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00:00:26.640Hey for the wild community, Ayana here.
00:00:29.720I'd like to offer my gratitude and thank you to the city of Bend, Oregon for generously supporting our work.
00:00:36.160From the rushing waters of the Deschutes River to the spring wildflowers that bloom in the mountains of the Three Sisters Wilderness,
00:00:44.140this place holds so much life and wild abundance.
00:00:47.500While exploring the land and waters of Bend, we encourage you to take a moment and consider those who work hard to take care of these spaces day to day.
00:00:56.920Trail maintenance and habitat restoration not only support the health of vibrant ecosystems,
00:01:02.380but also allow those who visit to connect with the outdoors.
00:01:06.600For the Wild is excited to work alongside Bend, Oregon to foster a culture of stewardship
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00:01:18.700Pledge for the Wild helps those who are passionate about nature conservation give back to local
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00:01:41.660Okay, cool. We're going live in, it's not live, but we're going recording in three, two, one.
00:01:48.260laws that are written on paper can be broken but laws that are written in the stars and the bark
00:01:59.120of trees those you just cannot break those laws you can try it might work for a couple generations
00:02:05.300but it's going to fall into itself welcome to for the wild podcast i'm ayana young
00:02:11.440In the beginning, there was the word, flares of white fire burning in the void, her sparkling
00:02:25.800phosphoric dream escaping through the chasms of rebellion, her scintillating fountain of
00:02:38.120love, defying the laws of silence, holographic refractions of her wild imagination, searing
00:02:49.580through the night in five trillion directions, finally coming to rest in the marrow of our
00:02:57.980bones we are the supernova that exploded long
00:03:04.880we walked into the valley together as one not quite sure
00:03:21.240I'm excited to share this refreshing conversation with my dear friend Lila June as we explore poetry, language, and traditions that honor indigenous rights and remind us all of our sacred responsibilities.
00:03:38.060Join us as we meditate upon the true spirit of giving back to each other and to the land.
00:10:22.040They are endemic the same way species are endemic. So talking about that and sort of, yeah, breathing life into this and showing how these rights are important to have in everyday life.
00:10:34.140I'd love if you could tell us more about your intention behind these lines.
00:10:39.200Quote, the undrip puts our principles into the format of the numbed world. It begins to speak of the sacred. To achieve its goal, the numbed world must come into the format of the sweat lodge.
00:10:52.040oh yeah that's that's a big one so if you ever spend just a couple weeks learning an indigenous0.97
00:11:03.920language you will realize that we live in completely different worldviews there are
00:11:10.720assumptions built into our language that are not built into english and our languages are very rich
00:11:18.260Our languages are very spiritual. Our languages are very much relational and kinship-minded.
00:11:24.200Our languages are verb-based. It's all about the dynamic flux of creation. So as soon as you
00:11:31.280write anything in English, which the UNDRIP is in English, you are already missing out on entire
00:11:37.680universes of Indigenous experience, entire universes of Indigenous thought, entire universes
00:11:44.200of indigenous planning, implementation, and reflection, a lot gets lost in translation. I
00:11:50.860would say, I would dare say like 90% of what we're trying to talk about gets lost when you translate
00:11:56.840from our languages into English. For example, to say mother, you don't say amah, you say shimah,
00:12:05.180which means my mother. Shi means my, ma means mother, or amah means mother. So you always link
00:12:13.420shih with any of these kinship words because you're saying you are my mother. You are my
00:12:18.340precious mother. And built into that word shih is like this attitude of preciousness that you're so
00:12:24.680precious to me. And our word for maternal grandmother is different than our word for
00:12:29.720paternal grandmother. Maternal grandmother is shamasaneh. Paternal grandmother is shenaleh.
00:12:36.480And so shamasaneh, we have a really heavy focus on the matrilineal line of things.
00:12:42.860So what comes from your mother is wildly different than what comes from your father. And what comes from your mother has certain roles and responsibilities in your life different from those who come from your father. So our kinship terms are the basis and the word means kinship. It means understanding who you're related to by clan. It means the responsibilities you have to someone you're related to by clan.
00:13:08.900So that little syllable has so much packed into it. It has love. It has community. It has
00:13:15.520responsibility. It has hard work. It means accountability. And that is the foundation
00:13:21.400of our entire universe. So by the time you, I even say, hi, Ayana, you know, I've already lost
00:13:28.360what my people are about. The real way to address you is Shade, you know, older sister. Like,
00:13:35.280I love you as my older sister. And I have certain responsibilities to you as a younger sister. And
00:13:41.260you have certain responsibilities to me as an older sister. And so all of that gets lost. So
00:13:46.020when I say that, you know, the undrip is formatted for the numbed world, I mean that it's formatted
00:13:52.980for the brain. It's formatted for the intellect. And a lot of what the Western world believes to
00:13:59.680be true is that which the intellect believes to be true you have our hearts and our spirits going
00:14:06.640into atrophy when we enter into western institutions such as universities such as politics
00:14:11.960such as writing books and reading books all of that is generally speaking geared towards the
00:14:18.980intellect unless some brave soul decides to break out of that norm and say you know what i don't
00:14:24.460know why my heart is saying this is good but i'm going to trust it i have no logic i have no
00:14:28.880rationale to explain it. But I'm going to say that love is important right now. And feeling love
00:14:33.700between people is important right now. So the Sweat Lodge, on the other hand, which I say, you
00:14:38.780know, this book is designed to bring the world into the format of the Sweat Lodge. The Sweat Lodge,
00:14:46.600if you haven't ever been in one, is completely dark inside. So everyone has no skin color. You0.99
00:14:53.360know, we're all family. It's shaped like a dome, which is the mother's womb. So we're basically
00:14:58.320babies. We become babies again, going into the dark womb of the mother earth. And we sing songs
00:15:05.060and these songs, you can feel it through every cell in your being. And the knowledge that you're
00:15:11.980learning in the sweat lodge is not understood through the intellect. It's understood through
00:15:16.160the whole body. It's understood through the heart, through your prayers, and it's understood through
00:15:21.220the spirit. And so when I went to Stanford university, I had a really hard time there
00:15:25.660Because I wanted to say hi to everyone. And I wanted to treat everyone like my relative. I wanted to say hi. And everywhere I went, I was waving at people and people thought I was crazy. Because that is just not compatible with a world that is distant, that is intellectualized, and a world that is numbed.
00:15:45.640And so that's hopefully explains what I meant by that is, let's bring these articles of the UNDRIP down into reality, indigenous reality, where our way of knowing is honored.
00:16:00.340these issues are i think really at the core of our disconnection from and when i say our i mean
00:16:09.520this dominant culture's disconnection from the real world like i i think about that statement
00:16:14.660too people go i have to go back to the real world what are we even saying is the real world these
00:16:20.100days is the real world capitalism or is the real world relationships in the earth and i just am so
00:16:27.780grateful for all of this reworking that you're doing in our psyches with language with the way
00:16:34.680we understand how we're relating to one another I think we're losing more than we can even
00:16:40.420understand at this point with the western intellectual mind so I feel so aligned with you
00:16:46.660and we would love to hear you read a poem of or two or more of your choice and then I'd love to
00:16:55.200break those down and talk more about them after you read them for us sure okay so article 31 says
00:17:07.680indigenous peoples have the right to maintain control protect and develop their cultural
00:17:14.800heritage traditional knowledge and traditional cultural expressions as well as the manifestations
00:17:22.240of their sciences, technologies, and cultures, including human and genetic resources, seeds,
00:17:29.460medicines, knowledge of the properties of fauna and flora, oral traditions, literatures, designs,
00:17:37.240sports, and traditional games, and visual and performing arts. They also have the right to
00:17:43.920maintain, control, protect, and develop their intellectual property over such cultural heritage,
00:17:51.680traditional knowledge and traditional cultural expressions part two of the article says in
00:17:57.620conjunction with indigenous peoples states shall take effective measures to recognize and protect
00:18:03.560the exercise of these rights so this is a intellectual property article which is saying
00:18:10.680you know because because a lot of indigenous peoples uh like the acai berry right has become
00:18:16.640really popular in whole foods culture where we know it's an antioxidant we know it's a superfood
00:18:24.080but who who developed the acai it was indigenous peoples who crafted it and then someone's like
00:18:30.660we could make a buck off that right so it's talking a lot about stopping the marginalization
00:18:35.860of indigenous creations or and stopping the exploitation of that so what i wrote is maybe
00:18:44.120not what you would expect, but this is what I wrote in response. The old ones say we do not0.99
00:18:51.000own the land, much less the songs, much less the symbols gifted to us by the star nation.
00:18:59.760Who can own the only thing worth having? Who can own God? The Lakota were the most generous of us,
00:19:09.520freely giving their sacred technology to all who asked for it to all who needed it
00:19:16.560take it they said take it for we cannot hoard what was freely given to us you can try to sell it
00:19:26.580you can try to exploit it you can try to patent it you can try to own it try it the moment you
00:19:36.680think you own it is the moment it disappears slipping through your fingers like holy water
00:19:44.440you cannot hold it you can only be held by it we do not carry this sacred pipe
00:19:53.000it carries us through the valleys and over the hills it cannot be owned you can only pretend to
00:20:02.200own it just like you pretend to own your own flesh and bone but ultimately even that you cannot take
00:20:11.020with you on the soul's journey home so that to me was sort of my response to the article because I
00:20:22.020see that the article is saying listen if this indigenous nation planted and cultivated over
00:20:29.800thousands and thousands of years the acai berry they have the right to patent it we can't take it
00:20:37.760but I kind of flip that on its head and say you know what I bet if our elders could do the same
00:20:45.540thing again or could have another try everything that happened in colonization I bet we would do
00:20:51.980the same thing again because it's our job to give and it's our job to love and if the world takes
00:20:58.760that and exploits it that's on them you know that's their deal that's their stuff that they
00:21:03.500got to deal with but it's our job to give and it's our job to support even if it's a scraggly
00:21:10.640pilgrim who just landed on the shore and is starving you know and even if their descendants
00:21:17.400are going to completely wipe us out it's our job to give and to help unconditionally whenever we
00:21:24.820can so that's my i'm sure a lot of my contemporaries don't agree with me on that but that's my feeling
00:21:31.640and that's what i've learned from our elders the really gentle elders they're really connected
00:21:35.920elders is they say like we we need to give this medicine to the world um that doesn't mean the
00:21:42.380world should exploit it but the moment that the world tries to own it i mean they're not gaining
00:21:49.080anything they're they're losing in the most profound way that they can to try and own something
00:21:54.560sacred so that's them at least we got to give a lot of antioxidants to a lot of people whose
00:22:00.540bodies were dying because they were eating american food you know at least we got them
00:22:04.360some acai berries in their system you know what i'm saying so um that's my thought on it that's
00:22:09.860very personal though ownership is such a strange way of living through this world and i think about
00:22:20.080the plants, they are also very giving. They give their soil and they give their nutrients and they
00:22:27.480give their shade and they give their bodies and they give their flesh and they give their sense
00:22:32.260and they give their beauty. And even though they've been exploited and raped and pillaged and
00:22:39.060burnt down and logged, they still give. This is something that I talked about with Bronte
00:22:44.980Velez on our episode, The Necessity of Beauty. How are we able to show up in our generosity and
00:22:52.420our beauty when we know that this colonizer dominant culture is on a trajectory to continue
00:23:01.980to exploit that? But I agree that it is on them. It is on those who are strangling that power
00:23:11.980between their grasp to try to get some type of fulfillment, which I agree with you. I don't
00:23:17.720think it actually is fulfilling to have that stranglehold on beauty, that exploitation on
00:23:23.420the generous world. It's interesting for those of us who want to be those gentle givers, how we can
00:23:31.540continue showing up and giving and being open and receptive. Also knowing that there is a lack of
00:23:41.240safety in that, but also what else would we do? How else could we, how else could we be in alignment
00:23:47.520with our own integrity? I just want to thank you
00:25:39.060Yeah, I feel like on one level, lifting hearts off the ground translates this complex document into an accessible language.
00:25:47.500and on another level, I really sense that this project imbues an impersonal document with the
00:25:54.800substance of your lived experience. So I'm curious how your relationship with the UNDRIP
00:26:01.020shifted over the course of this project. Yeah, I definitely disagreed with the hidden
00:26:10.600assumptions within a lot of these articles like there's one poem i wrote that says
00:26:16.200laws that are written on paper can be broken but laws that are written in the stars and the bark
00:26:22.980of trees those you just cannot break those laws you can try it might work for a couple generations
00:26:29.160but it's going to fall into itself and so what's ironic about this whole book is i inherently
00:26:35.980disagree that words written on paper are going to be the final say again we will have to feel
00:26:45.200these words we will have to experience them and know them in our body before we ever change but
00:26:52.560the beautiful thing is is that the beauty of unsustainable behavior is it won't be sustained
00:26:57.280it's like a blip on a screen it exists ephemerally and then it ceases to exist that's what rome was
00:27:04.400You know, Rome existed for a little while and then it died. And Chaco, you know, Chaco Canyon, where we had caste systems and we weren't taking care of the land, it was born and then it died.
00:27:16.160Creator sent us a drought to give us the courage to change because that was not a sustainable society.
00:27:21.560So I think that those laws are the ones that we really are going to end up listening to, not out of choice, but out of it's just the way things are.
00:27:29.400Nothing can exist without love. And if we lose love, we will cease to exist. Nothing can exist
00:27:36.120without water. If we poison our water, we will cease to exist. So I do disagree with a lot of
00:27:42.640fundamental assumptions hidden implicitly within this undrip. However, what I do like about the
00:27:49.700undrip, it articulates the things that have happened to us. It articulates that, yes,
00:27:54.380we have been relocated against our will. Yes, we have had our languages destroyed. And I really
00:28:00.780love it for that. It gives people insight into all the different ways Indigenous peoples have
00:28:06.740been disempowered. Even though it is formatted for the numbed world, it is really, it took many
00:28:13.220decades to publish this thing. And a lot of people worked very hard. And they worked at the UN and
00:28:19.040they consulted with Indigenous nations and the Indigenous nations consulted with the UN. And I
00:28:24.020think it's really beautiful and good and it gives us a good guiding light so i did you know i have
00:28:30.380a few snarky poems in this book that are kind of almost jabbing at the undrip and like you know
00:28:34.960like this is great but we need to go deeper um but even with those little jabs i'm really
00:28:40.640appreciative of it and i really think it's worth reading i think about this other critique that i
00:28:47.540had about UNDRIP just considering how a monolingual document ignores the responsibility on the part
00:28:55.560of the settler governments to learn indigenous languages required to enact true nation-to-nation
00:29:01.120relationships and yeah I just wonder what it would have been like or what it could be like if UNDRIP
00:29:10.880were to weave in indigenous languages within it and I mean I also could imagine logistically that
00:29:22.240might be challenging because there's so many and how would they even choose which languages get
00:29:26.980prioritized well there were 80 languages 80 plus languages spoken in the state of California alone
00:29:33.260before colonization so there definitely is a lot of linguistic diversity which people are finding
00:29:38.120is deeply tied to biodiversity, interestingly. I totally hear you. And I think that it would be
00:29:45.020hard to translate this into all the indigenous languages. But what might be good is if it was
00:29:50.560written first in an indigenous language, so that that paradigm of that language was infused
00:29:56.640throughout the document, and then translated into English. That way, at least the soul and
00:30:03.240the paradigm which we live would be dictating the whole way in which the words would come out
00:30:08.900and what words would come out. I agree. I'm in a PhD program right now and we had to write some
00:30:15.020policy papers. You know, they weren't real policy, but just take a stab at trying to do policy.
00:30:21.380And one of the things I said is every single elementary school student will take one year
00:30:27.160of an indigenous language. Every single middle school student will take one year of an indigenous
00:30:32.120language every single high school student will take two years and before they graduate college
00:30:38.640they're expected to be conversational within one indigenous language and people might be like well
00:30:43.760that's crazy we can't expect American college students to learn a indigenous language like
00:30:49.080they got other stuff going on but it's like actually no you are on indigenous lands if you
00:30:53.740want to come here you need to learn our languages you need to understand what we're talking about
00:30:59.340you need to understand our worldview. And if, like you said, if there's going to be a true
00:31:04.160nation to nation relationship, we need to understand each other. And why are we always
00:31:10.640the ones who have to go out and learn English and get soap in our mouth if we speak an indigenous
00:31:15.080language and, you know, go through the boarding schools and get whipped if we speak our language
00:31:19.440and always having to learn English. But then the American society doesn't have to take any effort
00:31:25.060to understand us and ironically they are impoverishing American you know mainstream0.84
00:31:31.800students by keeping these languages from them that we are impoverishing the world by letting
00:31:37.460these languages go extinct because held within them is really juicy epic beautiful paradigms
00:31:44.220that could pretty much save our whole planet and so I totally agree with you there and that is a
00:31:50.160big critique and I know it's in several different languages but I'm pretty sure that most of them
00:31:54.180our Eurocentric languages. So I think that would be a really good step to at least translate it
00:32:00.920into a few different languages. And yeah, what also I feel from speaking with you about this
00:32:08.120a few times is, and even in this interview, what's within these indigenous languages,
00:32:14.500ways in which we can relate to the land. And when we are so disconnected to the land, we need
00:32:18.860every tool, every skill to be able to relate back to the land. I'm thinking, for instance,
00:32:27.340there's a, in another poem you write, we would have typed faster if our iPhone spoke Denebizad,
00:32:34.300the Navajo language. There will be a day when we will not be auto-corrected out of existence.
00:32:40.380and that was so beautiful and uh maybe this is another moment where you could read us another
00:32:48.800poem sure let's see there's a lot of poems in here I like um yeah yeah I could imagine it's
00:33:02.820hard to choose it's all good um all right um so article 33 says indigenous peoples have the right
00:33:15.580to determine their own identity or membership in accordance with their customs and traditions
00:33:22.440this does not impair the right of indigenous individuals to obtain citizenship of the states
00:33:29.700in which they live. And part two of that article is Indigenous peoples have the right to determine
00:33:36.740the structures and to select the membership of their institutions in accordance with their own
00:33:56.960only 1 16th sorry you're not you don't count you know which is the way it is right now so anyways
00:34:03.280the idea of indigenous peoples have the right to determine their own identity was sort of the line
00:34:09.180that I riffed off of in this poem thinking about our identity as indigenous peoples and what I
00:34:16.140have seen throughout the country and throughout the world so this is what I wrote
00:34:20.480RISE PEOPLE OF THE WILD RICE RISE PEOPLE OF THE RED WILLOW RISE PEOPLE OF THE MIDDLE RIVER RISE PEOPLE OF THE AGUAHE PALM RISE LAFQUENCHE RISE PEHUENCHE RISE RISE MAPUCHE RISE GANAKAHAGE RISE
00:34:45.280all of you rise to speak your truth we need more people who name themselves after the land
00:34:53.360instead of naming the land after themselves learn from us Washington learn from us Georgia
00:35:02.400learn from us Louisville learn from us San Luis Obispo
00:35:07.940there is a vast world unbeknownst to you for now climb to the mountaintop look out into the
00:35:18.100valleys see just how much you do not and cannot control so i wrote that poem because i noticed
00:35:30.380that a lot of indigenous nations if you look at how we identify ourselves it's often related to
00:35:37.500the land that we live in. So Doitecota, one of the, I believe, the Pyramid Lake area tribes.
00:35:45.720And what that literally means is the people who eat this kind of fish. So they literally name
00:35:51.000themselves after that fish. And the word Mapuche, which is the indigenous peoples of Chile,
00:35:57.320it means, Mapu means earth and Che means people. So people of the earth. And within the Mapuche
00:36:04.040nation, which is a really vast nation, there are subgroups. For instance, there's the pohuenche.
00:36:10.860And pohuen means it's a certain nut that they harvest from what in English we call the monkey
00:36:17.260puzzle tree. But in their language, they call it the pohuen. So the pohuenche are people of this
00:36:24.140nut. And their entire economy and their entire livelihood revolves around this sacred nut that1.00
00:36:31.700is highly nutritious. And the, you know, Anishinaabeg oftentimes view themselves as people1.00
00:36:39.820of the wild rice. And so they're naming themselves after what they eat, and they're naming themselves
00:36:45.360after the land. And so I noticed that when the European colonizers came, who had had the
00:36:54.720indigenous spirit beaten out of them for millennia, and I'm sure they did used to identify themselves0.84
00:37:01.160this way. But because of the Roman expansion, because of the witch hunts, everything, they1.00
00:37:06.140caught a little bit of amnesia. So when they came over here, they said, okay, well, this is Washington
00:37:11.140and I'm going to name it after George Washington. And this state, we'll call it Georgia. We'll name
00:37:16.480it after, you know, George. This is Louisville. We'll name it after Louis. And all of these
00:37:22.400different names that the land was given was naming the land after these men. And to me, that was the
00:37:30.060fundamental paradigm that we needed to shift was how do instead we view the earth belonging to us
00:37:36.840how do we start seeing that we belong to the earth and identifying ourselves based on that so
00:37:43.520that's just another poem that I was hoping could help people see because sometimes we're born into
00:37:50.700it right we're born into Santa Clara California or Santa Monica or Santa whatever San Francisco
00:37:58.600you know and we just kind of take it for granted that it's normal to name the land after a human0.53
00:38:04.340being and not only that but like a pedophilic you know priest from the catholic church you know
00:38:12.120so we have to relearn and remember that that's not necessarily normal
00:38:19.300that's what i was trying to do with this poem
00:38:22.100And I wonder, when we live within these systems that name land after rapists and torturers, and when we're in this day-to-day life where we're not even really aware of that, I can't imagine that it doesn't seep into our psyches.
00:38:52.100I can't imagine that it doesn't affect us, even if we can't name it, even if we don't actually know the histories as well as we should.
00:39:01.040Because sometimes I'll be speaking to people and they'll go, oh, well, those people don't know what's going on or they're asleep or they're in denial.
00:39:07.360And I say, yeah, maybe they are in denial and perhaps they haven't done the research to really understand the depth of the truths that are really happening.
00:39:15.940But I do think that it affects everybody subconsciously. And then how that manifests in our bodies, in our illnesses, in the way we treat ourselves, treat others. I don't think that we can just brush off the fact that we are living under these umbrellas of tortures in the names of the places that many of us live.
00:39:42.220I think that there are deeper ramifications of these decisions that were made by the first settlers and colonizers.
00:39:52.340And so you bringing this up, to me, feels like a mandatory exploration.
00:39:57.900We are really trying to get to the root of this pain and this disconnection.
00:40:06.220My mother's medicine lives in the earth.
00:40:12.220Rising from the ashes as we remember, remember
00:40:19.300I can hear her songs running through my veins
00:40:25.440As my brothers blow on embers of old bard stories, old bard stories
00:40:32.840I will place my feet in the Tuscan streams
00:40:38.720To mend the tattered edges of my father's dreams
00:41:07.740and honor the ancestors that live inside of me, live inside of me, live inside of me, live inside
00:41:20.440of me. I want to shift our conversation a little bit to talk about Native American Heritage Month
00:41:34.520since we are in the month of November and I spoke with Jade Begay a couple weeks ago about the
00:41:42.220disgusting move by Trump's administration to attempt to erase Native American Heritage Month
00:41:48.060by replacing it or at least by trying to make more present this National American History and0.93
00:41:57.640Founders Month, which is honestly just so ridiculous and so blatant in the erasure
00:42:05.140that this administration is trying to accomplish. And so I'm wondering,
00:42:09.740how do you see these renewed acts of violence echo in the communities you're visiting?
00:42:15.600well first of all i think i want to say that every soul has to feel every hurt that they inflicted
00:42:28.600in their lifetime from what my elders tell me so i actually pray for trump i call him my uncle trump0.96
00:42:36.000should die you know because even these misfits and sometimes especially these misfits0.89
00:42:44.320we have to bring into kinship and love and help them and obviously he's a little too dangerous to0.98
00:42:51.700help over a cup of tea or something like that but at least I can help him through my prayers
00:42:57.080but you know truly he's hurting himself and the uh Stephen Miller one of his main buddies
00:43:07.220you know they found over 900 emails of his that were really really blatantly disgustingly all
00:43:14.300about white nationalism 70 of the country now believes that what he did with ukraine was wrong
00:43:21.400and one comedian was saying you can't get 70 of americans to agree on anything so he went to
00:43:29.320kentucky the same day i was there the same time we gave a speech at the same time in lexington
00:43:33.460and um to prop up this governor who was running and the governor lost he tried to do the same1.00
00:43:40.640thing in Louisiana the governor lost so that is some silver lining on all this is all of his stupid0.99
00:43:48.940atrocious crazy moves and acts have only made him less and less and less desirable even by1.00
00:43:58.100Republicans so that is the silver lining in this is that yes he is atrocious and the American people
00:44:07.380aren't going for it anymore so that's good at least you know we thought it was going to be like
00:44:11.800oh everyone's just going to support them no matter what but apparently that's not true okay so
00:44:16.120Native American Heritage Month I mean some critics say you know like every day is Indigenous People's
00:44:23.420Day but I think it gives us a time when people like for instance a lot of people have been showing
00:44:30.960my music video All Nations Rise in their classrooms this month and they're having the kids like
00:44:36.260dissect the lyrics. And what does this mean? When you're writing songs, you don't realize kids are
00:44:40.840going to be like dissecting the lyrics. But so it gives people an excuse to talk about Indigenous
00:44:47.680issues, which is good. I wish they would do it every month. And we do do it every month. So I
00:44:53.080love that. And I think a lot of Trump's moves have only emboldened us. And that's the other silver
00:44:59.800lining. I remember being in the Women's March in Washington, DC, a day or two, I forget if it was
00:45:05.620a day or two days after his inauguration he was the next day and man that was beautiful that was
00:45:11.840freaking beautiful and to see so many young boys walking beside their mothers in solidarity with
00:45:19.740the feminine it was so beautiful and um I don't know I think in a lot of ways what he's doing is
00:45:27.140he's emboldening us and he's he's helping people he's forcing people to answer are you going to
00:45:37.580stand on the side of justice or not you know and a lot of people who didn't really care about justice
00:45:43.500before he was in office because when Obama was there you know you have to admit everyone was
00:45:47.860not everyone but most people were like oh everything's okay Obama's in office and Trump
00:45:52.140helped us realize, no, everything is not okay. And we have some serious work to do. So in a strange
00:45:58.380way, I think there's a lot of benefits out of his atrocities that have had us really grapple with
00:46:06.000certain and have public debate on a lot of issues. And I know that all the young men who are born
00:46:11.780today don't want to be like him. He reminds me a lot of coyote in our stories. The reason we told
00:46:17.960coyote stories is to help children know what not to do. We'd be like, this is what coyote did. And
00:46:23.760it bit him in the butt, you know? And so I think Trump is a modern day coyote where he is showing0.99
00:46:28.680us exactly what we don't want to be. And a lot of children are looking to him and being like, wow,
00:46:34.980huh, this is what it looks like when your ego runs away with itself. This is what it looks like when
00:46:40.540you get insecure and you have to make up for your insecurities in unhealthy ways. And the men are
00:46:46.180like oh this is what happens when you're a jerk to women and so I personally don't think his0.98
00:46:53.460creation of whatever founders month whatever it's called has had any impact on the people0.98
00:47:00.540who believe in justice we're not taking away native heritage month right like I know a lot
00:47:06.340of teachers who like leaned into it and did even more because he tried to change it and are like
00:47:12.340wow we really got to up the ante and like bring more lessons about indigenous peoples into the
00:47:17.280classroom and I think the people who aren't necessarily for justice but also aren't necessarily
00:47:23.420against it they've been forced to be like where are you going to stand on this and those are like
00:47:28.860the swing voters of justice you know and a lot of those are swinging towards justice because this is
00:47:34.800this is not cool and the last thing I'll say about that is one of Trump's largest bases is the south
00:47:41.820right but he doesn't understand everyone in the south is native everyone in whether they look
00:47:51.060white or they look black they all are part i lived in alabama for a year they're all part
00:47:57.500chickasaw choctaw cherokee muskogee seminole you know they're all have one great grandma that is
00:48:06.400whatever and they are all extremely proud of that great grandma and they all have like native stuff
00:48:14.300everywhere you know it's very it's not a safe place for our african brothers african-american
00:48:19.700brothers and sisters right but when i was a native there i was like superstar it was like oh cool
00:48:24.500you're native i'm native too so trump i think actually pissed off a large part of his base
00:48:32.500by doing that. And he doesn't have that nuanced understanding that his base is not into the
00:48:39.240anti-native thing. Well, at least in the South, I say in North Dakota, South Dakota, they're very
00:48:44.180anti-native, but anyways, I'll stop there. But I just want to say, I'm not scared of it. I don't
00:48:49.080think it, I don't think it even made a mark on our movement. And I think if anything, it strengthened
00:48:54.080Yeah, I think Trump is this mirror. He's really showing us what we don't want to be. He's showing
00:49:04.580us how bad things can become if we choose to not be engaged with public process. And, you know,
00:49:12.340we were speaking about this before the show, but when Obama was in office, yeah, I feel like so
00:49:19.540many of us didn't really think that we had to be engaged in politics. But what I'm feeling,
00:49:26.440especially because I work so much in public land protection, the amount of rollbacks that Trump is
00:49:33.020doing with Bears Ears, Grand Escalante, Tongass National Forest, the list goes on and on.
00:49:40.260It really awakens me to say, Ayanna, if you care about these lands, you need to get extremely
00:49:48.060engaged in public process and the rights that I do have as a U.S. citizen, those rights are
00:49:56.300actually responsibilities. I can't really complain if I'm not willing to be engaged,
00:50:02.680if I'm not showing up to the public process and to the tools that I have been given. And so I think
00:50:09.220moving forward, 2020 is going to be such a big year for elections. And for those of us who are
00:50:16.400feeling emboldened and have that courage and have the capacity. We really need to look to those
00:50:23.620people who are running for office who do support our ethics, our morals. And also I want to speak
00:50:29.980to the people who have thought of running for office and say we need more people who are willing
00:50:36.380to get into the nitty gritty of this really strange political system. This last question is
00:50:42.660In an interview with journalist Tracy L. Barnett, you shared how, quote, human beings are meant to be a gift to the land.
00:50:50.400And I'm wondering, with this last response, if you could share about how we may begin to remember how to be a gift to the land.
00:50:58.040so my phd work is on the intersection of indigenous land management and indigenous
00:51:06.320food systems and how we can recreate undomesticated indigenous foodscapes which are
00:51:14.400regional food sheds just like a watershed but like a food shed this is different from gardening
00:51:20.740this is different from intensive agriculture this is more about helping the natural food
00:51:26.780bearing capacity of the land and facilitating that. For instance, the Shawnee tribes in Kentucky
00:51:34.100used to plant hickory nut, walnut, chestnut, and a whole bunch of different varieties of acorn.
00:51:41.740And these nuts were a big part of their caloric intake. And they were burned around the base of
00:51:50.660the trees to eliminate competing vegetation, low intensity burns, you know, very low intensity
00:51:57.380burns done at the right time of year by people who are experts in this type of burning. And
00:52:02.680actually that reduced the threat of catastrophic fires. And it also injected the soil with a bunch
00:52:10.200of ash, which was super nutritious for the soil. And I heard one California elder say,
00:52:16.500when we noticed the deer were getting hungry, we would do a burn. And so because that ash
00:52:23.120creates super nutrient dense grasses, and it's sort of like a renewal of the land. And so
00:52:30.160indigenous fire is actually responsible for the creation of the Great Plains as well.
00:52:36.940The Miamia tribe, for example, you know how we have a lunar calendar and each
00:52:40.980moon is named after a different ecological phenomenon. I believe it's in the spring,
00:52:46.500one of their moons is called the grass burning moon. So they would go out and they'd burn some
00:52:51.180grasses and that would help with the, the rest of the ecological process. And so the oaks in
00:52:57.560California, for example, are very fire resistant. The bark is. And one Amamudsen elder from Santa
00:53:03.900Cruz said that their rule of thumb was 14 trees per acre, which helps the trees who were competing
00:53:10.900for limited nutrients and water and sunlight to all be healthy. So you have a handful of very,
00:53:17.080very healthy trees instead of a whole thicket of very, very weak and unhealthy trees. So the
00:53:24.660national park system started or partly started by the racist man, John Muir, God bless him.0.98
00:53:31.560But one of his quotes is, a strange and dirty life these half-witted savages live in the wilderness.1.00
00:53:38.260You know, he literally thought we were dirty, stupid pests. He thought we were pests to the land. So what did they do? And take, for example, Yosemite, they removed all the indigenous peoples. And along with it, they removed the indigenous fire that applied a gentle pressure to the land that actually maintained the whole system and reduced the threat of catastrophic fire.1.00
00:54:03.300because the fuel load on the ground wasn't building up and building up and building up,0.83
00:54:07.720which is what the Smokies bear policies do. So he removed the indigenous peoples from the land.0.64
00:54:13.040And what do we get? We get a lot of thickets, tree thickets, understory thickets. And when the
00:54:18.620trees get really close together, for one thing, they are usually deprived of nutrients because
00:54:23.980they're all competing for limited nutrients. So that weakens their immune system. And when their
00:54:28.660immune system is weakened, the bugs, the pine beetle bugs, different types of viruses can just
00:54:34.680rip through these forests because their trees are so close together, they could just wipe out the
00:54:39.480whole forest. That's what I mean by we can be a gift to the land. So what if we could become a
00:54:46.020people where the presence of humanity is actually what helps everything go around, helps the world
00:54:54.600turn. And this matches with what a Yoruba elder told me, or not told me, he told all of us at the
00:55:00.960World Parliament, or the Parliament of World Religions in Toronto last year. He said, in the
00:55:08.200Yoruba language, the word for human being is chosen one. And at first I was like, that sounds kind of
00:55:13.780weird. But then he started explaining it more. He said, you know, we were chosen to be the stewards
00:55:19.000of the land. And that really sparked something in me for some reason. I was like, wow,
00:55:24.600Maybe, just maybe, the earth doesn't just like humans, but maybe she actually needs us. Maybe this brain we were given by creator is supposed to be used to groom the land, to maintain the land, to make sure the deer have grass to eat, to make sure the buffalo have grass to eat by burning patches on the plains and making sure that the desert is taken care of.
00:55:51.620You know, my people, we eat yucca fruit, we eat sumac berry, we eat wolfberry, we eat rice grass, making sure that all the other animals have berries to eat, too.
00:56:02.160Planting berries along the desert scape, reseeding the land, burning the land in low-intensity fires where necessary, pruning the land, taking care of the beavers.