In the Chalice and the Blade, Riane Eisler provides a compelling story of our cultural origins that incorporates both the female and male halves of our humanity. This story provides verification that a better future - a Partnership-based future - is possible. In this episode, Lyla June, an Indigenous musician, scholar, and community organizer of Diné (Navajo), Tsétsêhéstâhese (Cheyenne), and European lineages, explores this history as it relates to both environmental sustainability and our relationships with ourselves, other humans, and the planet on which we live.
Center@Partnershipway.org
Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future, Riane Eisler (https://centerforpartnership.org/resources/books/the-chalice-and-the-blade-our-history-our-future/)
Lyla June’s TedX talk, “3000-year-old solutions to modern problems” (lylajune.com)
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (https://www.amazon.com/Guns-Germs-Steel-Fates-Societies/dp/0393317552)
1491: New Relevations of the Americas Before Columbus (https://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/1400032059)
Resilience by Rising Appalachia (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tx17RvPMaQ8)
In the Chalice and the Blade, Riane Eisler provides a compelling story of our cultural origins that incorporates both the female and male halves of our humanity. This story provides verification that a better future - a Partnership-based future - is possible. In this episode, Lyla June, an Indigenous musician, scholar, and community organizer of Diné (Navajo), Tsétsêhéstâhese (Cheyenne), and European lineages, explores this history as it relates to both environmental sustainability and our relationships with ourselves, other humans, and the planet on which we live.
Center@Partnershipway.org
Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future, Riane Eisler (https://centerforpartnership.org/resources/books/the-chalice-and-the-blade-our-history-our-future/)
Lyla June’s TedX talk, “3000-year-old solutions to modern problems” (lylajune.com)
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (https://www.amazon.com/Guns-Germs-Steel-Fates-Societies/dp/0393317552)
1491: New Relevations of the Americas Before Columbus (https://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/1400032059)
Resilience by Rising Appalachia (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tx17RvPMaQ8)
Welcome to the Power of Partnership podcast. I'm Rihanna Eisler, founder of the Center for Partnership Systems, and this podcast brings you voices from the partnership movement, people who are using partnership practices to build a world that values caring nature and shared prosperity. The Power of Partnership podcast is hosted by Cherry Jacobs-Pruitt, a health policy and partnership scholar, and today Cherry interviews Lila June Johnstone on how indigenous partnership practices turn deserts into gardens. Lila June is a Native American historical ecologist, community organizer and artist. So now on to the Power of Partnership podcast, showing how we can reclaim harmony with nature.
Speaker 2:So, lila, i'd love to start our interview today by asking you to provide a deeper introduction for our listeners and how you first learned of Rihanna's work.
Speaker 3:Thank you so much. I stumbled upon Rihanna's work. I think her work's been a gift to the whole world and not everyone, but a lot of people, it's kind of. Her books have found themselves in people's hands around the world And I obviously love how she chronicles in Chalice and the Blade how we went from a Chalice culture in Europe of abundance, community unity, partnership, if you will, to a blade culture of fortification and brute force and things like that. And I think what she proved to say that human beings are not inherently war-like is so profoundly important for Native Americans. If you will, we prefer to call ourselves an indigenous people, but because one of the biggest excuses that people use to legitimize our genocide about 98% of us were wiped out here in what we now call the Americas What they use to excuse themselves of almost wiping out an entire race of people is, they say, oh well, humans are just war-like. So we had the bigger guns and Jared Diamond's book what is it? Guns, germs and Steel. That's basically his core argument Humans are just war-like and we had the bigger guns and that's why we won. And instead of saying we killed everyone because we were wrong, we killed everyone because we were sick inside. We killed everyone because we made a mistake, and so I think that her work actually has great implications for the indigenous conversation here in what we now call the Americas, because it's like no, we are not inherently war like Rian and many other scholars have done the work to show, there have been many peaceful societies that lasted for thousands of years, and speaking of which I come from one of those peaceful societies that lasted for centuries and millennia. And so, anyways, long story short, i stumbled upon her work through the chalice and the blade, first foremost, especially because I'm part European, and this last thing I'll say on this question is that I had to go to my European roots. As a half-native, half-european person, my native culture taught me that your roots are important, so it kind of guided me down the road of my European roots, and I had to see the witch burnings, i had to see the bubonic plague, i had to see the trauma that our European ancestors went through, and I think Rian really helped me there too, because she showed me how we are, not that We are, not this thin wall of time that dominates our understanding of Europe, which King Louis, napoleon, alexander the Great, all those patriarchal guys God bless them, but really see deeper, into these deeper archaeological contexts where the true European identity, i think which is buried under literally thousands of years of war, but our true selves, our true selves and that's what I've been trying to preach on top of the hill or whatever, or shout from the rooftops, is like we, as Europeans, we have more than just, oh, we're just the slave masters, oh, we're just the colonizers which, don't get me wrong, we did that And that's a problem, and we have to take accountability for that, but in a way of taking accountability for that is to really honor who we actually are, before the trauma, before the witch burnings, before the Roman expansion. And so her work was really instrumental in helping me share with the world a deeper, truer European identity, to help us reconnect with our indigenous roots and start acting in accordance with those for both the healing of ourselves and for those around us.
Speaker 2:Beautiful. Thank you, yeah, and it feels like you've taken Rianne's work and incorporated it and processed it across a pretty wide variety of fields musically, community organizing. I wonder if you can speak about what I'm thinking is your most current area that you've really delved into, which is your dissertation around. You know, you have on your website, lila June com, you have a copy of a TEDx video that you delivered. That was a present. I believe that was essentially just a summary of your dissertation, correct, and it was, yeah, so can you talk a little bit about that? That was just at one point. You describe it as a message of hope, which very much was to me personally, and I know everyone who is listening to it probably just feels like, oh my gosh, there is hope in this incredibly challenging time of climate change.
Speaker 3:Yeah, i mean, there was many. There were several main points of the TEDx talk which, by the grace of the creator, has blown up. I'm so grateful for that, not for my aggrandizement, but because this is what the elders taught me And I'm just so happy that my native elders message is getting out there. I'm just like, yes, that was a win, you know. But what it was saying was indigenous peoples have sculpted this entire continent in an extensive manner way before Columbus was born And 1491,. The book by Charles Mann touched on this a bit, but he's a good friend of mine now. But we actually I've actually delved a little deeper than his book and other and compiled a lot of incredible scholarly work that proves ancient indigenous fisheries were thriving all around the coastlines of this continent. Ancient indigenous soil management techniques that were just absolutely brilliant And in some places they still exist And the ways in which we used fire to sculpt entire grasslands to manage the chestnut forests of the east no-transcript, changing the narrative of oh, humans are a pest to humans are an essential piece of the ecological puzzle, and my native ancestors knew how to do that And in fact ancestors around the world knew how to do that, and we became what we call a keystone species, which is a species, a linchpin that the entire ecosystem depends on. So not only are we not a pest, we're actually an essential, vital variable in the whole functioning. Because if the creator creates everything for a purpose, you know it's easiest for us to say, oh, that tree has a purpose, that bird has a purpose, that rock is here for a reason, that star is holding the galaxy is doing its part to hold the galaxy in place. But then, when it comes to saying that human has a purpose, why wouldn't we have a purpose to? and we exclude ourselves from all of creation, like everything has a purpose except us, because we're these problem, child's problem, children misfits of creation, that we're just wrong and bad. You know, and don't get me wrong, we can behave wrong and bad, obviously, but we have proven, just as Rianne's work proved, that peaceable societies are possible. I think my work was proving we can be a gift to the earth, we can be a nourishing balm to the entire ecosystem, and not just in little gardens and little oyster farms, i'm talking. Entire estuaries were managed by the Algonquin nations in Washington DC. I'm talking. Entire chestnut groves were managed by the Shawnee people in Kentucky, starting 3000 years ago, that we know of through fossilized pollen records. I'm talking entire oak groves becoming fire resistant over 1000s of years because native peoples managed the entirety of California with routine burning. I'm talking about alluvial farming techniques where every time the monsoon rains come, people would position their fields where those rains flow down, which carry both water and fertilizer from the nutrient, dense upland soils. So saying like Hey, we had whole farms that lasted 1000s of years, never needed outside irrigation or outside fertilizer, because we went where nature was creating those deposits already, and so just showing the world like Hey, not only are native people not stupid, we're not primitive, we're not culturally backward, which is what the narrative has been right, we are actually profoundly sophisticated and we can learn a lot from these systems. These systems could transform food systems around the world, they could transform our governance systems And what we'll probably be talking about, the partnership ethic within indigenous cultures, is so informative and could help us a lot. And so I always think like the best part of my dissertation is the part I didn't write, the part where these elders and these land managers speak and tell their story, and they've been doing their whole lives, you know. So one of the things that the first elder said, val Lopez of the Amamutza Nation, which is indigenous to what we now call Santa Cruz, california. He said that sacredness, you know, is the first and last word of anything, anything, period, but food systems as well, that our food systems and our land management practices and, you could say, our relationships with each other sacred. Knowing what sacred means is always going to precede everything. So maybe I should just start with that, you know, which didn't make it into the TEDx talk, which is probably a mistake, but you know this, it's so hard for American culture, i feel like, to know what sacred means, and it's not our fault that we don't know what that means. We're not given many opportunities to, to, to, to revere something as precious and just stop, just put a pause on the clock and stop time and just honor how gorgeous and how sacred and how precious this breath of life is, and our, not just our life, but every single living being's life. You know, in native languages, you know, one of the words that's always so prominent is this word life, in Deneet Inna, you know, and that that word is imbued with such power and such excitement and such beauty and such excitement.
Speaker 2:So I think you know that's one thing you could say that I didn't say in the TEDx talk is like sacredness and and and honoring life as sacred Can you talk a little bit about any positive ways of addressing challenges that are bumped up against, when you're trying to get that back to narrative, where you're trying to communicate a narrative that's different than how things are being done and is so clearly a better approach. Any yeah, any thoughts on how we can help us all shift forward to partnership, how to address those challenges we meet.
Speaker 3:Well, i'll preface by saying at the end of the day, sometimes, no matter how eloquently you phrase things, people aren't going to change until they're forced to. So I think that one of the greatest allies to help us correct our behavior is collapse. That is something that no one can deny. When and if the grocery store has run out of food, no one's going to say, oh, i don't believe your opinion. It's like it's not an opinion. There is no food in the grocery store, you know. Or when hurricanes knock out entire. So I think collapse is one of our friends, because it's showing us like no, really, really, you can't pretend humans are the center of the universe on this planet. That will not work, period. No matter what your politics are, no matter what, whatever who you are, what race you are, you have to be within a web of relationships, of creation and partner with that web of relationships. But okay, so I'll preface by saying that, however, i think there are ways we can still shift culture, and the best practice that I know is love Being somebody's ally. It's kind of like when you train a dog. They say oh, we're not training dogs, we're training humans, because it's the humans who have to learn how to be their dog's ally. When you're trying to teach the dog to sit or to lay down or whatever, you have to understand that the dog needs your help and the dog has feelings too, and so not to compare humans with dogs and training them to sit. But I'm just saying that when I have a big culture that I really need them to stop behaving a certain way, which is the case every day. As a Native woman, you're surrounded by one big culture that you really need them to stop treating you like crap. It's through love. Instead of saying, hey, you're bad F, you deserve to be locked up or in the prisons of history, you know instead of saying that say, hey, i love you, i am your relative and I appreciate you and I forgive you for any past trespasses, because you've been through a lot and I have compassion and understanding for your situation And once you love and you forgive and you love unconditionally and many people will disagree with me on this, but for me it's like, once you establish that and you mean it, then people are so much more open. There's so much more. They're moved for one thing. They're moved of like, wow, i killed 98% of your people and you still love me And I'm like, yeah, of course I do, because guess who killed 98% of your people? the Romans. So it's like you have to have compassion and understanding for the people and, through your speech, to be their partner, you know, to be their ally, to be their comrade. Because the biggest problem here is not the outward behavior. The biggest problem is we forgot we are relatives. We forgot you are my sister and that random dude at the store is my brother and the policemen are our brothers, and it's not. They forgot that. That's why they're shooting us, right, that's why they're killing us in the streets because they forgot that we are relatives. So then, the only way, the only antidote to that to me, is to affirm we are relatives and to love that cop the way a mother would love her misbehaving son and say, hey, i'm your mother, remember me. And to confront that non kinship mentality with a kinship mentality and say, hey, we are relatives, and then from there, so much more is possible. So I've often you know I'm hard on people. You know I'm like, hey, colonization happened. You know I'm very frank, but I do it with a lot of love I'm like, hey, we have an opportunity together to change this story We. I want to be your partner in this, i want to be your friend in this, and that's very different from what you see most times, which is you're bad, you're bad, you're bad. You need to get your SHIT together and get out of my face. That's not going to work. I don't think.
Speaker 2:What would be your closing words to our listeners about finding their way to the partnership end of the continuum and helping create a healthier world and a more sustainable world that is truly filled with love?
Speaker 3:I think I would be remiss to say to not say that perhaps partnership mentality begins with being a partner to yourself. My journey to being a positive force in the world started with healing and loving myself, because the main reason that I stopped being a positive force was because of the wounds that I had endured and that had caused me to get lost along the way, specifically physical abuse as a woman. I didn't even know I had been through physical because it was so normal You see it in the movies They'll hit on her, they'll talk crappy to her and then they go to the next scene. It's just normal, and that happened to me growing up. A lot of abuse, and that's actually where my addiction came from. The addiction was more of a symptom than the actual problem, and so I had become not a partner to myself, i had become a dominator. I had said Lila, you're a horrible woman, you're a tainted woman, you're an ugly woman And you have desecrated your body in all these ways, when really actually the world had desecrated my body, but I blamed myself for all of it And I became a dominator, i became a jailer to myself, and it wasn't until I hit rock bottom and all of these elders helped me, that they helped me become a partner and ally to myself. To love yourself, to give yourself a hug and to say I like you, is a lot more than many of us can do, but it's so profoundly important because once you come into communion with yourself and you forgive yourself for being a kid who was abused, for being someone who didn't have the support that they deserved, for someone who to really take a good look like no, maybe you didn't have a perfect childhood, maybe that's what you tell yourself to take away the pain of the fact that your childhood was so imperfect, and then to come back into communion and partnership with yourself and love yourself deeply, then you reconnect to source, then you reconnect to creator, because you give yourself permission to Right I'm a good person, i'm a loving person, i'm a good person, period. Then you're allowed to connect to the creator, which is the ultimate source of goodness. And once you connect to creator, whoo, watch out, nothing can stop you, because you're connected to an entire web of incredible, synchronistic, beautiful, loving energy, if you will, around the universe, and then you're basically unstoppable. But the thing that keeps us from connecting to that gigantic, vast ocean of power and beauty and love. Is this shame, this guilt that says, oh, i don't deserve it, i tainted my, i let myself be desecrated, blah, blah, blah. Or for men, it's like I didn't protect my mom when I was a boy. I didn't. She got beat up and I I'm a bad kid because I. So it's different for men and women, but there's different ways that men and women allow shame to become a wall between them and the creator. And creators, always trying to knock that wall down, say no, you're my beloved child, you're my, you're mine, i love you, i'll never stop loving you, and I know your story better than you do, and I know that you've been through more than you even understand, and I'm here for you. And then, once that wall gets broken down, you can do partnership stuff in the world. You know, because you're allowing yourself to be that agent, you're allowing yourself to be that instrument that is so desperately needed in the world. But you can't do it alone. You know. You need that connection with creator, with your ancestors, with the, the universe, if you will, whatever you call it. You need to be connected to that source, to to move and shake in the world the way you were born. To do So step one break down that wall of shame. Connect to the creator, become a partner to yourself. Then you can start really moving fluently in the world to do the partnership work you were. You were created to do.
Speaker 2:Wow, well, we thank you so much, lila, for joining us for this podcast. Such beautiful words. We appreciate you so much.
Speaker 3:Thank you for having me, sherry, i really appreciate it.
Speaker 2:Thank you for listening to the Power of Partnership podcast. We're grateful to Rising Appalachia for the use of resilience as our power of partnership theme music. The full lyrics and music video are posted on our website at centerforpartnershiporg. If you'd like us to feature your partnerism story or if you'd like to become a proud sponsor of the Power of Partnership podcast, please contact us at centeratpartnershipwayorg. I'm Sherry Jacobs Pruitt. See you next time on the Power of Partnership podcast.
Speaker 4:I am resilient. I trust the movements. I negate the chaos, uplift the negative. I'll show up at the table again and again, and again. I'll close my mouth and learn to listen.