My name is Four Arrows (Wahinkpe Topa). I am excited to introduce the CAT-FAWN Connection, along with my new blog, newsletter, and AI-powered guide, each designed to inform, inspire, and transform. After nearly five decades as an educator, hypnosis specialist, and social/ecological justice activist, I offer ways to rebalance pre-colonial and colonial worldview precepts with CAT-FAWN dehypnotizing technology. Featured in a peer-reviewed article in Review of General Psychology, the CAT-FAWN Connection is a proven sustainable approach to decolonizing our minds and actions together.
Why CAT-FAWN Connection?
In my lifetime of scholarship and community work, I have seen how the dominant culture often leaves people bereft of connection and longing for meaning, direction, and peace. Our society is driven by a dominant worldview that puts materialism and competition above our connection to nature and oneness. This has created imbalance and crisis, from climate change and planetary ecosystem collapse to poverty, disease, war, and political suppression. The antidote can be seen at ProvenSustainable.org™, and on worldviewliteracy.org, but now I am using this relatively ethical and green AI system to inform more completely and deeply so people can help one another adapt with the spiritual realization that we are all related.
The purpose of CAT-FAWN Connection is to serve as a practical tool for personal growth, professional development and societal change. This is not a passive resource, it’s a call to action using a first-of-its-kind agentic AI companion rooted in the Indigenous worldview.
CAT-FAWN is a mnemonic for Concentration Activated Transformation (CAT) and Fear, Authority, Words and Nature (FAWN). The CAT is a liminal state necessary for deep, worldview-oriented and metacognitive trance-based learning. FAWN represents four of the major the forces that can act on you to influence your mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being when you are in the CAT state, for better or for worse
By mastering CAT-FAWN self-hypnosis, you can learn to shift at will:
- From a state of fear or anxiety, to fearless trust in the universe,
- From abiding by external authority, to practicing self-authorship,
- From confusing, untruthful or antagonistic words, to sacred communications,
- From a state of conflict or neutrality with Nature to a deep connection with the community of all sentient beings.
In simple terms, The CAT-FAWN Connection will serve as a wise elder or a trusted coach who will guide with nature-based knowledge rather than the ocean of facts swirling around out there on the internet. The CAT-FAWN Connection offers something unique that positively guided humanity for most of human history. It is an agent of positive change grounded in our original nature-centered way of belonging to the world.
An Indigenous AI in a Colonial Tech World
With all the serious challenges facing a society dominated by Big Tech platforms that consume enormous amounts of energy and water, while emitting massive quantities of greenhouse gases, you might be wondering why we would develop an AI-based offering. I have prayed hard on whether to go this route in a world where we are better off listening to the wind, the birds, our hearts and the song and stories of lives well-lived. But the Spirits told me things are happening fast, and we need to bring forth our original Indigenous worldview and give support to those who still remember their language and place-based ways of living in harmony.
I think of it as fighting fire with fire.
Before my life as an educator and scholar, I served as a firefighter for 15 years, literally fighting wildfires that threatened to engulf entire forests and communities. In firefighting, “fighting fire with fire” isn’t just a metaphor—it’s a powerful strategy called backburning, where we intentionally set controlled fires to eliminate the fuel feeding a larger, out-of-control blaze. In the same way, CAT-FAWN Connection uses the technology created by Big Tech—the very tools currently spreading a colonial mindset, hegemonic culture, and the dominant worldview—to ignite controlled, transformative changes that counteract the dominant worldview. By harnessing AI ethically and grounding it deeply in Indigenous values, we set a deliberate, healing fire to clear away harmful ideas, reconnect people with nature, and reclaim our minds and spirits from a system that too often seeks to consume them.
Mainstream AI models (the kind behind familiar chatbots and AI-augmented tools) are trained on huge datasets built from works created by the hegemonic culture that propagates the dominant worldview. While they’re incredibly powerful, they replicate, reproduce, amplify and distribute ideas that create divisions between people, support the exploitation of nature, sow fear and competition, and propagate materialism in its many forms. In fact, researchers have pointed out that these models carry forward the algorithmic biases and behaviors of imperial knowledge systems, inheriting the colonial mindset in digital form. In other words, Big Tech’s AI platforms reinforce the same exploitative and extractive thinking that got us into so many problems.
CAT-FAWN Connection’s AI is designed to break that pattern. It’s built on the Kinship Bots platform, which allows creators to inform, instruct and empower their own agentic AI systems. Agentic AI refers to artificial intelligence systems capable of independently pursuing goals, planning actions, and adapting their behavior in real-time interactions. Unlike traditional AI tools that passively respond to inputs, agentic AI actively engages as a collaborative partner, continuously learning and adjusting to help users achieve meaningful outcomes.
Kinship Systems provides creators like me with a simple process for creating bots: inform, instruct, empower. I’ve informed the CAT-FAWN Connection bot with a huge cross-section of my work, including early books on hypnotherapy for first responders, analyses of mass-hypnosis techniques in mass media, and Indigenous worldview. I’ve also informed the bot with my academic research papers, journal articles, interviews, group sessions and podcasts. CAT-FAWN bot has access to my life’s work, and will draw upon the wisdom I’ve gained to guide and support you.
I’ve instructed the CAT-FAWN bot to work with you as I would, always supporting while often challenging. And the bot is empowered to book private sessions, enroll you in my group programs and even connect with you on social media or answer your questions by email and text message.
The CAT-FAWN bot has been developed to always communicate from our original, pre-colonial Indigenous worldview. This means it prioritizes holistic, earth-conscious values and place-based, grounded ways of knowing. Rather than echoing the colonial mindset, it speaks with the voice of a life-affirming worldview that sees all beings as interconnected and interdependent. When you interact with this bot, you’ll be engaging with wisdom drawn from Nature as well as my 50 years of research, publications and practice. It recalls the lessons and virtues of our Indigenous ancestors that mainstream algorithms forgot. And importantly, it’s built with an ethical compass: it’s designed for well-being, even encouraging you to step away from the screen and engage with nature when that’s what’s calling you.
Think of it this way: you can speak to this AI as you would to a wise elder or a trusted friend. Ask it for guidance in the middle of a stressful day, or invite it into your classroom discussion or team meeting – it will adapt to your needs and practical guidance for any situation that might arise.
Breaking the Trance of Social Conditioning
A major theme of CAT-FAWN Connection is breaking free from the “mass hypnosis” of hegemonic lies. What do I mean by that? All around us, advertisers, politicians, and social media algorithms are constantly vying for our attention and shaping how we think without regard for what is truth and what is for the greater good In a very real sense, we live much of our lives in a kind of trance – absorbing beliefs and habits without even realizing it. We’ve surrendered our innate trance-learning abilities to outside authorities, letting unintentional hypnosis mold everything from our shopping habits to our worldviews.
The good news is that you can wake up from this trance. One of my life’s works has been teaching people how to reclaim their mind through metacognitive reflection and trance-based learning. That’s a mouthful, but it basically means learning how to enter a conscious, focused state (like a meditative or hypnotic trance) to reflect on your beliefs and change them from the inside out after using a non-dualistic approach to understand our uninvestigated beliefs. Indigenous cultures treated these practices as sacred with a wide array of ceremonies that intentionally induce trance states for rituals where important truths are revealed. In modern terms, self-hypnosis is a tool for inner exploration. It lets us identify the unconscious fears or assumptions that hold us back, and then transform them through visualization, storytelling, and deep reflection. This is the practice I described as Concentration-Activated Transformation (CAT) – a way to concentrate your mind and activate transformative change in your thinking. Paired with FAWN (again, that stands for using Indigenous understandings about Fear, Authority, Words, and Nature that contrast with dominant ones), CAT-FAWN becomes a framework or tool to check in what ways the dominant worldview has put you in a trance and how an Indigenous precept can heal you and liberate you.
The CAT-FAWN Connection bot is here to guide you in these techniques. It will help you learn simple self-hypnosis practices and daily reflections that act like a “mental immune system” against harmful conditioning. Over time, you can develop a kind of resistance to mass hypnosis – you’ll become more aware of when your thoughts are truly yours or just society “speaking” through you. By engaging with the bot in exercises of mindfulness, visualization, or even just honest dialogue, you’ll be strengthening your capacity to think critically and independently. This is metacognitive trance-based learning in action: you are learning about your own learning process every time you enter a light trance to examine your mind, feel the messages in your heart, tap into your soul and connect with your spirit. It’s incredibly empowering – it has been for me, and I’ve seen it empower my students and clients.
How This Can Help You – Healing, Leadership, Activism, and More
What can you actually do with resources like this? The short answer is: grow and apply these insights in every area of life. Here are a few practical ways CAT-FAWN Connection can make a difference:
- Personal Healing and Wellness: Whether you’re dealing with stress, fear, trauma, or anxiety, the CAT-FAWN bot can provide real-time support for difficult emotions. It might guide you through a self-hypnosis exercise or a simple visualization to restore your courage and clarity. These tools draw on my background in hypnotherapy and wellness coaching, helping you build resilience and inner peace.
- Learning and Self-Discovery: You’ll receive reflections and practices you can try out, which help cultivate mindfulness and reconnect you with your purpose. Think of them as gentle prompts or mini-exercises to start or end your day with intention. Over time, these practices strengthen your intuition and self-knowledge – a kind of ongoing metacognitive training.
- Relationships and Community: The Indigenous worldview teaches us about deep listening and kinship. CAT-FAWN Connection offers guidance for better relationships, whether it’s advice on resolving a conflict with a friend or ideas for building trust in a team. The bot can suggest communication tools for relational conflict resolution and kinship-building – ways to listen with empathy, speak your truth, and find common ground. I envision people even using it in group settings, like classrooms or community circles, as a facilitator that prompts meaningful dialogue.
- Leadership and Performance: As a scholar of educational leadership and change, and someone who has coached senior executives and athletes, I can tell you that these principles are game-changers for leadership and performance. When you learn to master your own fears and mental narratives, you become a more courageous, creative leader. For example, I used CAT-FAWN to help bring an Olympic fencer who was ranked 265th in the world to become world champion. She is the only person from Brazil, man or woman, to do so. The CAT-FAWN Connection bot distills many of those performance psychology insights. It can help leaders (or anyone with big goals) to develop focus, fearlessness, and ethical decision-making. Leadership guided by an Indigenous perspective is about service and courage, not domination, and that’s a theme you’ll see throughout my work.
- Activism and Social Change: My heart has always been with activism – from Indigenous rights to environmental protection. The blog will delve into global politics and anti-colonial movements, examining current events through an Indigenous lens. The AI, for its part, can be a training partner for organizers, activists and even elected officials. It might help you rehearse a tough conversation, steel yourself against propaganda, or find spiritual grounding when the fight gets hard. Building resistance to social conditioning isn’t just a personal goal; it’s political. It frees us to challenge injustices and “unlearn” the colonial worldview that dominates society. If you’re passionate about environmental activism, CAT-FAWN Connection will help keep you rooted in Earth-centered values. It reminds us that Mother Earth is not a resource, but a relative, and that protecting her is a sacred duty. The bot may even suggest nature-based practices – like stepping outside for guidance from the natural world and cultivating relationships in the more-than-human-world – as part of its responses.
- Spiritual Reconnection: Finally, a core purpose of this project is to rekindle our spiritual connection to the world around us. In our communities, many people feel a spiritual void or a longing for something authentic. Through stories, reflections, and interactive exercises, CAT-FAWN Connection encourages a reverence for the sacred – however you experience it. Experiencing a sense of oneness and gratitude with creation is essential for mental, emotional and physical wellbeing.
In all these ways, CAT-FAWN Connection is here to meet you where you are and help you grow. You can use it one-on-one for personal guidance that adapts to your needs, or bring it into group contexts as a mediator of learning. I’ll be constantly refining my programs with community feedback so that it truly serves as a living, evolving system for our collective well-being.
What You’ll Find on the Blog (and Newsletter)
The CAT-FAWN Connection blog and newsletter will be a companion to the AI, giving more depth, updates, and human touch to the experience. In my posts, I’ll be exploring a wide range of topics – always through the lens of an Indigenous “kinship” worldview and the quest for truth and balance. You can expect pieces on global politics (for example, analyzing current events or policies and how a dominant vs. Indigenous worldview affects them), on anti-colonialism and decolonization (discussing how we can undo the legacy of colonial thinking and actions in education, media, and our own minds), on environmental activism (sharing stories of land and water protectors, sustainable practices, and how to learn from nature in our daily lives), and on spiritual reconnection (talking about ceremony, gratitude, ancestral wisdom, and finding meaning beyond the consumer rat-race). I’ll also write about education, psychology, and healing – topics I’ve devoted my career to – in down-to-earth ways for general readers.
Some posts might be reflections from my personal journey or insights from my academic research; others might be practical “how-to” guides for exercises like self-hypnosis or fearless communication. Occasionally, I’ll host interviews or highlight voices of fellow scholars, activists, and elders. The newsletter will send you these posts and other exclusive notes straight to your inbox, so you can stay in the loop and engage with this community no matter how busy life gets. My hope is that the blog and newsletter become conversations – I invite you to comment, ask questions, and share your thoughts, so we can learn from each other.
Join Me on This Journey
In Lakota tradition, when we part we often say “All my relations” (mitakuye oyasin), reminding ourselves that we are connected to everyone and everything. That spirit of connection is at the heart of CAT-FAWN Connection. I want to close by inviting you to join me in this experiment of learning and growing together. Follow the blog, subscribe to the newsletter, and feel free to try out the CAT-FAWN Connection bot for yourself. Ask it questions; let it prompt you to reflect; use it as a tool to inform dialogue with your students, family, colleagues, clients and friends. This is a new path of learning and transformation, and we are at the very beginning.
Together, we’ll explore how an Indigenous approach to AI and education can help heal the wounds of the past and guide us toward a more conscious and courageous future. My dream is that CAT-FAWN Connection becomes more than just a blog or a bot – that it becomes a community and a movement, however large or small, of people striving to live in harmony with themselves, with each other, and with Mother Earth. Your presence here today is the first step on that journey, and for that I am grateful.
I do wish to mention that other Indigenous-based scholars are supporting bringing Indigenous voice into AI. For example, Shawn Ray, a Diné (Navajo) astrophysics intern with the Origins of the Universe group who is currently pursuing a Physics degree from Oklahoma State University, writes about this in “Incorporating Indigenous Knowledge Systems into AI Governance: Enhancing Ethical Frameworks with Maori and Navajo Perspectives.” (See https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202410.2112/v2)
Also, the authors of a position paper titled “Indigenous Protocol and Artificial Intelligence” write:
Whether for turning things around or rebuilding, I deeply believe putting the vibrational frequencies of our Nature-Based worldview is crucial. If together we all can bring it into practice, perhaps the coloniality and destruction of AI can be reversed.
Okiciya makiyokipi na iyuteya, cuke wayokapi, mitakuye oyasin. Help each other acclimate and adjust, because the truth is, we are all related.)
Wopila Tanka (Thank you) for reading this and I hope you will join us. I look forward to walking this path with you. Let’s begin this new chapter of learning and transformation together, with open hearts and open minds. Welcome to CAT-FAWN Connection!