Genius Teatime with Julia Cordero-Lamb

What is and what will be-- what the plants teach us about adapting to climate disruption

It was a delight to listen to the wisdom of Julia Cordero-Lamb last year.

This premiere of Genius Teatime, a community lecture series and experiment in conviviality, came forth because of a couple of social media posts shared by Pamela Samuelson of Love Notes and me. Back in 2022 a friend of hers asked folks what they could talk about for 40 minutes with no notes and no prep. She and I both shared the post and were flooded with amazing answers from our friends and acquaintances. When it came time for the memory to come around again, we both re-shared the post and again got a fabulous array of topics. I said I wanted this to be a lecture series, she agreed, and Genius Teatime began. We decided to ask for suggested donations, with no one turned away for lack of funds, and any proceeds would be divided between our speakers, their charity or mutual aid organization of choice, and to the Opulent Mobility accessibility fund (to add ASL interpretation to upcoming programming).

Julia’s charity was the Wishtoyo Chumach Foundation. Wishtoyo is a native-led organization founded in 1997 whose mission is to protect and preserve the culture, history, and lifeways of Chumash and Indigenous peoples, and the environment everyone depends on.

Julia Cordero-Lamb is a grassroots herbalist and teacher of traditional regenerative horticulture in her family’s homeland, the unceded tribal territory of the central coastal Chumash. She is an enrolled member of the Coastal Band of the Chumash Nation, and founded the Syuxtun Plant Mentorship Collective in 2016. Julia also co-founded the Chumash Maritime Association in 1996, which brought traditional Chumash plank canoes back into the Chumash family circle. She did her MA/PhD work at UCSB, but opted out of an academic career in order to practice traditional regenerative horticulture at the grassroots, community level, and to raise her children on her farm in Washington state. She writes, makes things, grows and preserves food, and farms 8 acres in the cedar forests in the Salish Sea area with her spouse, two children, two housemates, their two children, and many special plants and animals.

Thanks so much to Julia and everyone who joined us! This talk transcript is edited for clarity, and any errors in translation are mine.

Julia:

So the coastal Chumash and California natives in general, there's very few federally recognized plants there, the diversity of California is absolutely astonishing. So my little strip, my family's area is in what's now called Santa Barbara. For more than 15,000 years it's been the village of Syuxtun and it was one of the most densely populated areas. What we get asked a lot is how our people lived in dense populations, denser than most Westerners know about. There's this idea that there were very few people here before European colonization and that's just not the facts at all. No matter where you look, there are pretty big numbers of people living here pretty well, but our tribe is unique in that we didn't have any row agriculture and we also didn't follow any herds. So not nomadic and not agricultural in the sense that people are used to thinking about agriculture with row crops, that's what people usually think or, you know, three sisters gardening. You want to talk to some geniuses, talk to the Hopi about what it's like to farm corn in that incredibly dry atmosphere there. Their farming techniques blow my mind, but my people did not have those techniques, we did other things. But our resource space back in those days was so ridiculously abundant that it supported permanent villages of 10,000 people or more for 15,000 years. So how did that many people live there with no farming, without following big herds for that long without ruining everything? And the answer is first of all, it is ridiculously abundant and diverse, and also we tend to land, we don't farm. We go to the places where the plants are already there, we find out which ones are good for medicine, food, and all the other things that people need and we ask the plants “What's going on here? What do you need? Do you need to be burned? Are you on a fire dependent cycle, how often do you need to burn, okay well if you can't burn, how do I prune you, you know, what do you need?”

Anybody who's ever had an ongoing relationship with an apple orchard kind of knows what that's like, you know, you start small and you ask the tree what it needs. Are these two branches going to rub together, do I need to get rid of the one that's causing the trouble and what does this plant want to look like, is it getting enough water, is it being attacked by bugs? You just let it tell you what it needs, right? So it's that process, only over 15,000 years, with everything. (Laugh) So all of the edible bulbs, all of the berries, all of the leafy greens that are edible, all of the fruit bearing plants, all the oak trees with the acorns, you know, the diversity is absolutely stunning. When I take young people out on the land for the first time I tell them I know y'all are thinking you're going to learn everything with me and I'll just let you know I don't know what half this stuff is, because there's so much. You're gonna hear me say I don't know a lot, okay, but following right after that I'm gonna say I don't know, let's see if we can find out, let's see what we can learn about this little plant being here because this, there's so much, this is knowledge that needs to be held collectively.

What happened with my people is the Spanish missions happened, and beliefs that brought were brought by the Spanish. We were blessed with the Spanish Inquisition version of Catholicism so we have the very punitive version of Catholicism that came to our people through the Franciscan Padres. Over 90 percent of the people passed away in the first 50 years from diseases. The rest were kept in tiny crowded dormitories, men and women kept separately, no space for anybody who wasn't identifying as male or females, those Catholic priests, that was one of the first things they did was reduce gender diversity because that's considered an abomination, right? But if you're people who live on the land you know that nature is doing some pretty queer stuff, so we had room for all, in my people's language there are very many gender pronouns, not just he or she or they, there's a lot more than that. I'm kind of going off in the weeds here, don't mind me. So when the Spanish people came they instilled in our people the idea that our medicine was the work of the devil and it was just fine to use it if the priests got sick, but if we used it on ourselves that was not allowed, and so by the time my mom and I moved back down to Santa Barbara in 1996-- I grew up in Seattle on Capitol Hill, and I spent all my summers down in Santa Barbara getting to know my family. And my mom and I moved back so that we could found the Chumash Maritime Association, and by the time I got there, there were just a few elders who still had the medicinal plant knowledge, and I didn't learn from my own elders how to tend the land, I had to learn that from practitioners to the north and south of us, but, about our medicines I was able to learn from a few of the elders that were left and they taught me a lot. One of them in particular I remember, she would tell me all the time, “I don't know if you want to know this stuff now because it's the devil's work”. And I was like “Oh Auntie no, this is the generosity of the Creator, how could we say no to these gifts that we have”, and what I ended up having to do was sit with her and bring her fruit baskets and just having long conversations with her and then just guessing what things were for and she'd get so mad at me that she would just tell me what they're for out of disgust. You do what you got to do, but after a while she could see that I really wasn't gonna hurt anybody and that I have an affinity with the plants and I always have, and she knew we're family, so eventually she opened up and taught me what she knew and from that point I was just learning from everybody I could. I mean I don't really care who it was, if they had something to tell me about a plant that I knew was one of the allies of my family then I would listen to them and take in that knowledge however I could.

So one of the places I went to learn about deeper plant uses was the Southwest School of Botanical Medicine where Michael Moore taught, and had about a six-month herbal intensive with one of the great masters of American herbalism. He's passed on about 15 years ago. A good friend, I loved that man. I also had the honor of teaching at his school a couple years later, and that school, they were incredible, but he always gave deference to indigenous herbalists. He'd say you guys have a way of being with the plants, a way of generating abundance that is itself the best medicine than I've ever seen, and at first I thought, wow, he sounds a lot like my elders, saying that, and I still didn't quite understand what it meant until I started hanging out with my relatives who are basket makers. And, you know, the first question basket makers get asked is how long does it take to make one of those baskets because they're absolutely exquisite. They're high art. California Chumash (ones) sell for tens of thousands of dollars. I mean, imagine making a watertight basket, that's some serious skill. There are just a couple people who can weave like that in the tribe now but it is coming back. So they get asked that a lot and the answer usually takes longer to answer than they've got time.

The long answer is 15,000 years, because long before any weaving starts, you go out on the land, and you find the plants that are the right ones, and you find out what they need. In our landscape things have been neglected for quite a long time because they took us, they took our land. They removed us from the land and that land and we co-evolved for such a long time that now the land is dependent on a lot of our work, and that sounds like a really outrageous claim to make because we've been all raised to believe that humanity is bad for nature. I mean, that's the whole mindset of Protestant Christianity and American environmentalism. You either have industry that takes all the trees and cuts them all down and sees them as board feet of timber or you have nature, pure and pristine, don't touch it, don't leave anything there, don't pick anything. I'm not recommending people go out and go pick stuff, but with my people, our interaction is our environmentalism. We make sure that all those plants in those places are doing really well and now we're having this really interesting experience in my people after learning from how to gather plants from basket weavers, learning from tribes around us about how to do land tending. A lot of California tribes are now becoming successful bringing back what we call the good fires, where you burn enough and periodically and differently in each type of landscape, so that when big fires do come through they just kind of roll on through and do what they're supposed to do. They do what the plants have evolved for these fires to do. Some of these plants can't even germinate without fire. So a lot of tribes are working with municipal fire districts in the state and gaining money and training their young people to do the incredibly hard work of being a sawyer and a firefighter and, you know, getting certified to do that and the tribes that are successful at that are really seeing some changes in their land that are incredible, but in Santa Barbara we have mansions everywhere. [Laughter] We have Prince Harry. They don't let us burn there, so we have to be the fire with our clippers and our pruning saws and our sharp blades and our listening ears and our strong bodies. We have to go out there and we have to be the fire and that's a big job.

So we're just starting really small but our experience is teaching us something very interesting. You know what, it's almost like how it was for our ancestors, whoever those first people were, who came from wherever damn direction they came from, who knows, maybe it was the Bering land bridge, maybe it was across the Pacific Ocean in a canoe, maybe it was some other direction that we haven't figured out yet, but we've been there since time immemorial. Much longer than most anthropologists or archaeologists will admit. There's a lot more evidence coming out that shows no, not 9,000 years, not 13,000 years, since time immemorial we've been there, but who was there first? How did they grow up with these plants? What kind of questions did they ask? How do the plants communicate with those people, those early people? Weirdly, this modern group of 20 apprentices and me are kind of having that experience because we've been removed from the land for generations and we know we know where we are, we know all the place names, we know a lot of the really important plants, those things have never been forgotten but that deep knowledge, the materia medica, you know, very sophisticated way of doing medicine on a par with Chinese medicine or Tibetan medicine or any of the others, like ayurveda, you know, let your food be your medicine and your medicine be your food, that's very much in line with what I'm going to talk about in a second. So we're having this experience of okay, we've got some of what our elders taught us but who are our elders right now? The plants. The plants themselves are elders. Our original teachers are still there and the first instructions are still valid and the first instructions are find out what is. Not what should be.

What should be is that we never should have lost our land, what should be is there shouldn't be mansions in every damn direction, what should be is that that shouldn't be someone's fourth home. People shouldn't have four homes. What should be is that, you know, we have a tribal land base of some kind but that's not what is, yet. We would like to get some land back, we're working really hard on that, but what is right now is that, okay, we're facing unprecedented climate disruption and it's absolutely devastating to everything in California. The drought is insane, the floods are crazy, everything's out of balance, so what are the plants teaching us right now about how to live in this place and how can we plant seeds that have to do with those traditional world views in other people's minds. We're really careful that people don't misappropriate our traditions, but there are a few things we would very much like for people to appropriate and one of them is thinking regeneratively. We always think that capitalism and socialism are our two economic options and they're always positioned as being diametrically opposed to each other and in some ways they are, but they're also both European world views that see humans as intrinsically separate from nature, and our economies fed hundreds of thousands of people with a very different world view than that, and, you know, who knows what the heck that would look like in 2023, 2030, 2040. I don't know, I'm one person, I can't answer that question by myself, this has to be a collective answer, but somewhere somebody planted the seeds that made people first start thinking that humans were separate from nature and then we started thinking in these binaries and further, giving one side of the binary superior morality, right? Well okay, let's plant a different idea! Now, you know, who knows how long it will take to grow anything but I know that these are models that worked for a long time.

What I know about the plants is that they are 100 percent honest. (Laugh) They never tell us something that's not happening. They tell us about the weather, they tell us about what the water is like under the ground, they tell us about pollinators, they tell us about abundance, you know, and when we go out and collect this data, as it were, we're not just looking at numbers of plants down in a particular valley. We're looking at how they bend. We're looking at what's the sap, how watery is the sap. We're looking at flavors and colors. We're watching for those tiny little native bees. That data is multi-sensory, we do it with our entire bodies, and we do it by listening and discerning what is. And once you know what is, you can start having an idea of what can be, what's possible, but getting to there is really hard because we've just got so many myths and goggles over our eyes. You know, like the idea of native plants, think about that for a minute and pristine nature, think about that for a minute and Native people. Well, those things all got designated native as the second a European boot hit the ground and well, do you think that birds weren't flying around pooping seeds from other places before that? Do you think that the fish weren't migrating? Do you think that people weren't intermarrying and traveling? And trust me; I know about invasive plants and I have a vendetta against Russian thistle. There are a whole bunch of plants that we have a love-hate relationship, so I understand about how damaging invasives can be, but if my people were on our land, would those invasive plants be as invasive or would they just be locally abundant and heavily used? Would they? I don't know; we've not had the chance to find out, I can't say for sure whether that would be the case, but I do know that things were moving around long before Europeans got here, much more than Europeans are willing to admit. So I worked at the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden for five years. A lot of those botanists that are there are my good friends and we've had screaming matches over invasives and natives and what is a non-native and what is an invasive and, and one time I got really mad and just said, I've never seen people hate non-native plants anywhere near as much as non-native people do. To most of my relatives they're just another useful plan. Why do you guys hate? I mean, got a little guilt complex going on here, what's going on here, you know, let's just talk about these plants. What's locally abundant in Santa Barbara? Eucalyptus. Well, is eucalyptus good for Covid? Heck yes it is, it's a really good lung medicine. Is there a lot of it? Yeah there's a ton of it, so use that and don't worry about the white sage because you don't need it right now, okay, leave the white stage alone and go for the thing that's locally abundant, for crying out loud. So that's what is. I can't make it go backwards. I can't go back to the pristine past if there even was one, you know, let's go with what is.

Okay, so the second part I want to talk about; the first part was looking at the plants and how honest they are, and they don't lie to us and they tell us what is, we have to just drop a lot of our ideological goggles like the myth of the rugged individual, you know, ideas of what's pristine, how to really listen and how to make our actions and our cuts produce abundance in that place, the way that place wants it to happen. So simple rules, right, but it's like learning chess, only with lots of people and not competitive. You can learn to play chess in 20 minutes but if you've played chess you know that this game can get hella complex. You have to spend your whole life practicing until you get really good and it's the same with regenerative horticulture. The rules are deceptively simple. You do, you find out what is, and you learn how to prune header cuts and shaper cuts and how to cut up the stuff and make mulch and how to streamline the whole riparian water cycle over time, but the doing of it requires decades of daily practice, practice, practice and watching, watching what's happening, watching the impact of what you're doing, what's the feedback loop that you're in, how do you get the information from the plant so that you're doing well or not, that takes a lifetime. I have about 20 apprentices, and I spent about four years traveling down to Santa Barbara seven or eight times a year so that we could just follow the seasonal round, like what's happening with the spring greens, okay, then next you're dealing with, you know, darker leaves and then you're dealing with flowers and then berries and then in acorns and then roots, you know, you're just going through the seasonal cycle following those things. And it's going to take us another 30 years for me to have confidence that we can actually pass this tradition on in a way that even comes close to what our ancestors had.

But my point about all of that is people think, okay, well that's nice, it seems like a nice hobby, you guys are adding acorns back into your diet, that's nice, you know. No, we can feed a lot of people this way, a lot of people and, yeah, and maybe make the California landscape not so fire prone and maybe a little more climate resistant, climate adaptive, maybe a lot more because you know what my ancestors went through? The ice age, and they followed these same rules. We've seen pandemics, big ones that wiped out 90 percent of the people, we've seen huge climate change happen, and these rules will carry you through, but, you know, is Western Society even interested in doing something like that? Well no, the powers that be sure as heck aren't, but we are, and there are more of us. I don't know, I'm a dreamer, but the next part of this is just looking at some really cool stuff that I've learned about regenerative horticulture and how it can also apply to medicine and agriculture.

So, if you look at Western medicine, which I love, okay, I can't sew somebody's arm back on, I can't do neurosurgery, I'm not great at heart surgery. I asked one of my herbal teachers, hey Auntie, back in the day, when the women had an ectopic pregnancy, what did we do about that, and she said “Oh! Well, we died”. If you are internally bleeding like that and it's because you burst a Fallopian tube because of an ectopic, no, we died. So there's things about Western medicine I would never poo-poo. I love their diagnostic lab stuff, I found it absolutely fascinating. I've also watched a Tibetan doctor put their fingers on someone's vein like this with four fingers and look at someone's urine and diagnose as accurately as any Western lab, so okay, but the thing that gets me about Western medicine as a practice, it's called allopathic medicine, which means against disease and it does kill diseases, it does great at that, it's good at killing things. It is a combat-oriented approach. We are combating disease. And then you look at the way agriculture is performed, also combat-oriented agriculture. Our economies are combat oriented, and there's a time and a place for combat but it just kind of seems like if you're talking about the sources of life in human health maybe we shouldn't be at war with everything all the time. So I've sat down and talked with my doctor friend, I have a lot of medical colleagues and we were very respectful of each other's work, and I just said “y'all are amazing at heroic medicine. Surgery, saving people's lives, you know, antibiotics, I mean my people grew penicillin on acorn mush and we used that so, okay, but what about regenerative medicine? What about really focusing on the health not only of the single organism but of the organism's context, what about creating communities where people are taking care of each other and moms aren't so damn stressed out trying to raise their kids all by themselves and trying to like take care of our elders through IHS or through Medicare and nothing's paying for anything?” I don't know, it just seems like this heroic medicine really only works for heroic problems. It's not working for chronic problems, it's not working for the basics, you know, you go to the doctor and they say “oh well you should reduce your stress” and you're like, I don't know, maybe nuclear family is a failed experiment and we should go back to living in villages, but, I've been trying to make that happen for 30 years, you know, that's where my stress will be relieved, quite a lot!

So, I look at that and I look at the way plants are grown for agriculture, again, combat oriented, kill the bugs, kill the weeds, kill all the things except for the plant and that then you're going to need a ton of chemical fertilizers because ain't nothing growing in soil after you've killed off all the organisms unless you feed it all those chemical fertilizers. I live in farmland here. I've got a little eight acre place here in Stanwood, Washington. At the bottom of the hill they're growing corn, barley, sometimes soy, mostly corn and barley. They senesce the fields. Does anybody know what that means, when somebody's growing corn, or not corn, but…? Wow. Okay, so if you're eating wheat or barley or any grain that's grown in the United States and it's not organic, the practice of senescing the fields is they wait until it's almost ripe and then they kill everything all at once with massive applications of glyphosate or Roundup. And what it does is it turns the fields from green to kind of rusty colored. It kills everything at once, the plants get stressed out so they produce a little bit more grain, but the reason they do that is because if they try to harvest the wheat before it's a hundred percent dry, that just chews up the farm equipment and if you're a farmer that owns a 250,000 dollar grain harvester, you cannot have that machine go kerplut, you know, you owe the bank money for, I mean it's a big thing, right? So your wheat has to be dry as a bone before you harvest it, so that's how they get it dry when they're growing it in places like Washington or Montana or someplace North where it's kind of wet. They kill it. But think about that. You can't wash it off. Once you've harvested all that grain you can't get that grain wet, you'll blow up the grain silo! So you're just eating it, and even though we don't really know if glyphosate causes cancer, it's a suspected carcinogen, we definitely know that it kills flora because that's what it is for, it's an herbicide, right? Well, you kind of need the flora that you have in your body a lot so, so if you're eating non-organic wheat, you're eating Roundup and you're killing your gut, so that's bad. Don't do that.

So when I look at the way, not even organic farming, because that's getting more towards conventional farming too, but people who are doing like biodynamic farming or small scale farming using permaculture or food forests or things where the whole bottom, the soil, the health of the soil is the bottom line, like you're able to support more life, the more life is in the soil, the healthier the organism, the healthier all of the plants, right? Well, we're like that, (laugh), I mean there's the same stuff going on in the soil that goes on in our microbiome to support this organism ,and if we're doing this together as a community, that's where we find real health. That's where real health is found, right? I can only imagine what that would look like in like a global economy because right now what's happening with our global economy is that our bottom line depends on us making the sources of life a commodity; so water, soil, women, sex, air, electricity, the sources of life have to be monetized for this to even work, right? And I can't think of a more combat-oriented mentality than the exploitation of the sources of life, and that can't be our bottom line anymore. We can't keep living like this. We're going on and on and on as though this is going to keep working, and, you know, they call me a dreamer and other people like me dreamers, but these plants are telling us something very different than what these economies are telling us, and they've always been our elders. For crying out loud, they make the air, you know. (Laugh) We wouldn't even be here. They're what make everything possible, and if we're going to be listening to anything we should be listening to them about what to do next, how do we eat, how do we take care of our bodies, how do we work together as a community.

Okay, so somebody in this group knows about mycorrhizae, the beautiful network of fungi that lives under the soil and how it's like this giant network of stars, it's like the brain of the forest, like the whole thing is electrically alive and the plants can communicate with each other, they can decide to send nutrients to other plants, they can decide to keep a nurse log alive, they know who their offspring are through this network. I mean that's a level of consciousness that Western science is just now starting to understand. Meanwhile who's been saying "all my relations" this whole time? Who's been saying “this is our family, these are literally our relatives, and all of it is alive and sentient”, right? Who's been saying that the whole damn time? All the indigenous people of the world including in Scotland, I would like to say. I just was in Scotland about five, four or four years ago. People all over northern Europe are recovering their traditional ways of understanding their place in nature and I strongly encourage anybody who's an American immigrant to learn as much about that as they can, because we have a lot more in common than not when you look back far enough. So I got to spend time in the oak groves of the West Coast of Scotland near a little town called Glenuig, oh God it's so beautiful, and I was talking to them about how they take care of their oak forests and hearing the same kind of stories that we tell over here and saying, well, I would like to do as well as you're doing with those oak groves. This is pretty great. I'm so happy that you have control over your land. (Laugh) So it really would benefit everyone if California indigenous people were able to acquire back a significant part of our land, is because we are remembering how this works. A lot of California tribes have never forgotten how it works, particularly the ones that escaped missionization and they have a template, that's, you know, we've been testing it for a while, double blind human trials (laugh) ongoing for millennia. We figured out that it worked for a lot of people. It wasn't a perfect lifestyle, nothing is, but you know, we can do better, this is just nuts.

So how do we get to the next step? How do we figure out this non-combat oriented, you know, a regenerative economy, medical system, way of eating, farming-- I really believe that what the plants are showing us is that it has to happen in small communities, ike the 15-minute City or whatever you want to call it where you have everything in a small area and you're not doing this dumb thing where you're living it in a nuclear family with Mom and Dad doing absolutely everything for absolutely everyone, that that just doesn't work over time. So I think I've just beaten that horse five or six times and so I'm gonna stop, and I'd really like to hear from people about their experiences or questions or stories, right? I love stories. I'd love to hear people's stories about this, so have at it please. There's several people in the room who have a lot of direct experience of what you're talking about and a lot of questions about it.

Pamela: There are a couple things in the chat that I'm going to read that came in as questions. The first one's from Olivia Pepper who is out in Southern New Mexico. Are there any traditional plant names you can share with us so that we can de-anglicize our botanical vocabulary?

Julia: Oh, that's a really great question; it depends on where you live. I would ask the people where you live what some of those names are and, you know, you're going to encounter people that are like, oh, we don't want to share that information with non-natives but a lot other people would be happy to. In Santa Barbara we're recovering quite a few of our plant names. My favorite one that I'd love to say over and over is for California Wild Rose, it's washtiq’oliq’ol. It's so pregnant, so pretty but we actually developed a song for the young people. I'm not going to sing it because it's long and I don't want to but it's basically a seasonal round of plant names and it's got about, I want to say about 30 or 40 flowering plants in it and it starts in the winter and it goes through the spring and through the summer and into the fall and then starts again back in the winter and it's beautiful. And we put it together so that young people could start memorizing some of these plant names but washtiq’oliq’ol is one of my favorites. White sage is khapšik and that's Santa Barbara Chumash, that's Syuxtun, their language is called šmuwitš. There are eight Chumash languages from (unintelligible). It's a šmuwitš word, khapšik. I can spell it for you. Okay cool.

Joan Stevens: What land back efforts can we support locally in Southern California?

Julia: Hey, Joan Stevens! Land back, man, land back, oh boy, okay. So parklands, national parks, okay, state parks, uh, basically anything that hasn't been built on, and I know people get really upset when we talk about returning the national parks. I don't blame anybody for feeling that way because those are cherished landscapes for everybody, and I've talked to quite a few different people and different tribes still have different ways about access once we got land back but, you know, if you're going to treat it well, you are welcome, you know, but...

Joan Stevens: Are there organizations that are doing that? Like we, I teach this in my environmental science class.

Julia: Oh yeah.

Joan Stevens: In the last week, and I don't know if the students are being honest because I'm the teacher and they probably kind of know what I want them to think, but after going over some of the issues at a semester of learning about all kinds of different aspects of the environment they resoundingly say yeah, native people really ought to have land they need, it makes obvious sense and I would love to say “oh well, here are three organizations that you can get involved in that do this”.

Julia: Yeah, Wishtoyo would be a big one, also up in the Bay Area there's Amah Mutsun Land Trust. It's funny when you work with them because they're extremely well organized, they're training fire crews, they know how to take care of the land, but they don't have any of their own either, but the Amah Mutsun is one of the traditional tribes up there. Let's see, in my area in Syuxtun, you know, the Coastal Band of the Chumash, I would like to see a land base for the Coastal Band, um, there are other Chumash organizations in Santa Barbara, oh I'm sorry I'm totally brain farting here, I haven't been home in too long. Also I'm hoping that Syuxtun Plant Mentorship Collective can eventually get a 501c3 nonprofit and if we were able to do that, you know, that could be another organization but right now Amah Mutsun Land Trust, Wishtoyo, Coastal Band of the Chumash, that's a good place to start.

Joan Stevens: Cool.

Julia: Yeah I mean we're just trying to talk this through, it's been such a pie in the sky wish for so long that if it actually happened I think a lot of us would be like, oh crap! All right, let's get organized. I mean, we're getting organized, the Syuxtun Plant Mentorship Collective probably within about three or four years would be more than capable of very beautifully taking care of a land base, I know that we would. The little bits that we've taken care of have just exploded off the hook, really beautiful.

Olivia: Hi.

Julia: Oh hi, Olivia!

Olivia: Hi. Did you? (unintelligible)

Julia: Oh you just asked a question, are these acceptable words? Yes, thank you for asking. Washtiq’oliq’ol is fine, khapšik is fine, I love that. Another of my favorite plants in our area is hummingbird sage. I love hummingbird sage, it's one of my favorite tea plants and it's good for colds and flus, it's mildly antiviral, etc, it's good for wounds and its name is just qimš and I'll spell it, it's q i m and then the S with the little thingy deal over it. Qimš.

Olivia: I love that. Thank you so much!

Julia: Yeah, my pleasure.

Pamela: Is there anywhere on Earth where we see examples of this ongoing generations deep regenerative horticulture where people have a lot of plants, where we have good models?

Julia: Yeah, Yurok country, Northern California. They have not lost their traditions, they've never stopped making their baskets and running their ceremonies, it's been incredibly disrupted but they do have an unbroken tribal tradition of accessing their land base and they're also probably one of the most successful right now in bringing back the good fires. They've got an excellent program called Follow the Smoke and we're all kind of trying to model what they're doing. I wish I had more information just off the top of my head, this is one place where I should have had notes off to this side but I didn't do it so if you guys want to send me some questions I could probably give you some more people and more organizations and more tribal names to look at. Something really interesting happening in the outer Hebrides of Scotland is that communities are organizing around, uh, I won't say the old Croft style system because you know it's 2023, but they are working really hard to bring back regenerative fishing, regenerative farming on that land, how to do like sheep farming in a way that's not so destructive to the land, and they're the experts in their own land. Those folks out there, they know that land better than anybody in the world. And the reason I know about this is because there's a really interesting foundation in Scotland called the Onaway Trust, o-n-a-w-a-y, and they're a little bit disorganized right now because Covid screwed things up a bit but they have been funding grassroots tribal sovereignty, ceremony, land back. They're badass; they've really supported a lot of people. Also a really good organization to get a hold of that can talk directly about land management techniques and also people, they know everybody and you could ask them questions like this one and they'd give you a much better answer, is the California Indian Basketweavers Association or CIBA, they're fantastic. They've been around for about 40 years, I want to say, and they don't just keep the basket weaving traditional alive, they also educate people about what's happening with all those fire retardants when they drop them on the forest, how does that affect the plants, how does that affect the weavers when they put all those materials in their mouths to process materials, what about all the pesticides that are being sprayed on the side of the road, where does that go in the watershed? They know all of that stuff so they can tell you a lot about California.

Laura: Anybody else?

Julia: Yeah, Yurak Condor Reintroduction Program is super inspiring. Definitely, yeah. I would love to hear from some more people. I have to close my computer in eight minutes and get on the road so I'll just be like bye.

Laura: Yeah, please feel free to unmute, anybody who wants to speak. Please join in and if you feel like you've got stuff you want to add in later, we do have the Facebook group.

Julia: I just saw, Christina texted that, yeah six’on, I thought that was a typo. Six’on is a blue dicks or wild hyacinth or Dichelostemma capitatum for you nerds out there, and that's a really important food plant. Christina who just commented in the chat is a paleobotanist and she does most of her work on the Channel Islands, particularly Santa Cruz and she's so cool. She's one of my favorite scientists. She'll send us, uh, her papers on the carbonized plant material she's finding in the hearts in the pit roasting areas in the village sites of my people out on Santa Cruz Island, and you know it's very easy to date those things, but also she's able to track abundance. Six’on is one of those plants that is perfect for describing how regenerative horticulture works. First of all it's my favorite plant food in California because the little roasted bulbs taste like a cross between a potato and an artichoke heart. They're so good and you can make all kinds of stuff out of them, good healthy starch there. But when you first start to dig them they're like eight inches down in the clay and you kind of burn more calories than you dig up so it's not a very good exchange at first, but you take the little cormlets off the central corm and you put them back in the ground, and so that the next year you've got six growing there instead of one and they're a little closer to the surface and the soil's been worked a bit. But over several years that burst is exponential, it's absolutely crazy what happens when you've been going through and doing that regenerative work for a while, pretty soon all you have to do is go along with a digging stick and just kind of gently work the ground and the little kid that's behind you digs through everything and puts all the little ones back in and puts all the big ones in the gathering bag and you've got enough to feed a family in a very short time and it's great, it's wonderful stuff. Plus just seeing a meadow totally covered with those purple flowers is lovely. Up here the plant that's related very closely to that one is Camas and that is also like a staff of life plant, one of those ones that people regeneratively cultivate and rely on. It's a majorly important food plant up here. They're direct relatives, same family, same techniques for gathering them. Anybody else? Oh Christina thank you, yeah we're pretty nice, we're cute too. We're the bougie natives because we're from Santa Barbara so we have to kind of dress up.

Laura: If we don't have anybody else, thank you so much for doing this with us! This is amazing.

Julia: It's a pleasure. Thank you for letting me ramble about my favorite subject.

Pamela: So fun. Thank you so, so much Julia, thank you.

Julia: Looking forward to hearing the rest of the speakers too, this is going to be a lot of fun, thank you guys for putting this together.

Laura: Oh, you're welcome, this has been so exciting just to have everybody join in and it just feels like such a welcoming thing. So maybe you have a couple of minutes to breathe before you have to run out the door?

Julia: Yeah, I think I might be able to tell my kids that I'm leaving. (Laughter) All right, thanks a lot, I'm gonna go.

Laura: Okay. Thanks so much.

Julia: Bye now.

Pamela: Bye. Damn. That was amazing.

Laura: Thank you to everybody else here for showing up. This is fabulous. I'm gonna put the Facebook group in the chat and you can also find it online under Opulent Mobility Genius Teatime.

Pamela: Yeah, I want to give a little shout out to Laura Brody because I'm like, what if we did this and what if we did it this way and what about this other thing, she's like great, I'll go do that right now and she's the person who's actually like put in all the sweat equity to make this be real, so thank you so much for doing all of that.

Laura: You're welcome and this has been great, I was saying to Pamela that I'm pretty good at getting the ball rolling on things but sometimes I just hit snags and don't know where to go next so it really helps.