Our Ancestors Want Us to Be Mushrooms

Madison Murphy Barney is a Two Spirit, Indigenous sister, doula, author, and public-health storyteller. She authors the popular weekly newsletter Our Medicine, an exploration of our individual, collective, and ancestral gifts, which can serve as the medicine to heal and build our world into a more just, balanced, and communal ecosystem. Madison is frequently called upon as a thought leader in storytelling, health, equity, and community care. She was featured on the 2022 Indigenous People’s Day conversation on the BBC Global News podcast. She was also a guest at Aspen Ideas: Health in 2023, where she—alongside the StoryCorps CEO—shared her expertise in using storytelling as a tool for equity. Madison received her master’s degree in public health at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. For the past few years, Madison has been exploring personal and collective practices of rematriation. She moved from Brooklyn, New York, to Middlesex, Vermont, where she stewards two acres of land and is a part of an intergenerational community of Indigenous baddies.

“Filled with wise meditations and striking images, the nature text Our Ancestors Want Us to Be Mushrooms turns to the wild for lessons about community and social change.”—Foreword Reviews“We desperately need the medicine offered in this book, and I am so grateful for the guidance of Madison Murphy Barney, who reminds us that we are not just connected to ourselves and to one another, but to the universe of networks and beings who hold and tend to us just as we tend to them. In a world marked by rampant individualism and disconnection, we need paths of healing that restore us to community care in the deepest of ways. Recognizing that our ancestors want us to be mushrooms will help us forge that sacred path together. Read this book, and let it heal you.”—Kaitlin B Curtice, Potawatomi author of Native and Everything Is a Story and director of the Aki Institute “What if the answers aren’t above us, but beneath our feet? In this tender, imaginative book, mushrooms become a guide for living with more care, reciprocity, and wonder. Drawing on ancestral memory and the quiet wisdom of the natural world, Madison Murphy Barney traces a path toward a life shaped by cycles, connection, and attention to what’s already here. A small, luminous call to return. Barney has a way of making the reader feel like they are just walking with her through the woods, learning about the ways we are all interconnected.”—Cody Cook-Parrott, artist and author of The Practice of Attention“In a world where individualism and exploitation are considered a success, this book is a clear guide in returning to Earth wisdom. May we create networks of thriving, like our mushroom relatives.”—Panquetzani, author of Thriving Postpartum: Embracing the Indigenous Wisdom of La Cuarentena