Re-weaving the bond between People & Place
UYWANAKUY YAKU MAMA
June 10 - 13, 2026
Walking the memory of the water
Uywanakuy, or mutual upraising in Quechua, is a multidisciplinary arts initiative held at Lost Valley Education Center in the Southern Willamette Valley. This year carries the theme of the water ⎯ Yaku Mama or ‘Mother Water’. We will orient ourselves to the local watershed, deepen our relationships to place, and apply ecological and cultural skills, tools, and arts for the regeneration of our soils, ecosystems, and communities.
Through this project, we are inviting the active recuperation of ancestral seeds of knowledge and art: place-based stewardship, stories, songs and dances, resilient food ways, pilgrimage, and more. We will engage in cross-cultural pollination and dialogue on multiple scales, offering space for local and bioregional alliances to form through the mutual upraising of life-sustaining systems and waterways.
This project is participatory, experimental, and celebratory in nature. As people of place, we aim to facilitate more connective, rooted and resilient individuals, communities, and watersheds. This is art for the sake of world renewal, peacemaking, and the seventh generation coming. This is art for relationship building, diplomacy, and community organizing. This is art for the sake of joyful hearts, healthy minds, and working hands ⎯
for living soil and fresh clean water!
This project is made possible by our community donors. Donate below to support the development of place-based education for the arts, culture, and regenerative stewardship!
A dance between our territories:
Indigenous Alliances
2026 Delegates: Nuh Jay
"We are Nuhjay, from the Andean-Amazonian territory, right on the border between Colombia and Ecuador. Blessed with the heritage of our family lines and guided by the elders, we have passed on and shared healing ways of life in harmony with natural cycles. We have grown up in families, contexts, and experiences of recovering territories and traditions that were almost lost or forgotten, such as traditional dances, songs, stories, and seeds, which we have shaped into a path and way of supporting processes of transition toward more holistic ways of living. Currently, we care for a space in the Amazon where this entire cycle of recovery and regeneration of the memory of life develops and inspires people today...
”Now, we want to pass on these traditions, safeguarded, protected, and reconstructed with great effort and with the help and wisdom of the elders of different native communities in the Andean and Amazonian territories. The elders guided us throughout our journey, and now it's important to share this with other territories and families as a tool to navigate these times of change and evolve toward a more respectful way of life, more in tune with ourselves, with the living world, with planet Earth, and with the return to unity."
We will also be working with local elders, cultural practitioners, and regenerative artists from the Willamette Valley and greater Cascadia bioregion.
Song ✸ Dance ✸ Story ✸ symbol
Come dance with us at the intersection of ART & STEWARDSHIP.
“For many ancestral peoples, dance, music, singing, poetry, and the spoken word are not acts created solely for representation, entertainment, or amusement. They are a way of accessing the world and its manifestations through a logic of caring for life...”
The elders from the South tell us that song, dance, story, and symbol are the basis of what it means to be a People—to share an identity that binds us to each other and to the land within concentric circles of care, reciprocity, and responsibility. Thus, to participate in communal practices of song, dance, and story is not just a matter of joy-making and entertainment, but rather essential life-sustaining threads within the re-weaving of our collective sovereignty and ancestral memory. Here within the union art and stewardship, we offer our dance as part of a greater prayer to re-weave the bond between people and place and to strengthen our community alliances in service to the regeneration of land, community, and culture.
Cross-Cultural Pollination
We are extending this invitation for local or regional artists, cultural practitioners, and Indigenous people to participate in this project and weave alliances for mutual upraising of our shared mother.
As dominant systems and modern displaced peoples strain under the weight of disconnection and isolation—from land, spirit, heritage, cultural identity, and each other— learning from cultures that have sustained life through reciprocity, oral memory, and deep ecological knowledge offers us a path toward whole-systems regeneration. These kinds of mutually upraising exchanges are acts of healing and service to the whole. We are rebalancing narratives, awakening the memory of our bodies and territories, and reweaving a collective future rooted in respect, diversity, interdependence, and belonging.
While it is a privilege and an honor to welcome our Colombian family and to help build this bridge between the global North and South, we also want to recognize the prolific and diverse local efforts, seeds, projects, and communities working towards community, land, and cultural regeneration here in the Willamette Valley and Cascadia bioregion. We want to strengthen these local alliances and promote cross-pollination of diverse ideas, visions, tools and arts.
Together, we aim to address the root and foundation of what bonds us together as people of place and equips us to act coherently for the regeneration of our communities and ecologies.
If this corresponds to you, please send an email to vanessam@lostvalley.org with a statement of interest and brief introduction to your group or project.
We look forward to dancing, weaving, and working together!
calling all…
Artists, culture-bearers, bridge-builders & peacemakers…
Musicians, singers, poets, storytellers, weavers, dancers…
Keepers of fire, water, and seeds for future generations…
Educators, advocates, Earth defenders, farmers & forest folk…
This is a call for all those who are seriously and creatively engaged with the ethics and principles of regenerative stewardship. Let us cross-pollinate, co-inspire, and mutually upraise one another in relationship to this dancing, flowering, flowing Mother – Yaku Mama.
The land wants us back.
The forests are lonely.
The water knows the way —
humming in the mycelium,
drumming in the heartwood,
rising in the mist and on our breathe,
spiraling through our veins –
older than our forgetting.
Beaver, salmon, fire and human…
Come home, come home, come home.
Please contact outreach@lostvalley.org for questions and considerations!