...witnessing brave communities who have managed to hold onto Indigenous language and ways, and continue their advocacy for the Earth, is important. We can appreciate the Indigenous experience unfolding today as a model for what is happening to all of us.

Our Keynote authors represent the Coalition for Global Citizenship (CGC2030). The Coalition, based at the United Nations Headquarters in New York, advocates that governments, public and private sectors, and civil society, all work from a basis of values of just and fair treatment, inclusion and cooperation.

The stories that carried us here—myths of progress, human exceptionalism, personal salvation, and objectification of nature—resulted in ecological catastrophe. We are alone now, in danger, and the key to survival as a species is to gather and make myth.

Soon after the pandemic began in 2020, the authors separately found their way to a new community for each of them: the US Department of Peacebuilding Campaign and national grassroots advocacy community. As the pandemic raged, the authors engaged with a growing group of people across the country who were practicing the ways of the Beloved Community. For them, the experience was transformational.

What is urgently needed is a unifying and updated understanding of what a nation is today, and what it has to become in order to contribute to what might be a shared and peaceful future world.