‘We all have Indigenous roots’: Stewarding nature with shared knowledge & radio

Aimee Roberson, executive director of Cultural Survival, joins Mongabay’s podcast to discuss how her organization helps Indigenous communities maintain their traditions, languages and knowledge while living among increasingly Westernized societies.

As a biologist and geologist with Indigenous heritage, Roberson is uniquely suited to lead the organization in bridging these worlds, including via “two-eyed seeing,” which blends traditional ecological knowledge and Western science to increase humanity’s ways of knowing, toward a view of people as active participants in shaping the natural world.

Cultural Survival also sees radio as a critical tool for keeping communities together and fostering a relationship with the land. Roberson shares how their robust radio project is specifically designed to train and empower Indigenous media creators to share local news and cultural information of critical importance, in multiple languages across the world.

“It's something that's [a] core part of what we do. Some people are like, ‘Ah, radio, you know, this is 2025. Who cares about radio?’ But Indigenous people really care about radio because it keeps our communities together. It's a primary form of communication.”

Find the Mongabay Newscast wherever you listen to podcasts, from Apple to Spotify. All past episodes are also listed here at the Mongabay website.

Image Credit:

Lolita Cabrera (Maya K’iche’), an Indigenous rights activist from Guatemala. Photo by Jamie Malcom-Brown/ Cultural Survival.

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(00:00) A bridge between two worlds

(09:28) The fallacy of ‘Objectivity’

(17:20) The Indigenous Kinship Circle

(22:24) We all have Indigenous roots somewhere

(28:19) Indigenous led local radio

(37:55) AI cannot substitute the human experience