Xest Sxlhalt – Buen Día – Good Day 🌅
I’m Heidi J.
I live with my fox-dog Peanut 🦊 in Missoula, Montana, as a guest on the sacred lands of the Séliš, Ql̓ispé, Ktunaxa, Nimiipuu, Niitsitapi peoples and surrounding Indigenous communities.
Thank you for being here 💛
I feel profoundly grateful to be alive.
I am a decolonial artist, systems explorer, collaborator, and educator.
For over 25 years, I’ve worked at the intersections of embodiment, social justice, land connection, spirituality, and creative expression—both locally and internationally.
My work is rooted in a lifelong inquiry:
How do humans create harm—and how can we transform it?
I am also deeply interested in how we reconnect—not only individually, but collectively. 🐚
Through years of personal healing, intergenerational trauma work, and collaboration across cultures, I developed the 🌅 First Breath Framework —a living, multidimensional map for reconnection, repair, and building new systems together.
I was raised Catholic, which was deeply formative in my life. As a teenager, I traveled with my youth group to see Pope John Paul II in Denver, Colorado, for World Youth Day, where I had a profound spiritual experience.
I studied Physics and Dance at the University of Montana.
I spent over four years with La Caravana Arcoíris por la Paz 🌈🚌 across Latin America.
This collective, guided by Alberto Ruz and joined by hundreds of people from around the world—especially across Latin America—was an experiment in simple living, artistic creation, spiritual connection to land, and deep cultural exchange 🤝
I produced dozens of collaborative, multimedia performance art shows locally and internationally—blending science, ecology, spirituality, and the human condition 🎭
Fifteen years ago, I walked into the woods—literally and metaphorically—and gave up everything familiar to face my internal and ancestral patterns without institutional support or cultural permission.
For five years, I stripped my life down to the essentials and began deep psycho-spiritual integration 🪵
I have been in a deep process since then—exploring different realms and metabolizing intergenerational trauma patterns rooted in harm.
I live with disabilities as a result of repeated harm, as well as experiences of housing, food, and financial instability 🫶
I was assigned female at birth, and my lived experience of gender has always been more complex than binary categories.
I identify as genderqueer 🕺🏽💃🏻
I have explored this through embodiment, performance, and years of drag—engaging both my masculine and feminine expressions as part of healing and liberation.
My relationship to the body, sexuality, and spirituality does not fit conventional frameworks. These parts of being human—desire, sensation, and sexuality—have often been excluded from spiritual spaces, and I include them as part of a more honest and integrated path. 🦄
I am white-bodied.
I have benefited from white privilege, and I recognize that it has impacted my ability to access healing and opportunity.
At the same time, I have experienced the deep disconnection that comes with whiteness as a social construct—separation from land, culture, and loving ceremony.
For over two decades, I have been on a decolonial path:
learning, unlearning, listening, and taking responsibility.
I am anti-racist.
Most of my human teachers have been bodies of color and culture.
I am especially grateful for all the teachings and experience I received in my seven years with Karine Bell and the Rooted Global Village.
I believe it is possible for white-bodied people to engage in this work with humility, accountability, and care—without extraction or appropriation. 🤲
I have lived in community my entire adult life 🏘️
I am adopted, and have reconnected with multiple biological lineages—each carrying their own histories, cultures, and ways of relating.
I love my dog Peanut — teacher and friend 🐾
I love rivers, wood chopping, storytelling, laughter, song, and the vast diversity of life on this planet 🌊🌲
I am human—and also shaped by everything that has come before this lifetime 🌀
I am not here to fit an image.
I am not here to be placed on a pedestal.
I am here to participate in a shared process of learning, unlearning, and becoming more loving—together 💜🌍
For more on lineages, teachers, and collaborators, please check out our Honoring post:
