On Sacred Ground: The Indigenous Knowledge of Community

On Sacred Ground follows Samuel Juma, a Chicago community organizer whose failure to recruit a grocery store to a food desert forces him to rethink what community building actually means. Guided by his father—an architect who designs tribal community centers—and Joseph Blackfeather, a Potawatomi elder, Samuel learns that communities aren't broken and waiting to be saved. They're already organizing, sharing, and surviving through informal systems.
The book's central argument: modern mutual aid isn't innovation. It's recovery. The practices Samuel discovers—bulk buying networks, shared transportation, gardens, childcare co-ops, faith-based support—are fragments of what the book calls the First Economy: the Indigenous economic and governance systems that sustained human societies for thousands of years, built on reciprocity, communal resources, rotating leadership, and seven-generation thinking. Colonization didn't just take land. It replaced these systems with market dependence, charity, and hierarchy, and caused communities to forget they had ever known another way.
As Samuel stops leading and starts listening, he connects what already exists rather than importing solutions from outside. The networks grow into something resilient enough to withstand job loss, supply-chain failure, winter storms, and institutional pressure—including the repeated attempts by corporations and foundations to absorb what the community built.
On Sacred Ground distills this into practical principles and closes with a choice: Timeline A, where communities fragment and depend on markets and institutions that can withdraw at any moment, or Timeline B, where communities reclaim the capacity to feed, support, and govern themselves—by remembering the oldest human knowledge of all.