Robin Tekwelus Youngblood, Founder
Robin Tekwelus Youngblood is an Earth-centered ceremonial teacher, author, organizer, and founder of Church and Community of the Earth, whose work brings together Medicine Wheel teaching, ecological spirituality, women’s and elder-circle organizing, and Indigenous-influenced ceremonial practice.
Robin's Story
Robin Tekwelus Youngblood’s work grew from a lifelong search for wholeness across the worlds she inherited. Raised with both European Catholic and Native ancestry, she came of age in a family shaped by the pressures that had led many Native families to protect themselves through silence, distance, and assimilation. As an adult, Robin began turning with greater intention toward her Native heritage, seeking the teachings, relationships, ceremonies, and responsibilities that could help her understand where she came from and what she was meant to carry forward.
That search led her to a defining period of questioning. While conducting her career, Robin began asking what kind of life and service could fully hold her gifts. During her tribe’s Winter Dance, she sought guidance through dreams and brought those dreams to elders. They helped her understand that her path involved “dancing in both worlds”: carrying ancestral teachings with care while living and serving in the contemporary world. That insight became the living thread through her work as a teacher, ceremonial leader, author, and community builder.
In 2006, Robin founded Church and Community of the Earth as a home for that calling. The organization brought together Earth-centered spiritual practice, Medicine Wheel teaching, ceremony, community circles, and a shared commitment to caring for land, water, people, and all living relations. Through gatherings, books, workshops, international relationships, and training for facilitators, Robin developed a contemporary community structure for people seeking a more reverent and responsible relationship with the Earth.
After surviving the 2014 Oso mudslide, which took the lives of 43 of her neighbors, Robin understood disaster through a spiritual and ecological lens, as a call to attend more fully to the pain carried by the Earth and the responsibilities people hold within living systems. In the months that followed, she helped create Dance to Heal the Earth, a worldwide ceremonial movement centered on restoration, relationship, and collective care.
Her work today continues to invite people into that same practice: to remember their place within the larger family of life and to bring their gifts into service of its healing.