Transcript: TUSHA YAKOVLEVA on the Invitation of Invasive Plants /307
Ayana Young Hello and welcome to For The Wild Podcast. I'm Ayana Young. Today I'm speaking with Tusha Yakovleva.
Tusha Yakovleva A similar question is what memories do we need to cherish for the sake of a just and reciprocal future and it’s really hard for me to imagine that the memories of categorizing the more-than-human world into binaries of good and bad, especially during a time of great biodiversity loss, will hold much wisdom for generations yet to come.
Ayana Young Tusha Yakovleva is an educator, gatherer, and ethnobotanist whose work revolves around generating strong, respectful relationships between plants and people. Tusha’s botanical knowledge is rooted in rural and urban lands within northern temperate forests across two continents. The foundations of her life-long foraging practice come from her family and first home - the Volga River watershed in Russia - where tending to uncultivated plants and mushrooms for food and medicine is common practice.
Tusha’s efforts in growing reciprocity between land and people have included running a wild food program, learning the gifts of weeds, working with food sovereignty groups, keeping seeds, growing perennials, organizing community gardening and forestry, and sharing the stories of plants. Tusha is the author of Edible Weeds on Farms: Northeast Farmer’s Guide to Self-growing Vegetables — a resource for wild edible plants on cultivated soils. Tusha is currently completing graduate work at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry on Onondaga Nation homelands. Her research is in support of cross-cultural partnerships for biocultural restoration and takes place under the guidance of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment. Tusha spent 15+ years in the Muheconneok/Hudson River watershed and presently lives in Ute ancestral homelands near the headwaters of the Rio Grande, where she is meeting many spiky plants and missing sphagnum bogs.
Well, Tusha, thank you so much for joining us today for one of my favorite topics, which we are about to explore, well one of many topics, so yeah, thanks for joining us on this beautiful spring morning.
Tusha Yakovleva Thank you so much, Ayana, it's good to be with you.
Ayana Young There is so much in your research that I felt connected with, and I want to read one of your quotes from your book, Edible Weeds on Farms: Northeast Farmer’s Guide to Self-Growing Vegetables, and it’s “Weeds love disturbance and (most) humans love to disturb. And thus, humans and weeds share a long, intertwined history. For anyone who has ever turned the soil, weeds are our ancestry and our inheritance.” And I really am feeling connected to your words, especially as the weeds in my garden are just reaching for the sky taking over everywhere they can. So many of my neighbors are attempting to really have some neat and tidy gardens where mine looks pretty wild. So I just want to dive into this topic of this intertwined history of humans and weeds and explore some of these notions together.
Tusha Yakovleva Sure, I would love to. Well, I think firstly, we need to define our terms. Weeds is a very well-known word, but its definition is a little bit slippery. There are no weeds in botany, a weed is really in the eye of the weeder. And it's a significant group of plants, but it's really not contained within any sort of specific botanical definition. Sort of an ephemeral concept defined according to the relationship between a person and the plant in a given time and place. So it's forever subject to context and nuance.
That being said, of course, the term does have a strong reputation. I think in my mind, it's associated with two general characteristics. One is that it's referred to plants who are often vilified and who are unwanted in a lot of circles. And of course, the word itself has come to be applied beyond plants as well to mean undesirable or useless. And it also reverts to an ecological niche, the majority of plants who are considered weeds, not all, are early successional species, and who specifically thrive in disturbance in those soils. So there are plants who live near people since we move soil so frequently, and in that, perpetually reset the successional clock back to an ideal habitat for where the so-called weeds to germinate.
Now I want to spend a little time sort of setting a foundation for our relationship through time through the lens of agriculture. And, of course, there are many other ways to tell the story, but in relation to agriculture, that's really one of the birthplaces of so-called weeds. And that's not to say that plants who thrive in bare mineral soils didn't exist before fields were cultivated, but they certainly didn't have as much perfect habitat to live on and they were less likely to get in the way of human activities. I think. There's archaeological evidence that shows that wild plants co-evolved very rapidly alongside planted crops in the early days of farming. And many millennia later to this day, agriculture and weeds are still inextricably linked in this coevolutionary dance. But of course, today there's an accompanying robust industry and sort of associated scientific literature that offers solutions to the so-called problem of weeds.
Yet in my research I see, I rarely hear the question of whether these plants belong in disturbed soils. So, growing season after growing season through activities such as farming and beyond agriculture, other soil disturbance events like building, mining, cutting forests, many people inadvertently sow more and more weeds. Coming back to agriculture, you know, somewhere along this joint history, the pressures of capital accumulation and affinity for planting and straight lines allowed many of us to forget the gifts of wild plants. And then from there, coaxing medicine or nutrition, and maintaining healthy soils came to be seen as the jurisdiction of precise science, with no space for unruly spontaneous ways of wild plants. And in fact, they came to be seen as competing against the very gifts that they have provided for so long, to people. Now, I think the dominant extractive narratives continue to place cultivated and wild plants into dichotomy. And any positive attributes of weeds and disturbed spaces are often silenced in lieu of the difficulties that they present to farmers, builders, and other human keepers.
And this perspective leaves out all of that entwined ecological history of weeds and cultivated crops, but also the genetic collaboration between weeds and crops and also the cultural cooperations between weeds and people. I don't think there's a hard line between weeds and so called vegetables, cultivated vegetables. The plants that we have come to know as vegetables today are the product of so called weeds being selected and tended by generations of gardeners. They're essentially a product of ethnobotany, of people and plants stepping into long-term committed relationships. Long-term committed relationships have spectacular patience and spectacular effort by people with long rooted ties to places who select wild plants for traits that provide generously to human communities. And this is not work that's frozen in the past. It's ongoing, it's intergenerational, and it's been undertaken largely primarily and say, by Indigenous communities across the planet.
So today's weeds might be the crops of tomorrow, and today's crops were the weeds of yesterday. And I think one important point in this genetic collaboration is also just that the present day wild plants continue to support agriculture by carrying beneficial genetic traits, like dense nutrition or pest resistance, or particular drought resistance, or in particular, ability to withstand climactic stressors. And then, yeah, I also want to talk about the cultural cooperations between the plants and people. This too I see as immemorial practice, people have only ever relied on plants for pretty much all of our needs, we’re really nothing without plants, being those urgent and our frequent needs are often met by plants that are most readily and abundantly accessible. And so many such essential plants are now best known as weeds. They're the plants who have traveled around the world and the pockets of immigrants are carried with you know, with intention as precious holders of nourishment and healing. And yeah, the last thing I want to say is plants have always moved around the planet. As people began moving greater distances at greater speeds, the plants followed. So people became very impactful seed dispersers in the history of Turtle Island, that's that's especially true for settlers, as you quoted my work in the beginning. I see newcomers to Turtle Island as contemporaries with weeds, and our lives and histories as being in great synchronicity.
Ayana Young Yeah, there's so much in that response that I'm thinking of which part to dive deeper into. It's interesting because I feel that especially industrial agriculture works so hard to control and to grow what may not even want to be grown on the land that they are attempting to, yet weeds grow so abundantly. I'm thinking of dandelions, for instance, dandelion is a green that is edible, it's medicinal, and it wants to grow. It really wants to spread, it wants to be prolific, yet, instead of us allowing the dandelions to nurture and nourish us, we poison the dandelions and then force some cultivated green to grow in places that they're not trying to grow. And I guess I want to speak to this resistance, and the resistance we have as a dominant culture to plants. And what it would look like for our food system, if we actually allowed for more space for the plants to choose how not how much they want to give us exactly, because I know that we can't just be completely free in our growing methods. But I just think that there's something here, the struggle and the fight and not actually seeing what does want to give abundance. And so I'm wondering if there's anything in that that pulls on you?
Tusha Yakovleva Yeah. Well, I think maybe picking up the thread from dandelions,, I think they are such a good example of dominant cultures' amnesia about the gift of these spontaneous plants. They proliferated on Turtle Island after European settlers planted them near their homesteads, for food and for medicine and then it wasn't until about a century ago that their reputation soured, and they were no longer welcomed in front of people's homes, replaced by lawns. So I think that says a lot about just kind of forgetting our place in the circle of beings. None of us lead lives independent of other creatures with whom we share home, we are not exempt from interdependence. Yeah, in my mind, there's a sort of circle of beings as a synonym for the wild basically, which is everything that is all around us, always, including ourselves, and this encompasses all the beings whose lives fulfill our needs for survival. Weedy plants are not excluded.
So I think the placement of weeds in contrast with the wild or even with human desire, is this part of this great othering that so many guests on For The Wild have spoken to so eloquently, but of course we are the same, the wild is us and we are the wild, and weeds are kin. And I think there's a prevailing myth of the self made person but how can anyone who can a person whose body runs on plants and water be self made? I think the dominant culture praises extractive ways of being that encourage us to to categorize the world into useful and useless and perpetually take action to increase the former and an erase the ladder. And I see this as a fearful way of living, but also just lends to forgetting that plants have made our bodies and that our lives depend on other creatures. I feel like I've gone off on a bit of a tangent.
Ayana Young Tangents are good, Yeah, no I appreciate being able to run free with our minds. And I think something else that I was getting at is this Judeo-Christian origin story is one of dominion over the land. We see this informing the dominant invasive species management strategies within industrial, western societies. What is another story we might tell ourselves about our relationship with spontaneous plants? What management practices emerge from that re-storying?
Tusha Yakovleva Yeah, thank you for that question. I mean, first of all, I think stories are there for remembering, the essential purpose of storytelling is to carry memories and to share through time. So maybe another way to ask a similar question is kind of what memories do we need to cherish for the sake of a just and reciprocal future. And it's really hard for me to imagine that the memories of categorizing the more than human world into binaries of good and bad, especially during a time of great biodiversity loss will hold much wisdom for generations yet to come. So specific to plants of weedy proclivities, we can start by telling stories that aim to see them as beings in their own right, rather than beings in opposition to human desire.
It's abundantly clear to me that whatever new stories we tell ourselves or old ones that we remember, we have to center reciprocal livelihoods rather than a hierarchy of needs with humans placed at the top. At least, these are the stories we're in dire need of telling ourselves if humanity is to have any hope of the future, which includes us. And, I do see the story of Dominion fully expressed in the sort of management policies of weedy or invasive species within westernized societies. And it's interesting that this narrative around the management makes these plants and animals sound like such great threats that that one could assume that they only occur within the political boundaries of the management agency making policies. Yet, of course, these beings do not adhere to political borders. And moreover, they have diverse rich relationships with other beings that they're in community with, there are plenty of humans and more than humans who have stepped into a relationship of mutual care with these vilified plants. There are endless examples of pollinators who turned to Japanese knotweed for late season nectar, basketmakers returning to kudzu for their strong flexible fibers, water which is supported by Phragmites and phytoremediation.
I think that yes, there's great grief and heartbreak and the loss of ecosystems, and then there's great work happening and preventing further such loss. But there are also so many habitats that are changed to a point that it's not really an option to return to previous species composition, at least not without extremely violent interventions that might have no end. So I think in habitats like that, that are kind of altered beyond recognition to a new state, we need to make time and space to grieve the loss of those who have left and then learn to celebrate those who are here in this particular moment in time with us. So I think one place to look for better stories is to listen to people who have found ways to relate to weedy plants in question, in ways that are culturally and ecologically supportive. All plants are embedded in cultures of people and invasive species. So weeds are no exception. They're not without culture or stories, they have them within the places that they originate from. And many of them have new stories in places that have adopted them. So I think by listening to people who are in a deep lived relationship with these plants or have ancestral knowledge of them from their first range, we can begin to see to build a bridge of understanding. I guess the roles such plants may take on when they move into a new place, into a novel range. And I also think that's the most minimum level of respect that we can extend, to hear the plant stories before determining that they don't belong, need to be eradicated. And I think we could also tell ourselves better stories just as animals whose mere existence impacts plants.
And there's a story that's so often told right now, it's really shouted in desperate urgency in this time of great loss of biodiversity and loss of known ecosystems and familiar climates, which is that people, all people are negative forces in the natural world, with the environment on one side and humans on the other. This idea, I think, bumps up against another pervasive idea that humans are the worst invasive species of them, and that we should choose to stay as still as we can, and leave all more than human beings alone, if we want to have any hope of supporting their livelihoods. I think the philosophy of our story of Leave No Trace, which instructs people to minimize their impact on the environment, as a form of ecological care, has some intersections with this stance. But no, I think no matter what, people do leave traces everywhere we go, because we are interdependent members within. Within every ecosystem we placed our bodies into part of the circle of kinship, whether we know it, whether we like it or not. But there are different traces that one can leave. And that's something we do have a choice. And so right relation stories could start with the recognition of traces people leave on the land that support other beings and in mutual thriving. Everywhere that we are, is someone's garden, sometimes it's a human's garden, sometimes more-than, so maybe our new stories can begin by asking the question is my presence supporting this garden in regenerating biocultural, diverse thriving. Every land has its people and anyone currently walking on that land has the responsibility to honor the rich cultural and ecological legacies of place, and also to give back to that land and to its plants, and to their people, and at least tell stories that don't continue to interrupt traditional stewardship pathways.
Ayana Young This topic, or this feeling, this very misanthropic feeling, that humans, the best thing humans can do is to stay away from the land, stay away from nature, because if we come close to our more than human kin, we will consume, extract, destroy, disturb negatively, impact negatively. And I know for a long time, I absolutely felt that to be the truth and even though I think in some cases, it is true, it's also impossible for us as humans to be alive and to not have impact on this earth and to not consume. It's an impossible situation we find ourselves in. And so I'm wondering, what nuances can we find with our relationship with the earth knowing that we're kind of between a rock and a hard place where we can't be separate? We're not separate. And yet so many of the practices we've been taught and conditioned have been really detrimental.
I don't think that there's a one size fits all solution. I think that there are so many of us humans and land in different places need different things. I think probably there's some practices that can overlap. But I don't want to ask you well, what can we all do everywhere? Because that's just too, I mean, maybe we could have some general thoughts on that, but in this impossible time, what does right relationship look like with the land or what are some other practices or examples you have that have really stuck with you?
Tusha Yakovleva Well, I think one, one teaching that I, that I turned to over and over again, is the sort of Indigenous protocol of the honorable harvest, which I know you're well familiar with as well. I first learned of this protocol, through the words of my mentor, Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer. She frames these teachings as a covenant of reciprocity between humans and the land. And actually, I'd like to read a quick quote by her that I think is very helpful in this discussion. “The honorable harvest is a covenant of reciprocity between humans and the land. This simple list may seem like a quaint prescription of how to pick berries. But it is the root of a sophisticated ethical protocol that could guide us in a time when unbridled exploitation threatens the life that surrounds us, Western economies, and institutions, enmesh us in a profoundly dishonorable harvest and collectively by ascent or by an action we have chosen the policies we live by, we can choose again.” And what I hear in these teachings is a call to remember that we live interdependently and the only choice within our control is how we engage with our interspecies kin.
We depend on other than human relatives, and as with all families, there might be some relatives we like more than others, but picking and choosing who is relative, and who is not is only going to lead to more suffering and despair. So I guess coming back to sort of weedy relations and engagement with land, I think, a good question to ask in making these decisions, is why are certain plants and animals suddenly considered unrelated or relevant or suited for erasure out of kinship, including us. And these teachings apply to every exchange between people and the earth. And I think it can be really challenging even with the purest intentions of extending reciprocity and respect to all beings to consistently maintain an honorable approach, maintain an honorable approach with our interactions with the earth when the loudest teachings of mainstream society praise extraction and supremacy of humans over other features.
This is by no means an answer to your question. In fact, in some ways, it's the very opposite, but to be honest, one thing that helps me continue to face these challenges put up by extractive dishonorable economies is to continually remind myself that there's power and wisdom in what we, as a species, do not know. And again, coming back to weedy beings, who are we to fully know the lives of these so-called invasive plants do we know their reasons for making homes in unfamiliar soils or what gifts and responsibilities they carry? So I think, I don't know starting our stories and our engagements with the land, with this teaching, is a really strong place to come from, it's an invitation to see the world as a gift and then ask what principles we can apply in specific places, specific times to ensure that that the gift continues.
Yeah, and I guess again, to just bring things back to the weeds since this is one of our mutual interest focuses today, I think accepting this invitation is to step into a thoughtful, respectful relationship and so when we learn that ecological roles of weeds and their nutritional, medicinal, and even economic gifts, they immediately become not weeds, as weeds are unwanted. So the word just becomes an anachronism of a time before we learned to live in reciprocity with plants. I guess I yeah, just offer that as kind of an example of how one can begin considering just engaging with place.
Ayana Young It's a really important and tough practice I think in our time. I think this word honorable is challenging to truly understand if it is honorable or if it's what we want to be honorable. Honestly, I think most of us really want to be in right relationship with each other, and the earth, and we don't want to be the bad guys. We don't want to be implicated and complicit in the damage being done to our human and more than human communities. And I think a lot about who gets to decide what the honorable harvest is, or what is an honorable harvest.
I've been working in Alaska for the past few months on helping this community stop this massive mining project and old-growth logging, and I got into a really deep discussion, many deep discussions, with some local loggers here, and I live in a little cabin. And as much as I am so fervently against logging, and have been for a really long time, they're like, “Well, where does this would come from that built your house? Where does the wood come from that heats your home and your woodstove?” And, and then I thought back to living in Northern California, and all the times my myself and my really ecologically wonderful friends activist would go to Home Depot because they needed to build something and they'd get some two by fours. And it's really hard, because for those of us who want to protect the forest, but who still use wood, whether directly or indirectly, I think it becomes more complicated what an honorable harvest is. And now we could say, small scale forest management is more honorable because it's local, and it's taking from smaller areas, that maybe those areas are really ecologically important? And the sacrifice zones in Oregon and Washington that are, you know, really damaged at this point, but still growing trees, maybe that's in a sense more honorable, because it's not taking from places that are still ecologically intact. And so I’m really not saying either of these are the way, I'm sitting in the complexity, I'm sitting in the trouble of this. And really questioning how and what is an honorable harvest? You know, in this case of trees, in a time where we've lost so much, but in a time where we're still using, and I'm not sure if even those of us who are forest offenders are really not using wood. And you know, I'm raising my hand as one of them.
Tusha Yakovleva I'm sitting in that trouble right there with you.
Ayana Young Yeah, I'm just wondering if you could speak more to the honorable harvest? And who do you think gets to make the judgment on the honorable harvest? Is it something inside of us because we've built a relationship with deep time, with the land? Is it somebody outside of us? Have you explored this with your colleagues? Or just anything that's even coming to you at this moment?
Tusha Yakovleva Yeah, I mean, it's such an important complex question, the first answer that comes to my mind is it should be the people whose homes these honorable harvest decisions are being made in but of course, though the world and the communities within it are too complicated to be able to answer that question in such a way. And, yeah, I don't know it makes me think of the concept of biocultural restoration that, that my colleagues and I invoke a lot and we define it as the practice of restoring not just ecosystems, but the human and cultural relationships to place so that culture is strengthened and revitalized alongside the lands with which they're inextricably linked.
And of course, it's a helpful and beautiful call for restoring relationships to places, usually places that one considers home. I think so often, that place might have been stolen from other people and their ways of being and more-than-human beings who have called home for long enough to co-evolve with one another and to hold collective memory of both climatic shifts and just understanding of how to live in balance with one another and how to rely on one another for mutual care. But kind of no matter how much suffering and greed that land has seen, it remains a home for those who live there, and some stories remain thankfully, something all we can do is kind of regrow a right relationship with a place. And biocultural restoration takes many forms, but it's always about restoring that relationship between land and its people and rebuilding good relationships between people. So yeah, I don't know, I think it's just invoking that term because it feels like a cultural way of interacting with homeland that's incredibly different than prescribing a particular sustainable protocol or returning land to sort of a previous version that's frozen in time which has, which has passed. And yeah, it's a call to kind of move with curiosity and openness, and be a student of the land.
Ayana Young So many of the answers or solutions, which I don't even like those words, because I don't think that they're real anymore, but where we can get to is just more presence. And maybe these ideas of, you know, how to be better stewards and better lovers and better relatives of this earth, of the lands that we find ourselves on, is maybe presence, is the most honorable thing we can give. At this time, moving from a place of deep curiosity and slowness, even though I know it feels so intense, to want to change, to want to repair. But I find even in my personal relationships with loved ones, repair takes time and sometimes I want to rush the repair stage and I just want to be like, “Can't we just get over this already?” But you know, that's usually not what people need and I also notice in my personal relationships to repair, take space, it's like it takes a lot of presence and time and space and I need to really give that person a chunk of time that is unfettered by distractions. I really like thinking about how being in healthy personal relationships is really similar to being, for me, in healthy relationship with the land, and if I treat the land like a lover, then how I walk and how I harvest and how I tend, and how I think about the longevity of what is to come really shifts. So I think I find solace in that.
There's so much to say, but I almost want to go back to the weeds because it helps me get out of the existential esoteric wormholes, and vortexes, that just bring me to like a really airy place. Spring is here and going outside I'm finding yarrow, dandelion, and horsetail, and it's amazing to be able to go to so many places in the world and still see these really powerful medicinal allies that will just grow in so many places. Like they really just amaze me how fecund and expansive they are. And yeah, I'd like to talk a little bit about how these plants find themselves all across the world in so many different ecosystems. And maybe the second part of that question, I think it might be fun if you shared some of your practices with these weeds, how you cherish them, how you invite them into your life, and maybe inspire some of us to not overlook them so easily.
Tusha Yakovleva Well, I feel like I want to speak to the gifts that these plants offer. But wondering if you could repeat the first part of your question. That's the part I'm struggling with, about how they, how they move through the world.
Ayana Young Well, just thinking about how you can find dandelions and Alaska, in Los Angeles, in Berlin, they're just prolific. So just considering how powerful these plants are, that they find themselve, I don't want to say everywhere, which is kind of good, I guess, but a lot of places.
Tusha Yakovleva If we're to think about weedy beings as one giant plant community, then I think you could say that their society is built on their inexhaustible willingness to set roots in areas that other plants have been forced to vacate, often by human occupation, or other forces, floods and volcanoes, and that disturbance can turn place into a state that's nearly unrecognizable to the previous inhabitants. And then weeds see an opportunity to move into this newly vacant zone and quickly make themselves comfortable in rubble, which is just one of their superpowers, as you mentioned there. They travel around, they're resilient, and adaptable to so many circumstances. They raise large families and are hands off parents, they allow their children to grow pretty independently. And I think the one important lesson that they did make sure to pass on to the next generation is to be adaptable, to sort of practice seeing relationships where others might only see desolation. So their children grow fast, and they often move far, far away. But they always organize themselves around opportunity to step into relation, wherever they are, whether it's with soil, new animals, new moisture regimes, pollinators, again where other plant societies might only be able to see destruction. So I think the beauty in their approach that maybe has a lesson that can be applied elsewhere, is that weeds ameliorate the soil in places where the soil might be very, very sick and then slowly compost that destruction and desolation into habitats that are suited for less weedy plant beings.
I would say for me personally, as someone who has lived far away from my original homeland for the majority of my life, just seeing these familiar plants in different places, it's just the strongest way that I know to connect to land wherever I am, it's almost like an entry path into relationship because I know both the sort of ethnobotanical gifts and relationships that I could have with these plants, but also, I have a sense of what kind of balanced and honorable harvesting and caretaking relationships I can have with them, which is a lot more than I can say about other beings in unfamiliar habitats. And those relationships take so, so much time to have any confidence with. Yeah, so certainly, dandelions are also my lifelong ally. For me. sheep sorrel is another plant that I'm always so happy to see and have come across in many continents, throughout my travels. And that is also a plant that has such a strong memory for me, because it's one of the first memories of harvesting a plant, who was just growing themselves in a meadow, but also that sharp sour taste, and, of course, now I know, indicator of vitamin C nutrition. It has remained with me, and I imagine will remain with me throughout my life. Beautiful.
Ayana Young Well, as we come to a close, Tusha, I'm wondering if there's anything on your mind that you want to share that has yet to be shared? I'd love to just open up the floor to you.
Tusha Yakovleva Thank you. Well, I think to close, I want to spend a little bit of time touching on my more current work with the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment, and in cross cultural partnerships for biocultural restoration. And I will keep with our theme to touch on the weedy and plant relationships that intersect with that. At the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment, we're engaged in various partnerships that aspire to carry out justice for the land and in this work, we often invoke the phrase of finding balance at the speed of trust, which I first learned about from First Light Learning Journey, the organization, and it's an important framing for cross cultural relationships between humans of course, but I find it also deeply relevant in interspecies relationships involved in any bio cultural work. I think moving at the speed of trust here means learning from land, taking time to observe how things interact with each other, independent of socially constructed origin stories. As you so beautifully said, giving presents, I would also add to giving attention and respect when it comes to so called invasive species. Maybe it's taking the time to kind of find out what their reasons for being are and maybe from there, we can learn how to step into reciprocal relations with them. And yeah, as with cross cultural partnerships for the cultural associations that are between people, it's important to remember also about long term commitment to the land not just for a season or for the duration of say, grant funding, but we must draw on knowledge and memory of the past. In order to commit to the caretaking of the future, I think these cross-cultural partnerships, they've impacted my interactions with all plants so tremendously weedy and otherwise. When we consider interacting with plants or even talking about land and any of its inhabitants I see the first step to work, respect, and reciprocity is actively honoring Indigenous knowledge and sovereignty. And maybe that is the one piece of advice that can be applied across the world just thinking back on our sort of theoretical speculating on how to honorably engage in various times and places and communities. Indigenous ecological knowledge just inherently benefits all by offering practices that are placed based ecologically and culturally appropriate and sustainable, and here on the continent of Turtle Island, just like anywhere else, on the planet there, there are people who have cohabitated with the land since time immemorial, and whose language and culture and creation stories reflect a deeper relationship to place and whose knowledge and practices of science demonstrate environmental stewardship, that just incredibly benefits people and other beings, it results in healthy forests and strengthens biodiversity and air and water. And not only that, but it's exactly the land interactions, the changes that these cultures make to their home ecosystems that foster greater climate resiliency and greater biodiversity adaptation. Cultures whose records of environmental sustainability are time-tested to a degree that's so far beyond the length of human life that it can be hard to comprehend. So yeah, in closing, I guess I just want to say that for anyone aspiring to support the livelihood of diverse beings and not knowing this part of the story, and not working in alliance with Indigenous communities, who continue to carry out their commitment to the environment, in spite of all the many cruel forces that don't need to list the obvious, it's like reading a book with every third word missing.
Ayana Young Well, thank you so much for your time today, Tusha, this has been a really beautiful conversation, and I look forward to more in the future.
Tusha Yakovleva Thank you so much, Ayana. It's wonderful. And yeah, I'm grateful to be here.
Francesca Glaspell Thank you for listening to For The Wild Podcast. The music you heard today was by Ali Dineen and Violet Bell. For The Wild is created by Ayana Young, Ali Constantine, Erica Ekrem, Francesca Glaspell, and Julia Jackson.