Beyond Acknowledgement: Stewardship, Staying, and the Shape of an Ethical Business

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Author’s note:
This reflection is written from my own perspective, about my own learning. It does not name or describe other individuals, nor is it intended as commentary on anyone else’s intentions or actions. I share this as part of an ongoing effort to understand how values, stewardship, and responsibility show up in the quiet, everyday decisions of running a small, craft-based business.

I live and work on the unceded, ancestral territories of the Sinixt, Ktunaxa, Syilx/Okanagan, and Secwépemc peoples.

For a long time, that acknowledgement lived on my website as a footnote. Over the past year, it has become something more demanding: a lens through which I’ve had to examine how I work, how I make decisions, and how I relate—to plants, to customers, and to myself.

Some of the clearest lessons came through a business collaboration that ultimately didn’t hold.

I want to be clear about the bridge I’m drawing here. My experience of business rupture is not the same as the dispossession of land, nor am I claiming equivalence. But I’ve come to understand that both arise from the same extractive logic—one that treats relationships as resources, authority as transferable, and accountability as optional once value has been taken. Learning to recognize that pattern in my own work has been part of taking land acknowledgment seriously, rather than symbolically.

Autonomy and the cost of outsourcing confidence

Forage & Soothe began as a craft practice rooted in my relationship with plants, ecology, and formulation. As the business grew, I became increasingly aware of a gap I felt in myself: I didn’t feel confident in my ability to communicate the work through marketing.

Instead of learning how to make my values visible in my own voice, I tried to solve that discomfort structurally.

I entered into what I believed would become a partnership, and I ceded significant authority over the direction of the business. I did this because I believed that bringing in someone with marketing expertise was what the business needed in order to grow.

Over time, that decision had consequences I hadn’t fully anticipated.

I gradually lost meaningful participation in how the brand was communicated. Decisions about mission, vision, and values—things that had originally emerged from my lived relationship with the work—I gradually let be defined for me. I began to feel less like a steward of the business and more like someone executing within a framework I hadn’t authored.

I share this without blame. I made the choice. What I see clearly now is that I mistook a lack of confidence for a lack of ability.

What I actually needed wasn’t someone to speak for the business. I needed to learn how to speak for it myself.

Craft, like art, requires autonomy. When stewardship is handed over too easily, or when it drifts off course, the work loses direction and begins responding to external pressures rather than its own logic.

Value isn’t just a price point

The second lesson was about value.

No one will ever see or value my formulations in quite the same way I do. They carry years of study, experimentation, intuition, and care—often made under time pressure, sometimes imperfectly, but always with deep attention to the living systems they come from.

As commercial products, they can be priced, positioned, and sold. That’s real. But there is another layer of value that doesn’t translate easily into a product description or a social media caption: the way these formulations invite people back into relationship with the living world.

For a long time, I wasn’t communicating that layer—not because it wasn’t there, but because I believed it would be “too complicated” to explain. Too slow. Too nuanced. Too out of step with our modern marketing culture.

So I gave in to the norm, trying to make my work legible inside a trend-driven, attention-seeking, transactional marketing economy.

And yet, the feedback from customers consistently told a different story.

People told me they loved how much we talked about plants. That they valued the conversations. That they felt respected as thoughtful participants rather than targets. That the relationship itself was part of why they chose these products.

That was the value I wasn’t fully owning or articulating.

Over time, it became clear that the definition of success guiding the business wasn’t the one I wanted to organize my life around.

That doesn’t mean money doesn’t matter. Society functions through an economy, and if I’m living within it, money matters by default. But it isn’t the axis around which everything else should rotate.

This realization wasn’t just intellectual. My nervous system knew when something was off long before I could articulate it. The tension I felt wasn’t resistance to growth—it was resistance to misalignment.

Staying: the opposite of abandonment

There is another layer to this story that has less to do with business structure and more to do with staying.

Years ago, I moved across the country. On the surface, it was the pursuit of a quieter life—away from scrutiny, speed, and a hollow sense of momentum. That was true. But what I discovered slowly was that the sense of urgency and disconnection I was trying to escape wasn’t only external anymore. It lived in my body.

After the move, my body demanded a different pace. Long stretches of pain and unpredictability made it clear that there was no outrunning what I hadn’t yet faced.

What emerged instead was a different kind of work: learning how to stay.

Not staying in a place or a relationship out of obligation, but staying with myself. Becoming my own best friend. Practicing care not as a declaration, but as something enacted daily—through boundaries, pacing, nourishment, rest, and honesty.

That, I’ve come to understand, is the opposite of abandonment.

When the business collaboration I mentioned earlier ended—without the resolution I might have wished for—it echoed an old pattern. Someone I cared about was no longer there. There was pressure, again, to doubt myself, to collapse inward, to give up ground.

This time, something different happened.

Instead of abandoning myself—my instincts, my voice, my way of seeing—I stayed. I let the grief and confusion be present without treating them as evidence that I was wrong or incapable. I didn’t rush to replace what was lost. I didn’t hand my authority over to someone else in order to feel safe again.

That moment became a turning point.

It clarified that stewardship—of land, of craft, of a business, of a life—requires the capacity to remain present even when it’s uncomfortable. Especially then.

The plants I work with live this. They don’t flee difficult conditions; they adapt, root, signal, and wait. They persist without forcing. There is intelligence in that kind of staying.

Staying hasn’t felt heroic. It’s felt uncomfortable and, at times, frightening. Accepting that this is the business I created—and that moving forward means doing so without outsourcing my voice or authority—has required me to sit with uncertainty rather than escape it.

I’m still scared.
And I’m moving ahead anyway.

Beyond acknowledgement

A land acknowledgement, if it means anything, should change how we behave when no one is watching.

For me, that means letting it influence the quiet decisions: what I make, how much I make, how I speak about it, what I choose not to optimize, and where I’m willing to slow down or say no. Sometimes that means choosing to honour relationships — with land, with people, and with prior commitments — even when doing so constrains growth, limits short-term revenue, or costs me an easier win. It means treating land, plants, and people not as inputs to be leveraged,  but as relationships that place limits on what is appropriate. It means paying attention to the patterns in nature, noticing how those same patterns show up in my work, and letting the land remind me where my limits of understanding are. It means treating my craft not as products to be sold but as gifts to be shared within our social economy.

For me, it is becoming my compass. It reminds me that I am a guest here. That the land is not a backdrop or a resource. That business, like ecosystems, thrives on balance, boundaries, and reciprocity.

This is what beyond acknowledgment has come to mean for me: not speaking better words, but allowing land, plants, and limits to reorganize how I define success, authority, and care.

Forage & Soothe is still evolving. So am I.

This reflection isn’t about blame or judgment. It’s about learning, responsibility, and choosing a different way forward.

This is not an endpoint.
It’s a commitment to keep listening.

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