Transcript: LYLA JUNE on Lifting Hearts Off the Ground /147
March Young This program is supported by the Kalliopeia Foundation. Kalliopeia honors all life as sacred, and works to heal global issues at their root causes. The projects they support hold a common vision for a future built on love, reverence and responsibility for our shared home. Their visionary generosity brings impactful projects to life.
Ayana Young Hey For The Wild community, Ayana here. I'd like to offer my gratitude and thank you to the city of Bend, Oregon for generously supporting our work. From the rushing waters of the Deschutes River to the spring wildflowers that bloom in the mountains of The Three Sisters Wilderness, this place holds so much life and wild abundance. While exploring the land and waters of Bend, we encourage you to take a moment and consider those who work hard to take care of these spaces day to day. Trail maintenance and habitat restoration not only support the health of vibrant ecosystems, but also allow those who visit to connect with the outdoors. For The Wild is excited to work alongside Bend, Oregon to foster a culture of stewardship through Pledge For The Wild, a group of mountain towns that support responsible tourism, through the preservation of land. Pledge For The Wild helps those who are passionate about nature conservation give back to local nonprofits that care for these wild places. We encourage you to support and visit Bend, Oregon and help protect the land by giving back at pledgewildbend.com. Learn more at pledgewildbend.com.
Okay, cool. We're going live in... well it's not live but we're going recording in 3,2,1…..
Lyla June Laws that are written on paper can be broken. But laws that are written in the stars and the bark of trees, those, you just cannot break those laws. You can try, it might work for a couple generations, but it's going to fall into itself.
Ayana Young Welcome to For The Wild podcast. I'm Ayana Young.
I'm excited to share this refreshing conversation with my dear friend Lyla June. As we explore poetry, language and traditions that honor Indigenous rights, and remind us all of our sacred responsibilities. Join us as we meditate upon the true spirit of giving back to each other and to the land. Lyla June was raised in Taos, New Mexico, and is a descendant of Diné and Cheyenne lineages. Her personal mission in life is to grow closer to Creator by learning how to love deeper. In 2012, she graduated with Honors from Stanford University with a degree in Environmental Anthropology. She is a musician, public speaker and internationally recognized performance poet. Lyla June ultimately attributes any achievements to Creator, who gave her the tools and resources she uses to serve humanity. She currently lives in Dinétah, the Navajo ancestral homeland, which spans what is now called New Mexico, Colorado, Utah and Arizona. She spends her free time learning her endangered mother tongue, planting corn, beans and squash, and spending time with elders who retain traditional spiritual and ecological knowledge. I am so happy to be sharing this moment with you Lyla. It is such a pleasure to spend time with you. I'm constantly inspired by the integrity and love that you carry in everything you do. Thanks for joining me and For The Wild community.
Lyla June Thanks so much for having me, sister and thank Creator for letting me be alive and well.
Ayana Young I want to start off by saying that lately at For The Wild, we've been looking to poetry to find guidance and renewal in our own work, and we're just thrilled to reconnect with you around a special collection of poetry you released that responds to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous people, commonly known as the UNDRIP. And I must mention that all proceeds raised from Lifting Hearts Off the Ground: Declaring Indigenous Rights in Poetry go directly towards supporting Indigenous communities. I want to give listeners some background about UNDRIP. So, when UNDRIP was passed in 2007, it became a blueprint for upholding the inherent human rights of Indigenous peoples worldwide, and a crucial pillar in protecting Indigenous lands, water and forests. Now, we often refer to this framework in our interviews, and in our work to support land and water protectors on the ground. There is such potential contained in this declaration, and yet it's not legally binding, nor is it enforced. We're still seeing appalling levels of violence against Indigenous women and girls, brazen moves to expand resource extraction projects without free, prior and informed consent, and widespread rollbacks of environmental protections. So we still have a long way to go to truly upholding Indigenous rights. So Lyla, you co-created this collection with Joy De Vito, who is settler Canadian, to, "breathe life into the seemingly dry bones of the Declaration." So, to start off, I'm curious why you chose to translate the meaning of the UNDRIP using poetry?
Lyla June Joy is just like her name sounds, she's a joy to work with. She's a sweetheart. She is a student up in Canada, studying basically all these beautiful ways of how to do reparations, and reconciliation. And she linked arms with me to create what I call red and white solidarity, where we have Indigenous peoples and European peoples banding together to create a real change. Me and Joy were a little bit daunted by the test, because there's 46 Articles in the UNDRIP. So, we're like, okay, we have to write 46 poems. It's like, shoot, where do you start? And I said, you know what Joy, let's just read the Article and the first thing that comes to mind, let's just write. That was the first draft. And we didn't change the first draft that much, what came out of our hearts instinctually after reading each Article, is what the book came to be. It's a beautiful book, you know, it's like embossed, the cover is embossed. And I just have to say the Mennonite Publishing Company, which is Common Word, did a beautiful job of turning this poetry into a very beautiful book. But yeah, it's a fun book. And a lot of people I talk to say, if it wasn't for this book, I never would have read the UNDRIP. If it wasn't for this book, I never would have seen how vast and how complex and how beautiful the UNDRIP really is.
From what I understand, the Declaration of Human Rights came out after World War II. After basically, Nazi Germany did their thing. And so this Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples is sort of like the Indigenous version of that, born out of hundreds and hundreds of years of exploitation of Indigenous lands by colonial powers. So the Articles are pretty much for instance, like every Indigenous nation has the right to educate their own children, which obviously is in response to the boarding schools. Every Indigenous nation has the right to form their own governments, which of course, is in response to how colonial powers would move in and create a government for Indigenous peoples that was basically a mirror reflection of a Eurocentric form of government. And the native peoples would have to work through this Eurocentric governance system. There's also things about water, things about land rights, things about relocation, you know, you can't relocate Indigenous people. So my poems were basically taking these very generic statements, and giving real life examples of how this shows up in Indigenous people's lives. Talking about how the Japanese came into Korea and mowed down the forest and forced everyone in Korea to speak Japanese. Talking about Ben Nighthorse Campbell, who was a Native American Republican Congressperson and how he was forced to participate in a colonial government that was basically he was going to lose before he even walked in the door. Talking about healing, you know, our traditional healing methods and why it's important for us to have control over our medical world. I kind of tried to bring these really generic statements that said, "No one shall ever relocate an Indigenous nation to another place without their consent and their agreement to do so." So, then I talk about what it mean for us, when you move Lakota people off of the plains - they can't speak anymore because their whole language is built out of the plains. Their whole language reflects that specific ecology, that specific biome. So if you relocate an Indigenous nation off of their homeland, they're not gonna have anything to talk about because our languages are reflections of very specific places. They are endemic, the same way species are endemic. So talking about that, and sort of, yeah, breathing life into this and showing how these rights are important to have in everyday life.
Ayana Young I'd love it if you could tell us more about your intention behind these lines, “The UNDRIP puts our principles into the format of the numbed world. It begins to speak of the sacred. To achieve its goal, the numbed world must come into the format of the sweat lodge."
Lyla June Oh, yeah, that's a big one. So, if you ever spend just a couple of weeks learning an Indigenous language, you will realize that we live in completely different worldviews. There are assumptions built into our language that are not built into English. And our languages are very rich, our languages are very spiritual. Our languages are very much relational and kinship minded, or our languages are verb based. It's all about the dynamic flux of creation. So as soon as you write anything in English, which the UNDRIP is in English, you are already missing out on entire universes of Indigenous experience, entire universes of Indigenous thought, entire universes of Indigenous planning, implementation and reflection, a lot gets lost in translation. I would say, I would dare say, like 90% of what we're trying to talk about gets lost when you translate from our languages into English. For example, to say, mother, you don't say, amá, you say, shimá. Which means my mother. Shi means my, má means mother, or amá means mother. So you always link shi with any of these kinship words, because you're saying, "you are my mother, you are my precious mother." And built into that word shi, is like this attitude of preciousness that you're so precious to me. And our word for maternal grandmother is different than our word for paternal grandmother. Maternal grandmother is shimá sání, paternal grandmother is shinálí. And so, shimá sání, we have a really heavy focus on the matrilineal line of things. So what comes from your mother is wildly different than what comes from your father. And what comes from your mother has certain roles and responsibilities in your life, different from those who come from your father.
So our kinship terms are the basis. And the word k’é means kinship, it means understanding who you're related to by clan, it means the responsibilities you have to someone you're related to by clan. So, that little syllable, k’é, has so much packed into it, it has love, it has community, it has responsibility, it has hard work, it means accountability, and that, k’é, is the foundation of our entire universe. So, by the time I even say, "Hi, Ayana," you know, I've already lost what my people are about, the real way to address you is shiadí, you know, older sister, like I love you as my older sister, and I have certain responsibilities to you as a younger sister, and you have certain responsibilities to me as an older sister. And so all of that gets lost. So, when I say that, you know, the UNDRIP is formatted for the numbed world, I mean that it's formatted for the brain, it's formatted for the intellect. And a lot of what the Western world believes to be true, is that which the intellect believes to be true. You have our hearts and our spirits going into atrophy. When we enter into Western institutions, such as universities, such as politics, such as writing books, and reading books, all of that is generally speaking, geared towards the intellect unless some brave soul decides to break out of that norm and say, "You know what, I don't know why my heart is saying this is good, but I'm going to trust it. I have no logic. I have no rationale to explain it. But I'm going to say that love is important right now. And feeling love between people is important right now." So, the sweat lodge on the other hand, which I say, you know, this book is designed to bring the world into the format of the sweat lodge. The sweat lodge, if you haven't ever been in one is completely dark inside. So, every one has no skin color. You know, we're all family. It's shaped like a dome, which is the mother's womb. So we're basically babies, we become babies again, going into the dark womb of the Mother Earth, and we sing songs, and these songs, you can feel it through every cell in your being. And the knowledge that you're learning in the sweat lodge is not understood through the intellect. It's understood through the whole body. It's understood through the heart, through your prayers, and is understood through the Spirit. And so when I went to Stanford University, I had a really hard time there, because I wanted to say hi to everyone. And I wanted to treat everyone like my relatives, say, hi. And everywhere I went, I was waving at people and people thought I was crazy. Because that is just not compatible with a world that is distant that is intellectualized and a world that is numbed. And that hopefully explains what I meant by that, let's bring these Articles of the UNDRIP down into reality, Indigenous reality, where our way of knowing is honored.
Ayana Young These issues that are, I think, really at the core of our disconnection from... and when I say our I mean this dominant culture's disconnection from the real world, like I think about that statement, too - people say, "Oh I have to go back to the real world." What are we even saying is the "real world" these days? Is the real world capitalism, or is the real world, relationships in the Earth? And, I just am so grateful for all of this reworking that you're doing in our psyches, with language with the way we understand how we're relating to one another. I think we're losing more than we can even understand at this point with the Western intellectual mind. So I feel so aligned with you. And we would love to hear you read a poem, or two or more of your choice. And then I'd love to break those down and talk more about them after you read them for us.
Lyla June Sure. Okay, so Article 31 says,
"Indigenous peoples have the right to maintain, control, protect and develop their cultural heritage, traditional knowledge and traditional cultural expressions, as well as the manifestations of their sciences, technologies and cultures, including human and genetic resources, seeds, medicines, knowledge of the properties of fauna and flora, oral traditions, literatures, designs, sports and traditional games and visual and performing arts. They also have the right to maintain, control, protect and develop their intellectual property over such cultural heritage, traditional knowledge, and traditional cultural expressions."
Part Two of the Article says, "in conjunction with Indigenous peoples, states shall take effective measures to recognize and protect the exercise of these rights."
So, this is an intellectual property Article which is saying, you know, because a lot of Indigenous peoples, like the açaí berry, right, has become really popular in Whole Foods culture. Where we know it's an antioxidant, we know it's a superfood, but who develops the açaí? It was Indigenous peoples who crafted it. And then someone's like, "ooh, we could make a buck off that," right? So, it's talking a lot about stopping the marginalization of Indigenous creations and stopping the exploitation of that. So what I wrote is maybe not what you would expect, but this is what I wrote in response.
"The old ones say we do not own the land, much less the songs, much less the symbols gifted to us by the star nation. Who can own the only thing worth having? Who can own God? The Lakota were the most generous of us, freely giving their sacred technology to all who asked for it. To all who needed it. Take it they said. Take it for we cannot hoard what was freely given to us. You can try to sell it. You can try to exploit it. You can try to patent it. You can try to own it. Try it. The moment you think you own it is the moment it disappears. Slipping through your fingers like holy water. You cannot hold it. You can only be held by it. We do not carry this sacred pipe. It carries us through the valleys and over the hills. It cannot be owned. You can only pretend to own it. Just like you pretend to own your own flesh and bone. But ultimately, even that you cannot take with you on the soul's journey home."
So, that to me was sort of my response to the Article, because I see that the Article is saying - listen, if this Indigenous nation planted and cultivated over 1000s and 1000s of years the açaí berry, they have the right to patent it. We can't take it. But I kind of flip that on his head and say - you know what? I bet if our elders could do the same thing again, or could have another try everything that happened in colonization, I bet we would do the same thing again. Because it's our job to give and it's our job to love. And if the world takes that and exploits it that's on them, you know, that's their deal. That's their stuff that they got to deal with. But it's our job to give. And it's our job to support even if it's a scraggly pilgrim who just landed on the shore and is starving, you know, and even if their descendants are going to completely wipe us out, it's our job to give and to help unconditionally whenever we can.
So that's my... I'm sure a lot of my contemporaries don't agree with me on that. But that's my feeling. And that's what I've learned from our Elders, the really gentle Elders, the really connected Elders, they say, like, we need to give this medicine to the world. That doesn't mean the world should exploit it. But the moment that the world tries to own it, I mean, they're not gaining anything. They're, they're losing in the most profound way that they can, to try and own something sacred. So that's them, at least we got to give a lot of antioxidants to a lot of people whose bodies were dying because they were eating American food, you know, at least we got them some açaí berries in their system. So that's my thought on it. It's very personal, though.
Ayana Young Ownership is such a strange way of living through this world. And I think about the plants, they are also very giving. They give their soil and they give their nutrients and they give their shade, and they give their bodies and they give their flesh and they give their sense, and they give their beauty. And even though they've been exploited and raped and pillaged and burned down and logged, they still give. There's something that I talked about with brontë velez on our episode, The Necessity of Beauty. How are we able to show up in our generosity, in our beauty, when we know that this colonizer dominant culture is on a trajectory to continue to exploit that? But I agree that it is on them. It is on those who are strangling that power between their grasp, to try to get some type of fulfillment, which I agree with you, I don't think it actually is fulfilling to have that stranglehold on beauty, that exploitation on the generous world. It's interesting for those of us who want to be those gentle givers how we can continue showing up and giving and being open and receptive. Also knowing that there is a lack of safety in that, but also what else would we do? How else could we be in alignment with our own integrity? Yeah, I feel like on one level, Lifting Hearts Off the Ground, translates this complex document into an accessible language. And on another level, I really sense that this project imbues an impersonal document with the substance of your lived experience. So I'm curious how your relationship with the UNDRIP shifted over the course of this project.
Lyla June Yeah, I definitely disagreed with the hidden assumptions within a lot of these Articles. Like, there's one poem I wrote that says - laws that are written on paper can be broken. But laws that are written in the stars and the bark of trees, those, you just cannot break those laws, you can try, it might work for a couple generations, but it's gonna fall into itself. And so what's ironic about this whole book is I inherently disagree that words written on paper are going to be the final say. Again, we will have to feel these words, we will have to experience them, and know them in our body before we ever change. But the beautiful thing is, is that the beauty of unsustainable behavior is it won't be sustained. It's like a blip on a screen. It exists ephemerally and then it ceases to exist. That's what Rome was, you know, Rome existed for a little while, and it died. And Chaco, you know, Chaco Canyon where we had caste systems, and we weren't taking care of the land, it was born and then it died. Creator sent us a drought to give us the courage to change, because that was not a sustainable society. So, I think that those laws are the ones that we really are going to end up listening to, not out of choice, but out of, it's just the way things are - nothing can exist without love. And if we lose love, we will cease to exist. Nothing can exist without water. If we poison our water, we will cease to exist, you know.
So I do disagree with a lot of fundamental assumptions hidden implicitly, within this UNDRIP. However, what I do like about the UNDRIP, it articulates the things that have happened to us. It articulates that yes, we have been relocated against our will, yes, we have had our languages destroyed. And I really love it for that. It gives people insight into all the different ways Indigenous peoples have been disempowered. Even though it is formatted for the numbed world, it is really, it took many decades to publish this thing and a lot of people worked very hard. And they worked at the UN and they consulted with Indigenous nations and Indigenous nations consulted with the UN and I think it's really beautiful and good, and it gives us a good guiding light. So, I did you know, have a few snarky poems in this book that are kind of almost jabbing at the UNDRIP. You know, like, this is great, but we need to go deeper. But, even with those little jabs, I'm really appreciative of it. And I really think it's worth reading.
Ayana Young I think about this other critique that I had about UNDRIP, just considering how a monolingual document ignores the responsibility on the part of the settler governments to learn Indigenous languages required to enact true nation to nation relationships. And yeah, I just wonder what it would have been like, or what it could be like, if UNDRIP were to weave in Indigenous languages within it? And I mean, I also could imagine, logistically that might be challenging because there's so many and how would they even choose which languages get prioritized?
Lyla June Well, there were 80 languages, 80 plus languages spoken in the state of California alone before colonization. So, there definitely is a lot of linguistic diversity, which people are finding is deeply tied to biodiversity, interestingly. I totally hear you and I think that it would be hard to translate this into all the Indigenous languages, but what might be good as if it was written first in an Indigenous language so that that paradigm of that language was infused throughout the document, and then translated into English. That way, at least the soul and the paradigm, which we live would be dictating the whole way in which the words would come out, and what words would come out. I agree, I'm in a Ph. D. program right now, and we had to write some policy papers. We know they weren't real policy, but just take a stab at trying to do policy. And one of the things I said is, every single elementary school student will take one year of an Indigenous language, every single middle school student will take one year of an Indigenous language, every single high school student will take two years. And before they graduate college, they're expected to be conversational within one Indigenous language. And people might be like, well, that's crazy. We can't expect American college students to learn an Indigenous language, like they got other stuff going on. But it's like, actually, no, you are on Indigenous lands. If you want to come here, you need to learn our languages, you need to understand what we're talking about, you need to understand our worldview. And like you said, if there's going to be a true nation-to-nation relationship, we need to understand each other. And why are we always the ones who have to go out and learn English and get soap in our mouth if we speak in Indigenous language and, you know, go through the boarding schools and get whipped if we speak our language and always having to learn English, but then the American society doesn't have to take any effort to understand us. And ironically, they are impoverishing American, you know, mainstream students, by keeping these languages from them, then we are impoverishing the world by letting these languages go extinct. Because held within them is really juicy, epic, beautiful paradigms that could pretty much save our whole planet. And so I totally agree with you there and that is a big critique. And I know it's in several different languages, but I'm pretty sure that most of them are Eurocentric languages so I think that would be a really good step to at least to translate it into a few different languages.
Ayana Young And, yeah, what also I feel in speaking with you about this a few times is, and even in this interview, what's within these Indigenous languages, ways in which we can relate to the land. And when we are so disconnected to the land, we need every tool, every skill to be able to relate back to the land. I'm thinking, for instance, there's a, in another poem you write, "We would have typed faster if our iPhone spoke Diné Bizaad, the Navajo language. There will be a day when we will not be autocorrected out of existence." And that was so beautiful. And maybe this is another moment where you could read us another poem.
Lyla June Sure. Let's see. There's a lot of poems in here I like.
Ayana Young Yeah, I could imagine it's hard to choose.
Lyla June It's all good. Alright. So, Article 33 says "Indigenous peoples have the right to determine their own identity, or membership in accordance with their customs and traditions. This does not impair the right of Indigenous individuals to obtain citizenship of the states in which they live." And part two of that Article is "Indigenous peoples have the right to determine the structures and to select the membership of their institutions in accordance with their own procedures." So in other words, who counts as a Navajo woman, you know, only Diné people should be able to say, who counts as a Diné person and the government should never be like, “Oh, you're only 1/16 sorry, you don't count” you know, which is the way it is right now. So anyways, the idea of Indigenous peoples have the right to determine their own identity was sort of the line that I riffed off of in this poem, thinking about our identity as Indigenous peoples and what I have seen throughout the country and throughout the world.
So this is what I wrote. "Rise people of the Wild Rice rise people of the Red Willow. Rise, people of the Middle River. Rise people of the Aguaje Palm. Rise Lafkenche. Rise Pehuenche. Rise, rise Mapuche. Rise Kahniakehake. Rise, all of you rise to speak your truth. We need more people who named themselves after the land instead of naming the land after themselves. Learn from us, Washington. Learn from us, Georgia. Learn from us, Louisville. Learn from us, San Luis Obispo. There is a vast world, unbeknownst to you, for now. Climb to the mountaintop. Look out into the valleys. See just how much you do not and cannot control."
So, I wrote that poem because I noticed that a lot of Indigenous nations, if you look at how we identify ourselves, it's often related to the land that we live in. So one of the, I believe the Pyramid Lake area, tribes what that literally means is the people who eat this kind of fish, you know, so they literally named themselves after that fish. And the word Mapuche which is the Indigenous peoples of Chile, it means, mapu means Earth, and che means people so people of the Earth, and within the Mapuche nation, which is a really vast nation, there are subgroups. For instance, there's the Pehuenche and pehuen means, it's a certain nut that they harvest from what in English we call the monkey puzzle tree. But in their language, they call it the pehuen. So the Pehuenche people have this nut, and their entire economy and their entire livelihood revolves around this sacred nut that is highly nutritious. And as you know, Anishinaabeg often view themselves as people of the wild rice. And so they're naming themselves after what they eat, and then naming themselves after the land. And so, I noticed that when the European colonizers came, who had had the Indigenous spirit beaten out of them for millennia, I'm sure they did used to identify themselves this way, but because of the Roman expansion, because of the witch hunts, everything, they caught a little bit of amnesia. So, they came over here, they said - okay, well, this is Washington, and I'm gonna name it after George Washington. And this state, we'll call it Georgia, we'll name it after, you know, George. This is Louisville, we'll name it after Louis. And all of these different names that the land was given was naming the land after these men, and to me, that was the fundamental paradigm that we needed to shift was, how do instead we view the Earth belonging to us? How do we start seeing that we belong to the Earth, and identifying ourselves based on that? So, that's just another poem that I was hoping could help people, because sometimes we're born into it, right? We're born into Santa Clara, California, or Santa Monica, or Santa, whatever, San Francisco, you know, and we just kind of take it for granted that it's normal to name the land after a human being. And not only that, but like a pedophilic, you know, priest from the Catholic Church, you know, so we have to really learn and remember that that's not necessarily normal. That's what I was trying to do with this poem.
Ayana Young And I wonder, when we live within these systems, that name land after rapists, and torturers, and when we're in this day to day life where we're not even really aware of that, I doubt... I can't imagine that it doesn't seep into our psyches. I can't imagine that it doesn't affect us, even if we can't name it, even if we don't actually know the histories as well as we should. Because sometimes I'll be speaking to people and they'll go, "Oh, well, those people don't know what's going on, or they're asleep, or they're in denial." And I say - yeah, maybe they are in denial, and perhaps they haven't done the research to really understand the depth of the truths that are really happening but I do think that it affects everybody, subconsciously, and then how that manifests in our bodies, in our illnesses in the way we treat ourselves, treat others. I don't think that we can just brush off the fact that we are living under these umbrellas of tortures in the names of the places that many of us live. I think that there are deeper ramifications of these decisions that were made by the first settlers and colonizers. And so you bringing this up to me, feels like a mandatory exploration. We are really trying to get to the root of this pain and this disconnection
I want to shift our conversation a little bit to talk about Native American Heritage Month since we are in the month of November. And I spoke with Jade Begay a couple of weeks ago about the disgusting move by Trump's administration to attempt to erase Native American Heritage Month by replacing it or at least by trying to make more present this national American History and Founders month, which is honestly just so ridiculous and so blatant in the erasure that this administration is trying to accomplish. And so I'm wondering, how do you see these renewed acts of violence echo in the communities you're visiting?
Lyla June Well, first of all, I think I want to say that every soul has to feel, every hurt that they inflicted in their lifetime, from what my elders tell me. So, I actually pray for Trump. I call him my uncle Trump. Shidáʼí. You know, because even these misfits, and sometimes especially these misfits, we have to bring into kinship and love and help them. And obviously, he's a little too dangerous to help over a cup of tea or something like that, but at least I can help him through my prayers. But, you know, truly, he's hurting himself. And Stephen Miller, one of his main buddies, you know, they found over 900 emails of his that were really, really blatantly, disgustingly all about white nationalism. 70% of the country now believes that what he did with Ukraine was wrong. And one comedian was saying you can't get 70% of Americans to agree on anything. He went to Kentucky the same day I was there at the same time, we gave a speech at the same time in Lexington. And to prop up this governor who was running and the governor lost. He tried to do the same thing in Louisiana, the governor lost. So, that is some silver lining on all this is all of his stupid, atrocious, crazy moves and acts have only made him less and less and less desirable even by Republicans. So that is the silver lining in this, is that - yes, he is atrocious and the American people aren't going for it anymore. So that's good. At least, you know, we thought it was gonna be like, everyone's just going to support them no matter what, but apparently that's not true.
Okay, so Native American Heritage Month, I mean, some critics say, you know, like, every day is Indigenous Peoples Day. But I think it gives us a time when people, like for instance, a lot of people have been showing my music video "All Nations Rise" in their classrooms this month, and they're having the kids dissect the lyrics. And what does this mean? When you're writing songs, you don't realize kids are gonna be like dissecting lyrics, but it gives people an excuse to talk about Indigenous issues, which is good. I wish they would do it every month. And we do do it every month. So I love that. And I think a lot of Trump's moves have only emboldened us, and that's the other silver lining. I remember being in the Women's March in Washington DC, a day or two, I forget if it was a day or two days after his inauguration, I think it was the next day. And man, that was beautiful. That was beautiful. And to see so many young boys walking beside their mothers in solidarity with the feminine, so beautiful. And I don't know, I think in a lot of ways, what he's doing is he's emboldening us, and he's helping people, he's forcing people to answer - Are you going to stand on the side of justice or not? You know, and a lot of people who didn't really care about justice before he was in office, because when Obama was there, you know, you have to admit everyone, well, not everyone, but most people were like, oh, everything's okay. Obama's in office. Trump helped us realize, no, everything is not okay. Now, we have some serious work to do. So, in a strange way, I think there's a lot of benefits out of his atrocities that have had us really grapple with certain and have public debate on a lot of issues.
And I know that all the young men who are born today don't want to be like him. He reminds me a lot of coyote in our stories. The reason we told coyote stories is to help children know what not to do, we'd be like, this is what coyote did. And it bit him in the butt, you know. And so I think Trump is a modern day coyote, where he is showing us exactly what we don't want to be. And a lot of children are looking to him and being like, wow, huh - this is what it looks like when your ego runs away with itself. This is what it looks like when you get insecure, and you have to make up for your insecurities and unhealthy ways. And the men are like, this is what happens when you're a jerk to women. And so, I personally don't think his creation of whatever founder's month, whatever it's called, has had any impact on the people who believe in justice. We're not taking away Native Heritage Month, right? Like, I know a lot of teachers who like leaned into it and did even more, because he tried to change it, and are like, wow, we really got to up the ante and like, bring more lessons about Indigenous peoples into the classroom. And I think the people who aren't necessarily for justice, but also aren't necessarily against it, they've been forced to be like, where are you going to stand on this? And those are like the swing voters of justice, you know, and a lot of those are swinging towards justice, because this is not cool. And the last thing I'll say about that is one of Trump's largest bases, is the south right? But, he doesn't understand that everyone in the south is Native. Everyone in the, whether, they look white or they look Black, they all are part. I lived in Alabama for a year, they're all part Chickasaw, Choctaw, Cherokee, Muskogee, Seminole, you know, they all have one Great-Grandma, that is whatever. And they are all extremely proud of that Great-Grandma. And they all have like Native stuff everywhere. You know, it's very, it's not a safe place for our African American brothers and sisters, right but when I was a Native there, I was like, superstar. It was like, "Oh, cool! You’re Native, I'm Native too!" So Trump, I think, actually pissed off a large part of his base by doing that and he doesn't have that nuanced understanding that his base is not into the anti-Native thing. Well, at least in the south, I say in North Dakota, South Dakota, they're very anti-Native, but anyways, I'll stop there. But, I just want to say I'm not scared of it. I don't think it. I don't think it even made a mark on our movement. And I think if anything is strengthened.
Ayana Young Yeah, I think Trump is this mirror. He's really showing us what we don't want to be. He's showing us how bad things can become if we choose to not be engaged with public process. And, you know, we were speaking about this before the show, but when Obama was in office, yeah, I feel like so many of us didn't really think that we had to be engaged in politics. But, what I'm feeling especially because I work so much in public land protection, the amount of rollbacks that Trump is doing. With Bears Ears, Grand Escalante, Tongass National Forest, the list goes on and on. It really awakens me to say, "Ayana, if you care about these lands, you need to get extremely engaged in public process." And the rights that I do have as a US citizen, those rights are actually responsibilities. I can't really complain if I'm not willing to be engaged. If I'm not showing up to the public process and to the tools that I have been given, and so I think moving forward 2020 is going to be such a big year for elections. And, for those of us who are feeling emboldened, and have that courage and have the capacity, and we really need to look to those people who are running for office who do support our ethics our morals, and also I want to speak to the people who have thought of running for office and say, we need more people who are willing to get into the depths of this really strange political system. This last question is, in an interview with journalist Tracy L. Barnett, you shared how, "human beings are meant to be a gift to the land." And I'm wondering, with this last response, if you could share about how we may begin to remember how to be a gift to the land?
Lyla June So my PhD work is on the intersection of Indigenous land management and Indigenous food systems and how we can recreate undomesticated Indigenous foodscapes, which are regional foodsheds, just like a watershed, but like a foodshed. This is different from gardening. This is different from intensive agriculture. This is more about helping the natural food bearing capacity of the land and facilitating that, for instance, the Shawnee Tribes in Kentucky, used to plant hickory nut, walnut, chestnut, and a whole bunch of different varieties of acorn. And these nuts were a big part of their caloric intake. And they were burned around the base of the trees to eliminate competing vegetation, low intensity burns, you know, very low intensity burns done at the right time of year by people who are experts in this type of burning, and actually, that reduce the threat of catastrophic fires. And it also injected the soil with a bunch of ash, which was super nutritious for the soil and I heard one California elder say, when we noticed the deer were getting hungry, we would do a burn. And so because that ash, creates super nutrient dense grasses, and it's sort of like a renewal of the land. And so Indigenous fire is actually responsible for the creation of the Great Plains as well, the Myaamia Tribe, for example, you know how we have a lunar calendar, and each Moon is named after a different ecological phenomenon. I believe it's in the spring; one of their moons is called the grass-burning moon. So they would go out and they'd burn some grasses and that would help with the rest of the ecological process. And so the oaks in California, for example, are very fire resistant. The bark is. And one Amah Mutsun elder from Santa Cruz said that their rule of thumb was 14 trees per acre, which helps the trees who were competing for limited nutrients and water and sunlight to all be healthy. So, you have a handful of very, very healthy trees instead of a whole thicket of very, very weak and unhealthy trees. So the National Park System started or partly started by the racist man, John Muir. God bless him. But one of his quotes is, "A strange and dirty life these half witted savages live in the wilderness." You know, he literally thought we were dirty, stupid pests; he thought that we were pest to the land. So, what did they do and take, for example, Yosemite, they removed all the Indigenous peoples and along with it, they removed the Indigenous fire that applied a gentle pressure to the land, that actually maintained the whole system and reduced the threat of catastrophic fire. Because the fuel load on the ground wasn't building up and building up and building up which is what the Smokey the Bear policies do. So, he removed the Indigenous peoples from the land and what do we get? We get a lot of thickets, you know, tree tickets, understory thickets, and when the trees get really close together, for one thing, they are usually deprived of nutrients because they're all competing for limited nutrients, so that weakens their immune system and when their immune system is weakened, the bugs the you know pine beetle bugs, different types of viruses can just rip through these forests because their trees are so close together, they could just wipe out the whole forest. That's what I mean by we can be a gift to the land.
So, what if we could become a people where the presence of humanity is actually what helps everything go around, helps the world turn. And this matches with what a Yoruba elder told me or told all of us at the world parliament, or Parliament of World Religions in Toronto last year, he said, in the Yoruba language, the word for human being is "chosen one." And at first I was like, that sounds kind of weird but then he started explaining it more and he said, you know, "we were chosen to be the stewards of the land." And that really sparked something in me for some reason. I was like, wow, maybe just maybe the Earth doesn't just like humans, but maybe she actually needs us. Maybe this brain we were given by Creator is supposed to be used to groom the land, to maintain the land to make sure the deer have grass to eat, to make sure the buffalo how grass to eat by burning patches on the plains, and making sure that the desert is taken care of, you know, my people, we eat yucca fruit, we eat sumac berry we eat wolfberry, we eat rice grass, making sure that all the other animals have berries to eat too. Planting berries along the desert scape, receding the land, burning the land and low intensity fires where necessary, pruning the land, taking care of the beavers. Everything has a purpose here, every single thing. Would you know, Creator just make humans and it was like an accident? My people would say no, humans are not an accident. We are supposed to be here. We belong here. It's just when coyote infiltrates us and tries to turn us into his vibe, which is all about enslaving and power and hierarchy, that's when we lose touch with our true purpose on the land. And so how do we come back to becoming medicine for the land. And I think one way you can do that is to plant a pollinator garden. You know, that's one simple thing. Human beings can plant seeds, we have these hands, we have soil, we have water. If you plant a whole bunch of flowers that pollinators like, you are being medicine to the land; it's not that hard. And have that kind of thinking and expand it to other ways as well.
Ayana Young From my heart to yours, I'm so grateful for you, my sister. Thank you for joining us today and I want to say to listeners that they can purchase a copy of Lifting Hearts Off The Ground: Declaring Indigenous Rights in Poetry, and all of the proceeds will go directly towards uplifting Indigenous communities. And you can find the collection at commonword.ca. So please support this amazing initiative and really start to understand this declaration a bit better through Lyla's beautiful words. So, thank you so much, Lyla. And I know you are a busy, busy person. So go on and continue with your amazing force in this world.
Thank you for listening to this special episode of For The Wild Podcast. The music you heard today was from Lyla June. Lyla also takes her books on tour with her so you can buy a copy of one of her shows. You can also sign up and make a donation to attend Lyla’s webinar, Medicine Theory happening on December 14. Instructors will be teaching about being in solidarity with Indigenous communities, as well as practices in Indigenous hydrology and climate resilience. All proceeds will go towards the protection of natural springs and water resources at Indigenous sacred sites. Sign up at https://lylajune.wixsite.com/medicinetheory. A shout out to the team members who created this episode, March Young, Eryn Wise, Erica Ekrem, Carter Lou McElroy and Aiden McRae.