Seeding Sovereignty, a woman- and indigenous-led, multi-lens collective, works to radicalize and disrupt colonized spaces through land, body, and food sovereignty work, community building, and cultural preservation. Formed in 2016 by Janet MacGillivray, an environmental attorney, former whistleblower and social change activist, Seeding Sovereignty invests in indigenous peoples and communities by facilitating collective healing through reciprocity, trust, respect, and joy; supporting intentional collaboration to protect people and preserve the planet; providing access to opportunity to move towards a just and thriving future; and establishing relationships in synchronicity with the land and people to shift power from patriarchal, colonized, and racist systems. The organization’s projects operate under the tenets of mutual aid, community defense, emancipation through education, and solidarity with underestimated and often marginalized populations, and seek to amplify the role of indigenous knowledge for environmental justice and regeneration.
n 2021, activist groups and several individual plaintiffs – including celebrities Daryl Hannah, Riley Keough and Mark Ruffalo – came together to file an amicus curiae (“friend of the court”) brief in support of a groundbreaking lawsuit originally filed in 2018 by Seeding Sovereignty and the Animal Legal Defense Fund that aims to compel federal government action on climate change based on a constitutional right to nature and wilderness. In 2020, the musician Fiona Apple recognized Seeding Sovereignty with her support for their COVID-19 program. Ongoing projects of Seeding Sovereignty include Ancestral Farm and Gardens to support food sovereignty and community health; Medicine Wheels, an outgrowth of the COVID-19 pandemic, to provide tools and mentorship to support BIPOC & LGBTQIA+ communities; and the Missing and Surviving Indigenous Peoples Project, to amplify alerts and build real-time information sharing to unite search efforts when time is of the essence
Eryn Wise with Seeding Sovereignty