#38 | We Shall Dance With Chaos - Ramon Parish (Naropa University)

4/27/21 by Ian MacKenzie

https://anchor.fm/themythicmasculine/episodes/38--We-Shall-Dance-With-Chaos---Ramon-Parish-Naropa-University-evn1qu

Web player: https://podcastaddict.com/episode/122395301
Episode: https://anchor.fm/s/110a4ba8/podcast/play/32261406/https%3A%2F%2Fd3ctxlq1ktw2nl.cloudfront.net%2Fstaging%2F2021-3-26%2F2d1af902-5178-fe69-febf-26cddd46bfd7.mp3

My guest today is Ramon Parish, an assistant professor in Naropa University’s department of Interdisciplinary Studies. Ramon has been synthesizing mindfulness, embodiment, social justice, the environment, and ritual & ceremony for over a decade, and has helped usher hundreds of young people through contemporary threshold experiences. In our conversation today, we explore a dazzling array of themes, including: the impact of comics as modern mythologies, the power of healing personal and ancestral trauma through movement, the spiral dynamics of emergence, and how these uncertain times ask that we become riders of chaos.

#15 - Achieving Success: Advice from Indigenous Professors in Academia - Guests: WILLOW AGEP Alliance Fellows

8/13/20 by Annie Belcourt, Aaron Brien, Salena Hill, Serra Hoagland, Shandin Pete, Renae Schmitt, Robert Smith, Aaron Thomas,

https://tribalresearchspecialist.com/podcast

Web player: https://podcastaddict.com/episode/122262857
Episode: https://pdcn.co/e/www.buzzsprout.com/953152/4831205-15-achieving-success-advice-from-indigenous-professors-in-academia-guests-willow-agep-alliance-fellows.mp3?blob_id=20213285

In the episode, the IRC team speaks with The WILLOW AGEP Alliance Fellows. The Willow AGEP Alliance brings together three institutions - University of Montana, Salish Kootenai College, and Sitting Bull College. The WILLOW AGEP Alliance includes interconnected components focusing on retention and support for NAF-STEM via a mentoring program, grant preparation, and management program, and institutional support program. The development of a model to increase the success of NAF-STEM will provide more effective ways to strengthen their participation through professional development and systemic institutional change. This is an AGEP-T: Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate – Transformation under these NSF HRD grant numbers: #1723248 - University of Montana (UM), #1723006 - Salish Kootenai College (SKC), and #1723196 - Sitting Bull College (SBC).

The IRC team asked the WILLOW Fellows the following questions: In Western Academics, what has been considered a victory to you? In the current state, how do victory and success look in the future?

Guests include:
Dr. Annie Belcourt (Otter Woman) is an American Indian Assistant Professor in the College of Health Professions and Biomedical Sciences at the University of Montana Pharmacy Practice and School of Public and Community Health Sciences Departments.
https://health.umt.edu/pharmacypractice/Faculty%20and%20Preceptors/Directory.php?ID=3227

Renae Schmitt is an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. She is an instructor in the Environmental Science Program at Sitting Bull College
https://sittingbull.edu/sitting-bull-college/programs/environmental-science-masters-program/

Dr. Robert Smith is an Associate Professor at the University of Montana in the Computer Science Department.
http://hs.umt.edu/cs/facultyAndStaff/default.php?s=Smith3075

Dr. Aaron Thomas is a member of the Navajo Nation. He is the Director of Indigenous Research and STEM Education (IRSE) at the University of Montana, in addition to his role as Associate Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry.
https://hs.umt.edu/chemistry/people/faculty.php?s=Thomas2104

Have answers? Suggestions? Agree? Disagree? Join the conversation at one of our social media sites. Your input is valuable to advance our understanding. Hosts: Aaron Brien, Salena, Hill, Serra Hoagland, Shandin Pete

Website http://irc.skc.edu
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#524 - Stop Line 3!

4/2/21 by John Kane

Web player: https://podcastaddict.com/episode/121401071
Episode: http://feeds.soundcloud.com/stream/1021279747-john-kane-11-524a.mp3

Line 3 is the next battle line for Native people fighting the extractive industries and fossil fuels. Enbridge plans to run this tar sands oil pipeline through treaty lands and the wild rice region of Minnesota.

Like what you hear? Support the show on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/letstalknative

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Alexandra Horowitz: The World According to Your Dog

5/12/21 by Species Unite

https://www.speciesunite.com/podcast/alexandra-horowitz

Web player: https://podcastaddict.com/episode/123038444
Episode: https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/speciesunite/Ep6.x_AlexandraH_interview.mp3?dest-id=834548

“I can drive my car off a cliff and just leave it where it lay, the most I'll get is a littering fine, and if you throw your dog off the cliff the punishment is actually pretty similar. That's because they're the same type of thing to the law. So, unless you change that status, and you have people of course, who are thinking that there should be a status of kind of living property that might give them more attributes than my car has or my chair has; and then there are individuals who think they should be given the status of legal persons, which isn’t to say being people, but having rights of some sort. I think both of those are pretty intriguing offers. I think we're a little ways off from doing that, but boy, either of those would be a massive improvement in our societal treatment of these creatures. And of course, I don't think it's just restricted to dogs… It's been terrific to work with dogs for all these years, but I think this way about lots of non-human animals that we interact with, were we kind of get to use them sort of, for our sake. I would love to see some kind of sea change in thinking such that we don't get to use animals in the ways we do now, which are really abuses of animals.” – Alexandra Horowitz If you have any questions for your dog, Alexandra Horowitz is a pretty good place to start. She’s spent much of her life researching and writing about what it’s like to be a dog. She is the #1 New York times bestselling author of Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know; Our Dogs, Ourselves, Being a Dog: Following the Dog Into a World of Smell; and On Looking. She is a professor at Barnard College, Columbia University, where she teaches seminars in canine cognition, creative nonfiction writing, and audio storytelling. As Senior Research Fellow, she heads the Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard. I wish this conversation had lasted all day long as I had about 5 thousand more questions for Alexandra - mostly, everything I’ve ever wanted to ask my dog. Although, the time we did have together was pretty amazing and felt like an absolute gift.

Leek broccoli blended soup
Fermented crushed garlic with herbs, mixed greens, ginger seaweed sauerkraut, turmeric, black pepper

E102: Lyla June on Returning to Native American Agricultural Traditions

12/15/20 by Hosted by Kelly Brownell

Web player: https://podcastaddict.com/episode/117084628
Episode: https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/leading-voices-in-food/Lyla-June-Returning_to_Native_American_Agricultural_Foodways.mp3?dest-id=860036

https://leading-voices-in-food.libsyn.com/e102-lyla-june-on-returning-to-native-american-agricultural-traditions

What if we cultivated our environment instead of intensive crop planting and animal farming, and in turn created an abundance of food to meet our needs? Is this what First Nations people did here in the Americas? This concept is the focus of doctoral research of today's guest, Indigenous musician, scholar, and community organizer, Lyla June. June is an Indigenous woman of Dine (Navajo), Tsetsehestahese (Cheyenne) and European lineage. She's pursuing a doctoral degree at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. And she's fascinated by the intersection of Indigenous food systems and Indigenous land management. Interview Summary So can you begin by explaining how you came to be passionate about food as an Indigenous woman? And tell us some about your doctoral work. Sure, so as you may know, a lot of Native people are struggling with diabetes and other food-related illnesses and are having a hard time accessing foods. And a lot of us live in what they call food deserts.

A lot of our food systems were destroyed in the process of the creation of America. Everything from decimating buffalo populations to burning down orchards and cornfields to ruining the salmon runs by putting dams in all the rivers; and destroying the beavers for the fur trade, which destroyed all the ponds which supported a lot of food systems. So our ways of life, as you can imagine, have been deeply altered, and that has its ramifications on our health. I think you can't help but be very attuned to food systems as an Indigenous person. I think what sparked my doctoral research is how tribes have, before Columbus and still do today these genius practices of taking care of the land that actually enhance the natural food-bearing capacity of the land. And what really sparked my interest in that was an elder who said to me, "Native people control enough land "to change the way the world thinks about food and water." And that really inspired me because that made me feel like, you know, even though we've lost most of our land base, it doesn't take a very large model to start a revolution in the way people think about things. So I've been going around traveling as part of my doctoral research, recently reading a ton, but a lot of times just working face-to-face with Native people and seeing the ways in which they take care of the land. That's really how I got into it. This belief that Native people could not only create thriving life for their own communities through the revitalization of our food systems—but that we could actually become leaders once again to help not just our communities, but to help the rest of the world. Although industrial agriculture seems like it's working right now, it's only a matter of time until it collapses. We are on the precipice of a very, I don't think there's any way to sugarcoat it, a very tragic famine. I think there's a way around that with our current food system. And so I would like to work with a number, dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens of Indigenous peoples who are preparing for that, and ready to share our medicine and our knowledge with the world. If it's okay, I'd like to share just a few vignettes of how Indigenous peoples are exemplifying this way of working with the Earth. I'd very much like that. And what you're saying sounds very concerning and very hopeful at the same time. I feel that every day, a very strong mixture of urgency and hope all at once, and it's exciting work. And I very much feel guided by the ancestors 'cause the things I'm learning and the things I'm coming across are just way too big for coincidence. But for example, there's a group in British Columbia that I talk about very frequently called the Heiltsuk Nation. They live on a little island called Bella Bella, West Coast of Canada. And they actually have these hand-planted kelp forests that they plant along the shoreline of their islands. And at the right time of year, they go out and put this kelp, it's very fast-growing kelp. And this increases the surface area upon which the herring fish, which is a little silver fish, can lay their eggs. And so they just litter the whole place with eggs, millions and millions and millions of eggs. And that provides the basis for the salmon, the killer whales, the sea lions. The humans, of course eat it. It's a huge delicacy. You can sell it for tons of money, but they don't sell it.
https://leading-voices-in-food.libsyn.com/e102-lyla-june-on-returning-to-native-american-agricultural-traditions

They actually use it to feed their island ecosystem. So on up the food chain to the wolves, the eagles. And everyone in the system benefits from this anthropogenic base of calories. And I say anthropogenic, which means manmade. There are ways to touch the Earth that are very kind and very helpful, not just in the feeding of humans, but of other lifeforms as well. Another example I like to give is the Shawnee ancestors of what we now call Kentucky. What we see is in the fossilized pollen if you take soil cores out of the ponds, you can see pollen that is as old as 10,000 years. And you can see what the forest has looked like over the past 10,000 years. And what we find is for a long time, it was just cedar and hemlock dominating the pollen profile. And then about 3,000 years ago, this is before Christ, we see the Shawnee ancestors move in and we see a huge influx of hickory nut, black walnut, chestnut, acorns, sumpweed, goosefoot. All these edible plant species come into the pollen profile. Which means that somebody, presumably the Shawnee, radically transformed the whole cedar and hemlock forest into a dense food forest. What we also see is the influx of fossilized charcoal, which indicates that they managed this food forest with low intensity, gentle, prescribed burns, where you burn the forest floor, which eliminates competing vegetation. It injects nutrient dense ash into the soil, phosphorus, nitrogen, potassium. It creates the charcoal which creates little apartment buildings for microbes in the soil. So you make a living soil. And this food forest with the charcoal persisted for 3,000 years, up until about 1830, we see the whole system collapse. All the pollen disappears, all the chestnut disappears. This is an example I like to give to show people how longstanding and how sophisticated Indigenous food systems are. I have also been looking at the Tenochtitlan, which was the original city of Mexico City. They had these incredible waste sanitation systems where they say that human waste was so valuable on Lake Texcoco, way before Columbus was a twinkle in his daddy's eye, that you could actually bring it to the market and trade it. You could trade your own waste for goods and services because they had this waste sanitation system that reinvested all of this so-called waste into their food systems, which were floating gardens they created out of reeds and very special soil systems. Gardens that floated all over Lake Texcoco. So if that's not sophisticated, I don't know what it is. I'm really very impressed by those stories. And one of the things that you made me think of as you were describing the kelp forest in Canada, was that the food sounds like it's part of the spiritual life of the individuals who were raising it, consuming it, protecting it, et cetera. Is that correct? Oh, absolutely. In fact, there's one elder I interviewed from the Amah Mutsun Nation who are the Indigenous peoples of what we now call Santa Cruz, California. And they did a similar forestry management strategy where they used prescribed burns. But he said that it was a ceremony. He said the smoke would go up into the oak trees because they're oak people and those acorns form a very important caloric base for the pre-Columbian peoples of California. They were acorn people through and through. The smoke would go up through the trees and would smudge off the trees. It would bless the trees, he said. They had fire-resistant bark because they had co-evolved with human fire for so many millennia. And this smoke would kill all the weevils and bugs and pests. And so you had a really healthy acorn harvest in the fall. And so it was absolutely not just land management, but it was a prayer and a gift. Sort of like Vandana Shiva from India says. She says, "Nitrogen and potassium and phosphorus...
https://leading-voices-in-food.libsyn.com/e102-lyla-june-on-returning-to-native-american-agricultural-traditions

..."Those are elements in a periodic table "from a Eurocentric point of view." She said, "But to us, these are sacred elements "that we give as an offering to the Earth. "We offer these nutrients to the soil "as a spiritual offering to Mother Earth." I'm struck as you're discussing these conversations you've had with elders that they must be an invaluable source of information. And your discussions with them must be incredibly interesting, but they also must be very deeply moving, I assume. Oh yes, absolutely, because we don't have many of these elders left. And many of our elders don't know this information because America very deliberately expunged this knowledge through the boarding school system. My grandparents, for example, full-blooded Navajo, full-blooded Dine, they don't really know this type of knowledge. They were heavily Christianized as children in the boarding schools. They were heavily indoctrinated into this idea that white is right and brown is wrong. And the more like a white American you can be, then the more civilized you are, the more intelligent you are, the more holy and clean you are, which is absolutely what they taught Native children in the boarding schools. And it's just ironic that our food systems were actually very, very intelligent, and very, very advanced. The work that you're doing including your doctoral work is an effort to protect this information, to preserve it, to communicate it, to amplify it. Are there a lot of other efforts around to do the same sort of thing? Yes, I am one of many, many, many. It's a beautiful thing that I don't have to do this alone because Indigenous food systems as a movement is really burgeoning right now. For instance, you have a lot of eco-linguistic revitalization. The first Indigenous eco-village ever has sprung up in the South, the Muskogee Eco-Village. And they are a language immersion eco-village. So if you go there, everybody's speaking Muskogee. And they understand that in order to revitalize their food ways, they must revitalize their language. And conversely, in order to revitalize their language, they must revitalize their food ways because their language talks about a certain world. And unless you recreate that world, there's nothing to talk about. If that makes sense. There's also a wonderful film that just came out called "Gather" and it's available on, I think, iTunes and Amazon. And it's all about the fight to revitalize Native food ways. It's really well done, and has a lot of Indigenous speakers leading the charge. There's the Indigenous Food Systems Network, indigenousfoodsystems.org that is really bringing together a number of players in this broad-based movement. There's also this really interesting phenomenon popping up, the popularization of Indigenous culinary arts. For instance, you have The Sioux Chef, which I imagine many of you have heard of. He's a Lakota chef, and Sioux is spelled S-I-O-U-X, which is one of the names for Lakota. So The Sioux Chef has written a book called, "The Sioux Chef's Kitchen," all about natural Indigenous-based dishes that you can make. There's also Taste of Native Cuisine, Carlos Baca, based out of Southwest Colorado, who has his own farm. And he's been foraging and creating these amazing culinary dishes, like top-notch, five-star, but he's bringing all of that to the people. And he's been bringing food boxes to people on the Navajo Reservation during the COVID crisis to give them real medicine, not just food, but also plant, different medicines to help. And then there's Yazzie The Chef was a Dine, a Navajo chef who's really been talking up our food ways. Rowan White, who's based in Northern California, but she's a Mohawk woman. She is leading the effort in seed rematriation, and she calls it rematriation instead of repatriation, kind of as a feminist take on all of that.
https://leading-voices-in-food.libsyn.com/e102-lyla-june-on-returning-to-native-american-agricultural-traditions