ancestral skill lineages, historians, trackers, and traditional knowledge holders whose lives remain shaped by a long relationship with the land.
Modern life fractures memory. Languages disappear. Elders pass. Skills once learned through practice fade as attention pulls away from soil, water, plants, animals, and seasons. In response, the Institute listens. With permission and care, teachings are recorded through storytelling platforms designed as a modern hearth. The Institute does not speak for others. The work creates space where shared knowledge stays intact, contextual, and respected..
Our Media Platform: In The Old Way Institute
In The Old Way Media, serves as the Institute’s storytelling hearth. Podcasts, essays, and reflections gather here. Digital tools carry old teachings forward without stripping meaning or responsibility. The medium stays current. The source stays grounded.
The Voices From the Land Podcast features Indigenous elders, earth-based teachers, historians, and practitioners of ancestral lifeways. Conversations center on lived experience rather than theory. Topics include land stewardship, ceremony, oral history, plant knowledge, wilderness skills, and the unseen forces shaping human behavior. The podcast functions as a living archive rather than commentary or performance.
Inspired in part by Vine Deloria Jr.'s The World We Used to Live In, the podcast takes a clear stance. The miraculous persists within ordinary life for those who pay attention. Meaning does not vanish. Relationship does. Through conversation and reflection, the work returns focus to observation, presence, and direct engagement with land and life.
The mission stays simple. Learn to notice again. Notice forest. Notice mountain. Notice ceremony. Notice quiet inner spaces where awareness sharpens, and responsibility takes shape.
The Institute also addresses a defining condition of this era. Disconnection sickness describes a life shaped by separation. Separation from land. Separation from Body and Soul. Separation from community. Separation from meaning. This sickness shows up as anxiety, extraction, loneliness, and loss of orientation. The Institute responds through reconnection rather than commentary. Listening replaces noise. Relationship replaces consumption. Practice replaces abstraction. Reconnection restores balance across personal, cultural, and ecological life; the quiet places of the heart.
Our Blogs
Our blog platform extends the teachings of the podcasts and deepens our mission through reflective writing, seasonal teachings, and cultural storytelling.
In The Old Way: focused on ethnobotany and the traditional use of plants for food, medicine, and ceremony.
The Living Fire: holds ancestral stories, oral traditions, and cultural teachings rooted in Turtle Island and other land-based cultures.
Wild Visions: explores wilderness as teacher through essays on solitude, perception, and the human place within living systems.
Core Values
Preservation through story protects memory. Story carries knowledge forward when practiced with restraint and care.
Listening before speaking guides every action. Elders, land, and lineage lead. Sharing follows permission.
Earth-centered connection recognizes land as teacher and relative. Relationship replaces extraction.
Cultural integrity requires restraint. The Institute shares only what has been given. Source communities remain centered. Distortion and appropriation are rejected.
Holistic renewal addresses personal, cultural, and ecological health in an integrated way. Separation creates harm. Relationship restores balance.
Seventh-generation responsibility shapes decision-making. The Institute acts with future people in mind. Good ancestors protect land, knowledge, and practice so life continues with depth and meaning.
Vision Statement
The In The Old Way Institute, holds a clear vision. Traditional Knowledge, earth-based practices, and ancestral stories live through integrity and use, not nostalgia. These ways remain protected, practiced, and remembered through a relationship with land, place, and responsibility.
The Institute envisions digital space used with restraint and purpose. Platforms serve as modern fires where stories pass with care. Not for spectacle. Not for trend. For remembrance, repair, and continuity. Podcasts and writing create a gathering place where cultural teachings endure, and people reconnect with land, lineage, and lived responsibility.
This vision centers on direct experience. Earth-based knowledge forms through participation. Wisdom grows through time on the land, through effort, attention, and consequence. Personal sovereignty matters. Authority does not come through repetition of another person’s words. Understanding forms through immersion rather than opinion.
Across many Indigenous and ancestral traditions, listening precedes speech. Experience anchors truth. Speech without lived knowledge carries no weight. Words gain meaning only after action. Integrity follows practice. This vision calls people to live before speaking and to test understanding through relationship with land, community, and self.
The Institute also envisions healing through reconnection. Disconnection sickness fades when contact returns. Contact with soil. Contact with story. Contact with Body and Soul. Contact with place. Balance returns through practice, not ideology. Relationship repairs separation.
Responsibility and Restraint
In The Old Way Institute does not affiliate with any tribal government or nation. When sharing Traditional Knowledge (TK), plant knowledge, or cultural teachings, the Institute operates on the principles of permission, attribution, and context. The Institute does not speak on behalf of any community.
Not all knowledge belongs in public view. Sacred, private, or ceremonial teachings remain protected unless explicitly offered for preservation or education. Stewardship guides decisions. Humility shapes offerings. Cultural integrity sets the boundary.
The vision stays steady. Old ways continue through care, discipline, and lived relationship. The work supports continuity rather than consumption. The future holds depth when memory remains intact.