
OUR STORY
Burning Cedar Sovereign Wellness began in 2022 with a dream: to create a space for the Indigenous community in Tulsa to
gather, heal, and grow.

Tulsa sits in what was once Indian Territory, at the intersection of the unceded treaty lands of the Mvskoke, Cherokee, and Osage Nations. Today, it is home to Native people from dozens of tribal nations whose ancestral homelands span all of Turtle Island. Despite this vibrant intertribal presence, urban Native people in Tulsa often face limited access to culturally specific wellness resources, traditional knowledge, and community care. Many are far from their tribal headquarters, which are typically located in rural areas, creating barriers to the ceremonies, foods, languages, and healing practices that ground Indigenous identity and well-being.
This disconnection—from land, from culture, from one another—deepens cycles of intergenerational trauma, chronic illness, and economic hardship. Burning Cedar Sovereign Wellness was created in response to these conditions.
We are a 100% Native women-led and community-driven nonprofit dedicated to restoring wellness through Indigenous ways of knowing. We address the root causes of health inequities and cultural loss by reconnecting our people with the ancestral knowledge, values, and practices that have always sustained us.
Our work is rooted in the understanding that true wellness comes by finding balance in our physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual selves. Centering ancestral foodways, plant medicines, land-based healing, and traditional movement practices as living, evolving pathways to individual and collective health, we provide culturally grounded programs that educate and empower future generations of Indigenous cooks and caregivers, support Native food producers and land stewards, and share regenerative practices that reflect our original instructions to care for the earth and one another.
The name Burning Cedar reflects our shared medicine. Across our many tribal identities, cedar is a a medicine carried by many nations, used in ceremony for protection, purification, and prayer. It is a sacred plant that connects us as an intertribal community. Burning Cedar also represents continuity between past and present—between the sacred knowledge of our ancestors and the urgent needs of our communities today. As its smoke rises, so too do our intentions: to gather, heal, and grow.
