[Editor’s Note: Return to Mago E-Magazine (RTME) introduces Sister Organizations under the banner of the Nine Sister Networks as a way of consolidating Matriversal Feminism previously known as Goddess Feminist Activist Spirituality. If you are interested in interviewing or being interviewed for this project, please see here.]
Helen Hye-Sook Hwang: I am honored to e-interview Dr. Danica Anderson who is the founder of The Kolo: Women’s Crosscultural Collaboration. I am deeply grateful for Danica’s Kolo work in that it is grounded in the praxis of women in war zones, while offering healing and empowerment drawn from the matricentric Kolo tradition of Slavic origin. In my view, Danica’s Kolo project, like that of Nuwa who upholds the falling heaven pieces, threads the chasms between the bleeding of today’s women in war-torn regions and the original vision of Women. I feel Danica’s Kolo work is already legendary, carrying the muted outcries of women caught in violent conflicts in the course of history, which escapes my sane consciousness.
Helen: Tell us about your organization’s mission, founder, and its brief history.
Danica Anderson: My work is not situated within a formal institution, but is a living, embodied system of knowledge and practice developed through decades of forensic fieldwork with women in war zones—particularly Bosnian Muslim women who survived genocidal rape, war crimes, and cultural erasure. My praxis emerges from and centers around what I have developed as Kolo Informed Trauma: a framework that reclaims the female soma as a biological and ancestral archive, where trauma is not fixed damage, but an adaptive, somatic process of meaning-making.
The word Kolo is of Slavic origin, with roots in prehistoric matristic cultural cosmologies. In its earliest meanings, it signifies more than a circle; it reflects female-centered biological rhythm, sacred cosmology, and ancestral relationality. Kolo is the living geometry of how women pass knowledge through touch, story, song, blood, milk, and movement.
Over centuries, however, the cultural and sacred meaning of Kolo has been distorted and diminished by patriarchal systems—taken from its original use in oral memory rituals, grief dances, and communal embodiment, and reduced to a folkloric spectacle or ethnographic descriptor. It is now often portrayed in the language of tourism or anthropological structure—emptied by its somatic, spiritual, and ancestral truth.
I use the iconic meaning of the Kolo to evade patriarchal violence—by refusing the reduction of female biological knowledge into pathology, performance, or museum display. Through Kolo Informed Trauma, I restore the circle not as symbol but as methodology: a somatic system of healing grounded in the tacit knowledge of the female body, shaped by war, famine, and generational survival, and carried forward into decision-making, adaptation, and collective remembering.
My fieldwork has included forensic contributions to international war tribunals and post-conflict healing work in Bosnia, Afghanistan, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Sri Lanka. In places where dominant trauma models fail, I witnessed women healing each other—not through clinical frameworks, but through memory-in-motion: the embodied sharing of trauma, myth, ancestral insight, and story. These experiences directly shaped my development of Kolo Informed Trauma as a model where the body becomes the archive, the circle becomes the method, and the herstorical memory becomes the healing.
This work continues through cross-disciplinary dialogues like Embodied Herstory: Forensic Traumatology, Social Epigenetics, and the Inheritance of Female Trauma, and in collaboration with those who honor the body not as victim, but as a source of ancestral authority, sacred knowledge, and world-restoring power.
Helen: How do you see your organization contribute to the cause of feminist activist spirituality directly or indirectly?
Danica: My contribution to feminist activist spirituality is rooted in restoring the soma as sacred knowledge system—not metaphorically, but biologically, neurobiologically, and cosmologically. Through forensic traumatology and embodied inquiry, I challenge the institutional narratives that define trauma through pathology and the female body through absence.
Dominant justice systems are built upon male-defined rituals of truth. The very word testimony—from the Latin testis—refers to a man swearing truth by placing his hand on his genitals. This oath centers the male body as the vessel of law, rendering the female body as object, victim, and evidence. These systems are patriarchally structured to require and reinforce female victimhood. The courtroom, the psychiatric file, and the tribunal all operate through ritualized performances of injury, which strip women of agency while insisting on their woundedness.
As one war crimes survivor in India told me: “My womb has become a tomb.” Her statement is not symbolic—it is a precise diagnosis of how militarized sexual violence turns the center of generative life into a grave. This is not a personal tragedy, it is a strategy. It is systemic. It is the erasure of herstorical memory through patriarchal ritual. It is the structural embodiment of a world that has normalized female disposability and defined her soma through cycles of ritualized victimhood.
My work contributes to feminist spiritual activism by directly reclaiming female biology and epigenetic memory as cosmological authorities. It affirms that spiritual activism must begin in the body, in blood-memory, in oral herstory, and in the unbroken neurobiological patterning passed through the generations—not through scripts of salvation or abstraction.
Helen: What are your wishes for the future of your organization?
Danica: The future of my work lies in the continued recognition and transmission of the epistemology I’ve developed through Kolo Informed Trauma—a forensic, biological, and ancestral epigenetic memory methodology that restores the female body as a site of interpretive knowledge, not passive harm. This work does not grow by institutional replication. It extends through embodied presence, circle-based remembrance, and herstorical social engagement continuity, led by women who refuse reduction.
Kolo Informed Trauma is not only applicable to post-conflict recovery. It applies in all spaces where the female soma is erased, instrumentalized, or misinterpreted—in systems that define her through violation and victimhood rather than through her adaptive female biology and neurobiology. My work directly interrupts this by reclaiming the female soma as a memory archive, author, and agent of ancestral meaning.
This model expands wherever female biological and neurological intelligence is activated—especially in trauma fields, ritual circles, survivor gatherings, and embodied educational spaces. I continue to engage with those who carry this knowledge. Epigenetic memory is memory in motion, moving forward—not as a burden, but as biological memory narration, grounded in their own lineages and adaptations.
Crucially, this work is supported by the very material culture of our herstorical past. Epigenetic memory, as revealed through prehistoric artifacts, proves that memory is eternal—not linear. The Neolithic figurines, circular burial sites, and goddess sculptures are not archaeological curiosities; they are expressions of memory in motion, encoded in matter, inscribed in form. They speak in the same language as the soma, the nervous system, and the blood. This is not timekeeping. This is the rhythm of eternal remembering—and it lives in our bodies, not our clocks.
Helen: How would you like the Nine Sister Networks project help and/or connect with your organization?
Danica: The Nine Sister Networks has the potential to become a living circle—a Kolo of epistemic, embodied, and herstorical presence across geographies, generations, and knowledge systems. I do not view this project as a means of institutional expansion, but rather as a cosmological and biological resonance with the work I already engage in: the restoration of female soma knowledge, social epigenetic memory, and herstorical continuity.
What I require from such a network is not visibility, but alignment. The Nine Sister Networks can function as a sacred platform where Kolo-informed epistemologies are not explained, but recognized and integrated. I do not seek collaborations that repackage matristic memory through frameworks of Western feminism, anthropology, or performance. Instead, I ask for intentional space-making: gatherings, publishing opportunities, and dialogic structures that center female biology, neurobiology, and epigenetic knowledge as origin, not aftermath.
This network can support the biological narrators of epigenetic memory—those working in silence, across trauma fields, storytelling practices, ritual embodiment, and intergenerational transmission. It can offer protection and infrastructure for women holding Kolo-based knowledge—those often overlooked in academic and spiritual spaces alike.
Connection for me means shared cosmological responsibility. It means the Nine Sisters operating as somatic allies, not media, not extractive collaborators, but participants in the re-mapping of feminine time, memory, and presence. It is not about scale, but about coherence.
Through this alignment, the Nine Sister Networks can extend what Kolo already is: a geometry of memory, a praxis of ancestral return, and a biology of world restoration.
Helen: I feel humbled at the thundering roar of Danica’s Kolo vision. Attempts to bring peace and healing to women in the war-torn worlds is divine. May you be provided with what you need in holding up the vision. Thank you so much for taking time to explain your work in light of Nine Sister Networks.