About us
History of Development
​
The history of The Heartland Beads Project is really over 170 years in the making. The players, both dead and alive, span the globe from East to West, culminating in events that have reached out to profoundly inspire the participants of today to endeavor to leave a legacy for tomorrow.
Due to the profound experiences that pilgrims had on the 2012 and 2013 Trail of Tears and Civil Rights pilgrimage, another pilgrimage coupled with a workshop was organized on a more concentrated route in Arkansas. Attending pilgrims were members of the Beads-on-One-String Foundation, Cherokee Nation, icon Freedom Riders, and pilgrimage organizers and youth. A workshop was also structured for the purpose of determining if a match in vision between groups could be determined. When the representatives of the foundation met with other board members it was decided that a vision would not match with an organization that had political connotations inside its spirituality. The aftermath was the birth of The Heartland Project Inc … reconnecting humanity like beads-on-one-string. The members of the Cherokee Nation, the Freedom Riders, and the organizers of this event formed THPI using their own means, vision, and determination.
​
In April of 1932 during a filmed interview, dictated through an alphabet board, for the Paramount Film Company in London, the silent East Indian Master Meher Baba declared in his message to the West:"I intend bringing together all religions and cults like beads-on-one-string and revitalize them for individual and collective needs. This is my mission to the West."
​
In May of 1952 while visiting America, Meher Baba and a few of his devotees set out to follow a cross-country itinerary from Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, to Ojai, California. Ignoring the carefully crafted itinerary fashioned by one of his devotees Baba instructed the driver to navigate according to his wishes, including a very zig-zag path in Oklahoma. Right in the heart of America, just outside of Prague, Oklahoma, they were met with a terrible head-on collision. Baba was thrown from the car and landed in a ditch on the side of the road. Two weeks later, still bloodied, broken, and bruised, Baba and his companions were driven back to Myrtle Beach in ambulances.
​
Decades later it was discovered that the route Baba insisted upon taking matched almost exactly the Cherokee Trail of Tears that began in 1834 and ended in Tahlequah, very near the same spot as his accident. The route he then had to travel to get back to Myrtle Beach, while so badly beaten and broken, also matched some of the routes the Freedom Riders took, along with significant events of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960’s. These discoveries were the inspiration for pilgrimages of forgiveness and healing to take place on those routes and other sites in 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2015.
Along these routes pilgrims were met and accompanied by Cherokee women Lianna Constantino and Carol B. Long and two iconic heroes from the Freedom Riders Movement, Charles Person and Catherine Burks-Brooks. At every site throughout the pilgrimages we would invoke ancestors to witness apology, a heartfelt Prayer of Repentance, and songs that were given by living pilgrims to living recipients, acknowledging the generational grief and trauma still experienced today by their descendants.
​
Thousands of miles have been traveled where apologies and prayers have so moved those we encountered, young and old, that they continually expressed not having experienced anything like it. From those moments such connection and unification were established that The Heartland Project Inc. … reconnecting humanity like beads on one string was born. It continues with some of the very people met during pilgrimage. We do so because together we envision the creation of a living legacy through our shared experience of the heart.
Jill English
I was born and raised in Denver, Colorado in 1947. I became a single mother of 2 by the time I was 19 years old. Despite great challenges I was able to put myself through college, graduating from the University of Colorado Denver in 1976.
For many of my years I worked as an organizer, job developer, gender equity specialist, trainer and teacher within the community college system and numerous community-based organizations where I also designed and implemented training and education programs. Later I branched out into the world of small business ownership, using my innate culinary interest and talents to design and operate a “from scratch" bakery and catering service. I was also a personal chef.
​
I have always had a deep connection with philosophy, spirituality, music, art, and dance, with a particular love of animals and nature. I have had the privilege of nearly 20 years of riding and caring for a beautiful mustang culled from a sturdy herd in the Sandwash Basin region of Northern Colorado, over 40 years of caring for exotic parrots and a few special dogs and cats along the way. I am also blessed with 3 beautiful teenage grandchildren.
Charles Person
Charles A. Person was born September 27, 1942 and educated in the Atlanta Public Schools where he graduated in 1960 from David T. Howard High School as Class Salutatorian. He is a veteran of the Vietnam War and also of the Civil Rights Movement. He saw action in Da Nang; Chu Lai, Okinawa; Washington DC; Charlotte North Carolina; New Orleans, Louisiana, and Atlanta, Georgia. During his days in the Civil Rights Movement, the Klu Klux Klan savagely beat him in Anniston, Alabama, and, again, in Birmingham, Alabama. Numerous medals and ribbons have been awarded to Person for his hard work and dedication. He retired from the United States Marine Corps in 1981 on the island of Cuba. He remained at Guantanamo Bay Navy Base where he managed an electronic maintenance company for three years.
​
After his retirement from the Marine Corps, he continued his career with the Atlanta Public School System as an Electronic Technician.
​
Today, Person and his wife reside in his hometown Atlanta and are the parents of five children. He is an activist within the community and the NAACP.
​
For more information, see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Person
Lianna Costantino
Lianna Costantino is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation who now lives in WNC in her ancestral homeland. She served as the Chair of the Board of the Center for Native Health, and was the Board Chair for the Cherokee Healing and Wellness Coalition in Cherokee, NC.
Lianna is a proud mother and grandmother.
​
She is a retired midwife, university and prison interfaith chaplain, a former DFGL (civilian chaplain) and pastoral counselor for the U.S. Army, and a Cherokee storyteller.
​
​Lianna is involved in volunteering for movements seeking racial, social and environmental justice, as well as decolonization including Standing Rock, where she served as a Water Protector.
Catherine Burks-Brooks
I was born in Birmingham, Alabama, on October 8, 1939. Two childhood memories standout for me. One was when my mother would take me downtown to shop and a white person would approach us, we would step aside. I don’t remember any white people ever stepping aside for us. The second was that we had to walk four or five blocks from where we were shopping to get a sandwich, while the white people were eating where we shopped.
In September 1957, I went to Tennessee State University in Nashville, where I got involved with sit-in movements and was a member of a student Central Committee. We were trained and had been jailed, but we integrated theaters and restaurants. In May 1961, after we got word about the beatings in Birmingham and the bus burning near Anniston, we decided that we would take up the Freedom Rides. Over that summer, I was arrested and held in the Hinds County jail and Parchman State Penitentiary for 39 days.
In addition to being a Civil Rights activist, I have worked as a jewelry retailer, teacher, social worker, and newspaper editor. I’ve lived in North Carolina, Mississippi, Michigan, Illinois, and the Bahamas before coming back to Birmingham, where I eventually retired.
For more information, see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_Burks-Brooks
Marilyn Auer
Marilyn Auer was the publisher and editor of "The Bloomsbury Review," a multi-cultural, nationally distributed book magazine, for more than 30 years. She also co-wrote and co-published "The Colorado Women's Resource Guide" with Connie Shaw in 1976.
Ivan Lillie
I grew up on the plains of Southern Colorado in a town with fewer than 400 people and no TV. I felt a connection to those plains that included an awareness of the American Indians who lived and were massacred around there. I also knew, from a very young age, that I was different.
My coming of age as a gay man in the late 70s and early 80s made me feel that I finally found my real family or "tribe." But the AIDs crises rapidly wiped out my entire community. I was also diagnosed with 6 months to live in 1984. Two of my friends and I were all who survived from that community. Similar to the experience of the trauma and travesty endured by our American Indians, no one was talking about AIDs or trying to do anything about it.
The LGBTQ, Indigenous, Black, and People of Color communities have been so dehumanized in this country that I was drawn to The Heartland Project Inc's mission. This includes exploring the concept of trauma, and potential healing through awareness of the experience of others. I feel that this is where I need to be right now.
​