Upstream - Honorable Harvest: Indigenous Economics w/ Gregg Castro

Episode Date: June 16, 2026

The hyper-individual, anti-collectivist ideology that defines and permeates Western societies has profound consequences in multiple realms, from mental health to ecological health to economic health��it's a way of living and thinking that has stained our society from the start. No one knows this more than those individuals and cultures who have, for thousands of years, practiced life in a different way. And among those are many Indigenous cultures and nations which have prioritized a way of life that emphasizes the collective over the individual—not erasing the individual, but weaving the individual back into the fabric of society and the web of life.  One of the defining questions of our time is this: how can we learn from Indigenous wisdom to reimagine the world? How can we reimagine the scarcity, competition, and hoarding that defines Western society and replace these values with reciprocity, interconnectedness, and gratitude? And how does connecting with the natural world help us as we reimagine? This is the question asked in the latest book by Robin Wall Kimmerer: The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World. And we've brought on a terrific guest to help us unpack Robin's book and share their own wisdom and experience in relation to it.  Gregg Castro is the Culture Director for the Association of Ramaytush Ohlone and a writer and activist within the California Indigenous community focusing on issues regarding cultural preservation, protection, education and traditional practices.  In this conversation, Della and Gregg talk about their insights and takeaways from The Serviceberry while sharing about their own experiences. Gregg tells us about his childhood growing up in the South San Francisco Bay Area—a region once known for its vast orchards—and talks about how the natural world and the traditional wisdom of his ancestors has shaped his life and his values. They talk about key takeaways from the Indigenous practices and principles of the potlatch, the honorable harvest, and seven generation thinking. And finally, they explore how we can all unplug, unwind, and contribute to a more just and beautiful world based on the lessons of nature and Indigenous wisdom. Further Resources Association of Ramaytush Ohlone The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World, by Robin Wall Kimmerer, Illustrated by John Burgoyne Related Episodes: Debunking the Myth of Homo economicus (Documentary) Our Struggles are Your Struggles: Stories of Indigenous Resistance & Regeneration (Documentary) Intermission music: "Tsitsutsa Tsigesv (When I was a Boy)" by Agalisiga Artwork: John Burgoyne Upstream is a labor of love—we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Subscribe to our Patreon at patreon.com/upstreampodcast or please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

That's really the central distinction between our two cultures, is that we think in terms of we. There's very little about I or me. It's about we. It's about community. It's about us together. We don't live in isolation. We know this from the very moment we're born. We're not in isolation.

We're in community. We're in a village. We're in a multiple-person living structure that we're interoperation. that we're interdependent with. And that's what makes it so hard for Native people, especially those more culturally trained and enveloped in the culture, to bridge that gap and to understand this other world where it's so much about I.

You're listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. A show about political economy and society that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about the world. around you. I'm Robert Raymond. And I'm Della Duncan. The hyper-individualist, anti-collectivist ideology that defines and permeates Western societies has profound consequences in multiple realms,

from mental health to ecological health to economic health. It's a way of living and thinking that has stained our society from the very beginning. No one knows this more than those individuals and cultures who have for thousands of years practiced life in a different way. And among those are many indigenous cultures and nations which have prioritized a way of life that emphasizes the collective over the individual. Not erasing the individual, but weaving the individual back into the fabric of society and into the web of life. One of the defining questions of our time is this. How can we learn from indigenous wisdom to reimagine the world?

And how can we reimagine the scarcity, competition, and hoarding that defines Western society and replace these values with reciprocity, interconnectedness, and gratitude? And how does connecting with the natural world help us as we reimagine? This is the question asked in the latest book by Robin Wall Kimmerer. The service mirror, abundance and reciprocity in the natural world. And we brought on a terrific guest to help us unpack Robin's book and share their wisdom and experience in relation to it. Greg Castro is the culture director for the Association of Rami Tush Alone

and a writer and activist within the California indigenous community, focusing on issues regarding cultural preservation, protection, education and traditional practices. In this conversation, Della and Greg talk about their insights and takeaways from the service berry while sharing about their own experiences. Greg tells us about his childhood growing up in the South San Francisco Bay Area, a region once known for its vast orchards, and talks about how the natural world and the traditional wisdom of his ancestors

has shaped his life and his values. Greg and Della talk about key takeaways from the indigenous practices and principles of their potlatch, the honorable harvest, and seven-generation thinking. And finally, they explore how we can all unplug, unwind, and contribute to a more just and beautiful world based on the lessons of nature and indigenous wisdom. And before we get started, Upstream is almost entirely listener-funded. We could not keep this project going without your support. There are a number of ways in which you can support us financially. You can sign up to be a Patreon subscriber, which will give you access to bi-weekly episodes ranging from conversations to readings and more.

Signing up for Patreon is a great way to make upstream a weekly show, and it will also give you access to our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes, along with stickers and bumper stickers at certain subscription tiers. sign up and find out more at patreon.com forward slash upstream podcast. And if Patreon's not really your thing, you can also make a tax deductible recurring or one-time donation on our website, upstreampodcast.org forward slash support. Through your support, you'll be helping us keep upstream sustainable and helping to keep this whole project go. Socialist political education podcasts are not easy to fund. So thank you in advance for the crucial support.

And now, here's Delo, in conversation with Greg Castro. Greg, welcome. So good to be in conversation with you. Thank you for joining me. Well, thank you for having me. And as I said, thank you for giving me this opportunity to plant me down in a seat or in bed and read quietly. Usually get caught up too much in the work that we have to do and for getting a way. out why we do it sometimes. And this was a good reminder of those aspects of why we do this. Good. I'm happy to hear that. And yes, I did to enjoy getting to reread, braiding sweetgrass and then read The Service Berry. And thank you for being willing to be in conversation with me about it today. And maybe let's just start with an introduction of yourself, just so folks can get to

know you. How might you introduce yourself today? Sure. Shama's a Keshe. Mrs. Tu. greetings in my three lineages. I'm Greg Castro. Tertrace Lennon, Rumson, Ramatushaloni. These are three indigenous communities of California. We've all been here since time and memorial, both indigenous on both my mother and my father's side. And currently, I am the cultural director for the Association of Romitia Soloni, which is the indigenous people of the San Francisco Peninsula and have been doing that work pretty focused over the last seven years. Yes, thank you for that work and for that introduction. And yeah, as I mentioned, we thought we'd have this conversation, which will probably be, you know, broad around economics and ecology and

indigenous wisdom, but to focus it on this new book that Robin Well Kimmer has come out with, the serviceberry, abundance and reciprocity in the natural world. So how might you introduce that book and also Robin in general? Sure. Well, Wobin, as many people, poverty already knows, a well-known writer. She's a mother, as she identifies yourself first, scientist, professor. She's a member of the citizen, Parowatami Nation of Back East. She's written a number of books, grading sweet graphs, obviously, is her most well-known. MacArthur Fellow, and she's a sunny, distinguished teaching professor, environmental biology. So she is a biologist by trade botanist. and that's her specialty, but she uses that knowledge to share the indigenous culture she grew up with, with her relatives that taught her as she was coming up. Thank you.

And, yeah, I'll add her other book is Gathering Moss, a natural and cultural history of mosses. And then I'll also add that she's the founder and director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment. And yeah, I'm wondering anything you might say by way of your connection with her, even if it's, you know, just reading her book or just coming in contact with her work, just how maybe her books and her activism has touched or impact you? Well, yeah, I think, you know, she, you know, that's what happened, you know, that people, you know, sometimes have a way of words that reach out to people and touch people in a different way. I grew up, you know, with a few, reading lots of authors, even when I was very young, but only a few reached like spoke to me. And I think that's what Robin has done that explain things in a way that reach people differently and obviously more broadly because she's a New York time bestselling author. So that's got to count for something that a lot of people talk about her. and obviously she's had an impact and have if for nothing else allowed people to ask questions that they never knew they had questions about before.

Yeah, and I'll just give one example of this, this real gift of language that she has. And it's a quote that I share often. It's actually from braiding sweetgrass, but she talks about the verb-like language of her own indigenous heritage. and what she calls the animacy of grammar. And she talks about, she says that a bay, like a water bay, a bay is a noun only if water is dead. When bay is a noun, it is defined by humans, trapped between its shores and contained by the word. But the verb, wikiwagema, to be a bay, releases the water from bondage and lets it live. To be a bay holds the wonder that for this moment the living water has decided to shelter itself between these shores conversing with cedar roots and a flock of baby Murgansers because it could do otherwise

become a stream or an ocean or a waterfall and there are verbs for that too to be a hill to be a sandy beach to be a saturday all are possible verbs in a world where everything is alive water land and even a day a language a mirror for seeing the animacy of the world this is the grammar of animacy so just to give a taste of that. Yeah, yeah. And what's really good about the way she expresses it is that, you know, it gives not just animacy, but agency. That these things, we treat them as relatives, and they have choice. You know, at this point, and it could change its mind tomorrow. You know, but today it's a bay. It wants to be a bay. So that idea that is embedded in our languages, and maybe that's what we'll start. I think that over my time doing activist work 35 years,

here now that I've learned from elders and have learned myself how to better articulate our indigenous thought patterns or mindsets our way of view in the world in this very rude lewd crude language called English right it's so new so simplistic and so crude that it's difficult to contain the things we really want to talk about in a way that conveys the real meaning. And that, you know, you just had that illustration of people think of these words, most of the time, as nouns, as labels you slap on something. And we think of them, we're describing and talking about relatives, that the whole world that we are part of, we're all

related to each other. We're all children of Mother Earth, if you want to use that expression. And if that's true, that means we're all relatives, we're all siblings. As elders taught me in California, a lot of our oral narratives, what other people call origin stories, tell us that we were put in a place at the beginning of the time, but we weren't the first. We were, in most cases, the last. As one of my elders, Dr. Darrell Bay Wilson said, were the two-footers. And we came last. And by then, the world was shaped by what we call the first people into this paradise that the newcomers have found thousands and thousands years later. But it wasn't just sprung out of nothing,

that it was formed by the first people with the powers given by Creator, and Creator gave them instructions on how to do it and the responsibility to do it in a good way. And then the last responsibility is to bring the two-footers, us humans, into the world, to keep it going. So when we came, we were given the instructions,

basically how to do chores, how to maintain this world. That was a gift. And so that's where the connection with Robin's book is. She talks about the gift economy. The world itself is a gift. It wasn't ordained for us. We had no right to it. We had no predestined determination of for it.

We were brought in and brought in with the idea of being grateful for this gift that was a paradise. that took care of us, literally formed who we are down to our very molecules, were made from the places we came from. And all we had to do is take care of it, to express that gratitude and the humility as a responsibility of these sacred instructions given to us at the beginning. And we did that for many, many thousands of years until it was disrupted by the newcomers. So that time period of literally thousands of years where you develop an intimate relationship with the place you came from. It creates itself, this experience, this relationship you have, creates the language that's from that place. And that's especially in California, too, why there's so many languages in California,

more than anywhere else in the world, perhaps in human history, here in California, because we were put in a place and we didn't have to go far to find food and sustenance, and all the resources we need to not just survive, but to thrive. So our thriveance was directly related to the land we're put on, and we developed this very close, intimate relationship with it, and we use language to describe it. And each language is different because each landscape is different. So what we now do in our struggles is how do we convey that to others

using this crude instrument of English? and I think, you know, Robin did a really good job of that part of it, at least. I kind of commensurate with Robin that, you know, in the book she talks about a little bit of a struggle with the economic parts. And me too. That's not my, you know, wheelhouse, so to speak, when I was growing up either. But culture, you know, which is really what she's talking about when she talks about a college, it's culture. It's all culture. And that I understood, even if it was in a different language from her indigenous language. but still the same concepts.

Yeah, and, you know, you can kind of trace from braiding sweetgrass to the service berry, this journey kind of towards a regenerative economics or ecological or indigenous economics. It's really interesting because she really does start a little bit more with the botany and the biology, but then does broaden out to these larger cultural questions and, you know, this big, deep, kind of upstream question as to why are we in the crises that we're in? And she really comes to a lot around our economic system. And part of it is what you're talking about and reflected in that quote about a bay is dead, you know, if it's a noun, is this commodification, this objectification of the living world. You know, that is part of it. And also this loss of

gratitude and reciprocity, which, as you said, is so central. Yes, and the central part of that gratitude is that we understand we're a part of it, right? In fact, that's one of the central things that I think she expressed not explicitly, but when I'm asked questions or I give talks, that's really the central distinction between our two cultures is that we think in terms of we, there's very little about I or me, it's about we. It's about community. It's about us together. We don't live in isolation. We know this from the very moment we're born. We're not in isolation. We're in community. We're in a village. We're in a multiple person living structure that we're interdependent with. And that's

what makes it so hard for Native people, especially those more culturally trained and enveloped in the culture to bridge that gap and to understand this other world where it's so much about I. And one of the ways that this is described is winingo. And she actually says in Braiding Sweetgrass that we have a windingo economy. So let's introduce this term because I really do find, you know, when we go upstream to the root causes, this metaphor, this monster, this tale is really one of the ways to understand why we're in the mess that we're in. So what is your understanding of when Ningo?

How would you introduce it? Well, you know, there are here in California, and especially in my own cultures, I know that there are stories, as my elder, Dr. Bay talked about, you know, he didn't like the word stories. Stories are what do you tell a cop when they stop to give you a ticket?

He called him oral narratives because there are teaching tools. They're an encyclopedia. There are Bible. There are dictionary. There are instructions. who we are and how we're supposed to be, and sometimes what happens when we don't be how we're supposed to be. And so there's lots of stories in lots of the native cultures I'm familiar with

that talks about, to use the Spanish term that was often used in California, the maleditos, right? The bad spirits, right? And what would happen if you took on their characteristics, or you allowed those bad spirits to go unchallenged. And so that's the Wendingo that I saw in what she was talking about, this bad spirit, this selfish spirit that is only concerned of itself and its own needs. And it only feels. It doesn't think. It doesn't connect.

It doesn't have a relationship and anything but itself in its own fear and hunger. And to me, that's what the windiga. I mean, I never heard the term used that way. I thought that was pretty brilliant. You know, because some people know about that term and inglicized terms, what that might mean. But to have it used in that way that there's this wild spirit that is selfish and self-centered. And that pretty much describes our society nowadays. Absolutely.

And I'm just pulling up a quote from the book so I can read it. On a grounder scale, we seem to be living in an era of when ningo. economics, a fabricated demand and of compulsive overconsumption, what native peoples once sought to reign in, we are now asked to unleash in a systematic policy of sanctioned greed. The fear for me is far greater than just acknowledging the windingo within. The fear for me is that the world has been turned inside out. The dark side made to seem light, indulgent self-interest that our people once held to be monstrous, is now celebrated as success. We are to admire what our people viewed as unforgivable. The consumption-driven mindset masquerades as quality of life, but eats us from within. It is as if we've been invited to a feast, but the table is laid with the food that nourishes only emptiness, the black hole of the stomach that never fills. We have unleashed a monster.

Yes, and the monster is us. Exactly. That's the part we don't want to face. We don't. We don't want to face. We are. are the monsters. And that idea of the monster within us that's become unleashed is because this modern society has, through stoking our fears, broken the bonds that kept our relationships going for thousands and thousands of years. And we're talking about everybody, not just California Native people or Native Americans, so to speak, but we're all indigenous, just that the vast majority of us have forgotten that and have been forced or put in situations where we were made to forget some of us who it happened to a little bit later haven't forgotten but the struggle is still there because we're certainly still impacted by this idea of a self-centered universe right that only

exists for us and because we're we feel so alone right I raised three kids and five grandkids with my wife and we know what happens when kids are little, you can put them in a room and they'll be fine as long as they have the sense that there's somebody nearby, right? Then they can do whatever they want. Sometimes they get a little bratty. They don't want to come in out of the sandbox, whatever, but there's this idea that somewhere there's somebody covering for them.

The moment they think they're not protected, they're vulnerable, that's when they panic. That's when they have their tantrums. And that's what I feel our society is about, right? now is we're in the middle of this two-year-old tantrum in the sandbox because we realize like, hey, wait a minute, we're all alone, everybody for themselves. Which is not true, but that's the belief system that's being stoked by others who then manipulate us to do what they want. And that's what the economy is really about, especially just in the last few months. It's really been more than

just coals in the fire. It's gasoline in the fire. And everybody's affected. Everybody has been at least singed if not burned. And how do you undo that? Well, you know, go find that bay. It's not a noun. It's a verb. Go find the bay and jump in. Put the fire out. And then swim around a little bit. You know, reconnect with that water, which connects to everything else, including all the other people that are in the water with you, trying to put out the plain fire. That's, I think, you know, how does that work? How long will that take? That's hard to say, because we're in a deep bass here. That's my personal opinion. And I get asked that all the time. Like, what's the solution? How do we turn us around? Robin in the book herself talks about that.

And she says the same thing. Most of us say, I don't know. I know the solution. I don't know how to get there because of what it took to get us where we are now. How do we counter that? How do we cure that? I think most of our elders would tell us, our culture bros, would tell us, Well, it's going back to our roots, going back to who we really are, which is usually culturally based, putting our hands in the ground, taking our shoes off, putting our feet in the soil, and having the earth remind us of who we are still, not who we were, who we are still that we may have forgotten because we put shoes and socks on. and we stay in a room and we're talking to video screens instead of to trees. And that's the world we live in, but you can't sustain yourself by doing only that. You have to get out and reconnect with wherever you came from. Now, for most people, sadly, you know, I can get in my car in an hour and a half.

I'm in my homeland or less, depending on traffic. lots of people can't. Lots of people have never been to their homelands. There's lots of native people that have been relocated into the San Francisco Bay Area in the 40s and 50s. They're here for a couple of generations. Some of the young ones have never been to their own homeland. They know who they are. They know where they came from.

They've never been there. And those are the kinds of mechanisms that keep us separate, that keep us on edge, that keep us vulnerable, and keep us easily manipulatable. because we, in this fear-based state, we forget who we are and can't remember how to get back to who we were. And that's really the key. And there's no easy solution to that. And there's no quick fix. Yeah. And so I really hear you're guiding us on this journey upstream, right, from the challenges of our time to supremacies, right? Supremacy of humans over nature, patriarchal supremacy, white supremacy, colonial supremacy. We go upstream, from that we find this isolated sense of self, this ego self or homo-economicus, as Robin points out,

as one of the things we must unlearn about mainstream economic thinking, that we are rational, self-interested beings who are isolated and individualistic, and that's actually what's best for the economy. And then the antidote to that that I'm really hearing is this remembering, right, remembering ourselves to the web of life, remembering ourselves to our eco-spiritual traditions, and that's all of us, including folks from, you know, of settler colonial ancestry of, you know, European ancestry, that there were, you know, pre-Christianization, eco-spiritual traditions that were more animate and more eco-spiritual. And so it's remembering those traditions and those ways of being with the world, but it's also remembering ourselves

to the web of life in any way that we can, like you said, putting our feet on the earth our hands in the soil conversing with the more than human world as kin, as relations, not as, you know, as things commodified only for our use and exploitation. And, you know, one of the real gifts of this book, the Serviceberry, is that, you know, it's as if Robin had this remembering through her relationship with the Serviceberry, right? She had this remembering of this way of reciprocity and abundance and gratitude from being with the more than human world. So let's go into this idea of what she really studied and learned through experience. So about the service berry and about her relationship with botany, how would you describe what

she learned about the gift economy through her relationship with the natural world? And that's the key. The service barrier is something that is very central to their culture back east. You know, what most people understand is that in large parts of the West Coast, California, it's the oak tree with the acorns serving a very similar function, that we understand trees are central to a landscape, that they take up resources and then redistribute them in a very equitable way, that then services the entire community

that then services the tree back. So then you find this very symbiotic, ongoing living relationship, this web and cycle of give and take that goes on endlessly. It was there even before the two footers came along, and we know it's been here for the tens of thousands of years that we've been here,

and we were put into this system and integrated to it. it welcomed into it after expressing our gratitude for being there. And now we're part of it. And of course, now we're sort of feeling the responsibility of healing it, you know, and fulfilling our responsibilities that we've been prevented from doing for the last half a millennia in the continent in 250 years here in California. But the idea of having this abundance, we well understood that, you know, in the before time, meaning before contact, there was no homelessness. There was no hunger. There was no aloneness unless, you know, you wanted that or you so severely acted out

that the community can know or tolerate your presence as long as you continued to act that way. So you were literally banished. That was actually worse than a death penalty in a lot of communities in California. To be alone was considered worse than death. So within that context, is that conformity? That's what we were taught, you know, to have these villages, these tribal communities, was you had to conform to the rules. And that's not how they worked, that tribes needed individuals to be the best they could be so that the tribe could be the best they could be.

That's a very different way of view in the world and people within it. she talks about that, that people come into the world and are raised in the community with gratitude and humility and understanding that you're part of a world that's a gift, and the gift is treated with respect by not abusing it. And the most important part of that is don't take what you don't need. Only what you need. That means there's plenty for everybody else. there's not really any waste because even if it's not used, it goes back into the environment and recycles again.

So this idea of waste is in a sense foreign to most indigenous communities. When we hunted, when we gathered, we used all parts of whatever we gathered after we asked permission and attain permission to gather in a good way. we respected that permission by using all of it. So if we hunted, let's say, a deer, right? We used all parts of the deer. It wasn't just meat. We used the skin. We used the sinew as cordage.

We made rattles out of the deer hooves. I have a deer hoof rattle sitting right next to me that I use when I sing songs. We use a deer bone to tie the hoofs together to form the rattle. It's our idea of honoring this gift of the food that the deer gave to us. And we expressed that gratitude by using all of it, not wasting it, and being disrespectful to the deer. By being wasteful. And, you know, if we kill a deer and there's food left over, well, we don't toss it. We don't necessarily store it, although lots of native communities knew how to store food if they needed to.

but we usually just call, hey, we got some extra food. Would you have to come over and eat with us? So it didn't get wasted. Everybody benefited from your abundance. The generosity that the world gave to you, you turned around and gave it to somebody else. Because that's what we were always taught to do. So in this, I mean, that's how I was raised,

even within this modern context. I was born and raised and lived my whole life here in San Jose, where I'm still at. And yet I lived in a family that understood this idea of there's enough for everyone. And if we have more than we need, there's always somebody in the family that could use it. We let them have it. No questions asked. No thought of return. No thought of payment.

It's like, no, that's just what's supposed to happen. that we're done. Here's some more. Take it. And if you have any leftover, you pass it on to the next person. These are not actually foreign. I think Robin points that out towards the end of the book

that it's what she calls the disaster economy, I think, is that we have these responses to disasters, large and small, where people donate generously, right? So the idea is not totally, foreign to us. It's just that something somehow pushes us out of that muck that we've immersed ourselves in in this scarcity economy. And we find, well, maybe we're not that scarce after all. We can donate. We can offer. We can send money. We can send food. We can send goods. We can send

ourselves in some cases. People travel to go help other people. And we're doing that more often in California now. Why aren't we doing that every day? I live in San Jose. We had a huge homeless problem. We still do in a sense that they've started to address by basically clearing out homeless camps. Where are those people going? They keep on saying, well, there's plenty of housing. Well, how come there's still homeless people then? We haven't resolved all these questions ourselves, but we certainly hate to look at it. And we certainly hate to have that pushed into our face. It's only something like Robin says, this disaster economy, when something shocks us out of our stasis, you know, our static place,

our very self-serving place, that we can react in a way that our ancestors did every single day for thousands of years, all across the world. So I think that's the important part to remember. We get stuck in this idea of time that is very short-sighted. We think of this economy as always being here. There's never been another way. And it's actually in human history really, really short that this, this scarcity economy has been relatively well embedded only over a very short time. But we've been managed to be brainwashed into thinking it's always been here and it's the only way. And it obviously is not. Yeah, thank you. And yeah, you brought up the scarcity aspect, which she talks a lot about in the book.

And, you know, the scarcity part is interesting because in one sense, yes, we can learn from nature abundance, right? Like I'm thinking about an apple tree or cherry blossoms right now are in bloom. And there is such abundance. And yet there is also scarcity at times in our ecological systems. And she talks about this, like, let's say a drought, you know, or some sort of like a wildfire. Something might happen where, you know, the, you know, the. the trees or the berries produce less. And one thing she says is that with this attitude of the honorable harvest, which we'll go into in a moment, it's it's that everyone kind of shares in that,

that like scarcity instead of only some people taking so much more than others and other people having nothing. And then she also distinguishes the natural scarcity that can happen and manufactured scarcity. And I think that's really important because actually in capitalism in our current dominant economic system, there is scarcity, right? There is only one corner office. There is only one CEO. People have said that our economy is like a game of musical chairs in the way that, you know, it really is vicious in the way it pits us against each other and makes us inherently competitive against one another for, you know, what are manufactured as scarce. resources. Now, it doesn't have to be that way, but she really does bring that up. So, you know, again,

learning from the abundance of nature and the natural world, when there is drought or pests or wildfire that we, that we share in that reduction, you know, equally, and that we also address where there is this manufactured scarcity that is so vicious and really does isolate to individualate individual ourselves. Yeah, and it is manufactured because here's an example.

Yesterday I went to go getting something for my wife at Dollar Tree, right? And I was kind of walking, you know, I was looking for a particular thing. But I was going on when I was looking around

at the literally 100,000 of the items they have in a dollar tree and I'm thinking, oh, I could use that. Oh, that would be cool to have. And I realized, you know, right in the middle of reading this book, It's like how immersed we are in this. Even I am as a native person trying to fight against that.

And yet I can get caught up on it just like anybody else, right? You know, I hear these, read these stories of strategy of when you go to Costco, right? Ride a list. Look at your list. Don't look up from your list because then you see, oh, the prudies. You know, and you get caught up on that. instead of walking out of Costco with three things, you wind up with 12 or 112. That's the mentality we have because it's an emotional response, right?

That's where it's so difficult that the, you know, manufactured scarcity model, you can look at it rationally, logically. You can, you know, look at the data, the information. It's all right there. It makes sense. It's obvious that this is a world where we have a manufactured scarcity that drives our consumption that's all consuming and never ending. And yet, nearly all of us are caught up in it in some way because it's been embedded into our emotional makeup.

With Dollar Tree or Costco or Walmart or the endless sales that we're, we see, you know, on media, whether it's television or now even the internet that we're being targeted, that, you know, whatever you have, here's one more thing you really, really need. It's really hard to get around that when it's at the emotional level. That's really strong. And the only thing that I found personally that helps me in any way is going to my culture that has been around for literally 15,000 plus years. and has such an embeddedness into the landscape of relationship building, right? Which comes in many forms of ritual, ceremony, song, stories, dances.

The elder that taught me said, those are all prayers. And the purpose of prayers, to use the English term, is to renew every single time you do it, and for us it used to be every day, to renew the relationship with everything around us, to remember who we are and our place within that web of life. And that's why we did it so often, because we never were able to forget.

Well, obviously, colonization, genocide, the cultural wars, the things that have happened with rampant capitalism, the entire purpose of it is to make us forget those relationships, make us back into individuals that can be manipulated easily by ads, by walking into a dollar tree, and spending, you know, 12 times what you intended. The idea of enough for all is really so hard in it.

It's not that old. You know, not too long after you sent me the book, I went on a trip back to my dad's homeland. We're talking not far away. It's just Monterey County. to a tribal member's ranch. And she's off the internet. We're away from lights.

It's like, oh, good time to read a book. Well, I forgot the book. I didn't bring it with me. But she had another book that was very familiar with. It called Enough for All. It was actually written by somebody who I knew personally. She passed away just a short while ago. She said Kathleen Rose Smith was a Miwok and Pomo elder,

just north of San Francisco. and she grew up in Healdsburg area and she was an artist and a writer and a naturalist and did all kinds of things and wrote a book for Hayday Books called Enough for All and she said something that really lived with me this book's about 10 years old and yet it echoed you know,

Rahman's book echoes much of what she says in the book this is Kathleen saying my mother told about her own mother, my grandmother, who taught her that we had many relatives that we all had to live together, so we'd better learn how to get along with each other. She said that wasn't really hard to do. It was just like taking care of your younger brother or sister. You got to know them, find out what they liked, and what made them cry, so you would know what to do. Sounds like it's not true, but it is. When that baby gets to be a man or a woman,

they're going to help you out. You know, I thought she was talking about us Indians and how we're supposed to get along with each other. I found out later by my older sister that mother just wasn't talking about Indians, but the plants, the animals, birds, everything on this earth. They are all our relatives and we better know how to act around them or they'll get after us. It's that very Indian phrase in English, they'll get after us that I think is, you know, really spot on. And in a way, that's what we're experiencing the world now with our climate crisis. Mother Earth is getting after us.

And I always emphasize this the last several years as I've learned to better articulate what I've been taught by elders that let us not fool ourselves that in the climate crisis we're saving the Earth. We're doing no such thing. We're saving ourselves. The Earth will do fine without us.

The Earth was here before us. Two phages showed up. As far as we can tell, Mother Earth likes us. We're one of her children, but sometimes children need to be put into the corner and taught a lesson. And that's what we're learning now. And the less we learn the lesson, the longer it takes to learn the lesson, the more Mother Earth is going to discipline us until we get the message or we get out of the way.

And there's elders that have talked about. We have no special place in the world that the Eurocentric, model tells us we are the supreme beings of our existence on the planet. And tens of thousands of years of indigenous science says that's not the case at all. Even modern science says that's not the case. You know, homo sapiens aren't that old at all. And for all we know, we might be replaced by crickets and grasshoppers in the next evolution. If we don't take care of business, because Earth likes us, but doesn't need us. has lots to choose from. We're not saving the earth. We're saving ourselves. And when I talk,

I know that there's this, at least there was a level of let's not get people too upset. Let's not get them too much in a panic mode. And I go, yeah, we're way past the panic button time, I think, personally. I think our elders have been talking about their interaction with their homeland through over 100 years saying it's getting bad and it's getting worse. They've been seeing. They've been this for a long time with indigenous science, the data collection through their own hands, through their feet, through their mouths, through their eyes and their noses, very highly developed instruments of science and telling them the world was changing and it wasn't good. How do we get around that? How do we recover from that? How do we get back to the job we were supposed to do

when we're brought here in the first place, those original instructions. Is it too late? I think that's the wrong question. I think that's what elders tell me. It's more of what are we supposed to do and how come we're not doing it. Regardless of the

outcome, which we are also taught that is an illusion that we have control of. We only have control over ourselves and what we do. So let's just do that and let the rest take care of it. But if enough of us do, that it will be good enough, I think. Yeah, you remind me of Martin Shaw, a mythologist. He says,

when we prematurely claim doom, we posit dominion over the miraculous. We could weave our grief to something more beautiful than that possibility. And he says it's as if we've walked out of a movie 15 minutes before the end, you know? And so instead of like, is it over or not, it's more like, what is our wise response right now? And I really, hear that gratitude and enoughness, which you brought in, that those are really radical acts right now facing our current economic system to practice gratitude. And as you mentioned, daily ritual or daily ways to reconnect us and to practice that gratitude and to cultivate a sense of enoughness. And one of the ways that Robin Well Kimmerer brings this in is through the invitation of the

honorable harvest. And so, She offers it as a way to relate to the more than human world. We might imagine if we were foraging, for example, and she gives many stories of foraging in both books, braiding sweetgrass and the service berry, things like sweetgrass or service berries or wild leaks. That's another story she tells. But she documents the honorable harvest.

I want to share these because I just find they really echo what you're sharing and also give us instructions. as to how to relate with the more than human world. So she says, first off, know the ways of the ones who take care of you so that you can take care of them. And I just want to make visible here. It reminds me of oikos nomos ecology and economics and how they share that oikos, that echo, E-C-O, where it's like to manage our home, Oikosnomos, economics, we must deeply know our home, Oikos, Logos. ecology. So, you know, and she is such a wise person in her study of ecology. So knowing the ways

of the ones who take care of us so that we can take care of them, that's the first one. Then she says, introduce yourself, right? So if you're foraging for wild links, introduce yourself to the plans, introduce yourself to the forest. She says, be accountable as the one who comes asking for a life, right? Just like really feeling the gravity of that we are not entitled, right? And we, We are asking for a life. You mentioned the story of a deer, like hunting for a deer, for example. And then ask permission before taking and abide by the answer. And like, what deep listening skills does somebody have to have to be able to listen to the wild leak or to the deer?

Right. Like, that's a really interesting thing to think about. And then never take the first one and never take the last. And she talks about this in Braiding Sweetgrass. I think it's like she finds the first leaf. and says, I can't take that one and then keeps looking for the next one. She says, take only what you need, take only that which is given, never take more than half, leave some for others, harvest in a way that minimizes harm, use it respectfully, never waste what you've taken, share, give thanks for what

you've been given, give a gift of reciprocity for what you've taken, and the last one, sustain the ones who sustain you and the earth will last forever. So I want to see if you have any response to those documented, the Honorable Harvest. Yeah, I think, you know, that I was especially blessed when I started this work, you know, growing up, knowing I was native, but not growing up in the culture, as many of the coastal mission Indians did not. And of course, others throughout the state too, colonization and genocide being so pervasive across the state here in California, there are lots of native people who did not grow up into culture or had to practice what little they had in secret. And yet it was still there and it still survived. It went underground in lots of cases. And when I started out in 1990, one of the first things I went to by pure accident was a cultural gathering.

I didn't even know that's what it was. My tribal council, I was on tribal council. I was a young kid at the time. And they sent me off to this meeting because they didn't do meetings. So, you know, send the kid from the city. That's what they do in the city. They meet all the time. So let him go.

But it turned out to be a language gathering of culture bears, you know. And it was supposed to be language. but culture bears do all the culture. They don't just do one culture. They do all of it. So there was lots of basket weavers I met there, a number of them. And they all taught me something very similar to what Robbins talking about. And of course, by then I had become familiar with one of my cousins, Linda Yamani,

who is a well-known basket weaver here in the Central Coast in Monterey. And she was taught the same thing by these elders in California that had been handed down. this tradition of how you go about being in the world and doing these things like basket weaving and that's the first thing you do is you find the place that you feel a connection to the rudimentary beginnings of a relationship or to use a English story does it have a good vibe for you right so then you go just like stand there right and see if the place reacts to you and they usually don't talk about time, how long that might take, minutes, days, I don't know, but you just kind of like feel it.

And then at some point you begin to talk and introduce yourself to this place. And you say, well, you know, you're just a lovely place. I really like the things that are here. And I would like to make beautiful baskets from the things I see here. And I would like your permission to work with you to gather these things. in a good way. And then you wait for the answer. Now, that, you know, was just a wonderful lesson by itself. It was years later, I was talking to a basketweaver who was repeating the same thing and I happen to ask, well, wait a minute, what happens if the answer is no? Nobody had ever

had, I don't think she'd ever heard that answer before. It's like, as Robin said, you respect the answer. And in most, almost nearly all cases, if you do it in a good way, you'll get it. You'll get affirmative answers. But I asked that question. It's like, well, what if the answer's no? And they kind of like stuff like, well, if the answers no, well, the answers no. Go away. Go someplace else.

Although later they came back and said, well, maybe you can come back the next day. Maybe they're having a bad day, you know, come back the next year. Maybe it was a bad year. Maybe somebody else had already asked, you know, you don't know. But that day, if that answer is no, the answer is no. full stop, go somewhere else. That's a very different response and something that people don't catch in these things.

They understand about gratitude, reciprocity, asking permission. But getting and honoring the permission is a deeper level that not everybody gets. And that was a very important lesson for me in the work that I do. It's like if you go someplace, if you're doing something in the land,

ecological restoration. Maybe that place isn't ready. for you. Maybe it's too wounded. Maybe there's she have to do something else first and then come back and ask permission. Maybe you have to do some healing things to it to get it to a place where it can give assent and assert its agency to be able to give permission. There's all these nuances that you should give respect to another human being, but the thought of giving it to plants and animals and even landscape just doesn't come into our consciousness. But that's how native people are grown up.

There's no distinction between a human being and a tree being and a plant being and a bird being and a ground being, a rock being. They're all living manifestations of creations just like we are. And they all deserve the same respect. And so you go through these protocols. We use that English term nowadays. some would even say their rituals to develop a relationship, right? So I learned early on being part of San Jose and after high school,

I jumped right into the Silicon Valley rat race and worked in tech for almost 50 years. And I know even though I tried to avoid it, had to learn a little bit about business and how business connected. And it's always very transitory and transactional and scary because not everybody adheres to the same business protocols, let alone ethics. And so you have to be aware of who you're dealing with. In the native world, that's backwards. It's like, you don't do business, if that's what you want to call it, with somebody you don't know. you have to build a relationship and that relationship has to build on trust, mutual trust, going both ways, before you entrust somebody to do business with.

And of course, in the old times, that business could be very crucial to your life way, right? The exchange of food, right? Trade ties, right? Marriage ties even. Those are very critical things, you know, nowadays, if you go into a store and so, somebody doesn't want you to sell you something. Well, now there's another store down to treat, or you just do it out, or you offer more money,

and sometimes then they'll sell it to you. That's just not the way we look at the world. You create a relationship, then you do business. You don't do business and in hope a relationship magically appears after the fact, because we all know, and we read about it almost daily, that that doesn't happen and doesn't work out that well. The percentage, batting percentage is not that high. when you do it in that way.

You're listening to an upstream conversation with Greg Castro. We'll be right back. So, Lully, unadal Gatty O'i, who Jee's see o'erone, C'OJ. O'Holing, that's the one of us,

and a lily he'llie, so, J, Doha, see o'j, doha, I'm Gullig, go hasty, I'm done at least Gautiholy Garno'o'est

And I'm a tushkin I'm a I'm a Ghalihan, I'm a Wachto heedom Goo Gah! The Ligueh Dele Wodeast

Gohidah Dhihii Oestee Nanihae and Jathloy Oestee, Kali Oestee, Kali wasty,

Kliwo isti Oestee, Oste, Oste, Gutee Hoas, That was Situu Kyi, Ghano Leskong, and Ani Tusci, Ani J. Usti, Aga Lihan, Wachto Hiata. That was Sitsutsa Sigas, or When I Was a Boy, by Aga Sigila. Now, back to our conversation with Greg Castro.

And, you know, she talks about this in a really interesting way. this idea of relationship and sharing. She gives an example of somebody who has a service berry farm, and they invite people to just come and pick the berries. And she alludes to the fact that somebody might say, that doesn't make economic sense. You know, why wouldn't you charge? Like, you could totally charge for those.

Why would you just give them away for free? And the person really gives an example, or it gives a different take on what investment means, right? Like you're saying, to invest in, community. And it's not like an exchange thing. Like I'm going to let people come and pick the berries for free so that they owe me a favor. No, it's not an exchange. But it's more my investing in the well-being of the community. She gives an example, like perhaps they'll be more likely to support policies or, you know, practices that are more supportive of the land around here and the bioregion.

Or they're just more likely to give gifts further down the line. So it's like it just enhances the gift economy more generally and builds community cohesion. And another example of this, this one is really, it stood out to me for both books, actually. Robin Well Kimmer talks about Daniel Everett, who was an anthropologist, visited an indigenous community, a hunter-gatherer community in the Brazilian rainforest. And he saw somebody come back from hunting and they shared the, the meat with the community. And this person, Daniel Everett, said, you know, this didn't make economic sense because this person who hunted this animal could have saved it, could have

stored it and gave themselves and maybe their immediate kin or their immediate family more benefit. So why did they do this? And he asked this person, this, you know, this hunter. And what the hunter responded was, store my meat. I store my meat in the belly of my brother. Such a powerful reframe. It's like, and it just really speaks to the, the root causes of the challenges of our time of, you know, storage and hoarding and, you know, this is mine and me and fences and all that versus this alternative of I store my meat in the belly of my brother. So what comes up when I, when I should remind us of that story? Well, you know, it talks about the psychosis of our current society, because even if you talk to certain elements of it in a rational way, you know,

and there's certain aspects of our society that are supposedly very conservative, very family oriented, to use that term Christian-oriented, I grew up as a Catholic. My mother was a catechist teacher for 20 years. I'm well-versed in the, I think, above average, I think, than most people in the understanding of Christianity and what this person that we have named Jesus Christ talked about. And what some people keep insisting is the fundamental guide in their life, and yet they don't act it out, right? I am my brother's keeper. Is a fundamental tenet of Christianity and this society that they want to create that's based on it doesn't act like it. And yet, Here is these pagan, savage Indians

wandered around the Brazil forest doing exactly what this person Jesus Christ said and had been doing it for thousands of years before he existed. These are the things that drew me to native culture. Actually drew my mother, even though she was the devout Catholic.

But she made that distinction. He says that's what drew me to these things. These are the things our family grew up with. of sharing, of investing, if you want to use that word, but it's like, you know, they're family. I'm not going to sit there and watch my cousin starve or even go hungry, right? When I grew up, we had fathery gatherings. There was no lack of food whatsoever. What there was a lack of usually are pans and pots and plates to take home the extra food. That's what we usually like. You're stuffing into the napkins, you're putting it into the plastic bags, whatever you do so people can

go home with the abundance of this gathering that you're at. And this was just the modern crude version of what our people had been doing for 15,000, 20,000, uncounted numbers of years, where the

idea of hoarding, yes, we did store because there were times of the year where we wouldn't be able to get that food. But we also shifted. what we gathered during that time. There was always something we could gather for sustenance any time of the year as well as stored goods. But again, it wasn't just for me. I didn't hoard it, you know, beef jerky under my pillow in my tuli hut. No, it was in the common

storehouse that we all took care of, protected from critters who would want to share with permission and then it would be there for everyone right the idea of a community is so foreign to our thinking you know we can't really stretch it you know in modern society beyond family right my wife my kids that's it I'm done yeah I like my neighbors grandparents yeah love them but they're two states away my cousins yeah they come around and drink my beer but other than that I don't see them that often those are the trappings of modern life that we call family, we call community.

And they're totally alien to us as native people that we would keep something when somebody wants it. What am I going to do with it? Well, unless you did store it, you wouldn't store a lot because there would be a limit to what you could store, a limit to what you wouldn't want to store. Right? Because if you stored too much, that means you took too much. Now, what's going to happen next season? You might get lucky. Maybe there's a one or two deer. Maybe three deer. The whole village is going to feast. If you take five deer, well, now what about next season? That herd is going to be diminished. Now there's got, may not be enough deer because you took five the year before. So this idea of taking what you need. even in the moment when you're just like, well, I don't need more. I'm just going to stop here.

But embedded within that is the understanding that there is not just tomorrow, not just next year, but there's forever. Somebody asked me about that kind of a, it's a cliche, I'm thinking of seven generations. And I usually respond, well, you know, the elders that taught me, they think that's very short-sighted. They think 70 times seven generations. they're thinking long term, very long term.

Our idea of time is very truncated. It's part of the SCADA model. We don't have any enough time. We have to get that now, right? That's why we have sales, right? That's why I get, you know, dead tree leaves in the mail every week, advertising sales, and they're only going to last until Friday. Come and get it now.

And do we really need it? again, it's that mentality of, you know, dollar tree of Costco or Walmart or all the other ones that you go in and you see this abundance, right? And I have talked to people that have been from outside of America, right? We're not talking about, you know, the backwaters are Borneo. We're just talking about other places. And they come to America and they're just absolutely flabbergasted at the amount of product we have in our stores like a Safeway. or a Walmart or Costco. It's just mind-boggling to them. And then they go, well, some of the stuff, it only lasts a certain time. What happens to it?

And most people don't know and don't want to know that it gets tossed. It's utterly wasted. There's regulations that even prevent it from being given to the poor and the hungry. Or it's self-preservation

because they think, well, somebody gets sick and they might get sued. So we can't do that, right? I'm part of the American Indian cultural district in San Francisco where we're trying to help on this issue and that's something we encounter. It's like, well, we can't really give, we can give some things away,

but we can't give other things away because liability. Meantime, people are starving. What kind of crazy world is that that we've created in this scarcity model that's so antithetical to the harvest that Robin talked about, the abundance harvest.

There was that. word she used that was, I've heard it before, but I hadn't really paid attention to it. The tragedy of commons, right? What an odd term. Who thunked that up? I mean, and the whole concept behind the idea is utterly alien to indigenous thought. Or what we would say in English, it's an oxymoron. And yet it's a whole philosophy that's the foundation of our scarcity the economy. That, again, it's not a we, it's an I. It's based on the idea of a person who has to worry about whether there's any food tomorrow. So I have to gather everything I can today and hoard it and get as much as I possibly can. There's no discussion of, well, what about the guy next to you?

What about the next door neighbor? Yeah, I think the presumption is, well, if you have a family, you're going to share it with your kids, maybe your spouse, but the idea of your neighbor, well, you know, there's a store down the street, go buy your own. I mean, you know, I like that idea that Robin talked about, you know, in your, you know, creating these micro communities. You know, that's not the word she used, but that's what I call them. You know, and we did this when we were young, right? I grew up in an isolated area of San Jose south of the Virgins. that was basically a field and it was a former orchard.

So I grew up in the middle of a bunch of walnut trees. Walnuts were falling all over the place in fall and we'd buck it then. We'd use as many as you can. And then we start passing around the neighborhood. We were surrounded by a more conventional, you know, track home neighborhood. But the kids all came into our area

because there was a big field. We played baseball and football and catch and all kinds of things out in the field. And in the fall, we would be surrounded by these walnut trees and they would just go to waste if we didn't take them. So we all like started buckets and then bags and then we put the bags out. If we knew neighbors that, you know, elders that couldn't get over there, like we'd take them over there. Hey, Joe, here's some walnuts.

You know, do you need somebody to crack them for you? We'll find somebody to crack them for you. That's what neighborhoods were really like back in the 50s and 60s when I grew up. And we don't see that today. isolated and so scared by scarcity that we hoard ourselves and within our own houses. I'm as guilty as that of as anybody. My own grandkids and kids know our neighbors, but I don't. I'm too busy doing other things. And I've lived here a long time. But that's the kind of the corruption that I've allowed to creep in my own life. And I think we all are guilty of that. And I think the purpose of that is to

remember that and to counter that every day. You know, a lot of the culture bears I know, they sing songs every morning. And it reminds of who they are, right? I have this regalia that I'm holding on to right now that reminding me of who I am of part a community, part of a system of living, that even community, which in the old does meant we're in a village. now community is much more, if it's the right term, amorphous, that it exists in a spiritual level,

but not in a physical level anymore, because they're so spread out. And of course, colonization, genocide is contributed to that. Modern society is contributed to that. I grew up in San Jose, that was the Valley of the Heart's Delight. It was the prune capital of the world. I worked those orchards when I was a kid, myself, my brother, my mom,

to supplement family income. you know, walnuts and prunes and apricots for many years and didn't think anything of it. I didn't think I grew up poor. I had enough every day. I ate every day. I had a place to play and live and grow up every day. I had great neighborhoods and a great neighborhood every day. That's been kind of washed away in a lot of places. And we've had to form these virtual communities, I think, to supplement that. And they're weak substitutes for that relationship that so tightly bound us together for so many generations. And now we're trying to

scramble, try to recreate that, hopefully in time, to band together in a way that's going to save ourselves. Yeah. And I really hear the way that you're identifying the invitations to unlearn what we've learned about mainstream economic thinking, right, that Robin offers us offers us, and one of them is that on learning this idea of this myth of the tragedy of the commons, which Garrett Harding offered this idea that, you know, if we have a commons, a common land or resource that due to our homo-economics, rational self-interested natural way of being, in quotes, that we will exploit it. We will exploit it and extract it to the point where it is depleted. And the consequence or the and so as a result of that is that it is better for things

to be privatized. Right. It is better for something to be privately owned and not a commons anymore. And that could be water, education, land, etc. So it's really a justification for that. And one, one thing that is Eleanor Ostrom, the first woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize in economics, she debunked this myth and how she did this was she went around the world and throughout time and found examples of people in places that do manage commons and no surprise to you,

it is mostly indigenous communities. And so that's why, like you said, this really feels shocking or like an oxymoron because it is so antithetical to the cultures and the ways of living of indigenous peoples. And so, and she identifies, Eleanor Ostrom identifies how it is that people, have been managing commons. And she says, you know, accountability is a crucial part of this,

but also this sense of community. And Robin O'Kimmer talks about this. She says, you know, it's from the tragedy of the commons to the abundance of community. And I love that what you're talking about of like who is it that we see as our relations, right? And not just our immediate kin, but we can also say our kith, right? Like our widened circle of relations. And then, of course, to the more than human world. It's reminding me of when I, we got to interview Cornell West. I remember Cornell West, who's African American, called my co-host Robert, who's Persian and white. He called him brother. And I was like, wow, it just, it really touched me that he had never met him before. And yet he called him brother in the conversation. And that just speaks to, yeah, what do we see as our,

as our relation, as our family? And I just want to kind of conclude here with this, this idea of I store my meat in the belly of my brother, Robin expands that beyond the human. She says, and this is a quote from the book, as I watch the robins and the cedar wax wings fill their bellies, and she's talking about the service berries, I see the gift economy in which abundance is stored in the belly of my brother. Supporting a thriving bird community is essential to the well-being of the service berry and everyone else up and down the food chain. This seems especially important to an immobile long-lived being like a tree who can't run away from ruptured relationships. Thriving is possible only if you have nurtured strong bonds within your community. And she really echoes this phrase several times in her books,

all flourishing its mutual. Yes, the idea of the, you know, earlier in the book talked about Adam Smith's rational economic man, that ideal of how people presume they would be under the tragedy of commons they're going to act only in their self-interest speaking to the worst of us so the idea again then is of well why we just give into that that's the only conclusion they can go with let's just give in to that childish a self-centered narcissistic idea of a rational economic man who only is going to serve themselves and create a system to serve that that's their idea. You know, Robin talks about the empathic mutualist human who thinks in a very different way. And like you said, there's been economic studies that don't get a lot of light that show there are different ways and they do work. In my understanding of how we developed very complex, highly evolved what we would call protocol, social constructs of how to behave in our communities over thousands of years,

hundreds of generations, so that we would learn to interact together, right? So what the Europeans came and saw as savages, we were actually far superior to them in a lot of ways, as my elders would say, because they don't know how to act. They're acting like children.

They don't act in community. Our elders, our ancestors, understood that there was a level of us based on emotions, mainly fear, and those harsher gut emotions that would drive us towards individuality, right?

So they created social structures, we use this term village or tribe, that countered that and gave another way for you as a person to flourish outside of your fears. And you did that because you learned to depend and develop relationships with everything around you, not just the human beings within your village,

but everything around you. And everybody else did the same. So it was very communal, to use that term, that some people are, for some reason, are afraid of. But community. That's what we are also, I think, intended to be in community, that we all want to be in community. We just don't know how.

and we've forgotten how. And with a little bit of time we have left, I want to share something. During the pandemic, you know, I worked for AT&T for many, many years, up until a year and a half ago. And I had to work through the pandemic, the shutdown. And one of the things I did was, at the very beginning of the shutdown, was we were ordered to put in literally hundreds of high-speed fiber optic systems.

We'd never had to do that at that level. I mean, I had been working with fiber objects for many, many years, but that level of orders, like, we got stacks of orders to implement business lines that normally take months and we had like a week. Because they needed them that bad. Somebody saw what was going to happen during the pandemic. Anyway, I had to work through the pandemic. So I wasn't doing any community indigenous work during that time. I was busy working, as were my colleagues. and then about a month and a half after that, I started getting emails asking, can you come and talk to our employee group? I go, okay, what's that about?

You know, lots of high-speed community pipelines had come in, like Zoom. There are other business ones, but Zoom was the one that became popular to the common person by that time. And they learned how to use them and learn to use this tool in a different way. because these employee groups were not there because they were doing employee work. They were there because they felt their companies had abandoned them,

told them to go home, we don't need you and want you right now, we'll call you when we do. And so they had to sit there for more than a moment, wasn't exactly vacation, and they started to really think about the world that they lived in and existed in, and started to question that.

and that's what I saw happening in a way I'd never seen before in all the work I'd done that you know Nizjic before started you were saying

you know tried to avoid saying yeah we told you so but that's what we were saying your cogs in the machine we were cogs in the machine that were almost ground to dust your cogs in the machine too

what does that make you feel like what does that make you want to do and what people naturally did because they couldn't do it at work in their normal workplace flow of things. Go to coffee, go to break, go to dinner, go party and have drinks afterwards. Whatever they

used to do, they couldn't do that anymore. They still wanted to be together. At least some of them did. So that told me that our inherent pension is for connection. That goes beyond our fear. Because fear was there for a while

and then they got beyond their fear and then they go, well, I feel so alone. We know this from many studies that have been done are still ongoing about being alone is maybe the greatest fear of all. And I think that's what Robin's books, The Serviceberry, Grading Sweetgrass, is about what my dear elder Kathleen Smith's book,

Enough is for All, was about, is talking about what it means to live in a world where you're not alone. and in a sense you're literally surrounded by living beings all around you rather than just objects and it's such a different

way of looking at the world beyond fear beyond selfishness you realize if you think about it and you immerse yourself into it and I've lucky enough to be able to do that that you are connected to everything

And at some point, although you have to keep working on it, that like I said about prayer, it's about renewing that relationship. And that relationship is about reminding yourself, you're not alone. You're never alone. And as long as we remember that, maybe we'll get somewhere. Yeah, as Thomas Berry once stated, the universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects. And you're absolutely right. Robin's work really reminds us of that. we are part of a web of life. And so how could we possibly be alone? We are so interconnected.

So one of the one of the ways to move from this interconnectedness and sharing and gratitude and abundance in the idea stage to the material stage is the practice of the potlatch. So I want to bring that in. And I know the potlatch comes from the northwest indigenous communities. but I just want to like voice it because it feels like a very manifestation of what we're talking about. So Robin O'Kimber talks about the potlutch and she says, you know, in a gift economy, wealth is understood as having enough to share. And the practice for dealing with abundance is to give it away. In fact, status is not determined by how much one accumulates, but by how much one gives away.

The currency in a gift economy is relationship, which is experience. which is expressed as gratitude as interdependence and the ongoing cycles of reciprocity. A gift economy nurtures the community bonds that enhance mutual well-being. And the economic unit is we rather than I, as in all flourishing as mutual. So there's that phrase again. So tell us about the potlatch, if you have any experiences with potlatch, but also just, yeah, what it is and how it exemplifies and embodies what we just shared. from the people I've interconnected with, not just in California, but I've been fortunate to meet people, indigenous people from all over the world, Hawaii, Japan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Australia, South America, New Zealand, all over the place. And they all have different words for the same process, the same central part of their life as a community, is gatherings, to use the same.

the English term. And when you gather, you share. You bring, right? Like, I mean, with a few exceptions, when you're invited to a family potluck, what do you do? You bring food, you know? You may have to run down the safe way and buy, you know, macaroni salad in a box, but, you know, that's modern world. But still, you bring something to contribute. In return, you're going to get something back. And like I said, when I grew up, when we had father gatherings, like, not only was there more than enough, it's like we struggled to find containers to take it all home with because we brought more than enough and made sure people, especially our elders, our aunties and uncles and grandparents, like, do you have enough to last a week, right? So you don't have it even cook, you know.

That's why they like to have the barbecue at their house, like, because they didn't have to go in air, they didn't have to do anything. We cleaned up for them. And then we packed their refrigerator. So you have to cook for a week and a half. That is community. And that is common in all indigenous communities that I know of. This idea of, for lack of a better way of expressing it, in a way, you're showing off. I have so much. I can give you a bunch of my stuff.

And then, like you said, a modern economic way of it, it's an investment. Because one day you might need somebody to share their stuff with you. And so that investment in community, right? You know, it's odd that our society has disassembled a lot of these concepts into isolated parcels, right? You know, of one example, you can't take it with you. So what does that mean, right? They've disconnected that from the original idea of it's not all yours to take with you. So share it.

Give it away. Don't waste it. Don't let it sit in the closet and rot. Don't let it sit in a refrigerator and you have to throw out in the trash next week. What a waste. Give it away. And so the idea that we are isolated as people is so foreign to the idea of a potlatch, right? Even though depending on the community and their particular protocols and customs, you know, it might happen once a year, might happen once a reason it went to happen once a month. But it happened on a regular basis. And it was more than just food. It was a gathering of people where songs and stories were told, even when I was growing up, I'd sit around and listen to the old people, our elders talk about the old days when they grew up, and that's how knowledge was passed along. And building those relationships, renewing those relationships, creating new relationships, right? People were bringing new spouses, new girlfriends and boyfriends were being brought in. Babies were being brought in and introduced to the family and everybody, they're passed around like a loaf of bread, you know. Parent would show up and

five hours later and hopefully get their kid back, right? Because it was passed around. And everybody took care of the kid and you never heard a cry because everybody took care of the kid. that's community. And whether you call it a potlatch or I can't remember the word that Robin used for her community, but they had their own everybody has their own word for it. These gatherings, these opportunities

to renew these relationships. But the concept is absolutely universal in indigenous communities. That we need to remember who we are and we remember by being together and reminding each other of who we are, not just to ourselves, but to each other.

And then what that means to our relationship to the world itself. And being remembering that we're all part of that, you know, very intricate, complex web of life. And we're not separative from it. We're not apart from it. We're not special within it. We are a contributing member of it. And we have an important role.

And rather than worry about, you know, somebody else's role, we need to pay attention to ourselves. Otherwise, as Casseline, you know, said, there are relatives who we better know how to act around them or they'll get after it. Yeah, and part of that piece around what is our role, you know, Robin asks this question that you asked earlier about, okay, how do we move towards the world that we want, right? And we've talked about post-capitalist economics in this conversation, ecological economics, indigenous economics, gift economy. we have a I feel like we've come to a very clear description and envisioning of that economy that we want to see. But the question is, how do we get there? And so one of the things that Robin offers from her study of plants is what happens in ecology, in an ecological system.

How do ecological systems change? And she says that there's two things that she looks towards how change happens that we can learn from as agents of cultural transformation. And she says there, one is incremental change and the second is creative disruption. And incremental change, I understand to be the like, you know, transitioning our businesses into worker cooperatives and, you know, engaging in reparations or land back movements or, you know, shifting our food systems, right? It's like that incremental changes that are more life affirming and equitable and just and democratic. And then this other piece around creative disruption is really interesting. And so she writes,

Some massive disturbances are destructive, and recovery from them may not be possible. But other disturbances of the right scale and type create renewal and diversity. Indigenous land stewardship has relied on humans using carefully calibrated kinds of disturbance to create a living mosaic in different stages of recovery. Disruptions create gaps, openings, and edges between the needs. new and the dominant. So I love that she's both saying incremental change, but also, I mean, you could say revolution. That's another way to say it, or maybe that's one type, but this creative disruption of the right scale and of the right disturbance can actually lead to cracks in the

system and transform it. So anything you might say by way of her how we can be agents of cultural transformation. Yeah, that was really interesting that part of it, because actually what I described earlier, my own personal experience here in the San Francisco Bay Area, and I didn't follow through on somewhat I was talking about, but that, that disruption of the pandemic. My personal experience is that we needed a convergence of things to happen that then led to that creative disruption that is still reverberating. It didn't get as big as I had hoped and thought, but it did happen. It's still happening. That at least some people, are quote unquote woke finally from their comatose state of scarcity.

And I think part of it was the social justice movement was already building when the incidents that led to Black Lives Matter started to occur. And then the pandemic, you know, COVID-19, was starting to wear its ugly head. But what really brought them together is the shutdown. that's what I saw. It's like all three of those things then led to the shutdown where people had to sit there

and see the world in a different way, right? And of course, you know, Native people, we've been talking about the genocide that happened to our people, and I can speak with some knowledge of California that more than 90% of our people were gone within 100 years after being here for

archaeologically 15, 18, 20,000 years, probably longer. And all of a sudden, within a hundred years, these newcomers and their system were doing things nearly wiped us out, 90%. And the 10% that were left were scrambling to survive in a world that was very inimical to them for many decades, for generations afterwards,

all the way into the 20th century, and of course, there's still vestiges of it even now. And so we had already gone through our apocalypse, sort of like. And we came out the other side, obviously greatly diminished, greatly wounded, but still here, and remembering who we were. And I saw reflections of that when I started to get these calls from people that want to be to be on their sessions, right? And it started just with a few, but it accelerated. So I started getting them probably late April, early May this time of year in 2020. By July, I was getting a couple of weeks. And by August and September,

I was doing several a week and sometimes several a day. And I was still working. So I'd come home and have to do these sessions. And I just felt like, you know, it was exhausting, but I felt such need because the people in those sessions, when I got online, whether it was five or 25 sometimes, there was sometimes bigot. And sometimes there were Zoom presentations where there were hundreds. I don't know any. But they were asking questions that I'd never heard people ask before. And they were listening in a way I'd never saw people listen before.

Like this creative disruption had opened them to a different way of viewing the world and they're part of it. It didn't last and it wasn't pervasive enough. I feel, of course, I'm pretty radical in that way. You know, I, you know, should be 100%, but it wasn't. But it made a substantial difference. I could see it in the way that our tribal communities in the Bay Area and California were interacted with by government, by nonprofits, by foundations, by the public. We were treated differently.

I should add in that the climate crisis that created the fire crisis was a big part of that as well especially in terms of how governments interacted with needy communities to where we were dismissed before and now they came to us asking us for help because their science was not addressing the issues

and towns were burning up land was burning up sadly people were burning up and they were desperate and in their desperation they even wanted to talk to native people that's the way I kind of put it and they listened.

So now, all throughout the state, we have these fledging programs of indigenous science working with modern science. The Mick Mack elder who created that, he didn't create the system, but he gave it a name called Two I'd Seen, right? But this has been ongoing for 10 or 15 years,

but it vastly accelerated the last four years during this crisis of both climate and people and health and political and social unrest that created that disruption that Robin talked about. I don't know if she thought it was big enough. I didn't think it was big enough, but I'll take what I can get because it did make a substantial difference that, you know, native nonprofits were able to exist where they couldn't before. We were, you know, I spent the first 30 years of my activism paying to do this. And it's only been

in the last year and a half that I actually was able to retire from my tech job. and get a salary that I could live on here in Silicon Valley that I could do this work, you know, all the time, which I was sort of doing anyway, but I just wasn't getting paid for it. And now I do it full time. There's no hours attached because there's no time. It's at 24-7 job, or I call it 28-8, because there's so much to do. And there's such an urgent need by the public that want to see this. It's certainly diminished. After the crisis is over, that's what happens. The tsunami sort of fades away a little bit. But there's always consequences in aftermath. And sometimes that's good because it creates that disruption that Robin talked about.

And if that's the biggest one we ever get and it creates enough change, good. I'm not sure that's going to be enough. what I understand from a technical standpoint and people I know of that understand the science is that we're headed for some really hard times, ecologically hard times, that are going to lead to economic hard times. It's now unavoidable. It's just a matter of how much and how much people are going to be aware of it and get ready for it and maybe change the way they live their lives because under a scarcity model, it's going to plunge us faster. But there's still abundance. There's still abundance that our elders and culture bearers and gatherers talk about. Our Association Romto Shaloni has been working in consultation with nonprofits and museums and organizations in San Francisco now for the last seven plus years. And one of our early partners was the Exploratorium. And one of the projects we developed through them is what we call the California Native Native.

Homeland Festival. It's the fourth Saturday of April. This year just happened to be at the end of Climate Week. And so we just had it. And the idea is to bring culture bearers and knowledge keepers from all throughout Northern California and the best of the best and hopefully expand in the future. But, you know, 12 to 14 culture bearers, elders who have not just decades of personal experience, but literally hundreds of generations have handed down information about their homelands and how to work in service and relationship with them. And they do that by gathering in a good, constructive, positive way that creates abundance, not detracts from it.

And from that abundance, they create these wonderful things like baskets, jewelry, soaproot brushes, and other expressions of art, not just art, but of our lives. We use these things, right? You know, winnowing baskets to winnow seeds. Airt tight baskets where we can boil acorn and make soup. And we do that with other soups as well. How do you make those baskets that are airtight that will survive boiling water?

Those are the kinds of things we show at the Exploratorium every 4th Saturday of April. and one of the things we've done is brought together elders that they demonstrate for hours out in front of the Embarcadero it's free to the public and you can sit down and watch them and sometimes they'll even let you help them by they'll give you some materials and they'll show you what to do and you can either take something with you

or help them create something depending on what they're doing and get your hands actually sort of like our version of putting your toes in the soil and your hands in the dirt and get reconnected to something very real, something very alive, these gifts of abundance from each of these people's homelands. And we also have them talk about it in these panel discussions that we have about their experience, including the last several years their experience with climate change and how it's affected their gathering in a very

serious concerning way. So, you know, we hope to have this ongoing, you know, Exploratorium. Last year, committed to do it annually. So the one that happened here in April 25 is our third annual. We hope to continue into the future. So put that on your calendar every fourth Saturday of April and hopefully expand from there and have opportunity for people, you know, rather than have to go find native people somewhere else in somewhere in the backwoods, California, bringing them to urban areas like San Francisco where they can come and experience them and talk with them directly. So in closing, I want to return to the creation story that you shared at the beginning, this idea that two-legged or humans were created last, right, instead

of Adam and Eve, created first, and that they were given instructions and responsibilities to be caretakers. And, you know, this relates to this idea of like, it's not enough for us to think about how do we live with little impact on our planet or on our ecologies, but how do we live with positive impact? And so Robin Wilkimer talks about this in the way that she says, you know, part of the gift economy is the gratitude that we talked about. But the second part is reciprocity to give a gift in return. So it's this idea of like, what might we give to the earth as we are grateful for all that we receive. And she asks this or she invites this in each of us. She invites us to think about what is your reciprocity or what is your gift back to the earth, to the web of life?

And so she writes, quote, in the spirit of the reciprocal gift economy, you might consider how you can reciprocate the gifts of the earth in your own way. Whatever your currency of reciprocity, be it money, time, energy, political action, art, science, education, planting, community action, restoration, acts of care, large and small, all are needed in these urgent times. You are invited to become a member of the gift economy on behalf of people and the planet. So I just want to close with any invitations from you, Greg, as what would you invite folks, both people who have, you know, who are indigenous, native peoples, but also people who are of settler colonies. How might we be members in this reciprocity? How might we contribute right now at this time? Well, I think, you know,

the immediate reaction of a lot of people as well, you know, where do we send my check, you know? You know, and we've done that too. We will take checks, cash, death residents, whatever. But that's not really what we need. We need people to be engaged. And we often get asked, you know, the association, you know, we're a very small nonprofit. And the reality of our history in San Francisco of a lot of people along the coast is that we were pushed out of our homelands. A lot of our people don't live in our homeland. They can't, especially in the urban areas like San Francisco. We were the first victims of gentrification. We were pushed out. By 1870s, we were almost totally out because again 95% of our people were you know did not survive the colonization process and the

few survivors they fled they usually to the central valley or down the salinas valley became of the part of the agricultural communities of those places so now that we're back so to speak and fulfilling our responsibilities how do we fulfill that since there's so few of us well it doesn't have to be us, right? You know, we're not saving it for us as in the Ramosatush. We're saving it for us as in everybody. And so it's really a time of all hands on deck. And it's not a matter of currency. It's a matter of participation, engagement. You have to be involved. You have to get off your and do something. Now, that could be lots of different things, you know. And not everybody has to be the one to save the world. Not everybody has to, you know, sell their home and give it all to some

charity and think that that's going to, you know, work. It has to be ongoing involvement. The daily process of being connected into the world that you're part of is really the heart of it. And remembering there's a we, right? I was thinking just the other day, I don't know if you've ever experience that I've experienced in a number of times where you've been in a situation where like it's situations like at a store, bus stop on a train, whatever, where somebody is like, oh my God, I lost my wallet, I don't have money, I'm caught without something, can I get help? And you have an opportunity there to do something, to contribute to the community. That's reciprocity.

Reciprocity is not an economic exchange. It is a passing along the gift that's been given to you. And if the idea of that within an abundance economy, well, then, you know, what's the big deal? You have plenty for you. Share it. Do something good, right? I've experienced that where I've been in a grocery line

and somebody's like, oh, my God, they don't have enough. And I know that. They're looking through their wallet. They're checking their pockets. whatever, the cashier's standing there. And it's really not that much. And you know what? I just go over there.

It's like, don't worry about it. Put it on my deal. That's all I had to happen. You know, I didn't expect anything return. I didn't. I'm never going to see that person again and that's fine. But I did something good in the moment because the opportunity represented itself to me. That's what I said earlier about doing the right thing.

right what is the right thing in this moment don't calculate don't extrapolate don't predict don't sooth say about what you might get back that's not reciprocity reciprocity is giving back what's already been given to right that basket that the basket weavers create is a gift to the world because a place gave them permission and welcomed them in to use the material at that place. And their response to that is this gift of a beautiful basket. That's the way our lives were structured for thousands of years, all of us, before so-called civilization, before so-called economic. So before so-called economic. systems were developed that made us all so advanced to the point where we have so much homelessness

and hunger and starvation in the world and in our backyards here in wealthy Silicon Valley. That's reciprocity. That's another word that, you know, Robin didn't use, but I learned early from elders, balance. Our world, we didn't use the word equity all that much. It was about balance. What keeps the world in balance? It's everybody doing their part at the place and time they're supposed to do it. That's balance. And when you do that, you contribute to reciprocity because you came into the world as a gift, right? I used the analogy of I was born into a household where I had two older brothers. My parents had been married for a while. They knew the family games. They did the parent thing. I had food at the table every night. I didn't know I was poor. I had everything I needed.

I lived in a great neighborhood in San Jose, South San Jose, just south of the fairgrounds, where I grew up with people from K through 12. Everybody knew everybody. We have great fields to play in under walnut orchards. I worked in the orchards and didn't think of it per se as work. It was hard and I was tired, but that's what I did. and it was great to run around in orchards and be able to eat like Robin did

apricots and prunes not so much walnuts had that took a little more work but that idea of another world that's the real world not Hazi and Harriet not the Brady bunch that's the world I grew up in where everybody had enough and those who didn't

got it without a second thought that's what keeps the world in balance. That's what the word reciprocity means to mean. It's our actively every moment keeping the world in balance. And we're part of that world. So we keep each other in balance by doing those things that share that wealth. And it's not always about dead presidents on a piece of paper.

It's about a wealth of a different kind. You've been listening to an upstream conversation with Greg Castro, the Culture Director for the Association of Rami Tush Aloni and a writer and activist within the California indigenous community focusing on issues regarding cultural preservation, protection, education, and traditional practices. Please check the show notes for links to any of the resources mentioned in this episode. Thank you to John Bergoin for the cover illustration and to Aga Lisega for the Intermission Music. Upstream theme music was composed by me, Robbie.

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