We are the
Kithship Collective
We restore the prairie through facilitating artist and artisan-in-residence programming.
Re-Storying Ecosystems
+ Agri-Culture
About our vision
Kithship (as opposed to kinship, which implies a genetic component) is a relationship built on a shared knowledge of place. The collective’s origin story involved a series of invocations of praise and prayers of gratitude for the prairie, for healing, for understanding and for rebuilding our relationships to this place and to one another. We wanted to write love songs to all there is to fall in love with. We wanted to write songs people could dance to together, and We wanted to find other musicians and artists who were interested in doing the same thing.
Our goal is to provide an alternative narrative to the dominant culture’s current extractive relationship with the land, and strive towards a renewal of thriving prairie ecosystems. Ultimately, our goal is to cultivate a “re-membering,” a reclaiming of kith, a relationship we share the literal earth we stand on, and whose health is inextricably intertwined with our own.
How do we initiate this “re-membering”? Through seasonal, site-specific concerts that calls us back to our heritage of beauty, communion, and connection. Jay Griffiths writes in her book, A Country Called Childhood about the seasonal/land based festivals that “once ribboned a child’s year.” When children were robbed of these festivals, she explains, “they lost a particular aspect of their relationship with nature, something at once intimate and political.” With the Kithship Collective we aim to return some of that to both the urban and rural communities on the Northern Plains, as well as facilitating an artist and artisan-in-residence program that creates an incubator for new ways of describing and co-creating these relationships.
Our current and continuing work endeavors to return both artists and audiences to our rightful place in the family of all creation with the hope that folks in this agricultural region, will take the best interest of future generations into consideration.