MEET THE FOUNDER
Centered in Relationship with Land
Guided by ancestral knowing and a deep-rooted connection to Maala Bwia/Mother Earth, our founder's journey is one of braiding timeless wisdom with modern organizational transformation. Their practice is centered on the trust that true leadership and collective prosperity emerges from being in right relations with the land and all living beings.
Dr. kj
Yaqui/Bisayan
Founder
With years of experience at the intersection of strategy and Native and Indigenous literacies, they serve as a weaver—connecting Native and Indigenous worldviews with collective caretaking. Their journey has been defined by a commitment to fostering sustainable growth through responsibility and reciprocity.
Born and raised on Tongva Land in what is now called Southeast Los Angeles, Dr. kj comes to this work through generations shaped by agricultural labor, Native and Indigenous survivance, and enduring relationships to land. Their family histories move across Arizona, Sonora, Hawai‘i, and the Bisayan islands of the Philippines—carrying stories shaped by colonization and displacement, but also by care, reciprocity, humor, and profound relational knowledge held within community.
Long before founding the Sewatua ReWorld Institute for Indigenous Land Literacies, Dr. kj’s path carried them across many worlds. They worked within major hospital systems and executive governance environments across Southern California, collaborated with state reviewers and institutional leadership, governmental and tribal agencies, mentored youth and university students, taught in classrooms from K–12 through the University of California system—undergraduate and graduate student oversight—and spent years learning as a member of their urban Native communities and Native knowledge keepers in Southern California.
Moving across those spaces revealed something that would eventually become central to their work: many institutions know how to speak about care, relationship, and community, but far fewer know how to practice them in
accountable and sustained ways with Native & Indigenous Peoples.
That tension—and possibility—sits at the heart of their work today.
Grounded in environmental and sociocultural anthropology, as well as Indigenous Science, Technology, and Society (ITS), Dr. kj’s work bridges Indigenous relational frameworks, organizational systems, land-based education, community-engaged learning, institutional transformation, and creative practice. Alongside their work as a scholar and educator, they are also a creative whose approach to teaching, facilitation, and institutional design is shaped by storytelling, visuality, emotion, and the belief that creativity itself is a form of knowledge-making and remembering.
For Dr. kj, this work has never only been intellectual.
It is personal, ancestral, emotional,
embodied, and lived.
As a Native and Indigenous Yoeme (Yaqui)/Bisayan professional, scholar, artist, educator, and cultural practitioner, they carry a deep commitment to right relations with Indigenous lands and beyond human worlds. Their work honors an ancestral obligation to uplift relational ways of knowing and being, including the recognition of plant and pollinator personhood, collective responsibility, and forms of knowledge often dismissed or fragmented by colonial institutions.
Over the past two decades, Dr. kj has taught, designed programs, mentored students, facilitated institutional dialogue, and guided leadership learning across K–12 education, higher education, community initiatives, interdisciplinary research environments, and land-based programs. Their teaching across the University of California system emerged through invited appointments and independently designed courses in Anthropology, Indigenous Studies, Ethnic Studies, Feminist Studies, decolonizing methodologies, environmental justice, and social systems. Whether working with university students, nonprofit leaders, educators, or institutional teams, their approach invites people into deeper forms of reflection, relational accountability, and ethical engagement with place and community.
As a National Science Foundation Fellow, ethnographer, and researcher, Dr. kj has collaborated across tribal communities, universities, scientific laboratories, nonprofit organizations, and international research networks while contributing to Indigenous-led initiatives surrounding pollinator knowledge and sovereignty. Their research and collaborative work have also contributed to the growing interdisciplinary field of Indigenous Science, Technology, and Society alongside scholars and community collaborators internationally.
Yet what people often remember most is not simply their scholarship, but the way they hold space: with curiosity, warmth, emotional depth, humor, creativity, care, and an ability to guide people through complexity without flattening it. Their programs are shaped not only by research and pedagogy, but by storytelling, reflection, atmosphere, relationship-building, and the cultivation of spaces where people can encounter themselves, each other, and the living world differently.
Through the Sewatua ReWorld Institute, Dr. kj partners with schools, educators, organizations, leadership teams, and broader publics seeking more meaningful relationships with Indigenous lands, peoples, and place. Their programs and professional partnerships through the Institute are rooted in the belief that transformation does not happen through symbolic gestures alone, but through sustained relational practice—through learning how to listen differently, how to remain accountable to place and community, and how to reimagine institutional life through reciprocity, responsibility, creativity, and collective care.
At the center of Dr. kj’s work is a belief that another way of relating is possible. One grounded not in extraction or performance, but in relationship, humility, creativity, and a good heart.