Kirra Swenerton

Founder & lead scientist

MY STORY...

My ancestors came to California as both colonizers and refugees. They migrated across land and sea and settled on the unceded traditional territories of Patwin-speaking Suisuni, Ulato and Coast Miwok peoples in the early 1900's. My people came primarily from the British Isles and Ireland, the mountains of Northern Italy, Sicily, the Caucasus Mountains and Armenian Highlands, as well as Western and Southern Europe. My family contains farmers, gardeners, teachers, ministers, priests, artists, laborers, scientists and conservationists. I am a seeker, practitioner and teacher in service to the healing of all beings. I am drawn to explore liminal, in-between and feral places and have been sowing and gathering alongside my own elders since I was a small child. I have a special affinity for cultivating native and medicinal plants and have been a professional grower for over 20 years. It is rare to find me without seeds stuck to my clothes and soil beneath my fingernails.

Gender-wise I identify as a female-socialized, non-binary person. The deeper I go, the looser these various identities become.

I endeavor to answer the calling to take my rightful place among the diverse and wondrous beings of this earth. I have been honored with the roll of picking up trash and planting seeds as the human custodian of Atihana, 418 +/- acres of wild forest, meadows and streams in the heartwaters of the Eel River.

My expertise flows from many ways of knowing and from plant, spirit and human teachers alike. My teachings bridge the worlds of science and the sacred, merging rigor and ethics with herbal wisdom and ancestral traditions. I am a staff carrier and Seiðr practitioner of the Old Norse magical ways and a knowledge carrier of the indigenous flora of the San Francisco Bay Area. I am a consulting ecologist working on citizen science and endangered species recovery projects for the Mission blue, Monarch and Bay checkerspot butterflies. I am an independent researcher and regularly speak, teach and write about biocultural conservation of entheogenic plants and fungi, with a focus on Peyote and Sonoran Desert toad habitat protection. My current offerings include Ancestral Lineage Healing, spiritwork such as compassionate deposession and psychopomping the dead, mentorship, ceremonial services such as birth and death rites. I am particularly interested in assisting humans to come into accord with the other beings and inhabitants of the earth.

I earned my Bachelor's degree in Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley (1998) and a Masters of Science degree in Restoration Ecology at the University of Washington (2003). In 2012, I was initiated into the Temple of Awakening Divinity, became an ordained Minister in 2018 and hold a Doctorate of Divinity from the Universal Life Church. I've directed and produced award-winning documentary films on topics from spider monkey sexual behavior Out There (1998) to cultural appropriation and body modification An Urban Tribe (1997). Winner of the William Hammond Hall Award for Excellence in Horticulture and the Byron and Alice Lockwood Graduate Fellowship, I have had the honor to care for beautiful public lands and environmental preserves with the National Park Service, Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Golden Gate Park, The Nature Conservancy, San Francisco State University and the University of Washington's Center for Urban Horticulture.

I am privileged to have trained directly with some incredible mentors and elders including nature advocate and California Native Plant Society fellow, Jake Sigg; master horticulturalist and conservationist, Betty Young; professor and anthropologist, Dr. Katharine Milton; scholar and ethnobotanist, Kathleen Harrison of Botanical Dimensions; Dr. Daniel Foor of Ancestral Medicine; medium and teacher of mystery traditions, Betsy Bergstrom; Izoceño elder, Don Odon; and ecologists and botanists, Doctors Kern Ewing and Sarah Reichard, senior Iyengar yoga instructor, Heather Haxo Phillips and Vedic scholar, Gitte Bechsgaard. I continue to learn directly from master plant teachers, the stars, the stones and from and my own ancestors, spiritual allies and guides. I currently serve as a member of United Plant Savers, Botanical Dimensions, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, the Society for Ecological Restoration, the Women's Visionary Council, the Femtheogen Collaborative and the psychedelic risk reduction team at the Zendo Project.

I have also enjoyed decades of connecting to spirit through ritual and dance. My personal dance practice, emerging from 90's rave culture, grew into a lifelong study and practice of sacred, classical and folk dance traditions from my own heritage spanning the SWANA region and Central Asia. Over the years I have studied and performed with Ballet Afsaneh, Miriam Peretz, Helene Eriksen, Katarina Burda and Amelia Moore and enjoy exploring free-form, ecstatic movement practices. My current creative works explore themes of sovereignty and relationship, death, intimacy, transformation and thresholds through the medium of immersive theater in collaboration with Ritual Death Experience, House of the Quivering Heart, Sensual Services, Valloween and Malaise Airways™.