Emergence Magazine Podcast

From the Yangtze Valley, to Neolithic Mesopotamia, to the orchards of Oxford, Roger Deakin sought to understand the origins of the domesticated apple. His essay East of Eden—an excerpted chapter from his book Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees—recounts his journey into the wild fruit forests that grow on the mountainsides of Kazakhstan. After Roger’s death in 2006, Robert MacFarlane planted a sapling grown from an apple seed that Roger carried home. As ‘Roger’s tree’ now fruits in his yard, Robert collects the pips to distribute to others, envisioning a “worldwide wildwood of memory-trees.” This essay is narrated by Robert Macfarlane. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Gathering wild foods was once a practice of deep observation, carried out by women who knew the ways of wild medicine. In this narrated essay, Gina Rae La Cerva considers the widespread loss of this traditional knowledge and the generations of women in her family who have intimately known the land. How, she asks, can the ancient feminine understanding of wildness and foraging serve a fragmented world? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The coronavirus has shrunk the scale of our individual worlds, setting us on an uncertain and increasingly narrow path. While in lockdown, David Farrier finds inspiration in the meandering imprints left by the tracks of animals. He begins to seek out desire paths: ways of walking and paying attention that mimic the way an animal pads a path across the land. Walking through his neighborhood, he locates new ways of moving which offer new opportunities for noticing both where we are and where we wish to be. When we keep ourselves open to the unexpected, he suggests, we might find a new path from here to there, and from present to future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

To conclude our six-part “Language Keepers” podcast series, we explore the rapid rate of language loss occurring around the world and hear from speakers of endangered languages who are increasingly resisting predictions of extinction. We revisit the keepers of the Tolowa Dee-ni’, Karuk, Wukchumni, and Kawaiisu languages, who offer their thoughts, prayers, and hopes for the future of their languages and for the generations that will come after them.Adapted from our award-winning multimedia story, “Language Keepers,” this six-part podcast series explores the struggle for Indigenous language survival in California. In each episode, we meet and learn from dedicated families and communities across the state who are working to revitalize their Native languages and cultures in order to pass them on to the next generation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For many Indigenous communities, the effort to document and learn from as many last speakers as possible is a race against time. In Episode Five of our “Language Keepers” podcast series we meet Julie Girado Turner, who, for nearly two decades, has been documenting and recording her father and aunt, the last remaining fluent speakers of the Kawaiisu language. Adapted from our award-winning multimedia story, “Language Keepers,” this six-part podcast series explores the struggle for Indigenous language survival in California. In each episode, we meet and learn from dedicated families and communities across the state who are working to revitalize their Native languages and cultures in order to pass them on to the next generation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Episode Four of our “Language Keepers” podcast series brings us to the home of Marie Wilcox—the last fluent speaker of the Wukchumni language and the creator of the only Wukchumni dictionary. Younger generations of language learners often rely on both fluent elders and physical resources: Marie and the dictionary she created have been an inspiration to four generations of her family and to Indigenous communities around the world.Adapted from our award-winning multimedia story, “Language Keepers,” this six-part podcast series explores the struggle for Indigenous language survival in California. In each episode, we meet and learn from dedicated families and communities across the state who are working to revitalize their Native languages and cultures in order to pass them on to the next generation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Episode Three of our “Language Keepers” podcast series explores efforts to revitalize the Karuk language, which is deeply tied to the Klamath River in Northern California. Just as a river is dependent on an unobstructed flow to remain healthy, a language depends on healthy connections and transmissions between generations of speakers. Karuk language keepers Maymi Preston-Donahue, Phil Albers, and Julian Lang are working to fill generational gaps in the transmission of Karuk.Adapted from our award-winning multimedia story, “Language Keepers,” this six-part podcast series explores the struggle for Indigenous language survival in California. In each episode, we meet and learn from dedicated families and communities across the state who are working to revitalize their Native languages and cultures in order to pass them on to the next generation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Episode Two of our “Language Keepers” podcast series brings you to the redwood forests of Northern California, home to Loren Bommelyn, the sole remaining fluent speaker of the Tolowa Dee-ni’ language. Tolowa, like other Indigenous languages, is interwoven with the ecosystem where it came into being and thus holds the traditional ecological knowledge of the Tolowa people. Along with many Native communities, the Bommelyn family is grappling with what is at stake—for their children, for their culture, and for the land itself—if they lose their language. Adapted from our award-winning multimedia story, “Language Keepers,” this six-part podcast series explores the struggle for Indigenous language survival in California. In each episode, we meet and learn from dedicated families and communities across the state who are working to revitalize their Native languages and cultures in order to pass them on to the next generation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Adapted from our award-winning multimedia story, “Language Keepers,” this six-part podcast series explores the struggle for Indigenous language survival in California. Two centuries ago, as many as ninety languages and three hundred dialects were spoken in California; today, only half of these languages remain. In this series, we delve into the current state of four Indigenous languages which are among the most vulnerable in the world: Tolowa Dee-ni’, Karuk, Wukchumni, and Kawaiisu. Along this journey, we meet and learn from dedicated families and communities across the state who are working to revitalize their Native languages and cultures in order to pass them on to the next generation.In Episode One, we are introduced to the language revitalization efforts of these four Indigenous communities. Through their experiences, we examine the colonizing histories that brought Indigenous languages to the brink of disappearance and the struggle for Indigenous cultural survival in America today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lia Purpura is the author of nine collections of essays, poems, and translations, including It Shouldn’t Have Been Beautiful and All the Fierce Tethers. In this narrated essay, Lia bears witness to the decomposing body of a deer and considers stories of “rightness”: the processes which transform bodies from one state to another and the beginnings that emerge from endings. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices