Visiting Author – Taylor Keen – Rediscovering Turtle Island: A First Peoples’ Account of the Sacred Geography of America

Join us on Saturday, June 29th for an exciting conversation and book talk with the founder of Sacred Seed, and the author of the upcoming book Rediscovering Turtle Island, Taylor Keen!

Order a copy of Rediscovering Turtle Island HERE

About the Book:
An exploration of Indigenous cosmology and history in North America. While Western accounts of North American history traditionally start with European colonization, Indigenous histories of North America—or Turtle Island—stretch back millennia. Drawing on comparative analysis, firsthand Indigenous accounts, extensive historical writings, and his own experience, Omaha Tribal member, Cherokee Citizen, and teacher Taylor Keen presents a comprehensive re-imagining of the ancient and more recent history of this continent’s oldest cultures. Examining the complexities and commonalities of Indigenous legends and creation myths, Keen reveals shared oral traditions across much of North America, including among the Algonquin, Athabascan, Sioux, Omaha, Ponca, Osage, Quapaw, and Kaw tribes. He explores the history of Cahokia, the Mississippian Mound Builder Empire of 1050-1300 CE, told through the dramatic story of Honga, a Native leader who is building a dynastic empire within the third largest city in the world at the time. He examines ancient earthen works and ceremonial sites of Turtle Island, revealing the Indigenous cosmology, sacred mathematics, and archaeoastronomy encoded in these places that artfully blend the movements of the sun, moon, and stars into the physical landscape.

Challenging the mainstream historical consensus, Keen presents an Indigenous revisionist history regarding Thomas Jefferson, expansionist doctrine, and Manifest Destiny. He reveals how, despite being displaced as the United States colonized westward, the Native peoples maintained their vision of an intrinsically shared humanity and the environmental responsibility found at the core of Indigenous mythology.

Building off a deep personal connection to the history and mythology of the First Peoples of the Americas, Taylor Keen helps to rediscover and give renewed voice to the immemorial cultures of Turtle Island, revealing an alternative vision of the continent’s geography and the significance of our past and future presence here.

About the Author:
Taylor Keen is a Senior Lecturer in the Heider College of Business Administration in Strategy and Entrepreneurship at Creighton University.  Keen holds a bachelor’s degree from Dartmouth College as well as a Master of Business Administration and Master of Public Administration from Harvard University, where he served as a Fellow in the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development. Taylor is the author of the forthcoming book from Inner Traditions Press “Rediscovering Turtle Island: A First Peoples’ Account of the Sacred Geography of America”. A Cherokee Nation citizen, Keen carries the name “Bison Mane” of the Earthen Bison Clan of the Omaha Tribe, The People Who Move Against the Current. Taylor Keen is the Founder of Sacred Seed a NFP to educate and celebrate Indigenous culture and history and lives in Omaha, NE.

Book Reviews:
“The official history of the United States begins with Spanish contact in the late fifteenth century. The oral traditions and legends of the various Native peoples of North America, however, stretch back much earlier, into the opaque mists of preliterate times. With a member of the Earthen Bison Clan of the Omaha Tribe to serve as our guide, Rediscovering Turtle Island leads the reader along near-forgotten, overgrown paths that twist and turn throughout a resacralized landscape, decorated with ancient landmarks, populated with whispering ghosts and supernatural beings. The sacred geography of America will never again appear the same.”– P. D. Newman, author of Native American Shamanism and the Afterlife Journey in the Mississippi Valley

“Taylor Keene has written a fascinating story of North America that integrates scholarship and mythology in a very entertaining and readable way. His linkage of some of the North American creation stories to the places where they are told and their representations in carvings and drawings is fascinating. He interweaves aspects of North America’s history, cosmology, and geography from an Indigenous perspective, which, combined with the sharing of his own life experience, uplifts us and demonstrates how we are all related.”– Lewis Mehl-Madrona, M.D., Ph.D., author of Narrative Medicine, Remapping Your Mind, and Coyote Wisdom

“What could be more fascinating than the origin of mankind itself? The premise is staggering and the consequences far-reaching. Keen’s hard work pays off immensely in Rediscovering Turtle Island, and readers will be gripped by that experience on every page.”– Sidian M.S. Jones, coauthor of The Voice of Rolling Thunder