About Kristine Hill
Kristine Marie Hill is a member of the Beaver Clan, Tuscarora nation, Haudenosaunee Confederacy. As part of her lineage within the Confederacy, she takes her responsibility of peacekeeping and respecting the land and waterways of her peoples seriously. She has been practicing indigenous peacekeeping for over 25 years in the context of the educational and familial systems of her home community on the Tuscarora reservation, serving the next generation’s re-acquisition of their language, traditions, and ceremonies. She is the proud mother of four adult children and six grandchildren, several of whom are speaking the Tuscarora language that her grandmother was forced to forget in the Carlisle boarding school.
After over 20 years working in K-12 education systems as an educator, an accountant and auditor, in the past two years, she has followed openings to share practices of peacekeeping beyond her home community and into the larger historical waterways of the Haudenosaunee and beyond. To enable the wisdom that can nurture renewed and even healthy relationships across cultures and support the growth of harmonious movements, she is launching Collective Wisdoms, LLC. Using what she describes as the Succotash Way, her work is built on “corn” (“the sustainers”), beans (institutions in need of support) and squash (wanderers and responses to invitation) .
As a restorative practitioner, circle weaver and circle keeper, she has been supporting scattered minds (both groups and individuals) to come together again. She has been bringing restorative practices and indigenous peacekeeping perspectives and practices to local bodies such as Erie County, Rochester NY, Dutchess County; faith communities, and numerous institutions addressing issues of racial harm, sexual misconduct and spiritual abuse across the United States. She is a member of the Ahimsa Collective, based in Oakland, California, and is Secretary on the Board of Partners In Restorative Initiatives (PIRI in Rochester, NY). In all of these spaces, she is consistently building relationships and deeper understanding and sometimes wisdom between within bipoc communities and between indigenous and settler communities, enabling the social infrastructure for different pathways towards care for the earth, stronger alliances and different kinds of movements towards peace.
Her commitment to healing and caring for Earth is not only through working with human beings. It is also through working directly with the elements and with plants. She is an avid firekeeper and firewatcher, which serves as a central component of her spiritual practice. In this vein, she is in the early stages of developing initiatives and organizations that can enable the Tuscarora people to remember their ancestral knowledge as People of the Hemp, including developing ceremonies, and develop spaces and alliances at the intersections of justice, plant medicine, and settler-indigenous alliances around the healing of soil, soul, and plants. She is currently based on the Eastern Door of the Confederacy with her partner, near the town today known as Hudson.
