Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast. I'm Emanuel Vaughn Lee, executive editor of Emergence

Magazine, located on the unseated ancestral lands of the Coast Mewalk people of present-day

Marin County. Each week we feature a new interview, narrated essay, or story, exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

Storytelling is, in many ways, the passing of a torch, connecting knowledge across generations.

Stories can bring us face to face with who we truly are, helping us find ourselves over and over

within the great web of life, reminding us of our ancestry and hinting at possible futures.

They reach across time to place seeds of truth in our palms.

In this week's podcast, tribal chairman of the Federated Indians of Great Rancheria, an award-winning author, Greg Seris, invites us to step into such a story.

In a woman meets an owl, a rattlesnake, and a hummingbird,

Greg turns to his ancestral homeland of Sonoma Mountain in northern California and introduces

us to the Crow Sisters and a world in which a moving strawberry marks the beginning

of a confounding journey to the ancient village of Kobichai.

In a landscape of sacred ponds and bard-like animals, we are called to remember

the mystery of creation in which all stories and all life are deeply connected.

Here they are, coyote's twin daughters, answer woman and question woman, sitting on a fence

rail high atop Sonoma Mountain telling stories. Some people say they are a pair of crows. Others

claim they are two identical-looking women with long dark hair.

In any event, they have been on the mountain a long time.

They are coyote's daughters, after all.

The Coast Mewa people tell us that coyote created the world and the first humans on top of Sonoma Mountain.

They know that the mountain is a sacred place, and that if you hear the twin

sisters telling stories, you should listen. This is their predicament. Answer Woman knows all the

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