For The Wild - ROBIN WALL KIMMERER on Indigenous Knowledge for Earth Healing ⧸35

00:00:00.000 It's high on a mountain, the warm winds are blowing, and where the winds are blowing to,

00:00:26.400 There ain't no way of knowing

00:00:29.380 The mountain grass is short

00:00:32.680 It's dry and close to burning

00:00:35.440 Crying out for water

00:00:38.680 As the season's turning

00:00:41.680 Sweet smell the pines

00:00:46.680 Tall western cedar

00:00:48.360 Drifting on the wind

00:00:51.840 Through the mountains like a river

00:00:54.440 Hello, I'm Ayanna Young, and I welcome you to Unlearn and Rewild, where we explore radical

00:01:08.520 ideas relating to earth renewal. Today, we are speaking with Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer.

00:01:14.540 Dr. Kimmerer is a mother, scientist, writer, member of the citizen band Potwatomie,

00:01:20.400 and Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse, New York.

00:01:29.560 She is also the founding director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment.

00:01:34.900 The center's mission is to create programs which draw on the wisdom of both indigenous and scientific knowledge for our shared goals of sustainability.

00:01:42.860 Her research interests include the role of traditional ecological knowledge in ecological restoration and building resilience for climate change.

00:01:52.660 In collaboration with tribal partners, she and her students have an active research program in the ecology and restoration of plans of cultural significance to Native people.

00:02:03.640 She is active in efforts to broaden access to environmental science training for Native students

00:02:09.020 and to introduce the benefits of traditional ecological knowledge to the scientific community

00:02:14.600 in a way that respects and protects Indigenous knowledge.

00:02:18.760 Dr. Kimmerer has authored numerous literary essays and scientific papers on restoration and plant ecology,

00:02:24.900 as well as the award-winning books, Gathering Moss, and Braiding Sweetgrass.

00:02:30.700 She lives in an old farm in upstate New York, tending gardens, both cultivated and wild.

00:02:37.260 Hello, Robin. Thank you so much for being on the show. Welcome.

00:02:41.740 Thanks, Ayanna. It's a pleasure.

00:02:43.780 You begin braiding sweetgrass with a beautiful retelling of a Native American creation story, Sky Woman Falling.

00:02:52.480 Would you mind treating us to a telling of that story?

00:02:55.920 Oh, I would be happy to. It's one of my favorites.

00:03:00.540 If we begin in the beginning, people lived just as they do on Earth today,

00:03:07.000 but they lived in the sky world, raising their families, cultivating their gardens.

00:03:12.620 And in the sky world, there grew a beautiful tree called by different people,

00:03:17.560 either the tree of light or the tree of life.

00:03:21.160 and on this tree grew every kind of plant all of the medicines all the grasses all the nuts

00:03:28.460 everything on this one tree and one day a great windstorm passed through the sky world and fell

00:03:35.060 this tree and when it toppled a great hole opened in the sky world a beautiful young woman who we

00:03:42.640 call sky woman or gish kokwe stepped over to the edge of that hole and looked down and it was only

00:03:50.080 darkness below and she was very curious and she looked a little harder and bent a little farther

00:03:56.680 and her feet began to slip um on the edge of the hole and so she grabbed out onto the tree of life

00:04:03.880 to to brace herself and to stop her fall but the branch broke off in her hand and she began to fall

00:04:11.260 all by herself falling through the darkness into this unknown far from everything that she had ever

00:04:19.480 known and and of course she was really frightened and alone and she was falling into emptiness

00:04:26.800 but as it turns out it wasn't emptiness because below her all the water beings were assembled

00:04:34.100 and the geese looked up at this sudden shaft of light that was coming from the sky world and they

00:04:41.400 saw there this little speck just a dust moat in the beam of that light but as it came closer and

00:04:48.440 closer the geese could see that it was a woman spiraling toward them with her arms outstretched

00:04:55.020 and her black hair billowing behind her and they knew just what to do and they rose from the water

00:05:02.000 a whole flock of geese they rose as one calling as they do and they rose up to meet her and they

00:05:08.340 caught her they caught her on their wings so in her state of great fear and worry as to what

00:05:15.920 would become of her the geese saved her they rescued her and so we're taught that the very

00:05:22.640 first relationship between people and the other beings of the earth was one of care and of

00:05:30.020 responsibility and the geese brought sky woman down to the water world where all the water animals

00:05:36.960 were assembled because at that time the earth was only water and they understood that they couldn't

00:05:43.760 hold her forever and so the snapping turtle who was floating there in the water said here rest her

00:05:51.020 on my back and i'll hold her while we decide what to do they knew of course that she couldn't live

00:05:57.280 on the back of a turtle and so they all said well we have heard of earth of mud down underneath the

00:06:05.140 water and that's what she needs she needs some land to live on and so all of the water animals

00:06:11.420 said well we'll go get her some and mong or that is our name for the loon who's the strongest of

00:06:18.000 the swimmer said i'll go get some and so he dove down deep as loons do and he was gone for a really

00:06:25.560 long time and but when he came back up and shook the water off from his beautiful black and white

00:06:31.860 feathers his beak was empty he said it's too far it's too dark it's too cold i couldn't do it

00:06:38.180 and so then the sturgeon said let me try same result the otter the beaver all of the water

00:06:46.920 animals tried in their turn and nobody could get the earth till finally the only one that was left

00:06:53.640 was the little muskrat and you know muskrats are pretty wee little creatures but he said i'll do

00:07:00.380 this and so the muskrat turned under the water and pawed furiously and flailed his little legs

00:07:08.120 and disappeared from the surface and he was gone the longest time of all and all of his relatives

00:07:13.980 were really worried at what would become of him and indeed before long a little stream of bubbles

00:07:20.700 rose through the water followed by the limp body of the muskrat and everyone wept that their small

00:07:29.420 relative had given their life to try and save this woman and then they noticed that his little 0.97

00:07:36.280 paw so like a human hand was clenched shut and when they opened his fingers there was a dab of

00:07:44.600 mud and the turtle said here spread this on my back and sky woman took the little handful of mud

00:07:52.620 and did exactly that and in her great gratitude for the gifts and the sacrifices of all of the

00:07:59.700 animal beings she began to dance and she danced in a circle around the back of the turtle and she

00:08:08.440 was doing what we today call the women's dance that her feet did not leave the earth she was

00:08:14.220 caressing the back of that turtle and as she danced her gratitude as she began to sing her

00:08:21.040 gratitude all of this gratitude poured forth and caused the earth to grow and the back of the

00:08:28.460 turtle spread into what we call today our home of north america of of turtle island and like any

00:08:36.020 good guest sky woman hadn't come empty-handed because remember that when she was falling from

00:08:42.940 the sky world she had broken off a branch of the tree of life in her hand and so she had there

00:08:49.280 the roots the seeds all over the nuts and berries and she spread those seeds over the back of the

00:08:54.980 turtle and the world became the beautiful green place that we are today and so what this beautiful

00:09:02.700 story teaches us is that in return for the care and responsibility from the animals we human people

00:09:10.660 bear our own gifts we have to give our gifts in reciprocity for what has been given to us

00:09:17.180 And this fundamental teaching of reciprocity and responsibility for each other reminds us that in the very beginning of time, all the rest of the creation acted as a life raft for human people.

00:09:34.440 And now so much closer to the end, we must be their life raft in reciprocity for their gifts that they have shared with us.

00:09:43.900 thank you so much for sharing that beautiful story with us now across the ocean another

00:09:53.300 creation story was being told about a woman in a garden how does the moral of the story of eden

00:10:00.400 differ and how can we see the psychological effect rippling down through history

00:10:06.600 well i'm certainly not an expert in that other tradition but i think about eve as an exile

00:10:15.600 from the garden she was banished from this beautiful productive generous landscape and

00:10:23.920 and told that she had to go earn her living elsewhere that instead of being the beneficiary 0.94

00:10:29.920 of the gifts of the earth that she was going to have to work to rest her living out of the earth

00:10:35.500 and that she was in fact she and all of her children were charged with what essentially

00:10:42.100 became interpreted as a control or a domination over the earth as opposed to the role of sky

00:10:50.260 woman being in a sense a co-creator of abundance of making the garden and eve was banished from

00:10:58.220 the garden and to me those are such fundamentally different orientations to the world that then

00:11:04.420 color how it is that we interact with the land, it almost sets up the adversarial relationship

00:11:11.080 that we see today in between people and the land, people and nature, that I think is at the root of

00:11:17.980 many of our environmental ills. It's so fascinating to begin to understand how

00:11:24.940 our religious and spiritual stories continue to shape our relationships.

00:11:29.060 And now it seems science is essentially the new religion of the West.

00:11:34.180 It informs political decisions and is the foundation of our evidence-based legal system.

00:11:40.380 The late Sioux academic Vine Deloria said, quote,

00:11:44.040 Science imposes highly restricted patterns upon the natural world, thereby limiting its potential for response.

00:11:51.580 Scientists, and more broadly all of us, are not asking complete questions of nature,

00:11:56.560 and in many cases are asking irrelevant ones, end quote.

00:12:01.540 How has science carried over the wounds of separation from nature?

00:12:06.060 And why is science restrictive and not enough to understand the world we live in

00:12:11.220 or to confront our greatest challenges?

00:12:15.720 What a great question.

00:12:17.860 And as a person both of indigenous heritage and a practicing scientist,

00:12:22.780 this is a tension that I live with all of the time.

00:12:25.540 And the way that I think about it is that science is, of course, or can be a really, really powerful tool for sustainability, and I don't want to take anything away from that, but one of the reasons that science is so powerful in its explanatory power is also its limitation,

00:12:47.140 In that when we have this strictly materialist, reductionist worldview that explicitly separates the scientist as observer and that which we observe, let's say nature, that separation between the observer and the observed is supposed to give us great rationality and objectivity, right?

00:13:10.800 And it can.

00:13:12.100 If the questions that we're asking are how does it work?

00:13:16.160 if the questions are reductionist if the questions are well essentially true false

00:13:21.420 hypothesis testing science is a great tool but the issues that we face today lie at this nexus

00:13:29.340 land and people it's all about relationship the questions that are important are to some extent

00:13:35.960 how does it work we have to know that but the more important questions are of relationship

00:13:40.980 and strict objectivity is not going to get us where we need to be if science very explicitly

00:13:48.420 separates values from outcomes and the crises that we face i think are at root crises of values and

00:13:57.260 relationship and orientation and science can't be the only tool and vine de loria and other

00:14:03.740 wonderful elders will often talk about the fact that we human people have four ways of knowing

00:14:10.900 at least. Frank Kejete, the great Pueblo scholar, talks about the fact that we human people have

00:14:18.040 the gift of intellect that science engages. We have the mind, we have the body, we have emotion,

00:14:23.940 and we have spirit. And science explicitly excludes emotion and spirit as valid ways of

00:14:31.220 knowing. So to me, using traditional knowledge and science together means that we can then

00:14:39.900 re-engage our spiritual ways of knowing, our emotional ways of knowing, and bring those to

00:14:45.500 bear in environmental problem solving as well. Science can be a bit of an intellectual monoculture.

00:14:53.080 What we're really advocating for in the Center for Native Peoples, and many Indigenous scholars

00:14:57.860 make this case as well, is for an intellectual pluralism to bring all of our ways of knowing

00:15:03.800 together mind, body, emotion, and spirit. Just because science is a powerful tool doesn't mean

00:15:10.720 that it's the only tool, and it's exciting to see a resurgence of other ways of knowing.

00:15:33.800 If we don't believe someone can explain

00:15:43.200 How we do all this stuff

00:15:45.320 Cause of the size of our brain

00:15:47.220 We'll die immediately

00:15:50.120 And so ends humanity 0.98

00:16:00.600 As we all fall down 0.99

00:16:05.160 Any fool knows 0.99

00:16:14.520 It's better not to look below 1.00

00:16:17.940 With all those poor, poor souls

00:16:22.280 Who still have fun

00:16:24.020 Blind faith and science

00:16:26.240 As they all fall down

00:16:28.480 As they all fall down

00:16:33.340 Now, can you say a bit more about the Center for Native Peoples and the environment?

00:16:45.880 What is the mission?

00:16:47.600 And can you tell us about your research program

00:16:50.000 in the restoration of plants of cultural significance to Native people?

00:16:54.800 Sure.

00:16:55.360 As you mentioned in your introduction, the mission of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment is really to bring together, to bring into conversation, two great ways of knowing, Indigenous environmental knowledge and philosophy, which we use the shorthand of TEK, or traditional ecological knowledge, and scientific ecological knowledge, or SEK.

00:17:21.080 and what we really are imagining is a garden of ideas you know what would it be like if we

00:17:29.240 began to do environmental caretaking and indeed environmental science using indigenous philosophical

00:17:36.300 principles as the foundation and then using the appropriate tools of science where they are the

00:17:43.940 best tool they sometimes they are sometimes they aren't to solve environmental problems

00:17:48.800 And we're really lucky to sit at the confluence of two great intellectual traditions. Our university sits in the heart of Haudenosaunee territory, just a few miles from Onondaga Nation, which is a center for indigenous philosophy, particularly environmental philosophy.

00:18:08.200 and then we have the tools of western science represented in the in the nearby universities

00:18:13.720 and so we are working hard to bring these ways of knowing into conversation for the earth that

00:18:21.720 we all love and some of the work that we've been doing has been in education it's been in research

00:18:29.880 and in public outreach and as you asked what has been the nature of our work in terms of

00:18:37.020 plant restoration. One of the projects that we did, which was related to the disappearance of

00:18:45.440 an important plant in basketry and an important sacred plant as well, in our language, we call

00:18:51.780 it wingosh, sweetgrass, Linnaean name, the scientific name, hierochloe odorata, which means

00:18:59.460 the sacred, fragrant, holy grass in botanical Latin. So Leneas got it right. But our Haudenosaunee

00:19:07.480 basket-making partners had told us that sweetgrass was beginning to decline, that they couldn't

00:19:13.920 always find it in the places that they had historically gathered it. And even in the

00:19:19.340 places where it was, it was not as vital as it had been. And so using those observations and

00:19:27.620 their hypotheses about what might be contributing to its loss, we began to work together on

00:19:33.960 understanding the pressures that were put on that important plant and how we might alleviate them.

00:19:40.520 So one of the things that we ended up learning and doing again with our Indigenous partners at

00:19:46.380 Gana Johalege, which is a restored and renewed Mohawk community along the Mohawk River,

00:19:52.160 is we did experimental restorations there.

00:19:56.320 Gana Johalege is a cultural site

00:19:58.460 where there is a great deal of work being done

00:20:00.460 in revitalization of Haudenosaunee culture,

00:20:03.760 language, teachings, ceremonies,

00:20:06.520 all kinds of traditional teachings.

00:20:08.720 And they were doing it in a landscape

00:20:10.060 that was missing a lot of plants

00:20:12.000 who should be our companions and teachers.

00:20:14.360 So that's why we chose to put sweetgrass back there.

00:20:18.360 And I'm glad to say that that sweetgrass

00:20:20.760 really began to thrive there and one of the reasons i think is that people embraced it and

00:20:26.500 used it the plant brought the gifts to the people in reciprocity people accepted those gifts and it

00:20:33.580 turns out that one of the other areas of our research collaboration was about the effects

00:20:40.060 of harvesting how does sweetgrass respond to harvesting and a couple of the basket makers

00:20:46.680 had told us that there was a difference in teaching there were some groups of harvesters

00:20:51.780 who were taught to only pick the sweetgrass blade by blade and the other group had said well no we've

00:20:58.920 been taught you should take a little handful and pull it up both groups agreed that they were

00:21:05.880 taking it by the honorable harvest never taking more than half doing it in a respectful way but

00:21:11.540 they were taking in different ways and so they wanted to work with us again to try to ascertain

00:21:17.920 which one of those ways of harvesting was most beneficial to the sweetgrass and one of the really

00:21:24.340 cool results came when we had these restored sweetgrass meadows and we practiced these two

00:21:32.260 kinds of harvesting to see what was going to happen but of course because it was a scientific

00:21:37.300 experiment we also had a control we had a place where there was no harvesting and of course in

00:21:43.300 the western conservation paradigm indeed in the western restoration paradigm as you're familiar

00:21:49.960 with we have this idea that again nature and people are a bad mix so the best thing that we

00:21:56.540 could do for the plant of course would be to keep people away from it right that's how a lot of

00:22:02.160 contemporary conservation works. Well, what happened when we kept people away from it?

00:22:07.520 In the control plots, where nobody harvested, that's where the sweetgrass declined.

00:22:13.540 Where harvesting was done by either of the traditional methods, the sweetgrass responded

00:22:19.340 beautifully. It almost doubled in numbers. And as it turns out, sweetgrass needs people.

00:22:24.680 People need sweetgrass. It needed the disturbance of this micro-harvest to reduce competition,

00:22:32.160 to break the buds on the rhizome so that the plant would flourish in response.

00:22:38.040 That sweetgrass was a really amazing teacher for us to remind us

00:22:42.740 that people are an important part of the thriving of this particular plant,

00:22:48.680 that in order to restore the plant, we had to restore the harvesting relationship as well.

00:22:55.360 It's so amazing and comforting to know that plants and humans need each other

00:23:01.020 and it's possible to truly have a healthy relationship with our plant relatives.

00:23:07.940 And traditional ecological knowledge and native land management

00:23:11.660 emerged out of gradual and long-lasting relationship with land

00:23:16.500 and are so interwoven with their native lands

00:23:19.680 that they could be seen as an evolutionary force

00:23:24.520 as well as shaped by evolution.

00:23:26.840 But with the biotic collapse progressing on catastrophically short timescales, how could our course of action be informed by traditional thought? What land management practices could be helpful in this rapid extinction period?

00:23:45.400 it's important i think to remember that traditional ecological knowledge is exactly

00:23:54.660 as you suggested it is adaptive knowledge that helps us adapt but it is also continually evolving

00:24:03.500 and adapting to novel circumstances so in fact it may be just the sort of guidance that we need

00:24:11.660 as the world is changing so rapidly and if you think about throughout the long long human history

00:24:20.380 over which traditional ecological knowledge evolved it is resilient knowledge it is knowledge

00:24:27.600 that shifts and changes because nature is a moving target right it's not standing still it's hugely

00:24:34.920 dynamic and so traditional ecological knowledge i really think about as a way of being in a web of

00:24:44.640 relationships and while nature may change while the players may change the stage may change

00:24:52.680 i think it's the relationship to place that endures and can guide us so these relationships

00:25:02.000 which are based in reciprocity for example are i think going to be a guide for adaptation in

00:25:11.080 rapidly changing times and you know oftentimes we say that as the land changes traditional knowledge

00:25:19.820 is lost we hear this from our relatives in the far north right who see their traditional knowledge

00:25:27.000 threatened by climate change and by melting ice and and the disasters that are befalling them

00:25:33.160 but i've also been taught that the knowledge itself may disappear from the people but it's

00:25:42.920 not lost because that knowledge is actually resident in the land it's the land and the

00:25:48.620 rivers and the plants and the animals that are going to teach us and it's our relationship with

00:25:54.300 them that is going to enable us to learn. So while it's super important to maintain and revitalize

00:26:02.780 traditional knowledge, I think an element of this that we also have to focus on is revitalizing our

00:26:09.340 ability to learn from the land, to be better students of the land again. And with this theme

00:26:16.460 of reciprocity and responsibility, one of the things that I think ties together a lot of

00:26:23.000 traditional land management practices over the years is this notion of mutuality, that what's

00:26:31.600 good for people is often the same thing that's good for land. And when I say good for people,

00:26:38.400 I mean good for the lives of people and living healthful, balanced lives. I think that one of

00:26:47.020 the keys to traditional land management whether we're talking about in the cascades or in the

00:26:54.240 prairies or in the adirondacks or in the desert one of the hallmarks of those traditional land

00:26:59.740 management practices is that they were designed to engender biodiversity and here we are in a

00:27:08.180 biodiversity crisis where evolutionary biologists estimate that we are losing 200 species a day

00:27:16.820 it's hard to wrap your mind and of course your heart around that kind of loss so land management

00:27:26.900 practices that safeguard biodiversity and in fact generate biodiversity are the land management

00:27:36.180 practices that we need and you look back and probably not just look back it's happening today

00:27:43.680 too that one of our most powerful land management tools that comes from indigenous science is the

00:27:49.400 use of prescribed fire which was really all about creating biodiversity in the landscape because

00:27:56.200 biodiversity translates to the well-being of people who live on the land you don't have all

00:28:03.760 your eggs in one basket you have multiple food sources multiple fiber sources by creating a

00:28:10.480 mosaic you know all sorts of successional stages a mosaic of habitat stages the greater the

00:28:17.240 biodiversity the greater choices and resilience people have about how to live in a changing

00:28:23.460 landscape and i'm sad to say that so many of our contemporary resource management practices

00:28:29.400 really yield homogeneity, they yield uniformity of just the one thing that people say they want

00:28:37.140 as a commodity, generally speaking. And I think that's so wrongheaded, that we can learn from

00:28:43.120 traditional land management practices to once again, adopt those practices that both safeguard

00:28:49.780 and regenerate biodiversity.

00:28:59.400 So if I could distill down my thinking on how to get through this bottleneck of convergent

00:29:06.440 crises, I'd say there are three areas of struggle that rise above the rest.

00:29:11.980 One, ecological restoration on a massive scale.

00:29:15.940 Two, activist resistance to slow or halt the destruction.

00:29:20.180 And three, working to refashion the collective psyche with a land ethic of reciprocity.

00:29:26.300 you've contributed generously to all these areas and i'm wondering how do you prioritize these

00:29:34.020 things where are you being called to serve yeah what a good question because they are all facets

00:29:42.080 of what we need to do aren't they the resistance the restoration and changing the way that we think

00:29:50.540 and throughout my career I think I've been part of all of those but what I've really come to

00:29:58.560 understand is that in doing restoration on the small scale on the large scale as well I can't

00:30:06.080 help but remember and it's always in your face isn't it when you're doing restoration work

00:30:11.240 that as we heal parts of the landscape we're simply going to in a sense replicate damages

00:30:18.600 unless we also heal our relationship to place.

00:30:22.940 I've come to the thinking that it's not just the land that's been broken.

00:30:27.260 The land is broken because our relationship to land is broken.

00:30:31.920 And so much of the healing that we need to do is healing of land, healing of water.

00:30:37.840 Yes, resistance against those forces of environmental destruction.

00:30:42.040 but fundamental to that at the deepest level is as you wisely say this notion of our collective

00:30:48.800 psyche it comes to worldview i think i think it circles right back to where we began ayana

00:30:55.520 with our stories like creation stories that guide us into thinking about what is our relationship

00:31:02.520 with place i really think that my work right now in reciprocity for all the gifts that the earth

00:31:11.480 has given to me is to try to work through story to change the story of our relationship to place

00:31:20.320 as i expect you know gary nabhand our wonderful colleague thinker botanist restoration ecologist

00:31:27.960 has this wonderful phrase we don't need to just restore we need to re-story in doing

00:31:35.440 restoration we have to reclaim another way of seeing ourselves in relationship to the world

00:31:43.460 and so much of the root cause i think of these multiple and convergent crises that you speak of

00:31:50.540 come from human exceptionalism quite honestly through a worldview which sets human beings

00:31:58.580 apart from the rest of nature that says that this one species homo sapiens is somehow more deserving

00:32:04.920 of all of the gifts of the world

00:32:07.940 and that other beings are just disposable things,

00:32:11.480 disposable objects in a way.

00:32:14.040 And that kind of thinking of human exceptionalism,

00:32:17.700 of creating this hierarchy in which all the rest of creation,

00:32:22.200 all these millions of other species don't matter,

00:32:25.220 that they don't have the same right of personhood that humans do.

00:32:29.700 I think that is the root of the crises that we face today.

00:32:33.980 so so often our environmental solutions you know i laughingly think that it's all about changing

00:32:40.760 light bulbs but what we really need to do i think is to change ourselves and to change our worldview

00:32:46.640 and reclaim this way of knowing that saw ourselves as one member of the democracy of species that we

00:32:55.840 work in partnership with all other beings that we are not above them or over them dominating or

00:33:02.300 controlling them, but that we work humbly in partnership with them. And that's the kind of

00:33:08.560 shift in collective psyche and worldview that I think can save us.

00:33:15.840 Thank you for that. Modern society is increasingly disconnected from the labor

00:33:22.700 involved in our daily provisions. Our needs for food, medicine, and shelter are met by the

00:33:30.800 exploitation of humans and planet. And we're really getting the chemical equivalents of those

00:33:36.340 things. A theme that emerges throughout your books is the way daily labors have traditionally

00:33:42.520 kept us in sync with the land. And you illustrate this exquisitely through the maple syrup harvest.

00:33:49.060 Can you take us through that string of thought?

00:33:51.300 absolutely to me our absence from the living world our absence of having our hands in the

00:34:02.600 dirt or our hands on a sap bucket or a basket full of berries has separated us from our greatest

00:34:10.940 teachers in the living world and it has separated us from some of the things that make us uniquely

00:34:18.540 human. I love the way you'd call that labor. It is, you know, it's hard labor, digging potatoes

00:34:25.440 and cutting firewood and all of that. But it's so joyful as well, because you feel in relationship

00:34:32.540 with place and surrounded by all of your teachers in a way. And I think honestly,

00:34:40.920 it makes us lonely. You know, when you go get your food just from the grocery store, all shrink

00:34:46.740 wrap you don't even have relationship with the being who made that for you we think of it as a

00:34:53.820 commodity as a product again it's this notion that it commodifies nature and makes these gifts from

00:35:00.440 the rest of the world things that we're entitled to and not gifts at all and this idea of once again

00:35:08.180 feeling as if recognizing that we live in a world made of gifts not a world made of stuff

00:35:15.620 changes everything because when somebody gives us a gift that's somebody who might be a raspberry

00:35:22.820 what might be a maple tree when somebody gives us a gift we are immediately called to gratitude

00:35:29.800 we know what to do we feel that gratitude and we feel the reciprocity that in return for the gift

00:35:36.400 that's given to us we want to give a gift in return and that kind of gift economy with nature

00:35:44.400 is a fundamental form of reciprocity and it comes back to our labor doesn't it because our labor

00:35:51.520 our work with the land is a way of paying back for what has been given to us that we then care

00:35:59.120 for the land and for the place through our labor that has supported us but the problem is of course

00:36:05.580 that when you get a shrink-wrapped plastic encased suffocating basket of berries at the grocery store

00:36:13.660 it's really hard to see through that to understand that it is buried persons who have given you those

00:36:20.400 gifts we just think of them as stuff like they were made in a factory so renewing our subjective

00:36:27.880 relationship with place i think is at the heart of renewing that relationship of reciprocity

00:36:34.520 to see the world as made of gifts and not of natural resources this brings up the tricky

00:36:41.380 situation we're in now. If 7 billion people all rushed into the forest to go foraging,

00:36:47.400 assuming they knew what was edible, many species would be picked to oblivion.

00:36:52.400 Delicate communities would suffer. So how would the concept of the honorable harvest

00:36:58.400 be applied to this grossly imbalanced situation?

00:37:03.040 Thank you very much for asking that, because oftentimes when we renew our relationship to

00:37:08.900 place people think again that well that means in renewing my relationship to place i want to be

00:37:13.700 a forager i want to wild craft all of these things the world cannot bear the weight of

00:37:19.280 seven billion wild crafters just can't so this notion of the honorable harvest

00:37:25.920 as a set of guidelines that govern ethically how we take from the earth needs to be applied

00:37:34.040 to the 80% of folks who live in urban areas today

00:37:38.280 who aren't physically engaged with the source of their food.

00:37:43.920 But I think, well, they're certainly economically engaged

00:37:47.220 and I think can be philosophically engaged as well.

00:37:51.520 One of the first precepts of this indigenous canon 0.78

00:37:55.180 of how we take from the earth 0.99

00:37:57.040 is to take only that which you need.

00:38:00.080 and self-restraint is a powerful mechanism of enacting reciprocity with the land of remembering

00:38:08.600 that these are the lives of other beings and so you only take what you need and that of course

00:38:15.020 has immediate consequences for for our carbon footprint doesn't it because we know that climate

00:38:21.340 change is driven by consumption and so one of the steps which is available to everybody

00:38:27.740 is simply to consume less, to separate our needs from our wants.

00:38:33.420 And that's one of the most important elements of the Honorable Harvest.

00:38:39.180 And what role would you guess cities will play in humanity's future?

00:38:43.740 And will urbanity always be an obstacle to rewilding

00:38:47.600 and connection to natural communities and traditions?

00:38:52.180 Oh, I don't think so.

00:38:53.820 It's such a myth to say that nature is out there.

00:38:57.160 It's outside the urban zones.

00:39:00.500 There's a wealth of natural ecosystems, of course, in the city.

00:39:05.440 Cities, as we know very well, are some of the most efficient places to live, right,

00:39:11.600 with a relatively lower impact than, say, you know,

00:39:15.720 complete continuing development and suburbanization and urban sprawl and so forth.

00:39:21.040 The denser we live, the more efficiently we live,

00:39:24.080 the better for our patterns of resource use, of course.

00:39:28.040 But that doesn't mean that we have to be disconnected from nature.

00:39:31.520 Whether you live in Manhattan or, you know, rural West Virginia,

00:39:35.580 you're still part of a human natural ecosystem.

00:39:38.940 So I think we have to, again, learn to honour and name

00:39:44.540 and feel part of the ecosystem in which we live.

00:39:49.500 There's a heck of a lot of urban foragers, aren't there,

00:39:52.620 who are building relationship and supplementing their diets

00:39:56.860 with the weedy, very valuable, courageous, brave little plants

00:40:02.220 who live among us in the city.

00:40:04.020 So I don't think it has to be either or.

00:40:06.220 There are tremendous ecological benefits of urbanization

00:40:10.220 in terms of reduction of our environmental impact.

00:40:14.160 But I think we just have to work harder and perhaps see differently

00:40:18.100 how we live in a web of relationships in urban nature.

00:40:22.620 Oh, tyrant city 0.92

00:40:29.960 Leave it from time to time 0.98

00:40:35.660 People with things in their ears

00:40:41.000 Cut me off at night 0.93

00:40:45.780 Get on the long yellow highway

00:40:50.960 Need to get the hell out 1.00

00:40:56.060 Hassholes, hassles, hassles 1.00

00:41:01.380 Always stacking up

00:41:06.220 Oh, children, lover

00:41:11.380 Why won't you leave me?

00:41:15.560 Why must you grind your axe against my fruit-bearing tree?

00:41:27.560 Oh, lonely mountain quiet, peaceful and mean

00:41:35.560 Out here in isolation

00:41:40.680 Don't hear no ambulance screams

00:41:46.340 Oh, bitter

00:41:49.460 Quote, we can starve together or feast together.

00:41:54.540 All flourishing is mutual.

00:41:57.180 Can you explain the phenomenon of massed fruiting,

00:42:01.060 which your ancestors experienced in the pecan groves of Oklahoma?

00:42:04.480 and what is your hypothesis of how these trees synchronize their fruiting all across the state

00:42:10.880 and what can we learn from the collective mentality of the forest? In that essay about

00:42:18.360 mass fruiting of trees I really draw on this phenomenon as a teacher for people because

00:42:26.600 indeed I do view the forest and as all elements of nature as as our teachers we think about this

00:42:34.220 emerging science of biomimicry right how we can use the way that other beings live to create

00:42:42.340 innovative products for ourselves what i'm really interested in is not so much of that kind of

00:42:49.740 biomimicry but a kind of cultural biomimicry of looking and seeing how nature is organized

00:42:55.520 and how we might learn from that in terms of how we live our lives both individually

00:43:01.440 and collectively. The question of mass fruiting, this ability of trees from many families,

00:43:08.440 but in North America, often from the families related to the oaks, this idea of simultaneous

00:43:14.580 fruiting every so often, followed by times when there's not a single acorn or black walnut or

00:43:21.660 pecan to be found, is for me a teaching about sticking together, about acting as one.

00:43:29.240 ecologically speaking what we find is that when all of those trees engage in mass fruiting and

00:43:36.640 produce all their fruits at once what tends to happen is that it saturates the desires of all

00:43:44.100 of those seed predators all of the squirrels shall we say that out there to eat those acorns or

00:43:49.180 or those pecans are going to have everything they need to eat in one year so much surplus

00:43:54.840 that some of those nuts that they hide

00:43:57.820 they don't need

00:43:59.500 or they are going to forget about

00:44:01.820 and so the next generation of the forest

00:44:04.840 is regenerated from those surplus seeds

00:44:07.520 and then in the next year

00:44:09.160 when there's a big squirrel population

00:44:11.660 having been fat and happy from the year before

00:44:14.920 suddenly there are no nuts

00:44:16.880 and so what the trees are doing in their self-restraint

00:44:20.700 is quelling that predator population

00:44:23.840 the squirrel population bringing it back into balance so that a few years later when all of

00:44:30.280 those trees do provide seeds again it's when the squirrel population really needs it so the squirrels

00:44:38.280 and the trees are working together to achieve a balance which enables the trees to flourish and

00:44:44.800 enables the squirrels to flourish so to me that's one of these teachings of all flourishing is

00:44:51.940 mutual. And can we design our societies with that in mind? What benefits one benefits all,

00:44:58.840 and that we need to know enough about how the natural world works to devise solutions that are

00:45:05.720 good for everybody. Evolution has produced just such systems, and we need to be mindful of them

00:45:12.960 and learn from them. At one point in history, people were considered to be ecosystem engineers

00:45:20.480 in a beneficial sense.

00:45:22.860 I cling to a dream that one day we can collectively remember our role

00:45:27.700 and once again harmoniously re-enter the wild web of life.

00:45:32.160 As far as you can tell,

00:45:33.960 what are some of the beneficial ecological functions of humans?

00:45:38.140 Who did we co-evolve with, and who would miss us if we were gone?

00:45:44.540 That's a great question.

00:45:46.800 Who would miss us if we were gone?

00:45:50.480 In many situations, of course, human beings, when we view ourselves primarily as consumers,

00:45:58.940 the rest of the world, in any cases we think, might just go on perfectly well without us.

00:46:07.600 But I'm not sure that that's true.

00:46:10.100 In fact, I'm pretty sure it's not true.

00:46:12.320 Because human beings in their practices on the landscape, some of these traditional land management practices we were speaking of a few minutes ago, can actually enhance biodiversity and can enhance the well-being of other elements of the ecosystem.

00:46:33.000 Human beings can be caretakers of place if done in such a way that we are mindful of our role as humans in creating balance.

00:46:44.400 And there are situations in which ecological dominance occurs when there is not adequate, what ecologists call natural disturbance.

00:46:55.280 You tend towards homogeneity when there isn't enough disturbance to create a mosaic of different habitat types and different opportunities for other species to flourish.

00:47:09.320 This is something that ecologists have come to call the intermediate disturbance hypothesis, that you can disrupt competitive dominance by creating opportunities for other species.

00:47:21.600 And human people can be really good at that. That's what prescribed fire is doing. That's what sustainable harvest does, is to create this kind of balance that allows all different life forms to flourish.

00:47:35.600 So re-establishing that balance is, I think, a step in the direction toward the vision that you suggest, but it has to be in balance. It's not don't consume. It's don't consume too much. It's finding that middle ground where human people can be co-creators of abundance, but not to dominate the landscape.

00:48:03.220 as many human people are awakening to earth's dilemma of biodiversity loss and the suffering

00:48:11.620 of practically all life many of them want to stand up and be active and engage in the world's

00:48:17.660 problems at the same time many non-native humans are awakening to traditional knowledge of

00:48:24.520 indigenous peoples wanting to learn and be a part of these traditions so how can non-native people

00:48:31.600 offer kinship and allyship to Indigenous people

00:48:35.980 without engaging in cultural appropriation.

00:48:39.520 I would want to direct your listeners to a wonderful piece of artwork

00:48:45.700 which has been created by the Syracuse Cultural Workers.

00:48:49.840 It's a piece of artwork which is a list.

00:48:52.620 It's called How to Be an Ally to Your Native Neighbors.

00:48:57.860 And I wish I had it here in front of me.

00:48:59.500 It's quite beautiful and deep in answering the question that you pose.

00:49:05.700 So that's an important resource. 0.98

00:49:09.040 I think that one of the dangers when enthusiasm grows for indigenous ways of knowing

00:49:18.040 and recognition of the power of indigenous ways of knowing,

00:49:22.420 That we'd be very careful in terms of the respect and avoidance of cultural appropriation that comes with that, that Indigenous knowledge speaks so deeply of acting from a relationship with your local landscape, with the landscape that feeds you, with the watershed that cares for you.

00:49:47.140 And I think one of the most powerful things that can be done in allyship with Native peoples and allyship with the land herself is to create authentic relationship with your home place.

00:50:01.140 to ask yourself what is it that you love too much to lose and then design a plan to fight for it

00:50:09.820 to protect it in your own way without often the impetus to borrow from native peoples but to

00:50:18.600 create an authentic sense of place to become oneself native to place and the way that that

00:50:27.640 happens is by paying deep attention to your landscape and to learning from it that i think

00:50:34.040 is really the essence of sense of place it's the essence of traditional knowledge thank you for

00:50:40.640 shedding some light on that very important and sensitive topic you've spoken about how the

00:50:47.480 language we use in english to refer to our non-human earthmates is deeply dishonoring to

00:50:53.320 their aliveness and their personhood. Can you speak about how it's much more than just a

00:50:59.160 grammatical problem, but a form of linguistic imperialism? And how do you propose we change

00:51:06.000 our tune? Well, we talked a few moments ago about this notion of human exceptionalism as being at

00:51:14.040 the root of many of our environmental pathologies, quite honestly, that is coded in the English

00:51:23.020 language and perhaps in other languages as well. And what I mean by that is that in English,

00:51:29.800 you are either a human or you are a thing, right? When we talk to one another, we wouldn't ever say

00:51:38.520 about our grandmother, oh, look, it's sitting in a rocking chair. It's drinking tea. We just

00:51:45.720 wouldn't say that because we rob her of personhood. We show her disrespect. We eliminate ourselves 0.98

00:51:51.760 from kinship and compassion but if you think about it in English that's exactly what we do

00:51:57.760 this powerful form of linguistic imperialism was when we began to speak English that we

00:52:04.560 had to it the world because English is structured in that way when I began learning my own language

00:52:12.820 and I'm just a fair beginner in doing so one of the challenges and one of the beauties of the

00:52:18.800 language is that we don't speak of the living world ever as it. We speak of the living world

00:52:27.860 with the same grammar that we use for our grandmother, for our brothers and our sisters

00:52:33.400 and our uncles and our grandfathers, because they are our family. We give them that same

00:52:39.020 kind of respect. And so I really worry that this worldview, this collective psyche we've been

00:52:46.120 talking about is conditioned by the language that we speak. It's represented in English's

00:52:51.740 itting of the natural world. And that, as I said, in Anishinaabe-born, in my language,

00:52:58.780 and in other indigenous languages, that nature is subject, not object. So I've been doing a fair

00:53:05.760 bit of thinking about how we might remedy that. And one of the things that I've wondered about is,

00:53:12.480 could we craft an alternative pronoun so that we don't have to speak of the living world as if it

00:53:21.020 was nothing, as if it was just stuff. In our language, the word for the earth is aki. And one

00:53:28.900 of my elders, Stuart King, gave me this beautiful word, bemadazi aki, which means a living being of

00:53:35.320 the earth and so I've been wondering and thinking about using that syllable key to slip in next to

00:53:44.760 he and she in place of it so that when we go to humbly ask for the gift of sap from those maples

00:53:54.260 as spring comes we don't say I'm going to go tap it we say key is giving us sap this spring

00:54:01.280 it fundamentally causes us to stop for a minute and reflect on the fact that that tree that maple

00:54:08.520 tree is another being is another person we also would need to have the plural pronoun and

00:54:16.120 fortunately we have that word already in english if we use key as the singular pronoun we add an

00:54:24.120 end. We're saying kin when we talk about collectively living beings, so that when those

00:54:31.180 robins come back to us in the springtime, we can say, oh, our kin have returned to us. Welcome.

00:54:38.160 We're so glad to see you. So that every time we talk about the living world, instead of reducing

00:54:43.280 it to object, to stuff, we honor them as our relatives. So that's a thought experiment I've

00:54:50.720 been playing with in terms of changing our language but most importantly we have to change

00:54:55.780 the way that we think the way that we behave to extend personhood to other beings and this can be

00:55:03.140 a really small thing but it can also be a huge thing if we look at for example the constitutions

00:55:09.940 of indigenous-led nations like Bolivia and Ecuador they have in their constitutions the personhood

00:55:17.360 of nature the rights of mother nature we look at the maori-led movement in new zealand

00:55:22.980 where their sacred wanganui river was granted the rights of legal personhood another example

00:55:31.240 being the rights of mother nature movement that before the united nations today is the universal

00:55:36.960 declaration of the rights of mother earth which would extend personhood to the land herself and

00:55:44.240 this I think is the fundamental shift in worldview that we need is the recognition of the personhood

00:55:50.260 of all beings as opposed to in this country where the the only things shall we say that

00:55:57.200 that have personhood are humans and corporations and no personhood granted for maple trees and

00:56:05.480 bluebirds. What I've really come to honor and so appreciate is that I think what we're engaged in

00:56:15.120 is collective remembering. We know these things. We know these things intuitively. The land speaks

00:56:21.500 it to us all the time, but we're conditioned not to listen to that. And so what is most hopeful

00:56:27.760 for me is that we are remembering our relationship with the living world and that that's why these

00:56:34.860 ideas resonate with us because we already know them to be true oh thank you so much robin for

00:56:42.340 this beautiful conversation you've helped guide us on this journey to dive deeper and challenge

00:56:48.520 our conditioning our relationships with each other the land and all that stems from her

00:56:54.320 do you have a website you could share with our listeners they can certainly go to the website

00:57:00.440 for the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment at SUNY ESF.

00:57:05.500 And I would refer them also to the books that you mentioned

00:57:09.580 and the books of many other writers.

00:57:11.840 The beautiful thing is that there are so many of us working in this direction.

00:57:15.540 It's very heartening.

00:57:17.240 So thank you so much for this good conversation and for your work, Ayanna.

00:57:21.580 It's really important. Thank you.

00:57:24.260 You've been listening to Robin Wall Kimmerer on Unlearn and Rewild.

00:57:28.340 I'm Ayanna Young.

00:57:29.220 the show is produced by March Young

00:57:31.600 we heard a song called Science

00:57:33.800 by Monkey Swallows the Universe

00:57:35.340 and Lonely Mountain by Sun Kill Moon

00:57:37.920 the theme song is

00:57:39.540 Like a River by Kate Wolfe

00:57:41.200 please visit our website to sign up

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00:57:45.000 and donate if you can

00:57:46.560 see you next time

00:57:59.220 Thank you.

For The Wild - May 14, 2016

ROBIN WALL KIMMERER on Indigenous Knowledge for Earth Healing ⧸35

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