Dear ones,

This week, the United States turns 250 years old.

Or rather — the Declaration of Independence turns 250 years old. The founding mythology turns 250 years old. The story the country has told about itself since July 4th, 1776 — that this is a nation conceived in liberty, dedicated to the proposition that all people are created equal — turns 250 years old.

The distance between the story and the reality is something we are being asked to reckon with, right now, in ways that feel both urgent and overwhelming. I want to sit with you in that reckoning this week — not to despair in it, but to understand what it is actually asking of us.

I have been thinking about the work of Vanessa Andreotti, a Brazilian-Canadian scholar whose framework for what she calls hospicing modernity has become an important touchstone for me. Andreotti invites us to consider that the systems and structures of the modern world — the extractive economy, the nation-state, the legal and governance frameworks built on colonial foundations — are not simply flawed systems that need reform. They are dying systems. And our task, in this moment, is not primarily to fix them or to replace them immediately with something better. Our task is to be present to their dying — to be the hospice workers, the ones who sit with what is ending with honesty and compassion and clear eyes.

This is hard work. It requires the willingness to name what is dying without turning away. And it requires the wisdom to distinguish between what needs to be released and what needs to be carried forward into whatever comes next.

What the founders built

The men who signed the Declaration of Independence and drafted the Constitution were, by most measures, brilliant governance architects. They built a framework for the distribution and limitation of governmental power that has proven more durable than most of its contemporaries. They encoded principles — due process, freedom of expression, the separation of powers — that have been used by people the founders never intended to protect to claim rights the founders never intended to recognize.

They also built on a specific foundation, with specific premises, for specific purposes.

The Constitution was drafted by fifty-five men — all of them white, all of them property owners, the majority of them slaveholders or otherwise directly invested in the economic structures of a society organized around the ownership of land and of human beings. The governance framework they produced was designed, among other things, to protect the interests of people like themselves — from the tyranny of a distant monarch and from the potential demands of the landless, the enslaved, and the Indigenous Peoples whose land the new republic was simultaneously claiming.

At 250 years, we are living in the consequences of those foundational choices. The governance structures built on those premises have produced, alongside their genuine achievements, the specific outcomes that those premises always produce: the concentration of power, the protection of institutions over communities, and the systematic suppression of governance traditions — matrilineal, Indigenous, ecological, relational — that were never designed to fit within a framework built without them.

What was borrowed without credit

There is something else that belongs in this anniversary reckoning, and it is something that the official celebrations of the 250th will largely omit.

The governance principles at the heart of the American constitutional experiment — federalism, deliberative governance, the distribution of power among multiple bodies, the understanding that governance must serve the people rather than consume them — were not invented in Philadelphia in 1787. They were documented there. They were articulated in Enlightenment political philosophy, yes. But they were also observed, in living practice, in the governance of living confederate Nations whose Great Law of Peace established a federated governance structure among multiple sovereign nations centuries before European contact, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy.

The framers took the principles — federalism, deliberation, the accountability of leaders to the governed — and left behind the foundational governance architecture that made those principles work: the lineage authority of women, the long memory of elders, the accountability to the land and the seven generations, the restorative holding of conflict.

They took the triangle's version and called it democracy.

At 250 years, we are living in the limits of that truncated borrowing.

What hospicing requires

Vanessa Andreotti is careful to say that hospicing is not the same as abandoning. The hospice worker does not walk away from the dying. She shows up. She is present. She holds what needs to be held. She ensures that the dying happens with as much dignity and as little unnecessary suffering as possible — and she pays attention to what needs to be transmitted before the end, what must not be lost, what is worth carrying forward.

For those of us who work in and with governance — in organizations, in communities, in our households and circles and professional practices — hospicing the structures that are no longer serving looks like this:

• It looks like being willing to name honestly what the current governance system is producing, without the defensive insistence that it can be reformed if we just get the right people in the right positions.

• It looks like paying attention to what has been sustained outside the official structures — in the households, in the circles, in the lineage practices that the dominant system spent centuries trying to erase and failed to fully erase.

• It looks like being present to the grief of what is ending — the grief of the communities that built their lives within these structures and are watching them fail, and the grief of the practitioner who loved the law and still sees clearly what the law has been designed to do.

• And it looks like beginning, carefully and deliberately, to build something different. Not instead of the hospicing — alongside it. Which is what next week's letter is about.

This week, though, I want to invite you simply to sit with the anniversary. Not to celebrate it uncritically, and not to dismiss it. But to be a good hospice worker — present, honest, attending to what needs attention.

Two hundred and fifty years is a long time. It is also, in the governance timescales this series has been exploring, not very long at all. The governance traditions that understood authority as flowing from lineage, from the land, from the long memory of elder women — those are older. The lineage practices that have held communities through every occupation and every collapse are older.

What is old enough to have survived this long is old enough to inform what comes next.

With love,

Maija

🌿 For the first time, I am bringing this work into a live course for practitioners. If what you have been reading here has been useful — if it has given you language for something you have long known in your body — I invite you to join me. And please share this with any attorney, mediator, community leader, or governance practitioner in your life who is ready for tangible legal and governance tools to help shift culture from the inside out.

Register here: https://www.maijawest.com/2026-matriarchal-governance-design-for-practitioners-course

Maija Danilova West is a governance practitioner, peacemaker, and the author of Matriarch Makeover: A 30-Day Invitation. Her forthcoming book, From the Triangle to the Circle: Matriarchal Governance Design, is addressed to practitioners of law, peacemaking, and governance who are earnestly seeking a way to practice that is more life-affirming.

🌿 Matriarch Makeover

Original content by Maija, copy edited by Claude.

Last updated: July 2, 2026