Stephen Jon Thompson

MINGA. When sitting to think of the build your websites, what came to mind was this word, this concept, of MINGA. When I was travelling through Ecuador meeting the community there I came across this idea, and I have been in love with it ever since. Talking with you, what your purpose, your mission, what you want to build, how you live your life, this idea of Minga immediately became the backbone of how I thought about building your 2 websites. Minga is a word that describes a kind of communal work, where members all the members of the community come together to help the one, that in turn, helps everyone. Everyone comes together to help each other when needed in a task that not only benefits the one but the entire group. We are strongest when we are in a community. This is why it was the first thing that I thought of when thinking about your projects. And this is the foundational level that we build on. 

As is the way of Earth Legacy when we approach to work, we come from a place of indigenous knowledge systems, local lore, and connection to country, the land, the people, all the human and non-human entities in a landscape. This initial thought of Minga inspired the investigation and conversation into native culture from the traditional lands of Northern & Southern Piute / Western Shoshone / Washoe. These native lands come from where the book is based in Nevada. I started to talk some story and lore from that place, and immediately found similar values of cooperation, mutual support and coming together for the benefit of the one for the benefit of the all. Of course they don’t use the term minga, there is actually not a word for ‘community’, for their ways are relational context meanings, always linked together with family, and kinship ties, in what we then call back home a relational economy, because we are all one extended family. We all belong to the one people, one fire, that intercontinental community that share common lore. Family is not only a pillar of your story, but the reason you do what you do. And this should be a prominent part of the site, both in not only content of what is being shared for the Why you do what you do, but the How, the way you talk to people through this digital space and build that relation as an extension of your family, coming together in minga, in tabeno’a.

These are unspoken, interwoven components of concepts that enrich the next stages, for it is these ideas are the foundations of the rest of the work, the building blocks of value that the rest of the copy, and the design come, that roadmap to how we get from here, to what are we are going to create – and in a greater affect the minga we step up to provide for support of the greater community, by sharing this story, your story, with the world.