Transcript: LIL MILAGRO HENRIQUEZ-CORNEJO on Climate Resilience Rooted in Ancestry /249
Ayana Young For The Wild is brought to you in part by the Kalliopeia Foundation who support reconnecting ecology, culture and spirituality. We are grateful for their continued support and the support of grassroots contributions from listeners like you. Learn more at Kalliopeia.org. To make a donation, visit ForTheWild.world/donate, or find us on Patreon. If you’d like to support us in other ways, consider sharing our episodes through social media or leaving us a review wherever you listen to the podcast.
Hello and welcome to For The Wild Podcast, I’m Ayana Young. Today I’m speaking with Lil Milagro Henriquez.
Lil Milagro Henriquez-Cornejo Be prepared to walk incredibly humbly and gently because we're all trying to figure it out together.
Ayana Young Lil Milagro Henriquez is the founder and Executive Director of Mycelium Youth Network, an organization dedicated to preparing and empowering young people of color for climate change. Lil Milagro is a veteran of social justice organizing with over 18+ years of experience working on a myriad of issues, including access to higher education for low-income people and communities of color, food sovereignty, environmental racism, union democracy, and labor organizing, among others. In 2017, she founded Mycelium Youth Network. She is a current recipient of the Women’s Earth Alliance fellowship
Well, Lil, thank you so much for joining us on For The Wild Podcast. I'm really looking forward to diving deep with you today.
Lil Milagro Henriquez-Cornejo Sounds great. Thank you so much for allowing me to be here with you.
Ayana Young Thank you. So, you know, we've been warned that in order to limit global temperatures from exceeding a 1.5°C increase, we need to cut global emissions by 45% in the next 10 years. However, recent reports indicate that if our current global pledges were enacted, we’d only reduce our emissions by 1%, and so I think it should be pretty obvious by now that ourselves, and future generations, are going to live through what some might define as an ongoing climate emergency. So, I want to begin our conversation by recognizing that we really need to focus our energy into thinking about how we can be healthy amidst unhealthy, or unusual circumstances, rather than spending all our energy on thinking about how to “stop” climate change-related disasters. As an entry point into your work with Mycelium Youth Network, I wonder if you can talk about the importance of a new paradigm of education, coping mechanisms, and survival skills in context to climate change-related adversities?
Lil Milagro Henriquez-Cornejo That's right, thank you for that question. It's something that consistently keeps me up at night and really drives the work of Mycelium Youth Network. And for me, it is a fundamental question about how do we rethink what we are doing in education, and rethink the point of education in many ways. And a lot of times, what happens is, or what is currently happening, our business as usual model tells us that the point of education is to get a good job, to make lots of money, to you know, achieve the American dream in many ways, and we teach young people as if that is both where we should be going, and as if that should be the model, and as if the world is not going to change, and everything that you just highlighted in there - and you know the history of climate change and what's coming, it's becoming really well documented. And Mycelium Youth Network starts from the idea that we need to rethink the point of education. The point of education should not just be how do we get a good job? How do we make lots of money? How do we, “make it” as individuals, but how do we prepare young people for the world that they are already aging into?
We know what is coming, climate scientists have been telling us here are all of the points that we are hitting already. And the idea that the world is going to stay the same is really false and I think that we need to be able as adults to have the courage to start shifting the education and our educational model to support young people in normalizing what we know is coming and then preparing for it accordingly. And I think young people are already sensing the ways in which the education that they are receiving is not up to the task of the world that they're living in. And I think that the climate marches that have come out recently are strong indicators that young people are seeing past the hypocrisy of, you know, studying to get a good job, to go to college, to do all of these things when the world itself is falling apart. And so I think that as adults, we need to be able to have the courage and the bravery to say if we know what is coming is coming, qhat does that mean for young people from like kindergarten in terms of social-emotional development, in terms of science, technology, engineering, and arts and math skills, in terms of ancestral knowledge, kindergarten through 12th grade, and start shifting what we are teaching young people, and how we are teaching them so that they can actually have a chance of a better future, rather than what we see now, which is only - there's a great Washington Post article that was talking about that only 29% of young people feel optimistic about the future, and if that is not, in and of itself, a reason to start shifting the way that we're thinking about education I don't know what is.
Ayana Young Yeah, I hear you and I've seen so many memes on social media where young people, and honestly, even millennials are like, what the hell, you know, what are we inheriting, and why are the older generations not paying attention to this and thinking about our future, so I, so respect what you're doing and appreciated that introduction. And I’ve heard you share the importance of dismantling the narrative that frontline communities, which are also often BIPOC communities, need “saving”, and so often these narrative also pull income into the equation, while completely ignoring the wealth of wisdom that derives from BIPOC communities when it comes to tending the land, navigating failing systems, etc. With this in mind, I’d like to ask you how something like Mycelium Youth Network is working to change this narrative, while also developing climate resilience that is rooted in ancestral traditional practices and a Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics curriculum.
Lil Milagro Henriquez-Cornejo Yes, thank you for that question. It's something that we try to do at two different levels and I think that it is necessary to do it at two different levels to really be successful. And the first level that we think about it is, as an organizational structure, how are we orienting ourselves with our staffing, with our board of directors, with our advisory board, with the people we bring in as partners, like how are we understanding the ways in which we're, you know, in many ways, saving ourselves, right? And Mycelium Youth Network is a predominantly queer, all BIPOC staff, you know, Black, Indigenous, and other people of color staff. And our board is predominantly POC, our board of advisors is proudly POC, and I think that we think fundamentally about what does that mean on a daily basis in terms of how we even do the work, and how we are positioning ourselves in places of power, right, and our organization to be able to have a voice in what we are doing and how we are doing it? And how are we also thinking about things from a labor perspective, from a queer perspective, from an anti-ableism perspective, and so we're really trying to think into how we're also decolonizing ourselves as an organization. I think that that's fundamental because I don't want that to get lost in o the work that we do, because I think in order to do the work that we do, we need to first be able to have a staff that feels empowered, that feels like their voices matter, that we're bringing in voices that are traditionally considered marginalized, but which are actually incredible sources of power and knowledge, to be able to make the decisions in their individual lives as workers at Mycelium.
And for programmatically what that has looked like, has been us thinking deeply into our own ancestral traditions and practices, and recognizing that pre-colonization, so many of our communities, so many of our peoples, for generations and generations have been able to live in sustainable regenerative relationship with the land and not even just live in a relationship with the lands but live in ecosystem, live in community, right and so in sharing stories about plant relatives, about animal relatives, being able to understand the nature of our relationship to a much larger ecosystem, and it has been through the process of colonization that has really stripped so much of that knowledge from us and you know, taking a place like where my family is from which is Cuscatlan, El Salvador, I identify as a detribalized person of Nahuatl-Pipil descent, and looking at how the cities started springing up and so people in the farms and small villages started getting divorced and how people left their land in order to be able to move to the cities because they weren't able to survive otherwise.
So what we do is we say, like, what is the knowledge that we have lost through the process of colonization that our ancestors used to hold very, very close and dear to them? And how do we start recapturing some of that knowledge? How do we start recapturing the idea of what it means to live in sustainable relationship, to be able to know the songs and the stories of the birds around us, for example, or our plant relative? And how do we infuse that knowledge and a different way of being in relationship to the world into our curriculum? And only from that place, do we then start talking about science, technology, engineering, arts, and math techniques, because we want young people to feel like they're not they don't need to be saved, they already have ancestral knowledge, which is valuable and which is needed. And actually, this is the knowledge that Traditional Ecological Knowledge that ancestral cultural traditions and practices that is the knowledge that will save us, because even if we do every single thing, right, from a STEAM perspective, from a science perspective, we are still going to go over the climate cliff. And so how do we actually recapture some of what that knowledge means, start developing a different way of being in relationship to the world, to each other, to ourselves, and then be able to think about solutions on top of that, but then the solutions themselves would shift and change based on the conversations that we're having, that are forefronting and empowering that ancestral knowledge.
Ayana Young Hmm. Wow. Thank you, that was really beautiful. And yeah, it's clear that Western Science is not only failing in its approach to navigating climate change, but is also a part of the problem. How does developing a curriculum that incorporates both STEAM and ancestral knowledge move us into a much more comprehensive way of being in the world than what the western academic paradigm has provided us thus far, which is largely just overwhelming data?
Lil Milagro Henriquez-Cornejo And I will say before I answer this question, that my history really comes from one of organizing, and one of recognizing that numbers do not move communities, numbers do not move people, data doesn't make people take an action on something. What allows them to feel empowered to take action on something is stories, it is connection, it is feeling this more holistic, comprehensive approach to an issue and so when I think about just having what is, you know, classified as Western science, I think of it as really siloed knowledge that feels really abstract, both in my life as well as in the lives of the students that we're talking to our larger community. So if we're just operating from a place of siloed knowledge, then we are not moving people to actually shift and change, and what Mycelium really tries to do is we try to create a system where we're understanding that if this is a comprehensive, like climate change is a comprehensive, large issue and problem that our solutions need to match it with comprehensive, holistic ways of being and knowing in the world. And I think that, for us, that means that we do look at science, you know, our students are taught how to read National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data, they're taught to read ecomapping, but that knowledge is deeply embedded in a different way of being in relationship to the world, and that it needs to be because that knowledge doesn't move students, it doesn't move us to transform our communities.
And so the way that I think about it, one way to think about it is during last summer, right when COVID was happening, or getting off the ground, we launched our resilience and pandemic times series, and there were a few different workshops that we did as part of that, but one of them was from Seeds To Songs: A Musical Journey With Our Plant Relatives, and Dani “Ahuicapahtzin” Cornejo, who is from the Opata Nation came and lead that, so it wasn’t just a gardening class, it wasn't just a “Hey, here's how you plant a seed that will then sprout in X amount of days that will produce X amount of food.” It was how do you learn the stories of the plants that you're planting, how do you sing their songs? How do you actually develop a relationship to this plant? And how can that relationship then transform your life, as well as allow you to see a plant as a relative? And that class was a huge success with young people. And because it was about all of the ways that young people are inherently good at understanding the world, which is through like song through movement, through curiosity, through innocence, through wanting to develop a relationship. And what Western science will often tell us is this is an object to be observed, these are the data points, and that that doesn't spark that sense of creativity or wonder that we really want to highlight and uplift at mycelium.
I'll say, it's also led to where we are in this moment in time where our current way of seeing the world around us is in a very siloed way, where we're not having relationships with the food that we eat, with the water that we drink. And because of that, we just see them as commodities to be used, and then dismissed, and we don't see ourselves in relationship with any of the world around us within a traditional system, right? It is very much about self, you know, maybe family, maybe just people, but when we don't actually create a relationship with the world around us, it is easy to abuse, and to dismiss and to devalue, everything that is not us.
Ayana Young Yes, I feel you. And yeah, I'm thinking about adultism in environmental and climate change movements, and the first thing that comes to mind is the reality that for so long these movements were not made accessible to young people, and it was also often portrayed that young people didn’t actually care…And this has changed a little bit, but adultism is still rampant, it just takes on different forms these days. I’m curious to hear what critiques you have on this, and specifically what you think is needed to empower young people in a way that is meaningful, but also prevents them from getting jaded about these movements over time?
Lil Milagro Henriquez-Cornejo That's a great question and I think about that a lot because when people hear that Mycelium does work with young people, or knowing we have amazing youth speakers, whether that's through Mycelium directly, or in the larger worlds, I think Greta is such a wonderful example of that, we hear a lot of adults saying things like “Youth are so inspirationa.” Or, you know, “I feel so much hope when I see young people in the work that they're doing”, or the opposite of that, which is just “Young people don't care.” And so I feel like young people are placed in this false binary of either they're hopeful visionaries, or they just don't care and they're consistently connected with their phones. And I think about all the young people I directly talk to, and what really led me to start Mycelium was in conversation with young people who told me that they're terrified about the state of the world. And that almost every young person I've ever talked to, I said that they have a deep fear about what the future holds and so they go to marches, and they go to protests, or they connect with each other online on social media and then adults tell them, they might give them praise in that, you know, youth are so inspirational kind of way, or they might get dismissed like they're just always on their phones. And I think about how, in both of these scenarios, we are not giving young people any inherent power to make real change in their lives and I believe it like that is a form of adultism, and it's a way to dismiss young people, even when we say young people are so hopeful, but we're actually not taking any actions to ensure that young people have a livable future. That's adultism to me because then young people are there to just serve our own needs and our own fears and our own despair about the future without actually us having to change anything about the way the system is created and is being run.
And I think young people should have decision-making power over aspects of their lives and when I say that, oftentimes it’s met with a radical view like “What? They're so immature, they don't enough.” But I think that young people are also incredibly imaginative and innovative. And because they've actually experienced less socialization than adults, they're more willing to dive into out-of-the-box thinking and they're more willing to question the systems that we take for granted and assume will always be true. I think that youth should be on school boards, for example, I think youth should be able to be at all the places where decisions are being made. And they should actually be heard. Because when we make decisions about the future of the world, when we take action or don't take action on a climate issue, we are having a direct impact in the lives of young people and in to the world that they're going to age into. And I think if young people, like any group, if any group is old enough to experience something, they're old enough to learn about why it exists, and how they can have power to be able to change it.
So I want us to be able to, like think into that issue of like, how young people should be in all the places where decisions are being made, especially around environmental issues, but also about their education. It is wrong to assume that young people do not have opinions about things or that they're not experienced enough to be able to tell them something, because they're the ones that are directly experiencing it.
Ayana Young I'm wondering for listeners who aren’t engaging in this realm, I wonder if you could speak to the power of BIPOC youth futurism and the sort of visionary nature that is created when young people are committed to an integrated approach to navigating climate change?
Lil Milagro Henriquez-Cornejo When I think of youth futurism, I think actually about one moment in mycelium, where we were looking at classes we wanted to offer last summer for young people. And one of the classes, I'm not an educator, you know, I have, I'm blessed to be surrounded by amazing educators who are fantastic at their craft. But one of the classes I do teach when I can is a Dungeons and Dragons class. And I kind of offered it as something I didn't think was going to be very important last summer, but it's something I'm really into. I am a huge sci-fi fantasy nerd, and it became one of the most popular classes at Mycelium Youth Network. And it was really surprising to me and to my exceptionally cool staff, but Dungeons and Dragons was all of a sudden one of our most popular classes. And we were looking at having our first conference last year, and we did what we did normally, normally when we don't know exactly how we're going to go about something or when we need feedback, which is just go to young people. So we had a young person focus group for students that have done Mycelium before and we asked them what they wanted to do. Like what do you want to if you had two days to dive into anything, what do you want to dive into? These were largely middle school and high school young people, and they said that they actually wanted to play and they wanted a space to game and that they wanted to think outside of what was possible in that. We ended up creating Apocalyptic Resilience: An Afro Indigenous Futuristic Adventure, and we did that for several reasons. One is we really wanted to meet young people where they were at and where young people are at is in the amazing potential of futurism, the futureism that is granted in afro-centric or Indigenous traditions, which is I think, is really important because a lot of the sci-fi fantasy that we can read that is not that can be really depressing, it can be really apocalyptic for lack of a better word. It can feel absent of community and what I appreciate about Afro-Indigenous, afro and Indigenous futurisms is that it often is pushing us to have again a different relationship with the world around us. It is more hopeful, it is less accepting of boundaries like racism, sexism, classism, and is trying to imagine something different in our world.
I think that young people flocked to the conference, we had about 140 people attend about 70 of them were young people, during a time that we had heard that young people were so zoomed out, they came, and they created characters where they or were the heroes and their own adventures. And I think that when we open that up as a place of possibility, when we meet young people where they're at, when we allow them to be their incredible, imaginative selves, and we give them the power to be able to do that in a way that is authentic, that what we have is a system, we create a process in which like young people are able to blow every single expectation of what the world should be completely out of the water. And they're able to think collectively, they're able to build relationships with one another. You see this, like, innate sense of curiosity, there's so much there that young people are actually hungry for, because they haven't been taught it. And they want to dream big. And I think as we grow older, you know, we get that dreaming big kind of, you know, taken away from us, right? It's like conform, conform, if you want a good job, conform, if you want to go to college, conform, and I really appreciate the the ways in which young people consistently go back into this place of play, as a labor of love, and as a vision for all of us to be able to imagine something different.
Ayana Young Thank you. I'm feeling so energized by what you just said. And I’d like to transition into the practical make up of Mycelium Youth Network. Some of your programs include “Science for Survival”, “Clean Air is a Right: Air is Life”, and “Eco-Mapping Our Present and Future”. Can you share what these programs look like and what is being taught? Are there any upcoming programs you are especially excited about?
Lil Milagro Henriquez-Cornejo Oh, yes. So the programs you mentioned, are fantastic programs. And they all make up part of what we call our Climate Resilience Schools Initiative, which is us imagining schools as resilient centers or resilient hubs for the community around us. And what those are based on is we will take a school, we will train young people to read NOAA data, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data, we will train them to read different climate mapping tools, and then we will break down which issues are issues that they're likely to experience, and then we will do two things. We'll do climate adaptation and climate mitigation. So what are the ways in which we can mitigate damage around sea-level rise, around drought, around fires, around different issues that are climate-related? And then we'll also do climate adaptation. So if it's going to happen, then what do we do to be able to prepare for these different issues? All of our climate resilience schools initiative is Next Generation Science Standards aligned so that it is easily able to be embedded within science standards at schools.
We also have Water Is Life, Clear Air Is A Right, Growing Our Health: Food, Soil and Carbon Sequestration, they're all around different climate-related issues. And those look like again, starting from a place of social-emotional health, starting from ancestral traditions and knowledge, so that can look like anything from - if we're doing Clean Air Is A Right, talking about the breath as a tool of grounding, and of like meditation and mindfulness, it can look like the ways in which the breath and different breathing activities across different traditions and cultures has looked differently. But it all goes back to us being able to ground into the truest version of ourselves, and then we will talk from that point about how to create a DIY air filter. Then we will talk about how to create a detox box because oftentimes the chemicals in our homes are more toxic than the chemicals outside of our homes. You know, then we will talk about how to make a tincture or a salve and which are the plant relatives that we need to be able to bring in that medicine to our bodies. And so we always start off from that place of what does this mean for us social and emotionally, ancestrally, culturally, and then how do we then dive into the technical know-how.
The other one of the programs I'm actually really excited about is our Telling Our Story program, we are partnering with Bioneers, to train about 20 some odd young people from across the nation. So it'll be young people from the Bay Area, San Francisco Bay Area connecting with young people from Louisville, Kentucky, connecting with people from New Mexico connecting with people from Boulder, Colorado, and Denver, to look at environmental issues that are of concern in their area, then they'll learn how to speak their truth to those particular issues. So they'll learn how to create podcasts, how to do video blogging, how to make a social media post go viral, how to do written journalism around these issues. Then we'll pay young people to actually be able to post and share out those stories, because that's another thing that we believe in is that young people, if they put in the time, and the labor, they should get paid for their work, and they should be valued for the work they're doing. So that's a program we're really excited about.
We're really excited about our Gaming For Justice, which you know, I can talk about a little bit later, but which is a version of our Dungeons and Dragons curriculum where we're looking at environmental justice issues. But those are some of our programs. And what we do, we also do like one-off workshops for communities. Last January 2020, which feels like a lifetime ago, we co-ran with Youth Versus Apocalypse, a youth resilience village, where we ran the Science For Survival station and just trained up young people on different climate preparedness, tools, and techniques that they can use. So we've done things like that we also do shorter sessions just around my kitchen herbalism, or kitchen science, or, you know, mini Growing Our Health gardening class we offer so many programs because we recognize that the climate change itself has so many issues we need to prepare for and we're really trying to meet young people in the community where they're at to be able to provide solutions.
Ayana Young Mm hmm. Yeah. Yeah. And I, I wonder if some listeners might be thinking to themselves, “who is decolonizing education for?” And, I think about this balance between remembrance and unlearning. For myself, I know that if I had access to this sort of information earlier, it would have saved me from ultimately having to spend a great deal of time unspinning myself from the tangles of western indoctrination. In a post titled “Keeping Bees at the End of the World” you write: “We must return to our plant and animal relatives and to our own ancestral knowledge. If we are to survive, we need to learn what has been lost during the violent process of colonization. Imagine a Puerto Rico where there were thousands of community gardens, where everyone knew how to rebuild, and water purification was the norm. Imagine a California where public education meant that youth were trained in creating defensible space against wildfires. Imagine a New Orleans where bayous were national treasures so that when hurricanes hit, they slowed down enough to pose minimal danger.” And so I’d like to ask for your reflections here, and how you see decolonizing education engaging with public education, particularly for listeners who are parents and maybe have their children enrolled in public schools?
Lil Milagro Henriquez-Cornejo Right. I have to do a sad spoiler alert that my bees died because of the forest fires and because of climate change, which is incredibly sad, but I wrote that post because I - New Orleans, in particular, Katrina had a significant impact on my life. I grew up in New Orleans and I had left a few years before Katrina hit to go to undergrad, and I didn't know for months on end, if my father was alive, because he was in there or my aunt's and my uncles had to completely leave their homes for months, they weren't able to go back. And I remember seeing these videos of people who were, almost all Black communities, who were incredibly desperate straits, and nobody knew what to do. And I had this deep pain in my heart and I still have it when I think about post-Katrina, but then also, you know, now we've seen in Puerto Rico, in Texas, you know, also a United States case here in Texas, and I have this firm belief that the government as a whole is not putting into place policies that show that they care about poor people of color. And I have a fundamental belief that the government will not save us. And by us, I mean, poor people, communities of color in hard hit areas, we are already seeing the ways they're stripping us of so many - the right to vote, to just representation. And if something is going to save us, it has to be us.
I think about how education is not meant to produce people that know basic skills, like how to purify water, for example, how to build a fire, how to keep warm in a blizzard, right, and there are things that we can do. There are fundamentally things that we can do in these situations. But we don't have the knowledge to be able ,or we don't have access to the knowledge to be able to tap into that. And so when I think about a decolonial education, I think about relearning things that have been lost to us, I think about being able to train up for what's coming in the future. And not from a, like a conspiracy theorist kind of perspective, but just like from the fact that when climate disasters happen, or when extreme weather happens, or in when we say extreme weather now, what we consider extreme weather now is going to be I feel like the norm in 20 years, right 10 years, if not sooner, but like how do we respond? How do we create ways of being together or responding to emergencies? That is different.
I get incredibly hopeful when I think about things like the mutual aid network that's happening right now and the ways that people are actually saving other people, not governments saving us. So I would like us to actually start instead of waiting for the government to, you know, to come around or to fix it, is to start saying, actually, no, we have the resources, and we have enough knowledge within our own communities to start rebuilding, to start re-learning to start remembering how to do all of these things. And, you know, to take it back to New Orleans there, my dad lives in New Orleans East and there was an amazing documentary that came out about Vietnamese populations in New Orleans East, and how they were able to rebuild fairly quickly after Katrina, because they had already gone through so much upheaval at three or four different moments within their lives, right, like transferring over and how that community was able to rebuild itself, because they were immediately able to start, you know, connecting with other community members start like distributing resources. Like they're like, “Hey, we got this rebuilding thing, because we've had to do it so many times”, and I think about, but why can't we? Why can't we do that? Like, why can't that just be the norm of what we teach young people? Why can't we have something like mutual aid networks and how to set up mutual aid networks? It's just also a topic that our middle schoolers and high schoolers are really interested in learning is like, how do we set up mutual aid networks to easily redistribute resources to one another or to start distributing, doing skill shares to one another. And I think that that, for me, is what decolonial education is, it’s that personal connection that not waiting for governments, or even nonprofits, or corporations, to come in and save us. That we actually have, we can train ourselves or we can train our communities in having the knowledge to be able to grow how we want to grow. And that to me is is really beautiful and really hopeful.
Ayana Young Wow, I really love that you just said all that because I have been actually in multiple conversations about mutual aid and community empowerment versus big government, or big industry, or policy and, and just this, maybe it's two sides of the same coin, or maybe that's not even the right metaphor, but I'm just thinking about the pressure put on communities that they can't empower themselves and they need big brother or Empire to make sure they're okay, when really when we look in history, that's never been the case, and most likely never will be. So I am really grateful for you bringing that up, again, to our attention that the power really lies within the community. And it always has and it always will. And, yeah, in preparing for our conversation, I came across a report titled “Preparing People on the West Coast for Climate Change” that was put together by the International Transformational Resilience Coalition, and it concludes: “Further, because traumatized and stressed people often withdraw into a self-protective survival mode, left unaddressed, the harmful human psychological and psycho-social-spiritual reactions to climate impacts also threaten to stall or derail efforts to reduce the climate crisis to manageable levels.” We often hear about how mental health is suffering in context to climate grief and anxiety, but less so do we hear about the correlation between how well-being and personal preparedness impact our capacity for community resilience. And so I wonder if you could share a bit about the argument for integrated knowledge as a pre-emptive measure that will help stave off mental health crisis and violence,
Lil Milagro Henriquez-Cornejo Yeah, and, yeah, before I answer that, I just want to quickly go back to the second question and also say like, I think that I think there is space to do both. But I think that if we wait for the government to do it first, it's never gonna happen. And I think that what I think is helpful is the ways in which community action, then grudgingly brings government along with it. And by that, I mean, like, you know, government kind of follows when we after we have community action or a community response. And so, I always believe in having community lead before government leads, but I just wanted to point that out.
But like in terms of the ITRC, I love TRC, and I think they're thinking really big in terms of what does what will be the mental health effects of climate change, and I think about how within our communities or within communities that are traditionally thought of as again, like, marginalize our disadvantage, and these are all terms that I think are, for me really hard, because it doesn't embody who my community is. You know, I think about, like minorities, like, these are all terms that, for me, are really difficult, because we are so much more than that. And we are so resilient, and we carry with us both the legacy of intergenerational trauma, but we also carry within us so strongly the legacy of intergenerational healing. We have ancestors, my ancestors, I think, in many ways, a lot of our ancestors who have died to preserve our ways of healing, whether that is within a mexica tradition, you know, doing limpias, whether that's doing like, you know, herbal flower baths, whether that's doing prayer, whether that's the drum, you know, in many different ways, like we carry so much intergenerational healing, and how that is beautiful to me. And I think about again, what is the value of education? What is the meaning? How are we redefining education? That looks like for me incorporating a strong social, emotional dynamic into our curriculum.
That's also what we're trying to do with our ancestral traditions, so we want our curriculum to really match the social and emotional needs of young people. I think that that's why young people resonate so strongly with our curriculum, is because some days, we are actually talking about water catchment and water purification, and the necessity of being able to access clean water and some days, we're actually just talking about how hard the world is right now for a young person and creating open space to have that conversation. And Myceloum just finished the latest round of our affinity groups, we offer three different affinity groups, three, four different affinity groups, we offer our Talk Black To Me, which is the affinity group for Black youth Queer and Teen, which is an affinity group for queer youth, Sacred Circles, which is an affinity for Native youth, and In Lak'ech, which is an affinity group for youth activists, and our only point of being together in those spaces is to be together in those spaces. There's no agenda beyond what young people want to bring. I think that when we think about a lot of times, like mental health, it is something that we do as an afterthought, or it is something that is not as important as meeting next generation science standards, NGSS science standards, but it is actually the work. If we're going to prepare for the future, then we need to recognize it for a lot of our young people, we are already living in difficult environments, because of how poverty and racism and heterosexism for a lot of our queer youth have played out over their lives.
So just taking a moment to slow down and recognize that not as something extra that we have to do, but as the work itself that we have to do, I think is really important to be able to support young people in their mental health. Even like when I say mental health, it feels kind of off to me, because I'm like, this is we try to be holistic, and their mental health, again, feels like a siloed term, like there's mental health, and there's physical health. No, it's all an interconnected system and how do we support young people at every single angle, or every single part of their system, to be able to feel whole, and we can never talk about, with young people, you know, doing a STEAM project, or even talking about the Run For Salmon, if young people aren't in a mental place to deal with it, because they just went through a trauma, and so just the need to really prioritize and highlight that social-emotional health that is equally as important as the ancestral traditions and knowledge is completely wrapped up in the ways that we tried to do it. But that is also equally important into the STEAM. And so we really want to create a system, and we've done this more and more, as we started to develop out as an organization, but we want to create a system in which that knowledge is just sacred and just as important as more traditional STEAM type activities. Because when you know, things are incredibly hard. That's what we go to the just ground ourselves to still feel human. And I think that that often gets lost in conversations around education, and meeting standards is just that holistic heart education that for us is so vital.
Ayana Young Yeah, I really agree with you. I know that prior to your work with Mycelium Youth Network, you were looking at faith based activism and liberation theology. And, I know we could have had a whole conversation on this alone; but I really do believe that having a spiritual practice or an orientation towards faith can really feed us in many ways in terms of our ability to commit to world-making practices, and I think mainstream environmentalism and climate change movements have really alienated themselves from this course of thought, for many different reasons...but as someone who has looked at the ways that religious faith can be connected to social activism, I wonder if I could ask you what you think the role of religious faith is in terms of transforming communities and building climate resilience?
Lil Milagro Henriquez-Cornejo Yeah, that's a great question. I feel like it's a question that we don't ask ourselves enough on the left. I think that as a whole, we have ceded religion and faith to the right, and I think it's been a detriment to us as a society. I think that faith can be such a powerful vehicle to enact social change. My family is from Cuscatlan, my mother is from Cuscatlan, which is now known as El Salvador, and my family has a strong history of liberation theology. I think about bringing faith into movements is about recognizing, again, that people are not driven by data, people are driven by deep-seated beliefs, by stories by connections. Also faith-based places like churches or mosques, or different cultural centers are incredibly important places to mobilize people. People generally don't trust the government, I think for the most part, at least in my communities, they don't trust the government, but they will trust is a church, or there's what's happening at their school, so if we can start thinking about organizing, whether that is environmental justice organizing, or labor organizing, or whatever, as fundamental love for each other, and how it is a call to us to action, to put our faith in something larger, right, I feel like it's so much of organizing, we're putting our faith in the power of people to mobilize for something larger than us. I think that that is such a powerful way to tell people that they can bring their full selves forward. And that we will hold them as a movement in their full selves, and that they don't have to check any part of themselves at the door, they don't have to silo their faith, thhey don't have tosilo their politics, right? So we can have really difficult conversations about the connections between faith and politics.
In the United States, we're taught that there are two things you don't talk about at the dinner table, like, what is it faith and politics, and then we don't have difficult conversations, that it is more important to keep a veneer of “civility” at the dinner table, that it is to recognize that people are dying in the streets, and they're dying from policies and I think that it is okay for us to have difficult conversations. And I think that faith should be used to challenge ourselves to be the very best versions of ourselves that we can be for something larger than ourselves, whether that is for our community, whether that is for our planet, whether that is for the future generations that are going to come after us. Like I think that unless we grapple with that conversation, we're not meeting people where they're at where we're assuming that you know, we can win it in all of these different ways. When I don't think that we can, I don't feel like we also have enough time to figure it out without faith, and without bringing faith into the conversation. There's a study that says that we have until 2030 to make radical changes. Well, the things that people trust, most are schools and community organizations, like churches. And so let us actually start deep diving deep into those difficult conversations that we know are what shifts and changes people in their lives rather than ignore it because we feel like we need to silo it because it is not for us. And I feel like yeah, that's how we really make a change in our communities.
Ayana Young I'm so with you. And I'm so happy that we got to touch on that a bit. Because I yeah, I've been thinking about that more and more. And as we come to a close, I want to talk a bit about normalizing our fear and channeling it into action. I’ve heard you share that Mycelium Youth Network sort of came as a response to a moment in time where you were feeling a lot of anxiety for the future, and this is obviously so relatable to many, and I’d just like to ask what advice you’d offer to those who feel similarly now?
Lil Milagro Henriquez-Cornejo I mean, it's, it's also the same advice I would offer myself I have such deep anxiety and I'm starting to do better with my anxiety, but I oftentimes think my anxiety is very pragmatic, on a good day, it's very pragmatic on a bad day it's just hard to get out of bed, but I think that I have learned through doing this work that when my anxiety, or when my fear, rest just in fear and just in myself and it is a tight ball in my chest or in my neck, it is incredible debilitation, it is impossible and every time I connect with others, everytime I step into spaces where I’m there in service of others, my fear, that like little ball in my chest or in my beck kind of shrinks down.
I think that when we do work, when we commit ourselves lovingly, to a cause that is larger than us, while still practicing self-care, I think I'm all for self-care, so I don't want to say this is all just self-sacrifice, but when I am able to ground into something that feels larger than myself, and to do work for something that is larger than me, I feel that like knot in my chest slowly start unraveling. And t's not just the work itself that does that, it is the connection and the communication with others. And when I'm able to share that with young people, or when I hear young people sharing that with each other, I see the ways that this thing that feels so scary and large, becomes smaller, and smaller and smaller, the more it gets spoken.
I think there's there's so much power in just being able to share those stories with one another and knowing that we're not alone, and I hear from young people all the time that they wish adults would talk to them about this. And I get it, it's incredibly scary. Climate change is incredibly scary. It's scary for me, and I do this work all the time I pour over this news, like every single day, and at the same time, the more we speak it out loud, the more it becomes manageable, the more we can share, the more we create connection. So I would say to speak it out loud, as much as you can, share it with those that are also afraid. I think if young people are old enough to experience it, they're young enough to be able to talk about it, they're young enough to be empowered to create solutions around it. There are so many amazing people doing groundbreaking work around climate adaptation and climate mitigation, but we don't see any of that in the news. So unless we start seeking that out, unless we start figuring out where those conversations are at, it's impossible to know that. And so my advice would be to share, to share constantly, to be ready to grieve, a tremendous amount that we've already lost. And to also, in sharing those stories, be prepared to empower young people, to empower yourself, to create visionary change, because humanity to me is both so beautiful sometimes, and so terrible sometimes. But the beautiful part is the ways in which we consistently adapt, and we are resilient, and we try and we struggle, and we share. And I would say that is for me the most beautiful part, and it's when we don't do that, when we are just in our fear that things can turn toxic and then we see the worst of humanity.
So I would definitely say talk to young people about it, share that you're afraid, share that you don't have any answers, if that's also the case, we don't have answers. We're just trying to figure out together what that looks like. But share that you're also willing to try to meet a young person, where they're at and you're willing to think about it with them, I think is incredibly powerful. I think if there are any organizations, native organizations in particular that are doing work in your communities, it's like moving beyond the land acknowledgment. I see a lot of nonprofits that do land acknowledgments as if that is it, like we acknowledge we stole this land from you and we’re done. But also like seek out Native communities that are in your area, pay a land tax, if it's, you know, relevant to your community, figure out what are the traditional ecological sources of knowledge that are there supporting them wholeheartedly. You know, Melinda Adams is another scholar that does amazing work in Northern California on traditional fires and traditional burns and like support that work, that there are people out there that are doing visionary, groundbreaking work and support them, you know, whether that's through funding, whether that's showing up at events, whether that's through conversation with us, so sharing your story, and be prepared to walk humbly in it. You know, whether that's with a young person, or somebody that you might have privilege over, you know, be prepared to walk incredibly humbly and gently because we're all trying to figure it out together.
Ayana Young Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, such an amazing way to yeah, start to wrap up our conversation. But before we completely leave each other for this time, I just wanted to ask if there's anything else you'd like to share with listeners?
Lil Milagro Henriquez-Cornejo You know, follow us on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram, I feel very old with social media, I’m not even that old, but I feel very old on social media, but follow us on social media. We have amazing people leading the work. You know, we do offer classes virtually, if you want to get involved in that. But I yeah, I just want to say like if there's one lesson I would have listeners take away it is to meet young people where they're at, because like what is often seen within an adult culture as frivolous or silly, is actually some of the spaces for really groundbreaking transformational work and that to me is is where young people are actually visionary and hopeful and not just them giving a speech, right? So meeting young people where they're at and providing them a seat at the table, because they are going to go through it 1000 times more than we are and half.
Ayana Young Right. Hmm. Yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you so much. Well, this has been just a really deep and beautiful time to share with you. So thanks so much for your work and for joining us on the podcast.
Lil Milagro Henriquez-Cornejo Thank you so much for having me.
Francesca Glaspell Thank you for listening to another episode of For The Wild Podcast, the music you heard today was by Harry Foster, Lea Thomas, and Ian George. For The Wild is created by Ayana Young, Erica Ekrem, and Francesca Glaspell.