Author, conservation biologist and explorer Meg Lowman is one of the world’s first arbornauts. Whereas astronauts explore outer space, arbornauts make discoveries in the tops of trees. Lowman takes us on a global journey into forest canopies, tracing her geek-childhood as a nature nut into adulthood where she works tirelessly to conserve some of the world’s most biodiverse, yet endangered, forests. Formerly the Chief of Science and Sustainability for the California Academy of Science and the Director of the Nature Research Center, North Carolina, Canopy Meg (as kids affectionately call her) is the Director of the TREE Foundation, heading up her newest program, Mission Green, to build canopy walkways that will hire indigenous people for ecotourism, an action that in turn will conserve their high-biodiversity forests through economic sustainability.
The following excerpt is from Meg Lowman’s “The Arbornaut: A Life Discovering the Eight Continent in the Trees Above Us (Macmillan Publishers, 2021) and is reprinted with permission from the publisher.
The question I hear more often than any other from elementary schoolkids: “What is the most common species living in the canopy?” Unfortunately, there are not yet enough arbornauts to have figured the correct answer. But if I were to wager a guess, my response would be tardigrades, commonly called water bears or moss piglets. “Tardi-what?” most people ask. This relatively unknown phylum, Tardigrada, literally means “slow walker.” These sluggish microscopic creatures don’t really walk at all, but essentially float in a water droplet. They thrive in almost any moist substrate, fresh and saltwater, so they can thrive in dry deserts with occasional downpours, moist tropical forests, and even the extremes of hot springs or Antarctica’s icy cliffs. Any moist bit of moss, lichen, bark, or leaf surface provides the required film of water to coat their tiny cylindrical bodies plus four pairs of telescoping legs with claws or adhesive disks. And if their watery habitat evaporates, they transform into a dormant state to await rainfall, sometimes for decades, or they drift in the air above the treetops to a new location, seeking moisture. Neither drought nor flood nor extreme temperatures will kill them. About 0.2 to 0.5 millimeter in length (the size of a particle of dust), they dominate their Lilliputian kingdoms of soil, leaves, and water droplet along with other small creatures such as nematodes, collembola, rotifers, and mites. It sounds like a science-fiction invasion – billions of miniature bearlike creatures crawling across our suburban lawns and shrubbery while we sleep.
As a scientist, as an explorer – or really as any ordinary person living in this world – you never know what will bring you to your next discovery. Tardigrades came into my life because I was determined to provide opportunities in field biology for underserved youth. I have passionately pursued inclusivity in science for many decades, probably because I did not always feel welcome into my profession by the white-male network that dominated it…. I’ve made it part of my mission to take every opportunity to work with minorities in science – teaching girls from economically challenged families to climb trees at a summer camp, training female arbornauts donned in traditional garb in the jungles of India, hiring qualified candidates from minority backgrounds throughout every leadership position, sponsoring girls and boys from underserved communities for scholarships and research opportunities, and advising large numbers of minority students at the universities where I taught.
One group continually overlooked in field biology is mobility-limited students. Nearly 25 percent of Americans live with a disability, yet they comprise only 9 percent of the scientific workforce and 7 percent of PhDs in science, according to a 2019 report in Science magazine. …. What better way for them to become excited about field biology than discovering a new species? It is unlikely to find that new species of birds or beetles exist in temperate trees because those larger creatures have already been documented, but what about water bears? …
So that was how I ended up partnering with Randy Miller (aka Dr. Water Bear), a tardigrade taxonomist who himself has mobility limitations. With a combination of my canopy skills plus his water bear expertise, we made a great team. Those are the unexpected and circuitous pathways by which collaborations in field biology are born. We never overlapped at a conference because our disciplines are so different, but we knew of each other’s expertise and reputation, which formed the basis of a trust partnership. …
Our students addressed questions new to science: What is the density of water bears in different canopies? Are there hundreds per tree, or millions? Of the same species, or different? Over five summers, we collected 28,234 samples representing 37 species from 58 forests in 4 states, ranging from zero to 4,500 feet in elevation and from zero to 200-foot-high trees. Our students climbed 492 crowns and discovered 8 new species, plus set 26 new distribution records. What was especially amazing (called an “OH WOW factor” in field biology) is that 80 percent of every sample of lichen, moss, bark, or foliage collected contained at least one water bear! And it is likely the other 20 percent also had a water bear, but our microscopic techniques were not so exacting with amateur eyes.
A star student named Rebecca who was shy and reminded me of myself, later accompanied me to the Amazon jungles, where she undertook research in tropical trees. Loading and unlading her wheelchair from small dugout canoes was not easy, but the trip fulfilled a lifelong dream for her to experience the Amazonian rain forests – and she is now a seasoned arbornaut! Not bad for a reticent young lady with limited mobility working alongside her treetop supervisor, who still sometimes acts like a wallflower, even in adulthood.
As ecological destruction, climate destabilization, the global pandemic, and all forms of historical and current injustice are converging to initiate a near-death experience for our species, learn from a group of wise women as they discuss why the combination of honoring, respecting and learning from nature, being motivated by a deep quest for justice, and cultivating the leadership of women can provide a potent, three-pronged strategic path for getting us to a world we want.
With: Osprey Orielle Lake, founder/Executive Director, Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network (WECAN) International, author of Uprisings for the Earth: Reconnecting Culture with Nature; Amisha Ghadiali, a UK-based intuitive therapist, meditation and yoga teacher, host and founder of the podcast and community, The Future Is Beautiful, and author of Intuition; Naelyn Pike, renowned young Chiricahua Apache activist. Hosted by: Nina Simons, co-founder of Bioneers.
Panelists
Amisha Ghadiali
Amisha Ghadiali, a facilitator, speaker and writer with extensive backgrounds in sustainable fashion, socially conscious entrepreneurship, activism, meditation and yoga, is host of the globally-acclaimed podcast The Future Is Beautiful. She has led many retreats, workshops and rituals around the world, and designed programs such as: The Heart of Transformation, Wild Grace, and a residential fellowship in community facilitation leadership. She also hosts an online membership community—Presence: for Creative, Connected and Courageous Living; and works one-to-one in her Presence Leadership Mentoring program.
Naelyn Pike, 22, is a renowned young Chiricahua Apache activist and lifelong fighter for Indigenous Rights who follows in the footsteps of her grandfather who founded the Apache Stronghold to protect their people’s sacred sites and rights. At age 13 Pike was the youngest Indigenous girl to testify before Congress. Today she continues to battle corporations and political leaders whose actions damage the Earth as she fights for environmental sustainability and Indigenous rights at the local, state, and national levels.
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.
The psychedelic community owes enormous debts to the Indigenous cultures that, over millennia, developed the use of consciousness-modifying substances, which laid the basis for the now ever-expanding interest in and use of these medicines. Indigenous peoples are also very often the best protectors of what’s left of global biodiversity, so finding effective, concrete ways to help support these groups’ struggles to defend their lands and rights is of utmost importance to all of humanity. So far, though, while the psychedelic world is replete with romanticized language about Indigenous worldviews, it has done very little to offer genuine, large-scale tangible support that actually reaches frontline communities, and as enormous amounts of venture capital are now pouring into the psychedelic domain, this is the time to act. The Chacruna Institute’s Indigenous Reciprocity Initiative (IRI) was created to fill that void.
With: Joseph Mays, the IRI’s Program Director; Bia Labate, Chacruna Institute co-founder and Executive Director; and cultural anthropologist Daniela Peluso, who has extensive experience working with Indigenous communities in Peru and Bolivia. The session also features several videos of statements by Indigenous leaders from frontline communities throughout the Americas who are partnering with the IRI.
This discussion took place at the 2021 Bioneers Conference.
Panelists
Bia Labate
Beatriz (aka “Bia”) Caiuby Labate, Ph.D., a San Francisco-based queer Brazilian anthropologist whose main areas of interest are the study of plant medicines, drug policy, shamanism, ritual, religion, and social justice, is Executive Director of the Chacruna Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicines and co-founder of the Interdisciplinary Group for Psychoactive Studies (NEIP) in Brazil. Bia also serves as: Public Education and Culture Specialist at the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS); Adjunct Faculty in the East-West Psychology Program at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS); Diversity, Culture, and Ethics Advisor at the Synthesis Institute; and is the author, co-author, and co-editor of 24 books and a number of journals and peer-reviewed articles.
Joseph Mays, MSc, an ethnobotanist, biologist, anthropologist and conservation activist who has conducted extensive cultural and ethnobotanical fieldwork in Peru and Ecuador, is the Program Director of the Chacruna Institute’s newly launched Indigenous Reciprocity Initiative of the Americas, where he conducts research and builds connections with small Indigenous communities throughout the Americas to support Chacruna’s mission of increasing cultural reciprocity in the psychedelic space.
Daniela Peluso
Daniela Peluso, Ph.D., Emeritus Fellow in social anthropology at the University of Kent and a member of the board of directors of the Chacruna Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicines, is a cultural anthropologist who has worked over the last two decades in lowland South America, mostly with communities in Peru and Bolivia. She has been actively involved in various local efforts on issues relating to health, gender, Indigenous urbanization and land-rights, working in close collaboration with Indigenous and local organizations. Her publications focus mostly on Indigenous ontologies, urbanization, violence and relatedness.
Clayton Thomas-Muller and Julian Brave NoiseCat are nationally and internationally acclaimed Indigenous leaders in the fights against climate change and the accelerating, human-induced destruction of our ecosystems. When they aren’t on the front lines organizing movements to protect the planet, Clayton and Julian work as accomplished writers penning penetrating analyses of the connections between settler colonial capitalism, broken social and political systems, trauma, and environmental disaster. They also happen to have a deep friendship. In this intimate conversation, these two exemplary leaders share the story behind the story about how their lives intersect with their activism and discuss their new projects and their hopes for the future. Moderated by Alexis Bunten (Unangan/Yup’ik), Co-Director of the Bioneers Indigeneity Program.
This discussion took place at the 2021 Bioneers Conference.
Panelists
Julian Brave NoiseCat
A prolific, widely published 28-year-old Indigenous journalist, writer, activist and policy analyst, Director of Green New Deal Strategy at Data for Progress, Julian Brave NoiseCat has become a highly influential figure in the coverage and analysis of Environmental Justice and Indigenous issues as well as of national and global political and economic trends and policies.
Clayton Thomas-Muller (Mathias Colomb Cree/Pukatawagan), the Winnipeg-based ‘Stop It At The Source’ Campaigner with 350.org and a founder and organizer with Defenders of the Land, is involved in many initiatives to support the building of an inclusive global movement for energy and climate justice. He also serves on the boards of Black Mesa Water Coalition, the Global Justice Ecology Project and Bioneers and is a steering committee member of the Tar Sands Solutions Network. Clayton has for over 12 years campaigned across North America organizing in hundreds of Indigenous communities to defend against the encroachments of the fossil fuel industry.
Alexis Bunten
Alexis Bunten, Ph.D., (Unangan/Yup’ik), Co-Director of the Bioneers’ Indigeneity Program, has been a researcher, media-maker, manager, consultant, and curriculum developer for organizations including the Sealaska Heritage Institute, Alaska Native Heritage Center, and the FrameWorks Institute. She has published widely about Indigenous and environmental issues, and is the author of So, how long have you been Native?: Life as an Alaska Native Tour Guide.
Permaculture, based on the ethos of “earth care, people care and fair share,” has provided millions of people the principles and tools to live and work in right relationship to the earth and to produce and harvest abundance without degrading the environment. At a time when the world is desperate for a new approach to living on the planet, can permaculture scale-up to create the global ecological and social changes that are needed for human survival?
With Permaculture co-founder David Holmgren, Maddy Harland, co-founder and editor of Permaculture magazine, and author and regenerative farmer Mark Shepard. Hosted by Permaculturalist Penny Livingston.
This discussion took place at the 2021 Bioneers Conference.
Maddy Harland co-founded a publishing company, Permanent Publications, in 1990 and Permaculture Magazine in 1992 to explore traditional and new ways of living in greater harmony with the Earth. She is the author of Fertile Edges—regenerating land, culture and hope and The Biotime Log. Maddy and her husband, Tim, have designed and planted one of the oldest forest gardens in Britain: once a bare field, it is now an edible landscape and haven for wildlife.
Mark Shepard
Mark Shepard, CEO of Restoration Agriculture Development, runs New Forest Farm (in Viola Wisconsin), a cutting-edge solar, wind and local biofuel-powered 110-acre commercial-scale perennial agricultural savanna, one of the first of its kind in the USA. Mark also teaches agroforestry, Permaculture and Restoration Agriculture and designs natural resource and agricultural properties worldwide and is author of the award-winning books: Restoration Agriculture: Real-world Permaculture for Farmers and Water for ANY Farm. A certified organic farmer since 1995, Mark is also a founding member of the American Hazelnut Company, on the board of the Stewardship Network, and a lead designer for the Valley Foundation of the Reed Jules Oppenheimer Foundation.
Penny Livingston
Penny Livingston, one of the most renowned and respected leaders in the field of Permaculture, has been teaching internationally and working professionally in land management, regenerative design and permaculture for 30 years. She has extensive experience in all phases of ecologically sound design and construction and specializes in the site planning and design of resource-rich landscapes that integrate rainwater collection, agroforestry systems, edible and medicinal planting, pond and water systems, habitat development and watershed restoration for homes, farms, co-housing communities and businesses. She is currently teaching online courses with Ecoversity and the Permaculture Skills Center.
They say “laughter is the best medicine,” but the most powerful medicine of all might just be American Indian comedy. Native peoples on this continent developed rich and complex humor traditions in response to centuries of oppression and the intergenerational trauma of ongoing settler colonization. Jokes were and are used to reflect on life’s ironies, impart wisdom, build relationships, and help heal from pain. Comedy can be one of the most effective tools in the arsenal of Indigenous strategies of deep cultural resilience, and as we emerge from this global pandemic and continue to struggle with dire threats to our people and the planet, we need the healing medicine of laughter more than ever.
Share some laughter and learning with Oakland-based (Yerington Paiute/Washoe) stand-up comedian, writer, actor and producer Jackie Keliiaa; and Cara Romero (Chemehuevi), Program Director of Bioneers’ Indigeneity Program and renowned artist/photographer.
This discussion took place at the 2021 Bioneers Conference.
Cara Romero (Chemehuevi), Program Director of the Bioneers Indigenous Knowledge Program, previously served her Mojave-based tribe in several capacities, including as: first Executive Director at the Chemehuevi Cultural Center, a member of the tribal council, and Chair of the Chemehuevi Education Board and Chemeuevi Headstart Policy Council. Cara is also a highly accomplished photographer/artist.
From racist mascots, to stereotypes in national creation myths like Thanksgiving, we have always faced misrepresentation and disrespect of our cultures and identities. Cultural appropriation and commodification of our cultures is commonplace, but Native activists, artists, youth, educators, legislators and our allies are changing that reality. We are winning battles to ban racist mascots and call out negative stereotypes in the media.
This episode features Crystal Echo Hawk, an enrolled member of the Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma and President and CEO of IllumiNative and of Echo Hawk Consulting.
Crystal Echo Hawk (Pawnee), is the founder and Executive Director of IllumiNative, the first and only national Native-led organization focused on changing the narrative about Native peoples on a mass scale. Crystal built IllumiNative to activate a cohesive set of research-informed strategies that illuminate the voices, stories, contributions and assets of contemporary Native peoples to disrupt the invisibility and toxic stereotypes Native peoples face.
This is an episode of Indigeneity Conversations, a podcast series that features deep and engaging conversations with Native culture bearers, scholars, movement leaders, and non-Native allies on the most important issues and solutions in Indian Country. Bringing Indigenous voices to global conversations. Visit the Indigeneity Conversations homepage to learn more.
Credits
Executive Producer: Kenny Ausubel
Co-Hosts and Producers: Cara Romero and Alexis Bunten
Senior Producer: Stephanie Welch
Associate Producer and Program Engineer: Emily Harris
Consulting Producer: Teo Grossman
Studio Engineers: Brandon Pinard and Theo Badashi
Tech Support: Tyson Russell
This episode’s artwork features photography by Cara Romero, Co-Director of the Bioneers Indigeneity Program as well as an award winning contemporary fine art photographer. Mer Young creates the series collage artwork.
Additional music provided by Nagamo.ca, connecting producers and content creators with Indigenous composers.
Transcript
CARA ROMERO: Hi Everyone, I’m Cara Romero and this is Indigeneity Conversations, a Native-led and curated podcast from Bioneers. I’m here with my dear friend and Co-Host.
ALEXIS BUNTEN: I’m Alexis Bunten and we have an amazing episode today that we’re really excited about.
We’re taking a look at an issue Native peoples have been working for decades to address through education, activism and social justice campaigns.
So, you probably heard recently that the baseball team, the Cleveland Indians finally changed their name to the Cleveland Guardians. This didn’t just suddenly happen overnight, of course. It happened after a really long and difficult fight by many, many people and organizations that have been driving home the point that racist stereotypes of Native peoples are really harmful, and they have very real and negative effects on our communities.
CR: Andthe Cleveland Pro sports team name is a really poignant example of many battles taking place across the US to get rid of Native mascots in schools and sports. Many of these of these fights are covered by the media, but they usually aren’t covered from the perspective of Native peoples.
And Mascots aren’t the only issue Native People contend with: We face ongoing racism in schools and media – misrepresentation, like stereotyping and negative perceptions about our lifestyles and our very existence. All of these misconceptions and hostile attitudes towards Native peoples lead to devastating impacts within our communities – like depression, anxiety and youth suicide. They’re all tied to these ideas of systemic racism towards Native peoples.
I had a conversation about all of these issues with Crystal Echo Hawk, the President and CEO of IllumiNative. If you haven’t heard of IllumiNative, you definitely need to check them out. They’ve been one of the key organizations working to create cross-cultural understanding of the importance of accurate and contemporary representation of Native Peoples, and how getting rid of racist stereotypes helps create positive change.
AB: Crystal is a citizen of the Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma, and she’s just been such a mover and leader in our Native communities for at least 20 years. She’s worked with the Native American Rights Fund and she also founded and developed the Notah Begay Foundation.
In your conversation, Cara, youtalked with Crystal about the work of IllumiNative, and especially about a national public polling project she designed and co-led. The report that came out of this project is called “Reclaiming Native Truth”. And as a professional researcher, I can definitely say that this report offers solid data showing how non-Natives view us.
But most importantly, it shows that when we have control over our own representations, that we can and do shift the dominant narrative…
Crystal is such an inspiration to me, I know you agree with me, Cara. We’re both total fangirls of hers so let’s get into the interview.
CR: Crystal, thank you so much for being here. We’re all fan girls, and we all just appreciate not only you and your presence but everything you’ve done for your community and the greater indigenous community in North America, it’s really just something to be so proud of. And please know that everybody notices all the work that you’ve done over the years very selflessly.
CRYSTAL ECHO HAWK: Well, at first I want to say the fan-girling is mutual. When I got the call, it was like, yes, sign me up. You know, just, again, just have so much admiration. You know, we’re all doing it. We’re all working hard to do these things for our people, but…
The Reclaiming Native Truth project was a project I founded and co-led back in 2016 to 2018. It was a two-year $3.3 million project, and it was the largest public opinion research project ever done about perceptions of Native Peoples.
And really what we did with a multi-faceted research team was really unpack what are the dominant perceptions and narratives that Americans from across the country hold about us, including those in the highest kind of ranks of power. We interviewed federal judges and law clerks, to members of Congress, and people in media, philanthropy, and even our allies in social justice to really begin to unpack what do the American public think about us, why do they think that about us, where do these core stories and narratives emanate from, and most importantly, how do they affect our people. And so Reclaiming Native Truth mapped all of that, and really was able to not only map what those perceptions are, the role of invisibility and toxic stereotypes, in really advancing racism, but on the flip side it actually showed us a pathway forward about how we really change the narrative or change the story in this country about Native people so that we can really change our future.
CR: I think that that invisibility is really important to emphasize. I mean, I think that it goes back definitely to public education and all of these experiences that we have. They were still making drums out of oatmeal boxes, and having all of the kids put on turkey feathers. And like the way that a child internalizes the—it’s humiliating.
And I love the work that Illuminatives is doing to counter that narrative. I mean, it’s work that so many of us are doing, but you guys are so front and center of countering those humiliating narratives that we’ve endured our entire lifetime.
CEH: We’ve all carried these senses of this kind of duality I think we all walk with as Native Peoples, is that we feel very much unseen and unheard in society. We feel very invisible, but at the same time if we are, then we’re just these caricatures, right? We’re the stereotypes, we’re some other sort of representation that is not of our own making. I remember as a little girl, I would run home after school and turn on cartoons, and I’ll never forget about this cartoon I saw. I think it was like Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd, and it’s like a Wild West sort of episode, and all of a sudden this very kind of stereotypical Indian man with a big red nose, kind of lumbering across the screen, but he was wearing a banner that said “Vanishing American”. And he walked across the screen and he disappeared; he faded to black.
And I just remember being in third grade, and just internalizing that, and never forgot that feeling. And I think from that to really I think what caused me to kind of really found Reclaiming Native Truth was just watching my daughter, like as a mother, watching my daughter be bullied because we had given her a traditional Dakota name, and watching her relentlessly being bullied that led to her almost taking her life, and really having a lot of struggles. And I think it was that, it was like enough is enough. And it was understanding that so many of us as mothers and fathers and aunties, and we all feel this in our professional lives, in our personal lives, about the impacts of our lack of representation and our misrepresentation have on our people and our children, and that’s really what was the catalyst to everything that I’m doing right now.
CR: I have just a similar way of stepping into the work, and probably a not uncommon story of being raised both on the reservation and in an urban setting. And I think when I first stepped out of the reservation setting, there was definitely a culture shock. I think that we have an understanding, a very private way of knowing and relating to each other within our communities, and when we step outside of our communities, it’s really shocking how people perceive us, and how very little they know about what it is to be a contemporary North American indigenous person.
And I internalized so many of those things as well, Crystal. And I went through school often exhausted of trying to explain the truth about, you know, where I’m from, which is a lesser-known tribe in California, about how we all look different, about how all of our traditions are different. And it is I think first and foremost exhausting.
And then I went on to university where I was a liberal arts major in Houston, and was studying anthropology, and everything that I experienced up to that point. And then in the university setting was taught as bygone, you know, that we were relics of the past.
And I realized instantly that through photography, and through media, I think specifically, even as a young woman, that a picture was worth a thousand words, and that maybe, just maybe I could use this to become a photo documentarian of modern Native Peoples, to use this skill to really communicate to people all the intricacies of our cultures, of how alive and how beautiful we are.
Crystal, I think the mascot issue really stands out for me as something that is changing in my lifetime. I have so much respect for everybody that’s been fighting this issue for decades. For me, it was really stepping into tribal college at the Institute of American Indian Arts, where one of the other Native students was wearing an Atlanta Braves hat, and I remember it very clearly, because, Char Teters called him out in class, and she was one of the early activists that was fighting for, you know, Change the Name. It was a little bit of a scene, but she was explaining to him all the things that we were just talking about, how we really internalized this oppression.
CEH: You know, this is a movement that’s been going on for decades and decades, and particularly with, you know, the Washington football team, I mean, really led by elders like Suzan Shown Harjo, Amanda Blackhorse, and just thousands and thousands of other Native Peoples who have just been organizing.
One of the biggest targets of all has been the Washington NFL team, you know, that was formerly known as the R word. Right? The R word is the N word. It’s a dictionary defined racial slur. But there is, you know, really racist Native sports mascots that show up in all professional sports – in major league baseball, hockey as well. But they’re prolific through K-12 schools as well…
Right? And it’s not just the logos and the imagery, or the dictionary defined slur that was the Washington NFL team, but it’s the fan behavior. Who, you know, with chants from rival teams and sports fans, things like kill the Indians. Right? You look at all this whole fan behavior and culture that gets associated with racist sports mascots. And what we found with our research is that that promotes discrimination and bias against our people. It’s the red face. And red face is black face.
And thankfully this country has moved to a point where it understands that black face is wrong. Right? We’ve watched people lose their jobs. But yet somehow red face is okay. The way that the mascot debate has been framed in this country is about it’s a matter of public opinion. Oh, well, you know what, this Washington Post poll that was done was sort of, you know, 500 self-identified Native people says it’s all okay. Or, hey, we found, you know, a Native person to come to the football game, you know, and it all looks good. It’s a matter of opinion. And it’s not—that’s the wrong question, the wrong framing. It’s about harm.
And when they did studies with Native children, they found—and with Native young adults, they found that it increases suicidal ideation, depression, and anxiety. Right? The exposure to not only that imagery but everything around it. Right? So this is science speaking. This isn’t just a question of political science. This is actually showing that this causes harm to our children, and that they found that for Native young adults, they struggle to even see a future for themselves. It sort of depressed their ability to see the future.
And so when we look at our high skyrocketing rates of suicide, right, we look at the high rates of depression and the things that our people are struggling with, particularly our children, this becomes a matter of protecting our children from harm. This is what science is telling us.
And what we’ve found through our research is that promotes bias and discrimination against our people. Right? It is scientists and the studies, and research led by Dr. Stephanie Fryberg and other really amazing Native scholars and non-Native scholars have found that that level of representation fuels bias, it does fuel racism, and it’s important that we smash those toxic stereotypes.
So many of the things that came up in Reclaiming Native Truth about how, you know, just that the problems with stereotypes and the power of invisibility, I think on one level we all knew that and we’ve been talking about that and advocating it, and living it in our lives for so long. But to actually have data and evidence, right, to really show, as Dr. Stephanie Fryberg found from all of this research about the profound nature of our invisibility, right, which is really we found is institutionalized and perpetuated in big systems in this country, big systems like pop—you know, like popular culture.
And we think about everything that that entails, from sports mascots, to TV, to film, all kinds of things, museums, to looking at the role of media and really looking at the role of K-12 education. These are perpetuating our erasure and our invisibility, and that is – as Dr. Fryberg says – that invisibility is the modern form of racism against Native Americans today.
Part of our work at IllumiNative has not only been about the advocacy with the sports teams and schools and the media, but I think it’s also educating our own people about the harm that these representations have, and that this isn’t just a conversation that should be minimized and cast aside about public opinion or political correctness. So that’s really been kind of the work that we’ve been doing, and getting creative by partnering with artists and influencers, and finding ways in the media to kind of help create a social groundswell that people understand how important this issue is.
CR: I have so much respect for everybody that’s been fighting this issue for decades. And I think that what we’re seeing evolve with all of the contemporary media work is really this better future, right, where we’re able to choose accurate representations of ourselves. And that’s so powerful.
CEH: Yeah. Absolutely. Well, you know, the thing that we learned from the Reclaiming Native Truth project is that there’s such immense power in data, right?
You know, a big part of our work has been taking that research to Hollywood, for example, and meeting with the heads of the biggest studios out there, right, and educating their leadership about the importance of representation and not just check a diversity equity inclusion box. But that they’re no longer advancing harm by our erasure or by our misrepresentation. And that we were also able to show them through our research that 78 percent of Americans want to know more about Native Peoples. And what that 78 percent figure represents is audience demand. And that has really began to speak volumes to people within the entertainment industry, also in media and newsrooms, now that they understand there’s more of an audience there for our stories and our issues and what we think.
We have gone out and I’ve lost track now—it feels like hundreds of presentations I’ve done over the last two years and with my colleagues, traveling all over the country. And what we found is that when we go out and we educate our allies, I would say probably 85 percent of the people I talk to are like, “I didn’t know.” Once you walk them through how these big systems work and how they interact within these systems, and inadvertently sometimes, even through the best of intentions, kind of advance harmful representation about us, most people are like, “I didn’t know,” and “How do I change this?”
And so I think it’s really been the power of education and them understanding that they not only need to kind of wake up and understand and own that, but their guilt [LAUGHS] around that’s not helpful to us. What’s helpful for them is to really partner with us, and to really create platforms, and turn over the mic, so to speak, right, to Native Peoples. We don’t need non-Native Peoples to come in and save us. We need them, though, to be a partner in dismantling these systems that not only harm Native people, but they harm all of us and to really kind of go within the institutions and systems that they’re operating in, and saying, Wait a minute; how are we culpable here? How does Native representation show up and not show up? And that means everything from governance structures on boards of directors to staff in leadership, their hiring, to how they’re talking to Native Peoples, which nine times out of ten they aren’t talking about us. Right? So how do they need to make sure that we are in the room? So allies have an important role in all of this from a number of different angles.
CR: Crystal, what do you feel like has changed during your lifetime?
CEH: You know, I think about these sort of high points from, you know, over the last couple of years of just having our first Native US poet laureate, with Joy Harjo being named. Or with Wes Studi being the first Native American male actor to receive an Oscar, to things like the McGirt decision. The Supreme Court ruling that affirmed, you know, the Muscogee Creek Nation’s treaty rights, and its reservation, and that’s where I’m talking to you today, is sitting in the heart of the Muscogee Creek Nation, also known as downtown Tulsa, you know, and seeing, you know, big court victories for NO DAPL. Or looking at the exposure that was generated at the stand taken at Mt. Rushmore this summer. Right? And the way the LandBack movement has really kind of emerged from that. So it was amazing if we were watching that weekend of Fourth of July, it was like if you were watching MSNBC it was beautiful. There were nothing but a sea of Native faces speaking out on critical issues from mascots, to our treaty rights. I think it’s been exciting to kind of see, you know, how much of that is changing. And one of the biggest things is that in 2018 we elected the first two Native American women to Congress.
It’s just really about how we are building power. And so, our representation as contemporary Native Peoples and the way it’s showing up in all different facets is huge, and just those two women being elected, it’s really been transformative, and it really shows how important that aspect of our representation is as well. But, you know, it’s fairly recent. Right? We’ve been battling invisibility and misrepresentation pretty fiercely, and we still are, but to see the pace of change is really extraordinary.
CR: I think for me one of the biggest things that, again, I’ve seen change in my lifetime is when we talk about misrepresentation of Natives, it’s really hard to not talk about the Edward Curtis photographs. And the Edward Curtis photographs are an incredible body of work that were produced around the turn of the century by a non-Native photographer that’s aim was an ethnographic study to document the vanishing race. They were so beautiful, they captured America’s imagination, and really people’s imagination around the world.
But then it really kind of became this stereotype that stagnated people’s view of what Native Americans are – not only what they are, but what they should be. And I just remember feeling a lot growing up that, if you weren’t that, then what are you. You know?
Photographs by Edward Curtis
And I really hone in on this messaging in my own art, because I feel like it’s really dangerous to tell a young Native person that you’re only good if you are the way that you were 100 years ago, right? When you completely gloss over, you know, all of the assimilation, all of the residential boarding schools, all the things that have brought us to this place, including all the resilience of the things that have survived that have brought us to this place. I think everything that exists is really kind of against all odds. You know?
So we have this incredible thing to celebrate. But I think it’s really important for everybody to take a look at what they think they know Native art is, or what they think Native Americans look like, because again, those stories that artists and educators and activists are telling on their own are really the ones that people need to be looking at for representation. I think it’s unique to IllumiNatives and to this work that you’ve done, that you incorporate the importance of art and Native artists into your work. Could you talk to us a little bit about the importance of Native art?
CEH: Absolutely. What was so beautiful as we began to really understand through the research the power of our representation, the power of an image. The majority of them haven’t been authored by us, right, and don’t reflect who we are today in the 21st century. and so I think, I’ve always throughout my career, you know, working with artists has been such an important part of the work that I’ve done, whether it’s around the Native American Rights Fund, right, and the work we were doing, to really around youth leadership development, but really with Reclaiming Native Truth, it really centered the importance of artists.
And in fact, you know, IllumiNative was co-founded by a circle of artists, and it was really their idea. I remember we sat in the room, we presented all of the Reclaiming Native Truth research to them. I think it was like February or January of ’18, 2018, and they said, You know what, we need an organization that can really not only take all this research and put it into action, but to really bring the power of artists and activists and organizers and our best thought leaders, because these systems are so big, and we need to join forces, right, if we’re going to change the narrative and change the story and the way that people see us and perceive us, then we really—we needed to really look at the role of culture and art to be the way. Because words and advocacy, sometimes it’s not enough to cut through the noise, and so it’s really understanding the power of art and culture as a leading force for really eventually policy and systems change. And so I really credit, you know, those artists with the call to action. They said, “Crystal, go build it.” [LAUGHS]
And, you know, we founded IllumiNative in June 2018 and haven’t looked back since. So I’m just really grateful for the—just the vision and leadership of all of our artists, and all the different genres and mediums that they work in, because it’s so powerful. They allow us, you know, to really see ourselves and envision ourselves in ways that sometimes society tries to bar—create barriers to us not being able to see a future for ourselves, or to see ourselves reflected as we are.
CR: Stories by us for us, you know? It really has this ripple-out effect of authenticity, of actual conversations, of ways of knowing how we interact with each other, that really almost always counters the narrative that’s out there, in my experience. I mean, we’re really focused. Um When we’re telling our own stories. We’re really focused on things that are very different than when non-Natives focus on our communities.
CEH: It’s really about the values, about caring for Mother Earth, for our environment, for caring for our communities and our elders, and thinking about the power of art and its different expressions from beautiful photography like someone like Cara, you know, whose images can move us, to beautiful murals that can inspire that radical imagination that can help us get out of this moment where we feel so out of control, or the world feels out of control, and when we can kind of cut through the noise and see a beacon of light.
And I think that that’s what artists can do in this moment is appeal to us in different ways. And I think now more than ever there’s an urgency around supporting that art and those perspectives, and that level of storytelling.
CR: I think one of the biggest changes in the last decade also is our connection to each other through the Web, through the Internet. You know, we come from isolated communities, you know. That was by design. And, you know, the Internet provided, you know, YouTube and social media, and I just really started consuming this connection to, you know, other Indigenous Peoples around the world, really. We are consuming YouTube videos that are homemade, comedy, dance, you know, bird singing in Southern California,. We are so connected on social media, on Instagram, you know, artist to artist, Native to Native, culture bearers to culture bearers. So I think that like us harnessing the power of social media is also something that IllumiNatives is focusing on, as well as so many artists in, you know, continuing to connect to each other through the Internet. That for me has been such a huge change in my lifetime for the positive.
And, I love the power of art and seeing Native artists rise to tell our own stories. And it is happening in Hollywood. It’s happening in 2D art. It’s happening with graphic design.
And you’ve really been at the forefront of that, Crystal, in making sure that you incorporate some powerhouse artists in your messaging, and it really comes across. Where I think as a Native person I can instantly look at IllumiNatives and know that that’s a Native-led organization. And that’s important. That’s important when you’re building trust in indigenous communities, is that we know who we’re speaking to.
CEH: You know, I always laugh, I go back and think about something that filmmaker Sterlin Harjo once said. Because somebody asked him like: What’s the ideal representation, like, in a TV show? And he said, It’s a Native man drinking a cup of coffee wearing a pair of jeans. And it’s like [LAUGHS]— and that’s it. And it was like it’s funny ha-ha, but it’s just to be normalized, right? For us to show up and not as the magical, mystical Indian, or, you know, we all know what it’s like when a Native person shows up on something, and we all like freak out, like it’s a rare—it’s like seeing a unicorn. Right? Or Sasquatch, right? [LAUGHS] Like when we see ourselves, we get so excited.
Simultaneously, there’s two Native TV shows. One by Sierra Ornelas, she’s a showrunner and created it with Mike Schur. It’s called Rutherford Falls, and it’s 50 percent of the writers room are Native Peoples. You have a Native woman as the co-star with Ed Helms. It’s breaking all the record books on Native representation. To Sterlin Harjo, who’s teamed up with Taika Waititi to develop the show Reservation Dogs that’s on FX. And, again, I mean, these are really significant but, you know, it’s fairly recent.
So I think the future is really about that, our representation, we are everywhere. And so I think it’s about that political representation, that we really hit parity in every single state and city, and nationally.
Or when we click on Netflix, or whatever we like to watch, that there’s ample choices around Native representation, and stories that are authored by us. You know, all kinds of stories, and not just the epic Westerns or the tragic tales, you know, about Native Peoples, but, you know, comedies and, you know, Natives in outer space! [LAUGHS] That we have the diversity of representation that not only reflects our humanity and the complexity of who we are but all of our contributions. Even imagining ourselves in the future. And that it just is on every level of society.
I really got choked up earlier, you know, when you were talking, Cara, about—as a young person through school, like how exhausting that was, our children have to constantly live in hostile learning environments, and it’s not only related to sports mascots, but that, because there’s nothing in the history books really about us that Native children today are still asked to get up and teach their classes – Native American history.
My dream is that that no longer is the case. That our children can go to school and feel positive about that experience, and that our history and our contemporary contributions to this country are reflected, and that we’re thriving.
There is such a power to the power of our story, and our stories. It really has the ability to change the future. I feel like in changing that representation, that we start to see that these big systems are transformed, that we are really about building Native power; we are about advancing justice and equity for our people. That is really my dream, and I really believe that it’s something that we’re going to achieve.
CR: Simultaneously, the dream is that all of those things are reversed, that we are creating and fostering future leaders, that we are fostering, you know, representation that’s empowering and uplifting, and that we’re able to reverse some of those negative correlations for ourselves and for future generations. That would be the dream.
Crystal, I can’t thank you enough for being here with us today. It’s always an incredible honor to share space and time with you, and thank you for joining us. And I just appreciate the work that you do so much, and please know that everybody sees you and your team over there at IllumiNative.
CEH: Well, it takes a village. It’s a big beautiful team of all kinds of people and I think this is also just an extraordinary time for Native women, right? In particular. And I just thank you for the work that you do, and just for creating this space and inviting me into your circle, and to connect with the amazing work that you do through Bioneers. So thank you.
CR: Thank you for joining us for this episode of Indigeneity Conversations. To learn more about the guests we featured today, go to the episode page on our website, bioneers.org/indigeneityconversations. You’ll also find more episodes there to listen to and share, and ways to become involved as an ally to indigenous peoples.
AB: And To find out more about our Native-led Indigeneity Program, go to our website bioneers.org/indigeneity. We offer more original Indigenous media content there along with our Indigeneity Curricula and learning materials for students and life-long learners.
CR: It’s been such a pleasure to share with all of you today. Many thanks and take care!
Prior to the colonization of North America, over a thousand separate Indigenous nations populated the continent – each with their own unique culture, language and traditions. The perseverance of Indigenous nations in the face of a global extractive economic order, climate change, and racism speaks to the endurance of spirit and the wisdom of ecological stewardship. Today, Indigenous peoples comprise 5% of the global population yet protect 80% of Earth’s biodiversity. Building solidarity with and respecting the leadership of Indigenous peoples has been a core part of Bioneers’ ethos since our founding and is increasingly a focal point in global organizing across any number of issues, from large scale conservation work to climate activism to movements for social change.
This coming Monday, an ever-increasing number of state and city governments are taking part in a larger movement to challenge the American mythos about Indigenous people and the founding of this country. Indigenous Peoples’ Day offers us a chance to reckon with a violent and oppressive past in service of a nascent trajectory towards healing, reconciliation and new ways of being.
This article contains the content from the 2/01/2021 Bioneers Pulse newsletter. Sign up here to get the newsletter straight to your inbox!
Bioneers Decolonization Series
What Is Decolonization? | Decolonization has recently grown to become a buzzword among various organizations and businesses and used to support a wide range of political interests. With no informed understanding or intentional use of the term, decolonization risks being robbed of its political power. For an in-depth conversation about the concept, check out this interview with Alexis Bunten on decolonization.
Why We Should Indigenize Place Names | Over the past year, Americans have made great strides in dismantling white supremacy. We are still far behind other settler colonial nations in indigenizing our street names, but recent events point to a growing awareness and efforts to forward this movement.
Register for the 2021 Bioneers Conference today to tune in for this incredible panel and many more powerful programs.
Conversation with Oglála Lakȟóta Elder Basil Brave Heart
The Oglala Lakota Nation are one of the many nations that belong to the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ (“Seven Council Fires”; known derogatorily as “Sioux”). Basil Brave Heart is an Oglala Lakota combat veteran, Catholic boarding school survivor, author and retired school administrator from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota.
The newest podcast program from Bioneers is on its way in just a few days. Each episode will bring Indigenous perspectives to global conversations. Keep an eye on your inbox for launch details!
Life in the City of Dirty Water | Clayton Thomas-Muller
The mass Indigenous-led movement against oil pipelines left a permanent impact in the fight against climate change. Indigenous nations are leading the movement to protect water and hold governments accountable to treaty laws that preserve Indigenous relationships with the environment. In this excerpt from his brand new book, Life in the City of Dirty Water: A Memoir of Healing, Clayton Thomas-Muller shares the power and wisdom of Indigenous climate advocacy.
Bill Tripp, Deputy-Director of Eco-Cultural Revitalization for the Karuk Tribe’s Department of Natural Resources, is a forest management specialist and the lead author of the Karuk Eco-Cultural Resource Management Plan and co-author of the Karuk Climate Adaptation Plan. His work involves developing partnerships and strategic action plans to enable large landscape collaborative management throughout Karuk Aboriginal Territory and beyond. Bill is featured in the film the INHABITANTS: An Indigenous Perspective which follows five Native American tribes as they adapt to today’s climate crisis by restoring their ancient relationships with the land.
YES! is turning 25 this year and celebrating with a free virtual festival this Thursday & Friday, Oct. 7-8!
You’ll hear from world-renowned scholar & activist Vandana Shiva, Alicia Garza, Adrienne Maree Brown, David Korten, Sarah van Gelder, and discuss transformative justice w/ Dallas Goldtooth, Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharris of Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, Mariah Parker, and Amanda Alexander. Plus hear performances from Brett Dennen, Dar Williams paying tribute to Pete Seeger, Taina Asili, Chris Pierce, Raye Zaragoza, Tawana Petty, and groove to Mollywop.
If you loved the Fantastic Fungi movie on Netflix, you won’t want to miss out on the live virtual 3-day event from October 15-17 with over 40 leading experts such as Paul Stamets, Merlin Sheldrake, Michael Pollan, Suzanne Simard and many more!
Decolonization has recently adopted a wide array of definitions and has come to embody various differing political interests. From its theoretical origins in the frontlines of war to the calls to reject processed food, its recent surge in popularity begs the question: What is decolonization? The rampant use of a term with no agreed upon definition poses the risk of decolonization losing its power as a concept – a danger often seen in language originating in marginalized communities.
In this interview with Alexis Bunten, we explore how colonialism has evolved, its relationship with capitalism, and how this guides us to understanding decolonization. Alexis Bunten(Unangan/Yup’ik) is Co-Director of Bioneers’ Indigeneity program and is an accomplished researcher, writer, media-maker, and curriculum developer.
MJ Ruff is an Oglala Lakota poet and writer from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. MJ’s writing focuses on the role of class in the development of Native political movements in the U.S.
This conversation is part of the Bioneers decolonization series. Check out this article in the series to learn more about some of the ideas we explored in this interview.
MJ: What is the relationship between capitalism and colonialism?
ALEXIS: I don’t distinguish between capitalism and colonialism, and I intentionally call the social and economic system that we live in capital colonialism. Capitalism requires resources and it acquires that through colonialism. It also requires the exploitation of labor to extract those resources and colonialism is the method through which workers [extractive labor] can be acquired.
Lastly, capitalism requires continued growth. For a capitalist economy to stay in place, it must continually grow and expand. For settler-colonialism to stay in place, it also must grow and expand. Their growth is intimately linked and will never stop until the planet dies.
MJ: With this definition of colonialism, would it be safe to say that colonialism is an ongoing process today?
ALEXIS: Absolutely. Colonialism is a structure, not an event. Colonialism is not something that happened in the past and now we can all move on from it through apologies. It’s actively happening and we all have a role to play in fighting back against it.
MJ: How has colonialism evolved? What does it look like today?
ALEXIS: Some years ago, a multinational mining corporation was trying to steal resources in northeast Australia. Their tactic involved burning the local Aboriginal peoples village to take the land and extract resources from it. Today, as colonialism has evolved, so have their tactics. This same company, under a different name, tried to convince a community in Alaska to install a mine that would irreparably damage one of the world’s most important fisheries. Only, they couldn’t get away with burning down the villages in today’s political and social environment, so instead, they were going around to the villages, lying about the benefits of the mine, and bribing villagers with expensive steak dinners in a community where a box of cereal is $12.
MJ: How do we, as Indigenous people who share in the struggle against colonialism, reckon with the reality that some of our leaders are bribed by the system we are struggling against? What are we to make of a system that buys peoples’ political interests?
ALEXIS: I can’t fully answer that question without bringing up the internalized colonization.
When colonialism is internalized, you begin to believe in the supremacy of the dominant capitalist culture, you internalize the logic and ideologies of capitalism (for example, believing that you can’t live a good life without a lot of money.)
Traditionally, a vast number of diverse economic systems have existed in Indigenous societies. Many of these economies involved the accumulation of something that can be defined as wealth. What distinguishes economic accumulation within Indigenous societies is the way that that wealth is shared according to cultural values. Transforming the way we relate to wealth and it’s distribution through Indigenous values is important in creating a future where we can take care of the planet.
MJ: Is that the task of decolonization?
ALEXIS: Decolonization is a term that is incredibly hot right now and we need to talk about what it means. Decolonization is loosely bandied about; for example, concepts like decolonizing your food and such.
I think of decolonization as if it was defined on a continuum. At one end is literal decolonization which involves the return of land to Indigenous Peoples. On the other end is metaphorical decolonization in which colonial characteristics are merely stripped from things but the colonial core remains. Personally, I’m not a hardliner on either of the definitions but when asking if decolonization is possible, we need to be honest with how we are defining But, at the end of the day, I am an optimist, so I believe decolonization is possible, literally and metaphorically. It just depends on how long your timeline for it is. The planet is telling us right now that we don’t have much time.
MJ: What role do settlers play in decolonization?
ALEXIS: The burden of decolonization is disproportionately put on the people who have suffered the most from colonialism. Settlers today can find themselves distanced from the history of colonialism through time but still reap the benefits of it.
What’s going to have a huge impact is to shift public consciousness and the narrative around what colonialism and decolonization is. We need to start talking about what it means to live in a White Settler colonial nation that is an apartheid nation in practice.
First, learn whose land you’re on, and the history of colonization where you live. For example, I live on Portola Drive which was named after the Portolá expedition to what is now California in 1769 during the late stages of what’s called the Age of Exploration. This expedition’s goal was to solidify Spain’s claim to this land, so that it, and it’s peoples could be exploited through a very brutal colonization. Portola Drive bleeds out onto Freemont Street named after John C. Frémont who was directly responsible for the genocide of thousands of California Indians. Why should I have to be reminded of a genocide everytime I leave my house to go anywhere? And I know that the majority of my City Council is going to think I’m nuts when I come to them about changing these names to Ohlone Drive, or something more appropriate. I hope to begin a community conversation about changing the street names.
There’s so many more things like this that you can do on this community level to shift the public consciousness. In our next conversation, I’ll be happy to share some more tips.
Often regarded as a pest, the starling is a type of bird with a glossy black plumage that shines green or purple due to its metallic sheen. The speckles of iridescent, pearl-white spots that adorn their breast earn them the celestial title “Starling” (meaning “Little Star”). The starling’s impressive ability to mimic the sounds of life as it unfolds around them speaks to the way that song illuminates their practice of sharing in the web of life.
In this excerpt from the brand new book, Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations, Lyanda Fern Lynn Haupt reflects on the beyond-human kinship her relationship with starlings has illuminated, and the infinity of intelligences cradled by reciprocity in a world that both includes yet surpasses the limits of human knowledge.
The following excerpt is from “Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations” (Center for Humans and Nature, 2021) and is reprinted with permission from the publisher.
A starling lives in my house. I prefer to think of the circumstance under which she came into my care as a heroic rescue, but to be perfectly honest, it was part theft. I was working on a book about kinship and creativity, explored through the window of Mozart’s relationship with a starling he kept for four years. In my research for the project, I’d scoured the academic literature on starlings, interviewed myriad experts, and traveled to Austria, where I haunted the Vienna apartment in which Mozart had lived and composed alongside the bird. But the longer I pondered and scribbled, the more I came to recognize a gap in my understanding of the human-bird relationship central to my project—I didn’t know, as Mozart did, what it was like to coexist with a starling in my own household.
Under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (and according to common ecological sense) it is entirely illegal to remove, harass, touch, or even glance sideways at the nests, eggs, or nestlings of nearly any bird. Starlings are one of the few exceptions. The twenty-some starlings that were introduced to Central Park in the late 1800s have swelled in number to two hundred million and now blanket North America, flourishing on farmland, in suburban lawns, and in urban parks. They are omnivorous, adaptive, and smart. While most of the general public cannot accurately identify starlings, we do know one thing: we aren’t supposed to like them. In ornithological and conservation circles, starlings are beyond question the most despised bird on the continent, competing with native cavity nesters such as acorn woodpeckers and bluebirds for prized nest holes. They cause millions of dollars in agricultural damage each year, their great flocks descending to feast upon fields and animal feed. With this track record, the starling is considered not just an introduced species but an invasive one; fish and wildlife departments across the country enjoin us to discourage starlings from nesting, cover their nest holes, destroy their nests, remove their eggs, and even kill both chicks and adult birds in any way we can think up.
One day a friend in the city parks department familiar with my project called to let me know that a starling nest in the eaves of a nearby park bathroom was going to be removed by park workers. I’d been studying that nest and knew that the young had just hatched—here was my chance. It was a harrowing caper, but with my husband as coconspirator, some ill-conceived climbing upon wobbly park-owned garbage cans, a share of bloody scrapes and ugly bruises, and a shocking amount of foul language, I managed to swoop in and scoop up a nestling before she was swept into the city trash bin. I was aware that while we are allowed to maim or murder starlings with legal impunity, it is decidedly not legal to lovingly nurture one in our living rooms. I have a background in avian rehab and knew what I was doing in terms of raising a chick. Still—I was about to become a minor criminal. We can kill starlings, but we can’t keep them. Rescue. Theft.
We named the bird for the Latin word meaning song, and Carmen joined our family—her flock—with warm and trusting enthusiasm, wanting always to be with us, on us, inquisitive about our doings, a participant in the round of our homelife. Shining, mischievous, playful, singing—flapping now from my shoulder to my wrist as I write these words.
I had a preconceived notion of what I would learn from this personal bit of starling research. Starlings are curious, intelligent, iridescent, beautiful; they have a complex social structure and are capable mimics. And so I guessed: Carmen would join me in my studio and get into so much trouble that I would marvel at Mozart’s having ever gotten any work done at all. She would charm my family by mimicking our voices. She would invite me and those who met her to explore the cognitive dissonance involved in being conservationists who are enchanted by this individual of an ecologically disdained species.
And yes. Yes, she affirmed all those things with panache. Then, having dispatched my expectations, she went entirely off script, ignored my research needs, took over the story, improvised new hypotheses, composed her own results. She taught me things about the measure of my human complexity, and even more about the expanse of my ignorance. I have been thinking and writing about beyond-human kinship for more than two decades. Now a common, invasive bird perched lightly upon my shoulder and sang into my ear, You know nothing. Winging into the great cloud of my unknowing, this one starling has taught me ten thousand things. Here are two of them.
The Infinity of Intelligences
Because of starlings’ detested status, most people are uninterested in their astonishing natural history, and even those who identify as birders have little idea that starlings are gifted mimics, able to imitate novel sounds and build a repertoire of new learned vocalizations throughout their lives. Starlings skillfully imitate other birds, cats, environmental noises, various kinds of machinery, cell phones, music, and the human voice. Rather than attempting to teach Carmen specific words, I wanted to see how her mimicry would unfold within our household, unprompted. Starlings are flirtatious, social beings, and they respond to interaction, so it was fitting that Carmen’s first word was hi, followed swiftly by hi Carmen, hi Honey, and c’mere, the phrases we most often speak to her. Eventually, she mimicked the creak in our old wood floor and practiced the song of the Bewick’s wren nesting outside her window until I couldn’t tell the two birds apart. All of this was a delight—but unsurprising for a starling. Both male and female starlings sing (uncommon in female passerines) and mimic. But it took me months after she came into her full voice to figure out the most wonderous dimension to Carmen’s aural echoes—that they are in truth not echoes at all.
In the dark of morning, before anyone else in the house is awake, I pad downstairs in my pink sock-monkey pajamas. As soon as I reach the bottom step, Carmen calls in a soft, whispery voice, Hi Carmen. The first words she hears each day. Our elder tuxedo cat Delilah follows me, ready for her breakfast—Carmen looks at her and says, Meeooow! in a demanding, hungry-kitty voice. I pick up the jar of coffee and, hearing the tinkling of the beans, Carmen calls ker-klunk, the sound of the jar lid hitting the countertop, then a gritty whiiiir!—not her prettiest vocalization, but an exact imitation of the coffee grinder, the sound she knows is next to come. And when I open the door of the microwave but before I press the buttons, Beep! Beep-beep. In rhythm and pitch perfect.
For so long I simply thought, “Wow, Carmen’s mimicry is getting really good.” But the moment I comprehended what was actually happening, a shiver ran from my scalp to my toes. Carmen does not just imitate the sounds of her world; she anticipates them, and she participates in the world by proclaiming the order of life with her voice. The more I watched, listened, and witnessed, the more it became clear that this radical aural attunement and readiness is her primary way of knowing, of learning, of communicating, and—especially, as a social bird—of sharing in the unfolding life that surrounds her.
Just as all dog owners like to think they have the smartest pup in the world, for a brief moment, I marveled that I was living with the most intelligent starling ever to rise from the stuff of creation—right here in my kitchen. It dawned eventually on my slow human brain that it is not just this brilliant little starling but all starlings who have such astonishing aural responsiveness to life and everything that passes within it. I threw binoculars around my neck and ran into the world. I studied wild starlings for weeks and observed this auditory alertness in the individuals everywhere around me.
Starlings are one of the most ubiquitous, most widely researched birds on Earth (in the United States, they are common lab subjects because they are unprotected, requiring no special license for collection), yet they are busy learning and expressing right beneath our noses in a manner that few recognize. The scientific literature on starlings is full of analyses regarding their vocal intelligence and the complexity of their syntax. But their anticipatory aural perception of the world is not represented in the oeuvre, which explores animal intelligence mainly by the extent to which it approximates human intelligence. Sure, we humans can hear a sound and predict what will follow. But starlings dwell in the living aural landscape as a fundamental way of being, alert in a manner beyond human capacity. And this is just one animal with one way of being, a way that I just happened to become aware of while living in uncommon intimacy with a single wild bird.
The starling’s gifts are singular—as are those of all beings. Turkey vultures vocalize little, no match for a starling, but their brains house the largest olfactory sense of any bird, drawing them to freshly dead food through fragrances that rise from earth to air. My own sense of smell is trifling next to a vulture’s. How must it be to live guided by fragrance and flight? What manner of intelligence forms within a life framed and molded by these things? Or the whisker-based seeing of night rodents? Or the skin-based knowing of an earthworm? Or the beyond-human echo hearing of bats? Or the rooted mycorrhizal communication of red cedars? Or the geometrical pattern recognition of bees in the flowers they see and the visual wavelengths we are blind to but that guide bee lives?
Media-driven lists of animals considered the most intelligent are most often populated by the same creatures over and over: other-than-human primates of various sorts, elephants, dolphins, border collies, crows, ravens, and parrots. The list of traits that indicate intelligence commonly include facial recognition, spatial memory, response to music, mimicry of the sounds of other animals (especially the human voice), tool use, problem solving, and grieving. These animals have eyes, most often they have fur, they live in social groups, and they do things that humans do. (The octopus, neither feathered nor furred, or even vertebrate, is trending as an outlier.) It is a positive that in recent years academic science is beginning to admit animal consciousness as a valid topic for discussion, yet both in our science and our everyday lives we continue to diminish the soaring uniqueness of other species and individuals by discussing animal intelligences only insofar as we perceive in them humanlike ways of knowing and feeling. As with the wild aural attentiveness of starlings, we who grew up with a conventional Western education constantly fail to recognize, or even imagine, the breadth of unique animal and plant intelligences that lie outside of human manners of being.
With gratitude to Carmen, I start each day with a reminder that we walk, wondering, within an infinity of living intelligences, cradled by the reciprocity of kinship in an inspirited world that simultaneously surpasses and enfolds the limits of human knowing. We walk as if in a faerie story—every being we pass, no matter how common, possessed of both message and mystery.
The Kith of Kinship
The genesis of the common name for starling—which means “little star”—is uncertain. It may have been inspired by the shape the birds’ bodies form in flight, reaching in four directions—bills, wingtips, tails tapering to the point that distinguishes them from flying blackbirds. Or perhaps the celestial scattering of iridescent, pearl-white star spots that adorn their breasts in most seasons. In either case, the name starling is a call from the cosmos to the earth, an embodied reminder of kinship’s essence. Together we are made of the fine things: soil, blood, the sustenance of earth, and ether. Starstuff.
Carmen roosts on my shoulder, quiet. Breast settled over toes, plumes soft against my neck, a slight fluff of wings lifted by tiny scapulae formed within a vertebral bauplan evolved millennia before there were any primates at all, let alone anyone in the genus Homo walking the earth. Can I hear her heartbeat there so close to my ear? No, but I imagine that I can. Yet I do feel a tingle on my own scapulae, as if I may sprout feathered wings of my own.
We feel this entrainment with other beings when we allow ourselves to enter into it—leaning with bare feet against the trunk of an ancient cedar, our craniosacral fluid rising and falling with the sap. The recognition of bright lightness in our own feet when the doe leaps back into her forest shelter. The alertness in the eyes of a cottontail that makes us turn to look over our own shoulders for, maybe, an even larger predator than the rabbit perceives in us. Deep kinship invites these moments of prerational interbeing with another creature, of everyday shapeshifting.
Yet this wondrous interrelatedness leaves us faltering in the face of many species’ disruptive presence to ecosystemic integrity, including the starling’s impact on sensitive native bird populations. In 1957, Rachel Carson wrote a paper titled “How about Citizenship Papers for the Starling.” In it she praised the species’ playfulness, watchability, and the fact that one of their favorite foods is cutworms—a menace to agriculturalists and gardeners. She was right, too, in noting that starlings in North America aren’t going anywhere. Despite the arsenal of tactics deployed to reduce starling populations (guns, traps, explosives, and species-specific poisons actually called starlicides), starling populations continued to grow for decades after Carson’s paper and stabilized at their current level about thirty years ago. It is a surprise for eco-minded people to hear a voice such as Carson’s speak in favor of starlings, but in 1957 there were only twenty million starlings, a tenth of today’s population. Plus, Carson, who had a love for all creatures and was fascinated by starling behavior, would have run up against the same problem we face today. In the calculus of kinship, the starling is our relation. As humans interested in acting on behalf of a wild earth with beautiful ecosystems that maintain a semblance of integrity, we face a dilemma. Starlings belong with us in kindred continuity, but what about in presence upon the landscape? How do we balance these questions in mind, body, and heart?
Here, the little-understood word kith that evolved alongside kinship sheds light. In modern English—even in England where the expression “kith and kin” originated—the two words are mistakenly conflated into one meaning: our relatives, those who are close to us. But the reason the archaic phrase was formed around two different words is that they are in fact different. Jay Griffiths points this out in her radiant book, Kith (changed to A Country Called Childhood for an American audience who is not trusted to know the word kith at all). The etymology of the word kith is murky, most likely related to the Old English cūth, whence the obsolete couth. We are familiar today with uncouth—a lack of knowing, an ignorance of how to act or behave. Couth, and eventually kith, by contrast, is the known, the familiar. It makes sense that the conviviality of kith came to be associated with the relatedness of kin and, as the etymologist Eric Partridge writes, “hence, by confusion, relatives.”
Where kin are relations of kind, kith is relationship based on knowledge of place—the close landscape, “one’s square mile,” as Griffiths writes, where each tree and neighbor and crow and fox and stone are known, not by map or guide but by heart. Kithship, then, is intimacy with the landscape in which one dwells and is entangled, a knowing of its waymarks, its fragrance, the habits of its wildlings.
Kinship speaks to the truth of an interrelatedness that is shared no matter how deeply we as individuals perceive this connection. (We experience this with our human blood relatives; the substance of our genetic lineage remains whether or not we know our relatives well, like them, or have any sense of what they do day to day.) And although it might be more beautiful to dwell in awareness of our kinship with all of life and to act from that center, such awareness is not required for the fact of our kinship to remain as an ecological given.
Kithship is different. It is an exacting intimacy, one born of nearness, stillness, study, observation, openness. Vulnerability. Kithship is hard-won visceral intimacy—blood cut of the thorn, bright stinging of the nettle. Knowledge of the rock where the snake suns herself and the best path around it.
Kithship is particular. Among the several things that the ecologist Suzanne Simard suggests we human animals can do to assist trees in their lives and forest making is to simply go and be among them. Simard grew up in a logging family and found her early inspiration as a child in British Columbia, when she would lie “on the forest floor and stare up at the tree crowns” of the ancient Douglas firs and western red cedars. It is only by dwelling over time with a particular forest that we can understand its uniqueness, what it needs to flourish and to thrive—and it is how, in our graced interconnection, we ourselves flourish and thrive in response. The place-based particularity of kithship explains why starlings are beloved in the United Kingdom and across Europe, where they are native. With the loss of agricultural land, their numbers are falling, and they are officially listed as a species of concern. Birders and even many academic ornithologists in the United States are stunned by this news—unable to imagine a world in which starlings are welcome. When I spoke about this subject to audiences in Austria, people were astonished to learn that the species is so despised here.
The endangered orcas in the southern waters of Scotland are my beloved kindred to be sure. I know this even though I will likely never see them. But the Salish Sea orcas who roam the home waterways we share? I know them as individuals by the scars visible on their dorsal fins. I have seen their young breach the surface of waters I paddle in my kayak. I have watched the fountain of their exhale, the echo of their breath singing all the way to shore. I have walked home after such moments in wonder, wanting never to bathe again but to live always in a skin of orca breath.
Kithship crosses dimensions of knowing that bring us to intimate specificity: book learning, alert wandering, knowledge of species close to home and recognition of individuals within these species, knowing who lives where and why, knowing who is flourishing and who is failing. Kithship enlivens and complexifies kinship, and it is essential if the fullness of kinship’s wisdom is to be lived.
And the question of starling presence upon the landscape? What we should think, how we should relate, what we should do? Ah. I don’t know. Of course, I do not know. There is no one answer, no single right response. Dwelling with kith and kin awakens, always, an unsettled complexity. With our intricate human-animal minds, we can hold many dimensions of thought at once, and such complexity is not the same as contradiction. We are asked to walk lightly and intelligently within an essential ambiguity.
In kinship, Carmen and her own kindred starlings with their ravishing intelligence are my relations—sister, mother, beloved. In kithship, I pause. I observe the flicker who was evicted from her nest on the corner by a starling, recognizable by her habit of roosting on a particular cherry branch, near the tree’s trunk. I wander the woodland edges near my home where starlings do not nest and witness the uptick in native avian biodiversity there. I behold the starlings who swirl from their exquisite murmuration out of the sky and into our backyard fir. I watch Carmen when they begin to whistle; she falls silent, tilting her head. I wish starlings were not present upon this landscape. I know that killing them will not help and is unjustified. I know, too, that I cannot accept their presence with a full heart. We stand in a glorious, tangled dissonance filled with love, intimacy, and confusion. I cover the holes in my home where starlings might nest. I plant trees. And when I see a starling? I stand in awe of her loveliness and whisper, “Hello, shining one.”
Within recent years, decolonization has grown to become a buzzword in community organizing work. However, the political power that it holds can easily be robbed of its importance if we are not intentional with how we use it. Fostering informed intentional use of the concept first requires that we understand colonialism and history.
So, what is decolonization? Following an interview with Alexis Bunten (Aleut/Yup’ik), co-director of Bioneers’ Indigeneity program, we explore the Indigenous history, settler-colonialism and the meaning of decolonization.
What is Colonialism?
Colonialism is a structure through which capitalist nations steal land, occupy it with foreign settlers, and establish dominant political control to sanction the exploitation of Indigenous land and people. The misconception that colonialism is an event rather than a structure muddles its true nature and inhibits people’s development of a useful understanding of colonialism. Colonialism developed as a way for capitalism to expand its reach to new territories that could fuel the production of wealth for European nations. Capitalism’s global spread through colonialism is a result of its need to pursue infinite profit through finite resources. “The capitalist economy has to have continual growth to stay in place, and that’s what colonialism is about. It’s about this constant expansion, more resources to extract, more people to exploit, and it never ends and destroys the planet” says Alexis in talking about the intimate relationship between capitalism and colonialism.
Colonialism Today
As political and social norms evolve in different regions of the world, so does colonialism. Beginning in the late 19th century, a shift in federal Indian policy resulted in the investment in creating boarding schools that would serve to enact the cultural genocide of Indigenous people. In 1879, the federal government opened the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania under the superintendent’s motto of “Kill the Indian, Save the Man,” echoing the belief that Native people can be Americanized. Prior to the federal turn toward “civilizing” Indigenous people, the attitude toward tribal nations conceived of them as an impediment to American progress who needed to be killed en masse to pave way for the wealth of the new settler colonies. When Chief Justice John Marshall litigated a series of Supreme Court cases known today as “The Marshall Trilogy,” the federal government’s policy on Native peoples shifted as the ruling declared that the authority of tribes to govern themselves predated the creation of the United States and the American government had a responsibility to provide essential services and resources to tribal nations. The Marshall Trilogy marked the beginning of neocolonialism as federal Indian policy shifted from outright slaughter to a metaphorical “killing” of Indigenous culture and personhood. Despite the turn toward the systematic destruction of traditions, values, language and other cultural elements, the impact remained the same, as cultural genocide is still recognized as genocide. No longer were the wars against Indigenous people being waged with guns; now the wars were being waged with treaties and negotiations.
Indigenous people became intimately familiar with the pen’s might over the sword as tribes were displaced from their homelands and starved into negotiations. Alexis describes her people’s experience with the Pebble Mine project in Bristol Bay, Alaska: “In my region, all the way across the world in Bristol Bay, Alaska – did they kill people or burn them out of their villages? No. You can’t get away with that in the modern day USA. What they did do is lure people into community meetings where they were trying to convince them it was a good thing, and brainwash them by offering people really expensive steak dinners in a place where a box of cereal costs $12.”
George Gillette, second from left, chairman of Three Affiliated Tribes of the Fort Berthold Reservation, and other tribal officials at the 1948 signing of the Garrison Dam agreement.
When internalized by the Indigenous population, colonialism can be a powerful means of bribery through which to sow discord internally among communities. As much as colonialism is an act of physical violence that transforms material conditions, it is also psychologically and spiritually violent. By separating Indigenous people from basic necessities, stealing their resources and privatizing them under capitalist growth, settlers gain leverage through which they can coerce Indigenous leaders to comply with colonial interests.
Without a comprehensive understanding of colonialism and the ways in which Indigenous leaders can uphold it, allies often reinforce the romantic notion that uplifting Indigenous wisdom and spirituality equates to action. As Alexis pointed out in our interview: “That is not to say we should not romanticize nor stereotype Indigenous Peoples. We’re so diverse and there were plenty of tribes in North America that took slaves.” Among the 574 federally recognized tribal nations that exist (and another 200+ that aren’t federally recognized), political leadership among tribes are as diverse as congressional U.S. leadership. Tribes like the MHA (Mandan-Hidatsa-Arikara) nation have grown to become one of the most oil rich nations in the country. In 2011, tribal chairman Tex Hall adopted the mantra “Sovereignty by the barrel” expressing the belief that wealth accrued from fossil fuels can fuel tribal sovereignty and self-determination. As Alexis puts it, “You internalize the logic and ideologies of capitalism in the dominant society, which is things like the life narrative in America: You’re born, you go to school, you get married, you get a job, you buy a house, you have children. All of that is tied into market capital and the acquisition of goods and consumerism.”
What Is Decolonization?
Within the past few years, “decolonization” grew in rampant popularity among numerous social circles and without much care. Oblivious to the various uses of the word, allies risk robbing the concept of its political power when they lack a straightforward transparency with how they’re using “decolonization”. From “decolonizing your diet” to the literal taking of land, it is hard to pin down and define a single definition of the concept. The majority of the time it’s used, rarely does it ever center land.
A landmark text within the debate is Eve Tuck’s and K. Wayne Yang’s , “Decolonization Is Not A Metaphor”. In it, the authors argue that any use of the term that does not directly involve the return of land to Indigenous people is not decolonization. Within Native communities, tribal internationalism plays a key role in the development of a decolonial vision. The 2016 protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation garnered international attention and welcomed allies from around the globe. The international reach of the protests followed a long history of the tribe’s global alliance with other Indigenous nations.
Regardless of one’s opinion on the matter, the authors bring up a crucial aspect of the debate: action.
One way Alexis recommends taking action is beginning by first learning whose land you’re on. With over 300 treaties signed by the United States with tribal nations, not a single one remains unbroken. Learning the treaty history and how it contextualizes your life on the land you live is a step toward challenging the legacy of colonialism.
In a larger economic vision, Alexis speaks of how “the nation state controls the means of production and the distribution of it” and how “It should be out of the hands of the nation state and put in the hands of people.” Transforming our relationship to our resources and economy is a crucial aspect of decolonization. As we’ve seen in recent times, the United States colonial economic regime works to outsource production to Indigenous communities overseas where they can pay workers less in hazardous work conditions. Alexis’ vision of a decolonized economy seeks to end colonial exploitation in other countries that produce goods for the United States.
The plant kingdom is in mourning; their great long-haired ally, Gabriel Howearth, was swept away in August by the violent surge of a flash flood in Lo de Marcos, Mexico. The force of the waters turned over the pickup truck that he was traveling in, pulled him out of the vehicle and, presumably, out to the Pacific Ocean. His body, to date, has not been found. He was an extraordinary person who lived an extraordinary life.
Gabriel was renowned among herb farmers, seed savers, permaculturists, organic farmers and thousands of other people who learned from his profound depth of knowledge about plants and seeds as well as from his vitally important contributions to biodiversity in agriculture and gardening. Driven by his remarkable passion for botanical diversity and an indefatigable creative energy, he created unique, spectacularly beautiful and profoundly influential world-class gardens and farms in Oregon, New Mexico, and Baja, Mexico.
As a boy growing up in Southern California, Gabriel’s father took him to underprivileged neighborhoods to help start gardens for low-income families, instilling in him a deep sense of community service. It was the beginning of his love affair with the garden, and the first calling of his destiny. Later, he studied at UC Santa Cruz with the legendary Alan Chadwick who directed him to learn from Indigenous farmers. Gabriel took his mentor’s advice and traveled the world, working with Native farmers from a wide range of cultures, many of whom shared with him their most precious gifts – their traditional heirloom seeds.
These global travels awakened him to the many facets of biodiversity and its fundamental importance to the web of life. It was not just a botanical issue, as important as that is; Gabriel understood that the botanical, ecological, cultural and spiritual aspects of humanity’s relationship to nature were inseparable. He once said, “In cultures that are disappearing, usually there is a set of plants that is going with them, and a spirit in the food, unique to the culture, that is being lost.”
Landing in New Mexico, he was invited by the elders of San Juan Pueblo to help them, as Gabriel stated in a 1990 LA Times interview, “regain their once-thriving and now fast-disappearing culture rooted in the soil….Part of the San Juan project involved searching for many types of old seeds that had been preserved for generations in gourds, pots, and other vessels as well as in the adobe walls of buildings and in the root cellars of traditional Indian pueblos throughout the region. Someone found some seeds of the sacred red corn of San Juan, which hadn’t been grown for 40 years, and planting it again felt like a spiritual homecoming for me.”
The work at that cutting-edge experimental farm became the inspiration for Seeds of Change, co-founded by Gabriel and Kenny Ausubel, which, later led to the birth of Bioneers. Nina Simons, co-founder of Bioneers, on her first visit to that farm was so inspired by its beauty and diversity it changed the course of her life. The way she describes that experience is, “Nature tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘you’re working for me now.’ ”
They understood the immense importance of open-pollinated heirloom seeds that were adapted to a specific place and were in the public domain. Concerned that multinational corporations were offering fewer and fewer varieties and about their attempts to monopolize the seed business, Seeds of Change’s mission was to inspire a legion of backyard gardeners to grow and save heirloom seeds and preserve food crop biodiversity. It was the genesis of a grassroots seed-saving movement that today expresses itself in seed exchanges, seed-lending libraries and small local seed companies attempting to offer an alternative to the mega-corporations’ increasing control of the food supply.
By the late 1990s Gabriel found an ideal 10-acre piece land (that grew to 20 acres) on which he developed his last, and most impressive botanical garden, near the town of La Ribera on the coast of the Sea of Cortez north of Los Cabos in Baja California, Mexico. That coastal desert land is blessed with an abundant supply of water from an aquifer fed by the Sierra de La Laguna mountains, the southernmost range on the Baja Peninsula. Located on the Tropic of Cancer, with a year-round growing climate, abundant sun and Gabriel’s botanical brilliance, he began to create his masterpiece, the Buena Fortuna Botanical Gardens.
Under Gabriel’s stewardship, with the help of Kitzia Kokopelmana, the land became an Eden in the desert with 3700 different plant species from the dry tropics around the world, many of them endangered. Plants from India, Madagascar, Chile, Peru, South East Asia, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, Somalia and Ethiopia flourish in the “Kinship” gardening system that groups together plants in the same botanical family from different parts of the world. In addition, several hundred different vegetables and fruits are grown at Buena Fortuna.
In a Bioneers interview, Gabriel said “The plants and seeds we grow are shared with other botanical gardens and private collectors so that they can be preserved in different situations. The strategy is to make sure that whatever you collect you spread to each continent that has a similar climate, so that if there is a climatic condition (or some other cause) in which that plant species perishes, it will be preserved in another part of the world.”
With my wife Jan, I visited Buena Fortuna in the early 2000s. At the time the garden was only about 5 years old, but everything was so lush, vibrant and vigorous, it looked as though they had been there for decades. We slept in a tent and were awakened at dawn by a symphony of bird song. Buena Fortuna is on the Pacific flyway, and as birds migrate south along the desert of the Baja peninsula, hundreds and hundreds of them head straight to the bountiful garden oasis for rest and rejuvenation.
Traveling to Buena Fortuna, after a night on the ferry crossing the Sea of Cortez, we landed in La Paz and took a bus that dropped us off in a rural area about 3 miles from the Botanical Gardens. Where we got off there was an arroyo about 30-feet deep and perhaps a few hundred meters wide. When I looked at it, I couldn’t imagine that something like that in such an arid climate could ever fill up with water. Along the banks of the arroyo were a number of very simple but sturdy homes with corrugated tin roofs.
A couple of years later, soon after the birth of Gabriel’s and Kitzia’s 2nd son, a major hurricane hit the cape region of Baja with heavy rains and 200 kilometer-per-hour winds. The structures at Buena Fortuna are built of local natural materials and materials grown in the garden, mainly bamboo construction with thatched roofs. People from the nearby community by the arroyo urged Gabriel and his family to take shelter with them in their homes; they were concerned that the dwellings at Buena Fortuna were not going to survive the oncoming storm. Gabriel decided to stay at Buena Fortuna. During the storm, he sat with his back to the wind inside the bamboo home holding his baby in his arms for hours. The structures bent and swayed alarmingly in the violent winds but never broke. The arroyo filled with raging storm water and some of the homes along its banks were destroyed. Many of the trees at the botanical gardens were knocked over but ultimately survived and regrew. Buena Fortuna showed remarkable resilience.
I worked with Gabriel on two Bioneers projects. He and I traveled the back roads of the Deep South meeting with legacy African American farmers whose great-great grandparents were slaves. We collaborated with the Federation of Southern Cooperatives bringing Gabriel’s expertise in medicinal herb growing and organic farming to free workshops for Black farmers. For the Dreaming New Mexico project – a blueprint for a local food system at the state level – Gabriel designed a nutritional garden that grouped plants by the nutrients they contain. By eating something from each section, you would be consuming a balanced, healthy diet.
About 12 years ago, Gabriel came down with a life-threatening case of meningitis and was very close to death. He recovered, but it severely affected his speech, his walking and the use of one hand. He spent years rehabilitating but never fully recovered. Even so, he was able to, once again, teach and consult on projects. Despite significant physical challenges, he maintained his passion for biodiversity and dedication to sharing his knowledge.
A master seedsman, a tireless defender of biodiversity and an amazingly creative horticulturist, Gabriel increased biodiversity everywhere he went – Baja, Brazil, Oregon, Alabama, Mississippi, and the Indian Pueblos in New Mexico-just to name a few. In one wild, tragic and heart-breaking moment, he is gone.
The plant kingdom is in mourning; their great ally was swept away.
In the petals of every flower, dew drops turn to tearsbecause Gabriel is no longer with us.
The spirit of the plant world guides him now, lifting him from the raging water to somewhere beyond this world of mountains and streams that he loved.
His legacy, embedded generationally in the seeds and roots, his essence in the flowers and fruits.
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