Across Time and Territory: A Reading List for Reclaiming Ancestral, Indigenous, and Feminine Wisdom
This reading list curates texts that honor the lived philosophies, cosmologies, and sacred knowledge systems rooted in African, Asian, Indigenous, and Feminist traditions.
Far from being relics of the past, these works offer contemporary insights into healing, relationality, resilience, and sovereignty. They illuminate the spiritual, cultural, and philosophical frameworks that have long guided people in harmonious relationship with land, community, and spirit, often in direct contrast to colonial, capitalist, and patriarchal worldviews.
Whether you are returning to your own roots or expanding your understanding of others’, these books offer maps, myths, and methodologies for navigating our modern world with ancient wisdom.
1. Of Water and the Spirit – Malidoma Patrice Somé
This powerful spiritual memoir chronicles Malidoma Somé’s journey from a colonial mission school in Burkina Faso back to his Dagara roots, where he undergoes an intense initiation into the spirit world. Blending mythic storytelling with lived experience, Somé invites readers into the cosmology of his people, where ancestral spirits, elemental forces, and community rituals hold vital truths. The book is both an act of cultural preservation and a call to reconnect with ritual, purpose, and indigenous ways of knowing.
2. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being – Christina Sharpe
Sharpe’s poetic and rigorous exploration of the afterlife of slavery moves through memory, loss, and resistance. Drawing from African diasporic experience, Black feminist theory, and literary imagination, In the Wake is a deeply felt meditation on what it means to live and grieve in a world shaped by anti-Blackness. Sharpe offers a methodology of “wake work” that is as ancestral as it is contemporary, a practice of bearing witness and insisting on presence, complexity, and care.
3. Women Who Run With the Wolves – Clarissa Pinkola Estés
This enduring feminist classic draws on Jungian psychology, intercultural folklore, and oral tradition to recover the instinctual nature of women. Estés reinterprets myths and fairy tales to reveal the archetype of the “Wild Woman”, a force of creativity, intuition, rage, and restoration. By weaving storytelling with soul work, she reclaims feminine wisdom as ancient, wild, and necessary for healing both the individual and the collective psyche.
4. The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World – Wade Davis
Davis travels across the globe to document the disappearing languages and knowledge systems of Indigenous peoples, from the Polynesian navigators to the Dogon of Mali. The Wayfinders is both a celebration and an elegy, underscoring how cultural diversity is as vital as biodiversity. Davis argues that Indigenous ways of life are not primitive but sophisticated responses to place and meaning, and their loss diminishes humanity as a whole.
5. Bali: Sekala and Niskala – Fred B. Eiseman Jr.
This two-volume set offers a rare window into the deeply spiritual and symbolic world of Balinese Hindu culture, where the seen (sekala) and unseen (niskala) realms coexist. Eiseman, a scholar and initiate, explains rituals, offerings, ceremonies, architecture, and cosmology in accessible language while honoring the depth of Balinese belief systems. The books illuminate how everyday life in Bali is imbued with reverence, balance, and sacredness.
6. African Spirituality: Forms, Meanings and Expressions – Jacob K. Olupona (Ed.)
This edited volume brings together diverse voices exploring African spirituality not as monolithic but as a vast constellation of cosmologies, rituals, and community practices. Covering traditions from Yoruba to Vodun to the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, the book emphasizes the spiritual agency and adaptive creativity of African peoples. It’s an essential entry point for those seeking a multidimensional understanding of African sacred systems beyond colonial distortions.
7. Adinkra Symbol Dictionaries and Akan Cosmology Studies
Adinkra symbols, originating from the Akan people of Ghana, are far more than aesthetic motifs, they are carriers of ancestral wisdom, encoded with layers of philosophical, spiritual, and ethical meaning. Rooted in proverbs and cultural teachings, each symbol reflects universal values such as balance, strength, remembrance, and harmony. For Sumati Group founder Lisen, the call to these symbols came long before she understood their origins. In the wake of losing her mother to cancer when Lisen was 27 years old, she was moved to tattoo five Adinkra symbols onto her body, intuitively drawn to their resonance. It wasn’t until years later, while living in Bali and forging deep connections with women of Ghanaian and Akan descent, that the symbols’ meanings began to reveal themselves with clarity and spiritual depth. Today, these symbols serve not only as meditative guides and design elements within Sumati’s frameworks, but as a bridge between diasporic memory, personal healing, and collective ancestral intelligence.
8. Indigenous Sámi Resources (e.g., Johan Turi, Rauna Kuokkanen)
Johan Turi’s early 20th-century writings, especially An Account of the Sámi, are foundational to Sámi literature, offering intimate depictions of Indigenous life in Northern Scandinavia. Contemporary scholar Rauna Kuokkanen builds on this legacy through her concept of “the gift logic” in Sámi feminist thought, challenging Western academic norms. Together, these voices offer access to the philosophical and political sovereignty of the Sámi, where land, language, and lifeways are inseparable.
