From Discipline to Discipleship: Cultivating Love, Collaboration & Imagination

In this keynote from the 2021 Bioneers conference, Bioneers Co-founder Nina Simons draws from vast and varied cultural touchpoints – from Indigenous wisdom to Biblical storytelling to pop icon Patti Smith and intellectual heavyweight Cornel West – to share her journey towards uncovering and embracing the role of discipline in service of cultivating our hearts’ capacity to love.

By reframing and re-imagining discipline as disciple-ship, Nina addresses the necessary inward turning, self-examination and reflection that is integral to addressing the layers of unconscious bias that live within us. She asks each of us to hear the subsequent call to rigorous action needed – both individually and collectively – to eradicate Patriarchy, Colonialism, Racism and Capitalism in this massive era of change… and to build the future our hearts yearn for.

Nina Simons

What I feel called to share with you are some of the ideas, practices and perspectives that I’m finding useful to find my way through the uncertainty, grief and anger of this massive era of change. It’s a time that one of my beloved mentors, Joanna Macy, named The Great Turning.

To remember and retrieve my own agency, my sense of sovereignty and connection to the sacred, I’m peeling away layers of unconscious biases inherited from a constellation of deadly systems whose violence is being amplified by a pandemic: Patriarchy, Colonialism, Racism and Capitalism.

Sylvia Federici’s book, Caliban and the Witch helped me understand the inter-relatedness of those four diabolical systems – well beyond my earlier observation that living in a female body opens an empathic window on injustice for me and for all women.

She reveals how the consolidation of a capitalist system was dependent on 3 things:

the subjugation of women, the enslavement of black & Indigenous people, and the exploitation of colonized lands to extract resources. She details how the unpaid labor of women and of enslaved workers was a necessary foundation for capitalism to take root.

For me, capitalism’s driving purpose – to commodify and monetize ever more of our lives and nature, while increasing profits at all costs – is gaining ground as a primary culprit of the predicaments we’re in.

As a species, we’re facing nothing less than a near-death experience. Thankfully, throughout the history of times such as these, people have shown a capacity to rapidly change values, precipitating large-scale change.

Of all the resources we have available to cultivate ourselves to best survive this tumultuous time, to contribute to co-creating the future that our hearts yearn for I believe that cultivating our hearts’ capacity to love is the most powerful, most enduring and most regenerative of all.

I’m learning that disciplining my heart is central to increasing that ability.

The word discipline used to trigger an immediate reaction in me of rebellion, resistance and defiance. I assumed that it implied some external authority that I needed to resist, in order to protect or defend my own agency.

But that changed when another idea of discipline landed within me – reframed as disciple-ship. When applied to any aspect of myself, it means taking on an intentional apprenticeship. Now, it involves humbling myself to learn to do something more consciously and purposefully than I had before. In this case, to relate to my heart’s immense love and yearning.

But for me to become a more effective and magnetic lover of life, in the midst of all this tumult, I need to be rigorous with myself. Remembering or relearning how to value myself for my uniqueness and intrinsic value and discarding old habits of comparison and self-judgement that limit my expression.

To hold myself accountable I must give up my complacency, my learned helplessness and my rationalizations.

To love and care for yourself is not a self-indulgent act. It’s essential for each of us to embody the world we want to co-create, and to become more able to contribute meaningfully to it. By loving ourselves, we deepen our capacity to love others, and as we do so, we can become far more effective allies and advocates for changing the systems that oppress and destroy so many of those we love. Cornel West says “justice is what love looks like in public.”

I know I need to apply discipline (or discipleship) in how I relate to those I don’t agree with, or people who are decidedly different from me. This is not easy to do, but also so necessary.

Those of us who want to help make positive change in the world have got to grapple with the vast imbalance of the power differentials we face. Our class and racial inequities are so systemic and so ingrained that no matter how hard I try, I continue to discover my own blind spots and embedded patterns of white supremacy and privilege. It’s excavation work we’ve got to be willing to undertake, no matter how uncomfortable it is, as the need is so urgent and great.

In the biblical tale of David and Goliath, a small shepherd boy conquers a giant by slinging a rock at his exposed forehead. According to Malcolm Gladwell’s read of the story, we tend to think of David’s victory as a miracle, as proof that sometimes, the weak can conquer the strong.

He proposes, though, that David’s win may have less to do with luck than with our perspective. The things we assume to be disadvantages. Taking a novel approach, innovation and creativity are often an advantage. And fighting a giant weighed down with too much history or money may actually put them at a disadvantage. Having lived through prior traumatic events can confer strength.

Gladwell also notes that while underdog tactics can be highly successful, many don’t adopt them because they require harder work, greater adaptability and a willingness to think outside the box.

But with so much at stake in every domain of our lives, it’s a time to exercise discipline as discipleship. And to act, even if we feel scared and even though we know it’s hard.

The path ahead promises to be challenging, hard and uncertain. It requires higher levels of centering, practice, accountability and responsibility.

For me, it means shedding old simplistic and idealistic notions I held, often unconsciously – that change was possible without action or confrontation, that leadership was possible without sacrifice, and that I didn’t have to adopt a warrior stance to be an activist. As I’ve sought to leverage my privilege to become a better ally with Indigenous and other people of color’s struggles it’s required humility, dedication and perseverance from me. And it’s definitely a work in progress.

But for the future my heart yearns for, we’ll need lots of us stretching our skillfulness to create connective tissue among our communities, our movements, and our issues. To succeed, we surely need each other – and many of us – all together.

Over a thousand years ago, the Iroquois Five Nations or Haudenosaunee had been in violent cycles of destruction, with endless conflict and revenge killings for many years. The Peacemaker was born among them, and he brought them into unity by the clarity of his vision, and by sharing the Great Law of Peace.

As Onondaga Faithkeeper Oren Lyons tells it, the law’s basic elements are three-fold:

The first is peace. They all laid down their arms and agreed to fight no more.

The second is the power of the great minds united, the amplified intelligence of the collective.

And the third was symbolized as one bowl, one spoon.

That means to honor Life’s limits, and to share, with gratitude and equity among the people.

Much later, some of the governance principals of the Haudenosaunee Six Nations Confederacy informed the creation of the US Constitution and Bill of Rights. Their model of gender equity inspired the US women’s suffrage movement of the early 1900s.

It’s the people rising up in collaborative movements that I choose to believe in. The peoples’ voices together speaking in many tongues:

Enough! Basta! Arréte! No more Blah Blah! It’s time for Change!

That vision asks us to become connective tissue together to embody the power, strength and interconnectedness of all the issues we face.

Sadly, though, many among our populations have an easier time imagining the end of the world than the end of capitalism. As the Guardian columnist George Monbiot recently noted, “then let’s begin by imagining something that’s easier to comprehend: the end of concentrated wealth. Our survival depends on it.”

May we fling open the doors and windows of our minds to let some fresh air in and be willing to risk that change.

Pat McCabe, also known as Woman Stands Shining, a colleague and friend from the Diné or Navajo Nation, offered a challenge: she suggested we need to find ways to love the future.

When I heard her words, I realized how often I’ve held the future in a dim light.

I recognized how hard it’s become to hold a future vision that my heart can fully embrace.

In the late 1980’s, well before apartheid ended in South Africa, then journalist Catherine Ingram interviewed Desmond Tutu. She noticed that he kept saying, “when we end apartheid.” At that time, she thought “yeah right, dream on.”

Afterward, she reflected: “I didn’t want to rain on his parade or anything, but in my heart of hearts, I thought, not in your lifetime. And lo and behold, a year and a half later, it was over. It was really a profound lesson about what can happen when the will of people aligns.”

Sometimes, it’s hard to see massive changes while they are emergent. But we must be able to imagine them, watch for them, name them, continue working towards their happening, invest our hearts in their outcomes, make art that calls them in, speak and dance and pray them into being.

Now, learning to love our future is becoming part of my practice, not in a naïve way or one that denies the truth or complexity of what is, but as part of my discipleship towards cultivating congruence.

In many ways, our greatest challenge may be to unleash our imaginations. To be able to visualize, and feel in an embodied, emotive way the future we want, the futures our hearts desire, the futures we yearn for and imagine are possible.

In a recent interview about Climate Change, Michael Pollan, the writer who’s tackled issues as complex and varied as our industrialized food systems, psychedelics and consciousness, said he believes we still have a real chance as a species to shift our course.

He said “Nothing is inevitable; everything’s evitable; and that’s really important.

We’re very fatalistic. People assume things are the way they have to be and they’re not.”

As meaning-making creatures, we are innovative and hard-wired for story.

But these gifts are multivalent: they can be both a blessing and a curse,

and everything in between. What this means is that it all comes back to agency, to our ability to choose, moment by moment, what path to take, how to interpret what happens, and how to respond to it. To help shape our lives, both individually and communally.

To be in discipleship to growing ourselves and loving life, while stretching to become connective tissue with each other.

To being able to lovingly and whole-heartedly, with acceptance and courage, engage ourselves in this period of intense change.

I hope that in the future, this era may become known as “The Time of the Great Alliance” or “The Time of Rivers Coming Together.”

As Patti Smith sang to a crowd of 30,000 global activists assembled in Glasgow, Scotland, gathered to address climate change at COP26,

People have the power

The power to dream, to rule

To wrestle the Earth from fools.

Listen, I believe everything we dream

Can come to pass through our union.

May it be so.

Bioneers 2021 Day 1: Looking Beneath the Surface

Day 1 of the 2021 Bioneers Conference introduced brilliant speakers and inspirational conversations. We were asked repeatedly to look beneath the surface, both metaphorically (in the case of Deanna Van Buren asking us to inspect the way we design “justice”-related structures) and literally (as in the presentation on soil and food health from Anne Biklé and David Montgomery). Bioneers leaders brought new depth to enduring conversations about Indigenous wisdom, healing, agriculture, and art.

Following are some of our key takeaways from today.

LESSONS, IN THEIR OWN WORDS:

  • “When people understand that real solutions do exist it leverages the potential for change.” -Kenny Ausubel & Nina Simons; Co-Founders | Bioneers
  • “There are some basic things that we need to create for healing. We have to create environments that are deeply embedded and connected to nature — that can moderate our fight, flight, and freeze responses. Spaces for refuge, that we can cool off in and leave. Spaces where we can break bread, embedding objects of comfort, light, sound, texture, and materials that are good for our senses. Integrating art into our space so that people can see themselves. These are the kinds of spaces for justice that we can begin to make.” -Deanna Van Buren; Executive Director | Designing Justice + Designing Spaces
  • “A message to the western world: I would like to tell them not to continue consuming gasoline and plastics that are not good for our health and the environment. I would like modern people to know where their oil comes from. It comes from the Amazon so they can have a good life in the city. It pollutes our water, our animals, and our land.” Nemonte Nenquimo; Co-Founder | Ceibo Alliance and Amazon Frontlines 
  • “I firmly believe that farming practices can deliver health. We need to lay down the weapons, back off of the toxins, and support biological bazaars. And that’s how we’re going to get to this. That is how we’re going to turn this trend around. When soil health gets better, crops and animals get better. Those become the animals and plant foods in the human diet, and it’s immensely helpful to us.” -Anne Biklé; Biologist, Avid Gardener and Author
  • ​​”When we look at climate justice, we have to look at the intersections of our relationships not just with each other but with the land. We have to look at the root causes of the systems that have brought us to this place. The beauty we are witnessing in this crisis is the power of community and the power of Indigenous Peoples.” -Eriel Deranger; Co-Founder and Executive Director | Indigenous Climate Action

CAMPAIGNS TO FOLLOW AND SUPPORT

  • Join Designing Justice + Designing Spaces in unbuilding racism by investing more thoughtfully, igniting radical imagination, and closing jails. (Mentioned in Deanna Van Buren’s keynote address: Achieving Equity in the Built Environment.)
  • Sign this letter from Indigenous Peoples to Ecuador’s Constitutional Court to support their right to make decisions about what happens to their home in the Amazon. (Mentioned by Nemonte Nenquimo in her keynote address: Indigenous Guardianship is Key to Halt the Climate Crisis.)
  • Read more about how to bring our planet’s soils back to life in Growing a Revolution by David Montgomery. (Mentioned in his keynote presentation with Anne Biklé: You Are What Your Food Ate.)
  • Tell UBS and JPMorgan Chase to exit Amazon oil and gas with Amazon Watch. (Mentioned by Leila Salazar-Lopez in the panel Averting a Hot, Toxic Endgame: Strategizing & Mobilizing for Crime Justice.)
  • Attend an Embodied Leadership for Funders & Donors course in January, an 8-week introductory embodied leadership program for leaders in the funding world who are committed to redistributing wealth. (Mentioned by Staci Haines in the panel Embodied Healing Approaches to Personal, Generational, and Socio-Political Trauma.)
  • Connect with women interested in climate action worldwide by joining the WECAN Network. (Mentioned by Osprey Orielle Lake in the panel Averting a Hot, Toxic Endgame: Strategizing & Mobilizing for Crime Justice.)

INVEST IN CHANGE

By supporting Bioneers, you’re supporting an entire community of diverse leadership who are realizing breakthrough solutions. Every gift – large and small – really counts. Monthly giving and multi-year gifts assure our long-term impact. Future generations are counting on us.

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Beaver Believer: How Massive Rodents Could Restore Landscapes and Ecosystems At Scale

I first heard about the book Eager: The Surprising Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter in a conversation with Brock Dolman, the co-director of the WATER Institute at the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center. Brock was telling me, in his inimitable way, about OAEC’s Bring Back the Beaver campaign, a growing endeavor to “re-beaver” California. I considered myself fairly well informed on many environmental and conservation issues but, in all honesty, I had never really thought of beavers as a species that needed our attention as compared to the vast list of threatened and endangered species upon whose collective necks humanity has pressed its foot. Beavers had come up while we’d been talking about ecological restoration efforts and Brock told me to “Go read EAGER.” So I did – and I joined the ranks of the “beaver believers” in short order.  

Written by the journalist Ben Goldfarb, EAGER is a brilliantly researched and tremendously accessible dive into the past, present and potential future of the American Beaver, Castor canadensis. Goldfarb explores the historical extent of beavers in North America and the dramatic transformation of the entire landscape as a result of the truly barbaric fur trade that led to colonization of the interior of the continent and the near extinction of the species. As one of nature’s most tenacious and dynamic engineers, the ecological role that beavers have historically played in North America (and Europe, for that matter) is mind-boggling. Upon reading the volume, I found that my entire contemporary understanding of the continent received a major system upgrade, the result of a crash course in historical ecology. Just a taste: Goldfarb reports that pre-contact North America beaver dams may have impounded an additional 230,000+ square miles of water (think Arizona + Nevada for reference) via an estimated 150-250 million ponds. Read an excerpt of EAGER here.

EAGER manages to simultaneously expose how little we collectively understand about the ecological history of our landscapes while highlighting truly inspirational people and leading-edge projects that are working to partner with our rodent colleagues, including Dolman and the Bring Back the Beaver campaign as well as dozens of other efforts around the country. I spoke with Ben Goldfarb prior to the 2021 Bioneers Conference, where he participated in a session on the topic of Biophilic Infrastructure.

[This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length]

TEO: How did you find yourself writing a book about beavers?

BEN: I always had kind of an affinity for them. I grew up in New York and spent a lot of time in the Catskills and Adirondacks, which are some of the more beavery places on the East Coast, and saw them while hiking, fishing and camping. But I think my conversion to the cult of beaver belief occurred in 2014. I was living in Seattle as an environmental journalist, and I got a flyer to attend a “beaver workshop.” It sounded like it might be a story, so I went to the workshop.

It was a profound, quasi-religious conversion experience where one person after another – hydrologists and ecologists and fish biologists and fluvial geomorphologists – got up and told their story about why beavers are so crucial for conservation and carbon sequestration, for storing water in the face of droughts and creating firebreaks on the landscape. I started to realize that this rodent that I’d been around all of my life was not just a huge critter, it was actually one of the primary movers and shakers in North American ecosystems. It was really that workshop and some of the stories that spun out of that that really got me thinking about beavers as a profound environmental force.

TEO: What is the difference between the beaver population in North America today and pre-contact, before the fur trade really started up? And do we know what the result has been on the landscape?

BEN: What I attempt to do in the book is to figure out what North America looked like with its full complement of several hundred million beavers. It’s really hard to know, but there’s no question that this was once a much bluer, wetter, greener, lusher place than it is today. It’s amazing to read trappers’ accounts of crossing Southeast Wyoming, which today is basically desert, and finding these largely beaver-created and maintained marshes, full of waterfowl. 

One of the hard things to communicate is that beavers are not an endangered species. We’ve got maybe 10 to 15 million of them in North America, so they’re actually abundant. But they’re just a tiny fraction of their historic abundance, obviously. We’ve got them in every state, but we don’t have them in every watershed or even close to it, where they historically existed.

We have got a lot of laws that are geared toward recovering endangered species, but we don’t really have any laws that are geared toward bringing a common species back to its historical ubiquity, and that’s really where we need to get with beavers. We’ll never have 400 million beavers again, but there’s certainly a lot of room for them today that they’re currently not able to take advantage of because they’re trapped out every time a conflict occurs. 

TEO: Beavers are seen by some as a pathway towards restoring components of the ecological functions of North American landscapes. One of the complexities of ecological restoration is answering the question, “What (or When) are you restoring to?” Climate change obviously makes that even more daunting. Do you have a sense of the restoration potential for beavers and what the ecological implications of “re-beavering” could be?

BEN: It’s a great question. Certainly there’s a technical answer to that, which is that there are all these beaver GIS modeling tools where you can go to your chosen watershed and say there are X-kilometers of available beaver habitat here, or 36% of the watershed is suitable for beavers. However, there are a couple bigger challenges in beaver restoration. 

The first is that when we wiped out hundreds of millions of beavers, we also changed the landscape and the waterscape in ways that made it harder for beavers to return to those places. When you eliminate a beaver, you lose all those beaver-built speed bumps, those dams that are pushing water out onto the flood plain and slowing down flows. There’s nothing checking water velocity. You often get erosion and fission and the stream just erodes to bedrock, and you end up with a firehose-like stream channel that’s a very hard place for a beaver to build a dam. We actually lost a lot of the potential beaver carrying capacity as a result of trapping. 

That’s where tools like beaver dam analogues come in, building these little starter beaver dams that the genuine rodents can come in and build off of, and use to establish in a given watershed where they might not be able to otherwise. There’s a lot we can do mechanically to encourage beaver reestablishment and increase the restoration potential.

The second really important thing – I write about this in the book a lot, of course – is just reconfiguring our historical imagination or conception of what a healthy riverscape looks like. I think we have this idea that a healthy stream is a free-flowing, fast moving, gravel-bottomed thing that you would see in Field and Stream magazine when in reality so many of our streams were incredibly complex and multi-threaded. In some places they were more like very swampy marshes with dead and dying trees everywhere, and the bottom was mucky and it smelled kind of funky. I don’t think that is most people’s conception of a healthy streamscape, but we know, of course, because of beavers, that was historically more rule than exception in North America, and Europe as well.

Bringing back beavers is a technical challenge, but it’s also an imaginative challenge in that, again, we have to reconfigure our historical understanding of what a healthy stream is. 

TEO: Beyond wanting to return to a more wild and healthy landscape, what are the practical benefits? I assume there are benefits to both biodiversity as well as the ecosystem service side of things. 

Ben Goldfarb

BEN: I think you’re right. There are benefits to other species and then there are benefits to us humans. For other species, just name an organism and it probably benefits from beaver habitat, especially in the American West where water is life. Wetlands cover 2% of land area and support 80% of biodiversity. 

Here in Washington where I live, the flagship species that guides most management is salmon, and beavers create these fabulous little juvenile salmon-rearing refuges. That slow-water habitat that beavers build is perfect rearing conditions for young salmon. The salmon are the primary beneficiary, at least from a management standpoint. I think the importance of restoring salmon habitat is what has catalyzed a lot of interest in beavers in the Northwest over the last 15 years or so and beavers are really integral to that. 

Most species of waterfowl do well in the presence of beavers. Actually a lot of songbirds, warblers and flycatchers and the like. Woodpeckers, of course, love the dead trees that beavers create. Other aquatic mammals – mink, muskrat, moose, otter – are all big beaver beneficiaries, and amphibians, of course. The list of organisms that benefit from beavers is just basically a list of organisms that live in North America.

For us humans, the list is just as long. Water storage is a huge one, especially here in Washington state. We’re losing our snowpack and this is true around the West. More and more of our precipitation is falling as rain instead of snow. When it falls as rain, it just runs off the landscape right away. We don’t get that nice time-release delayed trickle deep into the summer. You start to wonder, if only there was this animal that could build thousands and thousands of reservoirs up in the high country to store some of that water. So that’s a huge one. It’s a lot better than the giant reservoirs on the Colorado or Columbia. 

Beavers support carbon sequestration. Blue carbon is a very hot topic right now and beaver dams and habitat are big stores of blue carbon. They’re fantastic pollution control agents. They’re basically creating these little settling ponds where nitrates, phosphorus, heavy metals and pesticides can settle out, and that’s actually guiding a lot of beaver-based restoration in the Chesapeake Bay watershed which is really impacted by agricultural inputs. 

Another really big one that’s become increasingly exciting as some of the peer-reviewed research has come out to support it is the role of beavers during wildfires. They create these fantastic fire refugia and firebreaks on the landscape, these wet areas where the vegetation is really lush and thus doesn’t burn. This is something that beaver folks had always kind of anecdotally observed, but within the last year or two there has been some great research that proves that point. The notion that you could support safeguarding communities from wildfire by restoring beavers in the surrounding wildlands is suddenly something people are talking about, which is tremendously exciting.

Teo Grossman

TEO: I grew up in Northern New Mexico and my good friend had a house near a beaver dam. We skated on it in winter and we fished and swam in the summer. It was totally dreamy and I’ve always been interested in them as a species, but not in any particularly dramatic or intense way. One of the experiences I had after reading your book was that I underwent this “beaver-believer” experience – I talk about beavers a lot now, possibly to my social detriment. Based on your own pathway that you shared earlier, I’m getting the sense that this is not a unique experience. In the book you dive into the cultural side of the beaver restoration world. Do you have a sense as to what it is that blows people’s minds in such a dramatic way?

BEN: That’s a really good question, and something I’ve often wondered about myself. There are lots of people who love wolves and bears and salmon, but I think the beaver community is one of the larger ones and definitely one of the most passionate ones. I think there are a few reasons for that. For one thing, beavers are just a tremendously empathetic species for us as humans. They’re very relatable. They live in these nuclear family units that really resemble human families in a lot of ways, and they’re relentlessly driven to modify their environment to maximize the provision of food and shelter. They’re really the only other organism that comes anywhere close to us in terms of their drive to change their surroundings. That draws a lot of people to them.

Then they’re just so tremendously interesting behaviorally. You can go to a beaver complex at dusk and just watch them perform the most fascinating, complex behaviors. Why are they building a dam over there and not here? Why do they dig a canal between these two ponds? Why do they put the lodge where it is? All animals have some kind of interesting behavior, but beavers are just so much more complex than most. They’re endlessly fun to interpret. 

There’s so much life at a beaver complex. If you’re going to go birdwatching, and you don’t happen to see the birds that you were looking for, then the day might be a bust. But if you went to a beaver pond and didn’t see the beavers, you would still see great blue herons and woodpeckers and toads and moose. There’s just so much life there that when you visit a beaver compound, you’re visiting an entire ecosystem. I think that’s just incredibly fun and exciting. 

The final thing I’ll say is – and I know this is within the ethos of Bioneers – we are so bombarded by negative, depressing environmental news, and it’s understandable. We’re in a dark place as a global civilization. But the beavers are an amazing ray of light in some ways. They are one of history’s great conservation success stories. The species was basically on the brink of extinction, certainly in the continental United States around the turn of the century, and now there are 15 million of them. They are proof that species can recover. 

Beavers are incredible agents of restoration and positive change on the landscape. They accomplish so much and prove that our efforts to restore nature are not futile, and that positive change really is possible. Beavers are a wonderful, hopeful species at a time when a lot of people need hope.

For more, read an excerpt of EAGER here.

No More Stolen Sisters: Stopping the Abuse and Murder of Native Women and Girls

Jessica Alva. Khadija Rose Britton. Hanna Harris. Anthonette Christine Cayedito. If you haven’t heard of these women, it’s no surprise.

They’re four of the untold number of Indigenous women and girls who have been murdered, kidnapped or gone mysteriously missing. A significant number of victims are from communities that are subjected to the harmful presence of fossil fuel and mining companies. The extractive industry is ravaging Native nations where oil and blood have long run together.

Add to this a dysfunctional police and legal hierarchy that leaves Indigenous women and their families with little support during the first crucial hours when they go missing, and little recourse to prosecute predators for their crimes.

In this program, powerful Native women leaders reveal the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women, and describe how they are taking action and building growing movements, including with non-Native allies. Morning Star Gali, Ozawa Bineshi Albert, Simone Senogles, Kandi White, and Casey Camp Horinek.

These stories are shocking, harrowing and heartbreaking. But then again, when your heart breaks, the cracks are where the light shines through.

RESOURCES

The Coalition to Stop Violence Against Native Women

The Intercept: A New Film Examines Sexual Violence as a Feature of the Bakken Oil Boom

Restoring Justice for Indigenous Peoples: MMIW Initiative

The Mendocino Voice: Community groups begin painting mural honoring Khadijah Britton and highlighting MMIW in Ukiah

This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature series. Visit the radio and podcast homepage to find out how to hear the program on your local station and how to subscribe to the podcast.

Subscribe to the Bioneers: Revolution from The Heart of Nature podcast

Transcript

NEIL HARVEY, HOST: In this program, powerful Native women leaders first reveal the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women – and then describe how they are taking action and building growing movements, including with non-Native allies…

Morning Star Gali, Ozawa Bineshi Albert, Simone Senogles, Kandi White, and Casey Camp Horinek.  

This is “No More Stolen Sisters: Stopping the Abuse and Murder of Native Women and Girls.” I’m Neil Harvey, I’ll be your host. Welcome to the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature.

Jessica Alva Khadija Rose Britton. Hanna Harris. Anthonette Christine Cayedito. 

If you haven’t heard of these women, it’s no surprise. They’re four of the untold number of Indigenous women and girls who have been murdered, kidnapped or gone mysteriously missing. 

A significant number of victims are from communities that are subjected to the harmful presence of fossil fuel and mining companies. The extractive industry is ravaging Native nations where oil and blood have long run together. Oil workers, mostly men, live in housing units commonly called “man camps.” They’re notoriously dangerous places for indigenous women and girls.

Add to this a dysfunctional police and legal hierarchy that leaves Indigenous women and their families with little support during the first crucial hours when they go missing, and little recourse to prosecute predators for their crimes.

As Lisa Brunner, a member of the White Earth Ojibwe Nation, and a longtime victim’s advocate says: “What’s happened through US Federal law and policy is they created lands of impunity where this is like a playground for serial rapists, batterers and killers and our children aren’t protected at all.”

While some news outlets report on these tragedies, each headline eventually fades and the stories have gone mostly unheard.  [Montage of news clips]

These stories are shocking, harrowing and heartbreaking. But then again,  when your heart breaks, the cracks are where the light shines through.

Morning Star Gali is a member of the Pit River Indian Tribe of California. She’s a lifelong indigenous rights activist and born into a family who has fought for the rights of Native peoples in California and beyond. 

As part of her organizing work addressing the ongoing missing and murdered Indigenous women crisis, she provides direct support to victims’ families.

Morning Star Gali: We held a prayer gathering and a press conference outside of San Francisco City Hall, and we held it for a sister of mine that was murdered six months ago. And her death has been ruled as a suicide. And we are pushing within the DA’s office, within the city officials to conduct a full investigation. 

We had for three days, while she was on life support, and had people coming in to pray and offer those songs and offer those ceremonies, and it was made very clear, it was very evident that she was native, and yet on her death certificate her race was still listed as unidentifiable.  

And in her death, it was her partner, there was a history of domestic violence. He had given a fake name. He was not on the lease, and he was allowed to stay in her apartment, clean up the crime scene, called it into the ambulance as a suicide, and that’s what the San Francisco Police Department went by, and so they failed in every way possible.  

There’s been a number of deaths. We are very much still grieving. We are very much in disbelief that this is the work that we are doing, and yet it’s our sisters that are being directly impacted. 

And so we spend a lot of our time just going to meet with families, and listening to them, and sitting with them in support and prayer, just letting them know that we are doing whatever we can just as community members, as people that are also affected by this, to help to hold them in that love and in that support, and helping to get the word out about their family members.

Ozawa Bineshi Albert: Across the nation, many police forces do not take serious what is happening to indigenous women. Disappearances, murders, are often dismissed and they’re not prioritized. 

Host: Ozawa Bineshi Albert is an Oklahoma-based Native Rights and Environmental Justice advocate. A leader from the Yuchi and Anishinabe Nations, she works on global collaborations to strengthen grassroots feminist movements. Up close and personal, she witnesses how police departments and courts disappear these women just as surely as the perpetrators who kill them.

Ozawa Bineshi Albert: There was a case where they found a woman tied and bound in a ditch with no shoes, but they have deemed it no foul play. Right? So, I lost an auntie a couple years ago a block and a half from her house, killed on the train tracks. And the police have deemed it an accidental death of an alcoholic person, right? That she would make a decision to choose to sit on a train track and drink is what they’re proposing. Her house, warm, was a block and a half away. Right? But they’re like, oh no, there was no murder, no foul play.

So there’s also this policy of practice that’s part of that culture of saying women are lesser than, and indigenous women are even lesser than that. We’re not wasting our resources to investigate murders of indigenous women. Which is why the creation of a database has not happened from any criminal justice system, it’s happened from indigenous communities saying we need to create a database because police forces, FBI, they’re not doing it.

Host: The nonprofit Sovereign Bodies Institute is the first organization to document how Indigenous people are impacted by gender and sexual violence, and maintains the most thorough and accurate database on missing and murdered indigenous women in the United States. 

In a single year in 2016, nearly 5,700 Indigenous women were reported missing. Only 2% of those cases even made it to the records of the U.S. Department of Justice, according to a study by the Urban Indian Health Institute. 

Altogether, Indigenous women experience 10 times higher rates of violence, murder, sex trafficking, and abuse than women of other ethnicities. And statistically, a great number of these crimes are happening in communities where oil and mining workers are housed in so called man camps.

Kandi White with the Indigenous Environmental Network, lives in Montana and is a member of the Three Affiliated Tribes, Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara.

Living in her ancestral homeland, Kandi has witnessed firsthand how blood and oil mix with misogyny and racism, and there’s little if any protection from the law. 

Kandi White: All these thousands of men came from all over the world and set up like little shantytowns, really. Some of them were RV trailers, some of them were just cars people were living in. They would work long hours roughnecking, they call it. And then when they had down time, they weren’t with their families. So they would either go to the bars, they would start using or abusing drugs. 

All of that led to our community having a 168% increase in the violence against women. We started seeing women being raped, we started seeing women as young as 13, maybe even 12, selling themselves. They would go into man camps willingly, and then they would get raped and there would be nowhere to turn to for them. There was just story after story after story of sex trafficking. people tried to kidnap our children and put them into the sex trade. 

Fracking fractured our communities, it divided us. It’s not the same. Whenever I go home, it’s like all these strangers are everywhere, and there’s a bunch of them unemployed now, because the price of oil went down and so they’re waiting for the oil boom to go again. And people that have money either are fighting with those that don’t have it, or they left because they could afford to leave. And a lot of broken families were left behind. And so women are left trying to pick up the pieces. 

Host: Another serious obstacle for women and families seeking justice is that tribal courts are highly constrained in their ability to prosecute crimes committed by non-Tribal citizens on their lands because of complex jurisdictional restrictions that disempower tribal governance and sovereignty. Again, Ozawa Bineshi Albert… 

Ozawa Bineshi Albert: This is a policy that is applied to Indian people, but is a policy of the nation of American citizens. It’s going to take a political will larger than what Indian people can hold their own. We have other really good policies, but have failed indigenous nations. Right? So, the Violence Against Women Act. The last time it was reauthorized was the very first time they included language for tribal nations to be able to prosecute someone for domestic violence, which was a huge gain for Indigenous Peoples, but 239 indigenous nations of Alaska were excluded from being able to have that same power to prosecute someone non-native in their tribal lands. 

Host: In 2013, when Congress reauthorized the Violence Against Women Act, or VAWA, it restored the authority of tribal courts to prosecute domestic violence crimes. But this hard-won legal authority still doesn’t apply to all Native nations or to all violent crimes, including rape or murder. 

Another catch is the onerous burden of criteria that Indigenous courts and law enforcement bodies are required to meet to try these cases. Many tribes simply don’t have the necessary resources, even with federal grants. Since VAWA was amended, just 24 out of 600 federally recognized tribes have been able to build the infrastructure required to try domestic violence cases. 

As a result, some indigenous women don’t even bother to report the crimes. The ones who do report them often find their cases passed along to the FBI, where they languish.

Casey Camp Horinek is a respected elder and leader of the Ponca Tribe of Oklahoma. As a culture bearer, she knows well the hidden history of Native Peoples. 

Casey Camp Horinek: We had our ways in the past. If there was a kind of man around that was abusive, he was shunned and put away from the people, had to leave the people and live out on his own. The woman was taken in by other women for her healing until she became whole again. We don’t know what happened to the men, because they weren’t allowed to ever be around us again.

Now, when we have the extractive industry in our backyard, and when our sisters in South America and up in Alaska have the industry in their backyard, and we’re right up there at frontlines, we have no recourse for those that are in pain.  In Oklahoma, it is the most imprisoned place in the United States, and a good majority of those are native people or people of color or poor people. And a huge majority of them are native women who are looking for a way to go forward. 

And so our statistics have been muffled and mismanaged, and deliberately ignored since the Doctrine of Discovery, since Andrew Jackson as an Indian killer, since the time when the policy was to kill the women and kill the children because that was the policy against native people. 

Host: When we return, we hear how these powerful Native American organizers are taking action and building growing movements to end the violence against Indigenous women and girls. They say success requires knowing the true history, and engaging the ally-ship of non-Native people.

I’m Neil Harvey. You’re listening to “No More Stolen Sisters” on the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature.

The song you just heard is a prayer for missing and murdered Indigenous women, composed by Antone George for the West Shore Canoe Family of the Lummi Nation. You can find a link for the music video and explore more Bioneers radio programs, podcasts and videos online at bioneers.org. For information on the National Bioneers Conference, please visit bioneers.org or call 1-877-BIONEER.

For Indigenous peoples of the Americas, being an unperson – dates back over five centuries to First Contact.

A year after Christopher Columbus claimed possession of the Americas, the Spanish Crown invoked the Doctrine of Discovery. It was a religious and legal edict that sanctioned European monarchies by divine right to seize lands occupied by Indigenous Peoples. The 1493 papal edict characterized Indigenous Peoples as quote, “the lawful spoil and prey of their civilized conquerors” unquote.  

From the very beginning, the colonizers branded Indigenous Peoples as sub-human and unworthy of rights.

In 1792, then U.S. Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson declared that the Doctrine of Discovery would extend from Europe to the U.S. In 1823, the U.S. Supreme Court adopted it into U.S. law by unanimous vote. 

Casey Camp Horinek: The Catholic Church decided that if they came onto any of the territories where those of us were in total touch with Wakonda and Mother Earth did not embrace Christianity, that they had the right to come into our territory that we were blessed to caretake, and take what they chose to take by just planting their little flag on there and saying ‘this is ours because you guys are savages’. That began the destruction of our peoples and our women, in particular, and that papal bull edict has yet to be rescinded and that was the beginning of what was going on here that allowed people like Columbus, that allowed the extractive industry. 

Simone Senogles: When there are societies of strong Indigenous Peoples and there are people who are colonizing and they want to disrupt and destroy those societies, they understand that one of the first things they do is attack our women.

Host: Simone Senogles, a member of the Red Lake Nation of Ojibwe, works on food sovereignty issues with the nonprofit Indigenous Environmental Network.

Simone Senogles: And so that women who typically held positions of power, of influence, of decision-making, over all spheres of indigenous life – our education, the raising of our children, our governance, our food systems, our politics, our spirituality, our families, all of those things – those women, they were disempowered, and our society suffered. And so that connection between attacks on indigenous women and the theft of our land is a very complex and yet sometimes very simple relationship. 

Host: According to Tejana historian Antonia Castañeda, within diverse indigenous cultures, quote – “Women’s power and authority were integral to, and derived from, the tribe’s core religious and spiritual beliefs, values, and traditions, which generally accorded women and men equivalent value, power, and range of practices.” Ozawa Bineshi Albert …

Ozawa Bineshi Albert: For indigenous people, matriarchal is not that women ruled, it’s not the opposite of patriarchy, but there was a balance and leadership that women carried and held—women held property or land, or held the wealth of community. 

And in colonial times, trappers, people who wanted to trade with Indian people, they didn’t want to trade with women. Right? So that shifted a power dynamic here in this country with women.

And then you move forward to when they moved Indian people to reservations in different places, and in Oklahoma where they did allotments, many of those early tribes that came, women were not given allotments. Men were deemed head of households, and if you were a woman who lost your family along the walk or along however they got you or removed you, you had nothing, unless you attached yourself to another family.  

And that kind of history keeps finding new ways and applications. It’s happened with Navajo Nation and the way that women held property with their livestock in the livestock reduction programs. It had an impact on the power that women held.

So when we talk about this, yes, we’re talking about this from a context of how patriarchy and colonialism has a relationship to this epidemic that we’re dealing with now. It is not a new practice, it is not a new policy, even. Because even in this country, during the women’s suffrage movement that didn’t include Indian women being able to vote. We didn’t get a right to vote until much, much later, in our own homeland, not deemed as citizens or entitled to have a voice in our American politic. So that’s our collective history, and not just Indigenous People.

Casey Camp Horinek: Even in those terms, if they told a story in the history book that was factual, which was rare, the Native woman was never even mentioned. And they certainly don’t mention things like, in Columbus’s diary, that 9-year-old Native girls, were the favored ones to be sought after and captured, and given for use. 

And they certainly don’t mention in the history books the stories that my aunties, sisters-in-law, mamas and grandmas told about when they came to the village of the Ponca – I have to stick to the history that I know – how they picked up our kids by the hair, by their braids, and flung them in the back of the wagons. How they separated out the women and the girls to be utilized by the soldiers during the forced removal, while the men were held at gunpoint and felt helpless. 

And they certainly didn’t mention us in the films that I watched when I was a young girl. They would pick anybody that was slightly brown to play us. And if there was a woman in that that was played, she was always very pretty, very scantily dressed, and very sexualized. The history, the herstory, was never one that had any kind of valid strong woman like the women that I knew that survived all of those things that I’m talking to you about.

I worry about you out there. I worry about the heaviness that you’re feeling right now because of these stories. We’re strong women, they’re sitting on each side of me here. They’ll help us to learn, help us to turn that corner, where we regain and re-understand our own portion of balance and how to go about that, and how to empower the men in our lives to honor, respect, and understand the sacredness of woman. 

Simone Senogles: We just recently did an exercise with some of the women in our community where we Googled ourselves, not by name but by Native American women or indigenous women, and the images that came up are just hyper-sexualized, fetishized, as Halloween costumes. And what we did in response to that, after we looked at those images of ourselves on the Internet, we made a collage of our own selves. We printed out pictures of ourselves, of our children, of our families, of our communities, of our lands and our waters, and we reminded ourselves of who we are to find ourselves. And especially our responsibility to Mother Earth, because we’ve said before, what happens to the body happens to Mother Earth. What happens to Mother Earth happens to our body. 

And so we’re reclaiming that. And that is a lot of power for us as indigenous women to remember what our roles and responsibilities are as far as taking care of Mother Earth. There’s a lot of strength in that.

And so the more that we understand our own ways of understanding even concepts around ownership, our relationship to the land, our relationship to ourselves, we are strengthened.

Host: In 2012, the hashtag #MMIW campaign took off as part of the movement to educate the general public about Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women. To offer people ideas for how to get involved, the nonprofit Sovereign Bodies Institute created a comprehensive toolkit for organizers. 

Ozawa Bineshi Albert: What is then the collective responsibility to this? We’re telling you a story about what’s happening, we’re doing our end of the work. And now we’re asking you: What are you going to be able to do to bring this issue to the forefront?

When VAWA comes up for reauthorization as it does from time to time, don’t throw us under the bus. When other gains need to be made, that you stand your ground and say, we’re not going without the indigenous women of Alaska. 

Bring this up with your police departments. We need citizens that look like you to say, Hey, there’s this crazy thing happening to indigenous women. What are you doing as the sheriff, as the police chief, as the mayor, as a city council? And in particular states where there’s high concentrations of Native people, call and ask your state legislatures, What are you doing about this epidemic? 

Kandi White: We have always traditionally and historically been the people that have held the homes together. We owned the homes, we owned the earth lodges, traditionally, and carried that role, which was a kind of more of a silent role. But now we’ve seen Women standing up and rising up and saying no more, we’re not going to be the silent role, we have to have a voice, we have to have our own grassroots organizations and take a stand and maybe help pick up our men that lost their warrior status when the industries came, and when colonization came. Because we don’t have a choice. We were forced into a role to pick up the pieces and to say we’re not going to allow this to happen anymore to our bodies, to our Earth, to our own children. We’re going to stand and rise up.

OTHER RESOURCES

The Coalition to Stop Violence Against Native Women

Article from The Intercept: “A New Film Examines Sexual Violence as a Feature of the Bakken Oil Boom”

Restoring Justice for Indigenous Peoples: MMIW Initiative

Decolonizing Regenerative Agriculture: An Indigenous Perspective

A-dae Romero-Briones (Cochiti/Kiowa) is the Director of Programs: Agriculture and Food Systems for the First Nations Development Institute. First Nations provides grants and technical assistance to strengthen native communities and economies. A-dae is a compelling voice against the injustices of colonization inflicted on Native People and for the acknowledgment of Indigenous People’s land stewardship as a basis for regenerative agriculture. A-dae was interviewed by Arty Mangan, Director of the Bioneers Restorative Food Systems Program.

ARTY: What are the differences between an indigenous perspective of agriculture and a non-indigenous perspective?

A-DAE: That’s a loaded question because the whole idea of agriculture puts a contemporary spin on the conversation. Agriculture is usually the point in our American historical narrative where Indigenous People are separated from the rest of civilization. Agriculture is usually the delineating line where people talk about civilization and non-civilization or hunter-gatherers and yeoman farmers. Whenever I get questions about agriculture, I always get a little squirmy because I realize most people are coming from the perspective of the American historical narrative where Indigenous People are excluded.

There are stark differences between agricultural systems in indigenous communities and agricultural systems in contemporary communities. The first being the idea of collective resources. In an indigenous community, there are some things that just cannot be commodified – land, water, air, animals, even the health of the people, all of which are considered collective resources. Collective resources require collective and community management. Contemporary agriculture doesn’t have the same base. In contemporary agriculture, there are individualized, commodified resources like land, you can buy water, at one point in our history you could even buy somebody’s body and health. 

With individualized, commodified resources, the whole dynamic of society changes. It requires different skill sets when you’re managing collective resources versus individualized land plots. There are a lot more specialized skills in the individual land plot scenario. In collective resources management, a variety of skills are needed because you’re not only dealing with people, but you’re also dealing with relationships and how to balance those relationships. 

The biggest difference in contemporary agriculture versus indigenous agriculture is the idea of money. In an indigenous community if you had a person who hunted, if you had a person who could plant a seed, if you had a person who knew how to gather, then you had access to food. In an American or contemporary agricultural system, the way to access those things is through money or some form of money. Sometimes it’s public benefit; sometimes it’s through actual cash economy transactions. There are a lot of transactions that limit the access that a person has to food.

It’s important to keep in mind that food is an indicator of the health of a society. In an indigenous community, food shortages mean something within that society is awry and has to be fixed. But because we have the extra barrier of food access through money, food no longer is that indicator. You have to replace that societal indicator with something else. When that happens, people are disconnected from society and from the collective resources that go into making food. 

A-dae-Romero-Briones

ARTY: What does it mean to decolonize agriculture and how does that pertain to regenerative agriculture?

A-DAE: Agriculture, as we’re told in the American narrative, is the delineating line between civilization and the wild Indians. It was the system that separated and allowed for a lot of injustice that occurred with land theft, slavery and indentured servitude. The conversation about decolonizing agriculture is about examining the agricultural system and concepts that allow for those injustices to happen. When we talk about decolonizing regenerative agriculture, we are looking at that initial definition. I’m asking people to stop and say, “Look at how we think about agriculture in America and think about whether it included Indigenous People.” The answer is it doesn’t. It doesn’t include indigenous people because only colonizers and settlers are considered farmers in America. That means that when people are talking about correcting agriculture to a time when it was better, we’re going back to that definition of when settlers came to America and started agriculture. Before that, people weren’t considered agriculturalists. Before that, they were considered hunters and gatherers, which has its own connotations.  

To decolonize regenerative agriculture, we have to go back and think about the times before European settlement and contact to the times when there was more of a balance in the ecological environments that we’re trying to correct now.

ARTY: How would you define regenerative agriculture?

A-DAE: At the heart of the concept regeneration is wanting to renew and correct some of the missteps that have taken us to the point of environmental damage and degradation. We want to create systems that are rebirthing a healthy environment. In order to do that, we need to include Indigenous People. So, my definition of regenerative agriculture is one that includes a true history of land and the environment and people’s health that starts prior to contact.

ARTY: In your writings and talks, you seem to challenge the idea of mimicking nature, which many people in the regenerative agriculture movement use as a guiding principle. Isn’t nature our best teacher?

A-DAE: Yes. I think nature is our best teacher. But it’s a fallacy to think that we can imitate a system that has been in existence for hundreds of thousands if not millions of years. These are systems that have been perfected because of relationships with other living beings, plants, animals, the land and everything that surrounds it; those relationships take time. We are a very young society and nation. Scientific inquiry and the scientific field is fairly young compared to the natural systems that we’re trying to mimic. 

We can probably shoot for mimicking nature, but the idea that we could actually achieve it is a fallacy to me. I think one of the most important lessons in indigenous epistemology is that natural systems have unknowns, and that man cannot know everything. We have to have reverence and respect for those unknowns. There are processes in the trees that grow, in the animals that migrate that we just will not know. We should respect in reverence and allow those unknowns to happen. We can observe it knowing that we can probably aid in the health of it, knowing that there is something just beyond our reach, and knowing that there is something greater out there that we must respect.

Coffee Pot Farms, a Native American woman-owned business in Navajo Nation

ARTY: The late Joseph Campbell, professor and author of books on mythology, said that Indigenous Peoples refer to the natural world and all in it as “thou,” as sacred. He said that Western culture views the natural world as an “it” that can be exploited and processed. Can you talk more about reverence versus exploitation?

A-DAE: There is an assumption that man has command of everything around us, or we are on a higher plane than the living things around us. To me, again, that’s a fallacy. We are probably the youngest species on our planet and in our environments; the trees and the plants and the animals are much older. Understanding our place in the universe requires us to actually look at those time frames. When you look at the whole of time, it becomes overwhelming. Indigenous People have created the idea of the unknown and the sacred and reverence for where we are as the youngest entity in this place. There is so much that we have to learn. Rather than being burdened with that task, the idea that we respect the unknown helps people deal with it.

It leaves room at the table for processes to happen because if we knew everything and if we could mimic nature, there’s no imagination that’s needed, there’s no room for surprises, and there’s no room for some of the beauty that happens by happenstance. Some of the greatest joys come from the understanding of reverence and the sacred.

This idea of exploitation puts us in the position that we have to manage everything with the right to commodify things that should never be commodified. We can’t sell everything. I think we learn that through our relationships with other humans that not everything is meant to be sold.

ARTY: I heard you tell the story of assisting your grandfather filling out an organic certification application and to the question of what inputs do you use, he said “prayers, love, river water.” 

You serve on the National Organic Standard board. Have you been able to provide some indigenous perspective to that process?

A-DAE: One of the reasons I entered into the organic community was because organic uses less chemicals to create a food system, and the use of those things by industrial agriculture really worried me. When I see basket-weavers who are weaving from roots that have been affected by pesticides, I worry about them. Why would I want to put that in my body? Indigenous people, in general, don’t use pesticides. We have really strong seeds. So, this idea that Indigenous People would be welcomed in the organic community was one that I was really hopeful for.

What I found is there are not a lot of non-white people in the organic community. When you’re trying to move an entire community of white people and as a non-white person, it is really, really hard and tiring. So, I sit on the board and it helps that I’m a brown face in a very white community. In that sense, I think there is some awareness that there needs to be more inclusion of non-white people in the organic community. I have tried to work on group certification for tribal communities, but again these are systems that are massive, and it takes way more than me to make really lasting change. 

My term is coming to an end, and I hope they replace me with another indigenous person, but that’s a political process, which is pretty crazy presently.

Sicangu Food Sovereignty Initiative addresses food insecurity and diet related illness on the Rosebud Reservation

ARTY: When Europeans came to North America they erected fences. How did fences disrupt indigenous food sheds in New Mexico and other places?

A-DAE: I think we’re still dealing with the issue of fences today. When I was a little girl in second grade, we were asked to draw a picture of our house. My teacher pulled my paper because I had all the houses together like a pueblo, which I grew up in. She said, “No, what I mean is you need a pitched roof and a picket fence in front of the house. The idea of the picket fence fascinated me. I was like: “What is this? What is the purpose of this fence?” Because in the Pueblo we don’t have fences. Rez dogs just wander in the community and people feed them. In our fields, there are no fences.

In the 1930s and again in the ‘60s, The National Resource Conservation Service came in and put in elk and deer-proof fences. They said you need to put fences around your fields so you can keep out all the animals that are going to eat your crops. My grandpa’s response was: “We’re farmers. When we plant corn, we don’t plant just for us, we plant for the environment around us too. If the deer are coming, it’s because they’re hungry. So, that means, I need to plant more.” We’re adjusting to our environment rather than trying to keep everything out. So, this idea of a fence is just antithetical to the way we view the world. 

Recently the Pueblo of Jemez had a lawsuit against the forest service. The Caldera in the Jemez Mountains in New Mexico is surrounded by a fence; it’s in a National Preserve. The Pueblo of Jemez said that the Caldera has always been sacred to the Jemez people, and they have always had continuous access. But the federal agency said, “There’s a fence there, and it says no trespassing. Are you telling us that the Jemez people have been going over this fence?” And the Jemez governor’s response was, “I thought that fence was to keep the elk in not to keep the Indians out.” 

ARTY: Relationships in indigenous ways are central. For example, you talked about growing corn for the deer. How does indigenous farming develop relationships and nurture life?

A-DAE: One of the things that comes to mind is food safety. I studied food safety law when I got my LLM [Master of Laws Degree]. I thought it was fascinating, the idea that you pretty much kill everything so that nothing living goes inside your body as a preventative to making you sick. I just didn’t understand the concept of making the food supply so clean to prevent sickness.

It’s almost like the idea of wilderness being healthy if nobody’s in it. To me it’s weird because in indigenous epistemologies people are a part of the environment, and it’s the same with the microbiome. Indigenous communities embrace the environments that we’re in. We have to embrace the bacteria and the microbiome that make our community because that’s the only way our bodies adjust to our environment. That’s the only way we’re going to ensure that we are within the cycle of whatever natural systems we’re a part of. We don’t kill the natural systems in order to ensure that we survive, which is what food safety does. 

When we farm, we’re thinking about natural cycles, and how do we become more embedded into those natural systems. We take the cues from the natural systems, whether that be deer, whether that be insects, whether it be water shortages.  In order to be successful farmers, we have to learn how to adjust to those environmental changes from the beings in that natural environment.

But it is very much the opposite of what agricultural systems are today, which tries to kill everything except the plant that you want to grow. That is so hard for me to understand. 

ARTY: I’ve always felt like one of the big problems with agriculture is that it needs more biology, it needs more life, not less. And as you describe, the thrust is to kill off the pests, kill off the weeds, destroy and kill and create the monocrop. But the real remedy is more diverse above-and-below ground living systems.

A-DAE: Absolutely. That’s exactly how I see indigenous food systems. The indigenous universal connection is the idea that you absolutely need to be part of the natural cycles around you, whether they’re negative or positive. You need to adjust to them. You’re part of that system. You need to become embraced in that system in order to create not only a healthy food system, but also healthy people, a healthy environment, and a happy mental state. I don’t understand the other side. I’ve tried. I’ve studied it to death, and I’m still learning.

ARTY: You wrote: “Indigenous People can look at a landscape and tell if the soil is healthy. They know how to see the health of the soil without needing a microscope.” Allan Savory, the founder of holistic livestock management, was criticized by scientists because initially he didn’t use scientific metrics to measure his success, but instead he used the overall improved health and biodiversity of the landscape. Is regenerative agriculture a place where traditional indigenous knowledge and science can complement each other?

A-DAE: One of the major components I hear consistently in regenerative agriculture is this idea of carbon sequestration. The language of science is very minute, talking about atoms and nutrients and carbon. These are things we can’t see unless you have a microscope and unless you know what a carbon atom looks like. It leaves the common farmer and the common Indigenous person outside of understanding, and that’s a problem. We need people to understand why it’s important to have healthy soil and why it’s important that you have a healthy root system that sequesters water. We need people to understand that. But counting carbon and counting molecules is not going to help people understand.

In regenerative agriculture, the science needs to follow healthy systems. Indigenous people are stewarding healthy systems. Rather than trying to disprove or prove the functionality of these systems, science needs to take their cues and use scientific methods to explain the importance and the positives of these stewarded lands. There are many reports that say carbon sequestration is happening in indigenous stewarded lands. In places like the Amazon or here in California where the Mono people are still doing traditional burns, or places along the rivers where Indigenous People are stewarding the salmon and the salmon burial grounds, those are some of the healthiest soils. Also, places that have been stewarded and kept by California indigenous basket-weavers, those are the places where carbon is probably its most healthy. Science rather than trying to count carbon, should work to explain to the Western scientific world why these stewarded places are so important and why these practices should be continued. 

In historical terms, science has been used to dispossess a lot of Indigenous Peoples of land. So, this idea that science is objective is kind of a fallacy to me because I think science is very much subject to political whims more than anything else. I could go off on politics and science, but I’m just going to end there.

ARTY: In the webinar you hosted as part of a First Nations Development Institute series on land stewardship, you said that agroecology is a non-indigenous term; it’s an interpretation of an indigenous way of farming, but not an interpretation by Indigenous People. How do Native voices become authentically included in the regenerative agriculture conversation?

A-DAE: Invite them to the table. When I say agroecology is an interpretation, it’s because agroecology practices are practices without the people. Many of these other disciplines take practices of Indigenous People, but don’t include the people or don’t include their stories.

For instance, my grandpa would take me to the field and tell a story about the last time he saw conditions like this and what his grandparents did. Those stories are just as important as the practices or the l hoe that I pick up. Those stories are the guideposts that need to be laid out before we even start digging into the soil. Indigenous People need room to tell those stories.

The same goes for traditional ecological knowledge. Really, what does that mean? It’s a very broad term. Cochiti people do things differently than Pomo people. Pomo people do different things than Navajo people. The Navajo people do different things than Kiowa people. It’s much more nuanced than these terms that are in vogue or not in vogue depending on the time and audience.

Each of these peoples have their own practices and stories that go along with these practices. They need that whole spectrum, the full body, the full room and the time to tell those stories along with their practices, which currently is hard to find in any of these multiple disciplines, whether it be agroecology, permaculture, or traditional ecological knowledge. 

ARTY: What needs to happen to make the regenerative agriculture community more inclusive?

A-DAE: We need to challenge, as a community, the historical narrative of this country that begins with this idea that the farmer is the true American, and that agriculture is really how our continent was started. It started long before that event happened in our country, and regenerative agriculture needs to challenge that narrative that has led us astray thus far.

3 Challenges To Sustainability

The dominant systems in place today — energy, food, agriculture, economy, education etc. — are unsustainable, and so by definition will fail. What are some of the obstacles to designing long-term, truly sustainable systems and how do we overcome them?


“When all the trees have been cut down, when all the animals have been hunted, when all the waters are polluted, when all the air is unsafe to breathe, only then will you discover you cannot eat money.”

—Alanis Obomsawin, Abernaki Filmmaker

Bill Mollison, the founder of Permaculture, wonders, “Why does society, with all its skill, intelligence, and resources, keep falling into holes of its own making?”

What is sustainability and what are some of the challenges to becoming sustainable? In 1987, the Brundtland Commission of the United Nations defined it this way: “Sustainable development meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

That definition is derived from the Great Law of the Haudenosaunee or Iroquois Federation that requires decision making to take into consideration the impact seven generations into the future. How will our actions today affect the great-grandchildren of our great-grandchildren 200 hundred years from now?

Janine Benyus, the naturalist and author who developed the concept of biomimicry — the idea that humans should emulate nature’s genius in their designs — says it in this way: “Life creates conditions conducive to life.”

Unfortunately, too many people in the modern industrial world still think that the environment is something outside or apart from themselves. The reality is that everything we do is a subset of the environment.

The great Coast Salish warrior and diplomat Chief Seattle, in his eloquent environmental treatise in response to President Franklin Pierce’s offer to buy Salish land and expand white settlement, said, “Whatever befalls the Earth befalls the sons of Earth. If men spit upon the ground they spit upon themselves. This we know: The Earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the Earth. This we know: All things are connected.”

Economist Hazel Henderson said, “The paradigm of sustainability, with its notions of limitations and carrying capacities, confronts dominant paradigms of progress, which do not recognize limits to unchecked growth.”

As a result of that kind of thinking, nearly all of the dominant systems in place today are unsustainable: energy, food, agriculture, economy, education, etc. And if they are unsustainable, then by definition, they will fail.

Eco-farmer Joel Salatin, who Michael Pollan writes about in Omnivore’s Dilemma, says, “Every paradigm exceeds its point of efficiency… only now has the industrial paradigm in agriculture come to the end of its workability. What happens is all these things we’re seeing — campylobacter, E-coli, mad cow, listeria, salmonella that weren’t even in the lexicon 30 years ago. [They are proof of] the industrial paradigm exceeding its efficiency.”

Social and economic systems mimic natural systems. Things in nature don’t expand forever. As an old system goes into decline the opportunity, space and resources become available for something new to grow. A tree falls in the forest allowing light to penetrate the canopy. The decaying leaves and limbs decompose creating fertile conditions, more water becomes available, hormones in dormant seeds are stimulated and seedlings emerge from the decay of old structures.

What are some specific challenges to sustainability? There are many artifacts of the old, non-sustainable systems that challenge sustainability. I’m just going to touch on three: rewarding the wrong activity, industrialization of biological systems, and treating nature like a slave.

1. Rewarding the Wrong Activity

It is estimated that governments spend more than $700 billion a year to subsidize environmentally unsound practices in agriculture, water, energy, and transportation.

The present economic system often rewards the most unsustainable practices, and by doing so, prolongs the pathology of the status quo, monopolizes resources, maintains the power structure, and decreases the opportunity for a new system to be designed and built that serves people and the environment in a sustainable and humane way.

One example is the agricultural subsidies for commodity growers that reward the worst farming practices. More than $15 billion annually is given to corn, soy, cotton, and other commodity farmers whose products create extensive toxicity, skew the marketplace, and tie up money that could be supporting sustainable practices.

This system was originally an emergency measure during the great depression to keep farmers on the land. Seventy years later, it is completely entrenched into the political system because subsidy payments buy political loyalty, and with it, funding for politicians who maintain the subsidy program.

The farming practices that are being supported are a disaster from the point of view of sustainability — using genetically engineered seeds, high chemical inputs, farming marginal lands, and forgoing crop rotation so that they can maximize subsidy payments.

The commodity prices, because of subsidy payments, are below real production costs and supply the cheap calorie market for junk food that is driving the obesity and diabetes epidemics, as well as dumping cheap GMO corn into Mexico, pushing farmers off the land and contaminating heirloom corn varieties with GMO genetic pollution. Nitrogen runoff from subsidized Midwestern cornfields leaches into the Mississippi River, creating a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico the size of Connecticut.

So what’s the answer? First, all government officials should take a Permaculture course so they can develop an understanding of the healthy connection between ecology and economy and to help inform them of what real sustainability is.

If, as Michael Pollan suggests, we all start to look at the Farm Bill as the Food Bill and make our representatives aware of the importance of eliminating subsidies and replacing them with incentives for conservation, permaculture, and organic farming, we can stop supporting the most damaging activities and encourage practices that create economic “conditions conducive to life.”

The Dreaming New Mexico project has created a listing of eco-services that farmers could perform and receive payments for such as: carbon sequestration, water shed restoration, pollinator-friendly habitat, erosion control, and managing invasive species.

2. Industrialization of Biological Systems

Historically, as herds of bison gathered to feed on native grasses in the plains, their manure and urine provided essential nutrients for the grasses as well as beneficial bacteria for the soil food web. The browsing on the tops of grass resulted in die-back of the underground roots, providing organic matter to feed good soil bacteria.

The manure and urine sent out pungent signals to predators such as wolves that the herd was in the vicinity. The predators put pressure on the herd to move to a different area. That movement ensured that the animals did not overgraze, which could have resulted in desertification.

Predator pressure also regulates the amount of animal waste deposited in a particular area. In high concentrations, those nutrients can become toxic. So the predator protects the grass, without which the bison could not survive. The grass feeds the bison that keeps the predator alive — interdependence in a healthy biological system.

Our modern version of animal husbandry is CAFOs: concentrated animal feeding operations. These may be the most industrialized of all agricultural systems; their blind pursuit of yield and efficiency have resulted in increased disease among animals and people, inhumane conditions for the animals, an increase in greenhouse gasses, and antibiotic resistance. Additionally, CAFOs create as much waste as a small city. These are highly concentrated operations, where tens of thousands of cattle are penned living in their own waste, eating an unnatural diet of corn, which acidifies their stomachs and encourages pathogenic E-coli to thrive. These negative outcomes are largely the result of ignoring the dynamics of natural healthy systems.

Grass-fed cows, on the other hand, have higher amounts of omega 3 essential fatty acids, lower amounts of saturated fat, higher quality protein, higher amounts of CLA — a good fat that prevents cancer, higher vitamin E levels, lower methane emissions, are more resistant to deadly E-coli, and, if managed properly, increase the fertility of the pasture.

The Bioneers Restorative Food Systems Program provides knowledge, inspiration, connections, and conceptual frameworks to help individuals, communities and decision makers envision and implement their own sustainable food systems. Learn more about this essential program.

3. Treating Nature Like a Slave

JL Chestnut, the great civil rights lawyer from Alabama, speaking at the Bioneers conference before he died said, “The same mentality that oppresses people pollutes the environment.”

The planet is in worse shape today than it was in the 1970s, when the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act were passed. Those laws were passed under the authority of the commerce laws of the U.S. Constitution, treating nature as property just as at one time slaves were treated as property.

Environment is considered to be a subset of commerce — merely a place to get resources for business. Environmental laws do not protect the rights of nature, but merely slow down the rate of destruction.

The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) has worked with communities in Pennsylvania, New England, and Virginia to establish the Rights of Nature by drafting and helping pass laws “that change the status of ecosystems from being regarded as property under the law to being recognized as rights-bearing entities.”

That effort led to the CELDF work with the government of Ecuador to write the Rights of Nature into the Ecuadorian constitution in 2009. The language that was codified in the constitution says nature “has the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution.”

Bren Smith’s Open-Sourced 3D Ocean Farm Model Can Feed a Hungry Planet

Bren Smith is one of the world’s most sustainable, ethical, and productive farmers. His farms have tiny footprints with massive outputs, and they’re open to public exploration and recreation. The crops he grows have the capacity to consume up to five times the amount of carbon that traditional farm plants consume. The key to Smith’s success? Everything he cultivates lives underwater.

Thimble Island Ocean Farm is one of the first “3D” ocean farms on the planet. Smith’s innovative vertical underwater gardening technique has made high yields on minimal acreage a reality, while his attention to biodiversity—he farms shellfish in addition to a whole host of healthy, fast-growing sea vegetables—is restoring ocean ecosystems and creating biofuel.

Believing that Thimble Island could provide a blueprint for a new ocean economy, Smith open-sourced his model. Today, his GreenWave organization helps would-be entrepreneurs start their own ocean farms, providing new employment avenues for those left behind by unsustainable industrial economies.

Watch Bren Smith tell the story of his transformation from deep-sea fisherman to sustainable economy pioneer in this video from Bioneers 2016, and read the transcript that follows.

Bren Smith:

My story is a story of ecological redemption. I was born and raised in Newfoundland, Canada, dropped out of high school when I was 14, and headed out to sea. I fished the Grand Banks and the Georges Banks—tuna, lobster. I headed out to the Bering Sea in the 80s and fished cod and crab.

Now, this was the height of industrialized fishing. We were tearing up entire ecosystems with our trawls, chasing fewer and fewer fish further and further out to sea. And most of the fish I was catching were going to McDonald’s for their fish sandwich.

I was a kid producing some of the lowest, worst, most destructive food on the planet. But God, I loved that job. The sense of humility of being in 30-foot seas; the sense of solidarity being in the belly of a boat with 13 other people doing 20-hour shifts; and the sense of meaning, of helping feed my country. Those were some of the best days of my life. I’ve been on the water for 30 years, and I miss them so, so much.

Then the cod stocks crashed back home in Newfoundland. This was a real wake-up call. Thousands of fishermen thrown out of work, boats beached, canneries emptied. It is amazing that a culture and economy built up over a hundred years can disappear in a matter of weeks in the face of ecological crisis.

That’s when I began to learn that ecological crisis has nothing to do with the environment, it has to do with the economy. There will be no jobs on a dead planet.

So, I started this search for sustainability, and I ended up in the aquaculture farms in Northern Canada, because aquaculture was supposed to be the great answer to over fishing, job creation, and reduction of pressure on fish stocks. Instead, it was more of the same. We were polluting local waters with antibiotics and pesticides. We were growing neither fish nor food. These were Iowa pig farms at sea.

I kept searching, disillusioned, and I ended up in Long Island Sound. I chased a woman down there. They were opening up shell fishing grounds for the first time in 150 years to attract young fishers back into the industry. I remade myself as an oysterman. I did that for a couple years, and then the storms hit— hurricane Irene, hurricane Sandy—barreling through, wiping out 90 percent of my crop. Most of my gear washed out to sea two years in a row. Suddenly I found myself on the front lines of a climate crisis that arrived 100 years earlier than expected. This was supposed to be a slow lobster boil. It’s here and now, as everyone in this room knows.

Facing ecological collapse means I can’t work on the water. The goal in my life is to work on the sea. My goal is to die on my boat one day. That’s going to be a measure of success. But we need to protect and save the oceans for me to die that way.

I picked myself up and started redesigning my farm. I lifted it off the bottom so it was resilient to storm surges, used the entire water column and searching for new species to grow—species that were restorative. After 15 years of experimentation with sustainability, I ended up as the first 3D ocean farmer, growing a mix of seaweeds and shellfish to create good local food, create jobs, and help fight the climate crisis.

Now, let’s look at the farm, because it’s hard to picture what I’m doing under the water.
I had a kid draw this picture, and it’s really simple. It’s just hurricane-proof anchors on the edges of the farm and then a rope eight feet across the surface. From there, we grow our kelp vertically downward. Next to that, we’ve got our scallops and lantern nets, muscles and muscle socks. On the bottom, we have oysters in cages, and then clams down in the mud.


Here’s a picture of our kelp. Beautiful plant. So, kelp grows in post-hurricane season, and it’s one of the fastest-growing plants on Earth. Once we harvest the kelp, the muscles set. We have mini-scallops and then we’ve got our oysters, which are thimble island salts. It’s like a splash of ocean when you eat it.

Here’s the picture of the farm from the surface. I run eco tours—$500 to come out. It’s the biggest rip-off in the tourist industry, because there’s nothing to see. But that’s such a good thing, right? It has a low aesthetic impact. Our oceans are these beautiful pristine places and we want to keep them that way.

Our farms have small footprints. My farm used to be 100 acres. It’s down to 20 acres, and I’m growing way more food than before because we’re vertical.

Anybody can boat, swim and fish on our farms. They’re community spaces where you can dive through our kelp forests. We don’t own the property. All we own is the right to grow shellfish and seaweeds. We own a process not a property. We’re going to farm to protect our commons rather than privatize it like agriculture did.

Our goal was to take on three major challenges.

One was develop a delicious new seafood plate in this era of overfishing and food insecurity. We reject agriculture’s obsession with monoculture. We grow for polyculture. Sea bass, two kinds of seaweeds, four kinds of shellfish, and we harvest salt as well.

But we’ve barely broken the surface. There are 10,000 edible plants in the ocean, and a couple hundred shellfish. I mean, imagine being a chef at this time and finding out there are arugulas, tomatoes, and rices that you’ve never cooked with before, tasted or seen. This is an exciting time to develop a culinary cuisine. What we’re going to do is re-imagine a seafood plate. We’ll move bivalves and sea greens to the center, and wild fish to the edges.

Our kelp is the “gateway drug” to de-sushify sea greens. We’re making kelp the new kale by doing barbecue kelp noodles with parsnips and bread crumbs. These are vegetables. This isn’t seafood. We’re doing sea green butters and umami bomb bullion cubes. Our new ocean dinner, it’s going to be fun, it’s going to be creative, and it’s going to be delicious. It’s time to eat like fish, because fish don’t make omega 3’s and all these things we need—they eat them. By eating like fish, we get the benefits while reducing pressure on fish stocks.

This isn’t some little boutique, like bearded Brooklyn bee farm. We can grow huge amounts of crops in small areas—10 to 30 tons of seaweed, 250,000 shellfish per acre. If you were to take a network of our farms totaling the size of Washington state, you could feed the world. And this is zero-input food. It requires no freshwater, no fertilizer, no feed, no land, making it hands-down the most sustainable form of food production on the planet. In the era of climate change, as water prices and feed/fertilizer prices go up, our food is going to be the most affordable food on the planet to grow, and the most affordable food on the planet to eat. We are going to be eating sea greens.

Climate change is going to force us to eat zero-input foods. Question is: Is it going to be delicious, or is it going to be like being force-fed cod liver oil? That’s where the chefs come in. If chefs can’t make what we can grow delicious, they should quit their jobs. Developing this climate cuisine is what they’re here on Earth to do.

The second goal of the farm is to transform fishers into restorative ocean farmers. Mother Nature created these two technologies millions of years ago, designing them to mitigate our harm: shellfish and seaweeds. Oysters are these incredible agents of sustainability that filter out 50 gallons of water a day, pulling nitrogen out of our water column, which is the root cause of dead zones spreading through the globe. Our kelp soaks up five times more carbon than land-based plants. It’s called the sequoia of the sea. We can turn it into zero-input biofuel—2,000 gallons per acre of ethanol. If you take an area the size of Maine, you could replace all the oil in the United States, according to the Department of Energy. The New Yorker recently called it the culinary equivalent of the electric car.

Our farms also function as storm surge protectors. Now that our coral reefs or oyster reefs are gone, our farms replace them. There are artificial reefs attracting over 150 species that come hide and thrive. My farm used to be a barren patch of ocean, and now it’s a thriving ecosystem.
As fishermen, we’re now climate farmers. Restoring rather than depleting, and really trying to tackle, in our own small way, the climate crisis we all face. We’re also trying to use our zero-input crops to replace land-based inputs. We’ve got a program with the Yale Sustainable Food Program to use our kelp as fertilizer in their organic farm. As the nitrogen leaches off back into the waters, we capture it and close that nitrogen loop.

Cattle have been eating kelp for hundreds of years, until industrial feed pushed it off the farm. If you feed cattle a majority diet of kelp, you get up to a 90 percent reduction in methane, and you get this beautiful tasting, umami-filled beef. It’s delicious stuff. When we bring this stuff into New York, I’m going to blow grass-fed beef off the table.

The idea is really to build a bridge between land and sea. Too often, our thinking about the food system stops at the water’s edge. I go to food conferences. There are maybe 1,000 people, and there’s this little break-off session about the ocean, and eight people attend. That’s why I’m absolutely frightened.

The last piece is building a foundation of a new economy that puts jobs, justice, and restoration at the center of the plate. Now, I’m not an environmentalist. I kill things for a living. You give me a gun, I’ll shoot moose out of my kitchen window. I grew up with seal hunts. And I wouldn’t be doing this unless it created jobs for the 40 percent of people that are unemployed in my community—unless it created opportunity for the millions of people that were left behind as we built the polluting industrial economy. That’s why I’m here.

We built Greenwave, which is a hybrid nonprofit/for-profit, to begin building this industry from the bottom up. We work to replicate and scale. We build the infrastructure necessary, and we develop new markets.

First thing we did was open-source our model. We don’t franchise. That’s a tool of the old economy. In a new economy, we make things accessible to everybody. Anybody with 20 acres and a boat and $30,000 can start their farm and be up and growing the first year. The key to replication is designing around simplicity, not complexity. Our farms require minimal capital costs and minimal skill. Think of it as the nail salon model of the sea.

And they’re profitable. Because we don’t have to feed and weed these things, we’re able to net up to $200,000 or $300,000 per farm and employ up to 10 people, and that’s just on the farm, that doesn’t count the processing centers.

As a farmer, you get some start-up grants. We give free seed, and we’re keeping the hatchery under the nonprofit side, because three companies own 53 percent of the land-based seed supply, and seed is the most expensive input for farmers. We’re going to look at our system and decide where profits can be extracted and where can’t they. They’re not going to come off the backs of new ocean farmers. We get gear from Patagonia, and we guarantee purchasing. It’s hard to farm in the era of climate change and globalization. We guarantee to buy up to 80 percent of farmers’ crops for three to five years at triple the market rate. We’re going to give people a stable platform so they can learn to grow.

We have requests flooding in. We’ve had requests to start farms in every coastal state in North America and 40 countries around the world. We have land-based farmers—young ones—just flooding in, because they can’t afford land. We also have our first farmer here in California who’s a Mexican American, second-generation plumber, and I’m really hoping is going to be the new face on the West Coast, so I never have to fly here again.

We’re also building a land-based infrastructure to scale. We have the largest hatchery network in the U.S., and we’re building seafood hubs so farmers can capture more of that value chain. Our land-based infrastructure is designed to be an engine of food justice—a place where we embed good jobs and food access into the DNA of the new ocean economy. In practice, this means placing our seafood hubs in communities that need it most. Our first one was in one of the poorest neighborhoods on the East Coast. Our starting wages are minimum $15 an hour, and it’s open employment, so don’t you dare bring your resume. I don’t care if you’re a former felon or undocumented worker, we’re going to figure out a way to work together.

This isn’t just about jobs. This isn’t about working in our processing factories. This is about agency. One of the major deficits in our society today is the feeling that you can make a difference—that you have to be an Amazon, you have to be a Google, in order to tackle the big problems. You don’t.
Our goal is to make sure the folks who were left behind from the old economy own their own farms, that they don’t have bosses, that they have self-directed lives. Giving people agency over their lives is a core value of this new ocean economy.

The last piece of the Green Wave program is innovation and market development. We’re developing new technologies for solar, harvesting boats, mobile hatcheries, data sensing. Data sensors make it so we can do pollution farming in places like the Bronx and measure our ecosystem services. We can use it not for the food system but for biofuels, because kelp is the soy of the sea, except for it’s not evil. The market power is that it has so many uses in so many sectors.

If you put this together, everybody asks me what does scale look like. It’s not thousand-acre banana plantations. It’s networks of 25 to 50 farms in a local region—a seafood hub, a hatchery on land, a ring of big institutional buyers (hospitals, colleges, companies like Google), and then a ring of entrepreneurs developing value-added products and doing the innovation. We take those Green Wave reefs and we replicate them every 200 miles. You see a Home Depot, we’re going to have a Green Wave reef right on top of it.

Offshore, we want to embed our farms in wind farms. Why just harvest wind? We have that structure, let’s do food, fuel, and fertilizer in those same spaces. Our oceans are huge places. There’s a lot of room to play, as long as we do it the right way.

To close, turning Green Wave’s vision into reality, I think, is a necessity. The land-based ag systems is entering these cycles of escalating crisis. Climate change is expected to drive up corn prices up to 140 percent in the next 15 years. It is terrifying, the carbon and methane output from the ag sector. You throw in population rise, growing inequality in the U.S. and around the globe, and food insecurities emerging as the new normal, and if that’s not enough, farmers can’t even make a living—91 percent of farmers in the U.S. lose money year after year. This is just a system that’s not working.

Climate change is going to force us into the ocean. I think that’s one of the real lessons of the droughts out here in California—we’re going to be forced out to sea. But our wild fisheries can’t handle it—85 percent of wild fish stocks are over-harvested, and we just can’t expect our fish to bear that burden.

This is all what’s so exciting: Climate change, at least out on the water, is breeding hope for those of us that are out there on our boats. Because this is our chance to do food right. For the first time in generations, to build an agricultural system from the bottom up. Our oceans are these blank slates. More of the U.S. is under water than above. This is our opportunity to protect rather than privatize our oceans, our seas, ensure beginning and low-income farmers have access to low-cost property, avoid all the mistakes made in industrial land-based ag and industrial aquiculture. Let’s invent whole new occupations to feed the planet and lift communities out of poverty.

This is the new face of environmentalism. It’s not just conservation and stopping pipelines. We have to do that, that is great stuff, but it’s also about building alternative visions. It’s about fighting climate change by creating jobs, and giving people meaning and agency. Wouldn’t that be a beautiful environmental movement, if we were pushing for that? We could be building an economy of food and work, where fishermen like me are proud to write songs about it. We can create something so beautiful, so powerful and restorative out at sea. And we can eat together, we can work together, and figure out how to make a living on a living planet.

3 Ways to Decolonize Thanksgiving

With Thanksgiving around the corner, millions of families across the country are preparing to celebrate one of the more loved holidays on the calendar. Travel complications and emotional/political familial dust-ups notwithstanding, most look forward to the day as a time to take a break, to be with family and to enjoy a meal together in the spirit of gratitude.

Classic American Thanksgiving scene painted by Norman Rockwell (1943)

For many Native Americans, however, Thanksgiving is a national day of mourning over the genocide that took place throughout America.

Because part of the mission of the Bioneers Indigeneity Program is to provide public education around Native perspectives, we wrote this blog post to share some ideas for new traditions you can include at your Thanksgiving this year to better honor the Native Americans, immigrants, and their descendants who contribute to our country’s diversity.

There is a saying that history is always written by the victor. It rings most true for me when I recall learning about Thanksgiving in primary school. Most of us are taught that the Pilgrims invited the Indians to sit down together for a feast to give thanks for the harvest after a hard year attempting to build a new home in America. Children outline their hands to make the bodies of construction paper turkeys. Some schools hold thanksgiving pageants, where children dress up as pilgrims and Indians together to act out the first thanksgiving.

As a child, I always found the whole situation incredibly uncomfortable. I didn’t have the words to describe it then that I do now: Erasure. Decentering. Oppression.

Erasure.


Thanksgiving was one of the only times America’s first peoples were mentioned in school, but they were portrayed as sidekicks, to the real heroes, the pilgrims. We did not learn about how the Wampanoag peoples had already been decimated by disease introduced by European traders by the time of the first Thanksgiving, how they had been stolen and sold as slaves back in Europe, or how their graves were robbed of precious seeds to go with them to the afterlife by starving Pilgrims whose old world seeds would not grow in the new land. All of this was erased from the history books.

Decentering.


My family comes from a very small Aleut and Yup’ik Eskimo village. What did a group of pilgrims and Indians over 2,000 miles away have to do with my history? When my mother was born, Alaska was not a state, and Natives did not have the right to vote. Contact with Europeans did not even happen in Alaska until 1741, and it was Russian traders, not British settlers, who first left their mark – enslaving the Aleut people to slaughter sea otter to near extinction for the Chinese fur trade. American history always ignored my ancestral homeland, decentering it from our Nation’s “more important” East Coast origins.

Oppression.

Typical children’s Thanksgiving craft

What we learn in school about Thanksgiving internalizes oppression. By reaching children at an age when their brains and ideas are still forming, we normalize the idea that America is a European-descendant, Christian country above all. Children of different ethnic and religious backgrounds implicitly learn that their roots are not a part of the American story.

The good news is that we can undo all of this, to remind ourselves that America’s strength is in our diversity. We can take back Thanksgiving and celebrate it through new traditions that honor the true origins of this beautiful time of year.

Here are three new traditions that you can adopt to begin to decolonize Thanksgiving.

1. Combat erasure by telling the real story of Thanksgiving around the table. Here’s an article to get you started.

2. Re-center Thanksgiving by serving locally sourced food. Your local farmers market is a great place to find locally grown foods.

3. Address oppression by widening your circle.  Ask someone outside your usual group of friends and family what Thanksgiving means to them.

Our Decolonizing Thanksgiving Feast

We decided to try it out for ourselves, and held a Decolonize Thanksgiving feast in New York City, hosted by Heather Henson, a friend of the Bioneers Indigeneity Program and champion of environmental and Indigenous rights.

Decolonized Thanksgiving Spread

We told the real story of Thanksgiving.

Michael Taylor (Chocktaw) of the Thunderbird American Indian Dancers read an incredibly moving speech about the real history of Thanksgiving, composed by Wamsutta (Frank B.) James (Wampanoag) to commemorate the 350-year anniversary of the Pilgrim’s arrival.

We ate foods Indigenous to North America.

Matoaka Little Eagle talks about growing up as the only Native American in grade school.

Our Thanksgiving meal was comprised of organic foods, indigenous to North America! After a starter of squash soup, we feasted on roast duck with wild rice stuffing, cranberry sauce, chestnuts, and micro-greens salad.

We had a respectful, eye-opening conversation about Thanksgiving.  

We were joined by guests of different ages, ethnicities, religions and political views who grew up across the United States. Each person shared their reaction to the real story of Thanksgiving. 

Matoaka Little Eagle (Tewa) talked about growing up in upstate New York, as the only Native American in her school. It was not until college, Mataoka explained, that she began to learn the real histories of what has happened to Native peoples across North America.

Charles Wassberg tells the story of Negaunee, Michigan.

Charles Wassberg (Swedish American) talked about how his hometown, Negaunee, got its name from an Ojibwe term meaning “to lead,” and how the local Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) were removed from their ancestral territory to make way for mining. Charles said the dinner experience prompted him to think of this story for the first time in years, and that he would tell the colonization story of Negaunee to his children and grandchildren as part of this year’s Thanksgiving.

I spoke about the role of the Bioneers Indigenous Forum as a source to learn about issues, such as the update on Standing Rock that took place at the 2016 Bioneers Conference.

Alexis Bunten, Bioneers Indigeneity Program, talks about what Thanksgiving means to her.

The conversation around the table was incredibly honest, moving and stimulating. It was the best Thanksgiving dinner dialogue I ever experienced, and I can’t wait to do it again with my own family!

Happy Decolonized Thanksgiving from the Indigeneity team at Bioneers!

Cara Romero (Chemhuevi) and Alexis Bunten (Aleut/Yup’ik)
Bioneers Indigeneity Program

“Stand Like an Oak” by Rising Appalachia

A luminous example of socially engaged and visionary artistry, Rising Appalachia perform their song “Stand Like an Oak.”

This performance took place at the 2021 Bioneers Conference.

Rising Appalachia, a renowned musical ensemble founded by Leah Song and Chloe Smith in 2006, and now grown to include David Brown on upright bass and baritone guitar, Biko Casini on world percussion, Arouna Diarra on ngoni and balafon, and Duncan Wickel on fiddle and cello, is rooted in various folk traditions, storytelling, and passionate grassroots activism. The band routinely provides a platform for local causes wherever it plays and frequently incites its fans to gather with it in converting vacant or underused lots into verdant urban orchards and gardens. In a time of social unraveling, Rising Appalachia’s unique interweaving of music and social mission and old traditions with new interpretations exudes contagious hope and deep integrity.

Learn more at risingappalachia.com

Averting a Hot, Toxic Endgame: Strategizing & Mobilizing for Climate Justice

A coproduction of WECAN and Bioneers Everywoman’s Leadership program

As the IPCC reports, climate destabilization is happening far faster than even the most pessimistic scientists had anticipated. The chaotic results are now visible to everyone around the globe. The situation is urgent, and failure to take immediate large-scale action would be catastrophic, but extractive industries and corrupt governments are barreling ahead with business as usual, wreaking havoc on our planet’s water, air, lands and living creatures, including people. Women, BIPOC and youth leaders are taking many of the strongest stands and implementing innovative tactics in this, the most important, crucial, existential struggle in history. In this panel discussion, three visionary climate justice leaders they share their strategic insights. 

With: Eriel Deranger, Indigenous Climate Action; Leila Salazar-Lopez, Amazon Watch; Osprey Orielle Lake, Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network (WECAN). Hosted by Bioneers co-founder Nina Simons.

This discussion took place at the 2021 Bioneers Conference.

Panelists

Eriel Tchekwie Deranger

Eriel Tchekwie Deranger (Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation), a leading global figure in Indigenous Rights and Climate Justice activism, is the co-founder and Executive Director of Indigenous Climate Action and is a member of the International Indigenous Peoples Forum on Climate Change. She also sits on a number of boards of notable non-profit organizations (including Bioneers) and activist groups. She has organized divest movements, lobbied government officials, led mass mobilizations against the fossil fuel industry, written extensively for a range of publications and been featured in documentary films (including Elemental).

Leila Salazar-López

Leila Salazar-López, the Executive Director of Amazon Watch, has worked for 20+ years to defend the world’s rainforests, human rights, and the climate through grassroots organizing and international advocacy campaigns at Amazon Watch, Rainforest Action Network, Global Exchange, and Green Corps. She is also a Greenpeace Voting Member and a Global Fund for Women Advisor for Latin America.

Osprey Orielle Lake

Osprey Orielle Lake, founder and Executive Director of the Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network (WECAN) International, works with grassroots and Indigenous leaders, policy-makers and scientists to promote climate justice, resilient communities, and a just transition to a democratized energy future. She also serves on the Executive Committee for the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature and is the author of the award-winning book, Uprisings for the Earth: Reconnecting Culture with Nature.

Nina Simons

Nina Simons, co-founder of Bioneers and its Chief Relationship Strategist is also co-founder of Women Bridging Worlds and Connecting Women Leading Change. She co-edited the anthology book, Moonrise: The Power of Women Leading from the Heart, and most recently wrote Nature, Culture & The Sacred: A Woman Listens for Leadership. An award-winning social entrepreneur, Nina teaches and speaks internationally, and previously served as President of Seeds of Change and Director of Strategic Marketing for Odwalla.

Nina Simons – From Discipline to Discipleship: Cultivating Love, Collaboration, & Imagination

In this keynote from the 2021 Bioneers conference, Bioneers Co-founder Nina Simons draws from vast and varied cultural touchpoints – from Indigenous wisdom to Biblical storytelling to pop icon Patti Smith and intellectual heavyweight Cornel West – to share her journey towards uncovering and embracing the role of discipline in service of cultivating our hearts’ capacity to love.

By reframing and re-imagining discipline as disciple-ship, Nina addresses the necessary inward turning, self-examination and reflection that is integral to addressing the layers of unconscious bias that live within us. She asks each of us to hear the subsequent call to rigorous action needed – both individually and collectively – to eradicate Patriarchy, Colonialism, Racism and Capitalism in this massive era of change… and to build the future our hearts yearn for.

Read a written version of this talk here.

Nina Simons, co-founder of Bioneers and its Chief Relationship Strategist is also co-founder of Women Bridging Worlds and Connecting Women Leading Change. She co-edited the anthology book, Moonrise: The Power of Women Leading from the Heart, and most recently wrote Nature, Culture & The Sacred: A Woman Listens for Leadership. An award-winning social entrepreneur, Nina teaches and speaks internationally, and previously served as President of Seeds of Change and Director of Strategic Marketing for Odwalla.

Kenny Ausubel – The Sting: The Role of Fraud in Nature

Nature is sending us extravagant distress signals. Earth is a hot mess. From COVID to climate catastrophe to fascism, the perils of disinformation are a matter of life and death.

We’d better get really good really fast at reading Nature’s mind. The stakes are too high to keep drinking the collective Kool-Aid.

This talk was delivered at the 2021 Bioneers Conference. Read a written version of this talk here.

Kenny Ausubel, CEO and founder (in 1990) of Bioneers, is an award-winning social entrepreneur, journalist, author and filmmaker. Co-founder and first CEO of the organic seed company, Seeds of Change, his film (and companion book) Hoxsey: When Healing Becomes a Crime helped influence national alternative medicine policy. He has edited several books and written four, including, most recently, Dreaming the Future: Reimagining Civilization in the Age of Nature.