Ep10: Kinship & Earth-care with Lyla June Johnston

“There's many ways that human beings around the world have not just not hurt, but have actually been a beautiful gift to the Earth, a keystone species that actually has become a linchpin in the healthy functioning of the ecosystem. And we treated the Earth so good, that She would actually miss us if we left. That's what I'm encouraging people to try to become again.” 

- Dr. Lyla June Johnston - Flourish Systems Change

For this episode, co-host Sarah Ichioka interviews Indigenous musician, scholar, and community organizer Dr Lyla June Johnston, in an extended version of a conversation originally recorded as part of Sarah’s Designing Cities for All Fellowship at Pakhuis de Zwijger in Amsterdam. 

Dr Lyla June Johnston (aka Lyla June) is an Indigenous musician, scholar, and community organizer of Diné (Navajo), Tsétsêhéstâhese (Cheyenne) and European lineages. Her messages focus on Indigenous rights, supporting youth, traditional land stewardship practices and healing intergenerational and intercultural trauma. She blends her study of Human Ecology at Stanford, graduate work in Indigenous Pedagogy, and the traditional worldview she grew up with to inform her music, perspectives and solutions. Her doctoral research focused on the ways in which pre-colonial Indigenous Nations shaped large regions of Turtle Island (aka the Americas) to produce abundant food systems for humans and non-humans.

Show notes

Sarah Ichioka and Michael Pawlyn’s book, Flourish: Design Paradigms For Our Planetary Emergency is available as a paperback and ebook from Triarchy Press and major online booksellers; and as an audio edition on Audible, Apple Books & Amazon.

Sarah leads Singapore-based Desire Lines, a strategic consultancy for environmental, cultural, and social-impact organizations and initiatives. Michael leads London-based Exploration Architecture, an architectural practice and consultancy company focused on regenerative design. 

Pakhuis de Zwijger is a cultural center and event space located in Amsterdam, Netherlands. The Designing Cities for All RE-generation Fellowship focuses on the role of design in (re)shaping and (re)creating regenerative cities by, for and with everyone and every living thing.

Read more about Lyla June and her work.

Watch Lyla June’s TEDx talk in 2023 on the “3000-year-old solutions to modern problems”.  

Lyla June writes and performs a poetic reflection on time and the wisdom needed to care for future generations in the music video, Time Traveler.  

Lyla June’s music video for All Nations Rise written and performed by her at the Black Hills Unity Concert 2016. 

Read Lyla June’s article on European indigenous knowledge in the Moon Magazine. 

Learn more about Paulo Freire’s ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’ on JSTOR Daily.

Transcript Episode 10: Special Episode Lyla June Johnston: 31 minutes

Sarah Ichioka

Hello everyone. It’s been a while, and a lot has happened, but it feels great to be back to share another special episode of Flourish with you.

Today, we’ll be hearing from a very special guest indeed, Dr Lyla June Johnston. Lyla June is a multi-talented Indigenous artist, academic, and community leader, representing Diné, Tsétsêhéstâhese, and European heritage. Through her music and activism, she champions Indigenous rights, youth empowerment, and traditional land stewardship, while addressing intergenerational and intercultural trauma.

Her studies in Human Ecology at Stanford, her graduate research in Indigenous Pedagogy, and her upbringing steeped in a traditional worldview, all combine to infuse her work with insightful perspectives and solutions. Her doctoral studies delved into how pre-colonial Indigenous Nations across Turtle Island (otherwise known as the Americas) cultivated bountiful food systems for both humans and non-humans, offering valuable insights into regenerative systems—the focus of this podcast.

We first recorded this interview last year as part of my Designing Cities for All fellowship with Pakhuis de Zwijger in Amsterdam. That was a series of public discussions exploring how design can play a role in creating regenerative cities that are better for everyone who lives in them. We’ll link to the whole programme in the show notes if you’re keen to learn more about it.

A small technical note: because we recorded this conversation over Zoom originally, there might be a few robot noises now and then despite our sound engineer Toby’s best efforts, but trust me, this one is well worth listening to.

Michael is away this week, but I know he is just as excited as I am to share this episode with you.

So let’s dive in.

Sarah Ichioka

Welcome to Designing Cities for All Dr. Lyla June Johnston.

Lyla June Johnston

Thank you so much for having me, so happy to be here.

Sarah Ichioka

We are so happy to have you with us. Where are you joining us from, and how are you feeling there today?

Lyla June Johnston

I'm joining you from a little town called Gallup, New Mexico area. And I'm feeling great. I'm in the forest with my sheep. And you can't really get better than that, so I'm feeling great, and so happy to add our little vantage point to this global event.

Sarah Ichioka

Thank you. So an increasing number of people are embracing the understanding that Indigenous forms of land stewardship and knowledge are key to reweaving regenerative culture and its associated practices. And of particular interest to the audience today, many designers are searching for ways that they can care for and augment the many other beings that give us humans life instead of the business-of-usual of extracting and destroying. And so it's an amazing privilege to have you with us today because of your doctoral research, which I understand focussed on the ways in which pre-colonial Indigenous nations shaped large regions of Turtle Island to produce abundant food systems for humans and nonhumans alike. Based on that work, in what ways would you hope to see Indigenous land stewardship practices valued in the transformation of broader contemporary culture?

Lyla June Johnston

Well, I think the denigration of Indigenous knowledge worldwide has not only deprived Indigenous peoples of our cultures, our lands, our lives, but it's also deprived the entire world of the extremely sophisticated sciences that are the byproduct of when you live in one place for thousands of years. So what I would like to see is not just more recognition of Indigenous knowledge, Indigenous sciences, Indigenous design, if you will, but also just more integration, and more humble observation, humble listening. Because we have so much to teach, and we have been trying to teach people for centuries about this stuff. In some cases, millennia, depending on which Indigenous culture you're talking about, that suffered from colonization and domination ethic. But we have so much to teach, and we've been wanting to teach it for eons. And so I think the time is now not just for the non-Indigenous world to start taking notes, but also for us, as Indigenous peoples, to really build up our home fires, really get clear on what our messages are to the world, because the world, like you said, is turning to us now. And we need to be prepared. And many of our elders are already prepared. They know back to front the songs, the ceremonies, the ways of tending the land, which is what my dissertation looked at. 

And it's time. It's time to do a knowledge transfer that can benefit all life, not just Indigenous peoples, not just non-Indigenous peoples or colonial societies, but literally every single living being on this planet is going to benefit because that's what our systems were designed to do. To augment not just life but biodiverse life.

Sarah Ichioka

Fantastic, thank you. And obviously righting historical wrongs also means working to return stolen lands, to their original caretakers, not just adopting or mimicking native practices, which I think is one of the one of the challenges we can see in this discourse within the design field. And I've been really struck how you often speak about forgiveness in your work. The way that you see land, restitution and reconciliation as crucial to restoring regenerative systems. And I understand that you view forgiveness not as a hindrance to the struggle for rights, but rather something that allows us to fight more effectively. Would you be able to share more with us about this?

Lyla June Johnston

Yes, and before I do, I just want to touch on a point you said earlier, which is that one other thing and in addition to the integration of Indigenous knowledge is the reparations, if you will, or righting historical wrongs. Because I think it's very tempting to be like “Oh, Indigenous peoples did this, let's do it now.” But if you're applying all of those practices on stolen land, then you might be healing the soil, you might be healing the biodiversity, but you won't be healing history. And I think true, deep regenerative practice actually heals not just the land, but heals history, heals relationships, heals hearts, and heals spirits and emotions. And I think that's the most exciting part about Land Back, this movement of returning lands that were stolen from Indigenous peoples. 

So that's exciting work that not just Indigenous peoples are excited about, but everyone who's engaged and really wants to shift things on a deeper level. But yeah, I think the way that forgiveness facilitates our movements, is that it relieves us of the last wound that colonization has inflicted, which is the wound of bitterness. I mean, there are many other wounds, but once we heal, and we realize that colonization never changed us, that these things were lies et cetera, then we get to, we have to address the bitterness. And when that bitterness is transformed into compassion, this is just my opinion, many people disagree with me, but that compassion makes us more fluent, you know? It makes us more clear. Easier said than done sometimes when your entire village has been murdered, you know. But what I found is that the deeper the injustice, and the more atrocious the crime, the more powerful forgiveness is when it is applied. It shakes the whole Earth. 

When you get hit with so much hatred, and you still stand up and say, “I love you”, and you still affirm to the people who hurt you like, “Hey, I'm not your enemy. I am your relative”. That is the reality, because colonial society has tricked us all into thinking we are enemies, we're divided, we're in competition. But the truth, the deepest truth, I think, of nature and of reality, is that we're all relatives. That's what all Indigenous ethics talk about,  kinship. Never address someone as “Hi, Sarah”, but say “yá’át’ééh shádí” (Hello, my older sister), or “yá’át’ééh shidéizhí” (Hello, my younger sister). You always greet not just people, but animals, plants, the earth as your kin, as your mother, your grandfather, as your sister. And so, that being said, forgiveness to me is like taking all of this division, all this hatred, and just pushing back on it saying, “No, we are relatives, and I'm here to fight for you as much as me, including fighting for your spirit”. And so forgiveness to me not only clears us of that bitterness, but it reiterates and reifies the reality of kinship.

Sarah Ichioka

And it's clear that this relational way of seeing and being in the world is so necessary and often still missing from the way we talk about our manifold global challenges, you know, foremost in my mind, the climate crisis. To go back to the point that you were making about knowledge exchange and learning exchange and an attitude towards that, could you share from your research into Indigenous ways of teaching and learning, what are some of the key characteristics of exchange that you've identified? And do you think any of these could help us in broader industrialized society as we seek to find our way forward and through the climate crisis? 

Lyla June Johnston

Yeah, I mean, I was honored to work on community curriculum development with Diné people, which I failed to say I'm from the Diné nation on my mother's side, and our clan is the Naaneesht’ ézhi Táchii’nii clan. We're also incorrectly known as Navajo. But I was fortunate enough to work with about a hundred Diné people to create our own teaching and learning systems and take it back from the boarding schools. Because in what we now call the United States, there's this whole system of boarding schools that's stolen our children and forced them into. Many of them died in the schools. And so we lost our right in our power and our practice of educating our own children. So we kind of took that back and we said, “Okay, what would we teach? What would we learn if we had autonomy over our school systems again?” 

And what I found was an Indigenous pedagogy, at least the Diné pedagogy with this particular group really was a circle. In many ways, for one thing, in a circle of teaching, everyone is a teacher, and everyone is a learner. So when you apply that to the climate crisis, when you apply that to the broader context of so many of the issues that we face globally, you understand that every single country, every single culture within that country has a puzzle piece to contribute to a solution. And every single one of us could benefit by learning. Because when you have biodiversity, you have many different genes to draw from. In the case of a catastrophe, you have many different species who can bounce back. It's harder for a pest or a virus or blight to wipe everything out, because no one pest can hack that many species all at once. So biodiversity forms resilience within ecosystems, but the same is true for the human worldview. 

A broad and robust diversity of perspectives is so much more strong and resilient than the monoculture that we have now, which is Eurocentricity. Europe knows everything, everyone else is stupid. Basically, that’s what the narrative has been for, like, at least 500 years. And not only European knowledge, but Greco-Roman European knowledge because even European tribes got wiped out by the Roman expansion, et cetera. And so, because of this monoculture, I think we're suffering right now we're applying this one way of seeing things, which yes, has some strengths, absolutely, but has a deficit in all these other places, which all these other cultures could have filled, all these other cultures could have helped. And what we're doing now in this call, really, we're trying to supply that deficit. So when we have the diversity of Yoruba traditions, Gunditjmara traditions from Australia, S'gaw K'Nyaw traditions from the hills of Thailand, we have Okinawa perspectives mixed with Diné perspectives mixed with Mapuche mixed with Welsh and on and on and on. We will actually have all of our questions answered, because everyone has a piece of the puzzle. So I think that’s one of the biggest applications that Diné teaching and learning could offer: is that the Circle of Learning, that everyone's a teacher, everyone's a learner. And there's way more I could say, but I think that's the biggest thing that our curriculum development experiment really elucidated for me.

Sarah Ichioka

I love it, thank you. I know that the team at Pakhuis de Zwijger, who are hosting this, have been thinking a lot about how the structure of their events can help to facilitate. So it's not just us talking down at a screen, right. There's full exchange in the audience. And I love that idea of everyone sitting in a circle, and exchanging knowledge and learning. 

Lyla June Johnston

And that's what Paulo Freire said too, if you read Pedagogy of the Oppressed. He said it's not about teaching someone something, because the person you're teaching actually has something to teach you. It's about creating a dialogical teaching container where the question is centered, everyone else works to answer it together. And that it's honoring the agency, the knowledge and the power of every student in the room. Whereas if you just sit someone down and say, “I'm going to tell you something”, that's what Paulo Freire called the banking means of education, we're just depositing something into his empty account. And he said this is not going to serve the teacher or the student.

Sarah Ichioka

I want to go off on a tangent from that to talk about ways of communicating in ways in particular that you communicate and interrelate in your work. So in complement to or full integration with your work as a scholar, you're also an activist and a musician and your performances combined speech, poetry, hip hop and acoustic music. And clearly effective communication and the power of persuasion is essential to rallying people to collaborate and take action, especially on these urgent issues that affect us humans and other species. And how do you feel that combining your different modes of presentation or expression help you in communicating effectively about the urgency of this effort, the turn or return towards regenerative culture? 

Lyla June Johnston

Yeah, I mean, I just want to shift to narratives, all kinds of narratives. Whether it be the true history of Indigenous peoples in Turtle Island, aka America, or it be our narrative about ourself, you know, no matter what culture you're from. How do you fall in love with yourself again? How do you heal those parts of you that you don't love anymore, which I had to do a lot of growing up. Changing the narrative of what ethics should drive our actions? What value systems? Why is profit maximization here as a goal, you know? So in the practice of narrative change, and culture shift, some people call it, you need to read diversity of, in Diné we call it ałtas’éí, which means just like many different, multicolored things. So we even have a really important word in our language ałtas’éí, which talks about diversity. And so yeah, I wrote a PhD dissertation that speaks to one audience. I do education where I'm not even talking but the community is talking to themselves, that's another audience. The music of course, not even in music, I couldn't pick which genre why limit to just one? Then also just, you know, radio, working on radio. We just produced a really cool series about the Winnemem Wintu Nation in Northern California. I have a podcast, Nihizhi Our Voices: An Indigenous Solutions Podcast. You could say, I'm spreading my energy too thin. But I think it also keeps me excited. It keeps me alive when I get to, you know, really taste so many different ways of relating with the world. And so I think it's just a matter of, you know, some things work. 

And then again, like, there's stuff I could say, that you couldn't say, and there's stuff you could, there's people you can reach that I can't reach, you know, we need you. I was once told you, your body is your passport to reach the audience you prayed to come to earth to reach. And so each of us has a very, very purposeful design. That's what I was taught by Creator. And so each of us, we need all of us to speak about regeneration, if you will, in our own way, to our own people and other people too. Whoever will, like there's something a white man could say that a certain audience would totally grab on to like, oh, because they trust a white guy for whatever reason. And then there's already other audiences that would not trust him, they need me to say it, even though we're saying the same thing. So the same thing we're all trying to say is Love, is regeneration, is selflessness, is service. And so as many different ways we could say that, the better I think.

Sarah Ichioka

Thank you for sharing that. And we will be sure to include as many links as possible of all of the amazing things that you are involved with in the program notes, and I would strongly encourage everyone in the audience to spend time with these. I wanted to draw to a close by returning to your work on practices of land stewardship. And I was so struck by your reframing, you talked about needing to transform our views of ourselves, and your reframing of humans as not being a scourge upon the landscape are not being a scourge upon the rest of life, but actually being essential to the flourishing of life and of landscapes and of ecosystems. You have found many different examples of this. But would you be able to share one with us today, to help give a sense of what this looks and feels like in practice? 

Lyla June Johnston

Yeah, I was lucky, honestly, and honored to give a TEDxTalk late last year that has now half a million views, which I don't attribute to anything about me. But I attribute it to like the actual stories and the knowledge that I was just the messenger for. Because everything I say is coming from my elders and what they have taught me. And so they're really deserving all the credit and, and the ancestors who did these practices. But what I was talking about how, during the pandemic, all these people are staying indoors, and we started noticing the world, like coyotes running in the streets of the cities, and, you know, pollution going down. And so many people were like, “Oh, wow, well, obviously humans are the problem, because as soon as we go away, everything gets better”. But what I was saying is “No, everything is better when our systems slow down.” But we as human beings actually have a critical role to play, which I believe that role has been stolen from us by years of trauma, by years of warfare. And at the end of the day, fear, you know, fear. When we're in fear, we can't flow as we're naturally designed to flow. That's not to say concerns aren't important, obviously, we're concerned about a train coming towards us. But that fear that drives us to hoard, that fear that drives us to kill et cetera. 

So basically, some of the examples were, you know, in the dissertation, there's fire, water, earth and air. Sso the fire looks at fire ecology and the ways in which Indigenous peoples here would burn the forest floor every fall, and some of them still do to the point where we have something called the grass-burning moon, we have a lunar calendars that tell us what to do when. So the grass-burning moons like September and October, and we would burn in between the trees which transforms the dead grasses into ash, it opens up meadows, and it protects the old growth from getting crowded by little saplings who steal the limited water, nutrients and sunlight from the forest. And it produces nutrient rich grasses in the spring which are, you know, forage for elk, deer, buffalo, horses, sheep, all these different undulates that used to walk this continent. And so it's just exciting how people's human touch, their human hand, actually augmented life, augmented habitat, augmented spaces for life to flourish. Another example is clam gardens in the Pacific Northwest, some of these Salish Nations and also the Heiltsuk Nation and a little further north will create these clam gardens where they construct intertidal rock walls. And they noticed oh, the clams like these calmer, warmer waters, let's create more spaces where that exists. And so the intertidal rock walls would catch sediment and water as the tide goes down. And they would create these little clam spaces. And we found in the Quadra Island, gigantic island in the Pacific Northwest, 35% of the coastline had these ancient rock walls on it, 35%. 14 kilometers worth of rock wall, and they radiocarbon dated it, this was 6000-year old rock walls. So this is how long people were harvesting clams sustainably, regeneratively from these coastal areas. And within that, it's really important to examine the ethics you know, it's really important to see animals as our equals, because we are animals too. And so what these nations do, they see the clam as having its own nation, nationhood status, so they would treat the clam as if they would treat another nation. And that's how many Indigenous peoples in Turtle Island would afford that label to every single species. They have their own nation, and they have their own communities, families, and just like we want the best for our families, we should support them having the best for their families. 

I could go on and on, you know, the ancient chestnut forests, the ancient eel farms, the 6000-year old eel farms in Australia, the Bolivian floodplain management. I mean the terra preta in the Amazon where native folks have created, like the entire Amazon basin is covered in these organic top soils that are anthropogenic and human-made in nature. I could go on and on and not just in, you know, the US and South America. Norway, we have examples of people burning, doing prescribed burns thousands of years ago, and Africa. I won't go too into it, but suffice it to say, there's many ways that human beings around the world have not just not hurt, but have actually been a beautiful gift to the earth, a keystone species that actually has become a linchpin in the healthy functioning of the ecosystem. And we treated the Earth so good, that She would actually miss us if we left. And so that's what I'm encouraging people to try to become again.

Sarah Ichioka

I feel like we couldn't have a more powerful message to end the conversation. But do you have any final questions or thoughts to share with the audience, in Amsterdam and online? In an urban context, many of them trained as designers are interested in design as a discipline. How can this worldview extend to their life and work? 

Lyla June Johnston

I think one of the greatest tenets within the research and I called the dissertation the ‘Excavation of Hidden History’, that was part of the tagline. The whole thing was ‘Architects of Abundance: Indigenous Regenerative Ecological Design and Excavation of the Hidden History’. But because I was just excavating all these stories, like dozens and dozens and dozens of stories, from scientific articles of what actually has happened, is the biggest tenet within them all, is like one of the biggest, is non-human centrism, or ecocentrism, some people call it. So to be ecocentric means the system is designed to benefit all life around you. Now, what is a city almost by definition, it is a human habitat. It is for humans, of humans, and it does not exist to support life around it. Let's just be honest. That's not to say we did that necessarily intentionally or even consciously, because we've been so trained into this human centrism. But it's just to say that obviously, there's some progress being made, but by and large global cities are for humans. 

And so how do we retool the city to be an agent of nourishment for all life? Frankly, I think they would not look the way they do today, we would not have cities as we know them. So I think it would be a complete overhaul. And that's okay. Because it's in that process of being in service to life, instead of being a leech of life, that we will grow as people and we have nothing to lose, except for our chains and our shackles and our disappointment in our own selves, for nearly destroying the entire planet, we have nothing to lose. So as we transform and retool a city from being human-centric to ecocentric in every aspect, this could mean for example, literally creating habitat in these cities for non-humans. Or some people say more-than-human, this could look like ensuring the city actually gives to the watershed instead of taking away, or actually nourishes the watershed instead of poisoning it, and on and on and on. But it would take a complete overhaul, a renovation to make this a truly non-human centric system. So I think that's how we apply this,  and as we think about urban design, you know, remembering that these cities were almost by definition, not in alignment with life. So it's a challenging, but exciting task to transform them into something that is a giver, not a taker.

Sarah Ichioka

Thank you, Dr. Lyla June Johnston, little sister, I think, not sure… “Little sister”, hmm although I feel like you may be my big sister in wisdom, but maybe a little sister in our trips around the sun. Thank you so much for all of that sharing. And I'm sure that people are going to find it so stimulating and enriching to their own thinking, worldviews and work.

Lyla June Johnston

Thank you for having me. It's been an honor and a pleasure to learn from you too. And thanks to all the organizers and hope to talk to you all again soon.

Sarah Ichioka

Wasn’t that amazing? During our conversation I heard from Lyla June about the transformative power of forgiveness, about re-thinking education in terms of mutual sharing, and how blending different modes of expression can help us communicate better. What stayed with me the most from our discussion is her vivid sharing about what land stewardship has, does and can like in practice, and the profound potential of human touch in enriching life on Earth. Thanks for listening and see you next time.

This podcast is based on the book Flourish: Design Paradigms for Our Planetary Emergency by Sarah Ichioka and Michael Pawlyn (published by Triarchy Press). Visit www.flourish-book.com to find where to get your copy, download our book club guide, find full transcripts and show notes for all the podcast episodes and so much more. 

Michael Pawlyn

And for all of you who prefer listening over reading, we encourage you to buy a copy of our audio edition of “Flourish”, narrated by voice artist Nicola Burgess. You can find it on Audible, Apple Books & Amazon. If there are aspects of Flourish that you particularly like - whether in the book, audiobook, podcast interviews or online lectures, please let us know through our website. We may do a second season of podcast episodes, but no promises just yet.

Sarah Ichioka

This special episode was co-produced by Sarah and Michael with support from Shireen Marican. Thank you to the Designing Cities for All team at Pakhuis de Zwijger and to Dolphie Bou who supported the original recording. The podcast is edited and features original music by Tobias Withers.

Transcript support by Xin Ru Sarah Leong.

Podcast cover art by Studio Folder