Partners

 

  • queer collective exploring the prophetic practice of alchemy as a medium to reimagine justice. We’re asking: How can black, eco-feminist public ritual and transforming guns into tools to heal and repair ceremony and land, shift our relationship to matter, memory, place, time, and trauma? leadtolife.org

  • Sitka Conservation Society is the oldest conservation organization in Alaska. SCS protect the natural environement of the Tongass National Forest while supporting the development of economically, socially, and environmentally sustainble communities within Southeast Alaska. sitkawild.org

  • For The Wild is a female-led, progressive media organization focused on land-based protections, co-liberation and intersectional storytelling rooted in a paradigm shift away from human supremacy, endless growth and consumerism. For The Wild is an anthology of the anthropocene. forthewild.world

 
 

Production Team

 

Young leans into her vast experience on the other side of the camera, along with her intersectional approach to ecological restoration to guide her process as the Founder and Executive Director of millennial media organization and nonprofit For The Wild. Learning deeply from the critical dialogue she’s shared with over 100 guests on the For The Wild podcast, including Chris Hedges, Sylvia Earle, Vandana Shiva, Jill Stein, Winona La Duke, Terry Tempest Williams and other thought leaders (including some of the brightest activists, political thinkers, and scientific minds of our time) Young approaches her mission with For The Wild with critical thinking, deep reverence and artistry.

Ayana Young
Executive Producer

  • Ayana is a podcast and radio personality specializing in intersectional environmental and social justice, deep ecology and land-based restoration. With an undergraduate degree from Loyola Marymount University including a double major in Art History and Theology and a minor in Philosophy as well as education through Columbia University in Ecology and Eastern Religions and Restoration Ecology at the University of Victoria, Young has a strong academic background at the intersections of ecology, culture, and spirituality.

    Post-graduation dividends, from her early career allowed Young to conserve 500 acres of coast redwood and salmon habitat in Northern California, where she has been living for over five years. Living for the first years, in a tent with no electricity or running water while she established a homestead, and broke ground on a native species nursery and research center.

    A budding filmmaker, Young is no stranger to the medium having spent her childhood as a prolific working actor, working alongside the likes of Steven Spielberg and Meryl Streep. Young’s debut film, When Old Growth Ends is an ode to the complex interweaving of the irreplaceable Tongass National Forest during its last stand as a distinctly wild place in Southeast Alaska. As Director, Producer, Narrator and Featured Cast Member of the film, Young wore many hats in midwifing this compelling and poetic story of struggle and beauty surrounding the Tongass National Forest.

    Young leans into her vast experience on the other side of the camera, along with her intersectional approach to ecological restoration to guide her process as the Founder and Executive Director of millennial media organization and nonprofit For The Wild. Learning deeply from the critical dialogue she’s shared with over 100 guests on the For The Wild podcast, including Chris Hedges, Sylvia Earle, Vandana Shiva, Jill Stein, Winona La Duke, Terry Tempest Williams and other thought leaders (including some of the brightest activists, political thinkers, and scientific minds of our time) Young approaches her mission with For The Wild with critical thinking, deep reverence and artistry.

brontë velez
Creative Director / Producer

  • brontë’s work and rest is guided by the call that “black wellness is the antithesis to state violence” (Mark Anthony Johnson). as a black-latinx transdisciplinary artist, curator, trickster, educator, jibarx and wakeworker, their eco-social art praxis lives at the intersections of black feminist placemaking, abolitionist theologies, environmental regeneration, death doulaship, and the necessity of comedy.

    they embody this commitment of attending to black health/imagination, commemorative justice (Free Egunfemi) and hospicing the shit that hurts black folks and the land through serving as creative director for Lead to Life design collective and ecological educator for ancestral arts skills and nature-connection school Weaving Earth. they are currently co-conjuring a mockumentary with esperanza spalding in collaboration with the San Francisco Symphony and practicing pastoral care as a co-steward of a land refuge in Kashia Pomo territory in northern California.

    mostly, brontë is up to the sweet tender rhythm of quotidian black queer-lifemaking, ever-committed to humor & liberation, ever-marked by grief at the distance made between us and all of life .

Molly Leebove
Videographer / Editor

  • Molly (she/her) is a multimedia artist and storyteller in devotion to a life-sustaining future based in Detroit, Michigan.

 

Jade Begay
Videographer

  • Jade, Dine and Tesuque Pueblo, is a filmmaker, a storyteller, a communications strategist but above all, Jade is a woman who has cultivated a deep and fierce passion to protect land, air, and water. In order to accomplish this mission, Jade has committed her life’s work to amplify the voices and knowledge of Indigenous Peoples, so that the world can remember who the original caretakers of this earth are and who have maintained balance and harmony for time immemorial. It is Jade’s hope that once we recognize and honor Indigenous leadership, we can move towards healing hundreds of years of oppression.

    Jade currently works as Climate Justice Strategy Director for NDN Collective. She has worked with grassroots and Indigenous communities, from Standing Rock to the Gulf of Mexico, and from the Arctic to the Southwest. She is also a facilitator and trainer in anti-oppression work.

jazmín calderón torres
Groundtruthing Oracle Creator

  • jazmín calderón torres (they/elle) is a trans-nonbinary mutli-racial boricua guided by their Black, Taino, and Spanish lineages. They are a transdisciplinary artist and Lead Producer, Curator at Lead to Life (An Allied Media Project). They have supported pre production visuals, treatments, and/or writing on film projects by Ummah Chroma Creative Partners (Terence Nance, Jenn Nkiru, and Bradford Young), adidas, Damon Davis, Julie Dash, KESH, and Esperanza Spalding Productions, LLC.

    They currently serve on the Stewardship Council for an emerging community through the Nuns & Nones project. jazmín is an apprentice to relationships to their boricua lineage, bomba drum making, the more-than-human world, wildlife track and sign, & indigenous land tending. They have a BA in Art Practice, New Media and Ecosystems Management & Forestry from UC Berkeley.

 
 
 

Film Credits

Producers
Lead To Life, Sitka Conservation Society, For The Wild

Creative Director
brontë velez

Performance Artists
brontë velez, stephanie hewitt

Videographers
Molly Leebove, Jade Begay

Editor
Molly Leebove

Voiceovers from For The Wild Interviews
Wanda Kashudoha, Kassyehgei & Tiffany Lethabo King

Groundtruthing Oracle
jazmín calderón torres

Archival Research
jazmín calderón torres

Score
Jiordi Rosales

Field Recording
Jiordi Rosales

Sound Design & Production
José Rivera

Moraine Oracle Poem and Voiceover
brontë velez

Clear-Cut Oracle Poem and Voiceover
stephanie hewitt

Graphic Design
Erica Ekrem

Coloring
TBD

Executive Producer
Ayana Young

Producers
Heather Bauscher, Frances Brann, Erik DeJong

Special Thanks
Eric & Pam Bealer, Frances Brann, Erik Dejong, Krystina Scheller, Andrew Thoms, Heather Bauscher

Quotes
The following quotes from the Groundtruthing oracle and Shoal oracle voiceovers are excerpts from the preface of Tiffany King’s The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black Native Studies, published by Duke University Press in 2019. The excerpts were quoted by brontë velez during Tiffany King’s interview on For The Wild. 

“I trust the radical and always shifting ground of Black freedom dreams. I also trust Black freedom dreams when they consider Native freedom.”
–Tiffany King, The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies, Duke University Press, 2019. 

“When I felt around and realized the new and unfamiliar about the slavery with which I had become so comfortable, it changed me. And I do not mean changed in a neat, orderly or containable way. It unmoored and disassembled me in ways that I and others did not expect. I could no longer be accountable only to myself, my ancestors, and my story of experiencing blackness and it’s slavery that had been passed down over my lifetime. When I say unmoored, I mean I could not continue life as I knew it.”  
–Tiffany King, The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies, Duke University Press, 2019. 

Archival Footage & Imagery
Alaska State Archives, Alaska State Library
Alaska State Archives 
ASA-A11-RG111-AS35395-Fd2-4-1
ASA-A11-RG11-SR603-PF3-Logging 1
ASA-A11-RG11-SR603-PF3-Logging 2
Alaska State Library Photo Collection 
Industry-Whales-Whalers-Whaling-19
Port Armstrong-2 – P01-4409
Sitka-Aerial Views-12 
Auke Bay Laboratory Photo Collection– P446-590-[no.]
B.B. Dobbs Photo Collection– P12-180 
Curtis Shattuck Photo Collection– P511-08 
David & Mary Waggoner Photo Collection – P492-II-021 
Dr. Daniel S. Neuman Photo Collection– P307-048  
Edward Sheriff Curtis Photo Collection– P49-14 
Fred B. Dodge Photo Collection– P42-100 
George A. Parks Photo Collection– P240-258 
Harriman Alaska Series, 1899 Photo Collection– P305-[no.] 
Mrs. Allen (Agnes Swineford) Shattuck Photo Collection– P27-103 
Paul Sincic Photo Collectio– P75-144 
Trevor Davis Photo Collection– P97-08 
U.S. Forest Service Photo Collection– P207-30-1 
Wickersham State Historic Sites Photo Collection– P277-005-077
William A. Langille Photo Collection– P123-33
Winter & Pond Photo Collection– P87-[no.] 
William Norton Photo Collection– P226-867 
Vincent Soboleff Photo Collection– P1-052
U.S. Forest Service Photo Collectionn– P207-21-15 

Alaska and Polar Regions Collections and Archives, 
University of Alaska Fairbanks: 
Charles Sheldon Papers– UAF-2009-123-586 /UAF-2009-123-585
Falcon Joslin Papers UAF-1979-41-232 
Jack Dillon Photographs– UAF-2006-24-82
Perry D. Palmer Photograph Album, ca. 1903-1913– UAF-2004-120-19 / UAF-2004-120-29

Additional Footage used under license from Shutterstock.com

Songs
“Who'll Be A Witness For My Lord” by Richmond's Harmonizing Four
The Orchard Enterprises; ℗ 1996 Document Records