THE STEWARDS

Ariel Waagosh

FOUNDING DIRECTOR AND CONVENER

Ariel Waagosh (she/they) is the Founding Director of Gwekwaadsing // Walking in a Good Way. An Anishinaabe lawyer, peacemaker, and community leader, Ariel co-captained a highly-acclaimed and women-led law firm for ten years, shaping California’s policy landscape. In 2023, Ariel returned to her tribal homelands in Michigan (Anishinaabeaki), where she now champions efforts locally, statewide, and nationally to resource Indigenous-led community projects.

Ariel’s work spans more than two decades at the intersections of law, culture change, and healing justice, with national and international reach. Across her work and thought leadership, she centers cultivating healthy futures and communities of care, with a particular focus on peacemaking, land, cultural renewal, and relational leadership. She co-stewards the Black & Indigenous Re-Storying Initiative, building allyship through land and culture-based circle practice. Through a year-long collaboration of deep listening with community leaders, Listening to the Land emerged as a collective offering honoring kinship across Turtle Island. She recently served on an innovative working group developing a model for incorporating Nature into the governance of an international arts organization, and helps to lead peacemaking convenings and transformative-bridging work in the U.S. and abroad.

Ariel has received significant professional and public recognition, including Rolling Stone naming her one of 18 “Women Shaping the Culture of Tomorrow.” Her work and perspectives have been featured or quoted in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Associated Press, POLITICO, CNN, Rolling Stone, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Law360, and Daily Journal, among others. She speaks regularly at conferences, gatherings, and in academic settings including Columbia, Yale, Harvard, UCLA, Berkeley, and Michigan State University. Her writing has explored, among other subjects, Rights of Nature as a means of protecting sacred plants and traditional cultural knowledge.

Ariel works closely with Life Comes From It, a Black, Brown, and Indigenous-stewarded grassroots grantmaking organization. She serves on the boards of Benefit Honoring, an organization dedicated to building a global community rooted in Indigenous traditional lifeways and biocultural preservation, and Urban Indigenous Collective, a health and wellness services organization. She is also a member of Roots To Sky Sanctuary, a Black, Brown, and Indigenous-stewarded, land-based healing justice community project. Alongside this work, Ariel sings with Wiingashk Negamajig Kwe’ok (Sweetgrass Women Singers) and facilitates a weekly women’s circle at Nokomis Cultural Heritage Center. Her hand drum is among her greatest teachers. These relationships—with Elders, community, culture, land, and water—remain central to how she understands leadership and responsibility.

Ariel graduated with high honors from the University of Michigan and earned her JD from Berkeley Law. She is an enrolled Tribal citizen of the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa & Chippewa Indians.

Robert "Roman" Haferd (he/him) is co-originator and co-directs Gwekwaadsing’s Black & Indigenous Re-Storying Project.  Roman is a restorative justice practitioner, civil rights attorney, farmer, and student of healing.  He serves as the Executive Director of Restorative Arlington, a veteran team of practitioners that has brought restorative diversion to Arlington County and beyond through its award-winning Heart of Safety program.  Roman is an adjunct professor of law at Georgetown Law School, and remains engaged as a restorative justice facilitator, innovator and trainer, having facilitated and overseen hundreds of restorative justice conferences in criminal and uncharged cases diverted from traditional prosecution, including serious violent offenses.  Prior to Restorative Arlington, in 2017 Roman was hired as the first Restorative Justice Coordinator for the Office of the Attorney General of the District of Columbia, where for seven years he helped build the nation’s largest in-house restorative justice program in Washington DC’s Justice Department.  He and his team’s trailblazing work establishing evidence-based restorative justice in the nation’s capital has been featured on NPR’s All Things Considered and Morning Edition.  

Roman partners with jurisdictions, communities and organizations nationwide to design and implement precedent-setting restorative justice pathways, and support new community projects in peacemaking, restorative justice, land-based and healing justice.  In 2020, Roman became a founding partner of Roots to Sky Sanctuary, a 125-acre BIPOC-owned regenerative farm and community hub located at the headwaters of the Potomac River, that fosters cultural, spiritual, and psychological sovereignty for individuals, families and youth traditionally lacking access to rural spaces. The Sanctuary is the recipient of a Mellon Foundation “Humanities in Place” Award for its fellowship program, “Re-Storying the Potomac,” and recently hosted, with Life Comes From It, a gathering of native and non-native land-based healing community leaders from around the country following the 2024 National Association for Community & Restorative Justice (NACRJ) Conference.  

Roman holds a BA from Bucknell University, and a JD from Harvard Law School. In his private legal practice, Roman has represented parties in numerous federal and state jurisdictions in cases involving deprivations of Constitutional rights.  Roman is regularly invited to speak about restorative justice, drug policy ethics and community healing.  He is originally from Akron, Ohio, and carries both African and European ancestry.  He is an identical twin and the son of a strong single mother, with farming in his blood on both sides of his family tree.

Sherrie McCumber is a mixed‑heritage mother of two boys, carrying her mother’s Ecuadorian roots, grounded in the place where her mother was born, and her father’s European immigrant lineage, each shaping her understanding of identity, resilience, and the work of repair. She spent fifteen years in San Diego before returning home to Illinois with her husband, where they continue to build a life grounded in family, community, and shared values.

Sherrie is a paralegal by training with experience supporting community‑rooted legal and organizational efforts. Guided by her heritage and a deep respect for relational ways of working, she focuses on building systems grounded in care, integrity, and cross‑cultural collaboration.

Her personal relationship with neurodivergence deeply shapes her worldview. As the mother of a neurodivergent son, she is a fierce advocate for his needs and for the broader systems that support children like him. This advocacy informs her commitment to creating environments - at home, in community, and within organizations - that honor difference, dignity, and the full humanity of each person.

Outside of work, Sherrie finds grounding in nature - hiking, being on the water, and spending time outdoors with her husband and sons. She brings a steady, relational presence to her work and community, guided by her heritage, her family, and a deep commitment to integrity and care.