HOW WE MET

We met in 2015 at a land-based youth camp, both doing preventative work with at-risk youth and families. Mentorship programs. Suicide prevention. Crisis intervention. Creating space for young people to remember their own strength and belonging.

The work brought us together. The land kept us there.

We started dating in 2016. Early conversations weren't just about us. They were about what we wanted to build. Meaningful relationships. Programs that actually served people. A future that didn't require begging institutions for permission to do the work we knew needed doing.

THE BUILDING YEARS (2016-2020)

We spent those years writing proposals for on-the-land camps. Youth programs. Family services. Cultural programming. Some got funded. Most didn't. We kept building anyway.

Late 2017, we found out we were pregnant with our daughter Ayla. Our home became togetherness in Montana for grounding, though we've always been most at home in the mountains and on the land.

We started working under the name Air Bean N Beez. Got some contracts. Built some programs. Then 2020 happened. COVID shut down in-person work. We pivoted online, created video workshops for tribal professional development series.

Got married June 20th, 2021. Transitioned our work to Keepers of the Seasons, the name many people know us by. Kept writing proposals. Kept getting told no.

The book was always going to be part of our story. A promise made to many people during our journey. It started in those early dreaming moments. "I'd like to write a book someday." Then, "We're going to write a book." Then, "We're writing a book." Then we wrote it.

WHEN GRIEF OPENED EVERYTHING

Then loss happened, and grief opened our hearts and minds.

Cancer and degenerative disease took two important family members. We learned what so many learn in hospital rooms and last breaths: grief is love with no place to go. Until you remember all the people still present. Until you understand that small acts of kindness are acts of love.

We honor their gifts through our teachings.

Relearning the language of plants became inseparable from relearning the language of love. Presence. Attention. Transmission while there's still time.

We'd been working with plants the entire time. Solar infusions, wildcrafting, traditional preparation methods passed down through our families.

Tallow was already part of our work through traditional food preparation. Pemmican-making workshops. Cultural development programs. Rendering fat, preparing ancestral diet. Then curiosity struck. People make lotion from fat. What if we investigated that?

The first experiments became our first creations. Then came the real learning curve. Proper formulations. Preservation methods. Stability testing. We pushed beyond salves and balms into something different, something just as beautiful. Finding new ways to capture the essence of our work and share the plants' gifts.

Grief clarified what mattered. We'd spent years writing proposals, waiting for institutions to fund our cultural work. We were tired of asking permission to preserve knowledge that was disappearing with every elder we lost.

Six Twenty Skincare became the answer. Named for our wedding date, June 20th, which honors the summer solstice and the seasonal cycles our work centers. Revenue that doesn't require grant applications. Income that funds the teachings on our own terms. A business model built to sustain the transmission work while we still have time.

We spent the last three years developing formulations that combine traditional fats with clinical actives. Building something that works and sells and sustains the deeper mission.

WHERE WE ARE NOW

Six Twenty Skincare: Tallow-based formulations that fund everything else. Products that work because we refuse to separate ancestral knowledge from modern science.

Keepers of the Seasons: The land-based teachings we wanted to do all along. Monthly workshops. Multi-day intensives. Programs we built without waiting for institutional approval.

Walking Through the Seasons: The book we published in 2025. 316 pages documenting plant knowledge from Ktunaxa and Salish territories. The promise kept. Knowledge preserved. Archive built. Something that outlives us.

Over the years we've worked in grief and loss facilitation, culture camps, youth and family programming, governance, culinary arts, traditional diet, herbalism, addiction and substance work. We bring that experience to everything we build.

Our approach to ancestral and cultural transmission is inclusive. No one gets left out of what we do. This knowledge isn't locked behind bloodline or identity. It's offered to anyone tuning into the frequencies they're just now remembering.

This isn't a side project. This is sovereignty. Cultural transmission. Revenue streams that don't require anyone's approval. Systems built to last seven generations.

For those who cannot. For those just remembering. For those yet to come.