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

00:00:00.280 Hey, for the wild community, it's Ayanna here, speaking to you from Prince Rupert, British

00:00:05.820 Columbia, where Madison and I are on the road north to the Tongass National Forest to do

00:00:12.060 some on-the-ground advocacy work for the campaign, and although the trip has been in many ways

00:00:19.900 beautiful, the northern lands are really in trouble, and the whole west is on fire, and

00:00:25.820 it's been so incredibly apocalyptic to see the forest burn. Really all land needs our protection

00:00:35.220 and our attention and support and I'm really blessed to be up here doing this work and I'm

00:00:42.620 looking forward to sharing this campaign with you all later this year. The month of August is staff

00:00:49.920 picks for the podcast so this week we are starting with carter lou's pick carter lou has been an

00:00:57.300 incredible friend and ally way before for the wild was even a twinkling in my eye so it's really

00:01:05.460 wonderful to hear from carter and if you value this podcast please consider subscribing on drip

00:01:11.860 it's a way to engage with the podcast and get bonus material the link is d.rip

00:01:19.720 slash four dash the dash wild all right now on to carter lou

00:01:24.860 hey there this is carter lou coming at you from brooklyn new york i've been a part of the further

00:01:36.820 Wild Team since it was called Deep Greens Gardens back in 2013. We were canned tomatoes,

00:01:42.560 hunting mushrooms, and coming to realize our role in serving the wild places that hold our hearts

00:01:48.880 so dearly. I feel really honored to still be a part of this amazing team and to kick off this

00:01:55.000 month of our favorites. This week's encore is a shout out to everyone who was able to make it to

00:02:00.400 our first reciprocity retreat two weeks ago. There were so many moments during that weekend that led

00:02:06.440 us back to Robin Wall Kimmerer's words and wisdom, so it feels right to start this month off with

00:02:12.560 Indigenous perspective. Robin believes that one of the most powerful things you can do to prove

00:02:17.860 your allyship to Native neighbors and the land that holds you is to create an authentic relationship

00:02:23.380 with that land. Paying deep attention to the landscape and learning from it is what Robin

00:02:29.300 explains as the essence of traditional knowledge. I am in love with this episode for so many reasons,

00:02:36.440 but especially because of how she outlines the fundamental importance of living in an active balance of reciprocity with the land we claim as home.

00:02:45.660 Well, without further ado, it is my great pleasure to introduce an encore of Robin Wall Kimmerer on Indigenous Knowledge for Earth Healing.

00:03:06.440 It's high on a mountain

00:03:22.360 The warm winds are blowing

00:03:23.800 And where the winds are blowing to

00:03:25.720 There ain't no way of knowing

00:03:28.660 The mountain grass is short

00:03:31.960 It's dry and close to burning

00:03:34.660 Crying out for water

00:03:37.960 As the season's turning

00:03:40.980 Sweet smell of the pines

00:03:45.960 Tall western cedar

00:03:47.640 Drifting on the wind

00:03:51.120 Through the mountains like a river

00:03:53.720 Hello, I'm Ayanna Young and I welcome you

00:04:04.520 to Unlearn and Rewild, where we explore radical ideas relating to earth renewal.

00:04:10.460 Today we are speaking with Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer. Dr. Kimmerer is a mother, scientist,

00:04:16.600 writer, member of the Citizen Band Potwatomie, and Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental

00:04:22.540 Biology at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse, New York.

00:04:28.840 She is also the founding director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment.

00:04:34.060 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.

00:04:42.780 Her research interests include the role of traditional ecological knowledge in ecological restoration and building resilience for climate change.

00:04:51.960 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.

00:05:02.920 She is active in efforts to broaden access to environmental science training for Native students

00:05:08.300 and to introduce the benefits of traditional ecological knowledge to the scientific community

00:05:13.880 in a way that respects and protects Indigenous knowledge.

00:05:18.040 Dr. Kimmerer has authored numerous literary essays and scientific papers on restoration and plant ecology,

00:05:24.140 as well as the award-winning books, Gathering Moss, and Braiding Sweetgrass.

00:05:29.980 She lives in an old farm in upstate New York, tending gardens, both cultivated and wild.

00:05:36.540 Hello, Robin. Thank you so much for being on the show. Welcome.

00:05:41.080 Thanks, Ayanna. It's a pleasure.

00:05:43.060 You begin braiding sweetgrass with a beautiful retelling of a Native American creation story, Sky Woman Falling.

00:05:51.740 Would you mind treating us to a telling of that story?

00:05:55.180 Oh, I would be happy to. It's one of my favorites.

00:05:59.880 If we begin in the beginning, people lived just as they do on Earth today,

00:06:06.180 but they lived in the sky world, raising their families, cultivating their gardens.

00:06:11.960 And in the sky world, there grew a beautiful tree called, by different people,

00:06:17.200 either the tree of light or the tree of life.

00:06:20.440 and on this tree grew every kind of plant all of the medicines all the grasses all the nuts

00:06:27.740 everything on this one tree and one day a great windstorm passed through the sky world and fell

00:06:34.340 this tree and when it toppled a great hole opened in the sky world a beautiful young woman who we

00:06:41.920 call sky woman or gish kokwe stepped over to the edge of that hole and looked down and it was only

00:06:49.340 darkness below and she was very curious and she looked a little harder and bent a little farther

00:06:55.940 and her feet began to slip um on the edge of the hole and so she grabbed out onto the tree of life

00:07:03.160 to to brace herself and to stop her fall but the branch broke off in her hand and she began to fall

00:07:10.540 all by herself falling through the darkness into this unknown far from everything that she had ever

00:07:18.760 known and and of course she was really frightened and alone and she was falling into emptiness

00:07:26.060 but as it turns out it wasn't emptiness because below her all the water beings were assembled

00:07:33.380 and the geese looked up at this sudden shaft of light that was coming from the sky world and they

00:07:40.680 saw there this little speck just a dust moat in the beam of that light but as it came closer and

00:07:47.720 closer the geese could see that it was a woman spiraling toward them with her arms outstretched

00:07:54.300 and her black hair billowing behind her and they knew just what to do and they rose from the water

00:08:01.280 a whole flock of geese they rose as one calling as they do and they rose up to meet her and they

00:08:07.600 caught her they caught her on their wings so in her state of great fear and worry as to what

00:08:15.200 would become of her the geese saved her they rescued her and so we're taught that the very

00:08:21.900 first relationship between people and the other beings of the earth was one of care and of

00:08:29.300 responsibility and the geese brought sky woman down to the water world where all the water animals

00:08:36.240 were assembled because at that time the earth was only water and they understood that they couldn't

00:08:43.040 hold her forever and so the snapping turtle who was floating there in the water said here rest her

00:08:50.300 on my back and i'll hold her while we decide what to do they knew of course that she couldn't live

00:08:56.540 on the back of a turtle and so they all said well we have heard of earth of mud down underneath the

00:09:04.420 water and that's what she needs she needs some land to live on and so all of the water animals

00:09:10.680 said well we'll go get her some and mong or that is our name for the loon who's the strongest of

00:09:17.280 the swimmer said i'll go get some and so he dove down deep as loons do and he was gone for a really

00:09:24.820 long time and but when he came back up and shook the water off from his beautiful black and white

00:09:31.140 feathers his beak was empty he said it's too far it's too dark it's too cold i couldn't do it

00:09:37.460 and so then the sturgeon said let me try same result the otter the beaver all of the water

00:09:46.200 animals tried in their turn and nobody could get the earth till finally the only one that was left

00:09:52.920 was the little muskrat and you know muskrats are pretty wee little creatures but he said i'll do

00:09:59.660 this and so the muskrat turned under the water and pawed furiously and flailed his little legs

00:10:07.400 and disappeared from the surface and he was gone the longest time of all and all of his relatives

00:10:13.240 were really worried at what would become of him and indeed before long a little stream of bubbles

00:10:19.960 rose through the water followed by the limp body of the muskrat and everyone wept that their small

00:10:28.700 relative had given their life to try and save this woman and then they noticed that his little 0.97

00:10:35.540 paw so like a human hand was clenched shut and when they opened his fingers there was a dab of

00:10:43.860 mud and the turtle said here spread this on my back and sky woman took the little handful of mud

00:10:51.900 and did exactly that and in her great gratitude for the gifts and the sacrifices of all the animal

00:10:59.260 beings she began to dance and she danced in a circle around the back of the turtle and she was

00:11:07.900 doing what we today call the women's dance that her feet did not leave the earth she was caressing

00:11:14.080 the back of that turtle and as she danced her gratitude as she began to sing her gratitude

00:11:20.860 all of this gratitude poured forth and caused the earth to grow and the back of the turtle spread

00:11:28.360 into what we call today our home of north america of of turtle island and like any good guest sky

00:11:36.880 woman hadn't come empty-handed because remember that when she was falling from the sky world

00:11:42.980 she had broken off a branch of the tree of life in her hand and so she had there the roots the

00:11:49.640 seeds all of the nuts and berries and she spread those seeds over the back of the turtle and the

00:11:55.300 world became the beautiful green place that we are today. And so what this beautiful story

00:12:02.600 teaches us is that in return for the care and responsibility from the animals, we human people

00:12:09.940 bear our own gifts. We have to give our gifts in reciprocity for what has been given to us.

00:12:17.440 And this fundamental teaching of reciprocity and responsibility for each other reminds us

00:12:24.740 that in the very beginning of time, all the rest of the creation acted as a life raft for human

00:12:32.500 people. And now so much closer to the end, we must be their life raft in reciprocity for their

00:12:41.260 gifts that they have shared with us. Thank you so much for sharing that beautiful story with us.

00:12:49.520 Now, across the ocean, another creation story was being told about a woman in a garden.

00:12:56.740 How does the moral of the story of Eden differ?

00:13:00.700 And how can we see the psychological effect rippling down through history?

00:13:07.020 Well, I'm certainly not an expert in that other tradition.

00:13:11.000 But I think about Eve as an exile from the garden.

00:13:15.820 she was banished from this beautiful productive generous landscape and and told that she had to go

00:13:24.560 earn her living elsewhere that instead of being the beneficiary of the gifts of the earth that

00:13:30.680 she was going to have to work to rest her living out of the earth and that she was in fact she and

00:13:36.980 all of her children were charged with what essentially became interpreted as a control 0.96

00:13:43.780 or a domination over the earth as opposed to the role of Sky Woman being in a sense a co-creator

00:13:52.140 of abundance of making the garden and Eve was banished from the garden and to me those are

00:13:59.580 such fundamentally different orientations to the world that then color how it is that we interact

00:14:05.920 with the land it almost sets up the adversarial relationship that we see today in between people

00:14:12.940 and the land, people, and nature

00:14:14.760 that I think is at the root of many of our environmental ills.

00:14:19.860 It's so fascinating to begin to understand

00:14:22.580 how our religious and spiritual stories

00:14:25.460 continue to shape our relationships.

00:14:28.540 And now it seems science is essentially

00:14:30.400 the new religion of the West.

00:14:32.240 It informs political decisions

00:14:33.920 and is the foundation of our evidence-based legal system.

00:14:38.580 The late Sioux academic Vine Deloria said,

00:14:41.140 quote, science imposes highly restricted patterns upon the natural world, thereby limiting its

00:14:47.580 potential for response. Scientists, and more broadly all of us, are not asking complete

00:14:53.740 questions of nature, and in many cases are asking irrelevant ones, end quote. How is science carried

00:15:00.980 over the wounds of separation from nature? And why is science restrictive and not enough to

00:15:07.760 understand the world we live in or to confront our greatest challenges? What a great question

00:15:15.160 and as a person both of indigenous heritage and a practicing scientist this is a tension that I

00:15:22.160 live with all of the time and the way that I think about it is that science is of course or can be

00:15:30.020 a really really powerful tool for sustainability and I don't want to take anything away from that

00:15:36.680 But one of the reasons that science is so powerful in its explanatory power is also its limitation, 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,

00:15:59.080 that separation between the observer and the observed is supposed to give us great rationality

00:16:07.040 and objectivity, right? And it can. If the questions that we're asking are, how does it work?

00:16:14.540 If the questions are reductionist, if the questions are, well, essentially true, false

00:16:19.400 hypothesis testing, science is a great tool. But the issues that we face today lie at this nexus

00:16:27.300 land and people it's all about relationship the questions that are important are to some extent

00:16:33.920 how does it work we have to know that but the more important questions are of relationship

00:16:38.960 and strict objectivity is not going to get us where we need to be if science

00:16:44.900 very explicitly separates values from outcomes and the crises that we face I think are at root

00:16:53.600 crises of values and relationship and orientation, then science can't be the only tool.

00:16:59.900 And Vine de Luria and other wonderful elders will often talk about the fact that we human people

00:17:06.360 have four ways of knowing, at least. Frank Kejete, the great Pueblo scholar, talks about the fact

00:17:13.540 that we human people have the gift of intellect that science engages. We have the mind, we have

00:17:20.460 the body, we have emotion and we have spirit. And science explicitly excludes emotion and spirit as

00:17:27.480 valid ways of knowing. So to me, using traditional knowledge and science together means that we can

00:17:37.620 then re-engage our spiritual ways of knowing, our emotional ways of knowing, and bring those to bear

00:17:43.680 in environmental problem solving as well. Science can be a bit of an intellectual monoculture.

00:17:50.460 What we're really advocating for in the Center for Native Peoples, and many Indigenous scholars make this case as well, is for an intellectual pluralism to bring all of our ways of knowing together, mind, body, emotion, and spirit.

00:18:06.100 Just because science is a powerful tool doesn't mean that it's the only tool, and it's exciting to see a resurgence of other ways of knowing.

00:18:20.460 We all have insights that we cannot see

00:18:25.160 Surely no one can understand

00:18:28.180 How we can work so perfectly

00:18:32.040 If we don't believe someone can explain

00:18:41.160 How we do all this stuff

00:18:43.300 Cause of the size of our brain

00:18:45.180 We'll die immediately

00:18:48.040 And so ends humanity as we all fall down 1.00

00:19:09.040 Any fool knows it's better not to look below 0.99

00:19:16.040 With all those poor, poor souls 1.00

00:19:20.240 Who still have fun

00:19:21.980 Life, faith, and science

00:19:24.180 As they all fall down

00:19:26.420 As they all fall down

00:19:31.280 Now can you say a bit more

00:19:40.160 about the Center for Native Peoples

00:19:41.920 and the environment?

00:19:43.660 What is the mission?

00:19:45.380 And can you tell us about your research program in the restoration of plants of cultural significance to Native people?

00:19:52.580 Sure. As you mentioned in your introduction, the mission of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment

00:19:58.580 is really to bring together, to bring into conversation, two great ways of knowing.

00:20:06.780 indigenous environmental knowledge and philosophy, which we use the shorthand of TEK or traditional

00:20:13.620 ecological knowledge, and scientific ecological knowledge or SEK. And what we really are imagining

00:20:22.220 is a garden of ideas. You know, what would it be like if we began to do environmental caretaking

00:20:29.380 and indeed environmental science using indigenous philosophical principles as the foundation

00:20:36.060 and then using the appropriate tools of science, where they are the best tool,

00:20:42.380 sometimes they are, sometimes they aren't, to solve environmental problems.

00:20:47.640 And we're really lucky to sit at the confluence of two great intellectual traditions.

00:20:54.000 Our university sits in the heart of Haudenosaunee territory,

00:20:57.700 just a few miles from Onondaga Nation, which is a center for indigenous philosophy,

00:21:03.920 particularly environmental philosophy and then we have the tools of western science represented in

00:21:09.720 the in the nearby universities and so we are working hard to bring these ways of knowing

00:21:15.620 into conversation for the earth that we all love and some of the work that we've been doing has

00:21:24.340 been in education it's been in research and in public outreach and as you asked what has been

00:21:32.600 the nature of our work in terms of plant restoration one of the projects that we did

00:21:38.960 which was related to the disappearance of an important plant in basketry and an important

00:21:46.580 sacred plant as well in our language we call it wingosh sweetgrass linean name the scientific

00:21:53.020 name hierochloe odorata which means the sacred fragrant holy grass in botanical latin so

00:22:01.560 lineage got it right. But our Haudenosaunee basket-making partners had told us that

00:22:08.220 sweetgrass was beginning to decline, that they couldn't always find it in the places that they

00:22:13.180 had historically gathered it. And even in the places where it was, it was not as vital as it

00:22:20.320 had been. And so using those observations and their hypotheses about what might be contributing

00:22:27.860 to its loss, we began to work together on understanding the pressures that were put

00:22:33.960 on that important plant and how we might alleviate them. So one of the things that we ended up

00:22:40.680 learning and doing again with our Indigenous partners at Gana Johalege, which is a restored

00:22:46.880 and renewed Mohawk community along the Mohawk River, is we did experimental restorations there.

00:22:54.000 Gana Johalege is a cultural site where there is a great deal of work being done

00:22:58.140 in revitalization of Haudenosaunee culture, language, teachings, ceremonies,

00:23:04.200 all kinds of traditional teachings.

00:23:06.280 And they were doing it in a landscape that was missing a lot of plants

00:23:09.700 who should be our companions and teachers.

00:23:12.060 So that's why we chose to put sweetgrass back there.

00:23:16.060 And I'm glad to say that that sweetgrass really began to thrive there.

00:23:19.980 and one of the reasons I think is that people embraced it and used it. The plant brought the

00:23:26.340 gifts to the people in reciprocity. People accepted those gifts and it turns out that

00:23:32.260 one of the other areas of our research collaboration was about the effects of

00:23:38.460 harvesting. How does sweetgrass respond to harvesting? And a couple of the basket makers

00:23:44.380 had told us that there was a difference in teaching. There were some groups of harvesters

00:23:49.460 who were taught to only pick the sweetgrass blade by blade and the other group had said well no

00:23:56.260 we've been taught you should take a little handful and pull it up both groups agreed that they were

00:24:03.580 taking it by the honorable harvest never taking more than half doing it in a respectful way but

00:24:09.220 they were taking in different ways and so they wanted to work with us again to try to ascertain

00:24:15.620 which one of those ways of harvesting was most beneficial to the sweetgrass.

00:24:21.020 And one of the really cool results came when we had these restored sweetgrass meadows

00:24:27.880 and we practiced these two kinds of harvesting to see what was going to happen.

00:24:33.580 But of course, because it was a scientific experiment, we also had a control.

00:24:37.200 We had a place where there was no harvesting.

00:24:39.060 and of course in the western conservation paradigm indeed in the western restoration

00:24:45.300 paradigm as you're familiar with we have this idea that again nature and people are a bad mix

00:24:52.800 so the best thing that we could do for the plant of course would be to keep people away from it

00:24:57.620 right that's how a lot of contemporary conservation works well what happened when we kept people away

00:25:04.460 from it in the control plots where nobody harvested that's where the sweetgrass declined

00:25:10.440 where harvesting was done by either of the traditional methods the sweetgrass responded

00:25:17.040 beautifully it almost doubled in numbers and as it turns out sweetgrass needs people people need

00:25:23.420 sweetgrass it needed the disturbance of this micro harvest to reduce competition to break the buds

00:25:31.140 on the rhizome so that the plant would flourish in response. That sweetgrass was a really amazing

00:25:37.820 teacher for us to remind us that people are an important part of the thriving of this particular

00:25:45.440 plant. That in order to restore the plant, we had to restore the harvesting relationship as well.

00:25:52.520 It's so amazing and comforting to know that plants and humans need each other.

00:25:58.020 and it's possible to truly have a healthy relationship with our plant relatives.

00:26:04.940 And traditional ecological knowledge and native land management

00:26:08.660 emerged out of gradual and long-lasting relationship with land

00:26:13.520 and are so interwoven with their native lands

00:26:16.680 that they could be seen as an evolutionary force

00:26:21.520 as well as shaped by evolution.

00:26:23.860 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?

00:26:42.400 it's important i think to remember that traditional ecological knowledge is exactly

00:26:51.660 as you suggested it is adaptive knowledge that helps us adapt but it is also continually evolving

00:27:00.500 and adapting to novel circumstances so in fact it may be just the sort of guidance that we need

00:27:08.660 as the world is changing so rapidly and if you think about throughout the long long human history

00:27:17.380 over which traditional ecological knowledge evolved it is resilient knowledge it is knowledge

00:27:24.620 that shifts and changes because nature is a moving target right it's not standing still it's hugely

00:27:31.920 dynamic and so traditional ecological knowledge I really think about as a way of being in a web of

00:27:41.640 relationships and while nature may change while the players may change the stage may change

00:27:49.680 I think it's the relationship to place that endures and can guide us so these relationships

00:27:59.000 which are based in reciprocity for example are I think going to be a guide for adaptation in

00:28:08.080 rapidly changing times and you know oftentimes we say that as the land changes traditional knowledge

00:28:16.840 is lost we hear this from our relatives in the far north right who see their traditional knowledge

00:28:24.000 threatened by climate change and by melting ice and and the disasters that are befalling them

00:28:30.160 but i've also been taught that the knowledge itself may disappear from the people but it's

00:28:39.940 not lost because that knowledge is actually resident in the land it's the land and the

00:28:45.620 rivers and the plants and the animals that are going to teach us and it's our relationship with

00:28:51.320 them that is going to enable us to learn. So while it's super important to maintain and revitalize

00:28:59.780 traditional knowledge, I think an element of this that we also have to focus on is revitalizing our

00:29:06.340 ability to learn from the land, to be better students of the land again. And with this theme

00:29:13.460 of reciprocity and responsibility, one of the things that I think ties together a lot of

00:29:20.000 traditional land management practices over the years is this notion of mutuality, that what's

00:29:28.600 good for people is often the same thing that's good for land. And when I say good for people,

00:29:35.400 I mean good for the lives of people and living healthful, balanced lives. I think that one of

00:29:44.020 the keys to traditional land management, whether we're talking about in the Cascades or in the

00:29:51.240 prairies or in the Adirondacks or in the desert, one of the hallmarks of those traditional land

00:29:56.740 management practices is that they were designed to engender biodiversity. And here we are in a

00:30:05.200 biodiversity crisis where evolutionary biologists estimate that we are losing 200 species a day

00:30:13.820 um it's hard to wrap your mind and of course your heart around that kind of loss so land

00:30:23.200 management practices that safeguard biodiversity and in fact generate biodiversity are the land

00:30:32.720 management practices that we need and you look back and probably not just look back it's happening

00:30:40.200 today too that one of our most powerful land management tools that comes from indigenous

00:30:45.300 science is the use of prescribed fire which was really all about creating biodiversity

00:30:50.620 in the landscape because biodiversity translates to the well-being of people who live on the land

00:30:59.680 You don't have all your eggs in one basket, you have multiple food sources, multiple fiber sources, by creating a mosaic in all sorts of successional stages, a mosaic of habitat stages.

00:31:13.280 The greater the biodiversity, the greater choices and resilience people have about how to live in a changing landscape.

00:31:21.660 And I'm sad to say that so many of our contemporary resource management practices really yield homogeneity.

00:31:28.980 They yield uniformity of just the one thing that people say they want as a commodity, generally speaking.

00:31:37.000 And I think that's so wrongheaded that we can learn from traditional land management practices

00:31:42.520 to once again adopt those practices that both safeguard and regenerate biodiversity.

00:31:49.140 diversity. So if I could distill down my thinking on how to get through this bottleneck of convergent

00:32:03.440 crises, I'd say there are three areas of struggle that rise above the rest. One, ecological

00:32:10.040 restoration on a massive scale. Two, activist resistance to slow or halt the destruction.

00:32:16.500 and three working to refashion the collective psyche with a land ethic of reciprocity

00:32:23.300 you've contributed generously to all these areas and i'm wondering how do you prioritize these

00:32:31.020 things where are you being called to serve yeah what a good question because they are all facets

00:32:39.080 of what we need to do aren't they the resistance the restoration and changing the way that we

00:32:46.960 think and throughout my career I think I've been part of all of those but what I've really come

00:32:54.980 to understand is that in doing restoration on the small scale on the large scale as well

00:33:02.100 I can't help but remember and it's always in your face isn't it when you're doing restoration work

00:33:08.260 that as we heal parts of the landscape, we're simply going to, in a sense, replicate damages

00:33:15.620 unless we also heal our relationship to place. I've come to the thinking that it's not just

00:33:22.820 the land that's been broken. The land is broken because our relationship to land is broken.

00:33:28.900 And so much of the healing that we need to do is healing of land, healing of water. Yes,

00:33:35.160 resistance against those forces of environmental destruction but fundamental to that at the deepest

00:33:41.960 level is as you wisely say this notion of our collective psyche it comes to worldview i think

00:33:48.660 i think it circles right back to where we began ayana with our stories like creation stories that

00:33:56.140 guide us into thinking about what is our relationship with place i really think that

00:34:03.080 my work right now in reciprocity for all the gifts that the earth has given to me is to try

00:34:11.120 to work through story to change the story of our relationship to place as i expect you know

00:34:19.360 gary nabhand our wonderful colleague thinker botanist restoration ecologist has this wonderful

00:34:26.700 phrase, we don't need to just restore, we need to re-story. In doing re-storiation, we have to

00:34:34.800 reclaim another way of seeing ourselves in relationship to the world. And so much of the

00:34:42.680 root cause, I think, of these multiple and convergent crises that you speak of, come from

00:34:49.000 human exceptionalism, quite honestly, through a worldview which sets human beings apart from the

00:34:56.320 rest of nature that says that this one species homo sapiens is somehow more deserving of all of

00:35:03.520 the gifts of the world and that other beings are just disposable things disposable objects in a way

00:35:10.320 and that kind of thinking of human exceptionalism of creating this hierarchy in which all the rest

00:35:18.340 of creation all these millions of other species don't matter that they don't have the same right

00:35:23.940 of personhood that humans do i think that is the root of the crises that we face today so so often

00:35:32.660 our environmental solutions you know i laughingly think that it's all about changing light bulbs

00:35:38.440 but what we really need to do i think is to change ourselves and to change our worldview

00:35:43.640 and reclaim this aim of knowing that saw ourselves as one member of the democracy of species that we

00:35:52.840 work in partnership with all other beings, that we are not above them or over them, dominating or

00:35:59.320 controlling them, but that we work humbly in partnership with them. And that's the kind of

00:36:05.560 shift in collective psyche and worldview that I think can save us.

00:36:12.840 Thank you for that. Modern society is increasingly disconnected from the labor involved in our daily

00:36:21.000 provisions. Our needs for food, medicine, and shelter are met by the exploitation of humans

00:36:29.200 and planet. And we're really getting the chemical equivalents of those things. A theme that emerges

00:36:35.680 throughout your books is the way daily labors have traditionally kept us in sync with the land.

00:36:42.140 And you illustrate this exquisitely through the maple syrup harvest.

00:36:46.080 Can you take us through that string of thought?

00:36:48.320 absolutely to me our absence from the living world our absence of having our hands in the

00:36:59.600 dirt or our hands on a sap bucket or a basket full of berries has separated us from our greatest

00:37:07.940 teachers in the living world and it has separated us from some of the things that make us uniquely

00:37:15.540 human I love the way you'd call that labor it is you know it's hard labor digging potatoes and

00:37:22.780 cutting firewood and all of that but it's so joyful as well because you feel in relationship

00:37:29.540 with place and surrounded by all of your teachers in a way and I think honestly it makes us lonely

00:37:39.120 you know when you go get your food just from the grocery store all shrink wrap you don't even

00:37:45.200 have relationship with the being who made that for you we think of it as a commodity as a product

00:37:52.340 again it's this notion that it commodifies nature and makes these gifts from the rest of the world

00:37:58.440 things that we're entitled to and not gifts at all and this idea of once again feeling as if

00:38:06.600 recognizing that we live in a world made of gifts not a world made of stuff changes everything

00:38:14.580 because when somebody gives us a gift that's somebody might be a raspberry what might be a

00:38:20.880 maple tree when somebody gives us a gift we are immediately called to gratitude we know what to

00:38:27.820 do we feel that gratitude and we feel the reciprocity that in return for the gift that's

00:38:33.680 given to us we want to give a gift in return and that kind of gift economy with nature is a

00:38:42.180 fundamental form of reciprocity and it comes back to our labor doesn't it because our labor our work

00:38:49.200 with the land is a way of paying back for what has been given to us that we then care for the

00:38:56.980 land and for the place through our labor that has supported us but the problem is of course that when

00:39:02.980 you get a shrink-wrapped plastic encased suffocating basket of berries at the grocery

00:39:10.360 store, it's really hard to see through that to understand that it is buried persons who have

00:39:16.640 given you those gifts. We just think of them as stuff like they were made in a factory. So renewing

00:39:23.040 our subjective relationship with place, I think, is at the heart of renewing that relationship of

00:39:30.800 reciprocity to see the world as made of gifts and not of natural resources. This brings up the tricky

00:39:38.040 situation we're in now. If 7 billion people all rushed into the forest to go foraging,

00:39:44.060 assuming they knew what was edible, many species would be picked to oblivion.

00:39:49.040 Delicate communities would suffer. So how would the concept of the honorable harvest

00:39:55.080 be applied to this grossly imbalanced situation?

00:39:59.680 Thank you very much for asking that, because oftentimes when we renew our relationship to

00:40:05.560 place people think again that well that means in renewing my relationship to place i want to be

00:40:10.340 a forager i want to wild craft all of these things the world cannot bear the weight of

00:40:15.940 seven billion wild crafters just can't so this notion of the honorable harvest

00:40:22.580 as a set of guidelines that govern ethically how we take from the earth needs to be applied

00:40:30.680 to the 80% of folks who live in urban areas today who aren't physically engaged with the source

00:40:39.180 of their food, but I think, well, they're certainly economically engaged and I think can be

00:40:45.360 philosophically engaged as well. One of the first precepts of this indigenous canon of how we take

00:40:52.980 from the earth is to take only that which you need and self-restraint is a powerful mechanism

00:41:01.140 of enacting reciprocity with the land of remembering that these are the lives of other

00:41:06.500 beings and so you only take what you need and that of course has immediate consequences for

00:41:13.560 for our carbon footprint doesn't it because we know that climate change is driven by consumption

00:41:20.060 And so one of the steps which is available to everybody is simply to consume less, to separate our needs from our wants. And that's one of the most important elements of the honorable harvest.

00:41:35.360 And what role would you guess cities will play in humanity's future? And will urbanity always be an obstacle to rewilding and connection to natural communities and traditions?

00:41:45.920 oh i don't think so it's such a myth to say that nature is out there it's outside the

00:41:52.960 the urban zones there's a wealth of natural ecosystems of course in the city cities as we

00:42:00.800 know very well are some of the most efficient places to live right with a relatively lower

00:42:08.240 impact than say you know complete continuing development and suburbanization and urban

00:42:14.000 sprawl and so forth. The denser we live, the more efficiently we live, the better for our

00:42:19.580 patterns of resource use, of course. But that doesn't mean that we have to be disconnected

00:42:24.540 from nature. Whether you live in Manhattan or, you know, rural West Virginia, you're still part

00:42:30.840 of a human natural ecosystem. So I think we have to, again, learn to honor and name and feel part

00:42:39.860 of the the ecosystem in which we live there's a heck of a lot of urban foragers aren't there who

00:42:47.240 are building relationship and supplementing their diets with the the weedy very valuable

00:42:54.800 courageous brave little plants who live among us in the city so i don't think it has to be either

00:43:00.080 or there are tremendous ecological benefits of urbanization in terms of reduction of our

00:43:07.040 environmental impact. But I think we just have to work harder and perhaps see differently

00:43:12.560 how we live in a web of relationships in urban nature.

00:43:37.040 Cut me off and I get on the long yellow highway

00:43:47.040 Need to get the hell out 1.00

00:43:52.040 Hassholes, hassles, hassles 1.00

00:43:57.040 Always stacking up

00:44:02.040 Oh, children, lover, why won't you leave me, me?

00:44:11.940 Why must you grind your axe against my fruit-bearing tree?

00:44:21.300 Oh, lonely mountain, quiet, peaceful and mean.

00:44:30.420 Out here in isolation

00:44:35.120 Don't hear no ambulance scream

00:44:40.440 Oh, bitter

00:44:43.920 Quote, we can starve together or feast together.

00:44:48.980 All flourishing is mutual.

00:44:51.620 Can you explain the phenomenon of massed fruiting,

00:44:55.500 which your ancestors experienced in the pecan groves of Oklahoma?

00:44:58.920 and what is your hypothesis of how these trees synchronize their fruiting all across the state

00:45:05.320 and what can we learn from the collective mentality of the forest? In that essay about

00:45:12.680 mass fruiting of trees I really draw on this phenomenon as a teacher for people because

00:45:20.920 indeed I do view the forest and as all elements of nature as as our teachers we think about this

00:45:28.560 emerging science of biomimicry right how we can use the way that other beings live to create

00:45:36.660 innovative products for ourselves what i'm really interested in is not so much of that kind of

00:45:44.080 biomimicry but a kind of cultural biomimicry of looking and seeing how nature is organized

00:45:49.860 and how we might learn from that in terms of how we live our lives both individually

00:45:55.760 and collectively. The question of mass fruiting, this ability of trees from many families,

00:46:02.760 but in North America, often from the families related to the oaks, this idea of simultaneous

00:46:08.900 fruiting every so often, followed by times when there's not a single acorn or black walnut or

00:46:15.980 pecan to be found, is for me a teaching about sticking together, about acting as one.

00:46:24.540 Ecologically speaking, what we find is that when all of those trees engage in mass fruiting

00:46:30.780 and produce all their fruits at once, what tends to happen is that it saturates the desires

00:46:37.380 of all of those seed predators, all of the squirrels, shall we say, that are out there

00:46:42.260 to eat those acorns or those pecans are going to have everything they need to eat in one

00:46:47.260 year, so much surplus that some of those nuts that they hide, they don't need or they are

00:46:54.820 going to forget about. And so the next generation of the forest is regenerated from those surplus

00:47:01.360 seeds. And then in the next year, when there's a big squirrel population having been fat and happy

00:47:08.000 from the year before, suddenly there are no nuts. And so what the trees are doing in their self

00:47:14.480 restraint is quelling that predator population the squirrel population bringing it back into

00:47:21.160 balance so that a few years later when all of those trees do provide seeds again it's when the

00:47:29.400 squirrel population really needs it so the squirrels and the trees are working together

00:47:34.260 to achieve a balance which enables the trees to flourish and enables the squirrels to flourish

00:47:41.080 So to me, that's one of these teachings of all flourishing is mutual.

00:47:47.440 And can we design our societies with that in mind?

00:47:50.660 What benefits one benefits all?

00:47:53.380 And that we need to know enough about how the natural world works to devise solutions that are good for everybody.

00:48:01.700 Evolution has produced just such systems, and we need to be mindful of them and learn from them.

00:48:08.740 At one point in history, people were considered to be ecosystem engineers in a beneficial sense.

00:48:16.700 I cling to a dream that one day we can collectively remember our role and once again harmoniously reenter the wild web of life.

00:48:26.280 As far as you can tell, what are some of the beneficial ecological functions of humans?

00:48:31.960 Who did we co-evolve with and who would miss us if we were gone?

00:48:38.020 That's a great question. Who would miss us if we're gone? In many situations, of course, human beings, when we view ourselves primarily as consumers, the rest of the world, any cases we think, might just go on perfectly well without us.

00:49:00.220 but i'm not sure that that's true in fact i'm pretty sure it's not true because human beings

00:49:08.180 in their practices on the landscape some of these traditional land management practices

00:49:14.400 we're speaking of a few minutes ago can actually enhance biodiversity and can enhance the well-being

00:49:23.640 of other elements of the ecosystem human beings can be caretakers of place if done in such a way

00:49:32.880 that we are mindful of our role as humans in creating balance and there are situations in

00:49:40.520 which ecological dominance occurs when there is not adequate what ecologists call natural

00:49:48.540 disturbance. You tend towards homogeneity when there isn't enough disturbance to create a mosaic

00:49:56.620 of different habitat types and different opportunities for other species to flourish.

00:50:03.160 This is something that ecologists have come to call the intermediate disturbance hypothesis,

00:50:09.660 that you can disrupt competitive dominance by creating opportunities for other species.

00:50:15.420 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.

00:50:29.420 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.

00:50:57.040 as many human people are awakening to earth's dilemma of biodiversity loss and the suffering

00:51:05.440 of practically all life many of them want to stand up and be active and engage in the world's

00:51:11.480 problems at the same time many non-native humans are awakening to traditional knowledge of

00:51:18.360 indigenous peoples wanting to learn and be a part of these traditions so how can non-native people

00:51:25.420 offer kinship and allyship to Indigenous people

00:51:29.800 without engaging in cultural appropriation?

00:51:33.340 I would want to direct your listeners to a wonderful piece of artwork

00:51:39.520 which has been created by the Syracuse cultural workers.

00:51:43.660 It's a piece of artwork which is a list.

00:51:46.440 It's called How to Be an Ally to Your Native Neighbors.

00:51:51.680 And I wish I had it here in front of me.

00:51:53.320 It's quite beautiful and deep in answering the question that you pose.

00:51:59.560 So that's an important resource. 0.99

00:52:02.960 I think that one of the dangers when enthusiasm grows for Indigenous ways of knowing

00:52:11.860 and recognition of the power of Indigenous ways of knowing,

00:52:16.220 that we'd be very careful in terms of the respect and avoidance of cultural appropriation that comes with that,

00:52:26.520 that Indigenous knowledge speaks so deeply of acting from a relationship with your local landscape,

00:52:36.680 with the landscape that feeds you, with the watershed that cares for you.

00:52:40.980 and I think one of the most powerful things that can be done in allyship with native peoples and

00:52:48.180 allyship with the land herself is to create authentic relationship with your home place

00:52:54.980 to ask yourself what is it that you love too much to lose and then design a plan to fight for it

00:53:03.640 to protect it in your own way, without often the impetus to borrow from Native peoples,

00:53:12.140 but to create an authentic sense of place, to become oneself Native to place.

00:53:20.580 And the way that that happens is by paying deep attention to your landscape and to learning from it.

00:53:27.100 That, I think, is really the essence of sense of place.

00:53:29.900 It's the essence of traditional knowledge.

00:53:33.640 Thank you for shedding some light on that very important and sensitive topic.

00:53:39.160 You've spoken about how the language we use in English to refer to our non-human earthmates

00:53:45.180 is deeply dishonoring to their aliveness and their personhood.

00:53:50.380 Can you speak about how it's much more than just a grammatical problem,

00:53:54.300 but a form of linguistic imperialism?

00:53:57.900 And how do you propose we change our tune?

00:54:00.260 Well, we talked a few moments ago about this notion of human exceptionalism as being at the root of many of our environmental pathologies, quite honestly.

00:54:13.060 That is coded in the English language and perhaps in other languages as well.

00:54:19.560 And what I mean by that is that in English, you are either a human or you are a thing, right?

00:54:28.320 When we talk to one another, we wouldn't ever say about our grandmother, oh look, it's sitting in a rocking chair, it's drinking tea.

00:54:38.520 We just wouldn't say that because we rob her of personhood, we show her disrespect, we eliminate ourselves from kinship and compassion.

00:54:48.040 But if you think about it in English, that's exactly what we do.

00:54:51.080 This powerful form of linguistic imperialism was when we began to speak English that we had to it the world because English is structured in that way.

00:55:03.420 When I began learning my own language, and I'm just a bare beginner in doing so, one of the challenges and one of the beauties of the language is that we don't speak of the living world ever as it.

00:55:18.780 We speak of the living world with the same grammar that we use for our grandmother, for our brothers and our sisters and our uncles and our grandfathers, because they are our family.

00:55:30.940 We give them that same kind of respect.

00:55:35.080 And so I really worry that this worldview, this collective psyche we've been talking about is conditioned by the language that we speak.

00:55:42.780 It's represented in English's itting of the natural world.

00:55:47.300 and that, as I said, in Anishinaabe-born, in my language

00:55:51.800 and in other indigenous languages,

00:55:54.400 that nature is subject, not object.

00:55:57.720 So I've been doing a fair bit of thinking

00:55:59.860 about how we might remedy that

00:56:03.120 and one of the things that I've wondered about is

00:56:05.780 could we craft an alternative pronoun

00:56:09.480 so that we don't have to speak of the living world

00:56:13.820 as if it was nothing, as if it was just stuff.

00:56:16.660 in our language. The word for the earth is aki. And one of my elders, Stuart King,

00:56:23.680 gave me this beautiful word, bemadazi aki, which means a living being of the earth.

00:56:30.080 And so I've been wondering and thinking about using that syllable, ki, to slip in next to he

00:56:38.440 and she in place of it so that when we go to humbly ask for the gift of sap from those maples

00:56:47.600 as spring comes we don't say i'm going to go tap it we say key is giving us sap this spring

00:56:54.600 it fundamentally causes us to stop for a minute and reflect on the fact that that tree that maple

00:57:01.840 tree is another being is another person we also would need to have the plural pronoun and

00:57:09.460 fortunately we have that word already in english we use ki as the singular pronoun we add an n

00:57:17.740 we're saying kin when we talk about collectively living beings so that when those uh robins come

00:57:26.140 back to us in the springtime, we can say, oh, our kin have returned to us. Welcome. We're so glad to

00:57:32.380 see you. So that every time we talk about the living world, instead of reducing it to object,

00:57:37.740 to stuff, we honor them as our relatives. So that's a thought experiment I've been playing

00:57:44.520 with in terms of changing our language. But most importantly, we have to change the way that we

00:57:49.820 think the way that we behave, to extend personhood to other beings. And this can be a really small

00:57:57.260 thing, but it can also be a huge thing. If we look at, for example, the constitutions

00:58:03.260 of indigenous-led nations like Bolivia and Ecuador, they have in their constitutions

00:58:09.340 the personhood of nature, the rights of Mother Nature. We look at the Maori-led movement in

00:58:15.800 New Zealand, where their sacred Whanganui River was granted the rights of legal personhood.

00:58:23.380 Another example being the Rights of Mother Nature movement that before the United Nations today is

00:58:29.620 the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth, which would extend personhood to the land

00:58:36.180 herself. And this, I think, is the fundamental shift in worldview that we need, is the recognition

00:58:42.240 of the personhood of all beings, as opposed to in this country where the only things,

00:58:49.680 shall we say, that have personhood are humans and corporations, and no personhood granted

00:58:56.500 for maple trees and bluebirds.

00:59:00.660 What I've really come to honor and so appreciate is that I think what we're engaged in is

00:59:08.620 collective remembering.

00:59:09.800 we know these things we know these things intuitively the land speaks it to us all the

00:59:15.800 time but we're conditioned not to listen to that and and so what is most hopeful for me is that we

00:59:22.240 are remembering our relationship with the living world and that that's why these ideas resonate

00:59:29.340 with us because we already know them to be true oh thank you so much robin for this beautiful

00:59:36.660 conversation. You've helped guide us on this journey to dive deeper and challenge our conditioning,

00:59:43.380 our relationships with each other, the land, and all that stems from her. Do you have a website you

00:59:49.920 could share with our listeners? They can certainly go to the website for the Center for Native

00:59:54.980 Peoples and the Environment at SUNY ESF, and I would refer them also to the books that you

01:00:02.440 mentioned, and the books of many other writers. The beautiful thing is that there's so many of us

01:00:07.240 working in this direction. It's very heartening. So thank you so much for this good conversation

01:00:12.960 and for your work, Ayanna. It's really important. Thank you.

01:00:17.560 You've been listening to Robin Wall Kimmerer on Unlearn and Rewild. I'm Ayanna Young. The show

01:00:23.620 is produced by March Young. We heard a song called Science by Monkey Swallows the Universe

01:00:28.660 and Lonely Mountain by Sun Kill Moon.

01:00:31.860 The theme song is Like a River by Kate Wolfe.

01:00:34.980 Please visit our website to sign up for our mobilized newswire

01:00:38.320 and donate if you can.

01:00:40.420 See you next time.

For The Wild - August 02, 2018

ROBIN WALL KIMMERER on Indigenous Knowledge for Earth Healing ⌠ENCORE⌡ ⧸35

Episode Stats

Transcript