Hi, I'm Matika Wilber, and I'm Adrienne Keane, and you're listening to all my relations.

Welcome back. We're so honored to be with you today.

On today's episode, we're exploring the connections between land and body, through a conversation

with the amazing community organizer, writer, farmer, curator, citizen scientist, and

denate woman, Kim Smith. We learned so much from our conversation with her, and a lot of

what I was left thinking about after listening to this episode, is the need to take matters

into our own hands as indigenous people. How do we heal the land and ourselves when there

isn't anyone else who will do it? How do we start the conversations, collect the stories

and the data, and make the needed change ourselves? How can we draw upon our community strengths

and relationships to make that happen?

And there's never been a better time to ask that question, and to dive into action

than right now. Kim Smith is from the Navajo Nation, and as we all know, Navajo Nation

is being hit really hard by this pandemic. The Navajo Nation is home to 175,000 people,

all of whom who are grossly endangered by the staggering spread of COVID-19 across their

homeland. Currently, Navajo has more cases of COVID-19 than eight U.S. states, and in

the episode that we did on COVID-19, a couple of episodes ago, in the end of the episode,

Dallas and I started to get into this idea of how our relationship to the way that we've

treated land with the extractive industries, deforestation, climate change, etc. and how

COVID-19 is just one of the many consequences of mismanagement.

While for the Navajo Nation, the promise to help from the U.S. has been slow to arrive,

community has stepped up in its place. In the last few months, networks of mutual aid,

systems of food distribution, and outside donations have appeared, and continue to grow as the

...