Never forget that anywhere you go that is not your home. It's someone's home

And you must pay them respect and build relationships with the land and the people to be welcome into their home

Otherwise, you're walking into their home as an unwelcome guest

You're listening to shortwave from NPR

Jessica Hernandez is a Zapotec and Maya Chorthy environmental scientist and when you ask her about her personal story

Who she is and how she came to write her new book she begins with her father Victor and the Civil War that shaped him

It started in 1979 in El Salvador and devastated his community

One of the things that I wanted to do was like write a book that

Interquated my father's story, especially the perspective of an indigenous child who you know

I 11 like while he saw himself as an adult. He was still a child that had to go through this gruesome reality, right?

Her father's experience as a child soldier is one of the many stories that powers Jessica's new book

Called fresh banana leaves healing indigenous landscapes through indigenous science

It takes a critical look at Western conservation and talks about

Incorporating indigenous knowledge into her field of study environmental science

Knowledge passed down through the generations through folks like her father

One of the things that he always told me was that nature protects us as long as we protect nature

It was a lesson that he put into action even in war during that time when he was in war

There was his banana tree where he will climb up and get bananas for the rest of his comrades now banana trees are

Originally from Asia introduced by the Spanish in the 1500s

But for Jessica's father this tree wasn't invasive

It was a place of refuge when a bomb dropped on top of the banana tree instead of the bomb igniting the leaves kind of wrapped it in the way that

Prevented it from igniting as a result of that right it kind of shows how the banana leaves

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