Transcript: CLAYTON THOMAS-MÜLLER on Disrupting Planetary Destruction /58
Ayana Young Hello and welcome to For The Wild Podcast, I'm Ayana Young.
Today, we are speaking with Clayton Thomas-Müller, who is a member of the Treaty #6 based Pukatawagan Cree Nation, located in northern Manitoba, Canada. Clayton is an organizer, facilitator, public speaker and writer on Indigenous rights and environmental and economic justice based in Winnipeg. Clayton is the 'Stop it at the Source' campaigner with 350.org . For the last 15 years, he has campaigned across Canada, Alaska and the lower 48 organizing in hundreds of First Nations, Alaska Native and Native American communities in support of grassroots Indigenous peoples to defend their traditional territories against the encroachment of the fossil fuel industry. This has included a special focus on the sprawling infrastructure of pipelines, refineries and extraction associated with the Canadian Tar Sands.
Thank you so much, Clayton, for joining us today. You have continually inspired me, and every time that we get together at an event. I'm always so excited to see what you bring, your energy, your motivation and your insight.
Clayton Thomas-Müller Thank you so much. It's a real pleasure to be here, and greetings to all of your listeners.
Ayana Young Thank you. So part of my excitement for having you on the show is I feel a real kinship with your fierce dedication and your willingness to go at these topics so directly as these ripples of mass extinction claim more species each day, the climate is undeniably shifting. I feel that preparing for an uncertain and chaotic future urges us, in a way, to decolonize. You know, it urges us to question what parts of our lives we walk blindly through and reflect on what we are complacently being spoon fed by the system. What we truly need in order to be self reliant when the system does collapse. You know, in the most basic sense, survival and preparedness in the Anthropocene requires each of us to reinhabit a reciprocal relationship with Earth. And you know this forgetting of the language of the land is what got us into this mess in the first place. We won't find all of the answers or solutions we seek in the dogmatic prescriptions of reductionist science or capitalism, but instead in the rekindled correspondence with our lands and waters as they evolved. So I really believe that we all need to spend more time watching and documenting how these climactic shifts are unfolding in the places we love and call home because I believe that if we wish to co adapt with our ecosystems in this new climate paradigm, then first and foremost, we must unsever ourselves from our elemental, sacred mother, and you know, begin to really learn directly from her.
I'd love for you to begin by sharing on the scientific side of things your current understanding about where the climate is headed, the kinds of changes Earth is going through. But I also welcome you to bring in your intuitive or your spiritual knowing. Do your gut feelings align with the scientific consensus of this unprecedented overshoot and extinction crisis?
Clayton Thomas-Müller Yeah. I mean, first and foremost, you know, I believe that if humanity is going to deal with this climate crisis, we have to understand that it's fundamentally tied to the colonial mindset, to the mindset of the colonizer. You know, our climate is a delicate, interconnected strand of webs. You know, you pull one strand and the entire web begins to unravel, and that's what we're watching happening right now. You know, I work for the global climate organization, 350.org and you know, our job is to end the fossil fuel regime, to build the world's largest social movement ever in the history of humanity, to deal with this issue. I think that in this journey, we've learned that things like the tar sands in Canada, Northern Alberta, where I work in support of First Nations who are fighting the expansion of that project and its associated pipeline infrastructure, refinery infrastructure, is that these primary drivers of climate change, you know, human interference in the Earth's atmosphere, carbon cycling capacity through our fossil fuel centered economy. Things like tar sands and even climate change itself are a symptom of the problem. They are not the actual problem. The problem, of course, is the big C. It's capitalism, it's consumerism, and I think that that's centered in a really interesting phenomenon of this, you know, Western scientific industrial experiment called capitalism. And that is that,I think neoliberalism, free market economy has severed our connection as humanity to the sacredness of Mother Earth. And, you know, the process of becoming politicized, of learning and practicing and executing social movement change theory, you know, to get people out into the streets and out onto the land in defense of our sacred elements from multinational corporations who want to commodify those things and chop them up and sell them to the highest bidder on the international markets. Our job is to help people get out of the apathy, that hyperindividualism, that our capitalist, economic paradigm perpetuates. You know, the way to do that, I believe, fundamentally, is through Indigenous worldview and cosmology. You know, I think that for many people, they are multi generations, disconnected from a cultural existence where they live as part of nature, as part of an ecosystem, as part of a biosphere, instead of this super patriarchal Western kind of like ownership mentality, where, you know, humanity exists above a life on the planet and it's ours to own and to, you know, to sell and to chop up. You know, extractivism is what I'm getting at.
You know, what I've seen over the years I've been organizing is that when human beings are exposed to ceremony, when they learn about the true names of the rivers, the lakes, the streams, of the ecosystems that they live on, the place that they call home. When they achieve that connection, they tend to care more about their footprint. They tend to care more about, you know, whether or not a pipeline runs through their community or a forest is going to get clear cut in their community. And I think that a big part of this work now, you know, in this era of the economics of the Anthropocene, you know, the era of human impact on a planetary scale, we must understand that, you know, we got to look to the Indigenous Peoples first. There are only 380 million Indigenous Peoples across the planet, but they represent 86% of the languages spoken on the planet. They live in high 80 percentile of the world's last remaining biologically intact bioregions. Ironically, these are the places that are most rich in fossil fuel resources and other mineral resources, but they're also places where renewable energy scores the highest as far as potential.
And so we're in this like moment right now where Indigenous cultures are making their final stand against industrialism and capitalism to protect the sacred places on the planet where life begins, where you can still drink from the rivers, where you can still harvest medicines and wildlife for consumption, for subsistence practices, and who have the stories of how to be connected to the sacredness of Mother Earth, how to be conscious. You know, in my own lifetime — I just turned 40 this year — in my own lifetime, you know, I remember riding dog sleds when I was a little kid. You know, I remember when my trapper uncle Alek got a SkiDoo and was the richest Indian on the reserve because he had a freaking motorized dog sled. So it's only within my lifetime that we've been removed from, you know, a life in balance, living close to the Earth in my own family. So there's still connection there. It's not a far distance, as far as time to travel and memories, you know, are fresh. I think that that's the same around the world.
Look at the world's Indigenous Peoples, is that we and our traditional knowledge have a vital and critical role to play in, certainly, the adaptation to the long term effects of climate change. Even if we turn the tap off now, we're going to be living with it for a few generations, if not more. But I think most importantly, our knowledge plays a critical role in mitigating the drivers of climate change, which are unregulated, unfettered expansion of the fossil fuel regime. We know, and we've known for a long time, and we've been saying the same things for a long time, that we need to keep it in the ground. We need to shut off the tap, now, and we need to do it, because water is life.
Ayana Young Yeah, I have heard these statistics of, I think it was 86% of the biodiversity of the world is in the hands of Indigenous People. And it really shines a light on the denial of the privileged, and although the Indigenous People of the world are holding so much of the biodiversity, they're also dealing with more of the consequences of the climate crisis, and they are the communities on the frontline, and they've been the most oppressed by the colonizer capitalist machine. And it's just amazing to see that also, those are where the solutions are being held. And I guess I'm wanting to understand, let's say, as of tomorrow, we kept it in the ground, we stopped fossil fuel extraction. What would it look like for Indigenous leadership to rise up and to lead the way for the next generations?
Clayton Thomas-Müller Yeah. I mean, I don't have the answer to that question, and I don't think anybody does. What I know, though, is that there are pathways forward that if people utilize, you know, those pathways, that the solutions will present themselves. What I do know is that we as humanity have to develop our economy. In order to quote, I think, David Suzuki, he says, "We need to put the 'eco' back in economy." You know, eco means 'home' in Latin. I fundamentally believe this. And I believe that, you know, that Indigenous Peoples, you know, in our traditional knowledge, are one part of the overall solution. I mean, I don't think that traditional knowledge, in and of itself, is going to stop capitalism. I believe that hybrid economic models that are bioregionally designed and that, you know, are designed to, you know, solidify humanity's place in the circle of life, in that particular spot on Mother Earth wherever these local economies are being established, they need to assert our footprint, our existence within living systems, not outside or external from living systems that we depend on for our livelihood. We need to develop closed loop economic infrastructure that has a full lifestream analysis. This throwaway economy that we have been living under created a circumstance where, you know, the fastest growing sector in our economy in the developed world is waste management sector, and that's just psychotic. I mean, you know all these super weather events that have been happening in the US this hurricane season that ties to geological movements on the Earth, you know, tied to climate change in terms of earthquakes and volcano activity. You know, all of these things are as a result of us living externally from the living systems that we live in. You know, building nuclear facilities along coastal lines and on fault lines in the state of California, I mean, these are us being very arrogant and not living within our circle of life that we were meant to live in. And I think that's where I think Indigenous Peoples in the deep, profound respect and humility of our cultures, of our worldview, of our cosmology, you know, in thinking seven generations. And you know, I come from the Cree Nation, and you know, our people say that you have to make your governance, your decisions, the way you design economy, the way you design social systems. All of this fundamentally, has to take into consideration three generations before you, the current generation that you're living in, and three generations ahead of you. So thinking seven generations before you and after you is a vital importance, because our decisions affect our ecology. And you know, ecology moves at a slower rate than a human life. And so when we think about, you know, the way that we plan our economy, the way that we plan our communities, the way that we do business, we have to think about the last three generations before us and the lessons that we learned, the responsibilities we inherited from them, as far as our ancestors three generations past, we have to think about the current people that are living here in the ecosystem right now, benefiting from it, depending on the sacred water and food that Mother Earth provides us. And we have to think about the children we're going to have and their children and children after them. You know, our great, great grandchildren. You know, because the decisions we make always have to be learning from our past, preparing in the present, to defend our collective future, to defend the commons, what we refer to as the sacred. And these things should not be commodities, bought and sold as things that we own. You know, they are things that we borrow from future generations, and they must be well taken care of.
So, however we design our economies of the future, we've really got to deal with this absurdity of privatization. If we're not talking about the radical dismantling of systems of power that enable, you know, the richest people on the Earth to own all the resources; you know, if we're not talking about the radical redistribution of land and wealth, especially in the developed economies of the planet, like the United States, like Canada, then we're not really doing anything, you know. We're just continuing the same patterns of colonial violence, of assimilation, of colonization that we have been. We're only doing it with solar panels and base plastics instead of petroleum. So we have to, like, be very intersectional in how we approach moving into the future. We have to embrace a mix of Indigenous traditional knowledge and technology. You know, Western technology and our economies themselves have to be, you know, modernized in that context as well, in that intersectional way. Because, you know, Indigenous Peoples are not stuck in history books pages. You know, we're not a monolith. We're diverse. Our knowledge is diverse, and it's forever adapting and modernizing in and of itself. You know, I think that we have to think about it that way.
[Musical break]
Ayana Young Thank you so much for starting to explain the intersectionality of a way forward. And, I find it really interesting to start talking about economy and that it's not just about switching over to renewable energy, and it's not just about plugging in our lifestyles into a renewable outlet, but this decolonization, this distribution of wealth, the actual way in which we treat each other and the Earth, equity.
I mean, these are all pieces of this bigger puzzle that I think a lot of people of privilege don't want to look at, because there's this this intense addiction to consumption and this fear of giving anything up, of losing any of these comforts that the developed world has become so addicted to that they're willing to stop at nothing even if it is pushing the Earth and humanity and all of species over this cliff. And so a big part of the environmental movement is being co-opted by this idea that electric cars and solar panels are going to be less polluting than fossil fuel extraction, but it's still going into somebody's backyard and using slave labor to mine the rare earth minerals. Also recycled grocery bags — that's great, it's still plastic, or reusable grocery bags. So I just, I don't know, I kind of want to hear you debunk this myth that we can buy our way out of it, that we can just look to these techno fixes to solve our issues. And why are these false solutions false? I guess, you know, of course, we can kind of go well, these false solutions are being pushed in the system because the powers that be still want people to buy. But I think it's really dangerous, because not only does it continue consumption, but it allows people to think that they're actually making a difference, so that they're actually engaging themselves in a better world when really it keeps people even more complacent, because then they can say, "Oh, well, I bought this Seventh Generation soap or I use reusable grocery bags." And it kind of, I think, stops people from pushing their boundaries more, to actually get up and really, really shatter what they know of themselves in this world, and really break that conditioning down.
Clayton Thomas-Müller Well, yeah, I mean, like you look at I always love quoting my dear comrade Gopal Dayaneni from Movement Generation in the Bay Area. He once said, "If we let Shell or Walmart build the people's economy of the future, climate just economy, a green job to them is photovoltaic panels, solar panels produced by indentured slave labor at Solar Valley in China, shipped over the ocean by bunker ship and then installed on a mansion you know of a white person in the Berkeley Hills by a poor black youth from East Oakland. That's their kind of green job. That's their people's economy." And I think that nobody has an answer, Ayana, to the rare earth minerals things. You know, I don't, I don't have an easy answer to that. What I do know is that if we don't get off of oil right now. If we don't turn off the tap right now, it's game over for everybody. That said, this is why we need an intersectional approach to dealing with war, no warming, and building the people's economy. Like how do we approach that? And I think that's where solutions to climate change, solutions to our economic paradigm must be bioregionally designed or localized power in the interest of globalizing justice. And I think that strategies, social movement strategies around climate justice have to be, you know, centered in building community self-determination, including in these communities that hold the valuable resources as far as the technical fixes that especially industrialized governments in the private sector are promoting.
And I think that privatization is another big piece that comes with solving the rare earth minerals moral crisis that we face in this tech age of Anthropocene energy production. You know, we need to keep that in the public sphere. Anytime privatization becomes part of what should be in the public sphere. You know, like, look at the discourse around Elon Musk and Tesla, you know, rebuilding Puerto Rico's energy grid. You know, a lot of people are like, "Hey, that's great," but, you know, I have a lot of reservations about a billionaire going in and building public infrastructure that should belong to the people in a for profit situation. It creates problems, you know. And I think that there's more accountability when things are run through cooperative models, when they're owned by the people, by the public, by the taxpayer versus if they're owned by shareholders or by a billionaire like Elon Musk, you know.
And I think that we still live in this polarized space between North and South, and we have that meta scale North and South power struggle that exists between the United States and every nation in the South on planet Earth or US capitalist interests in China, colonizing in their own way, especially in Africa. And I think that as a species, we really have to remove these systems of control that centralized big things like energy production and extraction, and we need to do like what they did in Germany. Look at Germany, you know, the anti nuclear movement there. They were able to shut down all of the nuclear power, you know, and they're kicking King Coal's ass in that country too, right now. And they were able to build up a solar grid there that's owned by cooperatives. Now the German government takes credit for that a lot of the times, but they didn't do a damn thing. It was social movements that did that, and we need those social movements to rise up all across Mother Earth. And I think that we have an extra added amount of responsibility in the industrialized economies like the United States to really lift up the moral dilemma that comes with renewable tech and also digital you know, our computers, our smartphones, they all have this rare earth minerals in it. And you're right, it does come from a lot of conflict regions. You know, and mining itself is a very destructive practice so how do we develop supply chains that take ecology and human rights, Indigenous rights, the rights of Mother Earth, how do we design, you know, production chains, supply chains, that take those things into consideration? Those are big questions that we have to figure out.
Ayana Young They are big questions to figure out, and I think that the first step in figuring that out is actually sitting with the truth of the actual questions, and not the surface level questions, you know — privatization and the commons, a truly just transition, and what that looks like, and how that distributes wealth across the globe and completely shatters the system that we have in place now. And it's really interesting to see how people are waking up and responding and really looking at the global economic and climate crisis, and like how you were saying that Elon Musk wants to go into Puerto Rico and set up solar panels. And I think it's really interesting how some folks are like, "Wow, this is great. What a what a charitable guy," and now it's going to be renewable energy. But how do we look deeper and go is that a form of disaster capitalism? Are the people of Puerto Rico actually being used and abused in their time of need? I'd love to talk about disaster capitalism and how it can trick people.
Clayton Thomas-Müller I'm not really qualified to talk about the situation in Puerto Rico. You know who is Is Cindy Weisner and the grassroots Global Justice Coalition. I encourage everybody who's concerned about Puerto Rico to learn about what Grassroots Global Justice Alliance is doing. GGJ, Google them. Check them out on their website. You know, they're doing a lot of support for the frontline organizations on the ground in Puerto Rico that everybody should be making donations to. I think that, you know, it's certainly disaster capitalism, what's happening with Puerto Rico, and specifically to Elon Musk. You know, I'm a big tech person. I love watching where technology is going, but, you know, it would have been so much more heartening and uplifting if he was like, I'm gonna donate a power grid system to, you know, the front lines of climate change. And I'm going to go to Puerto Rico, build this thing, and give it to the people of Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico's grid was destroyed and will take months and months to build because of US imperialism, because of US colonialism, because they've been, you know, in this limbo state, living as a territory of the United States. So it's the United States who created this crisis through treating Puerto Rico in the way that it has through its totally messed up colonial relationship and occupation of Puerto Rico. That's my understanding anyway, as a First Nations Cree man living in Canada. I think that in every instance where we have these catastrophic global warming weather related events, there's always the predator developers, you know, the the people that profit off of these kinds of circumstances. And that's where I think that, you know, it's so important to keep a real big check on privatization, you know, because it's created this circumstance where services that should be government run, that should be, you know, our collective responsibility end up falling to private contractors or, you know, opportunist billionaires like Elon Musk.
Ayana Young The other thing I think about with these huge climate catastrophes, whether it's Puerto Rico or the wine country of California with the fires or the floods in Texas and the south of the United States, I think sitting with these questions of 'Once these disasters hit, who's profiting? How is it being privatized?' But also, 'How do we move forward in a way that is just for the people who are actually living there on the front lines?' And it really is sad because I think there's this inevitability of climate refugees. That is not a topic that's spoken about enough in my mind. I think about where I live, in Northern California, and people are already trying to rebuild the areas of the fire zone. You know, just days after really it stops smoldering. Are we actually looking at the future? This will probably happen again next year. I understand that it's a really sensitive topic, especially for Indigenous People, that this is their homeland. I just wonder what your opinion is on what we can actually learn in disaster zones that are continually being hit year after year, and how to help support people in protecting themselves for the future.
Clayton Thomas-Müller Well, first of all, you know, my deepest prayers and condolences to especially the families that lost loved ones in the Northern California fire crisis that just rolled through wine country up there. You know, it continues to unfold. I just returned here to Canada, you know, after a lovely week in the Bay Area at the national Bioneers conference, and this was the big topic of discussion. And most Northern California people are in a state of trauma. And I think that that's a big part of the work, organizing this movement for climate justice, organizing a just transition that's fundamentally based on intersectionality, you know, between a number of issues. Part of what we have to do as organizers working in the movement for climate justice is continually dealing with our communities who are living in trauma from a variety of things, including these crazy disasters.
You know, I was recently at the 10 year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and Rita, which drowned the city of New Orleans, particular the Black community in the 9thWard. But there were many communities affected. You know, the Houma Nation, south of the city, on the five fingers on the Bayou, where their traditional land is. You know, their communities were wiped out. You know, Vietnamese fisher folk, who have a huge community there on the Gulf Coast, a lot of their fishing assets wiped out. You know, many water dependent fisher folk, people in the Gulf, you know, livelihoods wiped out. Going back 10 years later, it was amazing to me that, you know, the entire city had been redeveloped, rebuilt, the levees were fixed. But the 9th Ward, which was this predominantly multi generational, Black owned community. There continues to be brownsfields, burnt out houses, houses that were torn down and nothing ever built in their place, boarded up, houses that were never reoccupied. In this huge displacement of community all across the United States, people left and just never went home.
So trauma is a huge part of organizing the new economy of the future. You know, we need to deal with how people have been displaced, oppressed, and we need to approach that work from a strong framework of anti-racism, anti-oppression and anti -olonialism. You know, we have to have a theory of change that is about undoing those systems of power that make it so that poor people in Northern California have to just move to the city or go somewhere else because they don't have the money to rebuild, and that allows for these more affluent people to just recover. And I think that's the story globally, when we look at climate change, and the story between US imperialism and that of the European Union, and, you know, other industrialized countries of the world, they have a little bit more insulation, a little bit more time before they start feeling what many across the planet are already feeling as a result of increased typhoon, cyclone, you know, earthquake vulnerability. It's particularly acute in the Global South, and I think that that plays out in the United States over very, very deep lines of race and class. And again, if you're not organizing with a goal of the radical redistribution of land and wealth, then you're not really changing anything.
Ayana Young I'm so grateful that you brought up the trauma piece of moving forward after these climate catastrophes. And I mean, of course, there's trauma that's alive in probably all of humanity that doesn't even have to deal with these big disasters and so it's this compounding trauma that is probably one of the most frightening things I think about climate change is how people will react and how people will treat each other as land and resources become more scarce and places to live will become uninhabitable. I think about Joanna Macy and the Work That Reconnects and I think she had said one time in a workshop that her work is really for when the system collapses, how to help people not turn on each other. And I think about that just so much. You know, there's this amazing coming together after climate disasters. Usually it's like people are...I feel like they're really supporting each other and there's kind of this war like mentality of banding together and protecting each other. But I think as the adrenaline wears off, that people get afraid for their own survival and rebuilding and resources and there can be this turn because this selfish individual culture that has swallowed the majority of North America–
Clayton Thomas-Müller It's called greed.
Ayana Young It's called greed. Thank you so much for bringing up trauma, because I think that is something that's not talked about in climate discourse. You know, trauma isn't brought up in the UN when we're discussing these ways forward. I actually found this quote from you, and you said, "The current fight against oil is to give our young people the movement infrastructure to fight the next big war which is going to be to defend the sacredness of water." That quote is so powerful, because as we're talking about climate disasters that will continue, and we're talking about resource depletion and the trauma of humanity, of course, water, which is life and necessary for all life to survive, it's a pretty huge puzzle. I've heard that we've hit peak water. I don't know if you agree with that, but I'd love to hear you know your feelings about this quote that you know, our young people, this movement is supporting them, is teaching them how to fight for water, the sacredness of water.
Clayton Thomas-Müller You know, as human beings, we're pretty incredible, and the majority of our physicality, you know, is water, and we spend nine months inside our placenta in our mom, in that sacred water. You know, that's where we begin our life. And this whole fight, you know, for many people, has been about protecting the stream that pipeline's gonna cross, or that trout pond that they're going to eviscerate for a strip mine, you know, that mountaintop that they're going to blow to the moon and back, you know, to get the coal inside, that mountain that they're going to hollow out so they can store nuclear waste in it. A lot of this work, the good fight, as I often hear it referred to, is about protecting water, because we need it. We are water. For me, I believe that water is already trading at a much more profitable price than oil is on international markets, you know. And I come from a land of water, you know. Where I come from there's hundreds of 1000s of lakes, rivers and streams. Then you can still drink from these places, straight from the source. We have a majority of the Earth's remaining potable water. You know, fresh water resources exist in Canada. You know, the fight against the expansion of the Canadian tar sands and its associated pipelines. I mean, heck, the fight against the fossil regime and multinational mining corporations in general is social movement infrastructure that we're building up right now. You know, to shut down a fossil fuel regime will more frequently intersect with the movement to protect the sacredness of water from both contamination and privatization, and that fight will concentrate where I come from, you know, in this beautiful place that they now call Canada in our territories. You know, these are the places that have the world's remaining fresh water resources. Someday, you know, all these oil pipelines might be pumping water for all we know. I can't see into the future, but I know we have a big responsibility to protect the Great Lakes up in our North. You know, Great Slave Lake, Great Bear Lake, because these places are being drooled over by multinational water companies and by nation states who have poisoned all of their own water through their industrial practices and lack of oversight and enforcement, you know, against these multinational, predominantly US and Canadian based companies. So yeah, water is where it's at.
Ayana Young What a visual to think of oil pumps pumping water. That is a horror film, Twilight Zone, and I'm so with you that we need to protect the intact places, the intact creeks and rivers and streams and forests that hold this sacred water.
Clayton Thomas-Müller Standing Rock changed the world. It's not like Natives haven't been saying "water is life" for like ever. You know my ancestors were saying water is life when they fought Western expansion of European settlers. We all have that shared cosmology of our sacred responsibility to protect things like water for future generations.Like that's just how we're raised as Indigenous Peoples. It's in our blood memory. And the beautiful thing about Standing Rock is that you know this Thunderbird Woman, this meme that's been traveling the globe. She's showing up at every protest, at every March, at every direct action, every civil disobedience that's happening. We see the images of Thunderbird Woman. And you know the Thunder Beings, many Indigenous nations have stories about them, you know, and they bring the spring storms. They bring the rain. They represent the end of the hard season and the beginning of the growing season. You know, they represent the introduction of abundance back after the rest that Mother Earth gets during the winter, when she's covered in snow. And Thunder Beings, they bring that water, that sacred water. And I think that it's through narrative based storytelling strategies, like the ones that came out of Standing Rock, you know, with profound imagery like Thunderbird Woman, that facilitate a connection to the sacredness of place for people, not just those 60 million people that depend on the Missouri River for their water source, but people from coast to coast were touched by Standing Rock. They were touched by the meme, "Water is Life." And you know the ability for the Lakota people in that territory, and all the Indigenous Peoples and Non Indigenous Peoples that came to stand with them in solidarity. You know the ability to use that platform, that global teaching moment, to help citizens in the United States connect to this idea that water is life was a global shift moment. I think that we're going to see the ramifications of that story based strategy in terms of people caring more about where they live and being connected to the sacred elements that you need to be connected to when you're making decisions about development or economy or politics or whatever. So my hat's off to Standing Rock and everybody involved in that. An artist who made that meme, it's an Ojibwe man who works with Christy Belcourt. His name's Isaac Murdoch, and they've been kicking ass all across Turtle Island doing amazing decolonization work through art.
Ayana Young Yeah, my hat's off as well. And speaking of story based strategy, you have this new transmedia storytelling project called The Life in the City of Dirty Water. I'd love to hear about that and hear the details of this project. And I also want to learn how did you arrive at this creative concept?
Clayton Thomas-Müller Well, The Life in the City of Dirty Water is a very personal project. It's something that, you know, I'm not wearing my campaigner hat when I did that, representing that project, doing the stories, you know, telling the stories and that are housed within that project. You know, it started off as a book, and I wrote a book, but it was just too screwed up to publish, you know. It's a collection of stories about growing up Indigenous in the city of Winnipeg. Essentially, the premise of it was a survival guide for the urbanized, Indigenous person, you know. Because of my work and social movements, you know, I'm a narrative based digital storytelling strategist. You know, I use video to motivate people to get out in the streets and in the land in defense of Mother Earth. We decided to take elements of the book that I wrote that was too messed up to publish, but we took some of the lessons in the stories out of that, and I hired a videographer to travel with me across Turtle Island and to record live storytelling sessions in the tradition of oral history of non written language. We then took those stories and transcribed them into the existing book, which drops this spring, and we made a short documentary, a 30 minute short doc. But a whole host of other transmedia elements will be housed at the website, lifeinthecityofdirtywater.com. People can go there now and see some of the content to get an idea of this huge storytelling initiative. And you know, the movie is going to do the festival circuit. We hope to premiere it on television here in Canada once it's done the festival circuit and certainly posted online on the website for people.
So we're just at the beginning stages of this, but you know, the whole thing started off as a healing journey for myself, growing up native, turning 40, becoming a dad. You know, I've made a lot of mistakes in my life, a lot. And, you know, like any other Native man, I've been affected by colonial violence and white patriarchy and physical and emotional and spiritual and sexual manifestations of colonial violence. You know, I've lived with those things. And so this storytelling project is about me becoming whole and telling these stories of surviving colonization in an urban context and, you know, just kind of putting it all out there so that I can be a better dad to my kids. You know, I found that my two sons, Felix and Jackson, as they, you know, got older — they're 11 and nine now — I found that I was getting triggered by them, because I was remembering the things that I went through at their ages growing up in Winnipeg, and it was triggering me. So, you know, I talked to a therapist about it, and he said, "Oh, yeah, for sure. You know, that's going to be triggering. You got to do mindfulness meditation. You've got to, like, go to ceremonies, and you got to, like, confront those things so that you can be present for your kids, so that you're not disassociating, you know, so that you can do things like homework and playing with them." And so that's what I did, you know, I wrote this book, worked with my team, got an amazing team that I'm working with, Spencer Mann and Anna Lee Popham, my videographer and editor, and we're producing these beautiful stories to share with people so that we can normalize some of the things I think that other Native people are going through, but might be too ashamed to talk about. I'm hoping that Life in the City of Dirty Water will be a positive impact in this, you know, meta discourse on truth and reconciliation here in Canada. And it's the 150th year anniversary of the colonization of our homelands, of the confederation of Canada, and I chose this year to tell my story, and I hope that it has ripple effects in a healing way for other people who are trying to tear down patriarchy and white supremacy and heal from the generations of colonial violence that we've been affected by.
Ayana Young Wow. Clayton, thank you so much for having the courage to do this project, and this was a process for you to heal yourself and become a better father and to connect with those, like you, said, who may be too ashamed to talk about their wounding from colonialism and what a gift for your family, but for your extended family of humans. I'm so excited to see all this incredible creation that is coming out of this project and I'm wondering, is there a Kickstarter? Is there a way for people to support this project and support this transmedia project? So it seems like there's so many levels, and it will go on for awhile.
Clayton Thomas-Müller Certainly, I think that that's the beauty of this project, is that it'll live as long as I want it to, you know, through the podcast or dropping a hip hop mixtape. You know, I used to be a rapper. I've been sitting on these songs for years, you know. So music will be a part of it. And just the ability to create new vignettes on the website. You know, people don't want to read the book, they can watch each chapter and video vignettes on the website. It's going to be pretty cool, and we'll be able to produce new things. And certainly, we're still fundraising to polish the existing transmedia elements. And you know, if people want to support the project or just check it out, they can make a donation on the website, lifeinthecityofdirtywater.com there's a link to my paypal there, but if you're not able to support it that way, just hit share. And sharing that social media content on your social media platforms is also a really meaningful way to contribute.
Ayana Young I'm really looking forward to seeing how it grows over the years, and I think it's so wonderful because I was having this conversation about how burnt out people are getting in the movement, and there's so many losses, and even when there's a win, it's not a win that actually lasts forever. In the United States right now, for instance, the public lands, like Bear Ears, these were protected, and somehow, with the administration, they're being opened even things like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. So I think there's this deep sense of grief and exhaustion and hopelessness, and I feel like an antidote to that is creativity, arts, storytelling, all the things that you're doing in your transmedia project. And to me, if we can push ourselves beyond our creativity, if we can push ourselves beyond what we know in the movement and keep growing, and that's what I feel like this project that you're doing is. It's pushing the boundaries of creativity and storytelling and the wounds of colonization and finding new outlets and new ways to connect. And that, to me, is like what I really want to grab onto in the movement.
You know, I'm ready to align myself with these other projects, so that I have the fire and the fuel to keep going. And I think a lot of people are really craving that right now. How do we keep going? How do we find the connections and the energy to not wallow or to not become whether it's desensitized or debilitated or just overwhelmed. So I think you know, supporting projects like Life in the City of Dirty Water, supporting projects like this and being connected is the food to the movement. So I really appreciate all of your work, with the campaigning and the truth telling and your analysis on the economic and scientific level, and your connection to heart and land is so incredible Clayton. I'm so appreciative of you, and I feel wonderful being able to share your words and your insights with the audience today.
Clayton Thomas-Müller Well, it's been a real honor to be invited to this podcast. And again, you know, sending a lot of love and light to everybody affected by the California fires where you live. And you know, if people want to follow me on social media, it's super easy. On Twitter, I'm @creeclayton, that's C, R, E, E, Clayton, you know, easy to access on Facebook and you know, I encourage the listeners to check out 350.org plug in. You know, through local organizations in your community that are fighting for climate justice, you know, show up to the demos, sign those petitions, you know, and organize around your own dinner table. You know, have those conversations with your kids and with your grandparents, pull the family together. This fight for climate justice is an intergenerational fight, and we need to always be learning from our past, preparing in our present to defend our collective future. So yeah, thanks for having me.
Ayana Young Thank you for listening to For The Wild Podcast. I'm Ayana young. The music you heard today was "Go Back" by Leilani, "Mensaje de Alto" by Rondalla del Templo de Mita and "Night Stars Watcher" by Ahmad Al-Harazi. Our theme music is "Silence Returns" by Beau and "Like a River from Kate Wolf. I want to thank our amazing producers, Reach Out and March Young, our research director Madison Magalski and media director Molly Leebove.