A focus on our relationship with the living world and the first environment we experience as human beings.
Featuring: Katsi Cook and Robin Wall Kimmerer.
Transcript
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.