CIIS Public Programs Podcast

Transcript

Our transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human editors. We do our best to achieve accuracy, but they may contain errors. If it is an option for you, we strongly encourage you to listen to the podcast audio, which includes additional emotion and emphasis not conveyed through transcription. 

[Cheerful theme music begins] 

This is the CIIS Public Programs Podcast, featuring talks and conversations recorded live by the Public Programs department of California Institute of Integral Studies, a non-profit university located in San Francisco on unceded Ramaytush Ohlone Land. Through our programming, we strive to amplify the voices of those who have historically been under-represented. To find out more about CIIS and public programs like this one, visit our website ciis.edu and connect with us on social media @ciispubprograms.  

[Theme music concludes] 

Four Arrows: Wow, Darcia, it's so great to be with these folks. They've been so amazing in those half hours of prep that we've had, and I can just imagine who's out there in the audience, listening to us. You know, I usually end some of our presentations and interviews that we've had together with the Cherokee lullaby. That was sung by the women, on the Trail of Tears. I’d like to start with that instead, today. Is that okay with you? 

Darcia Narvaez: That sounds good.  

Four Arrows: All right. I think that it will set the tone for the conversation. Let people know that during the most difficult of times as certainly, the Trail of Tears was, seeing the beauty and the responsibility of all the other creatures. And that's what the lyrics to this song were about. Did you see the animals in the clouds? Did you see the dancing grasses? Did you see the beautiful colors of the fish and hear the sounds of the birds? And I think it's important to remember that no matter how difficult things are, and our conversation is going to be talking about difficult things, that it's important to remember that we're not alone and that there's beauty all around.  

So, I'd like everyone to tune in and participate by just being a part of understanding and remembering this wisdom of the women on the Trail of Tears singing this song.  

Darcia: Breathe deeply. 
 

[Music plays briefly] 

Four Arrows: You know, yesterday, I was doing some work outside and I walked into the house and my wife was watching a documentary or something on the screen and it was interrupted with a press conference. And the press conference was in mid- talking about the gun violence, that- what happened in New York and stuff like that. But as I was starting to walk out, one of the journalists, one of the gentlemen journalists asked the question to I think Jen Psaki is there's a lady with the beautiful red hair. They call her. He said that um- “what is the president doing? What is President Biden doing to deal with the lack of humanity for humans? What is he really doing about that?” And as I walked out, I thought well, that was probably a good question in many ways, but it really made me think about what we're going to be doing today. And I want to start with this idea of this focus on humans only. I think is maybe one of the greatest challenges that we have in re-embracing the world view that guided us for as you say 99% of human history. That if we can understand that this kinship that we talk about in our book, that the restoring of the kinship really brings about a much broader idea. And I wanted to just, you know talk about how the, you know, the mysterious creating energy that you know, we refer to in the Indigenous cultures is almost always as a great mysterious, a sort of a verb even. That this energy used the stars and the rivers and the mountains and the plants to teach us how to live in a good way.  

And I just wanted to read an excerpt from our chapter 9 and our chapter 11. Chapter 9 opens with Robin Wall Kimmerer from the Potawatomi Nation it’s entitled “All Earth Entities Are Sentient.” She says, “The taking of another life to support your own is far more significant when you recognize the beings who are harvested as persons, non-human persons, vested with awareness, intelligence, and spirit who have families waiting for them at home. Killing a who demands something different than killing an it. When you regard those non-human persons as kinfolk, another set of harvesting regulations extends beyond bag limits and legal seasons.”  

That's just a portion of her opening quote and similarly Professor LeBlanc, himself a Christian Theologian, is critical of anthropocentrism in our world, especially in our religions and he writes in chapter 11, and this is an excerpt from it. The title is “Non-Anthropocentrism”, and Terry is a Miꞌkmaq. He says, “The creation itself is groaning. This, native people would argue, characterizes the lived theology of the majority of the Evangelical Church even today as it has done through the ages. It's precisely this framework that allowed Christian missionaries to cross large bodies of water to where if they had not brought God, God would not have been present. How is it that the Christian Church could articulate this principle of the omnipresence of God and yet, call us Godless heathens, in a Godless heathen land? If I had a platform to do, so”, he says, “I would want to cry loudly that it is in the rest of creation then that we find the gifts of the spirit most consistently manifest to teach us to talk about the past and the present. We find this expression in the natural way of life, which creatures living in a more intuitive relationship with this Creator, tend to express. Why don't you ask the birds in the air? The fish that swim in the sea. The animals that walk on the land, speak to the Earth itself? Which of these do not know that the hand of the Lord has done this? My grandfather and people of this generation used to say that animals are indeed persons. They're not just people.” So, with that opening of this very difficult subject of a non-anthropocentric worldview very difficult to grasp. And when you're trying to ask an important question, like the journalist was yesterday in the press conference. So, Darcia from a developmental standpoint in your specialty in what ways can we broaden this idea of a sense of kinship with childbearing and child-raising? I mean, that would be it seems to be a starting place for us.  

Darcia: Yeah, so it's really vital these days. We aren't providing what children need really to foster their full potential which includes a sense of the living Earth. Our past in most of societies, were spent living in partnership with the natural world and treating them as persons, as you say. And what we've done is, we've undermined that early life experience. So, the brain just doesn't develop all the systems well, and we get very self-centered as a result, because we don't feel quite right. We're dysregulated on multiple levels, and I could say more about that later, but I think we have to explain what we mean then by this kinship perspective, it's the embracing of the whole, of feeling part of the cosmos. It's feeling part of the dynamism of the universe essentially and having a sense of the mystery and the movement and partnership. And we've lost that because we disconnect children, babies in particular, from early life. And they, their continuum of feeling connected is broken by leaving them alone, leaving them to cry, not touching them all the time pretty much in early life and not letting them wander in the natural world and connect. So, there's so many ways that we've pulled people away from our true nature, which is being Earth centric.  

Four Arrows: Well, so, just what when I was saying earlier about the origin stories of all the cultures that I've lived with and studied, that the original kind of wisdom was from the animals, from the trees, from the rivers, and the mountains, and the winds. Imagine if a child from the beginning, you know, that there was this kind of assumption that it's not going to be me or, you know, the other parent or the teachers or the books or the documentaries, or that's going to give you the main information. It's going to be in a fact, you learn that, you know, from six months on and I mean, in a way I did this with my daughter and horses. I mean, from the time, she was able to be in a front pack, you know, she was on horses and horses were our teachers and of course, in the wilderness we would bump into other creatures. But it has, have you ever been able to at Notre Dame, talk about how parents, do use, you know, I mean, certainly the storybooks are all cartoon animals, it seems like, so that seems like there's something there but I just want parents that are out there and that that have young children to be able to say this, even if their computers turn off in five minutes that wow this is some place that we can go.  

Darcia: Well, we do have an, we in our book, we talk about child connection to nature. Right? We have Viola Cordova's example she gives of two mothers- [Four Arrows: Oh yeah!] in terms of the nature connection specifically, she was giving an example, the two mothers, the Indigenous mother takes her baby to the, let's say a local park because that's where they live. And introduces the baby, the young child, to the trees, to the animals there, the plants and lets the child explore in the dirt. And, you know, expects the child to honor and the well-being of the other nonhumans, the other than humans. Then the other mother is Western raised, dominant culture person who takes her child to the same place and then puts down a blanket and then says, “Don't touch that, that's dirty. Don't go over there. That's dangerous,” and introduces the child to the natural world in a very distinctive way. Right? And I think that's sort of embedded in our Western kind of culture over the last hundreds of years, nature is dangerous, nature is not us. It's inferior. And all that kind of cultural assumptions that we come to the natural world with. [Four Arrow: Yeah, get out the bug spray and make sure there's no snakes around.] That's right. Ooh! [Both laughing] 

Four Arrows: Well, you know, it kind of reminds me of, you know, I've done this a lot where I'll go down into a classroom or a presentation somewhere. And, and I'll ask, I'll have pre scouted out a place where there's bushes or trees and I'll ask people to set their stuff down and go out to the hallway and turn left. And go out the doors and touch a tree and come back. And people will do this with, you know, a little bit dismay in their eyes and when they come back, they start to sit down and I stop them and I say, forgive me, but I want you to do this one more time. And I promise, it's the last time I want you to go out again and touch a bush. You can be the same one or a different one. But this time I want you to ask permission and do so sincerely and wait for some kind of an answer, oftentimes people will guffaw or laugh and with when I do it with, you know, some of the tough kids, they'll, they'll say, some more strong words, but I tell you, I've done it so many times, and when people come back, there's always a tear in someone's eyes. There's always a certain silence, a certain respect for listening to how people will talk out. And the stories that people say about getting a feeling that a tree or a bush actually said something or gave that permission and then when they touched it, they had a special feeling. And so, you know, we're it's in our DNA. So, this is the nature-based worldview that is in our epigenetics, and probably in our genetics. And I think that it's not quite as crazy as it might sound.  

Darcia: Right, then what I discovered in my work integrating across sciences is that when you under care for a child, that means you don't provide what our species evolved to provide, what we call the evolved nest. So that's soothing birth, breastfeeding for several years. A welcoming social climate of multiple adult caregivers and who are responsive, free play, social play within the natural world and the healing practices and lots of positive touch. When you don't provide that system of care, then you develop the systems get underdeveloped and the child is easily triggered into fear easily, triggered into, and then anxiety and depression over time. And there's, the Nazis knew that this was a great way to raise kids because you could control them later. They don't remember what happened in those first years of life because the way our brain is developing. You don't have the verbal knowledge, but your body remembers, and you easily go into the bracing mode, and we've established that as a way to raise children in the Western world and wherever we've been westernized. And then we can't open our hearts to the natural world, to one another, to who we are, our real selves, or we don't develop ourselves very well. We find things that make us feel safe and we can see the triggering going on in so many adults now, and in the United States, and it's very distressing because that you don't think very well when the stress response kicks in, the blood flow shifts away from your higher order thinking to your muscles. You can run or fight, you know, and physiologically then, we're setting people up not to reach their full human nature, which is a kin-centric way of being.  

Four Arrows: So, the more fear, the less, the less heart, the less trust certainly starting at young age and moving on into adulthood. With all the phobias that are listed in the DSM. We are not going to respond to a strange looking creature. Whether it be a caterpillar or a mouse, or a cockroach or a dog in a way that our first inclination is to be interested an curious and to maybe even be willing to want to learn from. Instead, it's as you said, it's this guardedness and then and that continues because, you know, during the first few years of life. We are literally you know walking hypnosis machines that I mean, that's why we can learn 10 languages in the first five years. And that that skill we will talk about later is really something that Indigenous people, understood that willful determination. It was not sufficient. To really become a fearless person to become a generous person to become skilled at different things. It required a combination of cognitive ability and this meditative or trance-based imagery. Einstein said, you know, “imagination is more powerful than knowledge” and they understood that and, and, and all without knowing the neuroscience of the phenomenon of hypnosis, which I of course taught at UC Berkeley for MFCC Licensures. We use ceremony because ceremony is essentially going into that lower brainwave frequency with an intention and an image and imagining it in ways that can heal or bring us to those places. So even though we're talking about early childhood and infancy. We still have that skill, all creatures do. I learned it from wild horses as you know, but we still have that skill and we'll come back to how these things we’re talking about aren't just at the early ages. We can begin to turn around now, but it's a lot harder.  

Darcia: Right, so ceremony for a baby is being carried in the arms of the parent and falling asleep and feeling safe and secure and that they can relax and let go of any anxiety and so when you leave a baby alone to sleep alone or crying. They don't get that feeling, right? They don't have this, totally letting go feeling which is part of that way of interacting with the natural world that is so healing. You know, when you earth, when you lie on the ground, and you feel like you just disappear into the Earth. That's the feeling we want. That's the oxytocin flowing and various other hormones that give us a sense of being okay. And a lot of kids never get that feeling because they're always worried that if they're going to be left alone now or how long will it be? And so, the, you know, it's just a lot of dysregulation and disorder and fear. And so, when they meet the ant, they stomp on the ant instead of watching and learning from that. 

Four Arrows: And then as adults we stomp on each other and we and that's what we're doing with the wars, with the, with the shootings. All of this is happening. And, you know and it's never too late to learn is sort of an adage that I believe in. And I think that if we could change the language, for example, if that journalist had asked the press secretary, you know, is the President doing anything about this terrible treatment of humans against humans? What if, what if that would have been commonplace to say, what is the President doing about helping Americans see this, the sacredness of all life? You know just as subtle as that sentence would have been, millions and millions of people saw it would start to trigger this phenomenon.  

You know, I remember when I was giving a presentation with three soil scientists about the degradation of our soil. I was on a panel with the three of them and I went last and after they were done, I got up and I showed a slide and I kind of winked at them and I said to the audience, I said, you know, I learned a lot from these three engineers, soil engineers, vital information for us all to know about loss of nutrition in the soil, etc. I said, but you know what they're telling us all that information? It's not going to sound really going to make a difference. Now, I kind of winked at them. So, they knew I was saying, so in a loving way, not in a critical way. And then I showed a slide in which I had Franklin Roosevelt, I think it was, yeah Franklin Roosevelt, Wendell Berry, and Mahatma Gandhi, three people that I respect, you know, historical figures that I respect for their concern about soil. They've all talked about it. And so, I showed the first three and Roosevelt said, “a nation that destroys its soil destroys itself.” I don't know if that sounded like Roosevelt or not, but then Gandhi said, “to forget how to dig the Earth and tender soil is to forget ourselves.” Wendell Berry, the great environmental philosopher, said “without proper care for the soil. We could have no life.”  

So, I showed that to everyone and I said, these are the kinds of things that our three soil engineers just told us. But are they going to make a difference because we're making this assumption that worldview, and we'll talk about what worldview is for our friends, that are out there, listening to us. The fundamental way that we understand our relationship to nature and to each other, and to supernature, if you will, was reflecting the dominant world view that we had to take care of the soil so we will be healthy.  

So then I read them a presentation that a portion of Chief Seattle's speech and I’ll try to see if I can remember, I won’t do it justice and I should find it, but he said something like every part of the soil is sacred to my people, even the rocks thrill, he said thrill with memories of stirring events connected to the lives of my people and I remember the last sentence and the very dust upon which we stand responds lovingly to our footsteps and I asked the audience. Can you see a difference between that one and the other three? And hands raised and people got it, you know, they got it.  

So, you know, I think if we can really promote this idea of worldview being the fundamental baseline that we have not used. Instead, we're using a baseline that really started with the colonization that has put us in so much trouble. You remember when we did the baseline work a lot when we first met? 

Darcia: No, what did we would do? [laughs] 

Four Arrows: Yeah. We talked about what would be a good baseline and we referred to the, to the Indigenous world view, you know, as a baseline. And I think that's where we're at. And I think that if we can just take a few minutes to talk about what worldview is, and then show our worldview chart. And so, I know Lyle you're ready to show it to everybody, so they can kind of get a sense of what we're talking about. What we're going to show to the folks out there is the worldview chart that we put together. It's based on a lot of research from first contact reports, you know, for example, Columbus talked about how generous the Indigenous people were, you know, and we've got those but also a lot of scholarship from the anthropologist that weren't anti-Indian and seeing through the dominant world view and called causing referring to them as, as savages, just grabbed my University of Texas book and opened up to some of the things that people have said about Indigenous people that make them reluctant to want to look at an Indigenous kinship based nature-based worldview. Keeping in mind that we're not talking about place-based knowledge, that can be misappropriated because only people that speak the language and have been in one place for a long time can know place-based knowledge. We're talking about the in common worldview that those many cultures share. And that's been put down, you know, as ignorant savages for most of our lives of our life until very recently. For example, Christie Turner from the University of Utah talked about, Man Corn: Cannibalism and Violence in the Prehistoric Southwest. So did Stephen LeBlanc. He talked about constant violence, cannibalism, and warfare among the Pueblans in his book. Here's one by Lawrence Keeley: The Civilian Massacres that prove Humanity of Humans as a Product of Civilization and Governments that Overcame the Horrors of Primitive Life. 

Darcia: I get, my blood starts to boil when I hear that because it was mistaken. 

Four Arrows: Yeah, exactly and they just go on and on. I mean you see oh uh…child abuse and other social maladies were far more pervasive in primitive societies than ours, improve the superiority of Western culture. And of course, we go on and on in the book on learning the language of conquest. And so, when we talk about worldview, we and we talk theabout binary of the dominant precepts of worldview that are scholarly, we have scholarly sources for, and the, Indigenous ones. People will say, well, wait a minute. Isn't that a dangerous binary? And it is, if you look at it through our dominant world view, you know, the George Bush, “you're either with us, or against us,” you know, the Indigenous worldview, according to the scholarship, is a non-binary worldview.  

So rightfully some of my liberal friends will say, well wait a minute, you're showing these 40 precepts, and you're saying this is better than these. Isn't that exactly, you know, the problem of our world? And we see it has been when science and religion fought their worldview battles. It was about stopping dialogue. What we're looking at is the sacred space between the continuum of where we all are. None of us are immune to the anthropocentrism or the materialism, or the things on the left side of the chart, even if in our hearts, we feel difference where, we are buying into that worldview, that column- coloniality worldview. Whereas we look at the other side. We see that as a continuum, and we look at it in that way of finding complementarity. And so, we're opening a dialogue.  

So, let's show that chart. [Darcia: He’s showing it. Yeah.] Yeah, and so if you think about when our, if we have what problems were having with our environment and our ecosystems and with wars and with each other, you know, we can, we can take in, begin to understand and talk about, well to what degree is a rigid hierarchy problematic here? Or helping or not? And in what ways can we move into a non-hierarchical? And you can just look down this list and get a sense of, now, I had somebody in the clinical psychology program I was teaching about decolonizing curriculum and right away someone said, well, Four Arrows, you know, I'm not on the left side of this and nor is our program. And I could hear some hem and hawing of her colleagues and, and you can move it down to the next 20, Lyle. And so that the folks out there can can see the second group and you know, and we, you know, we are not emphasizing rights, we’re emphasizing responsibilities and stuff like this, and I didn't say anything. I just kind of let her colleagues point out, some differences that they had of opinion. But then about an hour later. She said, oh, I see these dominant worldview manifestations describe our systems. They describe our education. Our economics, our movies, our folklore, the way we interact with each other, doesn't necessarily mean how we feel, or what we feel is, right. And I kind of wanted to say duh yeah, of course, but I think it's really important to recognize that we are all in the same boat and that space between these two opposites should be looked at for seeking complementarity and as sacred space.  

Darcia: So, I- can I clarify a few things? [Four Arrows: Yeah.] the list on the right, that common Indigenous worldview manifestations are practices that our species has employed for 6 million years or at least 2 million years since homo sapiens came into existence. This is the way we survived. We thrived, we adapted over generations. This is what helps us exist as a species. The left side is killing us. The left side of the diagram is where we've been for, especially the last few hundred years, is super charged on the left side. And it's, it's, it's detached from the Earth. It's dissociation. It's all the trauma that's been passed on generation to generation in the last millennia from slavery, from the cruel hierarchy, from neglecting children more and more over time, less and less breastfeeding, for example, less and less touching, and carrying children. All that is affecting brain development and then you end up with adults that aren't so great at taking care of their kids, and it gets worse over generations. So, the left side is an aberrant way of being on the Earth, right? It's destroying everything and the right side is our heritage.  

Four Arrows: Well, and for those people who are saying, well, it doesn't that get into a strict binary because that position is the first position that anyone would think about. And it's and it's certainly true everything that you've said, however in Indigenous worldview, people look at opposites, always as a complimentary no matter how it is a potential complementarity, no matter how opposing they are. Because they say that in some ways, some of those things that we are doing that are abhorrent that are destroying our world, that there's something in there that we can use to manifest a better way of operating in a more balanced and healthy way.  

Darcia: We can see that sometimes hierarchy is useful. So, the book that we’ve brought up in our talks before, The Dawn of Everything, by David Graeber and David Wengrow just out, an anthropologist and an archaeologist. They talk about how in our past, there's evidence that we didn't. We're not on this progressive linear kind of evolution of human societies. That's false. They're showing us evidence that there are societies that were egalitarian bands for half the year and then they got together for a few months, and they had a hierarchy and then they went back to the bands right of egalitarianism and egalitarianism is part of, we evolved with big social brain so we could be egalitarian. It's really our part of our heritage too, but this idea that we're on a progressive linear. There's nothing we can do, going back is, you know, considered oh it's just a romantic dream. No, they're people who live like this now, right? And it's so that the Western view is so rigid about its worldview that our idea for this book was to try to awaken people. To the fact that these are things that we, our species knows, you know, it's deep down in our bones. It's in our ancestors and we can bring it back. We don't have to be the way we are. We don't have to be killing off everything. We can actually come back, restore our sense of connection, restore our healing capacities. To be with one another, to be actually open and connected instead of bracing against each other. And there's a lot of things we can do to heal. We talk about a lot of those things. In the book.  

Four Arrows: Right. We can dispel the myth of progress and see that this last eight to nine thousand years has been a devolution if you will into something that we don't know what sense of complementarity, it may afford, but whatever it is, it has us in a tragedy and at the edge of an extinction.  

Darcia: Nomadic. Nomadic foragers. Don't, don't let big egos happen, right? They are fiercely egalitarian, and they keep that ego from inflating because they say it's going to be dangerous. It'll be dangerous if this successful hunter thinks he's better than the rest of us and yet we have a world full of big egos running us into the ground, right? Exterminating all of us.  

Four Arrows: Well, and the colonialization is something that we have to be aware of. That it's not just about identifying the problems. It's about what was before colonization. And that's what our worldview is all about. What was, what was lost, what was lost to us? And how can we get that, get that back? And since, you know, the destruction of life systems, water, air, is such a crucial thing. I think it's important to mention that the largest study ever done was the recent May 2019 released the United Nations biodiversity report. And it clearly said, if you go put in what the media missed the nation, you'll see an article I wrote that identifies six places in the text where they said, where Indigenous worldview is able to operate and is still remembered, the extinction rate is non-existent, are severely reduced.  

And this is, you know, 15,000 peer-reviewed papers, 450 interdisciplinary scientists and in from 50 countries, so we the evidence is there and like you refer to to Graeber's book, you know, that it wasn't, there was just naked gatherer hunters running around in ways that we would never want to go back to. They did sustainable agriculture. They just didn't do surplus. They had complex systems and government, but when we look at one of the studies, like recently came out about 13,000 years of Amazonia, and they had they had structures every bit as equal to the most sophisticated places in Europe and they, the impact of humans was significant as it the impact of ants is significant and we're supposed to have an impact and the impact was a healthy Amazon without extinction rates without extinctions, right? And so, and this is, you know, this is going on today. I had the honor of being at a meeting where some California's state senators and people were talking about the water crisis, a couple of years ago. And one of the speakers on the panel was the chairman of the Chumash. I think Kenneth Khan was his name, and turns out that per capita, the amount of water they saved compared to every other county in California was like three or four hundred percent per capita better from the techniques they used.  

And so, I got up in line really right away after their presentations, to ask a question and I didn't know how it was going to turn out because Ken was in a suit and tie, and I didn't know if he was, you know, one of the many that have lost the traditional ways or not. So, I asked the question, I said, I said Mr. Kahn, can you tell me if the Chumash spiritual traditions and the original worldview had anything to do with your success? And I didn't know what he was going to say, and I'll tell you what he said. I've got it here in writing. He said, and he said it with enthusiasm. He said, “absolutely, that's the driver, traditional water is provided to us by Mother Earth, and whatever we take, we give back with tobacco or a prayer. It is the driving factor in how water is used. We are small, we can put restrictions in place and can sustain a degree of sacrifice, but no doubt. It was our worldview. That was the driver. And this respect is about balance and our relationship to all things,” you know, this is two years ago, right. [Darcia: Beautiful]. Yeah.  

Darcia: That's great. Yeah, so we're all about getting back in balance with the Earth. I think people talk about that, but they don't necessarily talk about the importance of the heart mind the heart mindedness that sense of being one with the tree, with the the wolf, with the clouds that we’re all entangled together. Our biology, our DNA, our, you know, our stardust. We are stardust and we are all entangled together, physicists are telling this to us now our DNA, our viruses are going in and out of our bodies all the time. They make us stronger, typically, and, and so, we have to remember where we are. We're Earth creatures. We are here to help the other than humans flourish and that's what Indigenous peoples have done with their place-based knowledge, which is not again, not what we're talking about. We're talking about that more delocalized way of understanding how to be a human, how to be connected to nature, how to be connected with the cosmos. But we, one of our colleagues, calls the existence scape right, of how to to exist as a human being in community with the in partnership with the Earth.  

So, again, we're trying to get people, you know, jiggle their understanding of things to start to move towards developing that heart mindedness, our child-raising cuts that off, right? If you leave babies in distress, young children in distress, you spank them for example, or let them cry. They start to have to cut out their feelings because they're not respected and they have to, you know, “stuff them down” as my husband says and then you, what are you left with? You’re left with that, the instinct of survival systems, you know, not feeling safe.  

And so, you're always bracing, bracing, bracing or you and you go to school and then you're taught to reason and not be connected. Don't think about the birds outside the window, you know, don't think about what you really feel. Just learn this information, take a test. So, we really have to decolonize education as well, right? And bring this kinship view into how we are. The native way the Indigenous way of learning is about self-transformation. You're trying to build your virtue, build your community connection, build your gifts. Your unique gift, right? Each child has one for the community.  

Four Arrows: So, I'm going to ask you the tough question that was asked of me, not long ago. Do you think this transformation through education, and through community engagement and all of the different ways media maybe and movies and documentaries. Can we turn things around?  

Darcia: That's really a difficult one. I think each person can turn themselves around and then have a ripple effect on others. So, it, for when I've taught undergraduates, I tell them to and help them learn to self-calm, because your energy is, you know, going out in the world and if you're anxious or afraid or angry, you know, it's going to have ill effects on others. So, you want to learn to be calm and open-hearted and generous and kind, all the good virtues that we talk about and then you need to build that social connection. We played folk song games with one another because you have to be in the moment and that's growing your right hemisphere, which is normally developed very rapidly in early life, but with under care. It doesn't develop properly. And so, you're not as empathic, you're not as self-regulated. You're not as aware of transcendence. And so all this, you have things to do as an individual, as families, as communities, and we can build it out from there, but always in a sense of being connected, to the place where you are. To love this tree and this river and care for this land here and not, you know, kill the spider you see, say hello to the spider. Welcome the insects, you know, so it's a different way of being but be here now, right? Its presence, be present.  

Four Arrows: So, you're saying individuals, we can do it. We’ve both seen that in your work [Darcia: Yes] and in my CAT-FAWN work, where people look at, well, what is fear? How is Indigenous ways of thinking are… [Darcia: Why don't you talk about that now because our time is going, yeah?] Well, I had a near-death experience. Trying to kayak down the [indecipherable] river and we had a mountain lion and a fawn that came into our, my partner and I’s experience and had a vision of the cat and fawn that turned into letters. So, it means Concentration, Activated Transformation is CAT, which is essentially the phenomenon that we talked about earlier this self-hypnosis is believing in an image and meditation. This, here… [Darcia: We go into it easily. Right? It's just kind of a natural thing we do.]  

Exactly and we talk about that in the book and then we took four of the precepts: Fear, Authority, Words, and Nature and show how different our dominant worldview regards fear. And is afraid of fear, and how Indigeneity uses fear as a catalyst to practice a virtue once the fight or flight mechanism is gone. And that authority in the dominant worldview is generally exterior, you know, the Father, the Pope, the teacher, etc. Whereas lived experience honest reflection on it under the umbrella of everything being connected. It is the only the highest source of authority. People think that we're a collectivist Indigenous people but really, there's we're fierce autonomy independent, but really our independence is in behalf of the group.  

Words. Now, we know we're in a post truth world. The dominant worldview it uses language deceptively. You know, Kipling said, it's our most potent drug, words are our most potent drug. Tom Cooper's book A Time Before Deception shows that words are sacred vibrations and our verb based languages. So, what you do is you look and say, well, okay, the problems that I'm facing, what, what are the fears and how can I use the virtues to practice a few? What is the authority on this? And should that be the authority? Is it really true? What words am my using? And are they accurate? And then the fourth one is N, FAWN, nature, have I used some nature whether I'm in New York City and it's a weed growing out of the concrete or whether I'm looking at a squirrel in a tree. What can I learn from the other than human? So, CAT-FAWN is a very powerful technique that we talk about as a way to do this transformation.  

You know, I personally on whether we can turn things around before they get too bad. For me the definition of hope is not about an outcome. I don't think there's a really good chance we're going to turn things around frankly, in at least in my lifetime [Darcia: For the species, you mean for our species?] Well, I think there's going to be, so I said that to someone up at University of British Columbia. And the next question was, they asked me if the worldview we can do this turn around. Like I asked you. And the next question was, why are you here? You know, and, and I said, look, I want to be a human being, you know, and I wrote a little monograph on Sitting Bull's words for the world in crisis and Sitting Bull, you know, he didn't have hope all buffalo were gone. Smallpox was wiping people out worse than the pandemic we have now, you know, it was, it was bad, but he never stops singing. He never stopped creating songs or dancing or helping people, or being generous or resisting or doing his. It was like, he's going to be a human being because he believed that we are, we have these bodies that we have chosen and that are spirits that are inhabiting them, that will continue on in some way in some way that is too mysterious for us to be able to identify, right? But someone's going to have to rebuild and and so that's that's why we, I wrote the book, you know, so that people that are going to rebuild won't be using one of these post-apocalyptic movies, as an example with the white guys with machine guns and and bullets on their chest or dragging a koman by the hair, right? That they'll actually be looking at the kinship the kinship worldview as a way to do it.  

Darcia: That's right. So, what world are we in? According to the Hopi, the fourth or fifth world, we've wrecked. [Four Arrows: Yeah.] And so yeah, it looks like we're doing it again and we have to start over. We're not going anywhere, right? We're all stardust. We're part of the universe and we just, you know, when we die, if we die, normally we just become part of other animals and plants and the soil. Yeah. 

Four Arrows: Right. So, if we just remember that relationships, responsibility, reciprocity, redistribution, instead of, I think you said in an interview, not long ago, instead of the power and profit can guide us then, you know, certainly the Misak turned it around. I know they already, they were closer to it, but they lost it completely, you know, the Misak of Southern Colombia at complete cultural territorial linguistic loss and lot of violence and suffering and alcoholism. So, you know, led by women elders, they regrouped and restored their place-based knowledge and the worldview that that represents and today only a generation later, maybe 35 years later all of them speak their language, their mother tongue. They know the ceremonies, they regained land wisdom. They're healthy, happy, strong, 9 out of 10 of those who leave come back. And so maybe that's more hopeful than my definition of hope which is not about an outcome but about what you're doing is the right thing to do regardless of the outcome. And so, you know, maybe what they lost is what we have all lost and we can bring it back.  

Darcia: So, we need to close up, I think. We're very grateful for this opportunity. CIIS is really a marvelous place. We're just thrilled to be aligned with its work and we're happy that we had people interested in our book and hope that it inspires everyone to actually have some hope of the active kind to change your behavior to change your mindset and adopt the kinship and act as a kin member, kin centric world. 

Four Arrows: Yes, if people would look at the chart and say, what if, what if we all did this? What would be different? It’d be the way. So, I would just like to close my portion with a Lakota prayer that I would not be able to put into English, but it talks about all the things that we have done in terms of our giving gratitude for the interconnectedness and hope for the balance that we all deserve to have. [Lakota prayer] Thank you, everybody.  

Darcia: Thank you. 

[Uplifting theme music begins] 

Thank you for listening to the CIIS Public Programs Podcast. Our talks and conversations are presented live in San Francisco, California. We recognize that our university’s building in San Francisco occupies traditional, unceded Ramaytush Ohlone lands. If you are interested in learning more about native lands, languages, and territories, the website native-land.ca is a helpful resource for you to learn about and acknowledge the Indigenous land where you live. 
 
Podcast production is supervised by Kirstin Van Cleef at CIIS Public Programs. Audio production is supervised by Lyle Barrere at Desired Effect. The CIIS Public Programs team includes Kyle DeMedio, Alex Elliott, Emlyn Guiney, Jason McArthur, and Patty Pforte. If you liked what you heard, please subscribe wherever you find podcasts, visit our website ciis.edu, and connect with us on social media @ciispubprograms. 
 
CIIS Public Programs commits to use our in-person and online platforms to uplift the stories and teachings of Black, Indigenous, and other people of color; those in the LGBTQIA+ community; and all those whose lives emerge from the intersections of multiple identities.  

[Theme music concludes]