Joshua Fouts, Bioneers Executive Director, accepts the Gold Award for a Nonfiction Series on behalf of the Bioneers Radio Series at the NY Festivals Radio Awards ceremony, considered the “Oscars” of radio.
Listen to the award winning series at https://bioneers.org/bioneers-radio/ or subscribe to the podcast wherever you get your podcasts!
Kevin Powell, a leading figure in the movement to redefine manhood and in contemporary American political, cultural and literary life as well as in the hip-hop arena, is the product of a single mother, absent father and severe poverty in his youth. In spite of those challenges, he has become an acclaimed, prolific writer, authoring 13 books, including his autobiography, “The Education of Kevin Powell: A Boy’s Journey into Manhood.”
In this short clip from his keynote at the 2018 Bioneers Conference, Powell urges men to identify toxic masculinity in their lives and eradicate it.
Watch the full keynote and learn more about Kevin Powell and his work.
By around 2044, the U.S. will become a majority-minority nation. This seismic demographic shift has triggered a cultural earthquake, provoking a radical spike in hate crimes. In times of massive disruption and economic stress, what Carl Jung called the “shadow side of the psyche” comes into play: the pronounced psychological tendency in the collective psyche is to project these shadow qualities with unusual potency onto whomever people see as “the other.” But is there also a deeper story? Perhaps the question to ask is: Who benefits? In this half hour, we hear from Heather McGhee of Demos. She sees a direct connection between today’s extreme inequality and this peak moment of racial panic and white anxiety.
Elizabeth Dwoskin, the Washington Post’s Silicon Valley correspondent, is that paper’s eyes and ears in the world of tech. For the past six years, she has covered the rise of data-hungry technology companies, online conspiracies, and Russian meddling on social media. She was part of the team that broke over a dozen stories on Russian operatives’ use of Facebook, Twitter, and Google to influence the 2016 presidential election. She’ll shine a light on our growing awareness of the dark side of Silicon Valley, and how that awareness is reshaping public policy, our understanding of democracy, and the way tech is used and built.
Introduction by Joshua Fouts, Bioneers Executive Director.
This speech was given at the 2018 Bioneers Conference. Read the full text version.
To learn more about the work of Elizabeth Dwoskin, visit The Washington Post.
View more keynotes, transcripts, and more from the 2018 Bioneers Conference.
In Food from the Radical Center (Island Press, 2018), Gary Nabhan tells the stories of diverse communities who are getting their hands dirty and bringing back North America’s unique fare: bison, sturgeon, camas lilies, ancient grains, turkeys, and more. These efforts have united people from the left and right, rural and urban, faith-based and science-based, in game-changing collaborations. Their successes are extraordinary by any measure, whether economic, ecological, or social. In fact, the restoration of land and rare species has provided—dollar for dollar—one of the best returns on investment of any conservation initiative.
As a leading thinker and seasoned practitioner in biocultural conservation, Nabhan offers a truly unique perspective on the movement. He draws on 50 years of work with community-based projects around the nation, from the desert Southwest to the low country of the Southeast. Yet Nabhan’s most enduring legacy may be his message of hope: a vision of a new environmentalism that is just and inclusive, allowing former adversaries to commune over delicious foods.
The following is an excerpt from Chapter 7 of Food from the Radical Center. Read an excerpt from chapter 2 here, and read our review of this book here.
Have you ever been hiking and stopped in your tracks to gaze at wildflowers so vibrant and abundant that you couldn’t keep your eyes off of them? Did their delicate petals bring out the color in other lives found around you—the deer, the seed-eating sparrows, the other hikers making their way along the trail?
And was it just their beauty or also their scent—exuded for bees and butterflies—that told you that one day you too might taste this sweetness?
In late May 2017, ethnobotanist Joyce LeCompte offered me an opportunity to see such a sight and take a deep whiff of such a delectable fragrance. We hightailed it out of Seattle early one morning to rendezvous with others at the Glacial Heritage Reserve in the South Puget Sound area of western Washington.
There, the native plant in lavish bloom was the blue camas lily—Camassia quamash—the signature flower of wet prairie meadows in the Pacific Northwest. That spring, camas seemed to be blooming and blanketing the entire meadow in every direction we turned.
As far as our eyes could see, their six-petaled flowers added hues of pale lilac, violet blue, and deep purple to the vivid greens and subtle tans of the open prairie.
If you happened to arrive at the reserve unfamiliar with the restoration project happening there, you could easily assume that it was first and foremost about the restoration of beauty. After all, who could object to preserving the jaw-dropping, heart-pounding natural beauty of this world we live in?
The beauty of camas lilies was not ignored by previous generations of both residents in and travelers to western Washington. As early as the 1850s, camas lily bulbs were being dug up and shipped everywhere from the Atlantic seaboard to England to grace ornamental gardens.
But don’t get me wrong; this camas lily is not just another pretty face to be sent off to Some Place Else. Its ultimate value may lie in its ability to combat adult-onset diabetes among the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest. The complex carbohydrates in camas roots slow the digestion and absorption of glucose, flattening blood sugar levels and potentially reducing stress on the pancreas.
In addition to being a traditional food of great significance to First Nations communities along the Pacific North Rim, it may be a key factor in their future health. More than twenty indigenous cultures in western Canada and the US still tend, collect, clean, and pit-roast its bulbs for special seasonal events. Many of these communities hope that camas can help keep their children free of diabetes.
Of course, some of these intertribal “root festivals” have been taking place for centuries and millennia. But now, the bulbs are being dried and stored for families to eat year-round as one more means to deal with nutrition-related diseases.
Camas is just one of those “cultural keystone plants” that is both deeply intertwined with both indigenous health and the environmental health of the wet prairies. Thus the restoration of camas in wet prairies is linked to the restoration of human health for native communities who live in or near those landscapes.
And that is exactly why Joyce LeCompte of the University of Washington wrote an incubator grant to the Center for Creative Conservation: to bring together amazing women with diverse skills—Frederica Bowcutt (botany), Taylor Goforth (environmental communications), Valerie Segrest (native nutrition), and Sarah Hamman (restoration ecology). Their own goal was to provide technical as well as social support to leaders interested in camas that are emerging in Coastal Salish tribal communities.
The multicultural team set out to restore this landscape with the appreciation that indigenous knowledge, stewardship, and use of these plants matter deeply to neighboring communities.
I doubt that it has escaped your notice, but historically, most “environmental remediation” projects were dominated by men—albeit well-intended men—who inadvertently practiced a top-down management style that echoed the military as a whole and the Army Corps of Engineers in particular.
Under the auspices of “improving the environment” to control floods and stream flow, the Army Corps drained marshes and wet meadows while planting shrubs for game birds and to stabilize soil. That’s exactly what plants like camas lilies do not need.
Few of these environmental engineers were even aware that local women were continuing to take their families out to harvest camas in places like the South Sound Prairies. As shrubs and Douglas firs moved in, camas lilies began to fade away, and harvesting became less frequent.
To reverse historic declines in camas and their traditional uses, Joyce and the other women who cohosted me have formed a multicultural “community of practice” for the edible plants and healing herbs of the South Sound Prairie.
I was heartened to see that these restoration and recovery efforts now involve dozens of indigenous harvesters, healers, and herbalists as well as land managers, botanists, wildlife biologists, fire ecologists, nutritional scientists, and ethnobotanical educators. They exemplify a trend that even the higher-ups in the US Forest Services now embrace: that diverse membership in scientific communities fosters innovation and problem-solving more effectively than communities with a narrow range of knowledge, skills, and experience.
In fact, many of the practitioners are women with a set of technical and experiential skills that ethnobotanist Kay Fowler calls “plant wifery.” Elsewhere in the Pacific Northwest, ethnobotanist Madrona Murphy might be considered one of those “midwives.” As she herself has documented, “Tribes cultivated [camas] in large gardens, subdivided into family-owned plots passed down through the generations. These were fertilized with seaweed, cleared of weeds and stones, and burned to control brush and grass.”
Building on these ancient practices, the women in Joyce’s entourage have initiated what they call “the Camas Prairie Cultural Ecosystems Incubator.” They are like traditional midwives who use plants to help “bring out of the incubator” and into full light fresh ways of engaging with other people and with the land.
Together they have crafted a stunning vision statement: “Drawing on western and indigenous ways of knowing, this project will foster the health of Salish Sea prairies and the wellbeing of people connected to them, through collaborative partnerships based in trust, reciprocity, and respect.”
As I watched this incubator team put their values into practice at the Glacial Heritage Reserve, I sensed that the women involved are first and foremost attentive to camas itself. They teach others that there is a culturally appropriate time to gather camas lily bulbs—when the lower half of the blossoms have begun to fade.
Some First Nations communities stay alert to when it is time to sustainably harvest the bulbs by what they call the “Camas Moon.” They then begin to employ particular tools and techniques for gathering camas—ones that the “plant midwife” team demonstrated with their own digging sticks during our field trip.
When the digging is done properly, the bulbs pop out of the wet soil almost on their own. Historically, a knowledgeable camas digger could harvest as much as a bushel of bulbs a day from a gathering site of a half -acre to an acre.
As some of these Coastal Salish restorationists already know, a traditionally managed gathering site should be cared for by clearing competing woody growth by hand or by burning, by replanting smaller bulbs, and by ensuring seasonal sheet flow of water across the site. They draw upon historic evidence that camas were grown by their ancestors in well- defined, meticulously cultivated populations that they tilled with digging sticks, hoed for weed control, and enhanced with bulbs they had collected from other nearby camas populations.
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Patrick Dunn—the program director with the Center for Natural Lands Management—fully sanctions the use of these historic techniques and management strategies to bring camas back to their former abundance in the Glacial Heritage Natural Area. There, initial efforts have focused on reintroducing fire and engaging volunteers to thin invasive Douglas firs, which had grown up in the prairie during decades of fire suppression.
This particular restoration effort by the incubator team also has a social justice component. The program gets many of its native plants and seeds from inmates involved in the Sustainable Prisons Project, both reducing costs and building healthy relationships.
To be sure, the Camas Prairie Cultural Ecosystems Incubator team is also committed to human goals; they teach First Nations youth about the healing power and nutritional value of camas. A week after my visit to the camas prairie with Joyce, Sarah, Taylor, and Frederica, they hosted sixty tribal members from nine different tribes for both bulb harvesting and storytelling.
The community is now drawing on both traditional knowledge and Western scientific knowledge to tend camas and restore the land. But unlike in many cases, Western science is not privileged over local, indigenous ways of understanding. Both were welcomed. Even the divide between human and nonhuman nature has shifted.
In the welcoming space that the incubator team provided, some of the participants opened themselves up to different perspectives about plants and people. Is camas not “just” a plant but a sentient being and cultural ally as well? Are the traditional practices of harvesting camas merely “consumptive” or are they “regenerative”? Is wild plant restoration a “scientific management operation” or a “lifelong practice”?
Only when trust is gradually and respectfully built among cultures can such questions be fully explored and the challenges of collaborative conservation be fully addressed. And that is exactly what the Camas Prairie Cultural Ecosystems Incubator team of women has wisely and patiently chosen to foster.
From Food from the Radical Center: Healing Our Land and Communities by Gary Nabhan. Copyright © 2018. Reproduced by permission of Island Press, Washington, D.C.
Daphne Miller, MD, had long suspected that human wellbeing and how our food is produced are intimately linked. She visited and studied seven innovative family farms around the country on a quest to discover the hidden connections between how we grow our food and our health, and she published her findings in “Farmacology: Total Health from the Ground Up” (also the basis for the award-winning documentary In Search of Balance). (Daphne begins speaking at 44:00.) Joining Daphne to discuss how farming techniques from seed choice to soil management have a direct impact on our health will be: Timothy J. LaSalle, Ph.D., co-founder and Co-Director of the Regenerative Agriculture Initiative at CSU Chico and first CEO of the Rodale Institute (Tim begins speaking at 3:50); and Josh Whiton, a highly successful eco-tech entrepreneur whose most recent project is MakeSoil.org (Josh begins speaking at 25:35). Hosted by Arty Mangan, Director of Bioneers’ Restorative Food Systems Program.
Raised in the inner city by a single mother, Kevin Powell grew up steeped in the macho norms of a tough environment, compounded by an absent father and severe poverty. After having to face his demons in young adulthood, he embarked on a remarkable journey, emerging as a great writer and activist, and a leading advocate of a new form of redefined manhood — one anchored in nonviolence, love, and healthy self-expression.
Kevin’s story is powerful, and he’s written about it extensively in the 13 books he’s authored, including The Education of Kevin Powell: A Boy’s Journey into Manhood. His latest book, My Mother. Barack Obama. Donald Trump. And the Last Stand of the Angry White Man., is an emotionally naked and deeply engaging autobiography of America, by tracing the influence of his remarkable single mother, a woman who shaped his entire life, threaded with his lived experience. Powell strips away symbols and pretensions to get to the root of who and what this nation really is, and how it came to be, and why we are struggling so mightily in these times.
That’s also how he approached his 2018 Bioneers keynote address. He boldly and bravely discusses his experiences with toxic masculinity and his journey to redefine what it means to be a man. He touches on the importance of gender equity, ending sexual abuse and redefining manhood to address the ways that violence has been baked into our cultural understanding of masculinity.
Watch the full video of his keynote address here.
View more keynotes, transcripts, and more from the 2018 Bioneers Conference.
KEVIN POWELL:
I was born and raised in Jersey City, New Jersey. I’m the product of a single parent household, a single mother. My mother, like many African Americans, migrated from the South, from Texas, from Alabama, from Louisiana, from South Carolina, where she’s from, to places like Oakland, California, like Richmond, San Leandro and Hayward, or Brooklyn or Jersey City, where I was born and raised. She was in her early 20s. Being born in 1943, she had already survived the racism and the sexism and the classism of the American South, where her birth certificate said colored, not black, not African American — colored.
She dealt with sexism growing up because only her brother was allowed to graduate from high school. All the girls had to work. My mother started working when she was 8 years old in cotton fields. She only got to the eighth grade. She was basically groomed not to have a career other than being the help for the privileged and powerful in her community.
So she got on a Greyhound bus, as many black women did during those times, and she packed her life into suitcases and she and two of her sisters came up north, and they shared one bed in a one-room apartment in Jersey City.
At some point, my mother met my father. She was in her early 20s. He was in his 30s. She fell in love with him, and he fell in lust with her. e manipulated my mother and he got her pregnant. When it was time to give birth to me, my mother was forced to call a taxi cab because she’s was poor, black woman in America. There’s no resources. There’s no cars. There’s no drivers. There’s nothing. he had to go to the hospital in a cab, and that’s how I was born.
I only saw my father — my first introduction to manhood — three times in my life, between the time I was born and when I was 8 years old. My father pretended several times that he was going to marry my mother. He would play games with her. He’d say, “Well, let’s get married.” And then he would pull back. My mother would call him periodically to ask, “Can you help us?”
He was a truck driver, so he had money. He actually lived in a house that he owned, but we were living in a rat and roach-infested tenement. The one time I went driving with him in his truck, I was 6 or 7 years old, there were images of naked women. When he saw my discomfort at the nudity of these women, he started laughing and basically said what I heard from older men throughout my adolescence and youth: “This is what it is to be a man.”
When I was 8 years old, it was a rainy day and my mother said we were going to go to the drugstore down the street to a payphone – we didn’t have a telephone in the house – and she called my father. She asked him, again, “Can you help us?” On this particular day, his toxic manhood said, “You lied to me. He’s not my son.” And I look like my father. He said, “I’m not going to give you another nickel for him ever again,” and hung up the phone on my mother. My mother was devastated. She shared with me what my father had said. Right then and there, this 8 year old Kevin Powell had a father hole, a manhood hole that was as wide as the Grand Canyon, emotionally, spiritually, and every which way you can imagine.
Whether you have a father or father figure in your life, or no father at all like I did, the reality is most of us who grew up in this society, whether we’re white, black, Latino, Latinx, Asian, Native American, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, atheist, agnostic, most of us who identify as males are still bombarded with the same images. This is what boys do. We wear blue. This is what girls do. They wear pink.
Boys don’t cry. Boys have to be tough. Boys, from early age – 5, 6 years old – start to police each other. We start to use sexist or homophobic or transphobic terms to describe boys who might be a little different than the so-called norm.
That was me, in this hyper-masculine culture. I played sports growing up. I loved football. I loved baseball. You better believe that I fought every chance I got; “Meet us in the lunchroom if you want to settle this.” It’s this right of passage many of us go through in our families, in our communities, all over the country and around the world — unless you have a parent or parents or an adult who checks you as a boy and says, “This is unacceptable to refer to girls in this way, it’s unacceptable to police boys this way, and it’s unacceptable to learn that to be a man is to be violent.”
We would run around school, in fourth or fifth grade, boys grabbing girls’ body parts, not realizing that we were learning rape culture at 8 or 9 years old. Not realizing that when we used terms like gang bang, that’s what we were saying. I remember in my neighborhood there was a girl — and I’m embarrassed to admit this – but the boys made a decision very early on with this girl that she was sexually promiscuous, and so her name became “Whorey Dory.”
Meanwhile, the boys can do anything we want. But the girls, if it was even thought they had done something, we twisted it around as if there was something wrong with them, just like what we did with Anita Hill and Dr. Christine Blasey Ford.
It’s not just our families and communities that shape us, it’s also the schools that we go to. It doesn’t matter if you go to a public school or some elite private school. My mother went to school through eighth grade. I was raised in the first generation after the Civil Rights movement. I went to the so-called best public schools in Jersey City — integrated schools. I was an A student. My mother did not tolerate bad grades.
When I think about it, I didn’t learn anything about Black history or Latinx history, or Native American history, or Asian history, or queer history, or poor people’s history. In my 13 years of school, I learned about Betsy Ross sewing the flag. I learned about Florence Nightingale, vaguely. Helen Keller, even more vaguely. And then Rosa Parks because she served double duty with Black history and Women’s history. Now we’re laughing about this, but if you want to understand patriarchy, sexism, misogyny, rape culture, ask the average male in your life: Name me five to 10 women in American and world history, and see how silent most of us go.
Even though I was raised in a single mother household and it was a matriarchal family, the reality is, the things that we were studying — whether it was math, science, history — were all through the lens of men, as if women didn’t exist. I knew from the time I was 11, 12 years old that I wanted to be a writer because I discovered this very hyper-masculine male writer named Ernest Hemingway. In my 13 years of school, the only woman writer that I even remember was Emily Dickinson.
It’s not just there, it’s also pop culture and the mass media culture. I grew up loving TV shows like I Dream of Jeannie, where she called Major Nelson “Master” and he would put her back in a bottle. I’m thinking to myself, years later, “Wow. Boy was that reinforcing patriarchy and sexism.” Or I’d watch Happy Days. The Fonz would snap his fingers and women would just fly out of the ceiling. As a boy taking this in, think about the devastating effect of these images, just like the devastating effect of black folks seeing images of ourselves only in certain stereotypical ways.
This is how I was socialized. Fighting was normalized. Violence was normalized. Respecting women and girls as our equals was not part of it.
I get to college at Rutgers University in New Jersey. First year, first semester, probably the first week, an upper class male student said to me, “There is so much sex on this campus, we don’t need electricity to keep the lights on.” I realize there’s a whole kind of pimp mentality going on. There are student leader pimps, there’s fraternity pimps, there’s athlete pimps, there’s even faculty and staff pimps, where the men were running amok with women and girls. I would hear stories about domestic violence. I would hear stories about rape.
Unfortunately, I began to become like my father — irresponsible sex, reducing women to two things, caretakers or sexual objects. Because I grew up in a violent environment meant I was violent in my early life, sometimes towards males, sometimes toward women in college.
It hit a crucible for me after college. I was living in Brooklyn, New York, in 1991. A girlfriend and I were living together and we got into an argument. My male rage, my anger, my fragile masculinity, when she challenged me, pushed her into a bathroom door. I’m not proud of it. Years later I would apologize to her and she would accept my apology. But here’s what happened in that summer of 1991: There were women and a few men, who said to me, “Kevin Powell, you are a hypocrite. How can you talk about injustice in the world when you’re participating in the oppression of half the country and the world’s population?” That was devastating to me. This is why we need to have honest, open conversations with one another. When I look at a Bill Cosby, a Woody Allen, a Roman Polanski, a Matt Lauer, a Charlie Rose, a Harvey Weinstein, I’m saying to myself, “No one ever checked these very damaged human beings as they were doing damage.”
Equally devastating was when some women said to me, “You need to read bell hooks.” Not only did I grow up not learning anything about women and girls in our history, but in my four years at Rutgers University, the only woman writer I read was Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God. That was it. And here I was, thinking I was this brilliant young man, but when women leaders at Rutgers University would challenge us on our sexism, we would say disparaging, disrespectful things to them, because what men like to do who are engaged in toxic manhood is silence women and girls.
I was told, after that incident, “You need to own your mistake.” I was told that men must get help. What did that look like for me? It meant therapy. All those traumas that I grew up with, I was now passing along and taking out on other people, including women.
Men, we need to start listening to the voices of women and girls. I was in my 20s, taking all of this in. What was said to me was, “You need to become a consistent ally to women and girls.” How do you become an ally? You must read: bell hooks, Gloria Steinem, Eve Ensler, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni. I’ve realized I was completely ignorant about women, like many of us are.
It was hard to read things where women were saying what they had experienced at the hands of men. But we don’t have the kind of transformation that Bioneers represents if we as people, no matter how we identify ourselves, are not willing to take a hard look in the mirror.
The last thing is that you have to do the work. For us, as men, that doesn’t mean being around women all the time. You’ve got to do that work with men and boys. For me, it began in 1991 with a terrible experience. I never engaged in that kind of behavior again. It was a journey to move from toxic manhood towards trying to figure out what healthy manhood looks like.
Here I am trying to figure this thing out, and there’s all these wacky definitions out there about manhood, in rock’n’roll, in jazz, in hip hop, in movies, on TV, in books — I had to question everything. That’s how you begin to redefine manhood. You’ve got to ask yourself: “What’s wrong with love? What’s wrong with peace? What’s wrong with nonviolence?”
In my humble opinion, 27 years later, I’ve written about it in essays like The Sexist in Me, Confessions of a Recovering Misogynist. These are the different periods of my life. I wrote a piece in my new book called “Harvey Weinstein and His Toxic Manhood is Our Toxic Manhood” — because it is. Bill Cosby is us. Woody Allen is us. Roman Polanski is us.
It’s not just writing about it, it’s speaking about it, doing workshops. I’ve worked in prisons, colleges and universities, communities, community centers, religious institutions. This is an ongoing conversation. What I’m happy to say to you all is that over the last 27 years, I’ve seen more men get involved, but we still are a very small part of the solution.
The New York Times magazine said a few years back that ending violence against women and girls is one of the major human rights issues on the entire planet. Even if you are not the kind of man who would ever call a woman a disrespectful name, touch her inappropriately, touch her without an invitation, rape her, molest her, assault her, God forbid stab her, shoot her, murder her. Even if you’re the kind of man who would never engage in those things but you have men around you engaging in toxic manhood and in destructive language and behavior toward women and girls and say nothing about it? You — we — become just as guilty.
My great hope, in spite of all this happening right now, is that #MeToo will not only empower women like the Civil Rights movement empowered black people — my hope for us as men is that we understand that as women are using their voices, it should be the wind behind us in saying, I want to be a different kind of man and human being.
What does it mean to have a healthcare system that serves everybody? And what can physicians do to address the ways in which societal challenges impact our diagnoses?
Rupa Marya, M.D., is exploring these concepts through numerous projects aimed at researching our current medical climate and collaborating with marginalized populations to make healthcare more effective and compassionate.
Following is a transcript from Marya’s 2018 Bioneers keynote presentation, in which she discusses her research and vision for the future of medicine. Watch the full keynote video here.
View more keynotes, transcripts, and more from the 2018 Bioneers Conference.
I am the daughter of Punjabi immigrants who came to this country in 1973, with little money but plenty of caste privilege. We grew up with family vacations driving a VW van around the Western lands. My father would stop at the reservations. He would make us get out and listen and learn and look, and see what had happened to the original people of this land. He would talk to me about colonization, because we are also a people who had been colonized by Europeans.
I am a mother of two beautiful mixed heritage boys, and I am a farmer’s wife. I’m a physician who works in adult medicine, and who witnesses society’s ills manifest in my patients’ bodies, and a doctor who sees racism and state violence as an urgent public health issue. I’m a touring musician who has played in 29 different countries, singing in five different languages with the band Rupa and the April Fishes. To use a phrase taught to me by a Miwok elder, Wounded Knee, I am an Earth person.
What I’m going to describe for you is a system of domination in which we live, and what I believe are the direct health consequences of that system for all of us. I’ll begin with a description of how we have come to understand disease in a modern post-industrial context. In the 1850s, the germ theory was developed, which described how organisms such as bacteria and viruses made us sick. That led to the development of antibiotics and vaccines and systems to limit the spread of infectious disease.
In the 1960s, with the elucidation of DNA, we entered the molecular genetic era, where we are today. Here the gene creates a protein that can cause or protect from disease. How sick or well you were was thought to be preordained somehow by your genetics. This understanding has led to many powerful diagnostic tools and targeted therapies for specific diseases.
In 2004, with the discovery of the role of RAS gene mutation in the development of colon cancer, exactly 2,000 years after Roman physician Celsus described the cardinal signs of inflammation, we are entering the era of inflammation. Instead of a reductionist approach to understanding disease, we are seeing how many pathways lead to chronic inflammation, which in turn creates the conditions for illness.
Today we will be talking about the impact of social stressors, which have been shown to cause chronic inflammation. These diseases require more systemic approaches, not simply focusing on the individual, but rather moving our gaze to the structures of society, helping us see how the individual pursuit of health is actually futile in a system that makes health impossible.
To understand the root causes of pathologies we see today, which impact all of us but affect black, brown and poor people more intensely, we have to examine the foundations of this society, which began with colonization. To me, to be colonized means to be disconnected and dis-integrated from our ancestry, from our Earth, from our indigeneity, our Earth-connected selves. We all come from Earth-connected peoples, people who once lived in deep connections with the rhythms of nature. I believe it is not a coincidence that the colonization of this land happened at the same time Europeans were burning hundreds of thousands of witches, those women who carried the traditional indigenous knowledge of the tribes of Europe.
Colonization is the way the extractive economic system of capitalism came to this land, supported by systems of supremacy and domination, which are a necessary part of keeping the wealth and power accumulated in the hands of the colonizers and ultimately their financiers.
In what we now know as the United States, this system of supremacy is expressed in many ways and with many outcomes. Today, we will focus on specific ones. First, white supremacy, which created a framework that legitimized slavery and genocide. Slavery created cheap labor, which is necessary for a functioning capitalist system. Genocide created unlimited access to resources in the form of land, animal parts, minerals, and raw materials, which are also necessary for a fully functioning capitalist economy. As capitalism functions, it further entrenches these systems of supremacy.
We all know that white supremacy is the scary guy with the swastika and the hood. But it can also look like any place where there is an abundance of white people in exclusive contexts, where power and access is not readily ceded to others.
Please remember, lest you get caught up in a tsunami of guilty feelings, that as I talk about these things, I’m talking about systems of oppression that we are actually all a part of and that we all recreate, and these systems are what need to be dismantled.
There’s white supremacy and then there’s male supremacy, also known as patriarchy, which leads to the invisibilization of women’s labor, like creating the entire human race out of our bodies. Or in this context, reproducing the entire workforce and suppressing our wages, which further supports capitalism.
Patriarchy also leads to femicide, domestic violence and child abuse, which we see across all groups. We also see human supremacy, where people feel superior to the rest of living entities, thereby subjecting living soils, seeds, animals, plants, and water to horrific treatment in the name of exploiting resources, which in turn feeds the capitalist need for ever-increasing profits.
While this wheel of domination, exploitation, generation, and sequestration of wealth continues, we experience trauma as the byproduct and common pathway. Many studies show us that chronic stress and trauma create chronic inflammation. When we look at the top ten causes of death in occupied Turtle Island, we see diseases that have been described to us as diseases of lifestyle or ones that come about because of poor choices. Maybe we eat too much fried food. Maybe we don’t exercise enough. Maybe we have a genetic predisposition. What these diseases have in common in their pathogenesis is a component of inflammation, and we are just starting to parse out how the social stressors and the very structures of society contribute to and exacerbate this chronic inflammatory state.
It is short-sighted to see these diseases as caused by individual poor choices in the context of a genetic predisposition. I see them as diseases that are virtually impossible to avoid because of the system in which we live, which generates a biological milieu of inflammation through trauma, chronic stress, environmental degradation, and damaged food systems. I see these as diseases of colonization.
If you’re a Native person, you’re like, duh. It takes science and medicine a long time to catch up with Native knowledge. This is not news to Native people. When I met Oglala Lakota elder Candace Ducheneaux in Standing Rock, she talked to me about how these diseases that are so common in modern society and more heavily so in Indian Country are diseases that were brought by the colonizers.
We talked about diabetes, which I had been taught in medical school is a disease of insulin resistance. Either your pancreas doesn’t make enough insulin or your body’s cells are not sensitive to the insulin. These are both ways of seeing things that are based in a sense of individualism and predetermination.
On the Standing Rock reservation, before the damming of Mni Sose or the Missouri River, diabetes was rare. Actually across Turtle Island, diabetes was virtually nonexistent. Once the river was dammed, it ended up flooding nearby cottonwood forests. By shifting the ecology through a colonizing force, the people became more dependent on the cash economy for their food and medicine, and they lost the essential cultural connection to their traditional ways. This tragic loss of the commons is a hallmark of capitalist society, and the impact is felt in the individual body.
After the damming of the river, rates of diabetes skyrocketed. This story is similar for tribes all over Turtle Island. It is important to recognize this didn’t happen simply because people became more sedentary and consequently more obese. This happened because of colonization, not by changing the indigenous body, but by changing the social structures around that body, which in turn creates disease.
One powerful study from Alberta demonstrated that First Nations tribes that had maintained their cultural continuity specifically through language had lower rates of diabetes. Just imagine that.
This is what is protective. It’s not the low carb, paleo diet. It’s not exercise. It’s not the latest fad or trend. This study also showed that self-determinism has a powerful protective effect from diabetes for Indigenous People. These same factors had a protective effect against suicide for Indigenous People in Canada, who experience rates two to five times the national average. This example, to me, demonstrates how disease is a complex manifestation of social and biological influences on groups of individuals that results in a common expression – here, diabetes.
While we can understand this clearly from a Native American experience, we must be aware that these social structures of domination produce trauma and inflammation for all of us. We are all affected.
So what can we do in the face of this knowledge that can seem so overwhelming? Simple things can have huge effects.
To heal the diseases that are caused by the trauma of colonization, we must decolonize. If colonization represents a dis-integration and a disconnection, we must reconnect. Our work is two-pronged: to reintegrate and to dismantle. We must reintegrate what has been divided and conquered in our societies, between our peoples, between us and the natural world around us, and within ourselves. We can do this in many ways: by promoting acts that increase local autonomy and self-determinism, by exposing the myth of treating the individual as limited in its ability to actually address root causes of diseases, by reconnecting to who we were before our respective colonization – through songs, traditional knowledge, reawakening our food and medicine ways, and reawakening our relationships to each other, to the Earth around us, and to other beings. We must dismantle those systems of domination that create and recreate cycles of trauma and inflammation, those systems that work in service of capitalism.
This is my vision of holistic healthcare.
What does that look like for my work? How do I use my whitecoat privilege to address things systemically? Aside from starting to address diseases with my patients in the hospital as directly related to these phenomena, I’m doing these things:
With regards to integration, I have been invited to help create a clinic and farm to develop the practice of Decolonizing Medicine at Standing Rock, together with tribal members and healers Linda Black Elk and Luke Black Elk, great-grandson of Black Elk medicine man. We have been developing a framework for how to offer care that centralizes Lakota cosmology, an understanding of disease and health, and to create a model that can be replicable to other places and in other specific contexts.
We have incredible partners, including Mass Design Group and National Nurses United, as well as the Do No Harm Coalition at UCSF, who are over 400 healthcare workers committed to ending systems of oppression as a way of insuring health for all. We have raised over a million dollars so far, thanks to generous gifts from the Jena & Michael King Foundation, Colin Kaepernick, and crowdfunding, and seek five million more to break ground on this exciting project.
With regards to dismantling systems of oppression, I have been working on a national study of the health effects of law enforcement violence or terrorism, called the Justice Study. We were asked by the community fighting for justice for 26-year-old Mario Woods, who was gunned down by SFPD in 2016, to create a study that would answer this question: If the wound is police violence and the medicine is justice, what happens to our health when the medicine is not given?
We gathered a team of public health workers and researchers, and we are currently actively compiling data. It’s already illuminating, showing how many areas of people’s lives are affected by police violence. We know that Native Americans, Black and Latinx people experience disproportionate rates of police violence, and we can see that they are most impacted by the long-standing effects of violence. How does this reality contribute to the health disparities that we see?
Across all races, we are being traumatized, with black, brown, and Indigenous people being affected more intensely. We are continuing to collect data, and we’ll be offering it to policy makers who wish to shape community safety away from models that uphold white supremacist frameworks into ones that create safety and mitigate harm for all of us.
What I want you to remember is this:
Bioneers co-founder Nina Simons offers inspiration for anyone who aspires to grow into their own unique form of leadership with resilience and joy.
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Informed by her extensive experience with multicultural women’s leadership development, Simons replaces the old patriarchal leadership paradigm with a more feminine-inflected style that illustrates the interconnected nature of the issues we face today. Sharing moving stories of women around the world joining together to reconnect people, nature and the land—both practically and spiritually—Nature, Culture and the Sacred is necessary reading for anyone who wants to learn from and be inspired by women who are leading the way towards transformational change by cultivating vibrant movements for social and environmental justice.
Nature, Culture and the Sacred: A Woman Listens for Leadership, recipient of a Gold Nautilus Award for Women in the 21st Century and the recipient of a Silver Nautilus Award for Social Change & Social Justice, is now available for purchase on Bookshop.org.
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The world seems to be divided into two kinds of people—those who divide everything into two, and those who don’t. Reading Nature, Culture and the Sacred is a step toward melting this false division into “feminine” and “masculine,” and allowing each of us to become fully human again and at last.
— Gloria Steinem, co-founder of Ms. Magazine
In Nature, Culture and the Sacred Nina Simons has woven a compelling and honest tapestry of hard-earned personal and collective wisdom, honoring the earth and igniting the revolutionary ways of women. It’s a book as much about the inside as it is about the outside, exploring where and how they can meet for a sustainable future.
— Eve Ensler, founder of V-Day and author of The Vagina Monologues
This is the time when the power of women returns to us, as we reaffirm our relationships to each other and to our Mother Earth. Together we will doula the next economy into being, re-birthing ourselves and this world. Nina’s writing explores the path forward on this journey that we will make together.
— Winona LaDuke, Executive Director, Honor the Earth
NINA SIMONS, co-founder and Chief Relationship Strategist of Bioneers, is a social entrepreneur passionate about reinventing leadership, restoring the feminine, and co-creating a healthy and equitable future for all life on Earth. An advocate for social and environmental healing, she speaks and teaches internationally on leadership and transformational social change and is dedicated to the value of creating truly diverse collaborations and connections among issues, leaders and movements.
Doniga Markegard, as a teenager, trained as a tracker of wild animals, which ignited a lifelong passion for the natural world. On the trail of a mountain lion on the California coast, she met a rancher with a deep reverence for nature, fell in love, got married, started a family and together they run Markegard Family Grass Fed, a pastured livestock operation in which Doniga blends her tracking, permaculture and holistic grazing knowledge to regenerate coastal prairie lands. In this excerpt (Pg. 183-186) from Doniga’s recent book Dawn Again: Tracking the Wisdom of the Wild, Doniga and renowned Permaculturist Penny Livingston are sharing notes on their observations of the landscape from a tracker’s perspective and a Permaculture perspective, deepening each other’s understanding of nature’s phenomenal complexity and how to mimic nature in systems domesticated by humans.
As we entered the grassland, we started sharing our observations with each other. She pointed out the trail of water gaining velocity as it traveled across the land. The trail was worn smooth from the water picking up any small pebble that may have lain there. Penny said the traveling water could be captured or routed in a way that would allow it to penetrate the soil or be stored for later use. She pointed out that once the water hit the road, it picked up even more speed until it gushed out along the downward-sloping edge, causing the erosion she showed me. She was tracking water!
I stopped to part the grass and noticed a bobcat trail that led along the edge of the water trail. I pointed it out to Penny. The bobcat had been using the edge of the water trail but was hidden by the tall grass.
As we traveled along, Penny was looking at the soil types. She would point out the clay soils. “Those would be perfect for natural building materials!” she exclaimed.
We continued to drive down the road on the edge of the grassland. The ocean appeared in the distance. Penny pointed out the trees flagged by the winds, indicating the prevailing wind direction. I spotted a well-used game trail and asked her to pull over. There before us were tule elk tracks crossing the road, filing in one behind the next to travel through the grasslands. They looked fresh, lacking moisture on the disturbed surface, indicating they were not weathered from the morning’s fog. I asked if she wanted to follow the tracks and she eagerly agreed.
The tracks led us over a rise in the grasslands. Quietly we walked until we got up to a ridge. There before us stood a massive bull elk surrounded by five cow elk. With his neck outstretched and muzzle turned up, he sounded an eerie whistle out of his slightly open mouth. His dark brown neck, with long hairs reaching out from chin to chest, flared as he bugled to communicate with the cow elk as well as any bulls that may have been lurking nearby. The dark neck transmuted into a light brown body with a whitish rump. The small group did not compare to the one-thousand-head-strong herds of the past, but still held the magnificence of a species communicating with each other in a way that each individual understood and vocalized in response. The small group sounded high-pitched calls in response to one another, keeping their group together and communicating any alarm. It was an orchestra that needed no rehearsals.
As we stood in amazement in the presence of these magnificent creatures, I could see Penny’s eyes scanning the grasslands. I asked her what she was seeing and she pointed out the types of grasses the elk were feasting upon. The native perennial bunch-grasses dotting the trail looked delicate and wispy amongst the non-native annual grasses. The grasses had already dispersed their seeds, leaving a protective shell opened and exposed, like a mother without a child. She said next year she would come back to that patch once the grass was ready to harvest and collect the seed for her land. I would never have registered that patch of productive purple needle grass or noticed that it would be a site to collect the seeds to propagate elsewhere. Aside from working on the organic farm, I had never focused on propagation of anything in the wild. That day I was walking with Penny, I was focused on propagation of observations and collection of data. Collecting wild seeds was a new concept.
The things Penny focused on showed me how she perceived the world. I had seen the trail of the bobcat in the grass and parted the grasses because I knew there was a good chance I would find the tracks of a bobcat traveling along the edge of the trail, seeking cover in the tall grass. The bobcat could stalk up on the small mammals living in the cover of the plants while at the same time remaining hidden from larger predators or people. I knew what to look for, after having followed the tracks of that species for countless hours. Penny had focused on the movement of water and the types of soil with similar intensity. She had spent her own countless hours observing the way water traveled, was directed or dissipated, absorbed or shed. She applied all of that information to her landscape.
As we drove along, we buzzed like honeybees after being so close to those majestic elk. Our observations were flowing as if our brains had opened up to each other. I realized I had been viewing the earth through the eyes of a non-human animal—I’d worked immensely hard to understand how to get in the mindset of a bobcat, a beaver, a deer, a wolf. And now it was time for me to view the land through the eyes of a human animal—a responsible one, holding all living beings as my kin and relatives. I had learned, as Gilbert Walking Bull prophesized, how to live like the wild animals. I felt I needed to relearn, or perhaps even reimagine, what it meant to be human.
These two Brooklyn-based poets-artists-activists-educators-musicians-performers may be the most brilliant socially engaged spoken word duo in the known universe. They perform material from their recent album, “Intrinsic”.
Climbing PoeTree (Alixa Garcia and Naima Penniman) are award-winning multimedia artists, organizers, educators and a spoken word duo who have independently organized 30 tours, taking their work from South Africa to Cuba, the UK to Mexico, and 11,000 miles around the U.S. on a bus running on recycled vegetable oil, presenting alongside powerhouses such as Vandana Shiva, Angela Davis, Alicia Keys, and Alice Walker, in venues ranging from the UN to Harvard to Riker’s Island Prison.
Learn more about Climbing PoeTree at their website or explore all their performances over the years at Bioneers.
This Performance took place at the 2018 Bioneers Conference.
View more keynotes, transcripts, and more from the 2018 Bioneers Conference.
This Performance by Climbing Poetree took place at the 2018 Bioneers Conference. These two Brooklyn-based poets-artists-activists-educators-musicians-performers may be the most brilliant socially engaged spoken word duo in the known universe. They perform material from their recent kickass album, “Intrinsic”.
Climbing PoeTree (Alixa Garcia and Naima Penniman) are award-winning multimedia artists, organizers, educators and a spoken word duo who have independently organized 30 tours, taking their work from South Africa to Cuba, the UK to Mexico, and 11,000 miles around the U.S. on a bus running on recycled vegetable oil, presenting alongside powerhouses such as Vandana Shiva, Angela Davis, Alicia Keys, and Alice Walker, in venues ranging from the UN to Harvard to Riker’s Island Prison.
To learn more about Climbing PoeTree, visit climbingpoetree.com
View more keynotes, transcripts, and more from the 2018 Bioneers Conference.
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