Carter Lou McElroy  For The Wild Podcast is brought to you in part by the Kalliopeia Foundation and listeners like you. Kalliopeia supports projects interweaving spirituality, culture and ecology. We are grateful for their support and the support of grassroots contributions from listeners. To learn more about the Kalliopeia Foundation, visit Kalliopeia.org. To make a donation to For The Wild visit ForTheWild.world/donate or support us through Patreon.

Ayana Young  Hello and welcome to For The Wild Podcast, I’m Ayana Young. Today I’m speaking with Dr. Cutcha Risling Baldy.

Dr. Cutcha Risling Baldy We have to take a moment to kind of think about the ways in which we've not been able to to learn how to imagine futures together beyond resource extraction.

Ayana Young  Dr. Cutcha Risling Baldy is an Associate Professor and Department Chair of Native American Studies at Humboldt State University. She received her Ph.D. in Native American Studies with a Designated Emphasis in Feminist Theory and Research from the University of California, Davis and her M.F.A. in Creative Writing & Literary Research from San Diego State University. She also has her B.A. in Psychology from Stanford University. Her research focuses on California Indians, Indigenous feminisms, social & environmental justice and decolonization. Her first book We Are Dancing For You: Native feminisms and the revitalization of women's coming-of-age ceremonies addresses gender inequality and gender violence within Native communities. Dr. Risling Baldy is Hupa, Yurok and Karuk and an enrolled member of the Hoopa Valley Tribe in Northern California. In 2007, she co-founded the Native Women's Collective, a nonprofit organization that supports the continued revitalization of Native American arts and culture.

Dr. Cutcha Risling Baldy Yeah, thank you so much for inviting me.

Ayana Young  I’d like to start off by talking about the Land Back movement. In the past couple of years we’ve seen a cultural narrative shift around land ownership, settler relations, and stolen land, with more and more people attaching themselves to the language of landback, but it does feel like this shift loses some of its momentum in application, in part, because I think settlers remain overwhelmed, and perhaps unwilling to fully commit to the work of mapping out what land return looks like. Can you speak to the reality of who actually owns the majority of land in this country, individuals or the state? And what are some examples of how landback unfolds under United States’ legal governance?

Dr. Cutcha Risling Baldy I love talking about land back, because I think that it's a movement that sort of inspires what we could do. To me, it's like a really inspirational movement, it kind of says, like, how do we think beyond what we're currently living under, right? Like this settler colonial system, the system of capitalism and exploitation and, and instead think about what the future is going to look like. And I think, if you would have asked people 10 years ago, sort of, how could we even imagine that happening? People would have had a very different answer than now. Because I have seen land return happen in my lifetime, I have been fortunate enough to be, you know, a witness to it, and also to be a part of seeing that happen in my own communities. So I love this, like conversation, like starting this conversation. And I always know that when I do start it, it's very, it can be very kind of scary for people at first, you know, because they've never really been approached with like, “What would it look like if we returned land to Indigenous peoples?” But the more you talk about it, the more it starts to become; “Ooh, how exciting is land return. How exciting is land return and how could that help us to sort of imagine this world to look like next. 

In the United States, like we can talk specifically about the United States because you know, things are so very different, you know, if you're talking about other countries, other spaces, but in the U.S., the primary land ownership is by private landowners. So about 60% of land is owned by private landowners. And then about 30% of land is owned by the federal government. So the federal government is the second largest landholder in the United States and private landowners is anybody that owns land privately, and so that can be made up of, you know, you know, several millions of people really, but the federal government owns 30% of the land that is in the United States. And then the rest is sort of a mixture of state governments and then some tribal governments. Tribal governments own about like 2.5% of the land in the United States. So, you know, a significantly smaller portion. And when you think about land ownership in general, you also sort of, if you do research on it, you kind of start to realize that there's a very large racial disparity in who owns land through private land ownership. And so the five largest landowners in America are all white. And they own more rural land in the United States than all of Black America combined. So if you're looking at things like Black land ownership, the five largest landowners in America own more land than all of the Black ownership of land in the United States. It's generally white Americans who own land. So you have about 98% of land ownership is owned by white Americans. And so you see a great racial disparity, when it is white America to own 90% of U.S. land that is in land ownership. So of the 60% that's owned by private ownership, 98% of that is white Americans versus every other group in the United States. And I think that that's something that when people start to learn about that, they get very surprised that there's such a large racial disparity when it comes to land ownership. 

And it actually becomes like a really interesting conversation, because then you start to see that lends itself to how we understand wealth disparity in the United States as well. It's primarily white families who are significantly wealthier than all other racial and ethnic groups combined. So if you take all ethnic groups, and combine where their wealth is in their families, and you add them all together, it does not meet the same as white families who have generally, a net worth that is much more than all of those families combined. 

And then you also look at how then that lends itself to what land ownership looks like, within your own communities. When you break down land ownership in the United States, what you'll notice is that the eastern part of the United States, kind of blending into what we call now the Midwest, is primarily dotted with federal land ownership, and so you see very sparse areas that are owned federally, because you know, the federal government's the second largest landowner. But when you get to the west and the Southwest, the land of the West, and the Southwest is primarily owned by the federal government. And so what you'll see is that there are some places where the federal government is the largest landholder in the state. On the Midwest and East Coast, that's not usually the case. Usually, it's private landowners that are the primary owners of the land in the state. But on the west coast, it's primarily the federal government. And in California 45%, I think 45% of the state is owned by the federal government. In Nevada, it's like 80% of the state is owned by the federal government. So a lot of this really does have to do pretty significantly with history, like the history of the region and the area. And then also the availability of natural resources and the resource extraction industry. And then the availability of what we now call like, you know, the wilderness or state and national parks and forest land. And you see a kind of big disparity between federal government ownership of land on the west of the United States versus the eastern Midwest.

Ayana Young  I want to mention for listeners one specific example, where the city of Eureka returned the island of Duluwat to the Wiyot, can you share a bit about this example and how this return initiated a new chapter in Wiyot’s living history?

Dr. Cutcha Risling Baldy Yes, I mean, and this is actually particularly important to me, because it's, you know, it's the, it's the place where I live. So I am joining you today from Humboldt County, in what we refer to as like Baduwat, the Baduwat region, which is very near the Mad River, what’s currently called Mckinleyville. But it’s very near what we call Jaroujiji. Or Eureka, California and so this whole region where Humboldt State is, which is where I teach, that's all on Wiyot land. And Wiyot land really spans a large portion of what I know you, you know, we currently call Humboldt County and in the center, the city centers; primarily Eureka, but also Arcadia, Mckinleyville, sort of like the places where many of the people live, are right in the midst of Wiyot territory. And the Wiyot worked for, you know, close to two decades, like over 20 years, on the return of Duluwat Island, which is the center of the world for them. And it's the place where the world came into being and it's really significant to how they celebrate and renew the world each time that they do world renewal ceremonies. 

And in our area, you know, it was pretty well known by us as Native people, even though I don't think it's like standard practice to teach about Duluwat in the way that maybe we grew up learning about it. But it was the site of a really horrific massacre in the 1800s, during the Gold Rush, when we had a massive influx of people to this region, who were really just here to try to get as much gold as possible, and they thought of Native people really as in the way of that. And they didn't really want to set up, you know, like relationships with Native peoples and governance structures. They wanted to get whatever they could from the land from the gold and from the people. So you see these moments of them passing laws to legalize slavery of Native people passing laws, they can legalize militias that would rise up against Native people and commit massacres, and kidnap primarily women and children. And Jack Norton, who wrote a really great book called Genocide in Northwest California. He really talks about how in Humboldt County, it was a marauding horde of people, and he refers to them as a marauding horde and he just says, you know, the violence introduced during this area was in this area, during this period of time was really horrific, and you almost cannot, you can't tell a story that will tell you about just how awful it was. 

And so you're, you're talking about Indigenous peoples having to navigate this period of time, when really everybody is working together through law, through policy, through militias to try to get rid of usm to genocide. I mean, it was an attempted genocide of our people. And then in this region, with the Wiyot they had to navigate just sort of the ever changing policies of the state and county government about where they could and could not be. 

So you're looking at Duluwat, as a place that they thought of as very important, and they were doing a world renewal ceremony in the 1800s. And because of that many of their men would stay off the island, while primarily women, children and elders would be on the island during the ceremony and a group of people came together from, like of Humboldt county citizenry, and they went to the island to massacre everybody there. And they killed primarily women, children and elders. 

One of the things that a historian Tony Platt talks about is that they used very, like, he calls them quiet weapons, things like hatchets and knives, and came in the dead of night, to kill everyone. And it's really, a horrific and sad story about these people who were trying to perform a ceremony that would balance the Earth for everyone and help the Earth for everyone. And then they were attacked in this way. And after the island was emptied out, because of this massacre, you see people coming in and purchasing it, and selling off pieces of it. And it becomes sort of like private property, but also city property. And I think that one thing that I always try to point out to people is like, after that period of time, a lot of people started referring to this island as ‘Indian Island’. And like, colloquially, in this region, especially, they will sometimes call it ‘Indian Island’. And I, I really made a point like with myself, and my students and people that I talked to, to say that I try not to refer to it as Indian Island, although, if you look up different things, many people will talk about it that way. But it was only given that name, after they, you know, attempted this massacre of Wiyot people then they started referring to it as Indian Island, and instead it’s Duluwat, that's the name of the space, you know, that that the Wiyot have known for, you know, for time immemorial, and so Duluwat, I think is a really important name to sort of reclaim and make sure that that's what we call it.

And there're so many beautiful and amazing stories around Duluwat, that what I tell people is, it'd be easy to tell that story as if it was a story of like the end of Wiyot peoples or the tragedy of how we remember them or how we know them. And for a long time, I think most people would say that what they know about the Wiyot is that they experienced this great tragedy, this attempted massacre of all of their peoples on Indian Island. But now the story is very different. 

And I think that that's important for us to remember because, you know, 150 years later the Wiyot returned, and they did a world renewal ceremony there. And they made a point to be able to be in that space. And then they worked for 20 plus years to have the island returned. And it started with their Tribal leader at the time, Cheryl Seidner, just sort of starting to say to people that “I'm gonna get my island back”, like now is the time, it's time for us to get to Duluwat back and people told her, people told all of them I think that that wouldn't be possible that that was like a pipe dream, that that would take so long. And they just kept saying no like, this is what needs to happen. This is what's right. So they just made it happen. And I keep telling people like, you know, you're talking about people who came together and started doing things like bake sales, and selling t-shirts, trying to just get people to donate to them so that they could buy portions of the island that were for sale. And then they started saying out loud to people, we need to get this island back. And what would that look like? And how would that work, and you have the Eureka City Council working with them to make that happen. And yes, it took, you know, over 20 years to make that happen. But from start to finish, what I've learned from speaking with the Wiyot peoples and listening to them tell this story is to them, they were signing up for however long it took to get the island back, they were like it took 20 years, it took 30 years, we weren't going to stop working for the return of this place that is the center of the world, that we need to make the world healthy again, and that we need so that we can carry on the ceremonies that we have. And I think that that type of approach, which says, you know, this is our space, our land, our future. And we're going to work as long as it takes to make these things happen. Because we know that this is what needs to happen so that this whole world can be a better place. That's the story that we should tell about Native people. Sometimes we focus a lot on telling the story of California Indian genocide. And you see like the best selling books about California Indians tend to be about our genocide, but I think the stories of our resurgence and our revitalization, our land returnm our movements, those are the stories that I want people to know about us. And those should be the stories that are the bestsellers about us because we're doing that good work right now.

Ayana Young  Just as we’ve seen a popularization of land acknowledgements in the past couple of years, I’ve also noticed that Traditional Ecological Knowledge has become much more of a buzzword, and I can’t help be reminded of earlier moments in history where settlers were really interested in Indigenous culture as a means to secure their own hobbies, livelihoods, and even culture, but weren’t willing to engage with Indigenous sovereignty. Another example that you’ve written about is the hypocrisy of California implementing controlled burns and acknowledging Indigenous practices as a way to “save” the state, without addressing the California tribes still don’t have access to their land. It would appear that settlers just want to be able to import the ideas and practices that we think will give us a shot at life on this Earth, but we want to do so without having to learn about rematriration. Can you speak to the reality that you can’t uproot Indigenous sovereignty as something that exists siloed from Traditional Ecological Knowledge? 

Dr. Cutcha Risling Baldy Sure, I mean, I think that, um, we're always talking about like, what are we going to do now? Right, like, what is it going to look like as we start to really face what's happening with climate change? What's happening with like, environmental justice issues? What's happening with racial justice issues? What are we going to do? Like, what do the solutions look like? And I think that, for far too long, we've been creating solutions, especially to these larger problems of like, what do we do with climate change, without Indigenous knowledges and have been taking it for granted that Indigenous knowledge is going to be the response that we need to have. I've been reading articles talking about how like, you know, Indigenous knowledge is not a backup plan anymore, they are the plan. And the things that we've been fighting for and maintaining and pursuing for the last 50 years, really are the ways that need to happen in order to move forward. And what I think that also means is that we as Indigenous nations need to be centered in how we enact that knowledge and what that looks like, because it can't happen in a vacuum, in a silo, it is it's like a totalizing experience of what this space what the space is supposed to look like. 

So if you talk about cultural burning, for instance, some of the people that have the most intimate knowledge of the forest and the ways in which they're supposed to be managed, especially in our region, also have no access to forest land, because even though they are tribal nations recognized by the United States, and the land in which they now have, it doesn't include forest land. So when they want to go and gather or interact with or even propose cultural burning, they have to navigate several federal government agencies to make that happen. And a lot of the times that's based on a lot of education, because you still have people who don't know that, like cultural burning is one of the only things I think that's really going to address this issue of like, why are forest fires burned so hot, or why they're so damaging, or why it is that they pop up every couple years, in a way that really sort of like, does destroys rather than protects like the region that they're in. And you start to see people saying, well, what's the answer to this and people are like, it's cultural burning, if we had been burning consistently, we would not be having the same problems. And what you're seeing is that the policies that were set forth by the federal government that primarily focused on fire suppression, in order to maintain and really that was about like capitalism and profit, because it's really focused on how do we make more trees or more things that we could use, so that we could take it out of the area, and we can sell it. But it's also really based on this idea that somehow this is supposed to be wilderness, and what people were seeing was like, untouched land. 

And wilderness is a concept that really was used to erase Native people from lands. And most of the wilderness that we know today, especially in California, is Native lands where Native people were living when that “wilderness” was created. So when they became national parks, or state parks, Native people were actually living there. And so anything that you're thinking about when you think about wilderness, what you're actually thinking about is Native lands that they tended to that they took care of, and much of that was done with cultural burning. 

So when people start talking about bringing cultural burning back, what they don't tend to acknowledge is, yes, inviting Indigenous peoples from that area to come in and tell you and inform you and help you to do that cultural burning is really necessary. But it's also really insulting because you're acting as if that land is not their land that they have knowledge of. And you're being okay with the fact that they're being kept out of it, legally, and often physically. And often, like spiritually, and socially, they can't connect with that forest land in the same way because it belongs, you know, to the National Park Service or to the State Park Service, because it's part of wilderness areas are protected in some way by the federal government or even the state government laws. 

And so I'm thinking in particular in our area about like the Karuk Tribe, they are a Tribe who was significantly impacted by the Gold Rush, the horrific things happened in that area to remove them from their lands, and push them into various areas. And then they made a treaty with the federal government with the United States at a point in the 1800s, when they were making treaties in California. And because of pushback from the citizenry of California, those treaties were never ratified. And so suddenly, you go from tribal nations in California being guaranteed certain lands that they negotiated, that they made sure they would have until the end of time, that they agreed to, to maintain a relationship of nation to nationhood with the United States. And these treaties were unratified, and then they were put under an injunction of secrecy so that nobody knew about it, and then the Native people of California were never informed of this. And so what you suddenly see is like just pandemonium and chaos, because of what happened with these treaties, which are still in existence, you can actually go the Smithsonian, the National Museum of American Indians did an exhibit on the treaties, a couple years back and actually brought them out from you know, from where they had been kept in storage. So you can see that these were real documents signed by Native people and the federal government of the United States. 

And so what they have now are two areas of land that they live on that they are a part of, but they don't have like a large like reservation, and they don't have any forest land in their control, yet, they still continue to outreach and work so closely with forest managers in the forest area. And so they make requests about cultural burning, they make requests constantly about saying, we want to take care of this area, and there's so many roadblocks to making that happen. And a lot of people come at them through suspicion of like, “Why do you want to be in charge of this? What does this mean?” Or like, how do we make this happen? And so to me, it's like, people want the benefits. They want the knowledge, they want to be able to invite Indigenous peoples in, “Come here and give, and we will extract from you this knowledge of what to do in this area so that we can keep it healthy and safe.” But start talking to them about how like, well then look at the Karuk who, who don't have the same type of access to land and don't have the same type of ownership of land. How are you working to uphold their sovereignty, self determination? And how are you working to push back and say, “They need to be the ones who also have access to, who own this area.” And if you're not working in partnership in that way, then what you're really doing is kind of saying that you're okay with this unequal treatment of tribal peoples, where they are really important to how we're going to build our futures in a way that we can all breathe, that we can all like not have periods of time where the air is so thick with smoke, that we can't even go outside so that we can protect like our future like peoples and families and areas, even our water supply and resources because fire is really, you know, attached to water, and you're okay with letting them do all of that, but the idea of having a conversation about what that means for their sovereignty and what that means for their own land ownership isn't okay? Then to me, that's such an unequal relationship, that it, it behooves people pointing out, like, this is not okay. Like, we also have to uphold what they need, if we're going to ask them for that type of work, and they're happy to do it. But I will say that, you know, there is always a conversation about how hard it is for them to access the lands to do the things that they want, and how much pushback they constantly get, which they wouldn't get if they were the owners of that land in the first place.

Ayana Young  Yeah, I see this a lot in my, on the ground work, and it's so complex. And yeah, it's just another form of extraction, and really manipulation, as well. I think about California’s gold-rush, Canada’s current gold-rush, and all the extractive industries that continue to plunder the earth to uphold a violent lifestyle and I do wonder - what will it take for us to recognize that California’s gold rush was a precautionary tale, and despite living amongst the consequences everyday, we continue to replicate the same abuses. What is required to break this psychosis?

Dr. Cutcha Risling Baldy Well, first, I would say land return. I actually think physically, when people start to see land being returned, it kind of changes their approach to tribal nations, when they're starting to go like, “Oh, you guys could actually have land returned.” And then you know, it could work in a very different way, how we understand, like, the placement of land, or the idea of what land is what in this region. So I do think working toward land return to Indigenous peoples is really important. Because it demonstrates for people sort of the reality of how physically, ownership can change or even like the physicality of like, where you go to do certain industry, or where you where you can sort of have certain lands under, like, that are open for certain things or not. So I would say land return, but that's my answer to everything. Like, everybody's asking me like, what's the answer to this, and I always say, land return, just give it back. And then we'll have totally different conversations after that, I promise.

But the other thing I'll say is, we have to take a moment to kind of think about the ways in which we've not been able to, to learn how to imagine futures together beyond resource extraction. And, you know, we view the ways in which we do things in this world as kind of inevitable, and then also, that it's not possible to do something else. And all the time, people will say to me, like, that's a really good dream that you have, right? Where I'm like, oh, someday, we won't actually need any fossil fuels. And then they're like, that's a really good dream you have, but that's impossible. That's impossible. But what I tell people now is like, you know, I think we have to stop thinking about things as impossible. What we have to do is say out loud what we want the world to be. In Indigenous contexts, we say, nothing can become until you speak it into being and you when you first have to tell a story about it. You have to open up people's imaginations to what that could look like.

I've been doing a lot of really good research and talks where you hear you hear from people that like, there was a speaker who I heard one time talking about how it's easier for people to imagine what they're gonna do in a zombie apocalypse. They'll have like plans and they'll be like, when the zombies come, I'll do this, right? They can do that. But they can't imagine a world post capitalism. And they can't imagine a world like post settler colonialism. And they can't imagine a world post patriarchy because we don't get a lot of things like books or movies or things that are like this is what the world looks like once we know once we've taken apart settler colonialism and we started to look at what this could look like, when we're not building pipelines, right? When we're not extracting resources when the dams come down, like we, we have a hard time thinking about that post-. But we have to start to be the people that say out loud when the dams come down, after the dams come down, because we have to know it's possible. 

And, and the thing I know, in my life right now, is, when people, when the Wiyot went to the city, and they were like, “We're gonna get this island back however long it takes”. When they started talking to people about it, people kept telling him, it was impossible. And then it happened. And I always say to people, I have seen an impossible thing happen in my lifetime. So I've seen the impossible become possible in my own lifetime. So I know that it starts with being open with yourself to like, have that conversation and to say out loud, the things that you want to see happen. 

And so I feel like that's my job lately as I go, and I'll do talks, and I'll stand up in front of rooms. And I'll be like, give all the land back, and all the baskets and all the remains and all that, because that, to me, is where we're going with this. And then people will be like, “Oh, that's impossible.” And I was like, “Well, I'm gonna keep saying it.” Because I feel like at a point, it starts to become more possible, because we're just speaking it out loud. And I see that as like a movement toward allowing us the space to have conversations about what that could look like, because all the times I start talking about land return, for instance, people want all the answers about how that's going to look. So they'll start asking me real, kind of nitty gritty questions about like, well, how's that gonna work on a functional level of property taxes within city states and counties. And I just, I just started to laugh. And I'm like, you know, that's gonna take some work to do. You're right. But let's start by giving the land back. And then we can answer all those questions and see how it works. Like I, I kind of want to tell people it doesn't have to be all perfect before you make something happen, what you have to start doing is talking about it. And then you figure out how to make that happen. And anybody that's returned land, which we've done a report, which shows what land return looks like throughout California, it looks different foeverybody. Because I think that's part of the imaginatory process. 

And I do think that in Native American Studies, especially we're doing so much work to retell the stories. We call it re-righting history, so that people can start to see that imaginatively in history, there's always been a different view that shows you that there was something else happening and going on, and you need to see it, you need to know that story. So that you can imagine something different now, I think of the work of my colleague, Caitlin Reed, and she's really doing amazing research on how she's understanding the current movement and what they call the ‘green rush’ in Humboldt County with the cannabis industry. And she's really looking at the fact that it's repetitive of the Gold Rush in terms of the same types of focus on resource extraction, who's actually making money, sort of like what happens to the land in this region? And the question becomes, when will we learn our lesson? And one thing that I told her when she was interviewing me as part of that research is like, we've been rushing like Humboldt County has been rushing since the very beginning. Like we rushed, like they rushed the goal, trying to think that was going to be the thing, they rushed minerals, they rushed in the timber industry, they rushed in the fishing industry, it's never been good for the region, and there has to be something else. And through all of that, it was always Indigenous people saying, This is not the answer to how you're supposed to live here. Like this is not the answer to how we're supposed to be in this space. And they and we have maintained our ceremonies, our connections to land our histories, our knowledges, our sciences and we keep doing it, knowing that this is going to be the answer to how we're going to move forward. And I think we've seen that world. I think we've dreamed of that world for 1000s of years. So I don't think we're going to stop until we can chip away and see how we can make that happen.

Ayana Young  You write: “My contention is that through this in-depth analysis of cultural revitalization as decolonizing praxis we see how Native nations are able to challenge settler colonialism through Native feminisms and build revitalization movements that not only imagine decolonized alternatives but also acknowledge that these alternatives did, have always, and will always exist.” And, that last sentence I think really is saying that cultural revitalization is anti-apocalyptic, and revitalization is done in collaboration with the past, present, and future all at once, always. Can you speak a bit about what cultural revitalization has taught you about living well post-apocalypse?

Dr. Cutcha Risling Baldy I mean, I think it's taught me a couple of things. One is that the answers that we're seeking can be found within our own cultural teachings and cultural knowledge. I think we, we were some of the best philosophers, and many of our oldest stories are providing for us guidance to be able to build futures and saying, like, we're gonna be here for you, in multiple and various ways. And so here's a story to kind of help guide you through that. And I think it teaches us that like, the power of those things, so that we don't feel like we're starting brand new, but acknowledging that like, this is a very old knowledge that has been time tested, and has managed to be passed through generations after generations. So there's something very powerful about that, but that it is also so adaptable and challenging to our current situation. 

I look to the old stories a lot. And I'll say, you know, let's start with our language. Let's start with our stories to see what's the guidance that's supposed to be provided to us about how we live in this world. And I think it helps us so that we don't feel like we're making it up brand new, but that it's coming from a base of knowledge that we've carried with us. I also think when you're talking about, like, post-apocalypse, there's something very powerful about us being able to do this revitalization now, when you think about the effort, and energy that went into the peoples who were living through the apocalypse, right, who were living through the genocide, to make sure that we would have this, whether that was like a person saying, “You know, I'm going through this, but I have a song, I'm gonna pass that song on” or “I know, one part of it, you know, or I'll carry these words forward”, whether that was people saying, “I'm going to sit with this anthropologist, or this ethnographer, and I'm going to tell them everything I know about the women’s ceremony”, those are moments where you start to see that what we're doing now is such an, it's such an important honoring, of the effort and strength that it took for them to be able to do that. And also, I think, a demonstration, that they're envisioning, that they're saying out loud, someday, someone's going to do this dance again and we need them to have this information, made it happen. Like they had to start by saying that it was possible that someday somebody would do this again, and they said it, and they brought it into being, because then now we're doing it. So they were not wrong and they were making sure that you know, people could make it possible by saying aloud someday it would happen. And when I would interview the women who were involved in this revitalization, a lot of them talked about how like, you know, every generation, somebody shared something, somebody did a demonstration, somebody sang a song, somebody did something. And they just kept saying, someday, somebody's gonna do this dance again. Someday, we're gonna do it again. So now I'm going to share this part. They just said it out loud. And according to the medicine woman I interviewed, she talked about how when they finally were open to it, and they said, okay, we want to do it, once they said, “We want to do it”, she said, all we had to do was scratch the surface. We just had to say we wanted it. And then so many things came to us. Elders started to remember things that they had forgotten, people started to have dreams that reminded them of something that they might not have remembered otherwise, songs came to people. 

So I think that those are the things that people should understand. It's like, it was slightly bigger than us. But I think it also showed that those efforts and moments of what happens in time of great upheaval, where you're like, I'm going to believe that there's a better future after this, I'm going to believe that there's a there's going to be a moment of resurgence, and revitalization. That it mattered because that's what helped to make it possible for us to be able to do it because they never stopped bringing it up. They never stopped seeing it. They never stopped speaking about it. They never stopped. They never pretended like it was gone forever. To them it was always a part of their cultural imagination. It was waiting for the right time for it to happen again. And I think that that's a really beautiful thing for us to be a part of now because when I start talking about what the future could look like, and I'm saying let's speak into being the things we want, I'm telling you, for my elders and ancestors, I am the living being of the things that they wanted, like we are doing the things that they spoke into being now. So what are we going to speak into being and make happen in the future?

Ayana Young  You co-authored an article titled “Indigenous peoples and the politics of water” with Melanie Yazzie, and you write: “So,  too,  do  we  both  maintain Indigenous  feminist  integrity  towards  the love  of all  good  relatives  of  the  earth  and  the  cosmos who caretake the future. In closing, we leave you, our new relative, with this: Indigenous people are good at making relatives. It’s what we do; it’s who we are. Our relatives are our source of strength. We are not afraid when we are surrounded by relatives. We will have no future without relatives. We will have no future if we are bad relatives. To be a water protector is to be a good relative. To be a land defender is to be a good relative. To struggle together is to be a good relative. And to be a good relative is to be an Indigenous feminist.” And so I’d like to ask you about Indigenous feminism in terms of emboldening kinship and respect, for many folks, the concept of feminism in their communities has been appropriated, commodified, and hallowed out - which has caused a lot of injury. How has Indigenous Feminism in Native communities remained devoted to respect and relationality, while actually chipping away at the gender binary, not solidifying it? 

Dr. Cutcha Risling Baldy I think that what Indigenous feminism is really important and is really building off of and a part of, a lot of women of color feminisms, you know, like you're talking about Black feminism, you're talking about Asian feminism, you're talking about the feminism's that are sort of pushing back against a feminism that would sort of uphold white supremacy. And I think it's really important for me to point out to people, people will sometimes give the label white feminism and they'll say like, “You know what I'm really not on board with is white feminism”. And I always say like, any feminism that upholds white supremacy, or that upholds like racial injustice, or that in any way sort of, doesn't center intersectionality doesn't center like the voices of the least marginalized is just not feminism. So I wouldn't even call that feminism at all because feminism is about looking at how we understand what equality actually is. 

And for us, I think doing this work, we're really talking about how we uplift and center and push forward the most marginalized voices so that we understand that that you know, gender equity and equality is what we're talking about and that we have experienced that. I think what Indigenous feminism's adds to this conversation is that, that in the time before colonization, you are talking about cultures that were truly enacting, theorizing, and living, Indigenous feminism’s that we're living in a way that said, gender equity is about the ability of people to be able to live in a space where they are treated in a way that upholds dignity, respect and relationship and whether that manifests itself as various genders or manifests itself as various gender identities, that doesn't that doesn't play into how we understand what relationality is, and the relationship that we exist in with each other. 

And we know that time. We have stories about it, we talk about it, we see it enacted through our ceremonial practices. So we know that that can exist. So for anybody to come in and say, a society that exists where all genders are equal is a utopia, a utopian vision that could never possibly be, because a lot of the times we get told, through our own, like ways in which we learn about history, or the ways in which we learn about like, politics or culture or society, what they call like social science, right? People sort of take for granted, they kind of say, like, patriarchy is natural, and sort of like a patriarchal role of how we understand the world is the natural way of being. And then you see these kinds of moments throughout, even like the ways in which we understand science or the animal kingdom or whatever, when people are like, see, we can normalize this idea of like, patriarchy and inequality of genders through all these ways that we view the world. 

But Indigenous feminism reminds you that actually, when you are in relationship with the world, through an Indigenous lens, you are in that relationship in a way that values, the equity, of gender, and all beings, and that it's a very different way of approaching, it's not extractive, it's not exploitive, and it really values people, and, and demonstrates that when we exist in relationship, we make very different decisions. And it also then says there is a way that this can exist, because we have lived it, we have seen it, it has, it was the way that many of our cultures were organized. 

And then you see then what happens with the change with gender violence with sort of the introduction of like, the ways in which people approach gender, specifically, the attempted genocide. I mean, this is actually really important work that's been done by Deborah Miranda, here in California, where she talks about the attempted specific targeting for a genocide of people of different genders. So people who sort of lived in, who are a part of our communities, who, you know, don't fit the male, female binary of gender, were really targeted for genocide, especially in the Spanish mission system. And so you start to see that all coming in at the same time. 

And so now we're intervening again, because it's really hard to hear from people when you start talking about this, and they go, “Well, that's a utopic vision of society.” And I'll say, you know, prior to colonization, many of the work that's being done by Indigenous feminists show that there are, there are many Indigenous cultures that did not have rape, rape is not something that existed, it doesn't mean that we didn't have like any instances ever, in the 10,000 years minimum history that we have. It means that it was so rare, that people can't just be like, “Oh, yeah, it happened all the time,” or even like “It happened a lot, even I can name a time when it happened”, because it was so rare. And we're willing to say that because of the work that we do. And then people will say, “That's not possible. That's not the way it works.” And they won't believe it because we can't even imagine beyond this world of patriarchy, and how it kind of like holds us, holds on to how we understand things. And I think Indigenous feminism's intervenes on that, and says, “There was a time where that was, there can be that time again.” What that means is that we have to build true and better relationships with how we, how we all understand each other. And we have to reject, we have to flat out reject that patriarchy, heterosexism, gender binary, that says these things are natural and normal, we have to flat out say, that is not the way that a society is supposed to be structured. 

And I think that work has to be done, not just by us, not just by people who are in, you know, positions where they're teaching people about it, it needs to be done by everybody. And I'm not saying that our cultures are perfect all the time. I think what we also need to acknowledge as Indigenous peoples is which we, when we talk to each other we have a lot of discussions about this, you know, your talking about a very long period of history, and of course during that time, we made mistakes, we did some things and we didn’t like the way it turned out for the land, or for the people, or for the fish, or for other people. Or we might have had a policy, or we might have had a way that we did something and then we realized it was hurting a certain group of people. Of course that happened. But our point is, we always came from it from a place of Indigenous feminism from a place of looking at what true equity and equality looks like. And we said what do we do about this? How do we fix this and we had systems in place to make sure that when we understood the hurt that came within the relationship that we had with people, places, animals, the land, that then we made different decisions because it was based on that type. relationship. And I think it gives us a way to see forward from what we're experiencing right now.

Ayana Young  I should preface that you and I are recording on November 4th, the day after the election - and I want to talk about the parallels between Andrew Jackson and Donald Trump, that you’ve continuously called out over the past 4 years on your blog. And in one post you write “We act like all of these things couldn't happen so that they continue to happen. It becomes hard for us to imagine a world where our President would actually round people up and kill them all, illegally, even though the Supreme Court told them not to - but it already happened. It is hard for us to imagine that our President would make a plan to invade one of our states and not make efforts to avoid having to go to war with their own people - but it already happened. We can barely imagine that one of our President's would be beholden to propaganda news and get his facts and information from a propaganda news site and not from informed people in government positions - but it already happened.” And yeah, I mean, the question here is open - but it definitely recognizes that Andrew Jackson and Donald Trump are cut from the exact same cloth, like eerily so, and I wonder if you think it will ever be possible to break this cycle under settler colonial governance?

Dr. Cutcha Risling Baldy I mean you know, that's a really good question, I will say. So the blog itself, it's always very pithy, it's always very, like, let me just throw this information out there. But I will tell you, when I write in there that I'm like, 30-60% sure that Donald Trump is actually just Andrew Jackson. What I mean to say is, if someday, Donald Trump takes his wig off and starts saying like, “I'm Andrew Jackson and I've been zombified.” Like, I am not surprised, and the whole rest of the world will have to be like, “She was right.” And I will be like, “I was right”. Because it is, it's not just eerily similar, it's almost like a weird playbook and a repetition of the wording, the sort of ways in which he talks about things that, that you can almost, you almost kind of feel like he's in some ways, I mean, I guess that's kind of the standard of somebody who's like from television right, like somebody who's been in the entertainment industry, but he's like pulling the greatest hits the moments, and sort of being like, this is my rhetoric so that people can kind of identify with me in a way because it's so eerily similar. Even just the way that the like, who he was running against when he was running against Hillary Clinton, even just the ways in which I mean, he, he venerates Jackson, a lot. Like when he first moved into the White House, he put up a giant portrait of Andrew Jackson, so that when you are looking and when they take pictures of him sitting at the oval office desk, Andrew Jackson is right behind him, like looking over his desk, like lording over him. And then one of the first things he did when he became president was he went to visit Andrew Jackson's grave. Which I felt like he was trolling me. But I think that what it has kind of highlighted for me, because when you start to put that information out there, people go, “Well, I knew Andrew Jackson was bad.” Right, because they will often learn about things like the Trail of Tears, but they don't quite understand what that means. It means for me that we should not be surprised when a system that was created to uphold settler colonialism, and, you know, white supremacy and slavery fails us, we shouldn't be surprised. We should be annoyed and disturbed and angry about it, because it didn't need to be that way. But we shouldn't be surprised when the system is working the way it's supposed to work.

And I think that there are really important moments to understand because we tend to sort of look at history as like, look at those people back there. We would never make that same mistake today. And look at those people back there. Because we keep like, we've been taught that everybody's always getting smarter and better at things. And so somehow that means we're not going to make the same mistakes or we're not going to make mistakes like that. But really, we are those people, we are the same people. And so I use this example sometimes with people where, where I say 150 years ago, you have people coming into California, and they're like I really want gold. So what I'm going to do because I want to get all the gold, is I'm gonna pour mercury into the water and you know, somebody was like, I don't think it's a good idea to put mercury in the water, like what's going to happen, you know, like 150 years from now that could really affect people for all that time. And they're like, don't worry about it. It's like so far away, I'm pouring mercury in the water, it's gonna give me more gold. But we are the people 150 years from then. So we're like, hey, that wasn't a good idea that we really shouldn't be shouldn't important mercury in the water, because now we have a bunch of water that we can't fish for us. I mean, we like everybody in that part of California. So when we're thinking about our decision making process, we need to realize like when we make decisions and go, and we can take all the oil out of the ground right now, if we can build this thing here, because like, whatever, it's only going to matter. 150 years from now, it's really not that far away. It's like, like, that's us, that's like us in the future. So we have to kind of start thinking about ourselves is like connected generation to generation. 

And with Andrew Jackson, me, I have a personal hope that at some point, when someone mentions Andrew Jackson, everybody just rolls their eyes. And it's just like, yeah, that guy was not a good decision maker. And also, we need to be very clear about what we can do to prevent that from happening again, because there are still laws on the books that allow that to happen. So that the law that was passed to that so that he can invade some states because he was mad at them, they wouldn't participate in these tariffs, that doesn't get taken off the books, right. So we have some work to do, we want to make sure that, like, we're not repeating the same things. And then we have to remind ourselves, like we're in the midst of it. We're the ones that need to be the loudest, and we have all the methods we like, we have all the ability to be the loudest about what's happening. So like, we should speak up, and we should not sort of say, “Oh, this is just like, you know, acceptable and happening right now.” We need to speak up all the time, because we hold people responsible from history, and we're like, why didn't they speak up? Why didn't they fight? But we're in the midst of history right now. How are we speaking up? How are we fighting? How are we pushing back? 

And I will say there was one other thing that happened with Donald Trump that just like, I actively think he's like, trying to, he's really trying to find a way to tell us that he is Andrew Jackson. Sometimes I think he like maybe, like, did some kind of weird, you know, like Illuminati thing. And he, like, took in the essence of Andrew Jackson or whatever. But one of the things he did like, I guess when he met with Justin Trudeau, when Justin Trudeau who was like, you know, the Prime Minister of Canada came down to visit and he was like, they were meeting, he said something to him that was like, “Oh, nice to meet you. But we don't really like you, do we, because of the war. We don't like you very much.” And Justin Trudeau said that he was just like, what are you talking about? And he goes, are you talking about the war of 1812? Like, is that what you're talking about with me right now. And everybody thought it was like a haha funny moment. But uh, you know, who was in the war of 1812? Andrew Jackson. So I was just like, see this man, he's got some type of tie to this idea of like, to him that's like the moment of American history that we're just like, plowing through and, you know, doing whatever we want, passing laws and taking control. And because we because we have continued to, to venerate Jackson, instead of making him the laughingstock that he should be, we're now answering for that today. If we would have, if we would have laughed at Jackson the way we should have, if we would have said that that was an aberration and also completely unacceptable, maybe it would have been different. But we turned around and made him into some kind of like folk hero president. And now what we're seeing is that people venerate him in a way that says it's a good thing that he tried to, you know, really destroy everything that would have like, uplifted what was happening at the time with like, the people on the ground. 

But I think, I mean, I think when you're in Indigenous Studies, and when you're from like, spaces where you're really thinking about, like with Native interventions and philosophies, what you start to realize is like, the whole system from the beginning was kind of set up, so that it could uphold itself and white supremacy. And we've been navigating it and dealing with it, but it's never, it's never going to be a system that truly, that truly empowers our country to become, I think the vision of what it could have been had we had the right kinds of interventions at the beginning. So maybe what we can do now is dismantle and disrupt and then decolonize and then reimagine what it's supposed to look like.

Ayana Young  Well Cutcha, thank you so much for joining me today and before we come to a close I’d just like to invite you to share any closing sentiments you want to share with listeners or ways to support your work or the Native Women’s Collective

Dr. Cutcha Risling Baldy I always encourage people to like, follow me on Twitter, and then follow everybody I follow on Twitter. And uplift Indigenous voices, think about how you can have Indigenous voices be at the center of the things that you're talking about. Or you can invite Indigenous peoples to tell those stories. 

The work I do at the Native Women's Collective is on the revitalization of Native arts and cultures. And we're very clear about how we work in Native communities to empower people to be able to reconnect and, and have a resurgence of like our cultures and the things that we do. And I think that it's a pretty powerful way of supporting especially young people, as we work toward what decolonized futures look like. 

So if people want to look us up for it, nativewomenscollective.org, we have a special project that's going on with my book right now where you can buy a copy of the book through our site and then if you donate the amount of money it takes we will take that donation and use it to purchase a book and send it to, we send it to rehabilitation centers, tribal libraries, and women and men's prisons in California. So we're starting with California, but we want to get the book to places where people might normally not get a copy of it and really sending it to the various places where people especially like with the women's, the men's prisons, like where people are incarcerated, because we want them to have the opportunity to read this story about community and sort of the empowerment that's happening. And often they don't get, you know, books in their library. So we will donate a copy of the book to the various places that we have on our list. If people want to donate there. It's one project that we're doing to try to get the book out there. And then we have several other projects that we're doing, which you can learn more about, but it's really about connecting with community and making sure that our community is cared for, especially in times like this where we can find ways to reconnect with our culture so that we can move forward in really good ways.

Francesca Glaspell Thank you for listening to For The Wild Podcast. The music you heard today was by Aisha Badru, Holy River, and Theresa Anderson. For The Wild is created by Ayana Young, Erica Ekrem, Francesca Glaspell, and Melanie Younger.