Ayana Young  Hello. I'm Ayana Young and I welcome you to Unlearn & Rewild where we explore radical ideas relating to Earth renewal. Today, we are speaking with Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer. 

Dr. Kimmerer is a mother scientist, writer, member of the Citizen Band Potawatomi and distinguished teaching professor of Environmental Biology at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse, New York. She is also the founding director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment. The Center's mission is to create programs which draw on the wisdom of both Indigenous and scientific knowledge for our shared goals of sustainability. Her research interests include the role of traditional ecological knowledge in ecological restoration and building resilience for climate change. In collaboration with tribal partners, she and her students have an active research program in the ecology and restoration of plants of cultural significance to Native people. She is active in efforts to broaden access to environmental science training for Native students and to introduce the benefits of traditional ecological knowledge to the scientific community in a way that respects and protects indigenous knowledge. Dr Kimmerer has authored numerous literary essays and scientific papers on restoration and plant ecology, as well as the award winning books Gathering Moss and Braiding Sweetgrass. She lives in an old farm in upstate New York tending gardens both cultivated and wild. 

Hello, Robin. Thank you so much for being on the show. Welcome.

Robin Wall Kimmerer  Thanks, Ayana. It's a pleasure.

Ayana Young  You begin Braiding Sweetgrass with a beautiful retelling of a Native American creation story, Sky Woman Falling. Would you mind treating us to a telling of that story?

Robin Wall Kimmerer  Oh, I would be happy to. It's one of my favorites. If we begin in the beginning, people lived just as they do on Earth today, but they lived in the Sky World raising their families, cultivating their gardens. And in the Sky World, there grew a beautiful tree called by different people either the Tree of Light or the Tree of Life. And on this tree grew every kind of plant, all of the medicines, all the grasses, all the nuts, everything on this one tree. 

And one day, a great windstorm passed through the Sky world and felled this tree. And when it toppled, a great hole opened in the Sky World. A beautiful young woman who we call Sky Woman or Giizhigokwe, stepped over to the edge of that hole and looked down and it was only darkness below and she was very curious and she looked a little harder and bent a little farther and her feet began to slip on the edge of the hole. 

And so, she grabbed out onto the Tree of Life to brace herself and to stop her fall, but the branch broke off in her hand and she began to fall all by herself, falling through the darkness into this unknown far from everything that she had ever known. And of course, she was really frightened and alone and she was falling into emptiness. But as it turns out, it wasn't emptiness because below her all the Water Beings were assembled and the Geese looked up at this sudden shaft of light that was coming from the Sky World and they saw there this little speck, just a dust mote in the beam of that light. But as it came closer and closer, the Geese could see that it was a Woman spiraling toward them with her arms outstretched and her black hair billowing behind her and they knew just what to do. So they rose from the water, a whole flock of Geese. They rose as one calling, as they do, and they rose up to meet her and they caught her. They caught her on their wings. 

So in her state of great fear and worry as to what would become of her, the Geese saved her. They rescued her. And so we're taught that the very first relationship between People and the other Beings of the Earth was one of care and of responsibility. And the Geese brought Sky Woman down to the Water World where all the Water Animals were assembled because, at that time, the Earth was only Water and they understood that they couldn't hold her forever. And so the Snapping Turtle who was floating there in the Water said he would rest her on my back and "I'll hold her while we decide what to do." They knew, of course, that she couldn't live on the back of a Turtle. And so they all said, "Well, we have heard of Earth, of mud down underneath the water and that's what she needs. She needs some land to live on." 

And so all of the Water Animals said, "Well, we'll go get her some. And [unknown], that is our name for River Loon, who's the strongest of the swimmer, said, “I'll go get some.” And so he dove down deep as Loons do and he was gone for a really long time, but when he came back up and shook the water off from his beautiful black and white feathers, his beak was empty. He said, "It's too far. It's too dark. It's too cold. I couldn't do it." And so then the Sturgeon said, "Let me try;" same result. The Otter, the Beaver, all of the Water Animals tried in their turn and nobody could get the Earth till finally, the only one that was left was the little Muskrat. 

And you know, Muskrats are pretty wee little creatures, but he said, "I'll do this."And so the Muskrat turned under the water and pawed furiously and flailed his little legs and disappeared from the surface and he was gone the longest time of all, and all of his relatives were really worried at what would become of him. And indeed, before long, the little stream of bubbles rose through the water followed by the limp body of the Muskrat, and everyone wept that their small relative had given their life to try and save this woman. And then they noticed that his little paw, so like a human hand, was clenched shut, and when they opened his fingers, there was a dab of mud. 

And the Turtle said, "Here, spread this on my back," and Sky Woman took the little handful of mud and did exactly that. And in her great gratitude for the gifts and the sacrifices of all of the animal beings, she began to dance and she danced in a circle around the back of the turtle. And she was doing what we today call the Women's Dance that her feet did not leave the Earth. She was caressing the back of that Turtle and as she danced her gratitude, as she began to sing our gratitude, all of his gratitude poured forth and caused the Earth to grow and the back of the Turtle spread into what we call today our home of North America, of Turtle Island. 

 And like any good guest, Sky Woman hadn't come empty handed because remember that when she was falling from the Sky World, she had broken off a branch of the Tree of Life in her hand and so she had there the roots, the seeds, all of the nuts and berries, and she spread those seeds over the back of the turtle and the world became the beautiful green place that we are today. 

And so what this beautiful story teaches us is that in return for the care and responsibility from the animals, we human people bear our own gifts. We have to give our gifts and reciprocity for what has been given to us. And this fundamental teaching of reciprocity and responsibility for each other reminds us that in the very beginning of time, all the rest of the Creation acted as a life raft for Human people. And now, so much closer to the end, we must be their life raft in reciprocity for their gifts that they have shared with us.

Ayana Young  Thank you so much for sharing that beautiful story with us. Now across the ocean, another creation story was being told about a woman in a garden. How does the moral of the story of Eden differ and how can we see the psychological effect rippling down through history?

Robin Wall Kimmerer  Well, I'm certainly not an expert in that other tradition, but I think about Eve as an exile from the garden. She was banished from this beautiful, productive, generous landscape, and told that she had to go earn her living elsewhere. That instead of being the beneficiary of the gifts of the Earth, that she was going to have to work to rest her living out of the Earth, and that she was, in fact, she and all of her children were charged with what essentially became interpreted as a control or a domination over the Earth, as opposed to the role of Sky woman being, in a sense, a co creator of abundance of making the garden and Eve was banished from the Garden. And to me, those are such fundamentally different orientations to the world that then color how it is that we interact with the land. It almost sets up the adversarial relationship that we see today in between people and the land, people and nature, that I think is at the root of many of our environmental ills.

Ayana Young  It's so fascinating to begin to understand how our religious and spiritual stories continue to shape our relationships. And now it seems science is essentially the new religion of the West. It informs political decisions and is the foundation of our evidence based legal system.

The late Sioux academic Vine Deloria said, quote, "Science imposes highly restricted patterns upon the natural world, thereby limiting its potential for response. Scientists, and more broadly all of us, are not asking complete questions of nature and, in many cases, are asking irrelevant ones," end quote. How has science carried over the wounds of separation from nature, and why is science restrictive and not enough to understand the world we live in or to confront our greatest challenges?

Robin Wall Kimmerer  What a great question. And as a person, both of Indigenous heritage and a practicing scientist, this is a tension that I live with all of the time. And the way that I think about it is that science is, of course, or can be, a really, really powerful tool for sustainability. And I don't want to take anything away from that, but one of the reasons that science is so powerful and its explanatory power is also its limitation in that when we have this strictly materialist, reductionist worldview that explicitly separates the scientist as observer and that which we observe, let's say nature. That separation between the observer and the observed is supposed to give us great rationality and objectivity, right? And it can — if the questions that we're asking are how does it work? If the questions are reductionist, if the questions are essentially true-false hypothesis testing, science is a great tool. But the issues that we face today life is nexus for the land and people, it's all about relationship. The questions that are important are, to some extent, how does it work? We have to know that, but the more important questions are of relationship. And strict objectivity is not going to get us where we need to be if science very explicitly separates values from outcomes. And the crises that we face, I think, are at root, crises of values and relationship and orientation and science can't be the only tool. 

And Vine Deloria and other wonderful elders would often talk about the fact that we human people have four ways of knowing, at least. Frank [unknown], the great Pueblo scholar, talks about the fact that we human people have the gift of intellect that science engages. We have the mind. We have the body. We have emotion and we have spirit. And science explicitly excludes emotion and spirit as valid ways of knowing. So to me, using traditional knowledge and science together means that we can then re-engage our spiritual ways of knowing, our emotional ways of knowing, and bring those to bear in environmental problem solving as well. 

Science can be a bit of an intellectual monoculture. What we're really advocating for in the Center for Native Peoples, and many Indigenous scholars make this case as well is for. intellectual pluralism — to bring all of our ways of knowing together, mind, body, emotion and spirit. Just because science is a powerful tool doesn't mean that it's the only tool, and it's exciting to see a resurgence of other ways of knowing.

[Musical break]  

Ayana Young  Can you say a bit more about the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment? What is the mission? And can you tell us about your research program and the restoration of plants of cultural significance to Native people?

Robin Wall Kimmerer  Sure, as you mentioned in your introduction, the mission of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment is really to bring together, to bring into conversation, two great ways of knowing. Indigenous Environmental knowledge and philosophy, which we use the shorthand of TEK, or Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Scientific Ecological Knowledge or SEK. And, what we really are imagining is a garden of ideas. You know, what would it be like if we began to do environmental caretaking and indeed environmental science, using indigenous philosophical principles as the foundation? And then using the appropriate tools of science where they are the best tool. Sometimes they are, sometimes they aren't — to solve environmental problems. 

And we're really lucky to sit at the confluence of two great intellectual traditions. Our university sits in the heart of Haudenosaunee Territory, just a few miles from Onondaga Nation, which is a center for Indigenous Philosophy, particularly Environmental Philosophy. And then we have the tools of Western science represented in the nearby universities. And so we are working hard to bring these ways of knowing into conversation for the Earth that we all love. 

And some of the work that we've been doing has been in education. It's been in research and in public outreach. And as you asked, "What has been the nature of our work in terms of plant restoration?" One of the projects that we did, which was related to the disappearance of an important plant in basketry and an important sacred plant as well. In our language, we call it Wiingaashk, Sweetgrass. Linnean name, the scientific name, Hierochloe odorata, which means the sacred fragrant holy grass in botanical Latin. So Linneas has got it right. 

But our Haudenosaunee basketmaking partners had told us that Sweetgrass was beginning to decline, that they couldn't always find it in the places that they had historically gathered it, and even in the places where it was it was not as vital as it had been. And so using those observations and their hypotheses about what might be contributing to its loss, we began to work together on understanding the pressures that were put on that important plant and how we might alleviate them. 

So one of the things that we ended up learning and doing again with our Indigenous partners at Kanatsiohareke, which is a restored and renewed Mohawk community along the Mohawk River, is we did experimental restorations there. Kanatsiohareke is a cultural site where there is a great deal of work being done and in revitalization of Haudenosaunee culture, language, teachings, ceremonies, all kinds of traditional teachings. And they were doing it at a landscape that was missing a lot of plants who should be our companions and teachers so that's why we chose to put Sweetgrass back there. And I'm glad to say that that sweet grass really began to thrive there. And one of the reasons, I think, is that people embraced it and used it. The plant brought the gifts to the people. In reciprocity, the people accepted those gifts. 

And it turns out that one of the other areas of our research collaboration was about the effects of harvesting. How does Sweetgrass respond to harvesting? And a couple of the basket makers had told us that there was a difference in teaching. There were some groups of harvesters who were taught to only pick the Sweetgrass blade by blade. And the other group had said, "Well, no, we've been taught you should take a little handful and pull it up." Both groups agreed that they were taking it by the honorable harvest, never taking more than half, doing it in a respectful way, but they were taking in different ways. And so they wanted to work with us again to try to ascertain which one of those ways of harvesting was most beneficial to the Sweetgrass. 

 And one of the really cool results came when we had these restored Sweetgrass meadows and we practiced these two kinds of harvesting to see what was going to happen. But of course because it was a scientific experiment, we also had a control. We had a place where there was no harvesting. And of course, in the Western conservation paradigm, indeed, in the Western restoration paradigm, as you're familiar with, we have this idea that, again, nature and people are a bad mix. So the best thing that we could do for the plant, of course, would be to keep people away from it, right? That's how a lot of contemporary conservation works. Well, what happened when we kept people away from it? In the control plots where nobody harvested, that's where the Sweetgrass declined. Where harvesting was done by either of the traditional methods, the Sweetgrass responded beautifully. It almost doubled in numbers. And as it turns out, Sweetgrass needs people. People need Sweetgrass. It needed the disturbance of this micro harvest to reduce competition, to break the buds on the rhizome so that the plant would flourish. In response, Sweetgrass was a really amazing teacher for us to remind us that people are an important part of the thriving of this particular plant; that in order to restore the plant, we had to restore the harvesting relationship as well.

Ayana Young  It's so amazing and comforting to know the plants and humans need each other, and it's possible to truly have a healthy relationship with our plant relatives. Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Native Land Management emerged out of gradual and long lasting relationship with land, and are so interwoven with their native lands that they could be seen as an evolutionary force as well as shaped by evolution. But with the biotic collapse progressing on catastrophically short time scales, how could our course of action Be informed by traditional thought? What land management practices could be helpful in this rapid extinction period.

Robin Wall Kimmerer  It's important, I think, to remember that Traditional Ecological Knowledge is exactly as you suggested. It is adaptive knowledge that helps us adapt, but it is also continually evolving and adapting to novel circumstances. So in fact, it may be just the sort of guidance that we need as the world is changing so rapidly. And if you think about throughout the long, long human history over which Traditional Ecological Knowledge evolved, it is resilient knowledge. It is knowledge that shifts and changes, because nature is a moving target, right? It's not standing still, it's hugely dynamic. 

And so, Traditional Ecological Knowledge, I really think about as a way of being in a web of relationships. And while nature may change, while the players may change, the stage may change, I think it's the relationship to place that endures and can guide us. So these relationships, which are based in reciprocity, for example, are, I think, going to be a guide for adaptation in rapidly changing times. And you know, oftentimes we say that as the land changes, traditional knowledge is lost. We hear this from our relatives in the Far North right, who see their traditional knowledge threatened by climate change and by melting ice and the disasters that are befalling them. But I've also been taught that the knowledge itself may disappear from the people, but it's not lost because that knowledge is actually resident in the land. It's the land and the rivers and the plants and the animals that are going to teach us, and it's our relationship with them that is going to enable us to learn. So while it's super important to maintain and revitalize traditional knowledge, I think an element of this that we also have to focus on is revitalizing our ability to learn from the land, to be better students of the land again. 

And with this theme of reciprocity and responsibility, one of the things that I think ties together a lot of traditional land management practices over the years is this notion of mutuality — that what's good for people is often the same thing that's good for land. And when I say good for people, I mean good for the lives of people in living healthful, balanced lives. I think that one of the keys to traditional land management whether we're talking about in the Cascades or in the Prairies or in the Adirondacks or in the Desert, one of the hallmarks of those traditional land management practices is that they were designed to engender biodiversity. And here we are in a biodiversity crisis where evolutionary biologists estimate that we are losing 200 species a day. It's hard to wrap your mind and of course, your heart around that kind of loss. 

So land management practices that safeguard biodiversity and, in fact, generate biodiversity are the land management practices that we need. And you look back and, probably not just look back, it's happening today too, that one of our most powerful land management tools that comes from Indigenous science is the use of prescribed fire, which was really all about creating biodiversity in the landscape. Because biodiversity translates to the well being of people who live on the land. You don't have all your eggs in one basket. You have multiple food sources, multiple fiber sources. By creating a mosaic in all sorts of successional stages, a mosaic of habitat stages, the greater the biodiversity, the greater choices and resilience people have about how to live in a changing landscape. And I'm sad to say that so many of our contemporary resource management practices really yield homogeneity. They yield uniformity of just the one thing that people say they want as a commodity, generally speaking. And I think that's so wrong-headed that we can learn from traditional land management practices to once again adopt those practices that both safeguard and regenerate biodiversity.

Ayana Young  So if I could distill down my thinking on how to get through this bottleneck of convergent crises, I'd say there are three areas of struggle that rise above the rest. One, ecological restoration on a massive scale. Two, activist resistance to slow or halt the destruction. And they're working to refashion the collective psyche with a land ethic of reciprocity. You've contributed generously to all these areas, and I'm wondering, how do you prioritize these things? Where are you being called to serve?

Robin Wall Kimmerer  Yeah, what a good question because they are all facets of what we need to do, aren't they — the resistance, the restoration, and changing the way that we think? And throughout my career, I think I've been part of all of those, but what I've really come to understand is that in doing restoration on the small scale, on the large scale as well, I can't help but remember — and it's always in your face, isn't it, when you're doing restoration work — that as we heal parts of the landscape, we're simply going to, in a sense, replicate damages unless we also heal our relationship to place. I've come to the thinking that it's not just the land that's been broken. The land is broken because our relationship to land is broken, and so much of the healing that we need to do is healing of land, healing of water, yes, resistance against those forces of environmental destruction.But fundamental to that at the deepest level is, as you wisely say, this notion of our collective psyche. It comes to worldview, I think. I think it circles right back to where we began, Ayana, with our stories — like creation stories that guide us into thinking about what is our relationship with place? 

I really think that my work right now in reciprocity for all the gifts that the Earth has given to me is to try to work through story to change the story of our relationship to place. As I expect you know, Gary Nabhan, our wonderful colleague, thinker, botanist, restoration ecologist, has this wonderful phrase, "We don't need to just restore, we need to re-story." In doing re-storyation, we have to reclaim another way of seeing ourselves in relationship to the world. 

And so much of the root cause, I think, of these multiple and convergent crises that you speak of, come from human exceptionalism, quite honestly — through a worldview which sets human beings apart from the rest of nature, that says that this one species, Homo sapiens, is somehow more deserving of all of the gifts of the world, and that other beings are just disposable things, disposable objects in a way. And that kind of thinking of human exceptionalism, of creating this hierarchy in which all the rest of creation, all these millions of other species don't matter, that they don't have the same right of personhood that humans do. I think that is the root of the crises that we face today. So so often our environmental solutions — you know, I laughingly think that it's all about changing light bulbs — but what we really need to do, I think, is to change ourselves and to change our worldview and reclaim this ancient way of knowing that saw ourselves as one member of the democracy of species, that we work in partnership with all other beings, that we are not above them or over them dominating or controlling them, but that we work humbly in partnership with them. And that's the kind of shift in collective psyche and worldview that I think can save us.

Ayana Young  Thank you for that. Modern society is increasingly disconnected from the labor involved in our daily provisions. Our needs for food, medicine and shelter are met by the exploitation of humans and planet, and we're really getting the chemical equivalence of those things. A theme that emerges throughout your books is the way daily labors have traditionally kept us in sync with the land and you illustrate this exquisitely through the maple syrup harvest. Can you take us through that string of thought?

Robin Wall Kimmerer  Absolutely. To me, our absence from the living world, our absence of having our hands in the dirt or our hands on a sap bucket or a basket full of berries has separated us from our greatest teachers in the living world, and it has separated us from some of the things that make us uniquely human. I love the way you'd call that labor. It is. You know, it's hard labor, digging potatoes and cutting firewood and all of that, but it's so joyful as well because you feel in relationship with place and surrounded by all of your teachers, in a way. 

And I think, honestly, it makes us lonely. You know, when you go get your food just from the grocery store all shrink wrapped, you don't even have relationship with the being who made that for you. We think of it as a commodity, as a product. Again, it's this notion that it commodifies nature and makes these gifts from the rest of the world, things that we're entitled to, and not gifts at all. And this idea of once again, feeling as if, recognizing that we live in a world made of gifts, not a world made of stuff changes everything. Because when somebody gives us a gift — that somebody who might be a Raspberry what might be a Maple Tree. When somebody gives us a gift, we are immediately called to gratitude. We know what to do. We feel that gratitude, and we feel the reciprocity that in return for the gift that's given to us, we want to give a gift in return. And that kind of gift economy with nature is a fundamental form of reciprocity, and it comes back to our labor, doesn't it? Because our labor, our work with the land, is a way of paying back for what has been given to us that we then care for the land and for the place through our labor that has supported us. 

But the problem is, of course, that when you get a shrink wrapped, plastic encased, suffocating basket of berries at the grocery store, it's really hard to see through that, to understand that it is varied persons who have given you those gifts. We just think of them as stuff like they were made in a factory. So renewing our subjective relationship with place, I think, is at the part of renewing that relationship of reciprocity — to see the world as made of gifts and not of natural resources.

Ayana Young  This brings up the tricky situation we're in now. If 7 billion people all rushed into the forest to go foraging, assuming they knew what was edible, many species would be picked to oblivion. Delicate communities would suffer. So how would the concept of the honorable harvest be applied to this grossly imbalanced situation?

Robin Wall Kimmerer  Thank you very much for asking that because oftentimes when we renew our relationship to place, people think, again, that well, that means, in renewing my relationship to place, I want to be a forager. I want to wildcraft all of these things. The world cannot bear the weight of 7 billion wildcrafters, it just can't. So this notion of the honorable harvest as a set of guidelines that govern ethically how we take from the Earth needs to be applied to the 80% of folks who live in urban areas today who aren't physically engaged with the source of their food. But I think, well, they're certainly economically engaged and I think can be philosophically engaged as well. 

One of the first precepts of this Indigenous canon of how we take from the Earth is to take only that which you need. And self restraint is a powerful mechanism of enacting reciprocity with the land, of remembering that these are the lives of other beings. And so you only take what you need, and that, of course, has immediate consequences for our carbon footprint, doesn't it? Because we know that climate change is driven by consumption. And so one of the steps which is available to everybody is simply to consume less, to separate our needs from our wants and that's one of the most important elements of the honorable harvest.

Ayana Young  And what role would you guess cities will play in humanity's future? And will urbanity always be an obstacle to rewilding and connection to natural communities and traditions?

Robin Wall Kimmerer  Oh, I don't think so. It's such a myth to say that nature is out there. It's outside the urban zones. There's a wealth of natural ecosystems, of course, in the city. Cities, as we know very well, are some of the most efficient places to live, right, with a relatively lower impact than, say, you know, complete continuing development and suburbanization and urban sprawl and so forth. The denser we live, the more efficiently we live, the better for patterns of resource use, of course. 

But that doesn't mean that we have to be disconnected from nature. Whether you live in Manhattan or rural West Virginia, you're still part of a human natural ecosystem. So I think we have to, again, learn to honor and name and feel part of the ecosystem in which we live. There's a heck of a lot of urban foragers aren't there who are building relationship and supplementing their diets with the weedy, very valuable, courageous, brave little plants who live among us in the city? So I don't think it has to be either-or. There are tremendous ecological benefits of urbanization in terms of reduction of our environmental impact, but I think we just have to work harder and perhaps see differently how we live in a web of relationships in urban nature.

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Ayana Young  Quote, "We can starve together or feast together. All flourishing is mutual." Can you explain the phenomenon of mass fruiting which your ancestors experienced in the pecan groves of Oklahoma? And what is your hypothesis of how these trees synchronize their fruiting all across the state? And what can we learn from the collective mentality of the forest?

Robin Wall Kimmerer  In that essay about mass fruiting of trees, I really draw on this phenomenon as a teacher for people, because, indeed, I do view the forests and as all elements of nature as our teachers. We think about this emerging science of biomimicry, right, how we can use the way that other beings live to create innovative products for ourselves. What I'm really interested in is not so much of that kind of biomimicry, but a kind of cultural biomimicry of looking and seeing how nature is organized and how we might learn from that in terms of how we live our lives, both individually and collectively. 

The question of mass fruiting...This ability of trees for many families, but in North America, often from the families related to the oaks...This idea of simultaneous fruiting every so often, followed by times when there's not a single acorn or black walnut or pecan to be found is, for me, a teaching about sticking together, about acting as one. Ecologically speaking, what we find is that when all of those trees engage in mass fruiting and produce all their fruits at once, what tends to happen is that it saturates the desires of all of those seed predators. All of the squirrels, shall we say, that are out there to eat those acorns or those pecans are going to have everything they need to eat in one year. So much surplus that some of those nuts that they hide there they don't eat or they are going to forget about and so the next generation of the forest is regenerated from those surplus seeds. 

And then in the next year, when there's a big squirrel population having been fat and happy from the year before, suddenly there are no nuts. And so what the trees are doing in their self restraint is quelling that predator population, the squirrel population, bringing it back into balance, so that a few years later, when all of those trees do provide seeds, again, it's when the squirrel population really needs it. So the squirrels and the trees are working together to achieve a balance which enables the trees to flourish and enables the squirrels to flourish. So to me, that's one of these teachings of all flourishing is mutual. And can we design our societies with that in mind? What benefits one benefits all. And that we need to know enough about how the natural world works to devise solutions that are good for everybody. Evolution has produced just such systems, and we need to be mindful of them and learn from them.

Ayana Young  At one point in history, people were considered to be ecosystem engineers in a beneficial sense. I cling to a dream that one day we can collectively remember our role and, once again, harmoniously re-enter the wild web of life. As far as you can tell, what are some of the beneficial ecological functions of humans? Who did we co-evolve with and who would miss us if we were gone?

Robin Wall Kimmerer  That's a great question. Who would miss us if we are gone? In many situations, of course, human beings — when we view ourselves primarily as consumers — the rest of the world, any cases we think might just go on perfectly well without us. But I'm not sure that that's true. In fact, I'm pretty sure it's not true, because human beings in their practices on the landscape, some of these traditional land management practices we're speaking of a few minutes ago can actually enhance biodiversity and can enhance the well being of other elements of the ecosystem. Human beings can be caretakers of place if done in such a way that we are mindful of our role as humans in creating balance. And there are situations in which ecological dominance occurs when there is not adequate what ecologists call natural disturbance. You tend towards homogeneity when there isn't enough disturbance to create a mosaic of different habitat types and different opportunities for other species to flourish. This is something that ecologists have come to call the Intermediate Disturbance Hypothesis, that you can disrupt competitive dominance by creating opportunities for other species, and human people can be really good at that. That's what prescribed fire is doing. That's what sustainable harvest does is to create this kind of balance that allows all different life forms to flourish. 

So reestablishing that balance is, I think, a step in the direction toward the vision that you suggest, but it has to be in balance. It's not Don't consume. It's Don't consume too much. It's finding that middle ground where human people can be co creators of abundance, but not to dominate the landscape.

Ayana Young  As many human people are awakening to Earth's dilemma of biodiversity loss and the suffering of practically all life, many of them want to stand up and be active and engage in the world's problems. At the same time, many non native humans are awakening toTraditional Knowledge of Indigenous peoples wanting to learn and be a part of these traditions. So how can non native people offer kinship and allyship to Indigenous people without engaging in cultural appropriation?

Robin Wall Kimmerer  I would want to direct your listeners to a wonderful piece of artwork which has been created by the Syracuse Cultural Workers. It's a piece of artwork which is a list. It's called, How to Be an Ally to Your Native Neighbors, and I wish I had it here in front of me. It's quite beautiful and deep in answering the question that you pose. So that's an important resource. 

I think that one of the dangers when enthusiasm grows for Indigenous ways of knowing and recognition of the power of Indigenous ways of knowing that we be very careful in terms of the respect and avoidance of cultural appropriation that comes with that. That Indigenous knowledge speaks so deeply of acting from a relationship with your local landscape, with the landscape that feeds you, with the watershed that cares for you. And I think one of the most powerful things that can be done in allyship with Native peoples and allyship with the Land herself, is to create authentic relationship with your home place. To ask yourself, what is it that you love too much to lose, and then design a plan to fight for it, to protect it in your own way without often the impetus to borrow from Native peoples, but to create an authentic sense of place, to become oneself native to place. And the way that that happens is by paying deep attention to your landscape and to learning from it. That, I think, is really the essence of sense of place. It's the essence of Traditional Knowledge.

Ayana Young  Thank you for shedding some light on that very important and sensitive topic. You've spoken about how the language we use in English to refer to our non-human Earthmates is deeply dishonoring to their aliveness and their personhood. Can you speak about how it's much more than just a grammatical problem, but a form of linguistic imperialism? And how do you propose we change our tune?

Robin Wall Kimmerer  Well, we talked a few moments ago about this notion of human exceptionalism as being at the root of many of our environmental pathologies, quite honestly. That is coded in the English language, and perhaps in other languages as well. And what I mean by that is that in English, you are either a human or you are a thing, right? When we talk to one another, we wouldn't ever say about our grandmother, "Oh, look, it's sitting in a rocking chair. It's drinking tea." We just wouldn't say that, because we rob her of personhood. We show her disrespect. We eliminate ourselves from kinship and compassion. But if you think about it in English, that's exactly what we do. This powerful form of linguistic imperialism was when we began to speak English that we had to 'it' the world because English is structured in that way. 

When I began learning my own language, and I'm just a bare beginner in doing so, one of the challenges and one of the beauties of the language is that we don't speak of the living world ever as 'it.' We speak of the living world with the same grammar that we use for our grandmother, for our brothers and our sisters and our uncles and our grandfathers because they are our family. We give them that same kind of respect. And so I really worry that this worldview, this collective psyche, we've been talking about is conditioned by the language that we speak. It's represented in English's 'it'ing of the natural world. And that, as I said, in Anishinaabe, in my language and in other Indigenous languages, that nature is subject, not object. 

So I've been doing a fair bit of thinking about how we might remedy that and one of the things that I've wondered about is, could we craft an alternative pronoun so that we don't have to speak of the living world as if it was nothing, as if it was just stuff. In our language, the word for the Earth is Aki. And one of my elders, Stuart King, gave me this beautiful word, [unknown]-aki, which means a living being of the earth. And so I've been wondering and thinking about using that syllable 'ki' to slip in next to 'he' and 'she' in place of 'it.'So that when we go to humbly ask for the gift of sap from those Maples as spring comes, we don't say, "I'm going to go tap 'it.'" We say, "Ki is giving us sap this spring." It fundamentally causes us to stop for a minute and reflect on the fact that that Tree, that Maple Tree, is another being, is another person. 

We also would need to have a plural pronoun, and fortunately, we have that word already in English. If we use 'ki' as the singular pronoun we add an 'n.' We're saying 'kin' when we talk about collectively living beings so that when those Robins come back to us in the springtime, we can say, "Oh, our kin have returned to us. Welcome. We're so glad to see you." So that every time we talk about the living world, instead of reducing it to object to stuff, we honor them as our relatives. So that's a thought experiment I've been playing with in terms of changing our language. 

But most importantly, we have to change the way that we think, the way that we behave, to extend personhood to other beings. And this can be a really small thing, but it can also be a huge thing. If we look at, for example, the constitutions of Indigenous led nations like Bolivia and Ecuador, they have in their constitutions the personhood of nature, the rights of Mother Nature. We look at the Maori-led movement in New Zealand where their sacred Whanganui River was granted the rights of legal personhood. Another example being the rights of Mother Nature Movement that before the United Nations today is the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth, which would extend personhood to the land herself. And this, I think, is the fundamental shift in worldview that we need, is the recognition of the personhood of all beings. As opposed to in this country, where the only things, shall we say, that have personhood are humans and corporations and no personhood granted for Maple Trees and Blue Birds. 

What I've really come to honor and so appreciate is that I think what we're engaged in is collective remembering. We know these things. We know these things intuitively. The land speaks it to us all the time, but we're conditioned not to listen to that and so what is most hopeful for me is that we are remembering our relationship with the living world, and that that's why these ideas resonate with us because we already know them to be true.

Ayana Young  Oh, thank you so much, Robin for this beautiful conversation. You've helped guide us on this journey to dive deeper and challenge our conditioning, our relationships with each other, the land and all that stems from her. Do you have a website you could share with our listeners?

Robin Wall Kimmerer  They can certainly go to the website for the Center for Native Peoples in the Environment at SUNY ESF, and I would refer them also to the books that you mentioned and the books of many other writers. The beautiful thing is that there's so many of us working in this direction. It's very heartening. So thank you so much for these good conversations and for your work, Ayana, it's really important. Thank you.

Ayana Young  You've been listening to Robin Wall Kimmerer on Unlearn and Rewild. I'm Ayana young. The show is produced by March Young. 

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