Lyla June Johnston is an Indigenous public speaker, artist, poet, scholar and community organizer of Diné (Navajo), Tsétsêhéstâhese (Cheyenne) and European lineages. She blends her studies in human ecology at Stanford University, graduate work in Native American Pedagogy at the University of New Mexico, and the indigenous worldview she grew up with.

Lyla and I got together to discuss her brilliant PhD research on Indigenous Food Systems Revitalization. In this interview we discuss what 6000-year-old clam gardens in the Pacific Northwest, buffalo prairies, kelp forests, hemlock boughs, and herring eggs all have in common; the role of reciprocity in food systems; human beings as a keystone species; the reclamation of our own food production; land fragmentation, and thinking like a watershed.

Guided by indigenous values and understandings, this conversation charts the path to how we can restore our relationship to farming and food, and how these ancient ingenious systems can help us rethink our broken food systems.

Episode Website Link: lifeworld.earth/episodes/unexpectedagricultureslylajune

Show Links:

• Lifeworlds Resource Page: Agriculture
• Architects of Abundance: Indigenous Food Systems and the Excavation of Hidden History
• Cultivating Food Forests with Indigenous Wisdom
• Forgotten Fires: Native Americans and the Transient Wilderness - M. Kat Anderson
• Braiding Sweetgrass - Robin Wall Kimmerer
• Lyla’s podcast and website
• Seeing Like a State - James C. Scott
• Agrarian Trust
• Pacific Sea Gardens

Look out for meditations, poems, readings, and other snippets of inspiration in between episodes.

Music: Electric Ethnicity by Igor Dvorkin, Duncan Pittock, Ellie Kidd

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