TEK (Traditional Ecological Knowledge / Indigenous Ecological Knowledge) with Frank Lake

Note: This transcript was created by AI and has not been checked by a human. Please forgive any errors. 

Frank Lake  0:00  
What is just not what we can harvest from ecosystems and ecosystem services or what sustainability is you'll extract as much as you can. So the system of point collapse, but the tribal perspective very much as people and having reciprocity for the relations is human services for ecosystems and changing that narrative that you often got some of my college courses about, you know, environmentalism, humans have only done death and destruction and degradation and this and that, and it's like, well, so where's the positive relationship that humans can have with an environment? Hello,

Michelle Fullner  0:27  
and welcome to Golden State naturalist, a podcast for anyone who wants to shift from relationships of extraction to those of reciprocity with both place and people. I'm Michelle Fullner. And today, we're talking traditional ecological knowledge with Frank Lake whose voice you just heard. In this episode, we discuss mutualistic relationships between indigenous Californians and the land, traditional burning oak orchards, the powerful ways indigenous and western knowledge is can come together common misconceptions about pre colonial California, and how we can move from a mental model of scarcity to cultivating a shared abundance that leaves no one behind. Before you get started on this episode, I want you to know that we cover a lot of vitally important but very challenging topics in this conversation. We discuss the history of indigenous people in California, which includes genocide, forced removal, enslavement, and many more injustices. There is a lot of hope in this conversation, but parts of it may be triggering for some individuals. Please be the guardian of your own mental and emotional health as you decide how and whether to move forward with this episode. I also want to remind you that this is episode 11 out of 12. In season three after the next episode on tide pools, I'll be taking a break to head out into the field and interview some truly wonderful folks on some of your favorite species and landscapes in California. If you want to support my ability to get into the field for those interviews and keep bringing important information for free to all Californians and lovers of California ecology, I hope you'll consider becoming a patron for as little as $4 a month that $4 helps more than you know as I create the podcast and get to lots of extras like being the first to know which interviews are coming up a patrons only book club and bonus audio from Select interviews. You can find me on Patreon at patreon.com/michelle Fullner. That's Michelle with two L's and Fullner is fu LL and ER. If you want to see what my face looks like, see my videos featuring California species and naturalist vocabulary or keep track of my adventures during the podcast break. You can follow me on Instagram or Tiktok at Golden State naturalist podcast merch is available at Golden State naturalist.com. But now let's get to the episode. Dr. Frank Lake is a research ecologist and tribal liaison with the US Forest Service who earned his BS in integrated ecology and culture with a minor in Native American studies from UC Davis and his PhD and Environmental Sciences ecology from Oregon State University. Frank has authored and co authored numerous papers on ecology, indigenous burning and traditional ecological knowledge as well as the chapter on first peoples in the Klamath mountains of natural history. He served as the chair of the Ecological Society of America for two years and has won numerous awards for his work in research ecology, mentorship of tribal youth and civil rights. So without further ado, let's hear from Frank canola lake on Golden State naturalist.

I met up with Frank at the US Forest Service Pacific Southwest Research Station in Arcata, California. We sat in the large second storey conference room with a view of redwood trees right outside the window. Our conversation after a quick break. Welcome back today on Golden State naturalist or talking traditional ecological knowledge with Frank Lake. Here's our conversation from a US Forest Service conference room nestled among the redwoods, starting with a little about Frank and his story, Frank, would you mind introducing yourself real fast? Yeah.

Frank Lake  4:13  
My name is Frank canola Lake. I'm a research ecologist with the USDA Forest Service at the Pacific Southwest Research Station. I happen to be their tribal liaison and the tribal climate change point contact. I also serve as the coordinating scientists with the restaurant Klamath restoration Partnership, which is one of the big collaboratives that we have inland. And then also as the redwood Experimental Forest Research Coordinator for the experimental force on the coast in Klamath by the Yurok tribal area. That's a lot of hats. Yeah, and then that's my professional side and then culturally, I'm a mixed descendant of European and Indigenous ancestry. Mostly identify with the Northwest California tribes although I'm like Mexican, Indian and Spanish my mom's side and also back east tribes in Northern European on my dad's, but identify more as Group descendent and my half siblings are Yurok tribal members. And I grew up here in Northwest California went away to finish eighth grade through high school in Sacramento, went to University of California Davis, my undergraduate there, I pursued because I was jumping around as we get into this topic of bringing knowledges together, I bounced around between cultural anthropology and environmental science. They were formulating a new nature and culture program there at the time and developing my own individual major integrated ecology and culture with the Native American studies minor, and then I worked fisheries for a few years growing up amongst the Yurok fishers was very important. It was my yacht family. And I had enough degree courses in time in at UC Davis to qualify as a habitat fish biologist, and in the Forest Service recruited me to the Oregon coast. And I started working on the syslogd National Forest. And then when I graduated in 9819 95, I was converted to the fish biologists full time and then worked on the River National Forest, and then came to Hoopa in 1997, or eight to be a habitat fish biologist there with them to get more into this closer who pauses adjacent tribe to Hoopa Jason city rockin Karuk more culturally in this area from being up in Oregon. And for me, kind of my whole life's work from that part of we'll talk more about the cultural teachings and influences. But that time going from the management side, we had a big fire in 1999, the medium fire, and it got me thinking if I'm gonna restore salmon or fisheries, I have to understand bigger dynamics, like not so much climate them but was more like fire was driving, you know, wildfire, and looking from the rivers that are ridges. And as I got more into thinking about how fire as a watershed process affects fish, then it got me into the cultural element of how fire regimes were often presented as a natural fire regime. But there had been this strong assertion or perspective as a child growing up in his community as a fire dependent culture, how important that was and with government colonization and removal, the native Indian native burning, and especially fire suppression and exclusion, how that had affected the link between fire to vegetation, to water flow to fisheries and I Okay, I really need to get a bigger understanding and think broader. And so I was recruited to Oregon State University in 2000. And I began my graduate work there and environmental science program with ecology emphasis, and I really started to roll out what then was like What's TK searchable environmental knowledge, and I'd heard a little bit about that, especially from Anderson's work, or before the wilderness book came out in 1993. She did a lecture at Davis and 94. I got to know Cat Cat

Michelle Fullner  7:33  
Anderson wrote a book I've mentioned before on the podcast called tending the wild, which discusses indigenous land relationships prior to colonization, and quote, recasts California Indians as active agents of environmental change and stewardship. shattering the hunter gatherer stereotype long perpetuated in the anthropological and historical literature of California, and quote, this book shows the active relationship that people had with the land prior to colonization, and debunks the idea that indigenous Californians wandered or foraged randomly, to me, the paradigm shifts in this book are important not only because they convey a more accurate picture of California history, but also because that more accurate picture is foundational to better recognizing the indigenous stewards still here today, and the importance of indigenous stewardship in California, both today and into the future. I also recently found out that there's an audio book, so insert party horn imagery here,

Frank Lake  8:30  
I was also influenced by a bit of the professor's there that were more in tune with the native stewardship. And from there, I really pursued more of active research thing for my coursework at Corvallis, Oregon State University and then working down here to interview elders on traditional uses of fire, the effects of fire exclusion, suppression legacy of force management, and really begin to encapsulate more my broader understanding academically about environmental science, about fire about washing processes, somewhat on fish. And then for me, a big element of that was being able to the different disciplines be able to begin to articulate scientifically the understanding culturally I was raised with, because I think and even to this day, I feel like there's an important part of my work as a whole in translation, right, and being able to take the understanding from like a cultural philosophy and practice or our teaching, and say, This is how it applies to management or stewardship, or this is how it wasn't taught in the Western education system for California citizens or at the universities. And that kind of brings us to where we're at today. Fantastic.

Michelle Fullner  9:36  
And so it's almost like, here's all this knowledge and here it is packaged in a way that is going to be presentable to this audience, right. And in this with the correct jargon and all that kind

Frank Lake  9:47  
of stuff. And there's also it was interesting because talking to you know, tribal elders like oh, we're looking at adaptive management, okay, so what's that mean? Means you're trying to do things better, okay, we got that or, you know, ecosystem services. What are those? Everything we derive from the natural environment, and then the tribes are like, Well, okay, but we're a human important element of that. And we've been here since time immemorial, we've adapted and evolved through, you know, different climate cycles. They don't say it that way. But you know, through time, and it says Memorial, across generations and millennia, where people place. So how is that understanding for us, as indigenous people conveyed in this topic of understanding? Right, right. And in particular, what is just not what we can harvest from ecosystems and ecosystem services or what sustainability is you'll extract as much as you can so the system appoint collapse, but the tribal perspective very much as people and having reciprocity for the relations is human services for ecosystems, and changing that narrative that you often got some of my college courses about, you know, environmentalism, humans have only done death and destruction and degradation, and this and that, and it's like, so where's the positive relationship that humans can have with an environment, which I think leads us also to part of this is understanding the way that hasn't been taught the ways in which indigenous people have modified, enhanced or changed the environment, through their cultural practices through a lot of different, you know, time in place? And how is that important understand as we look at human adaptive capacity moving forward in the future, given the types of climate crisis we face now, given some of our pearls, ecosystems and aggregation of species and things? Like how do we have some form of hope, informed by the best available information to guide us to a better place and to where we can have some solutions for our challenges? Right.

Michelle Fullner  11:34  
And I feel like, there's so many threads. This is a beautiful introduction for our whole conversation. There's so many threads I want to pick back up in there. But the first thing I want to get back to is, you know, you talked about your education and as yourself as a young adult going into adulthood. I'm curious to go back even farther. All right. So when you were little when you were a little guy, how did you learn your relationship with place? Were you exposed to traditional teachings as a young child? Yeah, and

Frank Lake  12:00  
at the time, I didn't realize how important those were until I got older. So my my dad, my mom divorced when I was around five years old. My dad was the fat one of the founding professors here at Humboldt State University and Ethnic Studies Department taught the American Studies. He was very much in Indian environmental activism and bringing elders and other guest speakers tribal people in the community to relate the importance of at that time, we were facing the gasket Orleans road, so a controversial road construction between gaskets on the coast by Crescent City to interior Orleans that was gonna go through sacred sites and key watersheds. There was also the same time I was seeing the burden of conservation being placed on Europe, subsistence fisheries. And so I saw my step uncle's and other community members being harassed and the conflict over to fisheries. I also, you know, there was a cultural revival happening around that same time. So for me, it was really interesting to look as a child, the time my dad spent with elders to learn about their cultural knowledge or what we call down indigenous knowledge, he began to get more into the spiritual aspects of that. So my dad remarried a Yurok woman from a very prominent family, the spots on down Riverside of Iraq coastal part of Rockwall village, Rockaway, and at that point, I as a young five year old being with that family were visiting elders were out collecting acorns. We were trying to go somewhat into sacred sites, there was all this other environmental kind of conflict around resource management and stewardship and indigenous rights around that and so for me, I was quite fortunate because in that teaching in in a visit in the business places, there's a lot of teachings right so my dad wrote a book about she Lulu people with ancient redwoods. That was on an at the time, the extension of Reverend national park right in there were some of the timber companies that were desecrated village sites that became awareness. So it came out of political activism around protection of heritage and cultural resources. But my dad interviewed elders that were over like 90 years old at the time I was there present for that. Elders taken us to what is now a ribbon National Park and between like inland from orc and looking down and saying that was our traditional village. And this is the way we managed it. So I was around a lot of that right? It was around visiting native people who are activists like the American Indian Movement, but really the part I remember the most for me, was be taken to some of these sacred places that are highly biologically diverse. topographically complex have different kinds of even summon to have endemic species in them, whether it was along the ocean, the creeks, the river areas, going to bridges, even the subalpine environments like in the Cisco wilderness or the marbles or Mount Shasta was taken there introduce saying this is who you are, enrich who you are, why are there and essentially ask nature to show you what you need to learn to know right? So there's kind of a cultural teaching that you can learn from your relations in natures or that they're somehow the creator or the spirits will bestow upon you the knowledge and you're asking for us it was more around nutritional healing and more like the Indian doctor or the shaman stuff for my family, but that put me around a lot of knowledgeable elders. It put me around a lot of places that have high biodiversity that are sacred sites. It tied together for me a world view of human relationship and kind of the cultural teachings of the Creation accounts, how the spirits manifested in the physical beings that are now the rocks, the trees, the wind, the birds, the animals in the higher concentration of spirits that physically manifested in these physical things from the rocks down to the bugs. That's biodiversity. Right? Right. That's ecosystem integrity. I was around a lot of that as a child, and continued to be so that frame of reference is how I got into ecology. So you

Michelle Fullner  15:37  
grew up steeped in a mindset already, and then developed it as you grew up and continued to continue to grow and

Frank Lake  15:45  
then begin to as a translator, look at the fields of ecology, environmental science, fisheries, hydrology, wildland fire, and say, This is what they're trying to articulator this is what they're addressing, but there's not so much of the human element other than contemporary management, right. And and yet I had known and where I really got started on this was that David was looking at ritual fisheries management. And so there was a great book also on care Anderson's, our chapter Anderson's book about regional fisheries management in the Klamath and other areas. And you know, the tribes had a very sophisticated form of their allocation coordination between villages on the run coming in. So what type of species it was spring Chinook was it fortunate was it coho was a summer winter steelhead, was that the half pounders? Was it sturgeon types of sturgeon, Lamprey, eel, you know, like all those wasn't being taught in the fisheries management classes. And I'm like, something's wrong here. Fisheries Management and wildlife game management didn't start in California at statehood. And in the first game commission, it had been pre existing, and to not acknowledge that that was part of that indigenous erasure or colonial denial that I had faced, and you will talk to some tribal people will be like, Yeah, I was the angry Indian in class where every time they said something, I had to correct a professor. And I went through that. And what I eventually learned is, I had to know as much as they had to. So when I saw a point of bias or inference made, that wasn't accurate, because they were assuming something about tribal culture, or not even including it, I knew all the western science had to say on that discipline and topic. And then I can articulate better to tribal perspective.

Michelle Fullner  17:18  
So you had to speak two languages at a master level, essentially, to be able to translate into inform where this eraser is happening. And

Frank Lake  17:29  
especially in a power power hierarchy of often white older males in academia, I really didn't want being challenged who didn't like being questioned. Right, right. And be like, alright, well substantiate that, then I would come back the next class and be like, this is all the stuff that you should be aware of how you're going to study fire or not look at anything on Indigenous histories of fire use, how you're going to study fisheries, and not do that, how you're going to study forestry, and come in with either a John Muir or Gifford Pinchot perspective, and not look at the effective traditional management and uses of the forest and all those plants as habitat that you're missing in your convenience of teaching the whole generation of next managers and politicians and community and public. Absolutely. So that was that's kind of how I arrived at where I'm at today. Yeah,

Michelle Fullner  18:18  
that's incredible. That's, it seems like a heavy burden for a college student. Yeah. But

Frank Lake  18:23  
then also, you know, invisibility, so identified more native, even though I'm poor, Mexican, white, but you're less than 1% of the student body, right? At a US large institution. Right. So and sometimes the demographics just as all separate thing, like the other, the others, the less percent, which is usually native or indigenous, right? You're not black, you're not Asian, it's even lower than that number of reporting, right. And so for me, it was even as most native people who have went through higher education or even in western education at universities, like to I belong here, like, this isn't for me. I don't see myself in this right. I'm not even on the form. Yeah. Right. So that was coming into it. But where I did find was there, you know, like, at Davis, there was the Native American Studies Department. I had professors there that were, you know, very took me under and knew my father, when I went to Oregon State University, very supportive tribal program there within the graduate school. So I had that I had that support, but it didn't come easy. No, right. Yeah, I mean, I can think of a wildlife graduate seminar. When people settled, I'm thinking, okay, when you settled in a starts at like, 1840, or 50. And I'm just like, so what all the tribal people including my ancestors are non human. And I just closed my book and walked out and you could see the professor's changing. And I'm like, that's your unconscious bias, right? So where do I belong in your narrative? I'm out. And if it's not available, then who's the native scholars to write it? To take the his story, even natural his story and add a bit more honest First reconciliation, clear understanding of humans, including indigenous people as part of that range of understanding the natural history of a place. Right.

Michelle Fullner  20:10  
The first elected Governor of California was a man named Peter Burnett, the ACLU of Northern California has a page that describes Burnett as a former slave holder from Tennessee with a burning passion to create a whites only American West and goes on to give several examples of his white supremacist track record, including attempts to exclude African Americans from the American West and quote, Burnett also helped fuel the enslavement and genocide of California's indigenous people. He signed the perversely named act for the government in protection of Indians. This law enabled whites to force native people from their lands into indentured servitude. While Burnett was governor, US Cavalry troops slaughtered native Californians, including Pomo tribal members in the bloody Island massacre, which occurred on an island and clear like, this story doesn't feel good to hear but it is an important one. Burnett is representative of the broader historical context of genocide and a ratio of indigenous Californians. This ratio happened by design. And when things happen by design, they can also be redesigned. One recent example of this redesign is the push to phase out or replace the fourth grade missions project in California public schools. If you aren't familiar with this project, basically, fourth graders choose a California mission and make a model of it out of popsicle sticks, cardboard, sugar cubes, or whatever materials they have on hand. This project was pretty universal when I was a kid, but it lost popularity in more recent years, according to a KTLA article from 2018. This is because people have noticed significant problems with the project. Indigenous scholars and activists have pointed out that by focusing on the architecture of the missions, we overlook the forced labor disease and forced assimilation that took place in them. Instead of this project, a group of educators, tribal scholars, and native activists have come together to create a California Indian history curriculum, which includes information on the stories and cultures and lifeways of eight different tribes across the state. One of the goals of this group is to repeal replace, and reframe the fourth grade mission project, I'll link that in the show notes in case you want to learn more. So we've been talking so much about these two sides, you've grown up with all of this traditional knowledge and steeped in this community and in these ecosystems, and then going to university and having to translate. And I'm curious kind of, would you make a distinction between traditional ecological knowledge and Western science? Or what is the relationship or the overlap between those two things?

Frank Lake  22:35  
Yeah, I think it's a very good clarification point. And I used to not be so set on that distinction, especially when I was starting out, like I mean, literally, like in the late 90s, society of ecological restoration, ecological side of America help established or TTK section in like 2001 or two with Robin Kimmerer. And others, it was just coming emerging, right? So it was this thing of like, here's traditional ecological knowledge or environmental knowledge. And here's Western science, in it was beginning to be the narrative borrow, how does that indigenous knowledge now that we're not going to dismiss it as anecdotal, but it might have some relevance to our western science approaches of studying systems in ecology, now have bearing on what we can learn from it. So in that it very much was how T K can inform a bought a body of Western science? What I see now as I've advanced through a different perspective, and this is this kind of look at for others, our audience, if you're a scientists or a manager, you know, what are the tribes or indigenous communities researchable questions and science support needs? How are those in line with our not that of the broader society or other non tribal local community? Because a lot of the Western science that was done was being done through environmental or research needs that were framed from a Western academic, colonial settler perspective, right. And so it was setting the research agenda in some ways, it still does. But as I've worked through coming from more of that perspective of like, this is what I want to learn as a Western trained fire scientist or a forestry about what could be the implications of tribal management or stewardship or fire use on a system. It's now coming to the tribal communities and saying, What are your researchable questions and science support needs? And how has that in the past been marginalized or excluded or not well understood, and and how those priorities of the tribal or indigenous community relate to some of our crosswalk to the equivalent in society. And when we can find alignment between those, then we're going to have mutual interest and learning together in creating the best available scientific information to inform management and stewardship to even affect policy formation in that approach. So now, I see traditional ecological knowledge. Then there's also I've written about traditional force related knowledge. I've written with Mary Hoffman, she has a great paper on traditional fire knowledge She's the director of the indigenous peoples Bernie network for TNC. So we still work with her and other tribes. Those are types of like traditional what knowledge, right, but now, based on the White House guidance in the office of science, technology and policy, they came out with guidance last fall, which I actually helped participate in formulate with them is its indigenous knowledge. And if you think about indigenous knowledge as being a broader umbrella that ties philosophical and spiritual understandings, and also very much grounded in environmental observation, and all these other things, then that form of indigenous knowledge is a broader umbrella just above the sub topics of like environmental or ecological knowledge, just as you would have western knowledge, right. So it's just not discipline specific. It's more inclusive as interdisciplinary, multiple methods right are transdisciplinary. And so when I think about indigenous knowledge and western knowledge across different disciplines coming together, for really, we have some wicked complex problems today, now with a climate and everything else, wildfires, when you bring those knowledges together, they're formulating what the researchable questions are agreeing on the metrics, what you measure, what are the variables, how you go about collecting the information, that's culturally as well as in the Western academic training relevant how you go about doing your analysis, how you interpret those results, in what is the relation of that study, scope of inference for the time in which you study that phenomena or ecological process or that species or the habitat. So when you take it to that level, indigenous knowledge informs the whole process, so does western knowledge, and that creates the science? Amazing.

Michelle Fullner  26:35  
So it's almost they're working together? They're working together to some

Frank Lake  26:39  
people say integrated, some people say incorporate it used to be you incorporate TK into right, but that's still had a hierarchy position. Right? Yeah. And I was, you will look at my dissertation degree from 2007 incorporation of personal knowledge into right, but now, especially at the National Science and Technology Council, under the White House and other groups, is this notion of here's indigenous knowledge, and not only to have a federal responsibility to inquire about that, and see how it can be informative to our scientific process is to be recognized as a also suitable form of understanding and knowledge in I didn't know that until I reviewed last year, that guidance, there's like an Evidence Act. And then there's also just part of indigenous knowledge is a valid form of scientific evidence in you used to have kind of a colonial perspective, author from again, those Western educated scientists, or professors who came through colonial land grant institutions or colonial institutions, right, was that oh, that traditional knowledge is anecdotal, or it isn't substantiated, like our body of knowledge is. And so there was this kind of hierarchy or positionality of it. And I see that slowly changing, right? I've been one and part is developing studies that involve indigenous and western knowledge to create that best available science, that now we have a greater informed, because even at points like 15 years ago, 10 years ago, I would have a personal communication or have something from a tribe. And now I'd have to cite a scientific study that was similar. And then the journal reviewers would be it's not appropriate to cite this Western scientific study on this forest species that is also the backs that substantiates we will get to that point, this former personal knowledge, like okay, well did I have to start creating this studies that are the leading edge of what that work should be. So I CO produced and CO create the best available science so I can now appropriately referenced something that draws from indigenous and western knowledge as a way of understanding and finding

Michelle Fullner  28:41  
what's so ironic to me is that you're questioning knowledge that people have bet their lives on. Right? It's like, Would it be incorrect if they have had to depend on this knowledge for their lives? Right? And that's, of course, we can trust this knowledge. People have depended on it to survive, like they wouldn't be here if it wasn't accurate, right? Like,

Frank Lake  29:04  
that's the let's bring this around. And I'll end on one point, I'll go back to something that's for historical reference. So it's often like, Oh, you're your study. substantiates traditional knowledge, or indigenous knowledge? No, the Validate substantiate? No, but it did corroborate. I'm saying the word. Right. Right. Yeah, we came together. And it did show that indeed, this knowledge is accurate to the way in which we set up our study investigated that right, let's roll back since Spanish settlement since American settlement and colonization, there was almost 80 to 90% of California population died of disease, genocide, forced removal, relocation, dispossession of land, and then acculturation sent off to boarding schools, and then relocation sent to the cities. What happens to your reservoir of knowledge? Right If you have seven, if you have lost 80 to 90% of your population who holds that knowledge in the last 150 years? How much of that knowledge reservoir exists in these tribal communities? Right? Now we're at where we're at today, we finally recognize that. But why is it important? It's important because Western science hasn't been able to prevent a climate crisis. It hasn't found a technological fix. It hasn't been able to because of politics, socio economic condition, power, and positionality of industry and other factors, government, private sector, all those that haven't allowed native people to maintain their knowledge systems and practices, who haven't allowed native people do have closer ties and access and steward their indigenous homelands that are now national forests, federal lands, national parks, state parks, private industrial land, private property, or county or other lands, right. So look at what have been the factors that have reduced the body of available knowledge. And then now look at a point where society is coming to indigenous people and saying, Could you help us with solutions? Because now we're imperiled. And now we're at lack of system collapse, we don't have enough water, forest or burning up beyond what we could possibly manage, right? It's kind of, I just want people to reflect on that right? For long. Last four generations or so 150 years, your knowledge hasn't been important, you've been not important to the conversation about solutions. And now because our broader society is getting burned up and over, running out of water, has forms of insecurity has instability, we're coming to you to ask us how to finally solve this slap in the face. And more importantly, we're coming at it from a colonial Western society perspective, that's extractive we need your knowledge for us, not how can we partner to empower you to maintain a knowledge you have to regain it for the aspects that you need to that then can be a benefit not only to tribal community, but also to society and the local public? Right? What

Michelle Fullner  32:07  
are your goals? Yeah, no, we help you reach your goals, while also learning yet from what you know,

Frank Lake  32:13  
so many tribal people, it's not enough that they took the land, took the gold, took the timber, took the water, and took the fish. Now they're taking the knowledge, right, that's that. And so you have to remember from indigenous people who are willing or not to share their knowledge, what's in it for them? Right, what's and I don't mean like in a way like that. I mean, where's the reciprocity? Something

Michelle Fullner  32:35  
I've struggled with in the past couple of years making this podcast has been trying to determine how to respectfully approach indigenous Californians for interviews, because I recognize that asking for information and then sharing it as broadly as I can, could be one more form of extraction in a long line of abuses. At the same time, I also recognize that including indigenous voices is a vital part of telling the story and the ecology of this place. I love this place that has only been called California for a relatively very short period of time. That story is incomplete without the input of people from many tribes, each with their own distinct identities throughout the state. And to tell that incomplete story could be yet another example of a ratio of indigenous history, which is the vast majority of the history of the state and erasure of the indigenous people still here today. So I don't have this balance, totally figured out yet. But Frank will share some ideas later about approaching tribes and tribal people in a way that partners with their goals rather than coming in and just asking for knowledge, which I find very helpful in informing how to make this podcast going forward. And it will also be helpful in a lot of different situations. So keep listening for those ideas in a minute. And

Frank Lake  33:53  
then, as I'm trying to do now is to educate otherwise ignorant population or who has an unconscious bias, that in other ways have been a form of marginalization and erasure for indigenous knowledge, and culture.

Michelle Fullner  34:09  
It's so much, I

Frank Lake  34:11  
carry that burden every second of my life. Every tribal person you talk to who's in resource management, or some part of that has a angst of urgency, because time is running out. Some things we can capture data and store it. When elder passes away, you lose intangible intangible elements of a body of knowledge. That could have been one of the most critical things to help you figure out that ecological system and for a way for humanity to be able to proceed forward with some certainty of understanding what's currently happening and where it's likely projected to be, which isn't going to be much better. So that's so that's, I mean, those are some of the challenges I see that face tribal communities today about the appropriation of their knowledge or to co opting of it to write, even to myself as a Forest Service scientist, who is a tribal person, I've been criticized that I helped foster part of the cooperation, because it should be the tribes as sovereigns, who contribute their knowledge and who guide into lead that, but for me as a person who then contributes my own intellectual property and knowledge, as a force of a scientist, in some ways it can be conveyed or come across, oh, the Forest Service is doing that great TK work. Right, right, or is it in partnership with the tribe? And that's, and that's the next emergent area, right? So where do we, for tribal people who are Western academically trained and have a body of traditional knowledge or indigenous knowledge, it's called to icing you see the best of indigenous knowledge and the best of Western knowledge to address the challenge or the problem. But you use two forms of knowing understanding to come up with a solution. And it's stronger than each on their own. Right. And so you can do it through individuals, or you can do it through collaboratives. And through partnerships that bring that brain trust together to bring that reservoir of knowledge, who then tackle some very, some very important things that we have to be upfront and right on, right.

Michelle Fullner  36:17  
And I think that the vast majority of my audience is not indigenous. And so for any of us who are wanting to learn more, and wanting to work with tribes and wanting to kind of have more of a relationship with place, right, would you say and I think you touched on this a little bit. Would you say that the approach would be if we want to work with tribes approaching from a perspective of what do you need? And can we work together? And then also, can I learn from you at the same time? Is that like, the approach that you would recommend? What would you say?

Frank Lake  36:46  
No, use conservation as a as a Nexus, right, right. So we know that development, all these other things are threats to wild places, yeah, or natural areas. So we have a common interest in preserving the integrity of those places, because of all the benefits that they may have for society and for local communities and for nature itself. And so within that, if you say we're worried about the loss of this important species, pick a plant, for example, I'll use it, I'll use a lily, right. So we're in some ways going to conserve that area. But we're not going to allow people to come in and manipulate, harvest it prune it, till it yet that word Lily may be found on that State Park, which is founded upon a village, and that Lily might be a ruminant part of an ancestral garden of Indian potato, that was once a very common food for the tribe living there. But because of the removal, the lack of burning the lack of tilling, fire exclusion, suppression changes in opportunity for tribal people to cultivate and manage that it doesn't have a steward and protector, the only protector is a stay out fence, or a Land Policy Park otherwise, that says it's conserved, don't do nothing to it. And yet, the tribal perspective is I hear philosophical teaching and how you operationalize that is, you know, if you don't use these resources and interact with your relations, again, that cultural belief might be from a tribe that that Lily was a spirit that physically manifested in the physical form, it's found there to place might even be named off of it. It's human accountability and living with and stewarding rather than maybe a conservation one is that you just protect it from all these grazing, development, municipal waterways, whatever it might be, right, you protect it, but it stopped maintaining the other aspects of that species life history that looks at some forms of disturbance, like redistributed into scales to burn into open up bare soil for for seed set to maintain in a body of pollinators that help that right. Maybe even that Lily is important in a tribal name for girls, and there's like a girls coming of age story where that flowers needed as part of her head wreath in that regalia. And so without that, she has a hard time coming to age and recognizing her relationship as what would have been a traditional route digger to that Lily to that place, and to protect it and maintain it and to anything before you harvest. The tribal notion or philosophy or tenant that has the right to reproduce thrived in maintain in your stewardship roles to make sure you facilitate that. But if you're not allowed to access that because it's closed for protection, that this associates a prior multigenerational millennia relationship of why that plant is found where it is already, maybe as a unique Dimmick, but definitely knowing the tribal people that I know and how pay attention to things you recognize as uniqueness things right back to my teaching about sacred areas and endemism there are certain things that are recognized. You might not know the subspecies or variety name of it, but you recognize it as that's found there. Right, as a food medicine in material, cultural use species for ceremonies or spiritual products, you know, things of

Michelle Fullner  39:55  
nature. So like it's found there. And also, here's all these ways that we have a relationship with it. You Yes.

Frank Lake  40:00  
And that relationship based on this knowledge informs us about its habitat needs, its population viability requirements, what it takes to have some form of use, but also some form of protection. Absolutely.

Michelle Fullner  40:13  
And I think that this brings me back to kind of a question of, you know, we have this western mentality of in order to conserve something, fence it off, put a fence around it, but I kind of want to dig back into pre colonial history and talk about, you know, we have this misconception, it's a very widespread misconception about California being a wilderness, pre colonialism. And so how would you help people correct that notion, like what was it really like? Well,

Frank Lake  40:41  
think of people being here for at least, you know, we keep finding long archaeological stuff. So 13,000 or 20,000, right. So tribes will say since time immemorial, but in California as ecosystem, many ecosystems, right in its diversity spectrum, from north to south coastal to interior, across the different Coast ranges, interior valleys, Sierras, cascades, whatever, by other transverse range, whatever might be across California deserts, Great Basin side, those have always had some climatic change, right? Native people have migrated in and out, there's been linguistic and genetic and cultural diversity through time. Think of that through 1000s of years a generation through different climate shifts, as we know, as we reconstruct that, and think at the time of like, 1700, where there was a very strong functioning tribal culture, there had been some influence probably from some disease, or some things that came from the east over because of trade, but still pretty much larger populations, and quite intensive use of areas where we have our same population centers now, right, large valleys, foothills, by creeks out freshwater, and areas that produce access to a variety of plants and animals and other resources for food and for material. And for fiber. What we don't understand so much because it's not taught in the books was that within those cultures, there was very sophisticated forms of governance, there was also very sophisticated forms of resource allocation, even between tribes that might be different linguistic groups who have different histories, some migrated in some migrated out some now established at the time of light contact in 1840, or whatever was or late 1700s. It was, you know, tribal culture, but even within them, there's diversity. And within that, there's often this notion that characters and us and others is called proto agriculture like before agriculture, like if they were using fire as an energetically effective tool to manage a range of vegetation from even nearshore rocks off the ocean, coastal Headlands. The coast ranges across redwood forests to the oak woodland band and prairies, to the interior valleys up through the Sierra and Klamath fronts of the mixed vegetation, evergreen forest, even up to this high pine tree for forest right. Each of those figures for fire use, where lightning wasn't adequate. tribes had knowledge about burning on a certain frequency seasonality, even diversifying more than lightning, different seasons and specificity of if it wasn't adequately burned by lightning, then you burned it based on a series of cultural indicators about resource production and access and in the condition of it. So that was all in the play. Also, if tribes were using all those areas from the intertidal to the subalpine environment, as part of their hardware store, supermarket, pharmacy and sacred places as their church and ceremonial areas, there was a whole part of the landscape that had high value. And those were either managed at the family level, families within villages, intermarriage between different villages between tribes. But there was a system of stewardship that was coordinated. And I don't want to like over paint a picture of like, this greatness. But we know from looking at our past paleoclimate fires, three archaeological sites, there was a lot of richness, there was functionality, and that part of the narrative and the wilderness to get back to this point, wasn't understood. The first settlers couldn't. They might have ascribed Indians burning for a reason but didn't know the outcome of what it meant on Oak dominated woodlands. And by knocking acorns off with the poll, it caused tip pruning that then diversified and increased the abundance of acorns went from being x numbers of tons of acorns to being twice that so right for that the sea of wildflowers that were outside in this swale is in the places where this GFI that Erber for for medicine, this shrub for baskets, or material this other one for tools and for musical instruments, like elderberry, right. So it was a part of a colonizer cells are construct who didn't understand the sophistication in Native people that came from like as they expanded also a way to dehumanize native people because that way you could kill them easier. You could dispossessed of their land. And so all that narrative of will organists nature. Native people didn't have it. They just live off the land and wandered that was all part of that colonial narrative that went into justification to kill them and remove them. So then the settlers could occupy and colonize the most productive land. Justification. Yes. And you know, the first Spanish law by Aguila was like, you know, prevent Native Indian heathen burning, right? subjugate them enslave them. Right. The other atrocities were to, at the time of the Civil War, were to the militia groups who were run by the timber barons and other private interest finance that were then reimbursed by the state and the Feds that were getting bounties for Indian men raping and taking women and enslaving children, we often

Michelle Fullner  45:43  
think of California as a free state. But this perspective considers only California's constitutional ban on slavery and not the way that ban was applied, or not applied. It also doesn't consider other laws that directly contradicted the ban. There's a whole book on this published just last year called California, a slave state by Jean falls, or in case you want to learn more,

Frank Lake  46:06  
those are just survivors, who you're wanting your knowledge from now to how to live in that place. Those are those places that we call wilderness that were between tribal territories that had international trails, and I was called out by this one's by OR is a professor, what do you mean international trails? If you're this group who speaks this language, and has this cultural affiliation, and this one over here, and you go between nation and nation, it's international. If we look at the same trail system that went between France to this country, in that country, it's international, who take the same geographic area of 500 square mile or whatever is you put it here, it's international, right? So somehow, in the American psyche, it was portrayed that this was wilderness, native people didn't have an effect on it. They weren't responsible for the diversity that we're filling the riches of the settlers. And it's somehow justified that that could do that, right. And then then we what our colonial land grant institutions are formed by the wealthiest for education on indigenous lands that were stolen. And then it promoted within those early science, forestry agricultural classes, a Western European notion of what management and should be in grids in this, they didn't have the ability because they didn't stop to learn and ask what they assumed to be natural was actually the byproduct of intense cultural adaptation and indigenisation of place through millennia and generations. And that's the narrative that wasn't taught. And that's a narrative as barely understood now.

Michelle Fullner  47:34  
Right? How are these practices still continuing? Today, despite all that, well,

Frank Lake  47:40  
tribal people very much talk about knowledge as a responsibility, and more importantly, a spiritual and cultural obligation to care for your family, which includes the natural environment around you, and all those species that are your food, your medicines and your materials, right. And so what partly is going from that philosophy and kind of a tenant of being indigenous person to that area is how to we as non tribal or non indigenous partners, cooperators help foster that opportunity. So when we talk about restoration, and I've heard about this in my forest landscape restoration book is, you know, how do we define degradation? If derogation isn't as defined by a Western colonial settler construct, and not segregation as a removal of tribal stewardship and a decoupling of mutualism by indigenous people on place and species? Like how dare you use mutualism in the context of native people? How many different climate epics episodes have we been through in the last 20,000 years? That changed from this to that to this to that to where we're at now? In an ice age? Yeah, right. People here before that we're seeing now Right, yeah. And they emigrated migrated in and migrated down. And then others came in, same out sun stays somewhat. Right, right. But that's the kind of depth of time right so to bring it all back to today is indigenous people want to be able to have access to their homelands, which is part of that land back aspect. But more importantly, they need to have cooperators and partners who kind of did it again, I call it the form of reconciliation to understand what's happened. And not to like hold that guilt, not have settler fragility, about facing some of the hard truths that have been a process that leads to your position of privilege and where you're at, have that be a form of repatriation or repatriation for returning land and cultural practices within that tribes territory for those people to begin to even regain their own knowledge and cultural practice. Some of these ceremonies some of these practices haven't been able to carry on, the knowledge is there but then there has to be that opportunity to then enact it to pursue it. That leads to restoration, which is something that we all want. And rather than looking at a historical baseline that we kind of understand and we can say that's some desired future conditions. That helps us kind of like map out and chart where we want to be for that restoration approach and inference tribes is very much a revitalization to be able to be not only just brought in as partners, but in some ways to have that sovereignty in the decision making to be able to voice what they want for the actions that will take place within their ancestral territories that can be across jurisdictions. It can be federal lands, State National Park, it can be state lands, it can be even private lands, there's, you know, things of not NGOs, non government organizations, or conservancies, that have land, that's an opportunity there. Again, a lot of these places that were settled, were some of the most precious areas to tribes. And so having that ability to access as again, is important, right, it might be really important for them to access a sacred site at a very biologically diverse area, to have concurrent with that the repatriation of a ceremony that goes along with active restoration, getting your hands on the ground and working together.

Michelle Fullner  50:52  
Right. I love that. And in order to be supportive of that work, like, how do you think do you think that it would be helpful if people are like, Hey, do you need volunteer help? Or would it be more helpful to just be like, go do some learning?

Frank Lake  51:05  
It's tough. I think if people as well, you know, there's not many people, or if I see the casino, or this or that, like, so how was in our western California society? How are tribes portrayed? Right? And then how do you access them, there are opportunities for this. So the California Indian basket weavers Association has an annual meeting, usually in June, they also have other regional workshops, that's a great way to go out and talk to the basket Weaver's from different tribes about what they're facing them for natural resource management and interests around species affinity plans for basketry. And for foods. And for that material cultural part of it. Many tribes have sovereignty days or certain open to the public events. That's another great way. Many tribes are starting to do that, how have their own tribal museums that are usually curators, or tribal people that are from there, that would be more than happy to share with you all the items that are in there, from baskets, to nuts, to tools to regalia, and develop that relationship, or, you know, for many tribes now, because of the funding, you see a lot of requests for proposals coming out for tribes to be as a partner as a higher criteria for award. They're getting bombarded with requests or anything from National Science Foundation to climate adaptation science centers and others, right. But a person to try to say this is my interest is this in line with yours, or what is yours that I may learn of, so then I can come in wanting to work with you, and this is what I can come with. And if you find that a value, then maybe, you know, your priority will align with my priority and interest. And we can formulate a partnership. Right. Right. So but then understand also all that sort of context of a tribal governance, tribal departments, tribal programs, individuals, some are actually by tribal people who are tribal from that area, or other tribes. And some are also Western education, folks that are non tribal, that are working for the tribe, who are themselves learning about cultural history, community values, and working within a tribe. Right.

Michelle Fullner  53:03  
And like you said, I mean, we're talking about nations, right? And how many nations within what is now known as California, there's going to be a lot of individuality and a lot of individual tribal structures, and goals. And so many things are and

Frank Lake  53:18  
just because they're living in the same area, same watershed those tribes as sovereign governments may not necessarily see well together on certain things, right. And in that regard, you know, we have to go through me I say, we need to look at changing from being perceived competitors of a scarce resource to work to be cooperative for abundance. It's beautiful, right? Because we all perceive that something's limited, or it's rare, or that it's degraded. And so there's this perception of competition, right? And then with that, what do we usually hold back is our knowledge and our ability to support and capacity resources, because we're uncertain about what we may lose, if we try and what we might gain. But if we come out at where we each come with something of use and a value, and we work together to find out what that is, and to increase capacity, then we can work towards being cooperators for abundance. Right? We don't have to fight over the water. We don't have to fight over the last beautiful place that we either want to recreate or go subsistence gathering. Right? We can find ways that we can live together. And that's what we need right now more than anything,

Michelle Fullner  54:26  
and create more places that are places of abundance, right? Yeah. Right. Absolutely.

Frank Lake  54:30  
Right. And so it may be when you're going to your next state park, you might see tribal families out there digging some stuff up, they might be harvesting an animal, right, but to change that narrative of what is the appropriate place for California Native people to reoccupy their traditional territories, not one that's biased and determined by colonial settlers, but one that's determined in part by the tribes of sovereigns that we learn to undertake And we learn to appreciate because we maybe didn't understand there was a different way to achieve what we want for conservation and for restoration. And this going this tribal route of partnership and sovereignty, and CO governance and costura ship can still help us achieve that, right? Be open to new opportunity. I

Michelle Fullner  55:18  
love that open to new opportunity and partners for abundance. Those are huge takeaways. And I really appreciate both of them becoming partners for abundance is much more achievable if we understand more about how abundance was cultivated historically by Native people, and why we need to include these impacts in our basic ecological assumptions.

Frank Lake  55:37  
But you know, again, that back to that wilderness notion, right, right. So when I talked about the colonial land grant institutions and how they set up this education centers for the more elite of the American society at the time, right, because it was also very classist between working class and the wealthier elite who could go get a Western education and who became your doctors, your lawyers, your governors and your political right. So to me, I came up with this last couple of years back was like the colonial null hypothesis was that there was no indigenous influence, right? It's and I laugh that because it's like the null hypothesis in science is that there's no effect. And then from there, you do treatments to see what the effect is, right? But the colonial null hypothesis and applied to like native influence our impacts on landscapes and ecology was that they didn't, right. And again, that fostered back to that notion. And so for me, even to bring that out as an idea is, what if we turn that around and assumed that native people had a degree of influence and effect on biodiversity on fire regimes did indeed modify the extreme ranges of the climate, particularly where there's drought and water stress. And we see that through some of the studies that have come out now looking at work climate was a top down factor on fire. And actually it was more bottom up, because it was the frequency and use of indigenous fire as part of that cultural fire regime that buffered what would be the climatic severity or magnitude of effect, to understand that is a way then to help us position as a human adaptive capacity that's led by indigenous knowledge and in partnership with tribes to give us more actionable solutions. And for me as a scientist is to be well, we know native people manage oaks. So what does it look like to manage Oaks at the scale of orchards? That's another way of framing right? So I started telling people, Hey, these legacy oak dominated forest as ecologists are calling them are bondas. And like, No, those are oak orchards. You know, that's by the village area or a camp, you have the artifacts for food processing, like the hopper stones, the mortars, like everything to me, is at Orchard the architecture of the tree, a full open crown oak, a lot of branches, big, huge trunk, small fire cavity at the base, the pine next to it has a frequency medium fire return interval of every seven to eight years, they were using fire and horticultural pruning to manage acorns, which was the basis of the foodweb. And that place that fed native people fed deer, elk, squirrels, jays towhees, everything right? And to me, like just even reframing things that we would ascribe as more natural to really look at the proportion of the landscape, again, the null hypothesis being that it didn't manage. But let's ask what partly did they write. And so that's been part of my work is to look at what parts of the landscape were more sensibly managed, what were further out, and then we can begin to get a better idea of even today, how much nature will manage itself, and how much we can intervene in a way that will help support a natural process of recovery, right? Passive versus active restoration. And what degree of which that human adaptive capacity in our through our partnerships with our collaboratives can help us to a point where we have intensive investments, like a lot of money coming down for forestry and for fire risk reduction, or some that we can look at this needs to have certain restrictions on the types of management and to reduce the forms of disturbance or the amount of degradation factors that then help that recover. It's

Michelle Fullner  59:06  
checking those absolute baseline invisible assumptions, assumptions that people have taken for granted, right? And then flipping that null hypothesis completely on its head. And how does that then from the ground up, change the rest of the entire work that you're doing?

Frank Lake  59:23  
And I also think I've heard people come back and say, Well, you know, there's so many more people in California now and heirs are urbanized. And this, this and that, and I'm like, Yeah, but you still have a city park, you still have a state park, you still have an area of green space. You know, what about, like the Aloni people in San Francisco Bay area who are just looking for any place that isn't concrete or contaminated soil to have a place to start to bring back their personal foods to

Michelle Fullner  59:48  
have the Aloni people working to bring back and sustain traditional Aloni foods are Vincent Medina and Luis Trevino who started Cafe Aloni in Berkeley. Their website explains that cafe Aloni has over has been a one of a kind culinary and educational experience. Every meal of luxurious Aloni cuisine educates the public about our rich, enduring culture. They include all kinds of traditional foods like black acorn soup, baby not truffles, Aloni salads, seared venison, backstrap, and so many more. They'll be reopening in the spring, so make sure to search for Cafe Aloni and check out their website before you plan a visit. And while we're on the topic of traditional Aloni foods, the common name of claytonia portfolio data has changed from miner's lettuce to aurorae. I hope I'm saying that right. I'm totally just trying to copy the way I heard Vincent Medina say it in a YouTube video. And since this plant is delicious, and abundant and has a wide distribution across the state, it's very much worth looking up. If you're not familiar with it. Just make sure if you do harvest any that you're in a place where that's okay, and that you follow the principles of the honorable harvest described in the foraging episode. So if you want to see it on Cal scape, the name is Rory spelled R O R E H. Okay, back to what Frank was saying about what the Aloni people are working toward, to

Frank Lake  1:01:09  
recover a sacred space on a mountain peak that now that you've taken down the cell tower, or whatever it might be, right. I mean, there's all these things of how we have colonized and settled California as a broader society, that in some ways as part of our restoration, strategy, climate adaptation, living with wildfire addressing that, that we can learn from the local Native people there as a way that might be an appropriate way of having more inclusion for indigenous people, but also, again, would achieve some of the similar values and similar interest, public safety that we want for the rest of the community living with them. Absolutely.

Michelle Fullner  1:01:47  
And this is something where there can be a particular mentality sometimes where it's almost like, oh, well, it's it's like, let's do this, because it's the right thing to do. Well, it's like, it's also a very mutually beneficial thing to do. Right? Yes, it's the right thing to do. But everyone there benefits. Yeah. And the whole globe benefits from every local action, that restores an ecosystem. Right. And so the fact that we are all woven together in this cloth, right, like, I mean, I see that very powerfully. And I think that there's a huge incentive for all of us to make amends. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I

Frank Lake  1:02:27  
also wanted to go back to a point about the willingness of native people or tribe people to share their indigenous knowledge, right. So it can be extracted, we're coming like, we want this for this reason, as a scientist, as a manager as a, someone interested in working for organization or agency. The other part of that is to be okay, with not needing to know it. All. Right. So I often find, as I got back to when I alluded earlier, was, you know, knowledge is a responsibility. There are certain things within tribal communities, ceremonial practices, certain responsibilities that are specific to that family, or to that individual. And you as someone who maybe who's looking at doing a burn out of state park doesn't need to know all the details about why or how that was used. What you need to know is, there's a certain ways in which you're going to do your fire treatment, or you're going to do your thinning the plant you're looking to restore. But you don't really need to know the medicinal plants, the sacred beliefs and songs around them. There's a form of like, appropriate knowledge that you can be shared, and other ones, and especially in a society where we demand or expect that things come to us because we want it to be more respective of indigenous censorship, and what they choose or not to share, and relinquish as far as farmers information. And that's even a challenge I find as a scientist between things on data sovereignty and governance between things that were public domain. Well, anthropologists, during the time of like, late 1880s, to 1920, especially from the University of California system, we're out collecting as much information they could on the vanishing Indian, right. So there were people who were pretty much solder families and villages decimated their survivors of all that smallpox, genocide, forced removal, you know, so they were sharing their information, some of that information, even though I like to go back because it's in the archives, tribes may or may not want certain details disclosed, right. And so there's also this part of respectful understanding about why even though it's publicly available and one resource, understanding why tribes do or do not want certain things shared at what level of specificity and for you working with them on a project, be okay with that, you might not need to know everything, right? Right. But this is what you can do and for what you need to know for the way of your support and engagement as a partner.

Michelle Fullner  1:04:44  
I love that. Yeah,

Frank Lake  1:04:46  
another important thing, I see this and I mentioned this in my floor interview, but you know, indigenous place names there's a lot of tribes who are wanting to come back that's not around the land back part like the land acknowledgement, well, there's the land at lot land acknowledgement. but also like this place is called Houdini if I set it right in the we got we're here, a place amongst the redwoods build we got villages right down the hill here at the bottom of the creek by the Ville by the bay. But this was that place name right? This was that space, too, even if I don't say it right, if I'm asked by my tribal partner to say an indigenous name, try it. Yeah, right show that willingness, if the place our project areas named after the settler who massacred and killed and raped their great grandmother's why keep saying that settlers name right then that the state park name, like they just changed from Patrick's point to Soumik Village here to State Park. There's a reason why that name change is important and understand the antiquity of Yurok occupancy at that site, as well as Yurok interested in it now,

Michelle Fullner  1:05:47  
if you're ever in Humboldt County and get the chance, definitely visit Su Mei State Park. It has a reconstructed traditional Yurok village with buildings that are set partially underground. It is so cool and exploring it with my kids was one of the highlights of my trip to humble last spring. Here's a little more information on the village from the Su Mei State Park brochure in 1990. And all your crew constructed Su Mei village which consists of three typical read wood plank family houses, a sweat house, a dance pit, three changing houses and a redwood canoe. All of these structures are made from boards split from Redwood trees using Hazel bindings and local stone. The village was named Sue Mae, which means forever in Yurok in the hope that the village would endure for generations to come. The village site is used for cultural and educational activities that preserve the heritage of several neighboring tribes, Europe, Karuk and Hoopa. The parks native plant garden just south of the sumo village features plants used by the Yurok for basketmaking, food, medicinal and ceremonial purposes.

Frank Lake  1:06:47  
So those are all those minor things that just aren't feel good. But they're a way of acknowledging what the tribe or your tribal community you're working with is on the relevance of what are some of their trauma and to have that healing. And we need healing to be able to work together and have each other's back if we're gonna be facing some of the climate crisis and other challenges we have ahead of us. Absolutely.

Michelle Fullner  1:07:09  
Well, thank you for I really appreciate your time. Yeah, so the next time you step outside, take a moment to look around and notice your surroundings. Because wherever you are in California, that very place was almost certainly stewarded, and shaped by Native people who are still here today, over 10s of 1000s of years, I hope for each of us that this understanding can become part of our expanded awareness of place, and that we can find meaningful and authentic ways to live each day in reciprocity with the land and with each other. I want to thank Frank for making time in his incredibly busy schedule for this conversation, and for teaching me so much. And thank you, they're in your car or folding your laundry for listening, reading, reviewing Patreon, and sharing and learning along with me, you're the best. And if you listen to the end of the episode, I always share something interesting or mundane or embarrassing for my week. And this week, it's that I went hiking and got caught in a rainstorm. And I had checked the forecast so I knew that much of my hike would be dry, and then it would likely start raining at some point so I wasn't worried about it. I don't mind a bit of rain on a hike. What was alarming was when there was an forecasted thunder that sounded like it was right over my head and I can never remember if you're supposed to be next to a tree or not next to a tree in a thunderstorm. So I just scampered back toward my car as fast as I could. And at one point, the thunder seemed farther away, so I thought maybe I'd have time to use the Porta Potty on the way back then there was another boom right over my head. So I just held it and bolted hopefully faster than the lightning that was on my heels. Finally, I rounded the last corner in the trail and the sky opened up and absolutely dumped water on me. Right as I jumped into the car. As soon as I was in the rain turned into hail. So obviously I had a small laughing fit and then very happily cranked up my car heater and started to dry off. But in case you're like me, and you also don't know what to do if you're caught in a surprise thunderstorm. I looked it up for us first if possible, get indoors or into a car with the windows up. That's the safest thing to do. If that's not an option the CDC tells me never to be near an isolated tree. But if you're in a forest to shelter near lower trees, there are also a bunch more tips on this page. So I'll link that in the show notes. Okay, that's it for this one. I'll catch you soon on the next episode of Golden State naturalist bye.

The song is called at a no buy grapes and you can find a link to the song as well as the Creative Commons license in the show notes

Transcribed by https://otter.ai