First Environment

Michelle Schenandoah: (♪) We are living in a time of great change, and it's critical for us to come together as one human family, so that all of our grandchildren, Mother Earth. May Rematriated Voices create a space within your heart and mind to join with Indigenous thought leaders and allies. We've been brought here together for a reason, and it's up to all of us to figure out why. Oneida Nation of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. On this episode of Rematriated Voices, I'm joined by Mohawk midwife and environmentalist Katsi Cook and Potawatomi author and botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer to talk about our relationship with the living world and the first environment we experience as human beings. We recorded this episode on a beautiful autumn day by Blue Mountain Lake in the Adirondacks. How wonderful we're here together today. I'm so absolutely honored to be here in your presence and with all of this beauty that Mother Nature provides for us, and today, we're going to talk about first environment our mothers, our Mother Earth, and our families. And so...how wonderful, today we have our Indigenous Elder, midwife Katsi Cook, who is Mohawk from Akwesasne, and we have wonderful, wonderful, dear sister, Robin Wall Kimmerer, who is Potawatomi, who's a botanist and author extraordinaire, and I'm just starstruck being with the two of you. I really, really have to say, I want to ask you one of the easiest questions: why are we here? Why, as human beings, are we here on this earth? That was just a joke. I know that's probably not an easy question, but it kind of is, in a way, because we have an understanding as Indigenous peoples who we are. So from our perspective, why are we here on Earth? How does that shape our way of life as indigenous peoples? Katsi Cook: We're lucky, privileged, to be part of a universe, a very creative universe, that in its own life force whirls and spins, and in that spinning layers of organization in our bodies and in the bundles of genetic memory that are the lineages we come from. We are programmed in our bodies, evolved for connection to one another, to our own self and to all the beauty that we find around us, and so for me as a midwife, to keep that in mind as the mother is moving through a critical time in her life, and keeping in mind that this baby, too is arriving in this world with a purpose that comes from the Skyworld, from those memories, and in knowing my own matriline, I realize those ancestral women live in me, going from the Cook, Montour, Jacobs and Jemison, Garlow, moving through Kanawake, Akwesasne and the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee people. And so this is the purpose and meaning of my own life, my children's life, my grandchildren: to remember, and we spend our lives remembering and connecting and finding one another. So for me, that's the "why". The "how", that's a different question. Robin Wall Kimmerer: Thank you. You know I'm thinking about in our Potawatomi stories, when we ask this question,"why are we here?", we're told to remember that when we were given this gift of life to walk about in this beautiful paradise, Creator whispered our gift in our ear and that our job while we are here, and the purpose of every single being around us is to give those gifts that we were given and that we are to come to understand what each of our gifts is, what part of the story we carry, and to then be able to give that gift back to others. But that gift and responsibility are always coupled to your point of purpose. You know that the stars were given that gift of sparkle, but also the responsibility to hold our stories and to guide us at night, so that every gift that we've been given has a responsibility to use it and those teachings that as that each of us carries different gifts, but all of us to give our gifts in reciprocity for the privilege of being here and (♪) (loon call in background)(♪) ...ahh, miigwechwendam (thank you) for joining... with ki's (another living being's) gift, yeah, to give our gift on behalf of the continuity of life. Michelle Schenandoah: As you both are talking, I feel overwhelmed, like my eyes are getting watery and my heart feels full, because it's truth. There's an understanding that speaks to our DNA, and that's so beautiful. Thank you. So Katsi, as an Indigenous midwife, you have helped bring so many babies into the world, and with that is so many understandings and teachings, and you have said that women's bodies are the first environment. What do you mean by that? Katsi Cook: I have come to understand, after many years of practice, that the bodies of women and the body of the Earth are the same body. Woman is the first environment, the first relationship, the first exposure: even the linguistic patterns of the mother's speaking voice as the baby grows inside of her body is determined by influences the baby's linguistic patterns. And so this idea that the woman is the first environment reflects how our bodies are moving, constantly in flux at every level of organization within us and in the world around us, so that the old teachings that informed this idea of the elder women who I spent a lot of time with growing up...my grandmother, who delivered me in the big...her big white iron bed in her home, her farmhouse, I began to talk to them as I grew and ask them: "how did you do this in your generation? How did you prepare yourselves? What did it mean to carry a life and what behaviors were counseled by your family?" And they would say things like, "don't stand in the doorway, because the baby will get stuck during the delivery. Be intentional about your actions. If you begin an action, complete it, don't go halfway, turn around and come back." Everything that the mother sees, everything the mother feels, everything in her environment, impacts the development of the baby, to the point where I used to in the old days before our media was 24/7, counsel not to watch the evening news because of the violence that's constant in our environment. And so as the old women spoke of these things, I began to develop this idea, and then in the practice of delivering babies in our communities, from Akwesasne to Six Nations and beyond to other tribes, these teachings of "don't stand in the doorway. Be careful of what you see, because the baby sees it too" are universal to Indigenous people throughout the globe, as I've learned. And so behavior and practices are a big part of the traditional teachings for a woman who is carrying a life at the same time, practicing in communities such as my own, where we were identified as the largest PCB dump site in the United States. This was in the 1980s. One woman in my care asked, is it safe to breastfeed? Epidemiologists from Mount Sinai School of Medicine came to study the impact of PCBs on our environment, and they were taking fat samples from our Mohawk people at a time when the analytical capacity was not evolved to the point where they could be specifically understanding that PCBs are in the world and over 200 different kinds of patterns called "congeners". This really concerned me, as the scientists were taking samples from her water, her farm, her garden. Of course, you would wonder, what about my body and my breast milk, which is comes from our blood. And as I read the literature, the limited literature, at that time, I began to understand that it's through the food chain, eating the fish, being in relationship to the different species of fish that inhabit our beautiful St Lawrence river, the river that's fed by even these waters of the Adirondacks. It's a hard thing to understand that those contaminants, industrial contaminants, move through the food chain, up into our bodies. And as a member of of the women who gave samples of their breast milk for this breast milk study, I found that even after breastfeeding four children, when I had my set of twins, my breast milk showed PCB contamination, DDT, DDE, industrial and agricultural chemicals, Myrex. And so it became personal, but it was also a communications among the women that our individual results don't really provide much meaning, but as an aggregate of the women together, of all of our results, we would have a better understanding of this first environment, because it isn't just the womb, the fireplace of the woman's body, the womb where the baby grows, but her whole being, her mind, the thoughts that she carries, the prayers and intentions that she sets for herself every day, her spirit, her relatives, all of that comes together in this idea of woman is the first environment. Michelle Schenandoah: Robin in your book "Braiding Sweetgrass" you begin with contrasting the creation story of Skywoman with the creation story of Eve. How do these two stories shape human behavior? Or, how have these two stories shaped human behavior? Robin Wall Kimmerer: Two origin stories...two women...two trees. The parallels between the Skywoman story and the story of Eve are in conversation with one another, but the stories of those women and the ways that their stories ripple out into the world today could not be more different. When I think about Eve and becoming an exile from the Garden and the judgment that was passed on her so unfairly. And I I'm so sad for her that she got to have to be pushed out of the Garden. But then we think about Skywoman who helped to plant that earthly garden, the notion of a co-creator of abundance and beauty on the world, that first mother teaches us that that's our role, not to be in exile from the garden, not to be outside, but to be inside that garden, caring for all of the Creation around us, bringing your your seeds, right? And that notion of separation is something that we read on the land today when we think about Indigenous lands and lands that have suffered the scars of that tradition of exile. You know, there's such an interesting study recently about biodiversity on the planet done by the UN and in this study, they tell the heartbreaking story of the loss of biodiversity all around the world, right? It's heartbreaking, but in this study, there's a really bright spot, and that is that there are places on the planet where our relatives are thriving, and they are flourishing. And where are they? They are in Indigenous homelands all around the world, are these refuges for our relatives. Why? I think those are the ripples of these stories, a story that tells us that our responsibility is to care for all of those beings. In the Skywoman story, all the beings were here first. They were caring for her. Our first relationship with the living world was of rescue and and they were our life raft. And it seems to me that we've forgotten that we have to be their life raft now, in this in this moment of tremendous loss. The notion of separation, Katsi, when you talk about that permeability between a mother and her gestating child, and that permeability with the rest of the living world, we are all connected in that way. And the myth of Eve is separation, separation from the Garden, separation from the people, from her own maternal nature. And it is that myth of separation that I think ripples out onto the land, so that we treat the land as if it was just our property, as if it was a big old warehouse for us to take whatever we want, as opposed to our sacred home. And those, to me, are some of the ways that those stories shape our understanding of our place on on the planet. But I also, you know, in the great power of story, we can choose the stories. Katsi Cook: Yes. Robin Wall Kimmerer: We can choose the stories. And we inherit stories, right? We remember stories. But I think given the gifts that we have for discernment, we can also choose to change that story, and, and, and which story do we want to live out? Michelle Schenandoah: Yeah.Thank you. So Katsi in the practice of midwifery, as an Indigenous midwife, what are the first words that are spoken to a baby and why? Katsi Cook: What a beautiful moment as the baby moves through cardinal movements, through the pelvis of the mother. And in the medical world, the Western medical world, they didn't understand until the 70s that babies are sentient beings that we know they already are aware of words and sounds and interactions and so the speech to the baby that we found in organizing the Six Nations Birthing Center, talking to families and elders, a beautiful speech translates in English to "I give thanks for peacefully you are born, I pray hopefully that peacefully, your life will be ongoing, because it is that I know, I think of you clearly, knowing you will always be loved." And it shows us that, as the baby is emerging, already, the baby is a sentient being capable of grasping this intuitive connection at first, preparing for what's called a "Golden Hour" after the baby is in the mother's breast. And so these speeches to the babies that can include the Ohèn:ton Karihwatéhkwen, which is "the words that come before anything else" when a relative, an older sibling, a grandparent, can take the baby and introduce the baby shortly after delivery to all of its relations in this world. And it's a beautiful piece that was restored in the practice to our families, because many families that I've cared for describe them, they describe wanting a birth in their own home, so that the first words their babies could hear are in the - our own language, and so the speeches are delivered in the language can be designed by the family and kept for the baby as it grows in this world, and going to the idea of the "creation of meaning", in the same way that we might save parts of the cord or the placenta, those elements of the birth are kept just as carefully as anything else. So that's why speeches to the baby are important in the practice. Michelle Schenandoah: Yeah, wow. So beautiful. And the little bird was also singing as you were talking about this. And so there's the definition of "rematriation" that you know, I've really learned from you and from Mommabear, and has really inspired so much of the work that I do today. And so I want to thank you, because this process and practice and and rematriating is really, truly, you know, a space where we are as Indigenous peoples and even humankind and the consciousness that is becoming more aware globally of our connection to Mother Earth, to this beautiful gift of nature and the time that we have here, and for humankind to come to understand that connection. And so I appreciate so much of the work that both of you do, because it's really helping to reconnect our hearts our minds, to the fact that we are part of this living world. You just mentioned the Thanksgiving Address, the words that come before all else, and how you know these are in those words that are given first to a baby when they're born. Do you want to elaborate more on the Thanksgiving Address and its significance? Why do we have these words? What does it do for us? Katsi Cook: Having grown up with these words and participated, participating in anything worth participating in, to settle the mind and the spirit, to enter into a ceremonial space, a space of critical conversation, the words are associated with the burning of tobacco, the fire, the original tobacco, whose name in Mohawk translates to English: "it hits and it opens" and so that connective tissue between the fire and the Skyworld is reopened with the tobacco smoke and the words that come before all else. And it it has been with us from the beginning, the tobacco was brought from the seeds grasped by Skywoman at the base of the celestial tree when it was uprooted, as she attempted to grasp herself, hold herself to the sky world. But she brought those seeds here, and they have a purpose and a meaning. And so the Thanksgiving address of all of the elements that are connected with the Kaieiri Nionkwetake for example, Four Beings. We all sit at the center of the Four Directions. And I recall a non native nurse in a conversation at the National Aboriginal Health Organization in Ottawa many years ago saying, "well, Katsi, not all of us believe in the Four Directions". And I said, "Well, think of it this way, all life in the Universe is made up of four molecules, compounds, A, G, C, T, which is the vocabulary of our genetic code. And if you can agree with that, then you can understand the Four Directions. And inside of midwifery, the Four Directions are the grandparents of the coming child, and if in the prenatal visits, one of the grandparents is not available, then you find an elder to sit in that place of the missing grandparent. Some are lucky. They have six elder grandparents, great grandparents, and so the Thanksgiving Address is there to remind us to be conscious of these relationships in our daily lives. And so that's the significance for me of the Thanksgiving Address. Michelle Schenandoah: I love how you describe the connective tissue between the Earth and Skyworld, right? There is just the embodiment, right exactly, of Mother Earth and this, this place that we we exist. And so that's a beautiful way to see that, as a connective tissue. It's not just big open space, but there's a connection. So Robin, as a Potawatomi woman, I know that there are also practices and teachings that are so similar. And you also have spent a big part of your life growing up in Haudenosaunee territories and spending time with Haudenosaunee and have also come to embody the Thanksgiving Address and the work that you do and your way of life. And so how has this been meaningful for you? Robin Wall Kimmerer: I absolutely hear in the Thanksgiving, echoes of the culture of gratitude and practices of gratitude as our first responsibility as humans, in Anishinaabe ways. But in the Thanksgiving, I hear so much that resonates for me as an Indigenous scientist, as well as an Indigenous woman. When I hear the Thanksgiving and let those words just wash over I'm also thinking that this is a scientific observation of the world, The strawberries come first, so they lead the way in feeding not only humans, but the birds and the turtles and everybody who wants to eat a strawberry. I was thinking of the salamanders who will come up there as well and take a little nibble. So that notion of - it's almost like the scientific concept of biomimicry, of saying, "what is that concept of being?" They call it a new scientific term, biomimicry. What could we learn from the living world that's new? That is our ancient knowledge. But the Thanksgiving reminds us, I think, with every recitation that our relatives are our teachers, this notion of not they're not passive. We have so much to learn from them. And I hear that in the Thanksgiving as well, (♪) and as I'm remembering one of the first times in being in Onondaga territory, hearing the Thanksgiving at a tense meeting with government officials. And in the beginning, those officials were, you know what they were doing? They were looking at their watches. They were like, This is really taking a long time where we have to get to business. But then, when I was watching their faces, the medicine started to work, and they got to a gentler place, saying, Yes, we do think this about the waters. Yes, we do think this about our animals. And so that way of the Thanksgiving of bringing disparate minds together around what really unites us through the gifts of the land. And I think the last thing that I want to say about that is is the feeling of abundance that comes around you when you realize we have everything that we need when you take the time to name and thank you, know that we have everything that we need for Mother Earth and for me. That gives me that sense, not only that we love Mother Earth, but that Mother Earth loves us. And that is such a foreign concept in the Western world to think that the land loves us back. But it changes everything, because when you know that the land, the earth, is your Mother, caring for you and bringing you water and teachers and berries and medicine and food and each other, how can we harm our mother? And so the medicine of the of the Thanksgiving seems to me to be one of the most powerful medicines that we need in this moment. (♪) Michelle Schenandoah: One of our Clan Mothers from Onondaga said that the Thanksgiving Address is, is not a prayer. It's not a prayer to the natural world. We're not praying, but we're actually speaking to all the different beings of nature, and that when we give thanks, like we give thanks to another human being: "Katsi, I'm so glad you're here. Thank you for everything you do." That acknowledgement feels good, and that's exactly what the natural world receives from us when we acknowledge them for being here, for providing all of what they provide to sustain our lives, to help us. And so showing that appreciation through the Thanksgiving Address is that acknowledgement, and it's sharing of that energy the same way that we also like to be appreciated and acknowledged. Yeah, what disrupts our connection to Mother Earth? And how can we restore this? Katsi Cook: One of our Legacy Leader Elders, Lauren Williams from British Columbia, she describes how when a group gets together, there's a certain energy that flows through the group. We eat together, we share stories, we tell our jokes, and enjoy one another. She's one of the ones responsible for the decade of Indigenous languages, and she said, I thought about, what does this feeling mean in my language? And she thought about it. She said, in our language, we have root words and then we add prefixes and suffixes. But there's also a core idea, and she said, so when a group gets together and experiences this feeling of connection with one another. What's the word for that? And she thought about it, and she found the root word. It means "belly button". Belly button, because the life force is why we're all here and is moved through our belly buttons, our...the umbilical cord. And so to me, that connection needs to be restored, just as you described, the sentiment of appreciation, which is part of indigeneity, that the world is alive, that reciprocity and appreciation and respect are the markers of our indigenous knowledge, wisdom and being, and to restore these feelings, this love, that's the path to sustainability, to co creation, to continuous creation, are those markers of who we are as indigenous people. There's an elder in the mountains of Cuba who's deeply connected to the earth, who says she comes to him in his dreams as he sleeps in his hammock, and he said, Mother Earth is crying to us to let us, let her feed us. She wants us to grow food. And just this simple sharing of a human being connected so deeply to his environment because there's no Walmart down the road where he lives, it's even almost impassible to get to his village. And so transformation requires multiple languages, that once you've learned something, you can't unlearn it, it becomes part of who you are. And so I think that inside of all of that that has been said here is the path home, through our language, through our knowledge and our wisdom and our connection to one another, we have to find each other and work from that position. Michelle Schenandoah: Yeah, love, love, love is a path to sustainability. Yeah. Robin Wall Kimmerer: And I'm so glad that you were invoking language, because I think oftentimes we we don't really give enough credit to the fact that by speaking English - English is a way that we are separated from the land. Because, you know, if we don't know the name of this, this giizhik (cedar) or wigwasamik( paper birch) here next to us in English, we say "it is growing by the shore", and that's the only way we have to speak of the living world in English. And when we think about what that means, we would never say it about you or about you, right? We would never do those things. And so in English, when we speak of the world as "it", it gives us a kind of permission to treat the land as object, not as as as relative and in Potawatomi language, and I think in so many Indigenous languages, it's impossible to say "it" to a blue jay. You can't, grammatically speaking. We use the same language for that blue jay as we do for members of our own family, because they're our family. And so that separation that comes from speaking English and the worldview of the land as property, the land as thing, and all of our relatives as stuff. To me, that's one of the big sources of separation. You know, we'll add on top of that the wage economy and capitalism that separates our livelihoods from the land. Our grandparents knew the names of all the plants and the birds because they had to, like the elder in Cuba that you're talking about...foraging, subsistence...you know, we come to know the land as our sustainer, and that is a teacher. So that is constantly cementing our relationship with place. And so for me, among the many answers to, how do we start to restore our connection to land, is, first of all, be there. You know, if the land is your teacher, you know, you got to be there. You got to be with the teacher. You got to be paying deep attention and come to know the names and the gifts of the of the beings around you, and that too, to share your phrase, is the path home. Michelle Schenandoah: Yeah, during the pandemic, Mother Nature said, "Okay...humans, you're taking our time out." And we had a pause from industry, and we saw a direct response from Mother Nature, right? So the natural world responded, and we responded, what did you observe? Katsi Cook: It felt as though Mother Earth was sending us to our rooms to think about the way we were behaving. Human beings work from habit, and the pandemic disrupted all of our habits of getting on planes and how we move around in the world, but it was almost like being down-fended; in our Creation Story, they kept the young Skywoman apart from the rest of the people, covering her with corn husk and putting cattail down around so that her elders could notice any disruption, any intrusion to her, being kept apart so that she could be trained by spiritual tutelaries, teachers, and each one of us were down-fended in one way or another by the pandemic, where we had to look deeply into our own spirit and to learn new ways of connection in this globalized world; the tools, because technology is the biggest driver of change among human beings, and so to be able to use those emergent technologies in ways that are useful, that can connect us across great distances, to be able to reflect on what's happening, not only to our own selves, families and communities, but the other thing is that we couldn't meet in the longhouse, only certain ones to keep it small. And so we had to do - my family had to do the best we could, to say the words, to sing the songs, to clean the ashes at Midwinter in our humble family fireplace, and showed us the responsibility each of us has to keep it all going, which was the last teaching of John Mohawk, the last message that he left in the world. "Keep it all going", continue the songs, ceremonies, those gifts that were given to us, which is our belly button, to the natural world. Robin Wall Kimmerer: I think the pandemic was an opportunity for values clarification, right, for us to re evaluate what really matters to us, who is an essential worker? What does justice look like? It raised so many powerful questions in that pause when we were considering our state and state of our relatives, I think I was excited to see the way the natural world responded, oh my gosh, of silence and cleaner air and all the ways that Mother Earth said, thank you. I needed a break here. I remember listening to the birds that spring and thinking, this is the only normal thing is the sound of those robins and those thrushes. And then it occurred to me that both their voices were louder, and they seemed well in the quiet. But also to think that the questions that were on my mind of, "Will I ever see my children again?" You know, "where will I get my food? Am I safe here?" I came to realize that that's the way birds live. Every single day, they are faced with those questions that I, as a human in this privileged position, suddenly had to feel myself and for me, and I know for others that I talked to, it created this sense of real ecological compassion, because we were no longer immune from the laws of nature. We tend to think that we are outside, as if they've repealed the laws of nature on behalf of us, and that was a wakeup call to remember our animal nature and to create a kind of ecological compassion, not only for one another, but for the living world as well. So there were powerful lessons in the pandemic. When people had to hold school outdoors, I think you should always that's just a good idea. Let's always have school outdoors to be in the presence of the teacher. So all those wonderful opportunities, but I fear we're squandering them that we're not really using...we're too quick to come back to say, "I want things to be back to normal". And in fact, the normal was the pathology, and we need to, we need to think harder. Michelle Schenandoah: Yeah, yeah. So what we saw during that time, there was a lot of reconnection, in many ways, with ourselves, even with our families, those who we may have been in isolation with, but it certainly was a time of great awareness and reflection. And so as we're coming back into that time where we're putting ourselves back out into the world, taking the lessons learned and also looking at the connection that we have as humankind, but from an Indigenous perspective, what does family mean and how can people find healing with their families and the relationships that they have with their families? Katsi Cook: In Mohawk, the word for fire is "ohwatsire" and the word for family is "kahwatsire" We need to rekindle the fire of our families after generations of abuse, in residential schools, in colonial processes, in being made to feel who we are and what we know has no value, I have a dear teacher, mentor and Legacy Leader in Jan Longboat , Kahehti:io: her name means "beautiful garden", who expressed her work of over 20 years working with women who had no voice. She even did workshops to bring singers in to encourage them to at least articulate through song, and they weren't able to do it. And what she found they had in common is they were all survivors of residential school. So this concept of "the voice": as a midwife, I understood very early on that our vagus nerve, that comes from our brain stem and lives outside of the spinal cord, is the way our brain and our viscera, the organs of our viscera connect in communication and conversation with one another, so that the woman's voice, which comes from the larynx and the epiglottis, and....we would say to a woman in birth, "don't sing arias, (sings high note) but go low using the diaphragm to help pressure on the fundus to help the baby move through the pelvis, And this vagus nerve connects directly to the woman's cervix, the cells and tissues of the cervix. It hears it at that level through this vagus nerve, and so using the voice of the women is a critical element in restoring the well being of families. Jan Longboat Kahehti:io, in 20 years of relationship with this group of women and understanding they were primary survivors of the Mush Hole, the Mohawk Institute at Brantford, brought them to their voice by creating the space, the containers, the spirituality to help them recover. And in her chapter in "Worlds Within Us", she lands on recovering the self-esteem of the women because of the abuses that Indigenous women have endured for many generations, and her discourse around having gone across Canada to speak to families of murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls. She said "we did a lot of referrals to sweat lodges, to ceremonial practices.... but of all of the suffering that Indigenous families endure, at the core of it is having to rebuild self-esteem". Whether you're dealing with teenage pregnancies that are unsupported, or any of those outcomes of our historical trauma. And so a lot of good work is being done in our communities to help our people at all kinds of pathways, whether it be through addiction and drug and alcohol services or informing grandmothers and mothers of why our people behave the way they do at times, where they're self-destructing as a form of self hatred, of anger, and to bring them out of that, to support them. We have medicines. We have societies that are able to support our people in recovering their spirits and in recovering their voices. So the work of rematriation is so important to our future, because the more we can heal ourselves, we can show up in the presence of others and move it all forward and keep it all going. Michelle Schenandoah: And how would you then also translate this for non-Indigenous peoples in finding that same type of healing. Katsi Cook: That is a very important question. Our people are growing, spiritually, emotionally, adapting to current and coming environments that are extremely challenging, that have never been experienced before, the changing of cycles, even the winds need to be talked to, sung to, offered tobacco to, connected to, and to share that with non-Native people is an important part of our journey, because so many of non-Native people can't tell you who their relatives are, going back and moving forward. It's like they haven't been taught. They haven't been....shared stories and knowledge and wisdom from our elders and our own lives. But there are many who have started the conversation about regeneration of the natural world. I am a member of the Tiospaye of the American Horse Afraid of Bear Sun Dance. And what I love about our Tiospaye is that our elder George Sword, who lived in the 1800s left a message in the world that anyone willing to commit to the processes of the Sun Dance, to show up and be in relation to not just the people, but to all of life...because we create a vortex and we ourselves, each of us, our bodies create vortices, and in that consciousness, healing is possible. And George Swords' essential message is these things were given to us to be shared, not to be kept to ourselves, and so that anyone who wants to come to the Sun Dance should be there. It's not for everyone. There's a lot to it. But essentially, I feel the same way that we need to be communicating, such as we're doing now, to send a voice out, not just to the Cosmos, but to all of our relatives on this Earth, other human beings. And so that has been the work of our leadership program that Wakerahkáhtste is a standard bearer of. We need to get our voice and our message and our compassion out into the world and so that everyone begins their journey of healing. You know, there was a saying that no one snowflake feels responsible for the avalanche, but as each one of us as a snowflake together, we can do something meaningful in the purpose of our individual lives, in connection with one another, with compassion and love. Michelle Schenandoah: What do you believe is the most important lesson that people can learn from the Haudenosaunee, from Indigenous peoples? What is the most important lesson that they can they can learn in their own lives right now? Robin Wall Kimmerer: It feels to me that we are so caught up in a world that values belongings, what we crave is belonging. And in our ways of life, in our stories, in our teachings, in our ceremonies, that all remind us of kinship, of kinship with each other, kinship with the more than human world as well. And that's grounded in such humility to say, I don't know what a hemlock tree knows. I don't know what a red squirrel knows. I don't know what Katsi knows. And in humility, I want to listen. I want to be in kinship with all of of those ways of being and when the world feels, not only feels, but is on the cusp of catastrophe, we need all the intelligences. We need all the answers. We need all of those gifts that that you speak of. And if we think that we are as a human species, somehow perched atop this fictional pyramid of human exceptionalism, we miss out on all of that wisdom of the natural world and and so to me, one of the most powerful elements of Indigenous thought is that of kinship and not of thinking ourselves alone, in charge, in control. It's really lonely at the top, think of being alone in the world without the counsel of one another and of the natural world. And there's, I think, that's accessible to all people to listen to. Think of yourself as family, not as alone and in charge, but to come back to belonging. Katsi Cook: I sit here with a word for midwife in Mohawk that I learned working with our families and with a wonderful Mohawk teacher and artist Marita Thompson, she worked with me in a program called First Environment Collaborative that brought together health research scientists, community members and health professionals into a larger conversation. Using the gift of her artwork, she painted slippery elm trees, which is the classic Mohawk birth medicine. And in this forest that she painted in the slippery elm was a mother holding her newborn infant, and the other trees represented the other communities that this mother was bringing her baby into the world, and those communities would also be a part of its life. And in the process of painting, because Mohawk is a language of metaphor, she said, ♪ "Katsi you know how when you go in the forest in the fall, the leaves have fallen, and there's temporary rivulets under those leaves as the water moves through the forest floor?". She said, "I see a woman entering that space, kneeling down on the earth and clearing those leaves. And I see her pulling the baby out of the water, out of the earth, or a dark, wet place". I thought, what a beautiful interpretation of what it is that our births are about, that the color of the West is black. It's where the weather, the storms, the thunders, all of that tempest and turbulence comes from, but it's also the place of emergence, of chaos, of an embryogenesis being the model for chaos, that at times in our lives, when we're in struggle, when we're having a moment where we have to overcome an experience that leaves us with sorrow, self-doubt, whatever that energy is that's challenging you to grow, to develop, that human beings need to understand that we live in a world of suffering, so that we can know joy and connection to ourselves and others, to the Earth, to all of our relations, and to this creative Universe that we are a part of. And so your question leads me to that moment of kneeling on the Earth, that each one of us needs to find that rivulet and remove the debris and to give birth to ourselves through the power of Indigenous ceremony, connection, spirituality, and it may be a single passing moment, but the energies of it are so powerful that it can assist us in the growth necessary, especially at this time in our history, as human beings. So with that, yaw^ko. Michelle Schenandoah: Yaw^ko, to you and to both of you, Katsi Cook: May I call you sister? Robin Wall Kimmerer: It would be an honor. Michelle Schenandoah: I'd love to connect with the two of you. Yaw^ko. So grateful, Katsi Cook: What a wonderful moment. Michelle Schenandoah: Yeah, we're never alone. We're never alone. Yeah, my grandmother used to always say that to me, we're never alone. We're never alone. Thank you both so much. Yaw^ko. Rematriated Voices was recorded on Mohawk Land at Minnowbrook Conference Center overlooking Blue Mountain Lake in the Adirondack Mountains. It's a collaboration between Rematriation and Access Audio from the Special Collections Research Center at Syracuse University Libraries. It was produced by me, Michelle Shenandoah and Jim O'Connor. Audio recording and mixing by Brett Barry at Silver Hollow Audio on Lenape Land in the Catskills. Executive Production Assistant: Catherine Faurot. Production Assistants: Jalyn Jimerson, Pamela Pembleton and Caryn Miller. Sound assistants: Griffin O'Neill and Olivia Peters. Cultural and Storytelling Consultants: Rachel Porter, Katsitsionni Fox and Neal Powless. Research Assistant: Nada Merghani. Energy healer: Christina Porter. Theme song: Healing Song by Bear Fox and Teioswathe. Yaw^ko (a big thank you) to Chancellor Kent Syverud, Candace Campbell Jackson and Patricia Dellonte from the Office of the Chancellor at Syracuse University. Similar thanks to Nicolette Dobrowolski and Courtney Hicks of the Special Collections Research Center and Aileen Gallagher and Jon Glass of the SI Newhouse School of Public Communications, and a special thanks to Linda Parris of the Open Societies Foundations. Vocal Coaching by Joanne Yarrow of Distinctive Voices.