Dear friends,

I am writing to share something I have been quietly preparing for some time, and that I am now glad to name publicly.

On Friday, May 29, at 8:30 in the morning, I will be presenting at the 30th Biennial Conference of the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies, hosted this year at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The conference theme is Diasporas: Building Bridges Across Nations, and I will be facilitating alongside my colleague Kristine Hill — whose travel I am grateful to say has been supported by the AABS — as part of the conference thread on Cultural Relations Across Borders: History, Memory, and Identity. 

Our presentation is titled The Thread of Unity: Baltic and Haudenosaunee Lessons on Sovereignty and Peace.

This paper explores what it truly means to be a "United Nations" — not as a political abstraction, but as a living cultural practice — through the lens of two enduring peace traditions: the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and the Baltic Peoples. Drawing from our respective experiences — Latvian heritage, professional experience in Indigenous peacemaking, and legal reform — Kristine and I examine how unity, sovereignty, and peace are not merely political constructs, but living practices that have been carried across generations, across borders, and across centuries of pressure to abandon them.

This is, in many ways, the work I have been preparing for across the full arc of my practice: holding the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and the Great Law of Peace in genuine relationship with my own Baltic and Latvian lineage, and asking what these traditions can say to each other — and to us — about governance, belonging, and the possibility of a peace that holds.

If you will be in Illinois at the end of the month, I would be glad to have you there. You can find full conference information at aabs-balticstudies.org/aabs-2026-at-uiuc.

For more about Kristine Hill’s amazing work and offerings, please visit her websites ~ Collective Wisdoms and Strawberry Wisdom

And for those of you who are not able to join in person — or who are ready to go deeper into this work regardless of where you are — I want to name what is coming in August:

From the Triangle to the Circle: Matriarchal Governance Design for Practitioners is a two-hour live online course for attorneys, mediators, and governance practitioners ready to examine the governance documents they draft every day — the charters, the bylaws, the MOUs, the member commitments — and ask: what theory of authority is encoded here, and is it the one I actually believe in?

The course introduces the governance architecture of matriarchal systems that have survived centuries of occupation and suppression precisely because they hold authority in relationship rather than in position. You will leave with six core principles and specific drafting tools you can carry back into the documents you write and the organizations you serve.

Friday, August 14, 2026 · 9:00–11:00 AM PDT · Live online

Pre-registration is now open. Click here to register.

With care,

Maija

🌿 Matriarch Makeover

Original content by Maija, copy edited by Claude.