ANCIENT FUTURE(S)
This year’s edition of SAGE, Ancient Future(s), turns toward ancestry, memory, and inherited knowledge as guides through an unstable present and toward more livable futures. Rather than imagining the future as something totally new, this issue asks what ancient ways of relating still survive beneath systems that have tried to erase them. Across the magazine, contributors return to buried roots: Indigenous stewardship, migration stories, family lineages, embodied memory, and ecological cycles that continue despite colonialism, capitalism, and environmental collapse.
The issue moves through landscapes shaped by both devastation and persistence. Throughout the magazine, land itself is alive with memory. Home is not treated as static geography, but as a relationship continuously practiced through care, labor, and return.
Many pieces explore the fractures of identity produced by diaspora, colonial borders, and displacement. Contributors write from in-between spaces: between nations, languages, generations, and futures. There are meditations on inherited grief, immigrant belonging, gendered expectations, and the tension between modern life and ancestral intuition. Yet these works resist nostalgia. Ancient Future(s) does not romanticize the past; instead, it asks what wisdom, practices, and forms of connection might still help us survive the present. The issue repeatedly suggests that remembering is itself an act of resistance.
At the same time, the magazine wrestles openly with the darkness of this political and ecological moment. Contributors confront fascism, deportation, genocide, environmental collapse, capitalism, extinction, and the violence embedded in systems of “progress.” But threaded through these anxieties is a stubborn insistence on possibility. There are visions of restored forests, mutual care, cyclical time, queer and familial tenderness, spiritual awe, and futures shaped by humility rather than domination. Even in pieces haunted by collapse, there remains an undercurrent of transformation — the belief that another relationship to the Earth and to each other is still possible.
This year’s SAGE is ultimately a collection about reconnection: reconnection to ancestors, ecosystems, forgotten rituals, bodily intuition, and collective responsibility. It invites readers to slow down enough to hear what still survives beneath modern noise — to listen to rivers, soil, fire, animals, memory, and one another. In doing so, Ancient Future(s) imagines futures not built through endless extraction and control, but through reciprocity, remembrance, and care
Thank you to the editors, graphic designers, and artists that brought this magazine into being, and to the previous editors that have created SAGE’s legacy. And thank you for holding this work in
your hands.
Brandon Hoak and Camila Buitrago
SAGE Co-Editors
April 2026
Editors: Brandon Hoak and Camila Buitrago
Graphic Designers: Vanilla Chi & Sebastian Lijó
Printer: GHP Media
Front Cover: Hidden In The Shadow (Mariposa Lily), Michaela Janae Meyer
Back Cover: Vessel (Whispering Bells), Michaela Janae Meyer