Transcript: Dr. CLINT CARROLL on Stewarding Homeland /299
Ayana Young Hello and welcome to For the Wild Podcast. I'm Ayana Young. Today I'm speaking with Dr. Clint Carroll.
Dr. Clint Carroll I'm thinking along those terms, just understanding how the ethical frameworks that we have as Indigenous peoples can travel beyond the place-based relationships that are so vitally important for those frameworks, but that these ethical frameworks can exceed and in fact, have a lot to teach everyone else you know in the world, especially in this moment of climate crisis.
Ayana Young Clint Carroll is an Associate Professor of Native American and Indigenous Studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. A citizen of the Cherokee Nation, he works at the intersections of Indigenous studies, anthropology, and political ecology, with an emphasis on Cherokee environmental governance and land-based resurgence. Currently, he is working with Cherokee Elders, students, and Cherokee Nation staff on an integrated education and research project that investigates Cherokee access to wild plants in northeastern Oklahoma amid shifting climate conditions and fractionated tribal lands. Funded by the National Science Foundation and the Indian Land Tenure Foundation, this work aims to advance methods and strategies for Indigenous land education and community-based conservation.
Well, Dr. Carroll, thank you so much for joining us on the show today. I'm really excited for this opportunity to be speaking with you.
Dr. Clint Carroll Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.
Ayana Young So, to begin, I’d love for you to talk about the revitalization work you’re engaged with, with Cherokee Nation, particularly your involvement with the formation of Cherokee Nation Medicine Keepers and your current project, Knowing the Land which centers on land-based education and intergenerational cultural transmission. Can you talk about the historical significance of the creation of the Cherokee Nation Medicine Keepers and their work with Cherokee youth, as well as your process of returning to your Nation’s land base?
Dr. Clint Carroll Yeah, I think that in answering this question, I have to start with the last part, and then work my way backward, because my time in relating to the lands that are now known as the Cherokee Nation reservation in northeastern Oklahoma, is really a direct result of being able to have the privilege to work with our Elders and our knowledge keepers. And so my upbringing is not unusual. I grew up in a metro area in Dallas, Texas, and most Native people today actually live in urban areas. But still, you know, my sense of connection to community, culture, place, and language suffered as a result. And so thinking about the origin of my desire to work with my community, I have to trace my winding path through higher education. And that led me to the University of Arizona after Community College after dropping out of my first year at university, a local university in North Texas, but I ended up with quite a renewed direction. And I wanted to commit to the field of American Indian studies, as well as cultural anthropology.
And so, thinking about some of the experiences I had as an undergraduate at Arizona, working with local fishers in the Bahamas, working with communities in northern Mexico on different projects related to sustainability, I just really wanted to connect those experiences and those perspectives of research being community-based being applied and being related to land and environmental issues. I wanted to apply that back home, home being in the broad sense, and so thinking about reconnecting with relatives, with land, with Elders in Oklahoma, in the Cherokee Nation… and so making my way that way after I graduated with my bachelor's degree, I started out working for the tribe for the Office of Environmental Services, had a very kind person really advocate for me at the time due to, most likely, my persistence in bugging her about wanting to contribute to some of the initiatives they had there.
So Nancy John is still the current director of the Office of Environmental Programs for the Cherokee Nation. And she is Choctaw and Creek, and recognized my passion for these types of issues and put me on a project that was simultaneously super exciting, but also incredibly daunting. And it asked of me to design a database of sorts for some of the plants that Cherokee people know and use so that the office could be better informed about their activities. And, you know, they had been set up as an example of tribal self-determination, kind of the equivalent of the Environmental Protection Agency for the Cherokee Nation. But that cultural element was missing in some of those activities that they did. And so my work entailed extending that research into the communities. And that was really where things got started.
And that really was a process for me, that was both - you could say - professional and personal, and connecting to the land itself, in reconnecting with relatives, both extended and distant relatives, those who descend from one string of the family tree, and they descend from it from another. And it really was an amazing process of homecoming. And then beyond that, I'm extending my relationships with Elders and knowledge keepers who informed the project. And that led to the formation of the Medicine Keepers. And I've just been incredibly fortunate to continue our work together through the years - was a product of being able to be in Oklahoma, over the course of my graduate education at UC Berkeley, during the summer, specifically. And so after that first summer, I kind of picked up where I left off in subsequent years and really kind of tried to maintain that momentum through not only the project but the essential element of relationship wishes. You know, I credit just the ability to spend that time on it and really develop and nurture those relationships over time.
Ayana Young Beautiful. Thank you for sharing all that. And yeah, I’d like to ask you about your relationship to homeland and place amidst dislocation. In your article “Cherokee Relations to Land: Reflections on a Historic Plant Gathering Agreement Between Buffalo National River and the Cherokee Nation,” you write that the process of Cherokee stewardship over Oklahoma lands “entails maintaining the responsibility to act as caretakers of a place that, while it is not the homeland, it is nevertheless a homeland.” I’m struck by this reverence and commitment to place, and I’m wondering if you could share with listeners a bit about how Cherokee people, after forced removal from your ancestral homelands in Southern Appalachia, went about this process of making place. Can you talk about the policies that led to removal, what role your ancestors’ relationships with plants, and the environmental knowledges garnered through those relationships, played in tying your identity as Cherokees to your new land base?
Dr. Clint Carroll Stories of change, and flux, and mobility really define our history as Cherokee people and so to think with one of the parts of your question around movement, mobility, adaptation, I've been thinking a lot about that in terms of breaking out of fixity as it relates to how people associate, you know, how people think about Indigenous peoples, while at the same time staying with the importance of place and relationships to place. And so I've been thinking about this in terms of relational continuity. So acknowledging these intimate connections that we develop and build with place and with other than human beings but also how our ethical frameworks travel, so to speak. And I think there are some profound theoretical insights to be gained from that, as well as practical ones regarding the climate crisis.
So, thinking about ethical frameworks according to Indigenous philosophies and cosmologies as reframing our conversation around technology - so thinking more in terms of cultural technologies or relational technologies, the ability to relate well and to do so in a way that acknowledges interdependence and reciprocity. So that said, getting to some of the more details of your question regarding Cherokee history, it's also important to point out that the Trail of Tears isn't the only story with regard to removal and migration, so to speak. And, of course, in the case of the Trail of Tears was forced migration. What's important to also consider are the other stories and other histories of Cherokee people with regard to movement. Specifically, the Old Settlers, what people often refer to as the Old Settlers were heterogeneous in terms of their sense of how they identify as Cherokees. A lot of my Elders talk about Keetoowahs, which are who are typically referenced as traditionalists in Cherokee society. But they aren't necessarily synonymous with Old Settlers. There were other factions or groups, if you will, in Cherokee history, who could also be under that term.
But I'll start with talking about how my Elders talk about Keetoowahs and their interpretation of what was happening at that time during, during the era leading up to the removal period, really, actually going way further back from the 1830s, which is typically known as the Removal Era, and thinking about migration before all of this - and I don't want to say voluntary because I think voluntary implies that there was an inherent willingness and eagerness to leave the homelands. But my Elders talk about, you know, an ancient could to a precept being moved away from the conflict. And so fundamentally, just an ethos of peace, well-being, balance, and conflict, upsetting that requires the people to move away from it in order to maintain these fundamental concepts of being unbalanced with the world around you.
And so Keetoowahs have been, we're in this area, and I say, this area, I mean, just west of the Mississippi River. So what we now know is northern Arkansas, some say as early as 1721. And so that's over a century before the removal area. And so thinking about that, in relationship to play some relationship to that place, specifically, which became parts of the lands that we now know as the Cherokee Nation reservation, as important to kind of keep in mind when we think about, relationships with the land despite movement, and whether that is punctuated as in the Trail of Tears, or that it happened over a longer period of time, it's important kind of take all of those into account.
And this of course is not to deny the extreme losses our people experienced from forced removal. But, to me, it helps push back against portrayals of inauthenticity, for example, as being a relocated tribe, as well as notions of fixity when it comes to Indigenous peoples. And so again, thinking about that term relational continuity, I wrote a piece recently that came out in an edited volume that really worked through some of these stories that people were telling around the turn of the last century to oral historians. And so the Indian Pioneer Papers has a bunch of these accounts that Cherokee people were telling about their experience in these quote “new lands,” and then juxtapose those with stories that were recorded by the anthropologist James Mooney, with folks at the Eastern Band, so in North Carolina, that related specifically to our homelands.
And so looking at these stories of Cherokees who were in what is now called Oklahoma, and comparing them to stories that are representative of relationships with the homelands in North Carolina and the surrounding area, it's really interesting to me to kind of think through “how did Cherokees continue to be Cherokee?” and by that I mean continue to not only practice Cherokee cultural traditions, and perhaps speak the language, and all of these kinds of cultural notions, but be Cherokee in terms of how we relate to other-than-human beings specifically, in this piece, to animals to other-than-human animals. And so, anyway, I'm thinking along those terms, just by way of kind of understanding how the ethical frameworks that we have, as Indigenous peoples, can travel beyond the place-based relationships that are so vitally important for those frameworks, but that these ethical frameworks can exceed and in fact, have a lot to teach everyone else in the world, especially in this moment of climate crisis.
Ayana Young Yeah, I want to talk a bit more about how the climate crisis is impacting the Cherokee Nation. In chapter two of your book, Roots of Our Renewal: Ethnobotany and Cherokee Environmental Governance, you describe how many of the plants your people have had relations with since time immemorial were actually present in the landscape, with your people even through relocation. Can you share a bit more about this for listeners and how these relationships are preserved by Cherokee Nation Medicine Keepers and re-engaged with by youth through the ongoing project, Knowing the Land?
Dr. Clint Carroll Yeah, absolutely. So well, I don't want to frame this as luck, which is really an unfitting term when discussing colonialism and colonial policy, but when we compare our relocation as Cherokees to other tribes, who were removed to much more dramatically foreign landscapes, if you will, Cherokees did find themselves in a position of not having to learn and relate entirely from scratch. And so, thinking about both the similarities between the homelands and the southeastern Appalachian mountains, and what became the Cherokee Nation in the westernmost extent of the Ozark Highlands,mthat’s important to take into account that there are a significant amount of plants that are a constant throughout those two ecoregions.
And also the Old Settlers factored into this history as well in terms of being able to learn and relate to a new place. And we think about this in terms of how they were able to teach relatives who had suffered that forced march from the homelands during the Trail of Tears in the winter of 1838, 1839. And so I think about that a lot in terms of where we ended up as a result of forced relocation and other migrations, and how there is an element of familiarity. And we look at the landscape geographically, but also topographically, as it's much less dramatic, but still, at least in the eastern parts of the Cherokee Nation representative of those hills and valleys and places where Cherokee people felt at home and could relate well to the plants and animals that they were able to recognize but also learn about new ones in the process.
And the truth is that we did lose about a third of our plant relatives. I say lose but as a result of the forced relocation, we didn't have access to about a third of those plants that grew in the southeast. And I'm drawing from the work of Alfred Vick who wrote a paper on this, looking comparatively at a list of Cherokee use plants in the southeast and the homelands and those that had been recorded in Oklahoma, and looking at the differences. And you know, what Cherokees were able to recognize contributed to their ability to persist in the healing and foodways they had practiced in the homelands. But there was also a lot of learning that Cherokee people did. And that included not only observations, and you could say, trial and error, but also their profound stories of learning from the land itself, of gaining knowledge from the Creator, going to ceremony, going to prayer, and there are stories of medicine people asking the Creator directly for help after experiencing profound loss.
That in itself also represents the process of relational continuity and thinking about relationships not only in terms of observation and what Western science would call knowledge production, learning about the land, but also allowing that to be a two-way street and allowing that to incorporate spirituality as well - our connection to broader spiritual forces that also have the ability to teach. So there are also many stories of actively producing landscapes that enable such continuation of a Cherokee way of life, or something that resembled that way of life that we had developed in the homelands. And so, where there are other stories of Cherokee people transplanting seeds, there's speculation that ginseng, one of our seven Sacred plants, was one of those seeds. And that had been reestablished in the West because of its importance to Cherokee medicine people. But also the application of cultural burning, which again was something that Cherokees not only transferred from their practices in the east but had been applied to the lands since before the arrival of Cherokee people, by other Indigenous peoples.
And so, it's important to acknowledge that the landscape wasn't an untouched Eden, so to speak. It had been lived with and in relationship with others before Cherokees arrived or pushed further west. We can also talk about free-range animal husbandry practices that contributed to more open landscapes within forests. So open forested areas that enabled easier mobility, you combine that with fire, and things looked very different during that time, certainly before Oklahoma statehood in 1907, when things started getting much more difficult for Cherokee people to practice these ways of life as a result of the privatization of land through the allotment policy, as well as the continued encroachment of settlers into Cherokee territory.
And so we think about this leading up to today, and this is one of the access to land, and really understanding how Cherokee people are navigating such fractionated landscapes, is one of the central goals of our current project that we're enacting with the Medicine Keepers. And so it's funded by the National Science Foundation as well as the Indian Land Tenure Foundation. And I'm working with five Cherokee students on a land education program that was developed in coordination and partnership with the Cherokee medicine keepers, as well as a community-based research project that really seeks to better understand these questions of access and then inform tribal strategies for conservation and really Land Back so that Cherokee people can continue to access lands to enable the continuation of these practices and relationships with the land.
Ayana Young To speak to the climate change part, I’d like to transition our conversation to focus on the threats posed by climate change to Cherokee Nation and also highlight solutions emerging from within your community in response. Can you describe for listeners where Cherokee Nation is located in terms of its geospatial position between two different climate zones, and outline the threats of climate change to the Cherokee Nation and its citizens, human and more than human, specifically traditional-use plants?
Dr. Clint Carroll So, despite the fact that Cherokee people were able to recognize many of the landforms, plants, and animals after the relocation, after migration, the Trail of Tears, we ended up in a place that straddles two different equal regions. And these are the westernmost extent of the Ozark Highlands, and then the easternmost extended the central irregular plains. And so what we see at this confluence is a shift happening, or climate change being something that is affecting annual temperatures and therefore threatening many of those familiar plants and those plants that Cherokee people use to enable the continuation of these healing and foodways. With that, you think about how are we reacting to this, and how are Cherokee people understanding really what can be construed as another removal, although this time we're staying put, we're staying in the same place, it's just that the plants are either unable to be and unable to sustain themselves in the current place - or themselves shifting.
So we've got these multiple playing fields that Cherokee people have to keep track of - you'd have a fractionated land base. So as a result of the allotment policy, we lost 98% of our collectively-held communally held lands. And we have, as a result, very, very limited space in which to continue these practices. And then on top of that, you add climate change. And it's threatening the ability of those plants to thrive in that very limited space that we have. And so we think about this as yet another removal. And I'm thinking also with Daniel Wildcat’s work on viewing climate change broadly as the fourth removal for many Indigenous peoples and he puts this in the context of historical forced removals, like the Trail of Tears, but there are many other removals that Indigenous peoples have and their histories. The second one being the removal of children from their homes, from their families during the assimilation period, the assimilation policy. Think about removal as being expressed through the allotment policy and the theft of lands that Indigenous peoples owned communally but now had been privatized as a result, and then climate change being the fourth removal.
And so I think that's one way of looking at some of the threats that we're facing and in terms of how we are strategically reacting to these processes, these climatic processes. Where my mind goes is looking at how we can actively conserve lands within our current tribal trust holdings, as well as where we can enact different forms of Land Back that are in relationship with local landowners with perhaps federal agencies in one case, which is directly related to this question, looking further east and to areas that have more of a buffer to them.
And one case in point is a recent project that we've carried out with Buffalo National River in northern Arkansas, which presents a lot of complexities, also ironies in the sense of this being a national park that is a part of the system of the US government that has, by and large, been responsible for dispossessing Indigenous peoples and creating these enclosures that really represent the fundamental separation between humans and nature. But at the same time, paradoxically, having this sense of, again, a buffer zone but also a sense of protective sense of, well these lands, despite the fact that Indigenous peoples have not been able to enact their practices of caretaking and in relationship with them, have by and large been protected by this enclosure, this boundary.
And so we find a lot of our medicine plants growing within that area and the Cherokee Nation recently, via the medicine keepers, when we work together with a team from the University of Arizona, the Bureau of Applied Research and Anthropology, to really develop a gathering agreement that was, and still is, quite a novel thing for the National Park Service in that it allows American Indian tribes to establish agreements together within the park boundaries, which is kind of a system-wide or agency-wide act… or I think It's a rule, is the technical term for it, that allows these agreements to happen. And so we look at that as a strategy for adapting to these changes we're seeing. If the plants within our reservation are being threatened, how do we actively seek to protect them through tribal conservation formations? As well as, how do we work strategically with national agencies, federal agencies, that may have a troubled history, but at the same time would further enable Cherokee people to continue these relationships with plants through gathering agreements.
And so you know that of course is wrapped up in so much more significance with regard to Cherokee people's presence in that area, specifically, the Old Settlers who actually signed a treaty with the federal government in 1817. But the Treaty of 1817, and this is contested because the Old Settlers had claimed their own Cherokee Nation, the Western Cherokee Nation. So they were a faction, and they weren't looked upon very well by the Cherokee Nation that was still out east in the homelands. But nonetheless, they're considered treaty lands. If you look at a map of Buffalo National River and a map of the Treaty of 1817 lands, I mean, it's the exact same place. And so, in a way, this agreement is reconnecting with treaty lands and reasserting Cherokee presence in this area, as well as showing promise to affect the way that the park is managed by the National Park Service staff. We've been hit really hard by COVID in terms of our collective work together. So we haven't been able to enact the agreement as robustly as we would have otherwise, but the sense of being able to not only go in and gather plants, but also establish a relationship with the park service in a way that informs how they caretake those lands is hugely significant.
Ayana Young I absolutely agree, and that’s really powerful work. A lot of your work concomitantly navigates and subverts land management systems and structures imposed by settler colonialism for Indigenous sovereignty and Indigenous futures. I’m thinking about an article you wrote in which you address this titled “Commentary: The Environmental Anthropology of Settler Colonialism, Part II,” wherein you write, “contemporary tribally-based conservation projects can adeptly speak the language of conservation while holding true the understanding of land as a web of relationships.” I think this is particularly true in the context of the agreement you helped forge between Cherokee Nation and Buffalo National River. For listeners who are unfamiliar, can you expound on this agreement in the context of your Nation’s treaty history with the land and any other details that come with that?
Dr. Clint Carroll Yeah, I mean, that's the trick, right? My work is really situated in that space of engaging not only settler institutions and agencies - engaging our own tribal institutions and agencies in a way that understands the very complex ways of navigating different systems for different purposes, strategically. And oftentimes, those are fraught navigations because of the baggage that many of these institutions and structures carry. But the way that I was observing things unfold throughout the course of my work with the Medicine Keepers who worked very, very closely and continue to work very closely with our natural resource managers. Now within the Secretary of Natural Resources, or the Office of the Secretary of Natural Resources, really pushed me to think through these processes. And really, it's another expression of relationality, of understanding how bureaucracies work, understanding how governance unfolds and plays out through relationships between people and contestation over land-based issues, as well as culture and tradition. And so the Medicine Keepers and their formation represented, to me, this balance between the Cherokee Nation as a State, as an Indigenous state, and this is something that the Cherokee people have been engaging for a long time - since the formation of our constitutional form of government in the east in the early 1800s.
Seeing how the Medicine Keepers are able to provide a sense of balance between going too far in that direction of bureaucratic governance of completely buying into state structures, and then inserting themselves into the conversation in a way that guides our natural resource managers, and really lends their cultural capital. They're fluent speaking Cherokee Elders, who grew up with land-based knowledge and spent a lot of time out in the woods, learning from their Elders. And that group contains generations of knowledge and has been able to wield that in the service of not only protecting our lands, but encouraging people to think about our relationship to place. One of our spiritual leaders for the Medicine Keepers is a practicing medicine person, he's in his mid-90s. His name is Crosslin Smith, who I work with very closely and have been continuing to work with him through the publication of his own books, he remarked early in our conversations with the group that we have to honor the spirit of this place, we have to honor the spirit of this land. And that, to me, was profound in the sense that he recognized that not only that we have a relationship to place that is not predicated on ownership or possession but that also, as Cherokees, as you mentioned earlier, these aren't our homelands. But they are a homeland, they are a home for us. And we have to honor the fact that we are there to caretake them, rather than to possess them or to develop them or any of these other ways of understanding relationships to land from a Euro-Western perspective.
And so we think about these types of playing this, or navigating within these systems, and like I said, it can be fraught, but at the same time, I think it's extremely exciting to see where we go with this, and how these conversations can really manifest in important ways. And at the same time, sustain the protective barrier that our tribal governments represent with regard to settler state encroachment and other colonial policies that they were built to stave off. And so with that, some recent accomplishments that have been a direct result of the Medicine Keepers work have been just in March of last year of 2021, the establishment of a legislative mechanism that put aside 810 acres of land in Eastern County, so really bordering the Arkansas border, and this place that the Elders have christened a name which means the peaceful place of medicine has been set aside as a cultural conservation tract. And that's a direct result of some of our work together, in which the Elders have really made it a priority, or at least voiced their preference for conserving tribal lands in the face of a lot of the practices that the Cherokee Nation inherited from the BIA like cattle grazing leases, and then, previously establishing monocrop silvicultural projects for loblolly pine trees, which eliminated the oak and hickory forests in those areas. And so really pushing back and asserting a sense of Cherokee relationality into a system that, again, is a strategic way of interfacing with colonial power, that also can be articulated and enacted in ways that honor our relationships to place in our relational continuity as Cherokee people.
Ayana Young You're speaking about your relationships, the National Parks earlier, and in the context of the history of National Parks and preserves, the inception of which are rooted in and perpetuate settler-colonial logics and a terra nullius view of land. I’m thinking about how at the close of your article “Cherokee Relationships to Land," you observed Elders walking through the woods as if being reunited with old friends. This is a beautiful vision, and I’d like to hear about your perspective on reclaiming your Nation’s ties to the land, albeit through the settler “conservationist” enclosure of land?
Dr. Clint Carroll There were some profound moments in that work that we did with the Elders and some of them, as I wrote, really walked through that place and a sense of reconnection with familiar landscapes and being able to see, and touch, and feel plants that we're that people have a lot less access to in the 14 County reservation. A lot of Elders remarked that it felt like being in the homelands. And so I think there was that as well, that sense of here's a place that’s only a three hour drive from Tahlequah, from our tribal capitol, and yet invoked a profound feeling of home for the Elders. And then, interestingly, I think those who we were working with, and so they're the Medicine Keepers, include most of our language department. And so they spend a lot of time actually, and I say a lot but it's probably once or twice a year, pre-COVID, working with the Eastern Band through language Consortium. So they actually do travel back to the homelands relatively frequently. And yet, here's a place that's only three hours away from Tahlequah, from home, and it also evokes these feelings of being in the homelands.
And at the same time, it's complicated because northern Arkansas, in that area that surrounds the Buffalo National River, there was a lot of apprehension from the Elders about are we going to be experiencing racism in this area of, quite frankly, a lot of white supremacist organizations, and kind of more of an unfriendly environment according to their perspective, being outside of their comfort zone of home. And so for all those reasons, I reflect back on that experience, and I also look forward to continuing that work and continuing our intent to bring the students who I'm working with out there and perform the inaugural act of gathering a plant under this agreement.
I think of reconnecting and reclaiming areas that we have connections to but for the purposes of enacting a relationality that exceeds kind of a claiming narrative, and is more about the ability to perpetuate these practices and actively teach and show students in an area that we now have access to through that mechanism. And so, I hope thinking ahead to that time when we can gather again that those teachings will come out and that sense of place will be able to be transmitted between the Elders and our students in the program, and then beyond from there with other Cherokees who seek to be connected to that place in a way that's established under this agreement.
Ayana Young Thank you for sharing. I’ve heard you speak about the Cherokee story on the Origin of Disease and Medicine. I wonder if you could recount that story for us today and perhaps speak to any lessons you see emerging from this story that might be applicable for Non-Native people and Non-Cherokees in how we implement an ethics of care for land in our daily lives?
Dr. Clint Carroll Yeah, so this story has, I think, for a lot of us Cherokee people and scholars who are thinking about our current moment and really the past couple of years, has really resonated, and the way the story goes, is that there was a time in which the human beings, and I say the human beings because for many Indigenous peoples, their name for themselves simply translates to the real people or the human beings. And so, Cherokee people, the human beings had not been good relatives to plants and animals and the land, and had been wantonly killing their animal relatives and in ways that didn't respect the gifts that they offer for well-being and flourishing.
And so the animals came together in a Grand Council. And the way the story goes is that they had representatives there speaking from their perspectives of what the humans had been doing, and there are many proposals from different representatives on how to retaliate against the human beings as a result of the disrespect that they were showing them. And through all these different proposals, each one of them had its goals but eventually fell short because of the inability to really see it through or carry it out. And what they ended up deciding on was that they would inflict disease upon the human beings as a way of retaliating, as a way of teaching them to regain balance and relearn that respect toward other beings.
And so a lot of diseases were associated with specific animals, the most common one that's told is rheumatism being inflicted by the spirit of the deer. If humans hunted, killed a deer, and didn't give thanks for it, it would be visited upon them so that they could never draw a bow back again. And so what happened as this was going on was that the plant nations, the plant people, came together and took pity upon the human beings and offered themselves up as medicine for these various ailments that had been inflicted upon them. And so that's a very short version of the story. But as we reflect on it and think about the implications for our times today, even before COVID, Cherokee people, in our relationships to plants, have been kind of couched in this debt of gratitude and then this profound sense of relationality and reciprocity with the plant nations but also recentering in balancing our relationships with other-than-human animals.
And we think about a lot of the issues that were coming to the fore around the beginning of the global pandemic, and how that related to the discussions around these frontiers of human and animal coexistence. And really kind of what I'm getting at is some of the theories or hypotheses about the origin of COVID-19. And, you know, it struck home in the sense that human beings had fallen out of balance with the relationship to the nonhuman world, specifically animals. And it really made me think about that story in the way of what it can offer the world as we struggle, and think through how we got here. And, again, going back to what I was saying earlier, around narratives of technology and the technological fix for a lot of our wicked problems today.
It struck me that what wasn't represented in these conversations. We think about some of the initiatives and narratives about how the vaccine was going to be at the time this technological fix for the cure of COVID-19. And what was missing was a radical reframing of our relationship to the world, to the other-than-human world. And so, I thought there is a lot missing in focusing solely on the ability of Western science to triumph and to find a fix to things rather than the more meaningful work of trying to regain our sense of responsibility in relationship to the world that isn't centering human beings.
And so, again, I go back to thinking about how can we acknowledge the importance of Western science when it comes to vaccines and vaccine development, but at the same time, incorporate and acknowledge Indigenous philosophies in ways that stress how to be good relatives? And that story reminds us that we've been there before. A lot of times, Indigenous peoples are romanticized in ways that assume that we're inherently connected to nature. And yet the story underscores the fact that, well, we're not perfect, we're human, there's not an innate sense of connection to the natural world like a lot of the ecological Indian stereotypes portray, but we learn from those mistakes and we encase them in stories that continue to teach us today and continue to have relevance. So that's why I think it's just such a profound story. That certainly surfaced for a lot of us as we were trying to grapple with our current times.
Ayana Young There is so much in that response. I've had to sit with it for a bit. As we near the end of our conversation, I’d like to ask you about Indigenous Studies scholar Dr. Glen Coulthard’s concept of grounded normativity as it relates to your Knowing the Land project… In your article “Relational Activism and Indigenous Futures,” you remind readers that “Contrary to popular belief, Indigenous people do not have an innate connection with the land. Rather, Indigenous peoples maintain a set of relationships with other-than-human beings that are formed through tribal- and place-specific teachings and traditions.” With the Knowing the Land project being intimately rooted in the knowledges held by community Elders, long-held relations and commitments to place, and Cherokee knowledge systems, can you talk about how the project’s goal of disseminating traditional lifeways relates to the notion of grounded normativity?
And maybe some follow-ups to that as what is the political power of free indigenizing worldview and Cherokee epistemology for future generations?
Dr. Clint Carroll Yeah, I think that the way we are enacting this program that the full name for it is the Cherokee Environmental Leadership Program, and it's a mix of land education as well as looking at some of the knowledge that our resource managers have in the policy realm, the management realm. And, of course, that intersects with some Western scientific approaches. But what undergirds it are, and I think it gets at that notion that Glen writes about grounded normativity, but the Elders came up with a curriculum for this program through a series of workshops that we coordinated at the beginning of the grant project and they ended up with four grounding principles. And those principles are being encased in our language and linguistic concepts, and I'll talk just a little bit about what they are,
The first one is building a strong relationship to land. So in the Cherokee language, ᏂᎦᏓ ᎫᏍᏗ ᏗᏓᏓᏛᏂ (nigada gusdi didadadvhni) is a way of expressing relatedness not just between human beings, but between human beings and the land. The second one is teaching by showing, learn by doing. And so the word for teach in Cherokee ᏍᏊᏲᎲᎦ (sgweyohvga) actually means “show me.” So instead of saying, “teach me” it's “show me how to do it.” And so it's experiential, it's non-coercive, non-hierarchical. And so that's another central facet of the program. The third one, communalism and interdependency, sginogigawesga. If we all work together, we will get somewhere. So understanding that we all have gifts to offer, everyone has a role to play, emphasizing non-hierarchical ways of making decisions and learning in the process. And then the last one, having a good time. So ᎠᎵᎮᎵᏥᏓᏍᏗ (alihelitsidasdi), enjoyment, thinking about what's the single most important thing, and really, the most radical thing that we can be doing is just relating to the land and experiencing joy on the land.
And so those are the principles that really guide the program, and the students and I, we meet remotely because I live here and in Colorado, and we're reading other scholarship that has contributed and really informed the way that the program is designed. And certainly, Glen's work and others around Indigenous land education has been central in how we continue to think about the work that we're doing. And, I'm referring to grounded normativity as it's expressed through the Dechinta Bush University, which Glenn and others run up there in Yellowknife and Northwest Territories in Canada, and so thinking through how after these years of sustaining the program despite the fact that we haven't been able to actively meet together with the Elders, and kind of reflecting back on some of the profound activities that we've been able to do before, thinking through ways of expressing what this means to us collectively.
And I keep coming back to relationality, as I was writing in that piece that you mentioned, and thinking about how does this reference Cherokee ways of understanding what we're doing according to these guiding principles, but also, how can we continue to think in ways that inform our project from a Cherokee perspective? And that kind of linguistic theorizing, if you will, has been really helpful. And you know, one thing that I gravitate toward is understanding relationships in Cherokee and how we express them in the language is never a possessive thing. It's always an action-based way of describing relationships. And so you could even say it's a verb, like thinking about the word for my mother in English. Agitsi ( ᎠᎩᏥ), it actually, if you look at it linguistically, from a Cherokee perspective, it means the one who was mothering me. And so it's more of an action verb that is encased in that word rather than kind of the sense in English of having a possessive in front of that word.
And so, I'm reading and kind of relating that to some of my academic scholarly work and ongoing projects. You know, I just read a piece by Jody Byrd on where she engages with Glen's term grounded normativity, but then proposes something in terms of grounded relationality, that gets at some of the hang-ups around normativity as it intersects with Indigenous Queer Studies, and expressing this in a way that doesn't necessarily reify the normative but is still, in essence, a lot of what Glenn was writing about. So I'm liking that, right now, thinking through grounded relationality. I'm also thinking with the collective of scholars, you know, how to really kind of fully express an Indigenous studies take on political ecology. And so we're thinking through what it would mean to express this in terms of Indigenous political relationality.
So I think that that term really does a lot for me, in understanding this type of work and thinking about that kind of how do we distill, if you want to use that word, how do we take these place-based projects that are grounded in and tribally specific languages and relationships to place and really think about their application broadly, how they travel. And those terms really helped me think about that, as well as other kinds of emphasis on the ethical frameworks behind local place-based knowledge. So traditional ecological knowledge that has profound relevance, like the Origin of Disease and Medicine that I just recounted and discussed. And so that's what keeps me thinking about the broader implications of this work that we're doing, as well as the importance of a continued and sustained focus on the local.
And that's where my passion is. I love working with my people, I love working with Elders and students on the land. And it's highly applied, and it's working toward very locally-specific goals. But I think that's part of the answer too, and I'm a part of a new project that was actually funded by the Canadian government. I'm working with colleagues at the University of Alberta, and it's a $24 million project over the course of six years, I think. And the way that that is structured is that they have designed this grant project to connect through a network, but also ultimately support place-based projects, Indigenous projects, toward biodiversity protection and health. And so I think that for me, helps me kind of think through - okay, yes, absolutely. It's important to think about the broader implications. But at the end of the day, my commitment is to this specific place and specific community. But that can't necessarily be divorced from the broader implications as well.
So that's what I'm getting at in terms of relational activism to that piece that you mentioned, in terms of acknowledging that we have the frontlines activists who are the water protectors and are actively trying to stop the pipeline, we have the advocates at the UN and in the Department of the Interior for the United States who are working within that system. And then we've got these place-based projects. And I see myself situated within that specifically but also trying to speak out broadly to find the connections and understand that this is a relational space that we're all working in.
Ayana Young My goodness, thank you so much, Dr. Carroll. This has been a really beautiful and informative conversation that I've enjoyed being on the other end of so thank you so much for your time and your work and your dedication.
Dr. Clint Carroll It's been my pleasure and really great to talk with you Ayana. Thanks for having me on the show.
Emily Guerra Thank you for listening to this episode of For the Wild Podcast. The music you heard today is by Buffalo Rose, Cold Mountain Child, Kendra Swanson, and Christopher Watkins and The Crack Willows. For the Wild is created by Ayana Young, Allie Constantine, Emily Guerra, Erica Ekrem, and Julia Jackson.