by Geraldine Carriere (Author)

You learned how to survive. Then how to succeed. Then how to carry everyone else. But no one taught you how to put the weight down.

Wild to Wise is a memoir and guide for anyone who has built a life around being strong, capable and needed-only to wonder what parts of themselves were left behind.

Geraldine "Ger" Carriere is a Cree author whose community is Cumberland House, Saskatchewan. In a voice that is raw, funny and unapologetic, she brings personal history, Cree spirituality, the Medicine Wheel, matriarchal wisdom, psychology, leadership and lived experience into the same conversation. Ger can move from ancestral medicine to Tupac without asking anyone's permission because she refuses the idea that wisdom belongs to only one world.

Against a culture that increasingly treats people like machines to be optimized, Ger returns to a more complete understanding of what it means to be human: body, mind, emotions and spirit in balance; identity rooted in culture, relationship and community.

Across ten candid chapters, Ger explores pride, presence, influence, image, initiative, resourcefulness, productivity, entrepreneurship, women's bodies and legacy. She challenges readers to recognize the survival patterns still running their lives, separate their own voices from everything they were taught to carry and reclaim the selves they learned to silence.

This is not another demand to become tougher, louder or more productive. It is an invitation to discover:

• Rest without guilt
• Strength without hardness
• Ambition without self-erasure
• Belonging without performance
• Success that does not require abandoning yourself

Written most directly for Indigenous women but open to anyone prepared to question the life they inherited, Wild to Wise is not another system for optimizing yourself. It is a way back to everything our culture of optimization has trained you to abandon.

You have survived. Now it is time to become whole.