Restoring Right Relations A Deep Dive: Why Relationship-building is Central to Redbud's Work
- Trelasa Baratta
- 12 hours ago
- 8 min read
There's good medicine in the people of this land. Old medicine.
Like seeds that have gone dormant after generations of fire suppression, the seed isn't dead. It's sitting beneath the surface, patiently waiting to be awoken. Then good fire moves through, the conditions change, and suddenly life that hasn't been seen in years starts coming back.
Restoring Right Relations (RRR), Redbud's Native leadership development program, was once a seed. It began as an idea: What if we created an intentional space for Native people to develop healthy leadership skills by learning from one another, building a strong support system, and connecting with a shared culture that flowers healthy communities?
Three cohorts later, that seed has grown into a network of more than 60 alumni representing 40+ Tribal and Indigenous affiliations and connecting with 15+ partner Tribes and organizations across California.
We decided that it starts with repairing relationships to ourselves, to the land, and to each other. Redbud carries the torch. Restoring Right Relations is the good fire. Good fire creates the conditions for renewal. Within RRR, that fire is education, relationships, resources, time on the land, difficult conversations, laughter (a lot of it), and exposure to other Native people doing incredible work.
It helps us remember what good medicine looks and feels like in community.
Then people carry that fire home. One participant shares something with their Tribal Council. Another brings a tool back to their workplace. Someone meets a person they later collaborate with. Someone else finally starts the project they've been talking about for years.
This is where inner power becomes collective power. Relationships give it somewhere to travel.
We begin by asking participants to look inward, to identify that good medicine. What are my core values? What am I responsible for? What am I carrying that brings healing to me and my community? What am I ready to lay to rest?
Where am I leading from?
Before we can talk about institutional power, collective power, or even Tribal sovereignty, we have to recognize the power we hold within ourselves: the ability to pause, understand what is driving us, and choose how we want to show up in community.
Like Mother Earth, Power Flows From the Core
Western systems tend to make power pretty easy to identify. Money is power. Political influence is power. Land and resources are power. Part of Restoring Right Relations is helping participants understand how those systems work. But we start within.
Inner power, at least as I've come to understand it through this work, isn't about charisma or being the loudest person in the room. It's about knowing who you are, what you value, who and what you're responsible to, and being able to act from that core place with intention. That includes learning to recognize when trauma is driving our responses, and how we might interrupt those patterns.
Why begin with self-empowerment? Because it really isn't very different from Tribal sovereignty, a concept we bring up again and again. At its core, Tribal sovereignty is about the inherent right of Native Nations to determine our own futures. It isn't granted by an agency or institution (although they sure do a great job of making us think it works this way). For thousands of years, Native communities exercised power through our ability to make decisions for ourselves, care for our lands, feed our people, and fulfill responsibilities to generations we would never meet.
Realizing this power, holding this power, is no easy feat. Like fire, it must be respected and stewarded with care.
With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility
Our first gathering this year was co-hosted by an RRR alum at Native Roots Network outside of Redding, already an example of one generation of RRR leadership supporting the next. We talked about sovereignty-strengthening actions and ways Native communities can lessen dependency on systems that have been imposed upon us.
One conversation that stuck with me was about the difference between individual rights and individual responsibility. American society is pretty obsessed with the rights of the individual: What am I entitled to as a human being? What belongs to me? What am I free to do? Yet, an Indigenous worldview also asks: What am I responsible for? What has been entrusted to me?
Who am I accountable to?
Native Roots Network's Acornomics model illustrates this worldview through an economic model based on abundance, with an emphasis on our ancestral relationship with oak trees. Humans tend the oak. The oak provides food shelter for humans and countless other species. Those species sustain other life. The relationship goes around and around, generation after generation.
But somebody has to tend the oak. It’s not just about being nice to one another. It's necessary for the survival of our species.
For Native people, there is nothing new about the idea that relationships are necessary for survival. Our communities survived what can only be described as an apocalypse: genocide, destruction of environments we relied on for food and medicine, land theft, forced removal, the kidnapping of children, the suppression of TEK, language and ceremony - systems explicitly designed to make Native people disappear.
And still, we survived.
We're here because people held onto one another. Our ancestors maintained kinship, shared food and stories, protected ceremony, remembered songs, and carried pieces forward for people they would never meet. Community was not a result of survival; it was the mechanism.
The goal isn't to pretend the things that happened to us didn't happen. It's to become more intentional about what happens next.
So What Happens Next? Making Connections to the Outer World
Once we've begun that work internally, we can start building connections to the outer world - Who is doing what? What resources exist? Who can we learn from?
Over the course of RRR, participants meet Native people exercising power in different ways. At Berry Creek Rancheria, their Natural Resources Department shared how land restoration can create opportunities for community healing. California Natural Resources Agency Tribal Relations Director Geneva Thompson spoke about navigating state government to strengthen Tribal stewardship policy. At Middletown Rancheria, Tribal leaders and Native burn boss Jordan Reyes shared Land Back efforts and work to return cultural burning to trust lands.
“Every workshop inspired me in a different way. I found that our time in Middletown was the most impactful workshop. It is rare for me to be in spaces that make me feel at home and comfortable to be myself. When we were out on the land it felt like I got a small glance at what our traditional communities looked like in a pre-colonial context. Most importantly I saw and felt joy.”
-Anonymous, 2026 RRR Participant
Those experiences gave participants actual people and real-world examples to connect with concepts like sovereignty, Land Back, stewardship, policy, and institutional power. They also make those possibilities feel a heck of a lot less abstract. It's one thing to say, "Native people should be leading land stewardship." It's another to sit across from someone doing it and ask: Okay, how did you actually make this happen? Who did you talk to? What got in your way? Who funded it? What would you do differently?
We can see the power of these relationships in contemporary Native movements, too. At Bears Ears, five Tribal Nations came together to protect a culturally significant landscape, eventually helping establish the first U.S. national monument proposed by Tribes. Research examining the Bears Ears case study identifies coalition-building, trust-building, and power-sharing as pathways toward greater Tribal self-determination.
Those relationships matter just as much when hard-won progress is threatened. In July 2026, the federal government drastically reduced Bears Ears National Monument and terminated the Bears Ears Commission, yet the five Tribal Nations remain united in protecting their shared ancestral landscape.
Institutions can grant access to power, and institutions can take that access away. Relationships are harder to dismantle.
Planting the Next Seeds
Power-building also asks us to decide what we carry forward. While we were at Middletown, I brought the group up to the water tower I helped design and shared the story of my grandpa and his brother, my great-uncle. My grandpa chose to assimilate our family and largely leave the culture behind. My great-uncle spent decades working with a linguist documenting our language and songs so that someday, when we were ready, we would still have them (turns out, we're ready).
I do what I do because of both of them. There's no guidebook for figuring out what lessons from the past we carry into a modern context, but there is a community wrestling with the same questions. The water tower reminds me that power doesn't always look like what we expect. Sometimes it's removing your family from toxic relationships and securing financial stability. Sometimes it's quietly documenting songs for people who haven't even been born yet.
Both matter. Both are decisions about the future.
By the time we gathered at Bohemia Ecological Preserve for our closing program this August, participants were making some of those decisions for themselves. Their final projects became the next seeds: educational materials, new programs for youth and teachers, and community projects some had already begun implementing through their Tribes.
But they aren't leaving with seeds alone. They're leaving with a toolkit of resources and people who can help tend them. They've eaten together, learned together, traveled together, worked through hard conversations, and built relationships with one another and with Native leaders, practitioners, organizations, and others who hold knowledge and resources that can help move their ideas forward.
This is where Indigenous and Western understandings of power can begin to work together. We want Native leaders to know how to access funding, navigate institutions, advocate for their communities, and get into the rooms where decisions are made. But none of that should require forgetting where their power comes from in the first place. Sovereignty also lives in our everyday ability to make decisions for ourselves, care for our people and homelands, practice our ceremonies, carry our knowledge forward, and decide what kind of future our descendants will inherit.
Perhaps that's what we're really trying to build through Restoring Right Relations: not individual leaders with more power over something, but a network of Native people who know where they're leading from, recognize the good medicine they bring to their communities, and understand the systems of power operating around them so that together we can better advocate for our people and exercise our inherent Tribal sovereignty.
To My Restoration Dawgz (This Year's Cohort)
A huge ka húyka, thank you, to this year's Restoring Right Relations participants for choosing to help the RRR seed flourish. Thank you for always showing up in a good way, no matter what. Thank you for sharing your extensive knowledge, probing questions, and unique experiences. Thank you for your trust, and for being vulnerable when I put you on the spot (sorry not sorry!). Thank you to those who drove ridiculous distances across California to be with us, who stepped outside their comfort zones, who shared pieces of themselves and their communities, and who reminded us why this program matters.
Redbud may carry the torch, and Restoring Right Relations may be the good fire, but what happens next belongs to all of you. Your projects are the seeds. Your relationships will help tend them. Some will grow quickly, some may sit dormant until the conditions are right, and some will produce seeds we may never personally see germinate. That's okay. That's how this work has always been done.
The medicine is here, and it has always been here. Our responsibility is to recognize it, tend it, share it, and make dang sure there is plenty left for the generations coming after us.
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