Jan Kahehti:io Longboat

Jan Kahehti:io Longboat is a healer and elder with many decades of spiritual leadership among Native peoples. Kahehti:io is a knowledge keeper, educator, writer, herbalist, cultural advocate, and visionary. Having dedicated her life to the dissemination and learning of Indigenous language and culture, this treasured elder shares her knowledge of Mother Earth traditions through storytelling, fasting, dreams, visions, and profound use of plant medicines. Kahehti:io’s lifelong focus is to enhance the self-worth and power of Indigenous women, sharing understandings of women’s roles and relationships, messaging in the Haudenosaunee wampum belts, approaches to leadership, environmental change, and the important knowledge that her original language carries for embodying the
important values for life.

Kahehti:io represents that our ancestors left us a great legacy of Indigenous knowledge with which we can carry our spiritual, physical, mental, and emotional medicine bundles. Her ten-year program,
Idawadadi, won the Aboriginal Healing Foundation’s best practices award. The work evolved into an outgrowth project called Dotah’s House, to help Indigenous women survivors heal from abuse they
suffered at Canada’s residential schools.

Kahehti:io inherited cultural skills and a deep sense of peace from her grandmother and other women elders. Through her teaching and gatherings at health centers, universities, and her Earth Healing Herb Garden and Retreat Centre at Six Nations, Kahehti:io guides Indigenous individuals and families back onto a path to peace.

Kahehti:io received an honorary doctorate of law from the University of Guelph in 2011.