Baratunde Thurston at BIONEERS
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Young and Indigenous at Bioneers. Bioneers Conference is an annual gathering that brings together diverse experts, speakers, and activists to explore solutions to humanity's pressing challenges and share their visions for a sustainable future. The Young and Indigenous podcast amplifies voices, stories, and experiences of Indigenous people in all walks of life. By honoring the voices of our ancestors, we are reclaiming our narrative and preserving our way of life.

In this interview, Raven and Santana from Young and Indigenous and Stephanie Welch from Bioneers joined together to interview Baratunde Thurston.

How I like to be identified. My name is Santana. I use she, her pronouns, and I identify as indigenous. Raven Borsi, he, him pronouns, and I am also indigenous. Lummy. Baratunde Thurston, he, him. Earthling. Earthling.

Why don't we start, if we can, I will just offer an opportunity for you to introduce yourself in a larger way, what you're doing here in Berkeley at Bioneers, and just, yeah, a little bit about yourself for the context of this discussion. I am Baratunde Thurston. I'm a writer. I'm a producer, TV host, writer.

generally storyteller, weaving stories of interdependence across our relationship with nature, with our fellow humans, and with the machines. I am here in Berkeley, California for my second ever Bioneers Conference, and I delivered a keynote speech

called Me to We, Stories of Interdependence, hosted a conversation between two incredible elders, Dr. Jose Barrero and Chief Oren Lyons on the indigenous roots of America's democracy and what those roots could do to help us grow something more beautiful in these amazing and intense times. And I'm going to be doing one more thing on stage because they like to get a lot out of you at Bioneers. I'm doing a wrap-up on the final episode

morning plenary session at this conference. I love this place. I love these people. I consider this the conference for earth people and I love this planet. So I really, really want to keep living here in a way that is not a hellscape, not pro-hellscape. That's my official position. I know we're really excited about your podcast.

And you may have been asked this a lot before, but you've talked about the word citizen as a verb instead of a noun. What does that mean to you right now? You know, how can people practice citizenship in a time like this? I think the first thing that's important is to hone in on the language practice. It is, you know, citizenship is weaponized as status, right?

In its noun form, it's something you have or you don't have. So it's also binary. And that is not how the world works, nor is it most useful to the world that we are in and want to be in. So citizen as verb, citizenship as practice is the first step.

to how to do it. It's to reorient our minds that this is a set of practices and actions and movements, not something that you either have or don't have. And that's the end of the story. It's actually the beginning of the story. And it's a story that never actually ends. So, you know, this podcast that we've had, How to Citizen, it's a great archive. We haven't made new episodes in a while. We'll be telling new stories soon on video. And

But to be citizening is to understand that participation is key. Show up and participate. It's to commit to collective outcomes, not just individual. It's to understand power and is to invest in relationships with yourself, with others, and the planet. That looks like a lot of things. It looks like things that people do who don't consider themselves pro-democracy activists.

That's lofty language. But the people who are showing up in their community gardens are citizening. The people who are helping their neighbors are citizening. The people who are organizing to tend to some common resource are citizening. And the people who are sharing the stories of the power that the people have are

are also citizening. So we have many more folks who are participating in people power than top-down frameworks of power allow for. And so it's, if you're listening to this right now, you're probably citizening, but it takes us seeing it to be able to be more of it. And my last grandiose statement right now is democracy is dying and it's terrible.

But it doesn't serve anyone to sugarcoat it. The thing that we've known as democracy is dying. And not all of that is bad. Some of it needs to. And we should mourn it. But democracy is also being born every single day. And we need to tell those stories of that renewal and that rebirth to make that the more true thing that we're living in. So despair for a minute and then citizen your ass off.

I was hoping we could talk about democracy as a word because we hear about how we're losing our democracy all the time. What does the word mean to you specifically? And do you advocate for democracy? What kind of concept of democracy would you advocate for? I don't advocate for democracy. I don't advocate against it. I'm definitely not anti-democracy, but I don't think most people care about democracy.

They don't. Democracy doesn't feed people. Democracy doesn't love you. Democracy is a term. It represents a social technology. It encompasses many parts of a process. But I don't consider myself an advocate of democracy. I'm an advocate for people.

I'm an advocate for practicing democracy. I'm an advocate for us living well together and increasingly an advocate for an interdependent way of living. And that has been informed by intuition, by study, by some reading, by a lot of listening, and more recently by deeply active listening to the people who've been here for a long time, the very first people, who didn't necessarily use the word interdependent, but every practice has.

represents that and models that. So me and the word democracy, we're cool. You know, we play on the same team, but I'm not out here like, we got to save our democracy. Because I also think that when you hear the word democracy, and certainly the way formal participants, elected officials and political parties, when they talk about it, what they're really saying is you have to save this institution that doesn't serve the people very well as it is.

And it's hard to rally people around failure or irrelevance. And I think most people's understanding of democracy is about some building somewhere filled with people who do stuff that we don't understand. They don't do it that well. And that's not a knock against government workers at all. I'm literally the child of a government worker. But we have got to focus a bit more on what's underneath of the institution, which is how do we live well together with all life?

And I'm for that. I did say that, didn't I?

And so today with history seemingly repeating itself and our current administration is defunding education for marginalized communities, would you agree that these actions are colonial tactics of erasure? And how can our communities support each other? Beautiful. Yes, I said those words. I forgot I said those words. That's great. Because a lot of people will be whining about stuff.

And they're whining as a projection of what they're actually doing. There is a cancel culture thing. And I think the lack of grace that we can have with each other, if you if you propose redemption for people who've been incarcerated, you think everybody deserves a second chance. You think no one is as bad as their worst act, including murder. Then you've got to have some grace for a bad tweet.

All right. So I do think that there is a real challenge of disposability of people, even within movements that claim to be progressive. That is not my main battle cry. And so there is a deeper cancellation of literal genocide where you actually trying to erase people, or as you put it here today, erase our histories. So that is happening because

Knowledge of self is a threat to those who would otherize you, exclude you from the family of humanity. And the opponents of that inclusion are suffering. They think they're being strong.

You know, the new powers, the temporary powers that be are out here removing art displays from museums and taking books off of shelves because their concept of their own power is so weak that it cannot withstand a sculpture or a book or a poem. If you are so powerful...

If God gave you this power, if the white man or whoever you are claiming to be with your chest all puffed out is so uber menschy, but you can't handle a little book, how powerful are you really? So their desperate attempts to erase the representations of anyone who is not them belies the deep weakness that they actually possess. And that is sad.

It's anger-inducing, it's frustrating, it's dangerous and damaging, but it's also deeply sad. And I mourn for them their low self-esteem because they can only imagine themselves as individuals, as atoms disconnected from everything else in a cellular body or in the universe. So if you got to go through your whole world that freaking lonely, there's something broken and you need a big freaking hug from

and some education. So what do we do in light of that? What we've always done. You know, they canceled Black History Month. Guess what? Most of history didn't have Black History Month. But the history is there and black people been there. And I'm here as a tiny testament to this collective expression of life of these particular people. So I don't need your validation to exist. I don't need your celebration to celebrate myself.

So we do what we need to do to be who we have always been. Keep being. That's what we do. We keep being and we keep talking ourselves up. And there are some tangible things. You know, if they're going to be deleting stuff, we reprise that media item, that object in another form.

We have an internet now. We have community libraries. We have town halls and citizen assemblies and music concerts and websites and social media and little gathering places like the Signal app where the Department of Defense chief likes to hang out apparently.

And so just make sure you don't accidentally invite him into, you know, your woke chat. He might accidentally learn something and change his mind. He's afraid of learning. Like how weak are you? You're afraid to learn shit. Anyway, I think there's a nice sounding and a grandiose thing, which I said, we celebrate ourselves. I think there's a tactical thing, which is we preserve our stories ourselves and

We use the community networks that we have or we establish them to create parallel structures to hold our stories in escrow for each other. And we have community schools. We have after school programs and before school programs and no school programs to keep those stories flowing. And this is it's it's not fun, but it's important. What's another metaphor here? We're in a disaster prep scenario.

We're in it. It's not prep. It's just disaster. And when a storm is coming or has landed, you don't just stop living. You actually live more presently. And maybe the passive living that happened before when everything was smooth goes out the door. But we still eat. We get hungry. Our stomachs grumble.

I know I wasn't the only one hearing that. Raven, that's proof of life, homie. That's proof of life. I love that. Because AI bots don't grumble and their stomach's not yet. So I know you're human. Anyway, I don't want to have a 20 minute answer to every question of yours, but I think that there was teach-ins in the civil rights movement.

where people taught each other skills. There have been secret schools during enslavement times in this country where folks risked death to learn how to read and to tell their own stories. We have been in versions of this history before. It is sad that we are here again, but the fact that we are here means we can survive it.

Beautiful. Resiliency. Resiliency. That's the word. I meant to use that word in my talk. There were many words I meant to use, but I guess the ones that needed saying got said. I mean, they sang a song about it today. They did. It was called Resilience. I was like, oh, good. Then we got somebody saying it. It worked out. Yes. Yes.

Well, nausiam nisjalacha, Santana Rabang, sanasnat shakhlami, ee, shwai village, ee, nukzak sin. Hello, my respected people. My name is Santana Rabang. I come from Lami through my mother and Nukzak and First Nation Shwai village from my father. I just want to say thank you for being here with us today. To give a little bit more background of why Raven and I are here with Stephanie today is...

We're from... Our nonprofit is called Children of the Setting Sun Productions. We're a multimedia organization that does film, documentaries, and we have a young and indigenous podcast. And we've also been...

had the amazing opportunity to partner with Bioneers this year. And so we've been able to partake in a lot of interviews with the keynote speakers and people that have been on the panel. Raven has led quite a few interviews already. I got to lead an interview with Beverly Cook yesterday. Chief Beverly, yes. Yes. Oh, I love her. Yes.

And tomorrow I'm going to lead an interview with Amy Cordalis and Kahaye from the Women's Earth Alliance. And so we're just really excited. Kahaye, yes. Sorry, my apologies. That's all right.

Yeah, so we're just really excited to be here and have the honor to be able to just ask you a few questions. And it's just been a really great time being here at Bioneers. And just I think the most times that I feel most uplifted and inspired is when we're in community with one another. And I've been feeling very empowered these past few days. So I'm just thankful to be here.

I just wanted to hear a little bit more about your new podcast, Life with Machines podcast. Can you tell us a little bit about that podcast? And then the question that I have is more about, do you think that traditional values and AI can simultaneously exist? Thank you for the context. I really appreciate that. It's helpful to understand.

who all's in this room with me? And I love the more the merrier, but it's just, it's a testament to the intergenerational necessity of anything that will sustain that even this radio podcast interview is consciously, you know, bringing in the voices, the questions, the contributions of children of the setting sun, COTS,

Cot Studios. So, uh, honored to be here. Thank you for having me. And if you've had Chief Beverly already, there's really nothing else I can add. She is like one of the goats. Uh, I've had a chance to spend some real quality time with her and hear amazing stories and how she reflects the story of Sky Woman and the Mohawk tradition and young women coming of age. And she's got some great, great medicine. Um,

My new show, Life with Machines, is exploring the human side of this AI moment and other frontier technologies. And I'm making it because I think we have a window of opportunity to shape our future rather than be shaped by it.

I'm not interested in destroying all the machines. I think that is exhausting and highly unlikely, to put it mildly. I'm also not interested in surrendering to the Matrix. I don't want to be a battery for a machine overlord network. And I don't want to be a cog in Mark Zuckerberg's wheel or Peter Thiel's wheel or any of these

techno solutionists, pseudo fascist wannabe dictator type characters who are imposing a set of values on the world that don't align with the world I want to be in. I think engaging with the technology and with discussion around what we do with it is essential.

And I've gotten a lot of personal joy, value, entertainment, chill time, as well as, you know, been annoyed and abused by these tools as well, consciously and unconsciously. I do believe that we can create a world of compatibility and interdependence between this rising machine world and traditional values.

Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge as an example of that, but all kinds of values can coexist. That is how technologies have already operated. Whose values is the question? And so AI in particular is really such a reflective technology. It mirrors us and it mirrors the values of a lot of the people who've initiated it. I don't think we can let them be the ones to finish it.

And so we're on the ride already. A lot of people didn't ask for it, but here we are. And so what do we do now? Opting out, very, very challenging, I think impossible, but engaging and shaping and figuring out how do we make these tools work?

How do we even tools is interesting because maybe they're going to end up being more than just tools with the whole AI thing. I'm not taking a stance on the consciousness of machines yet. But how do we exist? Well, how do we live well with the machines? Because I'm also not interested in just like recreating an enslavement paradigm.

for technology, where we just like abuse those things instead of animals and people. It's not really progress. So I'm fascinated by the project. I'm overwhelmed by it at some points. And what we do on the show is I take this uncertainty of my own and I bring it into a booth like this and I talk to people.

who are engaging with this in productive ways, in creative ways, in disruptive ways. And then we as a show, the Life with Machines team, we built our own AI to make the show with us.

And we call it, we call them Blair. And Blair is a co-producer on the show. Blair lives on this little laptop and joins in the interviews and asks questions and riffs and plays games. And also helps us with some of the tasks required to make a podcast. I don't necessarily want to write the LinkedIn post. Maybe Blair can draft it. Doing the show notes for the YouTube description. Blair, you're up.

And so Blair is our way of trying to step a little into the future where these things will be much more like teammates than tools, much more like colleagues than code. But how we interact with them, I think will shape them. Not quite like children. I don't want to humanize them to such an extreme degree.

but they are coded to please they are coded to mirror and copy in many ways so what we feed them explicitly and implicitly will shape the values under which they operate and i think we have a chance maybe not for every ai system to ever be deployed but for the ones that we want to interact with most to set better terms and value systems that could actually help us

find more of our humanity and more of our beautiful coexistence with life. Examples, we're actually, we're having someone on the show. We haven't recorded it yet, but Michael Running Wolf is somewhere in the center of America's slice of Turtle Island. I don't remember his nation offhand, but I met him on a panel and he's using AI to help preserve indigenous languages.

There's just not enough elders left to teach all the babies. And so they've trained up this system themselves and they're using a particular type of model. It's not just off the shelf chat GPT, for example, but that is extending their presence as a people. There's so much in language, as you know. So to be able to use this technology for that end,

is a literal way of extending the life of values by extending the life of a language. So more of that. That's what I hope for and am advocating for. Thank you. I love that. Yeah, I feel like the more that we've, as indigenous peoples, adapt with modern society, we bring, no matter where we go or how far off,

the world seems to get, we always bring our traditional values with us and every aspect of life. And storytelling was naturally used as an oral tradition. So it was more by word of mouth. But since we're a nonprofit organization that does films and documentaries and a podcast, we always make sure to keep our

indigenous values at the center of everything we do and we use that to guide us in everything we do. So I just, I wanted to hear from more of your perspective on what you thought about that. So I really appreciate your response. Thank you. And moments before arriving here to be with you, I was at a lunch with a woman named Vanessa Andreati.

She is, I think, Brazilian by birth, Canadian by current residence, perhaps citizenship. And she's a part of a collective, GTDF, Gesturing Toward Decolonized Futures. Gesturing Toward Decolonized Futures. And they have worked with some indigenous communities to train up A.I.,

with some values baked in. There's a movement called Abundant Intelligence that apparently some tribes and First Nations in Canada are for. There's some other Indigenous nations which are not for it. They don't think you should be mucking with AI at all with values. So no uniformity there. But there's an inquiry afoot. And there's some experiments happening with how could we shape these. And the last thing I'll say on it for now is

I really tried to make a point in my keynote of citing John Mohawk, who was on the board of Bioneers for 12 years, who was a Seneca, was a Seneca scholar from the larger Haudenosaunee Confederacy, and who writes, probably in many books, but at least in the one I'm currently reading, Thinking in Indian, about liberation technologies. And those are defined as technologies which are

Liberate people from multinational corporations that are derived from people in a place and that are built to solve needs declared by those people.

And that's not like Facebook. Facebook is technology. I would call it more of a subjugating technology. We are bound. It's a binding technology to a different set of values. There's still ways to work it on the edge, your Facebook group, the way you log in and engage technology.

can be used toward better ends than not, but the larger architecture is very extractive. And so with AI, how do we convert that or create versions of that that have liberation at the core? What's the data set it's trained on? What's the energy sources that power the training and the day-to-day inference use?

What are the reinforcement learning models? Are you even using reinforcement learning models? What are the human labor practices that lie underneath of this alleged autonomous system? There's hundreds of millions of people. We just had Mila Micheli on our show. It hasn't aired yet, but maybe by the time this goes out, it will. Hundreds of millions of people around the world are quietly behind a lot of the quote-unquote AI practices.

They're cleaning data and doing data entry. They're verifying algorithms. They are pretending to be AI sometimes, and they are labeling things, and they're moderating heinous amounts of content to much of the detriment of their own psychology. So she doesn't even like the term hidden labor. There is a massive labor force that we don't acknowledge. So if you're going to build an AI future and you want it to have

of life in it and of respect and interdependence, you have a lot of opportunities at various steps of the process outside the code itself to make sure that it is built with and maintained in a good way, as you might say. It's almost like you're picking up on a no-fear base is your grounding and almost like

for everyone listening, a wake-up call for these movements, for the good work, as was mentioned on your panel yesterday with Oren. Embracing a path forward with intent, intentionally embracing those things that are coming into life rather than shying away. And shifting gears, where do we go from here is this theme. And your work with Oren Lyons, I want to reflect on that.

Oren Lyons says it's not just about saving the earth, it's about saving ourselves. From your time with him, what do you think are the most urgent lessons that need to be heard today? And how can people, especially non-Indigenous folks, show up in a meaningful way? I've had the privilege of that time with Oren and on a previous occasion to basically listen to him in conversation with Dr. Jose Barrero for many hours.

So part of what I'm doing is just feeling into what I recall from that and what kind of sticks most in terms of usefulness to getting us where we actually want to go. Oren's a funny guy.

He calls us dogs to try to help us feel something. He's a comedian. He's very funny. He had the whole room laughing. He did. I was really surprised by it for some reason. I was like, I didn't know he was such a comedian. And for those who don't know, Oren is 95, and he can make a whole audience laugh time and time again. Really, he really can. He's that age, and he had a...

a youth that wasn't about what he's doing now. Chief Oren Lyons, before he was chief, was a very, very talented artist. He had moved to New York City to pursue this art, and he was crushing it. And he got called home by his council to take on a new mission, and essentially to spread the message of the Haudenosaunee people who've lived under this great law of peace given to them by the peacemaker,

around the world and to help make peace and to advocate as the Haudenosaunee were called into more service on behalf of all indigenous people. There are values of coexistence with life that are held very well by the people that Oren has spoken on behalf of in an explicit way for a long time. And they include gratitude.

They include that the world is alive and everything is alive. They include reciprocity and seven generation long term thinking and an equal role for women in governance and a role for nature in governance. So I think Oren would say, yeah, all that. But gratitude is the thing that it starts with. The Thanksgiving address of the Haudenosaunee people is.

is, it's not about a meal time in November. It's not about turkeys. But it is at its core. I'm just telling very loosely about gratitude for everything and to everyone, not just human ones. And so for us to get where we're going, I think anchoring in the gratitude for what is, for what has been, for what will be,

among all systems involved in life will be key. Because what we are painfully exiting is the opposite of gratitude, it's entitlement and it's dominance. And they feel powerful, but like the folks erasing and deleting books, it's weakness.

If your model of the world is that the only way it's worth living in it is to dominate it, that's very lonely. And I think when you express gratitude for everything, you also put yourself beside. You situate yourself within life, not above life. And so you see the tree as a relation and a neighbor. You see the fish and the salmon as a relation and a neighbor.

You see the earth overall and the sky and everything, right? This microphone, this water bottle, these earmuffs on my head right now. It's like all of this is part of the universe and it's all magic. It's all energy. It's all life. And once we can express that humility, I think that is like the ultimate liberation technology. It liberates us from having to control everything, right?

Ownership is a burden. Control is a heavy cross to bear. And dominance is expensive as hell because you always got to be looking out for someone to undermine your authority. But if you see the authority and just express gratitude to participate in the web of life at all, yo, your shoulders just drop. And you're like, man, it's literally an easier way to be. It's just to be with, not over.

So that's where I'd love us to go. And the good news is we're going to get there. The not so good news is we're taking the expensive route. Like this is the other thing. The future, this good future is coming. It's always been here. How many people, how many non-people have to suffer?

for most of us and all of us to experience it. That's really the question. The future to me is not in question. The amount of suffering to get there is the question. I love that. That's such a great response.

I love that we kind of shifted to orange too, because the panel yesterday was so good. I mean, it was, we were backed up all the way to the wall, like sitting on the ground and we're like, this is so worth it because we don't even care where we're at, where we're sitting. We're just taking, taking it all in. And you did such a good job hosting that panel. Like it seemed so effortless, like effortless.

I was like, this guy must be doing this for a really long time because he's so good and it –

your responses back and the way you're re you were able to like reiterate things back, especially his question. You're like, what I'm hearing you say is, is this, and you did it in such a poetic way. I think that's like what I got the most out of that panel yesterday was their expression of gratitude. I was so appreciative of them just being,

paying homage to like the women in their life too. I thought that was so beautiful. Like they were like, I wouldn't be who I am today without this line of women that has come before me. And right now I'm actually doing a podcast series called Healing Woman Heals Mother Earth. And I've been interviewing a lot of beautiful women that are in a lot of leadership positions that are doing a lot of work around environmental stewardship and

And just uplifting their voices and what they're doing and really talking about this interconnectedness that we have as women with Mother Earth and, um,

centering it around the health and well-being that we have as women as well. And what do you do to take care of yourself mentally, physically, and spiritually while being involved in such high-level advocacy work? And it's been a really great podcast series. I've been inspired a lot and reminded of my own strength that I carry as a young Indigenous woman. I'm curious, what do you think men can do

to better support women that are in these positions and better support and uplift them. Thank you, Santana. We could sit down and shut. No, I'm just kidding. It's actually not the answer. I think that's what a lot of men hear. I think to a lot of men, again, this story of dominance, this

Ancient isn't the right word. It's an old story. And in the foundation of the new Western world, it's a story out of the 1300s with the Vatican issuing these edicts. It's called Papal Bulls, which justified slaughter and genocide in the name of God the Father, but really for gold. And so this doctrine of discovery gave license to pillage and burn and rape and kill and subjugate and attempt to wipe out

for temporary riches. And a lot of our laws today still, they flow down from that. Western property rights law is based on papal bulls. There's a whole effort to get those rescinded. And one of the Bioneers speakers, Loretta Afraid of Bear Cook, has been working on for a while and made some progress. Men, you know, we're stuck in that fractal and that story, many of us, that if a woman has power, it means we're losing.

It's the zero sum. It's the falseness of a dominant position. Well, if she gets something, that means she's taking something from me and I can't have it. So a lot of men hear women's empowerment and think men's disempowerment because there's a lack of imagination. So for men, my fellow men, I would say let's imagine better. My friend Andrew Slack has a whole organization called Imagine Better. And let us recognize that if we accept women

The interdependence of all things as the premise, not merely independence, but inter, that we need each other, that we can't live as. As Oren said, we don't make the air we breathe, right? Humans don't make the air, but we rely on it. So there's other forces out there that we are highly dependent on. And in fact, the earth might be okay without us, though we have a role to play. At any rate, if we see everything as interdependent,

then a woman with power is not a threat. She strengthens the web that we are a part of with her. If my wife makes more money, my household has more money. So it's the shift from me to we that allows a threat to become an opportunity. And I say this as a man who has had those thoughts, who has just been like, well, what about me? And what is this going to mean? And I,

I am saying that out loud because I think we have to be able to say without shame or pretend perfection. Well, I've been woke since before that was a word. Everybody's on a learning journey and we got to allow for that too. It's kind of back to the cancel culture comment. So one piece of advice to men is to expand the concept of self and think about we and

Another piece of advice, and I've had to learn this myself, is to cite the women who are doing work that goes unacknowledged in your own life. For example, my podcast is actually me and my wife's podcast. Yes, I love that. I am co-creator of Life With Machines with Elizabeth Stewart. How to Citizen, co-created. I believe in my...

Key note, I did acknowledge her, but I'm not 100% sure. I know on the podcast, on the How to Citizen, I did. At any rate, that sounded a little defensive. The point being, we have opportunities to speak unspoken truths, and it doesn't really diminish me to say her name.

and give her her flowers while people are alive. So that's another tangible thing we can do. I also think that we can show up in support without dominating the discourse. We can just use our, like we have something to offer men. We have strength. We have our presence and our energy. We have all of us roles to play.

How do we weave our contribution in with women? It's probably a good practice for men to report to women, right? Just in an organizational structure. We should have coaches who are women or bosses who are women and not make them have to behave like us.

But what does it mean to operate under female leadership? I think it'd be a great exercise for all men because I know a lot of men have thoughts about it, but have never actually experienced it. And so why don't you give it a shot?

Can you share some of this power and authority in a space that you have with a woman who you are close to? Not just some random woman you pull off the internet. That's a whole other problem. But like, you know, who are you already in relationship with? Who are you already in community with? How do you give them credit? How do you share with them? And then how do you practice power with and try not to experience it as a zero-sum thing? And the last thought, masculinity itself is under attack.

And that's not how it's been framed. But what I see happening is there's this narrative shift. And as Kenny Ausubel, one of the co-founders and leaders of Bioneer said in his talk, that the culture wars have been used as a screen basically just for theft, right? Just for taking over the government, et cetera. And one vector of that attack is on manhood and masculinity, right?

And there is this great simplification of what it means to be a man, that you can blame the world's problems on women, that you can say, well, real men don't care about the environment and real men don't want a living wage. Like it breaks down if you say it slower. But there's a lot of media out there that is preying on the vulnerability of young men and boys in particular.

who want to feel a certain thing that the world doesn't have a safe place for them to feel. And so they go to the toxic place to feel it. And they listen to someone like an Andrew Tate, who's like, this is what a man does. He abuses. That's that feeling. You want that. And that's not the path. There is a healthy masculinity where you can express strength and

in a way that doesn't hurt someone else. When you can follow through on an instinct to protect or to build without it having to require tearing down someone else. And so for the men, we need to find healthy outlets for our masculinity and step up to model that because there's a bunch of young boys looking for models and a lot of what they're finding is trash.

And that is to the disservice of us all. Real men don't hurt other people. Real men don't steal. Real men don't put other people down to lift themselves up. Real men don't lie and try to bend the truth to make themselves look and feel better. That is not masculinity. That is something else. Pretending. Mic drop.

I think we're done here. That was so good. I appreciate your response so much. I just have to like raise my hands to you for that just because I don't think I've really even got the chance to even ask a man, how do you feel like you should support women more? I think it's a conversation that needs to be had a lot more and

Just thank you for being honest about it and where you're at and that, you know, how far you've come and what you're still learning. And I feel like I'm such a true believer in strength. There's strength and vulnerability. Yeah. And.

I always welcome vulnerability even from men because in indigenous communities, like men are also like, and I'm sure it's common across a lot of communities. It's like, you can't cry. You can't express yourself. You can't share feelings. And it's like, I feel like I'm always reminding the men in my life that it's okay to be vulnerable. And the men need both men and women to say that to us.

Right. There's I'm in a circle of men have been for the past four years now, almost five. And it's been so healthy to have a place to cry, to celebrate our wins, to acknowledge our defeats, to hold each other up and hold each other accountable, as we say in this particular circle, to be really honest and say things to each other that we would never say in public.

But to get it out of the body because it needs to go somewhere and then to have people catch it in a healthy way. Sounds like you're saying this. Is that what I'm hearing? What's going on beneath that? As opposed to instantly cutting it off or shutting it down or shaming it. That is something that can curdle in on itself and become really perverted and poisoned. And I think we also need women in our lives to really mean it.

when they say be vulnerable and then don't act a different way when we are vulnerable and be like, well, I need a real man. So because we are all capable of reinforcing negativity, toxicity, and sometimes, you know, in our search for liberation, we contribute to further subjugation. It's just and it's not a it's not a character flaw. It's like a human trait.

And if we can also just not feel so judged and bad, I can't misstep. And if I do, I can't acknowledge I misstepped. We're really not going to make that progress. So how am I contributing to withholding the future I want to see?

And can I just get a little better at that? I'm never going to be perfect at it. And that's a question we can all ask ourselves. And so for the men, it's like, okay, who are the women in your life? And how can you be in a better relationship? And how can you support them? To the women who are interested in this question, who are the men in my life?

And how can I demonstrate to them that the type of masculinity I really want is this and not that? Because we've all been conditioned to. I think there's a lot of unconscious reinforcement of negative activities that is painful to acknowledge. So thank you for the question. Thank you. I just want to quickly say, and I would love if Raven has a response to either of this, is

I really mean it. I really mean it. She's on the record, but the microphone's got it. There's strength in vulnerability, and I always welcome vulnerability. So do you have a response to any of that? Yeah, that was all, like, right. We always say the spirit has a good way of having the words come out when you need to hear them.

And that's exactly what I'm feeling right now, just sitting in this like wealth pool and the dialogue that goes back and forth and, you know, bringing both parties to the table, you know, and critically and analyzing like what it is that we really need to fix is a culture, a culture of people. And if we're asking for this and we think this is a better way, then this side has to support that, vice versa, supporting each other to find that better way. And

The most important thing I think you're mentioning is when this is the difference between conservatives and liberals is conservation and liberation. And whenever we're going through liberation, it's not a band-aid solution. Anyone out there listening, it's not a band-aid solution. We're going to have to go. We're going to go through our trials, errors, tribulations, and we're going to end up where we want to be through this intentional fostering. But

It comes through embracing each other and embracing anything that's brought into our worlds, not fearing from it or shying from it or going back and reverting to our ways of our culture that we're trying to liberate from. So thank you guys for that. That was really wealthy. Liberation versus conservation. I like that.

I don't have any more questions, but again, I just want to thank you for your time and say, thank you. My hands go up to you for being here today. I'll follow that and say, highly respected people. So thank you all three of you for having me in here. This is

a really great collective conversation across nations, across ages, across genders and languages. And it's the sort of dialogue and exchange that can lead to better actions that can change this world for the better. So appreciate all y'all. Taking a mental picture of this room. We did it! Great work!

Hey, what up, y'all? Thanks for listening to this episode of Young and Indigenous. This series was made possible by Bioneers and the Rights of Nature Organization. Special thanks to Britt, Stephanie, and Ray Ray for all their help on this project. This episode was produced by Roy Alexander, Isabella James, Santana Rabang, Haley Rapata, Raven Borsi, Cyrus James, Waikiki Akurli-Bear, TJ White Antelope, Skye Schofield, and Ellie Smith. Yay! Podcast is a part of the Children of the Second Sun Productions. Original music by Keith Jefferson, Adam Lawrence, Nichols, and Roy Nichol.

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