Not citing is epistemicide
The work you cite is the work you protect
Hola! Iâm Ixchel Lunar (they/them), an Indigenous-Time ecologist, ancestral medicine guide, and rhythm witch for creative rebels, decolonial dreamers, and neuroqueer visionaries. This Substack is dedicated to weaving business, body, and belonging into something no empire can replicate. Still punk as fuck. Still cozy in the chaos.
Reminder: KâiinBody Weekend, June 5, 6 + 7, reply to join us! Learn More â
Beautiful Wildling,
The Stellar World Code is a fork.
In coding, a fork isnât a lesser version of something. Itâs how open source evolves: find existing work, name where it came from, build in a direction the original didnât go. The origin stays in the record because thatâs how the work stays honest.
(Itâs also exactly what a 4/1 profile does: investigate the foundation, fork from it, spread the new version through the network.)
One question shaped this one:
What does a Founder actually need to know about their own work to keep it from collapsing under them?
Eight elements emerged from it, each one load-bearing.
Voice. Climax. Method. Creation. Crown. Conversation. Crossing. Lineage.
You might already feel the weight of the first seven. Voice is where your signal lives. Climax is the precise transformation you deliver. Method is your system: the thing that makes your process yours and not anyone elseâs. Creation is how your offers are built to hold that work. Crown is your territory: what you are the sovereign of. Conversation is the architecture that moves your Founders from where they are to the threshold of what you offer. Crossing is the ethics of how they actually step across.
And then thereâs Lineage.
Lineage is the one most Founders skip. Itâs also the one doing the most structural damage when itâs absent.
Iâll model it here, because thatâs how it works.
The Stellar World Code evolved from a skills-mapping framework developed by Corey Haines and Paul Scrivens. What I built is a complete rebuild (anti-predtech in design, woven through with astrology and Human Design, oriented entirely around the Founderâs personal cosmology and life experience). The architecture of the original gave me a place to start. What it became is something else. But I name Haines and Scrivens because thatâs what the Lineage element requires: you donât get to dissolve your origins just because you went further than them. Citing isnât always an endorsement. (h/t Kelly Diels)
Thatâs the practice: the name belongs in the sentence.
Your work didnât emerge from nothing. It came from somewhere. From someone. From a body of knowledge built by people (often people whose names have been extracted from their own work, whose frameworks were laundered through Western academia, whose teachings survive only because communities kept transmitting them across centuries of active suppression).
When you donât cite, you participate in that laundering.
Epistemicide: the destruction of knowledge systems. It doesnât only happen through colonial conquest.
Founder bios say âI work at the intersection of X and Yâ and never name KimberlĂ© Crenshaw. Wellness brands built their vocabulary on Audre Lordeâs A Burst of Light and never named her or the political warfare she named. Leadership content runs on adrienne maree brownâs Emergent Strategy (in conversation with Octavia Butler) and credits neither of them.
Epistemicide occurs every time a framework is extracted from its source community and repackaged as a personal brand. It occurs quietly, in everyday content, by people who would never call themselves extractive.
I know this because itâs happened to me. One-time clients and longtime Dragon Letters readers have taken my frameworks into their offers without a citation of me or my mentors. Occasionally, word-for-word.
When Iâve talked about the erasure more openly, Iâve been told that some marketing bro said naming our influences makes us seem derivative. That citing undermines authority.
Citing your sources embeds you in something larger. The work becomes trustworthy and also timeless.
The best musical numbers carry lineage of their influencers in them. You can hear Parliament-Funkadelic, Nina Simone, and Miles Davis living inside To Pimp a Butterfly â Kendrick doesn't dissolve his influences, he builds from them, and the album is unrepeatable because of it.
Naming your lineage is how your work finds belonging. The people you come through become active participants, even cheerleaders, in what you're building. You stop being a solo origin point (because, eewww, white supremacy). Your Founders get a map that goes back further than you. Your work becomes part of something that existed before you and will continue after you. You get to be embedded in a tradition, which is a different kind of authority than the one the marketing bros were describing.
The invitation to steal by omission and epistemicide also adds years to the development of your actual gifts. When you build on borrowed frameworks you havenât cited, youâre standing in someone elseâs architecture without seeing your own talents.
Eventually, it has to come down and get rebuilt from whatâs genuinely yours. And the Founders who needed whatâs specifically yours in that time didnât get it, because you were occupied with the wrong foundation.
When you map your Lineage element in KâiinBody, we identify the specific ancestral traditions, thinkers, traditions, and teachers your framework is in conversation with. Where it extends, diverges from, or holds critical dialogue with those lineages. And how to make all of that visible in your content and offers, structurally, as part of how you present what you do.
This is what makes your work reproducible and trustworthy. It gives your Founders a map with origins.
It also, plainly, honors people who deserve to be honored.
The KâiinBody Build Weekend is June 5â7. All eight elements over three days, virtual, with a cohort capped at 10 Founders.
What you leave with: a mapped Stellar World Code that becomes the foundation of your KâiinBody second brain. The system knows who you are, where you came from, what youâre building, and who youâre building it for.
Join the KâiinBody Build Weekend â
If youâve been carrying the feeling that your work is bigger than how youâve been presenting it, Lineage is often whatâs missing. You know your influences. Making them structural is the work.
Thatâs what weâre doing in June.
Stay wild, love fiercely. Your presence is golden.
With wild and rebellious love,
Maltiox! xo Ixchel
P.S. If June 5, 6 + 7 won't work, reply and I'll put you on the Cohort 2 list.
P.P.S. Maltiox pronounced mall-tee-osh means with gratitude in Kâiche Mayan.
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I was raised and bore children on the traditional, unceded, and stolen lands of the Coast and Central Valley Miwok (colonized as Petaluma, CA) and Nisenan (colonized as Sacramento and Fair Oaks, CA), past, present, and future. I also write, work, and live in the highland forest of the traditional, unceded and stolen lands of the Totonac, Nahua, and Mexicah, past, present, and future, in what is known as Coatepec, Veracruz, Mexico.
P.P.S. I do not live or consent to the colonial impositions regarding the construct of Time. I also practice honoring rhythms of work, play, and rest so that I can serve you with embodied presence and with loving care. This means I may take several days to respond to your requests and questions. (h/t Eva Glamaris)
P.P.S. A mention is not necessarily an endorsement of someone. Itâs an acknowledgment, a citation, of the origin of information in my process of understanding. (h/t Kelly Diels)
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Copyright © 2026, Cheyenne, WY, and Veracruz, Mexico, All rights reserved. Sharing your lineage of knowledge is decolonial. When iterating, please cite me. Not citing is epistemicide.