Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast.

I'm Emmanuel 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.

Long before colonists came to America, armed with Western ideas of progress and industry,

indigenous scientists were nurturing and collaborating with the land. Embedded in this relationship that brings technological ingenuity into conversation

with the sentience of the living world is an understanding of the primordial reciprocity

between our species and the earth.

As unsustainable industrial practices, GMOs, monoculture, the use of heavy machinery,

continue to dominate the modern agricultural sphere, stripping our plants and animals of personhood and power,

how can we return to a relationship in which humans and land take care of each other?

To mark Thanksgiving this year, we are resharing one of our favorite stories.

Corn tastes better on the honor system by Potawatomi mother, scientist,

professor, and acclaimed writer, Robin Wall Kimimer. Taking us through the 9,000-year

existence of maze, she reflects on the ancient circle of reciprocity that links humans and corn,

and considers what has been severed in this once deeply sacred relationship. As we come together

this holiday in gratitude for food, family, and tradition, Robin invites us to reconnect with the teachings and kinships held within plants that are waiting to be remembered.

I remember how their songs drew us up through the warming earth just for the joy of hearing

them, how we stretched in the sun and turned air into sugar, my sisters and I, leaves and roots

entwined. It's lonely without them.

Grandfather Tio Sinti has been gone for so long.

...