Healing The Land IS Healing Ourselves

All My Relations Podcast

Matika Wilbur & Temryss Lane

Native, Documentary, Pop Culture, Society & Culture, Relationships, Indigenous, Native American, Society, Contemporary Native American Culture

5 • 3K Ratings

🗓️ 27 May 2020

⏱️ 73 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Join us for a discussion with community organizer, citizen scientist, activist, water protector, entrepreneur, writer, gardener, and all around incredible Diné woman, Kim Smith. We talk with Kim about her work, aiming to understand how violence on the land is violence on our bodies, and that the inverse can also be true—healing the land is healing ourselves. Kim tells us about her 1200+ mile journey with Nihígaal Bee Lina (Journey For Existence) which walked to all of the sacred mountains of her people. She also discusses her work healing land in her home town of St. Michaels, Arizona and her long-term citizen science project to collect data from Navajo people about the impact of extractive energy plants in their homelands, and so much more.

Kim is a beautiful example of what happens when you take matters into your own hands—taking things step by step, learning from other Indigenous communities, and implementing projects in a community-grounded way that takes into account all our human and non-human relations. We are so honored she drove across the southwest to talk with us, and know you’ll love her stories as well. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⁣

⁣This work is supported by The Wisteria Fund and our incredible Patreon subscribers. ⁣⠀⠀⠀⠀⁣

⁣+⁣

⁣Special Thanks to Max Levin, and Kyle for our new music, Ciara Sana for her amazing episode art, and Teo Elisio, for doing all the things.

Support the show

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hi, I'm Matika Wilber, and I'm Adrienne Keane, and you're listening to all my relations.
0:05.8	Welcome back. We're so honored to be with you today.
0:08.8	On today's episode, we're exploring the connections between land and body, through a conversation
0:15.1	with the amazing community organizer, writer, farmer, curator, citizen scientist, and
0:21.3	denate woman, Kim Smith. We learned so much from our conversation with her, and a lot of
0:27.2	what I was left thinking about after listening to this episode, is the need to take matters
0:32.1	into our own hands as indigenous people. How do we heal the land and ourselves when there
0:38.1	isn't anyone else who will do it? How do we start the conversations, collect the stories
0:43.2	and the data, and make the needed change ourselves? How can we draw upon our community strengths
0:49.7	and relationships to make that happen?
0:52.3	And there's never been a better time to ask that question, and to dive into action
0:57.8	than right now. Kim Smith is from the Navajo Nation, and as we all know, Navajo Nation
1:04.6	is being hit really hard by this pandemic. The Navajo Nation is home to 175,000 people,
1:13.2	all of whom who are grossly endangered by the staggering spread of COVID-19 across their
1:19.4	homeland. Currently, Navajo has more cases of COVID-19 than eight U.S. states, and in
1:27.8	the episode that we did on COVID-19, a couple of episodes ago, in the end of the episode,
1:32.6	Dallas and I started to get into this idea of how our relationship to the way that we've
1:37.7	treated land with the extractive industries, deforestation, climate change, etc. and how
1:44.5	COVID-19 is just one of the many consequences of mismanagement.
1:50.0	While for the Navajo Nation, the promise to help from the U.S. has been slow to arrive,
1:54.6	community has stepped up in its place. In the last few months, networks of mutual aid,
1:59.2	systems of food distribution, and outside donations have appeared, and continue to grow as the
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Matika Wilbur & Temryss Lane, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Matika Wilbur & Temryss Lane and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.