featured photo | Maria Ivanova
Excerpted from Sacred Migration: An Indigenous Elder’s Vision for Our Future by Steven Charleston. Copyright © 2026 Broadleaf Books. Reprinted with permission of Broadleaf Books. Sacred Migration is available for preorder now.
The forced movement of people causes immense suffering. Yet migration has also been a force for human survival and renewal. Drawing on Indigenous wisdom, human evolution, and spiritual imagination, a Choctaw author invites us to reimagine sacred migration as a new and ancestral journey of the heart-mind toward a shared positive future.
From the Introduction
Have you seen their faces? The migrants being rounded up for deportation. The refugees sinking into the sea. The children crying for their mothers. The starving ghosts walking in the desert. The survivors of natural disasters. The families running from war.
I have seen their faces over and over again. Our world continues to create more and more desperate migrants, who must do more and more desperate things to try to survive. Their images are graphic reminders of how the idea of migration has become a highly politicized flashpoint. Controlling the movement of migrants, turning back refugees, and closing the borders of nations: The rejection of migrants has become a common part of our daily news cycle. We can become desensitized to it. Or we can become fanaticized by it, adopting extreme positions that deny the humanity of those caught up in the politics of migration.
We have understandably come to associate the word migration only with forced movement of people. I understand that, especially because my own ancestors became refugees in their own land. I am a citizen of the Choctaw Nation (Chahta Yakni). We were the first Indigenous nation to be forced into migration in the early 1830s, the first to take the Trail of Tears. We were force-marched over the Ozark mountains in winter.
At least one fourth of our people died. Forced migration of any kind is inhumane and immoral.
But that is not the end of the story. As a Native American, I am not content to let the Trail of Tears have the last word. Many of us perished on that death march, but many of us survived. And ironically, we survived because of another migration, the one we had taken long, long ago.
I want to balance our perceptions of migration as a force for destruction with perceptions of it as a force for hope. I want to suggest that we still have a migration to take together: a migration out of our current situation and toward a peaceful future. There is something we can do because there is something we can remember…
…Migration can be a redemptive word. It is a challenging word. It is a word that sets us free to explore and create. It reminds us that we have a shared past. It suggests that we can also have a shared future. Because of a forced migration, my people almost perished. Because of an intentional migration, they survived. They remembered. They believed. They moved.
It is time for us to move again.
Across Turtle Island, Indigenous people are inviting others to join them on a spiritual migration. The positive nature of spiritual migration is what I offer here, a balance to the headlines of forced migrations that are happening all around us every day.
If we truly want to stop that kind of tragedy, if we want to help our kin find their promised land, then we need to get up, recognize the reality in which we live, and start moving together toward a new horizon. It will not be easy. None of the migrations our ancestors took were easy, but they were transformative.
And that’s the hope hidden in the word: Migration is transformation.
From Chapter One: Migration
The story of human migration is the story of human evolution for hundreds of thousands of years. Migrations shaped and created human cultures. Our constant movement, our curiosity, our adaptability: All of these emerged along the trail of human migration. We are, in a very real sense, the product of countless migrations. What we have learned, we have learned on the move.
Our ancestors walked from Africa to China. Some of them went north to live beneath great walls of ice. Others entered dense jungles. Some learned to survive in deserts. All of this, over centuries. Migrations are not sprints but marathons. The Sami (Laplanders), the First Nations of Australia, the Micronesians and Polynesians, the Ainu, and all the rest of us, are examples of how bands of people became a distinct human community after a long migration…
…Civilization began not when people learned to plant seeds but when they began to plant ideas, when they began to cultivate imagination. The nomads who built temples show us the moment when human beings evolved an interior life, one of great scientific, social, and spiritual imagination. They began to organize what they imagined: Leadership was established, plans were made, materials were collected. People began working together in a new way because they began to share a new vision of reality. They began to know who they were, why they were here, and what they were supposed to be doing.
Where did those insights come from? From the same place as human language: somewhere along the migration. The stream of new ideas, new connections, new myths, emerged by a campfire, late one night, when the elders told stories of the past, or they were shared on the walk to collect water, when the women talked as they went. Slowly, gradually, one imaginative vision after another, the bands of isolated families coalesced into larger and larger numbers. They were attracted to the new technology of seed planting, and they were engaged in imagining a common worldview. In short, they were creating what we now call community.
Solitary, isolated human beings are drawn into change. They watch one another and learn new skills. They imitate one another and discover improvements. They ask why.
This process is foundational for humanity. It has occurred everywhere and with everyone. All of humanity has made a migration, their migration, until it shaped them into cultures and religions. When enough storytelling by the firelight had taken place, the stories themselves became seeds. These visions of time and space took root in the fertile ground of human imagination and began to grow.
Agriculture may be the physical manifestation of this process of transformation, but spirituality is its interior manifestation, the sign that human beings have been changed by their long travels. The interior universe of human philosophy, spirituality, and art expanded and deepened. The stories of the elders became the traditions of the people. Migration became the potter’s wheel, shaping what we now call culture….
…As a species, we survived our most vulnerable period when we were only a tiny nomadic population. Scientific estimates, for example, speculate that sixty thousand years ago there were only a few thousand people spread out across Europe and Asia. All the human variants, like Denisovans and Neanderthals, as well as ourselves, the Homo sapiens, faced a hard struggle in a dangerous and unforgiving environment. Only one human community completed the great migration: our community, the Homo sapiens. We brought some of the DNA of other communities with us, but we ended our journey alone.
Now, millennia later, we face another time of threat to our survival. We, the descendants of those who made the original migration, find ourselves in a cultural dead end. Our journey has stagnated. We are moving backward in our evolution. A quick survey of our situation will verify that reality. While our ancestors on the migration were concerned about finding enough food for the whole community to eat, we live in a world that tolerates mass hunger and starvation, even though we have the means to end it. While our ancestors knew their survival depended on their relationship to Mother Earth, we act as if the earth is only a resource to be exploited until it is gone.
On the migration, we came to experience a deep spiritual awareness; now we exist in an era when many of us forget the sacred. When we were walking together, we felt a sense of family and common purpose; now imaginary lines of difference like color and sexual orientation divide us. Now that our ancient migrations are over, the places we inhabit are not something better for us but something far worse.
Our tools and technology alone will not save us, not without what got us through the first migration: the spiritual resilience of a people going somewhere together. The sense of moving forward, not sliding back. The visionary curiosity that expands the human imagination. The empathy with one another that keeps us going even when the going gets hard. The ancient core of our species transcends current definitions of ourselves. It still offers a foundation on which we can renew our sacred journey. As we approach the midpoint of the twenty-first century, it is time to move. It is time to begin a new ancestral migration.
It is time to offer humanity an alternative to sitting still in despair. It is time to break out of the ethical entropy that paralyzes us when we try to love one another. It is time to go around the walls built by intolerance and fear, and head out on a journey full of possibilities and surprises. It is time for those of us who are not afraid to get up and start walking to tomorrow.
At first, we may only be small bands of people, handfuls of visionaries who have been sitting up late around the campfire, watching the stars and telling stories. But that is all we need to begin the migration. Others will follow in time. The important thing right now is to gather up those of us who refuse to let go of hope, to pull us together around a shared vision, and then set off to rediscover who we are and where we are going.
I am embarking on an ancestral migration. I am going to try to tap into the same spirit that motivated my ancestors, our ancestors: to shake the dust of sorrow and anxiety off my feet, to ask again the questions that arise from our imagination, to reconstruct the human family that first decided to change their reality. We can do that too. We can decide to take a risk, to trust in our skills and our visions, to take responsibility with and for one another, to reconnect to the holy, to search for wisdom, to honor Mother Earth and save her children before it is too late.
From Chapter Two: Wormhole
When we travel spiritually, we travel as our ancestors did: along the path of perception. We take what we remember, even back to the earliest memory we have, and draw that forward to link with what we imagine the future will be. In the Indigenous perception of art and music, of dance and worship, an endless number of connections bridge the distant past to the even more distant future.
In other words, spiritually speaking, we fold space.
We go back in our memory to rediscover those core visions that prompted the journey in the first place. We listen again to the stories and the myths that are our road maps through uncharted terrain. We try, to the best of our ability, to feel as our ancestors felt, to see what they saw, to be changed as they were changed.
Perception is the wormhole, the bridge, that will move us through space-time to a new location. It may take a long time. It may happen sooner than we think. But the transformation will be real. By linking the contemporary visions of physics to the ancient visions of Native America, we begin a journey that will take us to places we can only imagine.
And that’s the point: Perception transforms. This is not pretend. This is not make-believe. Change, transformation, will occur. Perceptions will shift. What our ancestors discovered centuries ago on their migration will be available to us now. We are on a new migration, searching for a meaningful tomorrow by moving out of a sad past.
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