00:03:19.320which spans what is now called New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, and Arizona. She spends her
00:03:25.280free time learning her endangered mother tongue, planting corn, beans, and squash,
00:03:30.980and spending time with elders who retain traditional spiritual and ecological knowledge.
00:03:36.280Lila thank you so much for being with us today and it is incredible to be speaking with somebody
00:03:44.160with such a depth and breadth of work such as yours thank you for having me Ayanna I appreciate
00:03:50.520it I'd like if we could just start off with you telling us about the waters and the land that
00:03:57.860raised you? Sure. I had a house that my dad had built himself up in the mountain there, an outhouse
00:04:09.720that we used, which I miss very much because I saved a lot of water using the outhouse. But yeah,
00:04:16.360that's pretty much where I grew up. And I had a very difficult time growing up in Taos, New Mexico.
00:04:21.760definitely had a hard time with drugs and alcohol since I was a very young girl and then through
00:04:30.320prayer and through faith I was able to get sober around the age of 20 but growing up in Taos was
00:04:38.720beautiful and it was also very difficult because living as an indigenous youth is like living in1.00
00:04:44.280a battlefield there's so many things that are trying to destroy you by the nature of the
00:04:48.760intergenerational trauma that you inherit but i somehow survived and unfortunately many of my
00:04:54.160friends did not survive so i i really work for them and i do what i do in their name well thank
00:05:01.580you for sharing that with us and i want to talk about relationship with the living landscape
00:05:08.960no matter what corner of the earth you're in cultures and their unique languages ceremonies
00:05:15.800medicines, community structures, etc. arise from an intimate and ancient relationship with this
00:05:22.400living landscape. So would you mind explaining the concept of cultural endemism, the irreplaceability
00:05:30.140of certain land features within cultural ceremony, and how this vastly differs from the globalized
00:05:36.520culture's relationship to earth? Certainly. Cultural endemism is a term I kind of made up
00:05:43.680because there wasn't very much research that talked about this phenomenon but endemism is
00:05:49.860borrowed from biology and it's where there's a species that lives only in a very restricted area
00:05:55.760so for instance the blue cheek butterfly fish lives only in the red sea the catalina mahogany
00:06:03.400lives only on catalina island and so there's a few species or probably vast numbers of species
00:06:10.240actually, who only live in a very small corner of the world. And these are recognized by biologists
00:06:17.500because they're very, have a precarious position where they are vulnerable to extinction. Because
00:06:23.420if that small homeland where they are able to exist is compromised, either through pollution
00:06:29.200or climate change or some other natural disturbance, that species too, it goes extinct.
00:06:36.560And so similarly with cultures, which is what I wrote my thesis on in my undergraduate studies, is there are certain cultures that are tied to specific features of the land.
00:06:52.280For instance, the Hoopa tribe of California live along a certain river, and their entire language, for them, they don't have east, north, west, south.
00:07:03.220what they have is up river or down river so their whole language and their whole paradigm and their
00:07:08.920whole way of making sense of themselves and the world revolves around this river and is expressed
00:07:15.540through this river and so if you take this river away from the hoop of people or if you take the
00:07:21.940hoop of people away from the river a lot of what they have in their language is no longer worth
00:07:28.880talking about is because everything their language talks about is no longer there there's other
00:07:34.440examples like the taos pueblo people are very tied to taos mountain and they have annual
00:07:43.560communal ceremonies that they engage in on the mountain and these ceremonies are used to
00:07:51.780communicate very important knowledge bases to the next generation and if you were to pick up these
00:07:57.700people and put them out in the Everglades of Florida they would have no idea how to function
00:08:04.760how to communicate these ideas how to do their marriage customs womanhood customs manhood
00:08:12.760customs how to subsist obviously that's an important one is how do we eat and all of their
00:08:19.840skills for subsisting are geared towards deer and the edible plants of the mountain not
00:08:27.240alligators and edible plants of the everglades so it's a pretty simple concept that certain
00:08:32.640cultures are bound to very specific biomes on the earth now similarly in biology we have the
00:08:40.440opposite of endemic species which is a cosmopolitan species is what they call it and
00:08:46.280the cosmopolitan species exists in many many different biomes many many different regions
00:08:52.760around the world. And one example of this is the killer whale. The killer whale exists in almost
00:08:59.380every ocean around the world, or the orca, some call it. Similarly, the pigeon, there's pigeons
00:09:05.620in London, there's pigeons in San Francisco, there's pigeons in Mexico, there's pigeons
00:09:11.440in almost every continent, and so they are cosmopolitan species. Similarly, you have
00:09:18.240endemic languages and cosmopolitan languages. For example, Winnemum-Wintu language is very
00:09:24.920specific to the Winnemum River in Northern California. And so there's a few things they
00:09:30.740can talk about away from the river, but a lot of what they talk about has to do with the river. So
00:09:34.740it's a very tied, earthbound language, whereas English, it's almost like a viral language where
00:09:41.840it spreads around the world and because of its status that we each and every one of us ascribe
00:09:49.200to english the high prestige that we give to this language it doesn't inherently have value but we
00:09:55.840give more meaning to this language than other languages then that allows it to spread and
00:10:02.640become a global cosmopolitan language and so the the idea is that there is very little
00:10:08.800environmental areas that could go extinct that would extinguish the English language.
00:10:14.900Whereas when we talk about Denebizad, my mother's language, we have to be inside the four sacred
00:10:20.900mountains if we're going to speak our language, because that's where it all revolves around. So
00:10:24.760in other words, we have to take a moment to think about whose homeland are we destroying and what
00:10:30.600is going to be destroyed along with it.
00:10:38.800I wrote her a letter from the bark of a tree
00:10:53.720I was telling her that I would soon be there
00:10:57.820As the fire was lifting, my mind started drifting
00:11:04.560Drifting like the smoke curled in the air
00:21:07.720of the unknown and the not knowing and as we are losing languages and other deeply important
00:21:18.460aspects of this earth do you have ideas of how to safeguard cultural relationships to place
00:21:25.760despite the extractive paradigm that aims to continue destruction and development at all cost
00:21:33.680I think that's the question on all of our minds. What do we do in the face of extractivism and a world that is being overtaken by a paradigm that doesn't see the sacredness in everything, but treats it as a dead object to be mined and profited from?
00:21:56.200obviously this mindset is very destructive but the good news is that this mindset is unsustainable
00:22:04.420which means necessarily it will be gone eventually and probably quite soon and so what I have been
00:22:13.120focusing on is not so much fighting the power or bringing down the man or other things that
00:22:20.320are so exhilarating to do and intoxicating sometimes but rather preparing for when this
00:22:28.100system collapses because it will collapse and sooner than we think I believe because
00:22:34.640the moment we can no longer find cheap oil or or maybe we can find it but we can't afford it
00:22:43.800is the moment that everything in our grocery stores is not going to be there anymore
00:22:49.560The chair I'm sitting on right now is probably shipped here from China.
00:22:53.600The kombucha I'm currently drinking was made all the way in California, and I'm in New Mexico.
00:23:01.040And so how am I going to get my kombucha if it's way in California and there's no oil to ship it to me?
00:23:07.280The computer I'm using, many of the precious metals that are used to construct my Apple computer are mined with fossil fuel machinery.
00:23:20.380You can't even get the materials, process them, refine them without fossil fuels.
00:23:27.940And then once you do have those materials all together and you've constructed the product, then you have to ship the product using fossil fuels.
00:23:36.100And so, in other words, I think that our best option right now in terms of helping to safeguard a world, a world of diversity and beauty from the capitalist machine, if you will, is to start to create communities that are safeguarding certain genetic diversity.
00:24:04.900for instance, maybe you're safeguarding the churro sheep, or maybe you're safeguarding
00:24:10.700certain types of corn seeds, or maybe you're safeguarding certain types of, if you're in
00:24:16.820Mexico, maybe banana seeds. Because I was just in Mexico last week and I ate a banana and it looked
00:24:22.320nothing like what you buy at the store here in America. It was a smaller banana, it was thicker,
00:24:27.880it was sweeter and it filled me up faster when i eat bananas in america i eat it and i don't feel
00:24:35.720full it's like there's not much nutrition in it because it's so deeply enlarged and modified by
00:24:42.900human greed that it has lost its essence and so safeguarding these seeds and being ready for when
00:24:52.460this system collapses taking the time to practice being local whether that means gathering edible
00:25:02.420foods nearby hunting or raising certain livestock but doing what you can to start practicing while
00:25:10.720we still have a choice in other words because things can change very quickly gas fossil fuels
00:25:17.800is one thing I mentioned, but water is another thing. We're not guaranteed to have the kind of
00:25:23.220water flowing from our faucets like we do. Mexico City won't have running water within the next 20
00:25:28.720years. Albuquerque, where I am right now, is set to lose its water source in the near future as well.
00:25:36.160And so what do we do when the water doesn't flow from our faucets anymore? We are mining water
00:25:42.500from aquifers that are in an unsustainable manner, or we are polluting our sources that
00:25:49.680we do have. So things can change very quickly, very, very quickly. And so we need to be ready
00:25:55.580to help our brothers and sisters who live in an unsustainable manner. And I shouldn't act like
00:26:02.940I'm innocent. I live very unsustainably as well. So when it does come, when the hard fact that
00:26:10.240we are not sustainable stares us in the face and we have to change, we will be ready to help our
00:26:17.120people. So in other words, I don't think it's so much of a let's destroy what is destroying the
00:26:23.700earth, but rather let's create what sustains the earth. Let's create multi-crop fields. Let's
00:26:30.820create gardens. Let's create livestock that is raised in a humane way. Let's create a way of0.98
00:26:38.980feeding ourselves that nourishes the earth and generates biodiversity in turn, rather than
00:26:45.020protesting the coal plant or protesting the nuclear plant or protesting Trump.
00:26:50.680All of these things are important. And at the same time, I don't think we have enough time
00:26:55.300to not be learning these skills right now, because to relearn, for a whole society to relearn
00:27:03.540how to live local, it takes a little time.
00:27:07.400So I think we ought to start putting as much, if not more energy,
00:27:12.600creating the world we want than trying to take down the world we don't.
00:27:22.940The name of the song is Caller the Moose.
00:27:33.540I listen to the older folks, to what they have to say
00:27:49.540And I listen to the waterfall, begging for another day
00:27:54.060And I listen to an eagle cry, dying high in the sky
00:28:27.180And I listen to the cry of the people dying of mercury. Don't you know, we gotta let him be. Don't you know, can't you see? Don't you know, we gotta let him be, let him be.
00:28:46.240And I listen to a whippoorwill, the crickets are all in tune
00:28:55.060And I listen to a dying tree and to the whistling of a loon
00:28:59.760And I listen to a howling wolf echo throughout the night
00:29:04.380And I listen to a bark of a seal and he's just a buddy sight
00:29:42.480well i have gone down that train of thought many times the resources that can go unseen
00:29:57.000you know when you talk about your computer and the rare earth minerals and then going into water
00:30:03.240and just the infrastructure that it takes for water to get to a faucet the infrastructure it
00:30:10.740takes for really any of this modern convenience culture to show up at the store it's a huge
00:30:19.900extractive infrastructure death machine thank you for taking us through that and talking about the
00:30:26.840localization and talking about this relearning of skills so that when collapse hits which inevitably
00:30:34.360it will because we can't keep going as we are how can we emotionally physically tangibly
00:30:40.960skillfully help each other and sustain the earth and biodiversity it's something that i
00:30:48.040want to dedicate my life to here in cascadia and the pacific northwest safeguarding
00:30:54.280seeds and native plants and fungi and and just the whole network of life i just feel it in my
00:31:01.540heart how important it is to protect this biodiversity that we're losing at rapid rates
00:31:07.720and as you were talking about these skills you know what came into my mind was this idea of
00:31:14.880tending the wild and as you were explaining that just as environment shapes culture culture in
00:31:22.820turn shapes the environment and specifically women have danced a dynamic life-giving dance
00:31:29.360with the earth since time immemorial you know nurturing these wild gardens using prescribed
00:31:35.520fire to enhance biodiversity listening and learning directly from our plant and animal kin
00:31:41.540and cultures just like ecosystems are dynamic and adaptive and the stage our ancestors tended
00:31:49.500the wild within is inevitably much different than what we see today so i'm wondering how do you
00:31:56.960think we can embody these traditional methods in a world where land is commodified and privatized
00:32:04.400and access to land can be difficult to attain? How can we still create this new paradigm that
00:32:10.840you've been speaking of? Well, two answers to that question that I think I have is number one,
00:32:18.160Create small models that inspire. You don't need to solve the world's problems in order to educate the world. All you need is one small example that changes the fundamental worldview of your neighbors, whether they're local or national or international.
00:32:44.300If you find one acreage where you can practice these skills in a way that's successful, then you don't necessarily need to save the whole forest all at once because you'll be saving that one piece and showing people how the way you work with that land is incredibly advanced and it works.
00:33:06.100and then you don't even have to change people they're going to change themselves and that
00:33:11.760brings me to the second point is people love to think that they are civilized they love to think
00:33:19.440that they are advanced they love to think that they are sophisticated and it's for this reason0.77
00:33:24.880that the rather primitive cultures that came to this continent tried to put themselves above0.99
00:33:32.940other cultures and say, oh, these Indians are so savage and primitive because it made them feel0.99
00:33:39.140like maybe they were advanced or smart, intelligent. So we can use this hard truth1.00
00:33:47.040that we're all indoctrinated with. We all want to be intelligent, advanced, sophisticated,
00:33:53.040smart, civilized. We can use this in the favor of the earth because what is more primitive
00:34:00.900than bringing your entire community off the edge of a cliff what is more primitive than
00:34:11.380destroying your own water source what is more primitive than polluting and toxifying the
00:34:22.340environment that your children are going to live in there is nothing more primitive than that and
00:34:27.900what is more advanced, what is more civilized than working with the earth in a manner that
00:34:36.320provides plenty of subsistence needs to everyone involved? What is more civilized than working
00:34:47.780together to create a system that leaves everyone healthy and happy what is more advanced than
00:34:58.740creating a community that actually works and an education system that leaves your children
00:35:07.260feeling happy and so we can help people see how primitive our current way of living really is
00:35:16.520If we can communicate that to them, then they're not going to want to be a part of it anymore. They don't want to be part of something short-sighted, primitive, or sort of a mean way to say it is stupid. We don't want to be stupid. We don't want to be part of something that's stupid. We want to be part of something that's cutting edge.0.98
00:35:34.080And so helping people understand that living in close concert with the Earth's rhythms is the most advanced, civilized thing you can do, then people start to see, wow, I can be a part of something that is going to make me and my descendants proud.
00:35:58.240and so that came to me from an elder who said we were not primitive your ancestors were not
00:36:06.840primitive it's actually very advanced to move with the rhythms of the earth and it's actually
00:36:14.120very primitive and arrogant to think you can force the earth to move to the rhythms of your greed
00:36:19.240and the short-sightedness of that strategy ultimately leads to a hard life for your
00:36:26.160children and your grandchildren and their grandchildren and so let's be smart let's be
00:36:30.780intelligent and I think that's why permaculture took off so much because it has this aura of
00:36:36.440being like a science you know like cutting edge science and it's just so smart and generosity is
00:36:41.620woven into the whole model and so people want to feel like they're civilized and they're
00:36:46.540sophisticated and they're you know so changing the narrative that just because you have
00:36:53.520a computer doesn't make you civilized if in order to get that computer you cut your entire
00:37:01.920society's lifespan short and changing the narrative that just because these people's home
00:37:09.400is designed to biodegrade does not make them primitive in fact that makes them very advanced
00:37:20.000because they are going to build their homes in a manner that actually nourish the next generation.
00:37:27.220And so that whole savagism, civilization paradigm works very strong in our consciousness and the way we act.
00:37:37.300And so we need to flip the narrative and help people understand that creating these systems is highly evolved,
00:37:44.440highly sophisticated and all you need to do is make one example of this like for instance there's
00:37:52.440a gardens eco village south of tucson 200 people own 12 cars they bought these cars together as one
00:38:02.300massive 200 person family and they have the best cars they have state-of-the-art priuses because
00:38:08.240the money they each of them would have used to buy crappy cars is all being pulled together to
00:38:15.780buy really nice cars because they're buying fewer of them that's very smart it's very sophisticated
00:38:21.020it's very advanced and they carpool to tucson every day and so it's very smart to save money
00:38:27.760it's very smart to save water it's very smart to feed each other in a way that doesn't blow up your
00:38:34.020body. It's very smart to live in a community that makes you feel good. So if we can help people
00:38:40.660understand this by creating a single model that inspires the rest of the world, then we won't
00:38:45.780have to change the world. The world will change itself once they see the difference.
00:39:04.020I'll get out of all your boxes, I'll get out, you can't hold me in these chains, I'll get out, father free me from this bondage, knowing my condition is the reason I must change, your stinkin' resolution is no type of solution, preventing me from freedom, maintaining your pollution,
00:40:23.120As we're seeing these new models arise, like permaculture,
00:40:31.660we could see they're really stemming from these traditional agroforestry and ancient methods.
00:40:38.160And I'm wondering, are there any of these methods that you'd like to share with us
00:40:43.780that you've been really amazed by and would like to see more people bring these ways of tending back?
00:40:53.120Absolutely. And I have to be honest, right off the bat, I'm not very seasoned in the practice of these things. But I'm, I'm one of those people who spent too much time in academia. And now I'm all theory and no practice. But, but the things that have inspired me, I can tell you've probably read Kat Anderson's book, Tending the Wild.
00:41:15.380mm-hmm okay yeah because i keep hearing you reference a lot of her ideas so that i think
00:41:22.360is the the pinnacle of human subsistence is where you are gardening the mountainside
00:41:30.140and this is something that we definitely did in this continent and i imagine every other continent
00:41:37.100at one stage where the forests were not untouched by human beings rather they were made by human
00:41:45.580beings and more and more scientists of the western culture are starting to understand that when you
00:41:52.520walk into the Kogi village in Colombia the forest around you has been planted not completely but
00:42:01.860definitely in large part planted by the people so much so that when you venture farther away
00:42:08.080the forest looks completely different so not trying to control nature but helping nature do
00:42:16.480what she's already trying to do that's the key not to control her but help facilitate her along
00:42:24.060and what she's already trying to do.0.82
00:42:26.560So I guess specific examples of that are floodplain agriculture.
00:42:33.160So you're not exporting the water to go to where your crops are.
00:42:38.680You are bringing your crops to where the water is.
00:42:47.200And this is what a lot of dryland farmers do out here in the southwest.
00:42:50.340When I was in Mexico last week, there was these things called milpas, M-I-L-P-A. And the milpa is the mixed agricultural techniques. So I was literally on a hillside and there was coffee plants, corn plants, and probably 50 other kinds of plants all around me.
00:43:12.540And so these people were sowing their corn seeds into the forest right there with everything else.
00:43:20.180And so they didn't have to destroy the forest to create their crops.
00:43:25.520They planted their crops into the forest.
00:43:28.480And so that was so inspiring to me because it showed me that the forest is a farm.
00:43:38.360i had a dream once where there was this whole area that was completely shaved down all the
00:43:44.040trees and been cut and right beside it there was a forest and they were starting to cut down this
00:43:48.820other part of the forest i said what are you doing and they said we're taking down this forest because
00:43:54.420we're going to plant a farm and i said to them the forest is a farm and this was years ago before i
00:44:01.520even had much intelligence about all this stuff but that dream was really important to me because
00:44:06.640it showed me through dream that we have the ability to honor what the forest is doing and
00:44:13.640to help her out and to benefit from what she's already naturally doing and at the same time
00:44:19.900nourish her and benefit her through our actions so that's pretty normal but it's become abnormal
00:44:26.580because we think that's wild right and that word wild really needs to be interrogated it needs to
00:44:32.800be questioned because wild is only wild if you're unfamiliar with it the europeans came to this
00:44:39.100continent said oh there's wild plants everywhere and the native people were like no actually we
00:44:44.880we planted some of those you know it's like we know every single tree in this forest we know
00:44:50.600what it smells like what it tastes like what you can do with it ones that you should just leave
00:44:55.820alone and so it's not wild anymore it's very familiar and co-created between human beings
00:45:03.180and nature's creative process and so that term wild and honoring that if we go to the mountainside
00:45:11.380like there's a mountain outside of albuquerque called sandia mountain and i go hiking on it
00:45:16.180often and if i see lots of edible plants and medicinal plants and i harvest them and as
00:45:24.280you're harvesting them make sure to take a note of where the seeds are and help spread the seeds
00:45:29.100as you're harvesting but that hillside if you've never been to it before it looks wild right it's
00:45:34.940kind of wild but if you become familiar with it if you start to walk it and be with it then you
00:45:42.040start to see wow this is not so wild this is something i helped to create and something that
00:45:46.440created me. And so I think one of our goals as humans should be to make everything unwild to us
00:45:55.480and make it more familiar and more connected to our daily lives. And I think that starts with
00:46:03.340keeping track of how many, what percentage of your day do you spend indoors? Mine is atrocious
00:46:11.620because i'm a student i spend probably on average 80 of my day indoors every day and it's very sad
00:46:21.900but we need to change that we need to remember what it's like to feel cold to feel hot to feel
00:46:29.980to feel period and to get out there and and connect but i'm not sure if i answered your
00:46:36.740question completely but in terms of specific ways i think instead of the main point is instead of
00:46:44.620controlling where and how things grow try to find where they already are growing and instead of
00:46:53.820trying to contour nature to feed you change your own life so that you go to where the food is
00:47:01.960And through that sacred act of eating, you are becoming more and more connected with everything that you destroy, everything you eat, everything you drink. And then we will automatically be much more prone to protect the environments we live in.
00:47:18.600I chuckled to myself a few times when you were speaking about putting ourselves in positions to actually feel again, feeling cold, feeling hot, feeling a rash from a nettle, feeling the experiences of actually interacting with the world outside of our human built confines.
00:47:42.500and it's completely expanded my love of this earth to be interconnected with her on a daily basis
00:47:51.760so I really appreciate that and also speaking about the wild and speaking about how wild isn't
00:47:59.640something that is for me at least it's not something that is separate but it's kin and how
00:48:05.620we relate to this natural world around us and you know and i just thought about how to be
00:48:13.580ecosystem engineers keystone species in a positive light there were times where humans interacted
00:48:21.520and actually created more biodiversity and more abundance in the plant animal world rather than
00:48:28.020less and we can look at that and learn and reconnect with that way of being