00:00:00.000Hello, and welcome to For the Wild podcast. I'm Ayanna Young. Today, I'm speaking with Dr. Clint Carroll.
00:00:11.100I'm thinking along those terms, just understanding how the ethical frameworks that we have as Indigenous peoples can travel beyond the place-based relationships that are so vitally important for those frameworks,
00:00:26.480but that these ethical frameworks can exceed and, in fact, have a lot to teach everyone else, you know, in the world, especially in this moment of climate crisis.
00:00:38.840Clint Carroll is an associate professor of Native American and Indigenous Studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder.
00:00:48.520A citizen of the Cherokee Nation, he works at the intersections of indigenous studies, anthropology, and political ecology, with an emphasis on Cherokee environmental governance and land-based resurgence.
00:01:03.460Currently, he is working with Cherokee elders, students, and Cherokee Nation staff
00:01:08.200on an integrated education and research project that investigates Cherokee access to wild plants
00:02:25.860as well as your process of returning to your nation's land base?
00:02:32.520Yeah, I think that in answering this question,
00:02:35.920I have to start with the last part and then work my way backwards
00:02:40.240because my time in relating to the lands that are now known as the Cherokee Nation Reservation
00:02:49.160in Northeastern Oklahoma really is a direct result of being able to have the privilege to
00:02:55.720work with our elders and our knowledge keepers. And so my upbringing is not unusual. I grew up in
00:03:03.060a metro area in Dallas, Texas. And most Native people today actually live in urban areas. And so,
00:03:11.400but still, you know, my sense of connection to community, culture, place, and language
00:03:16.640suffered as a result. And so thinking about the origin of kind of my desire to work with my
00:03:26.180community, I have to trace through my winding path through higher education. And that led me to
00:03:33.040the University of Arizona after community college, after dropping out of my first year at university
00:03:39.020at a local university in North Texas. But I ended up with quite a renewed direction, and I wanted to
00:03:46.160commit to the field of American Indian studies, as well as cultural anthropology. And so thinking
00:03:53.760about some of the experiences I had as an undergraduate at Arizona, working with local
00:04:00.260Fishers in the Bahamas, working with communities in northern Mexico on different projects related
00:04:08.000to sustainability, just really wanted to connect those experiences and those perspectives of
00:04:15.740research being community-based, being applied, and being related to land and environmental issues.
00:04:22.240I wanted to apply that back home, and home being in the broad sense, and so thinking about
00:04:29.540reconnecting with relatives, with land, with elders in Oklahoma, in the Cherokee Nation.
00:04:36.500And so making my way that way after I graduated with my bachelor's degree, I started out working
00:04:43.540for the tribe, working for Office of Environmental Services, had a very kind person really advocate
00:04:51.380for me at the time due to most likely my persistence in bugging her about wanting to
00:04:58.080contribute to some of the initiatives that they had there. So Nancy John is still the current
00:05:03.620director of the Office of Environmental Programs for the Cherokee Nation, and she is Choctaw and
00:05:08.320Creek, and recognized my passion for these types of issues and put me on a project that was
00:05:15.920simultaneously super exciting, but also incredibly daunting. And it asked of me to design a
00:05:25.120a database of sorts of some of the plants that Cherokee people know and use so that that office
00:05:33.060could be better informed about their activities. And, you know, they had been set up as a really
00:05:39.100an example of tribal self-determination, kind of the equivalent of the Environmental Protection
00:05:45.860Agency for the Cherokee Nation. But that cultural element was missing in some of those activities
00:05:52.160that they did. And so my work entailed extending that research into the communities. And that was
00:06:00.120really where things got started. And that really was a process for me that was both,
00:06:05.960you could say, professional and personal in connecting to the land itself, in reconnecting
00:06:12.140with relatives, both extended and distant relatives, those who, you know, I descend from
00:06:21.260one string of the family tree and they descend from another. And it really was an amazing
00:06:27.660process of homecoming. And then beyond that, extending my relationships with elders and
00:06:35.140knowledge keepers who informed the project. And that led to the formation of the medicine
00:06:40.580keepers. And I've just been incredibly fortunate to continue our work together through the years.
00:06:46.480It was a product of being able to be in Oklahoma over the course of my graduate education at UC
00:06:53.100Berkeley during the summer specifically. And so after that first summer, I kind of picked up where
00:06:58.840I left off in subsequent years and really kind of tried to maintain that momentum through not only
00:07:04.460the project, but the essential element of relationship, which is, you know, I credit
00:07:10.500just the ability to spend that time on it, and really develop and nurture those relationships
00:07:18.540over time. Beautiful. Thank you for sharing all that. And yeah, I'd like to ask more about
00:07:29.220the relationship well your relationship to homeland and place admits dislocation and in
00:07:38.760your article cherokee relations to land reflections on historic plant gathering
00:07:43.980agreement between buffalo national river and the cherokee nation you write that the process of
00:07:50.820cherokee stewardship over oklahoma lands quote entails maintaining the responsibility to act as
00:07:57.100caretakers of a place that, while it is not the homeland, it is nevertheless a homeland, end quote.
00:08:06.620Yeah, I'm just really struck by this reverence and commitment to place, and I'm wondering if
00:08:12.840you could share with listeners a bit about how Cherokee people, after forced removal from your
00:08:18.460ancestral homelands in southern Appalachia, went about this process of making place, and
00:08:24.560And if you could also talk about the policies that led to removal and what role your ancestors' relationships with plants and the environmental knowledges garnered through those relationships played in tying your identity as Cherokees to your new land base.
00:08:42.100yeah well stories of of change and and flux and mobility really define our history as Cherokee
00:08:54.300people and so to to think with you know one of the those parts one of the parts of your question
00:09:00.680around movement mobility adaptation I've been thinking a lot about that in terms of
00:09:09.300you know, breaking out of fixity as it relates to how people associate, you know, how people
00:09:15.960think about Indigenous peoples, while at the same time staying with the importance of place
00:09:21.340and relationships to place. And so I've been thinking about this in terms of relational
00:09:26.740continuity. So acknowledging these intimate connections that we develop and we build with
00:09:33.540place and with other than human beings, but also how our ethical frameworks travel, so to speak.
00:09:40.020And I think there are some profound theoretical insights to be gained from that, as well as
00:09:44.260practical ones regarding the climate crisis. So thinking about ethical frameworks as,
00:09:52.160according to indigenous philosophies and cosmologies, as reframing our conversation
00:09:58.700around technology so thinking more in terms of cultural technologies or relational technologies
00:10:05.160the ability to to relate well and to do so in a way that acknowledges interdependence and
00:10:11.480reciprocity so that said you know getting to some of the the more details of your question
00:10:18.520regard to Cherokee history it's also important to point out that you know the the Trail of Tears
00:10:24.360isn't the only story with regard to removal and and migration so to speak um and of course in the
00:10:32.520case of the trail of tears it was forced migration what's important to also consider are the other
00:10:38.260stories other histories of Cherokee people with regard to movement uh specifically the old
00:10:43.420settlers what have been you know come to what people often refer to as the old settlers
00:10:48.000And they were heterogeneous, you know, in terms of their sense of how they identified as Cherokees. A lot of my elders talk about Kituas, who are typically referenced as traditionalists in Cherokee society, but Kituas aren't necessarily synonymous with old settlers.
00:11:10.360There were others, other factions or groups, if you will, in Cherokee history who could also be under that term.
00:11:19.460But I'll start with talking about how my elders talk about Kituas and their interpretation of what was happening at that time during, you know, during or leading up to the removal period.
00:11:32.400really actually going way further back from the 1830s, which is typically known as the removal
00:11:40.440era, and thinking about migration before all of this. And I don't want to say voluntary,
00:11:48.160because I think voluntary implies that there was inherent willingness and eagerness to leave the0.96
00:11:55.020homelands. But my elders talk about an ancient Ketua precept being move away from the conflict.
00:12:02.400And so fundamentally, just an ethos of tohi, or peace, well-being, balance, and conflict upsetting that requires the people to move away from it in order to maintain these, you know, fundamental concepts of being in balance with the world around you.
00:12:21.160And so Kituas have been, were in this area, and I say this area, I mean, just west of the Mississippi River. So what we now know is northern Arkansas, some say as early as 1721. And so that's, you know, that's a century before the, over a century before the removal era.
00:12:42.760And so thinking about that in relationship to place, in relationship to that place specifically, which became parts of the lands that we now know as the Cherokee Nation Reservation, is important to kind of keep in mind when we think about, you know, relationships with the land despite, you know, movement and whether that is punctuated as in the Trail of Tears or that it happened over a longer period of time is important to kind of take all of those into account.
00:13:12.140And this, of course, is not to deny the extreme losses our people experienced from forced removal. But to me, it helps push back against portrayals of inauthenticity, for example, as being a relocated tribe, but as well as notions of fixity when it comes to Indigenous peoples.
00:13:31.300And so, again, thinking about that term relational continuity, I wrote a piece recently that came out in an edited volume that really worked through some of these stories that people were telling around the turn of the last century to oral historians.
00:13:48.880And so the Indian Pioneer Papers has a bunch of these accounts that Cherokee people were telling about their experience in these, quote unquote, new lands.
00:14:01.340And then I juxtapose those with stories that were recorded by the anthropologist James Mooney with folks in the Eastern Band, so in North Carolina, that related specifically to our homelands.
00:14:14.320And so looking at these stories of Cherokees who were in what is now called Oklahoma and comparing them to stories that are representative of relationships with the homelands in North Carolina and the surrounding area, it's really interesting to me to kind of think through how did Cherokees continue to be Cherokee?
00:14:36.100And by that, I mean, continue to not only practice Cherokee cultural traditions and perhaps speak the language and all of these kinds of cultural notions, but be Cherokee in terms of how we relate to other than human beings, specifically in this piece, to animals, to other than human animals.
00:14:55.060And so anyway, I'm thinking along those terms, just by way of kind of understanding how the ethical frameworks that we have as Indigenous peoples can travel beyond the place-based relationships that are so vitally important for those frameworks, but that these ethical frameworks can exceed and, in fact, have a lot to teach everyone else in the world, especially in this moment of climate crisis.
00:15:25.060yeah yeah I want to talk a bit more about how the climate crisis is impacting the Cherokee
00:15:36.560nation and in chapter two of your book roots of our renewal ethnobotany and Cherokee environmental
00:15:43.860governance you describe how many of the plants your people have had relations with since time
00:15:50.180immemorial, were actually present in the landscape, even through relocation. So I'd love if you could
00:15:57.320share a bit more about this for listeners and how these relationships are preserved by Cherokee
00:16:02.380Nation medicine keepers and re-engaged through the ongoing project, Knowing the Land.
00:16:11.260Yeah, absolutely. So, well, I don't want to frame this as luck, which is really an unfitting term
00:16:19.060when discussing colonialism and colonial policy, right?
00:16:22.080But when we compare our relocation as Cherokees to other tribes who were removed to much more
00:16:29.440dramatically foreign landscapes, if you will, Cherokees did find themselves in a position
00:16:35.300of not having to learn and relate entirely from scratch.
00:16:39.340And so, you know, thinking about both the similarities between the homelands and the
00:16:45.660southeastern Appalachian Mountains, and what became the Cherokee Nation in the westernmost
00:16:52.280extent of the Ozark Highlands, you know, that's important to kind of take into account,
00:16:58.360that there are a significant amount of plants that are a constant throughout those two ecoregions.
00:17:06.340And also the old settlers factored into this history as well, in terms of being able to
00:17:11.740to learn and relate to a new place. And, you know, we think about this in terms of how
00:17:18.160they were able to teach relatives who had suffered that forced march from the homelands
00:17:25.760during the Trail of Tears in the winter of 1838, 1839. And so I think about that a lot
00:17:32.720in terms of, you know, where we ended up as a result of forced relocation and other migrations.
00:17:39.940and and how there is an element of familiarity and we look at the the landscape you know
00:17:47.880geographically but also topographically as it's you know much less dramatic but still
00:17:53.840at least in the eastern parts of the Cherokee Nation representative of those hills and valleys
00:17:59.120and places where Cherokee people felt at home and could relate well to the plants and animals that
00:18:07.440they were able to recognize, but also learn about new ones in the process. And the truth is that we
00:18:14.280did lose about a third of our plant relatives. And I say lose, but as a result of the forced
00:18:19.820relocation, we didn't have access to about a third of those plants that grew in the southeast.
00:18:27.140And I'm drawing from the work of Alfred Vick, who wrote a paper on this, looking at comparatively
00:18:32.800a list of Cherokee-used plants in the Southeast, in the homelands, and those that had been
00:18:39.080recorded in Oklahoma and looking at the differences and, you know, what Cherokees
00:18:46.380were able to recognize contributed to their ability to persist in the healing and food
00:18:52.880ways they had practiced in the homelands, but there was also a lot of learning that
00:18:57.740Cherokee people did and that included not only observations and you could say trial and error
00:19:03.860but also there are profound stories of learning from the land itself of gaining knowledge from
00:19:10.260the creator going to ceremony going to prayer and there are stories of medicine people you know
00:19:18.300asking the creator directly for help after experiencing profound loss and so that in
00:19:27.140itself is a to me also represents the process of relational continuity and thinking about
00:19:33.460relationships not only in terms of observation and what western science would call knowledge
00:19:40.300production learning about the land but also allowing that to be a two-way street and allowing
00:19:45.040that to incorporate spirituality as well our connection to broader spiritual forces that
00:19:50.780that also have the ability to teach. So there are also many stories of actively producing
00:19:58.740landscapes that enabled such continuation of a Cherokee way of life or something that resembled
00:20:04.800that way of life that we developed in the homelands. And so where there are other stories
00:20:10.160of Cherokee people transplanting seeds, there's speculation that ginseng, one of our seven sacred
00:20:16.800plants was one of those seeds, and that had been re-established in the West because of its
00:20:23.080importance to Cherokee medicine people, but also the application of cultural fire, cultural burning,
00:20:29.940which again was something that Cherokees not only transferred from their practices in the East,
00:20:36.740but had been applied to the lands since before the arrival of Cherokee people by other Indigenous
00:20:42.480peoples. And so it's important to acknowledge that the landscape wasn't, you know, an untouched
00:20:48.360Eden, so to speak. You know, it had been lived with and in relationship with by others before
00:20:54.600Cherokees arrived or were pushed further west. We can also talk about free-range animal husbandry
00:21:01.180practices that contributed to more open landscapes within forests, so open forested areas that
00:21:09.900enabled easier mobility. You combine that with fire, and things looked very different during
00:21:17.060that time, certainly before Oklahoma statehood in 1907, when things started getting much more
00:21:24.140difficult for Cherokee people to practice these ways of life as a result of the privatization
00:21:31.300of land through the allotment policy, as well as the continued encroachment of settlers into
00:21:38.260Cherokee territory. And so we think about this leading up to today, and this is one of the access
00:21:44.940to land and really understanding how Cherokee people are navigating such fractionated landscapes
00:21:53.600is one of the central goals of our current project that we're enacting with the Medicine0.95
00:22:00.520Keepers. And so it's funded by the National Science Foundation, as well as the Indian Land0.94
00:22:05.720Tenure Foundation, and I'm working with five Cherokee students on a land education program
00:22:12.280that was developed in coordination and partnership with the Cherokee Medicine Keepers, as well as a
00:22:19.200community-based research project that really seeks to better understand these questions of access
00:22:25.000and then inform tribal strategies for conservation and really land back so that Cherokee people can
00:22:34.140continue to access lands in order to enable the continuation of these practices and relationships with the land.
00:27:59.760where my mind goes is looking at how we can actively
00:28:05.560conserve lands within our current tribal trust holdings,
00:28:10.620As well as where we can enact different forms of land back that are in relationship with local landowners, with perhaps federal agencies, in one case, you know, which is directly related to this question, looking further east and to areas that have more of a buffer to them.0.97
00:28:34.040And one case in point is a recent project that we've carried out with Buffalo National River in northern Arkansas, which presents a lot of just complexities, also ironies in the sense of, you know, this being a national park that is a part of the system of the U.S. government that has, you know, by and large been responsible for dispossessing Indigenous peoples and creating these enclosures that really represent0.70
00:29:03.380fundamental separation between humans and nature. But at the same time, paradoxically,
00:29:10.440you know, having this sense of, you know, again, a buffer zone, but also a sense of a protective0.99
00:29:15.700sense of, well, you know, these lands, despite the fact that Indigenous peoples have not been
00:29:20.620able to enact their practices of caretaking and relationship with them, have, you know,
00:29:28.720by and large been protected by this enclosure, this boundary. And so we find a lot of our
00:29:34.460medicine plants growing within that area and the Cherokee Nation recently via the medicine
00:29:41.360keepers. And we worked together with the team from the University of Arizona, the Bureau of
00:29:46.500Applied Research and Anthropology to really develop a gathering agreement that was and still
00:29:53.720as quite a novel thing for the National Park Service in that it allows American Indian tribes
00:29:58.820to establish agreements to gather within the park boundaries, which is kind of a system-wide
00:30:05.920or agency-wide, if you will, act, or I think it's a rule is the technical term for it,
00:30:17.320that allows these agreements to happen.
00:30:20.320And so we look at that as a strategy for adapting to these changes we're seeing.
00:30:28.060You know, if the plants within our reservation are being threatened,
00:30:32.460how do we actively seek to protect them through tribal conservation formations,
00:30:38.620as well as how do we work strategically with national agencies, federal agencies,
00:30:44.400that may have a troubled history, but at the same time would further enable Cherokee people to
00:30:51.840continue these relationships with plants through gathering agreements. And so, you know, that of
00:30:58.860course is wrapped up in so much more significance with regard to Cherokee people's presence in that
00:31:04.780area, specifically the old settlers who actually signed a treaty with the federal government
00:31:10.940in 1821, I want to say. Actually, it was 1817. I'm correcting myself there. But the Treaty of 1817
00:31:25.160between, this is contested because the old settlers had claimed their own Cherokee Nation,
00:31:31.980the Western Cherokee Nation. So they were a faction and they weren't looked upon very well
00:31:37.420by the Cherokee Nation that was still out east in the homelands.
00:31:41.800But nonetheless, they're considered treaty lands.
00:31:43.820If you look at a map of Buffalo National River and a map of the Treaty of 1817 lands,
00:31:51.680And so in a way, this agreement is reconnecting with treaty lands and reasserting Cherokee
00:31:57.120presence in this area, as well as showing promise to affect the way that the park is
00:32:03.820managed by the National Park Service staff.
00:32:05.820we've been hit really hard by COVID in terms of our collective work together so we haven't been
00:32:11.320able to enact the agreement as robustly as as we would have otherwise but the sense of being able
00:32:20.640to not only go in and gather plants but also establish a relationship with the park service
00:32:26.320in a way that informs how they caretake those lands is is hugely significant
00:32:32.700yeah i absolutely agree and that's really
00:32:38.180powerful and exciting work i'm really happy to hear about that and yeah i just feel like a lot
00:32:48.160of your work simultaneously navigates and subverts land management systems and structures
00:32:55.100imposed by settler colonialism for indigenous sovereignty and indigenous futures and i'm
00:33:01.980thinking about an article you wrote in which you address this titled Commentary, the Environmental
00:33:07.660Anthropology of Settler Colonialism Part 2, wherein you write, quote, contemporary tribally
00:33:15.160based conservation projects can adeptly speak the language of conservation while holding true
00:33:23.700the understanding of land as a web of relationships, end quote. And I think this is particularly true
00:33:33.560in the context of the agreement you helped forge between Cherokee Nation and Buffalo National
00:33:39.660River. Yeah, so for listeners who are unfamiliar, I wonder if you could explain a bit more on this
00:33:47.240agreement in the context of your nation's treaty history with the land and yeah any other details
00:33:54.660that come with that yeah well I mean that that's the trick right um how to and you know my my work
00:34:02.740is is is really situated in that space of you know engaging not only settler institutions and
00:34:11.560agencies, but engaging our own tribal institutions and agencies in a way that, you know, understands
00:34:19.480the very complex ways of navigating different systems for different purposes strategically.
00:34:30.420And oftentimes, you know, those are fraught navigations because of the baggage that many
00:34:40.200of these institutions and structures carry. But the way that I was observing things happen and
00:34:46.960unfold throughout the course of my work with the medicine keepers who worked very, very closely and
00:34:52.860continue to work very closely with our natural resource managers, now within the Secretary of
00:34:59.300Natural Resources or the Office of the Secretary of Natural Resources, really pushed me to think
00:35:05.580through these processes. And really, it's another expression of relationality, of
00:35:11.320understanding how bureaucracies work, understanding how, you know, governance unfolds and plays out
00:35:19.760through relationships between people and contestations over land-based issues,
00:35:27.560as well as culture and tradition. And so the medicine keepers, their formation represented
00:35:33.460to me this balance between the Cherokee Nation as a state, as an indigenous state, and this is
00:35:41.960something that the Cherokee people have been engaging for a long time since the formation
00:35:48.060of our constitutional form of government in the East in the early 1800s. You know, seeing how
00:35:55.400the medicine keepers are able to provide a sense of balance between going too far in that direction
00:36:04.160of you know bureaucratic governance of of completely buying into state structures
00:36:09.340and then inserting themselves into the conversation in a way that that guides our natural resource
00:36:16.800managers and and really lends their what you call their cultural capital their their you know
00:36:23.260fluent-speaking Cherokee elders who grew up with land-based knowledge and spent a lot of time out
00:36:29.700out in the woods learning from their elders. And that group contains generations of knowledge and
00:36:38.240has been able to wield that, if you will, in the service of not only protecting our lands,
00:36:45.620but encouraging people to think about our relationship to place. And one of our
00:36:50.540spiritual leaders for the medicine keepers. He is a practicing medicine person. He's in his
00:36:56.340mid-90s. His name is Crosland Smith, who I work with very closely and have been continuing to
00:37:02.340work with him through the publication of his own books. He remarked early in our conversations with
00:37:09.380the group that we have to honor the spirit of this place. We have to honor the spirit of this land.
00:37:14.640And that to me was profound in the sense that he recognized that not only that we have a relationship to place that is not predicated on ownership or possession, but that also, you know, as Cherokees, as you mentioned earlier, these aren't our homelands, but they are a homeland.
00:37:35.260They are a home for us. And we have to honor the fact that, you know, we are there to caretake them rather than to possess them or to develop them or, you know, any of these other ways of understanding relationships to land from a Western, Euro-Western perspective.
00:37:53.060And so, you know, we think about these types of playing this or navigating within these systems. And it's, like I said, it can be fraught. But at the same time, I think it's extremely exciting to see where we go with this and how these conversations can really manifest in important ways.
00:38:20.240and at the same time sustain the protective barrier that our tribal governments represent
00:38:27.840with regard to settler state encroachment and other colonial policies that they were built
00:38:34.580to stave off. And so with that, some recent accomplishments that have been a direct result
00:38:40.440of the Medicine Keeper's work have been just in March of last year, of 2021, the establishment
00:38:46.800of a legislative mechanism that put aside 810 acres of land
00:38:54.740in eastern Adair County, so really bordering the Arkansas border.
00:39:01.020And this place that the elders have christened the name
00:39:06.220which means the peaceful place of medicine has been set aside
00:39:14.500as a cultural conservation tract, and that's a direct result of some of our work together
00:39:20.880in which the elders have really made it a priority or at least voiced their preference
00:39:27.880for conserving tribal lands in the face of a lot of the practices that the Cherokee
00:39:34.040Nation inherited from the BIA, like cattle grazing leases and then previously establishing
00:39:41.060you know, monocrop silvicultural projects for loblolly pine trees, which eliminated the oak
00:39:47.500and hickory forests in those areas. And so really pushing back and asserting a sense of Cherokee
00:39:53.940relationality into a system that, again, is a strategic way of interfacing with colonial power
00:40:01.020that also can be articulated and enacted in ways that honor our relationships to place and our
00:40:08.580our relational continuity as Cherokee people.
00:40:14.940Yeah. You were speaking about your relationships with the national parks earlier, and
00:40:23.520you know, just the context of the history of them and the inception of which they're rooted in and
00:40:31.580perpetuates still this, you know, settler colonial logic. But I'm just thinking about how at the
00:40:38.960close of your article, Cherokee Relationships to Land, you observed elders walking through the
00:40:45.000woods as if being reunited with old friends. And this is such a beautiful vision. And I just,
00:40:52.240I want to kind of scratch at this question or this topic a little bit more and hear about your
00:40:57.780perspective on reclaiming your nation's ties to the land albeit through the settler conservationist
00:41:05.120enclosure of land yeah um there were some profound moments uh in in that work that we did
00:41:18.180with the elders and and you know some of them um you know as i wrote uh really walked through that
00:41:27.260place and a sense of of reconnection with with familiar landscapes and and being able to
00:41:35.740to see and touch and feel plants that were in you know that that people have a lot less access to
00:41:46.160in the 14 county reservation a lot of elders remarked that it felt like being in the homelands
00:41:55.120And so I think there was that as well, that sense of, you know, here's a place that is not, it's only a three hour drive from Tahlequah, from our tribal capital, and yet, you know, invoked a profound feeling of home for the elders.
00:42:16.920um and then you know interestingly i think those who we were working with and so they're
00:42:26.840the medicine keepers include most of our language department and so they do they spend a lot of time
00:42:35.780actually and i say a lot but it's it's probably once or twice a year pre-covid working with the
00:42:42.020Eastern Band through a language consortium. So they actually do travel back to the homelands
00:42:47.080relatively frequently. And yet here's a place that's only three hours away from Tahlequah,
00:42:55.140from home. And it also evokes these feelings of being in the homelands. And so, and at the same
00:43:01.880time, it's complicated because Northern Arkansas and that area that surrounds the Buffalo National
00:43:09.040River, there was a lot of apprehension from the elders about, are we going to be experiencing
00:43:15.980racism in this area of, quite frankly, a lot of white supremacist organizations and kind of more
00:43:24.380of an unfriendly environment according to their perspective being outside of their comfort zone
00:43:33.520of home and so you know for all those reasons it's you know I reflect back on that experience
00:43:42.780and I also look forward to continuing that work and continuing our intent to bring the students
00:43:50.060who I'm working with out there and you know perform the inaugural act of gathering a plant
00:43:54.800under this agreement you know and I think of you know reconnecting and reclaiming areas that we
00:44:01.460have connections to but for the purposes of enacting a relationality that exceeds kind of
00:44:09.380a claiming narrative and is more about the ability to perpetuate these practices and you know actively
00:44:17.360teach and show students in an area that you know that we we now have access to through that
00:44:23.800mechanism and so I hope you know thinking ahead to that that time when we can gather again
00:44:32.160that those teachings will come out and that that sense of of place will
00:44:39.060you know be able to be transmitted between the elders and our our students in the program and
00:44:46.540then beyond from there with other Cherokees who seek to be connected to that place in a way that's
00:46:22.620And I've heard you speak about the Cherokee story on the origin of disease and medicine.
00:46:30.080And I wonder if you could recount that story for us today and perhaps speak to any lessons
00:46:35.940you see emerging from the story that might be applicable for non-Native folks and non-Cherokees
00:46:43.640and how we implement an ethics of care for land in our daily lives.
00:46:50.120Yeah, so this story has, I think for a lot of us, a lot of Cherokee people and scholars
00:47:00.040who are thinking about our current moment and really the past couple of years has really
00:47:08.300resonated and and and the way the story goes is that um you know there was a time in which
00:47:15.340the human beings and I say the human beings because for many indigenous peoples their name
00:47:23.360for themselves simply translates to the real people or the human beings and so Cherokee people0.94
00:47:30.140The human beings had not been good relatives to plants and animals and the land and had been wantonly killing their animal relatives in ways that didn't respect the gifts that they offer for well-being and flourishing.0.91
00:47:51.980and so the animals came together in a grand council and the way the story goes is that
00:47:59.820they had representatives there speaking from their from their perspectives of what the humans
00:48:06.700had been had been doing and there are many proposals from different representatives on
00:48:14.040how to retaliate against the human beings as a result of the disrespect that they were showing
00:48:19.460them. And, you know, through all these different proposals, you know, each one of them had its
00:48:27.240goals, but eventually fell short because of the inability to really see it through or carry it
00:48:36.900out. And what they ended up deciding on was that they would inflict disease upon the human beings
00:48:43.120as a way of retaliating, as a way of teaching them to regain balance and relearn that respect
00:48:51.980toward other beings. And so a lot of diseases were associated with specific animals.
00:48:59.420The most common one that's told is rheumatism being inflicted by the spirit of the deer.
00:49:07.740if humans hunted, killed a deer, and didn't give thanks for it, it would be visited upon them so
00:49:16.420that they could never draw a bow back again. And so what happened as this was going on was that
00:49:25.400the plant nations, the plant people, came together and took pity upon the human beings and
00:49:31.820offered themselves up as medicine for these various ailments that had been inflicted upon them.
00:49:37.740And so that's a very short version of the story, but as we reflect on it and think about the implications for our times today, you know, even before COVID, Cherokee people and our relationships to plants have been kind of couched in this debt of gratitude and in this profound sense of relationality and reciprocity with the plant nations, if you will.
00:50:07.740but also re-centering and balancing our relationships with other than human animals.
00:50:14.580And we think about, you know, a lot of the issues that were coming to the fore around the beginning of the global pandemic
00:50:23.240and how that related to, you know, discussions around these, you know, frontiers of human and animal coexistence.
00:50:34.120And really kind of what I'm getting at is some of the theories or hypotheses about the origin of COVID-19. And, you know, it struck home in the sense that, you know, human beings had fallen out of balance with their relationship to the non-human world, specifically animals.
00:50:53.340and it really made me think about that story in the way of you know what it can offer
00:50:59.960the world as we struggle and think through how we got here and again going back to what I was
00:51:09.900saying earlier around you know narratives of technology and you know the technological fix
00:51:16.800for a lot of our wicked problems today you know it struck me that what wasn't represented in these
00:51:23.620conversations you know we we think about some of the initiatives and and narratives if you will
00:51:33.220about how the vaccine was you know going to be at the time this technological fix for the cure of
00:51:40.660of COVID-19 and what was missing was a real like a radical reframing of our relationship to the
00:51:47.880world to the to the other than human world and so you know I thought there was a lot of there was a
00:51:54.540lot missed in focusing on solely the ability of western science to triumph uh western science to
00:52:02.660find a fix to things rather than the the more meaningful work of trying to regain our sense of
00:52:10.000responsibility and relationship to the world that wasn't centering human beings.
00:52:19.120And so, you know, again, I go back to thinking about how can we, you know, acknowledge the
00:52:25.380importance of, you know, Western science when it comes to vaccines and vaccine development,
00:52:30.920but at the same time incorporate and acknowledge Indigenous philosophies in ways that stress,
00:52:36.220you know how to be good relatives and um you know that story reminds us that we've been there before
00:52:45.680a lot of times indigenous peoples are romanticized in ways that assume that you know we're inherently
00:52:53.080connected to nature and yet the story you know underscores the fact that well we're not perfect
00:53:01.600we're human there's not an innate sense of connection to the natural world like a you know
00:53:07.400a lot of the ecological indian stereotypes portray but we learn from those mistakes and we we encase
00:53:14.380them in stories that continue to teach us today and continue to have relevance and so that's why
00:53:20.160I think it's just such a profound story that that certainly surfaced for a lot of us
00:53:26.780as we were trying to grapple with our current times
00:53:29.820yeah oh there was so much in that response um i've had to sit with it for a bit but
00:53:41.160yeah as we near the end of our conversation i'd like to ask you about indigenous studies scholar
00:53:49.880dr glenn colehard's concept of grounded normativity as it relates to your knowing the
00:53:56.280land project. In an article, Relational Activism and Indigenous Futures, you remind readers that
00:54:04.260quote, contrary to popular belief, indigenous people do not have an innate connection with
00:54:10.180the land. Rather, indigenous peoples maintain a set of relationships with other than human
00:54:16.960beings that are formed through tribal and place-specific teachings and traditions, end
00:54:21.560quote. Now, with the Knowing the Land project being intimately rooted in the knowledges held
00:54:27.700by community elders, long-held relations and commitments to place, and Cherokee knowledge
00:54:34.960systems, I'm wondering if you could talk about how the project's goal of disseminating traditional
00:54:41.200lifeways relates to the notion of grounded normativity. And maybe some follow-ups to that
00:54:47.360is what is the political power of re-indigenizing worldview
00:54:50.960and Cherokee epistemology for future generations?
00:56:41.280And so that's another central facet of the program.
00:56:45.760The third one, communalism and interdependency.
00:56:50.700So if we all work together, we will get somewhere.
00:56:57.200So understanding that we all have gifts to offer, that everyone has a role to play.
00:57:03.780Again, emphasizing non-hierarchical ways of making decisions and learning in the process.
00:57:11.380And then the last one, having a good time.
00:57:13.220So, enjoyment, thinking about, you know, what's the single most important thing and really the most radical thing that we can be doing is just relating to the land and experiencing joy on the land, right?
00:57:30.260And so those are the principles that really guide the program. And the students and I, we meet remotely because I live here in Colorado. And, you know, we've read, you know, we're reading other scholarship that has contributed and really informed the way that the program is designed.
00:57:52.200And certainly, you know, Glenn's work and others around Indigenous land education has been central in, you know, how we continue to think about the work that we're doing.
00:58:04.920And, you know, this is, I'm referring to grounded normativity as it's expressed through DeChinta Bush University, which, you know, Glenn and others run up there at Yellowknives in Northwest Territories in Canada.
00:58:22.200And so thinking through how after these years of sustaining the program, despite the fact that we haven't been able to actively meet together with the elders, and kind of reflecting back on some of the profound activities that we've been able to do before,
00:58:44.880you know it's I'm you know thinking through ways of expressing what this means to us collectively
00:58:54.660and and I keep coming back to relationality as I was writing in that piece that you mentioned
00:59:00.780and thinking about you know how does this you know reference Cherokee ways of understanding
00:59:06.780what we're doing according to these guiding principles but also how can we continue to
00:59:12.420think in ways that inform our project from a Cherokee perspective. And, you know, that type of
00:59:21.500kind of linguistic theorizing, if you will, has been really helpful. And, you know, one thing that
00:59:27.440I gravitate toward is understanding relationships in Cherokee and how we express them in the language
00:59:35.500uh is is never a possessive thing it's it's always a an action-based way of describing
00:59:43.360relationships and so you could even say it's a it's a verb like thinking about the word for
00:59:49.120my mother in english um so agiji it actually if you look at it linguistically from a Cherokee
00:59:57.300perspective it means the one who was mothering me and so it's it's more of a an action a verb
01:00:03.840that is encased in that word rather than kind of the sense in English of having a possessive in
01:00:11.400front of that word. And so, you know, I'm reading, you know, kind of relating that to some of my
01:00:17.520academic scholarly work and, you know, ongoing projects. You know, I just read a piece by Jodi
01:00:24.380Bird on where she engages with Glenn's term grounded normativity, but then proposes something
01:00:30.360in terms of grounded relationality that gets at some of the you know I guess the hang-ups if you
01:00:36.580will around normativity as it intersects with Indigenous queer studies and expressing this in
01:00:42.820a way that doesn't necessarily reify the normative but is still in essence a lot of what Glenn is
01:00:49.260writing about so so I I'm liking that right now thinking through grounded relationality I'm also
01:00:56.280thinking with a collective of scholars on, you know, how to really kind of fully express
01:01:02.480an Indigenous study's take on political ecology. And so we're thinking through, you know, what it
01:01:07.900would mean to, you know, express this in terms of Indigenous political relationalities. So I think
01:01:13.920that that term really does a lot for me in understanding this type of work and in thinking
01:01:20.620about that kind of you know how do we you know distill if if you want to use that word how do we
01:01:27.620take these place-based projects that are grounded in and you know tribally specific languages and
01:01:34.540relationships to place and and really think about their application broadly you know how they travel
01:01:40.540and those those terms really help me think about that as well as you know other kind of emphasis
01:01:47.200on the ethical frameworks behind local place-based knowledge. So traditional ecological knowledge
01:01:53.100that has profound relevance, like the origin of disease and medicine that I just recounted and
01:01:59.000discussed. And so that's what kind of, you know, keeps me thinking about, you know, the broader
01:02:05.400implications of this work that we're doing, as well as the importance of a continued and sustained
01:02:11.840focused on the local and you know that's that's where my passion is I love working with my people
01:02:19.140I love working with elders and students on the land and you know it's highly applied and it's
01:02:25.380working toward very locally specific goals but I think that's part of the answer too and I'm a part
01:02:31.600of a new project that was actually funded by the Canadian government I'm working with colleagues
01:02:37.880at the University of Alberta, and it's a $24 million project over the course of six years,
01:02:44.500I think. And the way that that is structured is that they are, they have designed this grant
01:02:50.860project to connect through a network, but also ultimately support place-based projects,
01:02:59.040Indigenous projects toward biodiversity protection and health. And so I think that for me helps me
01:03:05.780kind of think through okay yes absolutely it's important to think about the broader implications
01:03:10.860but at the end of the day you know my commitment is to you know this specific place and specific
01:03:17.240community but that can't be necessarily divorced from the broader implications as well so that's
01:03:24.240what I'm getting at in terms of relational activism through that piece that you mentioned
01:03:29.580in terms of acknowledging that you know we have the front lines activists who are you know the
01:03:35.360water protectors and are, you know, actively trying to stop the pipeline. We have the advocates
01:03:43.160at the UN and in the Department of the Interior for the United States who are working within that
01:03:49.560system. And we've got these place-based projects. And I see myself situated within that specifically,
01:03:55.040but also trying to speak out, you know, broadly to find the connections and understand that this
01:04:00.240is a relational space that we're all working in.
01:04:07.040My goodness, thank you so much, Dr. Carroll.