Why The Matriarch Project Exists

10.10.2026.

So much of our cultural heritage lives in the knowledge women carry forward and pass on to others.

A recipe prepared the same way for generations. A skill learned by watching someone’s hands at work. A song, a story, or a way of doing things that connects us to the people who came before us.

Sometimes traditions are so familiar that we don’t think about where they came from or who made sure they survived. Someone taught us. Someone took the time to show us, to explain, to share what they knew. And somewhere along the way, knowledge that might otherwise have been lost became part of who we are.

I’ve come to appreciate just how much these traditions can mean, not only to individuals and families, but to an entire culture.

I’m Abenaki, something I didn’t fully understand when I was younger. Some of my cousins grew up with strong cultural traditions and a clear sense of their heritage, while those traditions weren’t passed down to me in the same way.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more aware of the complicated history behind those differences. For generations, many Abenaki families faced pressure to conceal their Indigenous identities. Families made different choices about what they shared, what they practiced privately, and what they passed on to their children.

Yet traditions helped sustain the culture. Knowledge continued to live in families and communities, carried through practices, stories, skills, and the everyday things people taught one another. Even when cultural identity couldn’t always be expressed openly, traditions helped preserve connections to the generations that came before.

This has made me think differently about what it means to pass something on. Traditions are more than the things we make, the foods we prepare, or the skills we learn. They can carry memory, maintain a sense of belonging, and help a culture endure through difficult times.

It has also made me curious about the women in other communities who carry their own cultural knowledge forward. In a country shaped by so many different histories and traditions, I want to understand what these women choose to preserve, what they teach the next generation, and what it means to keep a culture alive as the world around them changes.

This is what led me to begin The Matriarch Project.