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.

In this essay, Jamie Figueroa, the author of the novel, Brother, Sister, Mother, Explorer,

encounters a lineage of indigenous story makers

and summons imagination, sovereignty, and courage

as she turns her attention to the narratives that will restory ourselves

and rebirth the world.

We don't heal by forgetting, we heal by remembering.

Leslie Marmon Silco We'd been warned.

Still, we stood in front of the tap as if betrayed.

We'd run out of water again.

No matter which faucet we turned,

bathroom sink or kitchen sink, not a single drop.

Before we'd downsized from our four-bedroom rental into this one-room casita, we were told that the

water from the well came and went. It was old and shallow as far as wells go. We could manage

it, we'd convinced ourselves, with camping supplies and access to a hose that consistently

delivered city water to the property,

from which we could haul in three and five gallon jugs that we'd heat on the stove and use to wash dishes,

bathe, and if needed, flush the toilet.

At the time, it had seemed a small sacrifice for relief from monthly expenses

...