A Movement of Reclamation, Remembrance, and Return
There’s a kind of grief that lives in the bones. Not the grief of death, but the grief of forgetting. Of being told your ancestors disappeared. That their wisdom died with them. That you are the descendant of nothing.
This is the lie colonization told us. And it’s the lie we’re dismantling, symbol by symbol, story by story, ancestor by ancestor.
Welcome to Ancestral Bridges – not just a project, but a homecoming. A movement reconnecting us to the ancestral intelligence encoded in our blood, our dreams, and the symbols our people left carved in stone, woven in cloth, and whispered through generations who refused to let the truth die.
This is the story of what we’re building. And why your participation matters.
The Bridges We’re Building
Ancestral Bridges began with a simple but revolutionary question: What if the similarities between Indigenous cultures separated by oceans weren’t coincidence, but evidence of universal ancestral wisdom?
What if the TaÃno spiral petroglyphs in Caribbean caves, the Congolese cosmogram mapping the sun’s journey, and the Celtic triskele at Newgrange all speak the same truth about cosmic cycles? What if our ancestors – Caribbean Indigenous peoples, West Africans, Pacific Islanders, ancient Celts – all understood something about the universe that colonization tried to erase?
What if that knowledge still lives in us?
Ancestral Bridges is our commitment to mapping these connections. Not to appropriate or blend cultures carelessly, but to honor the reality of diaspora – that many of us carry multiple ancestral threads, and that Indigenous wisdom transcends borders because it emerges from our shared relationship with Earth, cosmos, and spirit.
Through Livity Tree Art, we’re creating visual bridges. Sacred symbols from different traditions occupying the same canvas, speaking to each other across time and distance. The Aboriginal Spiral Goddess beside TaÃno cemà figures. West African Adinkra symbols woven with Caribbean geometric patterns. Celtic knotwork echoing Kalinago basket designs.
Each piece asks: What did our ancestors know that we’re only now remembering?
Daughters of the Erased: Giving Voice to the Silenced
One of the most powerful components of Ancestral Bridges is our upcoming “Daughters of the Erased” video interview series.
This series centers the voices of women reclaiming Indigenous Caribbean, African diaspora, and other colonized identities that systems declared “extinct” or “mixed away.” Women who were told they had no ancestors to honor. Women who are proving that lie wrong every day.
Why “Daughters of the Erased”?
Because colonization didn’t just steal land. It stole identity. It weaponized census systems, blood quantum laws, and racial hierarchies to erase Indigenous peoples from official record while we were still standing right here, still living, still carrying our ancestors’ wisdom.
Our Colonial Reclassification Series – now available as ebooks on Livity.Blog and Patreon – documents exactly how this erasure happened. How the Spanish casta system divided Caribbean peoples into impossible categories. How “mulatto,” “mestizo,” and “zambo” became tools of division rather than descriptions of our complex, beautiful heritage. How being declared “mixed” was used to strip us of Indigenous identity and land rights.
But here’s what they didn’t count on: You cannot erase what lives in the blood.
The “Daughters of the Erased” series features conversations with women who are:
- Reclaiming TaÃno, Kalinago, Garifuna, and other Caribbean Indigenous identities
- Reconnecting to African ancestral practices their grandmothers kept alive in secret
- Navigating mixed heritage in a world that demands you choose one box
- Raising children who know their full story
- Creating art, scholarship, and spiritual practice that resurrects what was “lost”
These aren’t stories of victimhood. These are stories of resurrection. Of ancestral intelligence activating across generations, calling us home to truths our DNA never forgot.
The series launches this spring. If you’re a woman walking this path and want to share your story, reach out to contactus@livity.blog. Your voice matters. Your remembering matters.
Sacred Symbols: The Visual Language of Our Ancestors
At the heart of Ancestral Bridges is the recognition that symbols are not decoration – they are technology.
Our ancestors encoded knowledge in visual language that transcends spoken word. They created symbols that could survive conquest, slavery, forced migration, and cultural suppression. Symbols that would wait in stone, in cloth, in pottery, in skin, until the descendants were ready to read them again.
Through Livity Tree Art, we’re activating these symbols.
The Spiral
Found in TaÃno caves, Congolese cosmology, Celtic sacred sites, and Indigenous traditions worldwide. The spiral represents the eternal cycle – birth, death, rebirth. Time moving not in a line but in a dance. The universe breathing in and out. Your own life repeating patterns your ancestors lived.
When you wear the spiral, you’re not just wearing art. You’re wearing a reminder that you are part of a cycle that cannot be broken by colonization.
The Crossroads
The Congolese Kongo cosmogram. The TaÃno understanding of cardinal directions. The Celtic cross predating Christianity. Different symbols, same truth: we exist at the intersection of physical and spiritual worlds. Our ancestors knew how to walk both. Colonial systems tried to trap us in only the material. We’re remembering how to move between worlds again.
The Goddess
Atabey, mother of waters in TaÃno cosmology. Yemoja, ocean mother of the Yoruba. Brigid, Celtic goddess of fire and healing. Across cultures, the divine feminine as creator, nurturer, destroyer, transformer. When colonizers tried to erase the feminine face of God, our ancestors hid Her in saints, in stories, in symbols that looked “safe.”
We don’t have to hide Her anymore.
Every piece in the Livity Tree Art collection carries intention. We don’t create for aesthetics alone – though beauty matters, because beauty is resistance against ugliness trying to convince us we come from nothing. We create to reactivate ancestral memory through symbol.
When you put on a Livity Tree Art shirt, you’re not just wearing clothing. You’re wearing your inheritance. You’re broadcasting to others walking the path: I remember. I am remembering. Find me.
Ancestral Intelligence: Your Inheritance from Creation
Here’s what they don’t teach in schools: You inherited more than trauma. You inherited genius.
Your ancestors survived the Middle Passage. Survived forced marches and reservations. Survived having their children stolen, their languages banned, their spiritual practices criminalized. And they didn’t just survive – they kept the wisdom alive.
They hid it in:
- Songs that sounded like entertainment but encoded maps to freedom
- Dances that looked like celebration but taught spiritual practice
- Food that sustained bodies while carrying healing properties
- Stories that seemed like fairy tales but contained cosmic truth
- Symbols that colonizers couldn’t recognize as power
This is Ancestral Intelligence – the accumulated wisdom of thousands of years, encoded in your DNA, waiting for you to access it.
You already know things you haven’t been taught. You already feel pulls toward practices you can’t explain. You already recognize symbols you’ve never studied. This isn’t mysticism – this is inheritance.
Epigenetics confirms what Indigenous peoples always knew: trauma lives in the body across generations. So does resilience. So does wisdom.
When you feel called to explore TaÃno spirituality, West African traditional practices, Celtic earth wisdom – that’s not appropriation. That’s activation. Your ancestors speaking through your curiosity, your creativity, your hunger for truth.
Ancestral Bridges exists to support that activation. To provide:
- Educational content that fills in what colonization erased from history books
- Visual art that serves as meditation, activation, remembrance
- Community of others walking the path home
- Permission to trust what you feel in your bones
The Colonial Reclassification Series: Understanding How Erasure Happened
Knowledge is power. Understanding exactly how colonization worked to divide and erase us is crucial to undoing that damage.
Our Colonial Reclassification Series – now available as ebooks on Livity.Blog and Patreon – breaks down the systems used to divide and erase us:
Volume 1: “Erased & Reclassified”
How dark-skinned Indigenous peoples across the Americas were systematically reclassified as “Black” or “Negro” to strip them of Indigenous identity and land rights. Explores the mound-building civilizations, the Washitaw Nation’s claims about the Louisiana Purchase, forced assimilation into slave populations, boarding school erasure, and the modern implications for Black Americans discovering Indigenous ancestry.
Volume 2: “Mejorando La Raza”
How the Spanish casta system created 16+ racial categories to divide Hispanic/Latino Indigenous peoples through shame and “whitening” policies. Examines blanqueamiento (improving the race), colorism programming (“pelo bueno/malo”), mestizaje as forced elimination strategy, and how to break free from colonial categories that pit families against themselves.
Volume 3: “The Northern Separation”
How blood quantum became mathematical genocide for U.S./Canadian “Native Americans.” Explores colonial favoritism strategies, later Mongolian/Inuit migration narratives, land-for-cooperation arrangements with certain tribes, federal recognition as control, and how phenotype policing within communities serves the colonial project of Indigenous elimination.
Volume 4: “The Forgotten Colonized”
Why white Indigenous Europeans—Irish, Scottish, Basque, Sámi, and others—must join the fight for Black and Brown sovereignty. Examines how European colonizers offered whiteness as a weapon to Indigenous Europeans in exchange for forgetting their own colonization. Explores the Irish genocide, Celtic erasure, and how reclaiming European Indigenous identity strengthens global Indigenous solidarity rather than diluting it.
These ebooks aren’t just history. They’re roadmaps for undoing internalized colonization.
When you understand how they divided us, you can refuse those divisions. When you understand why they declared us extinct, you can stand as living proof they failed. When you understand the tools of erasure, you can forge tools of resurrection.
Available now on Livity.Blog and Patreon. Pay-what-you-can sliding scale because this knowledge belongs to the people.
Divine Healing: When Ancestors Become Medicine
There’s a moment in the journey back to ancestors that feels like breaking open and coming home simultaneously.
It’s the moment you realize: Your healing and your ancestors’ healing are the same healing.
The wounds they carried – the trauma of conquest, enslavement, erasure, survival – live in your nervous system. But so does their resilience. So does their wisdom. So does their magic.
When you do the work of ancestral reconnection, you’re not just healing yourself. You’re healing backward and forward in time. You’re giving your ancestors witness they never received. You’re breaking cycles they couldn’t break. You’re accessing power they preserved for exactly this moment.
This is divine healing. Not healing from some distant god, but healing that flows through your bloodline. Healing that your ancestors are actively participating in from the other side of the veil.
When you:
- Create art inspired by ancestral symbols
- Research your family’s migration stories
- Learn traditional practices your grandmother kept alive
- Refuse to check boxes that erase you
- Teach your children their full story
- Wear your heritage proudly
- Build community with others on the path
You are doing ancestral healing work.
And your ancestors are celebrating. Trust that. Feel that. Know that when you take one step toward them, they take ten toward you.
Join the Movement: Ancestral Bridges is Calling You Home
This isn’t a spectator project. This is a community movement and we need you.
Here’s how you become part of Ancestral Bridges:
1. Follow the Journey
- Instagram/Facebook: @LivityTreeArt – Daily symbol education, art process, ancestral wisdom
- Livity.Blog – Weekly long-form articles diving deep into hidden histories and reclamation practices
- YouTube – Video essays, painting process, interviews with cultural knowledge keepers
2. Support the Work
- Patreon – Exclusive content, early access to new collections, behind-the-scenes creative process, monthly live Q&As, and the full Colonial Reclassification ebook series
- Shop Livity Tree Art – Every purchase supports creating more educational content and keeps this 100% Indigenous-owned business thriving. Wear your resistance. Broadcast your remembering.
3. Share Your Story
- If you’re reclaiming erased Indigenous identity, we want to hear from you for “Daughters of the Erased”
- If you’ve experienced ancestral awakening, share it in the comments or on social media with #AncestralBridges
- If you’ve found symbols, practices, or wisdom calling you home, tell that story
4. Educate Yourself
- Download the Colonial Reclassification ebooks
- Read the symbol breakdowns on the blog
- Watch the educational video series
- Study your own family’s history – talk to elders, request documents, dig into census records, follow the threads
5. Build Community
- Connect with others in the comments and on social media
- Attend virtual events and workshops (announcements coming soon)
- Support other Indigenous artists and educators doing this work
- Create your own ancestral bridges – art, writing, music, scholarship, spiritual practice
The Truth of Our Past: Before Colonization and Division
Here’s what they don’t want you to know:
Before colonization divided us, we were whole.
Before they drew lines on maps and created “races,” our ancestors were peoples connected to land, to cosmos, to each other through trade, migration, shared symbol systems, and universal spiritual understanding.
Caribbean Indigenous peoples traveled vast distances by canoe, creating networks across islands and mainland. African peoples built empires of learning, art, and technology while Europe was in its “dark ages.” Celtic peoples held councils under sacred trees where women’s voices carried equal weight. Pacific Islanders navigated by stars across oceans that terrified European sailors.
Our ancestors were brilliant. They were sophisticated. They were connected to something larger than themselves.
And then colonization came. With its ships and its guns and its Bibles and its lies. It came with systems designed to:
- Separate Indigenous peoples from land
- Divide Africans from each other through slavery
- Convince everyone that European ways were the only “civilized” ways
- Erase the feminine face of the divine
- Replace earth-based spiritual practice with religions of control
- Turn complex, beautiful peoples into simple categories: savage, slave, subject
But here’s the truth they couldn’t destroy: You can colonize land, but you cannot colonize spirit.
You can steal people from their homeland, but you cannot steal their connection to ancestors. You can ban languages, but you cannot silence the tongue of the blood. You can burn books and break monuments, but you cannot erase what’s encoded in symbol, song, and the soul’s memory.
Our ancestors made sure of that.
They hid the truth in places colonizers wouldn’t look. In “entertainment” and “superstition” and “folklore.” In the things enslaved peoples and conquered peoples were still allowed to do – sing, dance, cook, craft, dream, love, survive.
And now, generations later, we’re finding what they hid. We’re decoding what they encrypted. We’re remembering what they refused to let die.
This is Ancestral Bridges. This is the work of resurrection.
Your Invitation: The Bridges Are Waiting
If you’ve read this far, you know this isn’t for you by accident.
You’ve felt the pull. The hunger for connection to something older and truer than what this colonized world offers. The frustration with boxes that don’t hold you. The grief of forgetting mixed with the hope of remembering.
You’re being called home.
Not home to a place – though land matters. Not home to the past – though history matters. Home to yourself. To the version of you that carries ancestral wisdom in your DNA. To the version of you that knows more than you’ve been taught. To the version of you that’s been waiting for permission to trust what you feel in your bones.
This is your permission.
Join us in Ancestral Bridges. Let’s find each other in the symbols our ancestors left. In the sounds they carried. In the stories they refused to let die. Let’s build community across the bridges colonization tried to burn. Let’s awaken together to the ancestral intelligence that never left, only waited for us to remember.
Your ancestors are calling. It’s time to answer.
Connect with Ancestral Bridges
Website: Livity.Blog
Shop: LivityTreeArt.com
Instagram/Facebook: @LivityTreeArt
Patreon: [Patreon link]
YouTube: [YouTube.com/@livityblog]
Email: contactus@livity.blog
Available Now:
- Colonial Reclassification Series (4-volume ebook collection)
- Sacred Symbol Art Prints & Apparel
- Educational Blog Archive
Coming Soon:
- “Daughters of the Erased” Video Interview Series
- Ancestral Bridges Workshop Series
- Community Healing Circles (Virtual & In-Person)
- Expanded Art Collection with Symbol Guides
A Final Word: We Will Rise
They tried to bury us.
They didn’t know we were seeds.
Every symbol you reclaim is a root breaking through concrete. Every story you tell is medicine for cultural amnesia. Every connection you make across the bridges is proof that what they tried to divide cannot be separated.
We are the proof that our ancestors won.
We are still here. Still creating. Still remembering. Still rising.
And we’re not rising alone. We’re rising together – Caribbean Indigenous, African diaspora, Celtic descendants, Pacific Islanders, all peoples who were told their ancestors disappeared.
Our ancestors never left. And neither will we.
Welcome to Ancestral Bridges.
Welcome home.
Through livity we rise. 🌀
Share this post if it speaks to your spirit. Tag someone who’s walking the path home. Use #AncestralBridges to connect with the community.
The bridges are waiting. Your ancestors are waiting. We’re waiting.
Let’s remember together.
