• How can we share knowledge, curricula, and frameworks between Indigenous-led institutions and orgs to avoid redundancy and fill gaps for one another?
  • What does it look like to co-invest and/or share due diligence across our expansive geographies, aligned in our unique cultural values?
  • How do we best partner with our governments to activate nothing-about-us-without-us in Indigenous-to-Indigenous trade?

These are some of the questions I am reflecting on after a remarkable visit to the land of the traditional owners, the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation, where we were welcomed into new relationships with Indigenous kin from across the globe attending the World Indigenous Business Forum.

At the Fireweed Institute, we know that in order to move forward meaningfully on Indigenous economic liberation driven by entrepreneurship and innovation, we need to reanimate relationships, traditional trade routes and share in knowledge, wisdom and joy with our relatives from other lands.

This time together affirmed what we already know; that we have vital stories and teachings to share and in them, solutions we can activate at home.

For our team, this was a vital beginning step in growing the impact of the Fireweed Institute and each of our lodgepoles. With our Māori kin, Kay-Maree and Marcelle, we shared, laugh-yelled and yarned – of course – about our lands, families, businesses and traditional foods.

We even shared the architectural components of our longhouses, tipis and lodges that led to the development of our lodgepoles at Fireweed, and I was so thrilled to learn that in a traditional wharenui (meeting house) the tāhuhu/ridgepole is a significant architectural element and along with other structural components which represent sacred significance and connection to ancestors. This similar technology is one of so many through-lines in Indigenous ways of knowing and creates a shared language to quickly establish understanding.

I am still digesting some of the most significant teachings we exchanged that won’t be shared externally.

I’m coming home to our temperate coastal rainforest with new friendships and potential partnerships to explore across Turtle Island, Central and South America, Papua New Guinea, Hawaii, Fiji, New Caledonia, Aotearoa and Australia and an extra-overflowing list of items we can action. From sharing key introductions amongst our networks to dreaming into how we meaningfully activate new trade opportunities for the entrepreneurs we support – we are just getting started.

Mark your calendars! We are excited that the 2026 World Indigenous Business Forum will be held in Winnipeg, Manitoba, hosted by local partners including: Manitoba Métis Federation, Southern Chiefs’ Organization, and The Long Plain First Nation (and right in time for folks to stay to enjoy the Manito Ahbee Festival, which includes the Manito Ahbee Pow Wow). We look forward hopefully to hosting some of our relatives on their stop-overs in BC next October.

*On a personal note, my maternal grandmother – whose family we know little about – was born in so called Sydney and spent the first 16 years of her life living in Aotearoa, so this trip also felt like a meaningful step on tending to some ancestral connections.