A Decade of Roanhorse Consulting, LLC: A Reflection and a Pause
Honoring a Decade of Indigenous Leadership by Returning to What Sustains Us
By Vanessa Roanhorse
September 2025
In the winter of 2015, I found myself sleeping on a mattress on the floor at my twin sister’s house, my 15-month-old son curled beside me, job applications unanswered, and nothing moving. What I had was family. What I didn’t have was certainty. So I did what many Indigenous women have always done, I built something out of necessity.
What started as survival became Roanhorse Consulting, LLC.
Ten years later, I’m still building, but now with a brilliant team, powerful partners, and a clear vision rooted in Indigenous knowledge and futurism. We’ve transformed from a one-woman operation into an internationally recognized social enterprise working across Turtle Island to rematriate capital, redesign economic systems, and restore leadership back into the hands of Indigenous communities.
But after a decade of growth, innovation, and grit, I am choosing something even more radical than acceleration.
I am choosing to repair, reflect, and regenerate.
Repair: The Work Beneath the Work
Systems-change work is hard.
Social entrepreneurship is exhausting.
Even dream work, when done in extractive systems, can begin to feel like survival all over again.
At RCLLC, we’ve launched programs, mobilized capital, built funds, incubated businesses, and challenged long-held beliefs about who gets to define risk and value. But even success comes with its weight. And the past decade has taught me that you can’t build liberation on a cracked foundation.
As Leanne Betasamosake Simpson reminds us:
“Water is not just a metaphor, it is a practice. It requires presence, relationality, movement, and accountability.”
Repair is a water practice.
It means returning.
It means checking for what’s leaking, what’s been neglected, and what’s quietly holding more than it should.
This sabbatical isn’t just a pause—it’s a commitment to relational accountability, to maintenance, to tending what sustains the work and purpose.
Reflect: Remembering is Strategy
As we approach our 10-year milestone in January 2026, I’m taking a moment to remember who we are and how we got here.
We’ve grown from that mattress on the floor to a team of 14 full-time staff, a handful of part-timers, and a trusted circle of contractors and co-creators. Together, we’ve co-designed models that challenge the norms of finance, academia, philanthropy, and entrepreneurship. But we’ve also had to let go of people, partnerships, and practices that no longer aligned with our values.
In 2023, I made the painful decision to leave an organization I co-founded. It was a moment of grief—but also clarity. I chose to recommit to RCLLC, the company that had fed and clothed me, and had always reflected the values I hold most sacred: courage, curiosity, healing, and humor.
Reflection isn’t soft. It’s strategic.
It’s how we recalibrate.
It’s how we prevent mission drift.
It’s how we lead with integrity, not inertia.
Leanne teaches us again:
“Our bodies are bodies of water. Our governance is the governance of lakes and rivers. Our memories flow.”
Our memories are data. Our experiences are blueprints.
Our reflection is how we stay grounded in the work.
Regenerate: Preparing for What Comes Next
Regeneration is not recovery.
It is a return to vitality.
It’s preparing the soil before the next season of planting.
Beginning November 1, 2025, I will step away from day-to-day operations through January 19, 2026 for a sabbatical—not to disconnect, but to deeply reconnect.
During this time, our company will continue to thrive under the leadership of my fierce twin sister and COO, Olivia Roanhorse, alongside our incredible team of Indigenous strategists, builders, and organizers who have already been leading so much of this work.
We have always built RCLLC with interdependence as our core strategy.
We don’t believe in solo hero leadership.
We believe in systems of care.
In distributed wisdom.
In trusting the circle.
This sabbatical is about preparing for the next decade—one that will demand deeper courage, more vision, and even bolder experimentation with what’s possible when we lead from an Indigenous worldview.
The Invitation
To all of you building new systems, challenging old ones, or walking between them:
What in your life or work needs repair?
What have you not had time to reflect on?
And how will you regenerate not just yourself, but your relationship to the living world around you?
The future we are fighting for requires more than constant motion.
It requires cycles.
It requires clarity.
It requires leaders willing to stop just long enough to remember where the water flows.
This is my remembering.
This is my season to pause, repair, reflect, and regenerate.
Here’s to the next decade.
Let it be more than productive.
Let it be powerful, poetic, and sovereign.
Vanessa Roanhorse
CEO, Roanhorse Consulting, LLC
Founder, Return on Indigenous Studios
