Joseph Gazing Wolf: Re-grounding democracy in traditional ecological knowledge (Ep433)
“The more I have worked to build my way out of poverty, the greater the levels of worry, anxiety, and just general exhaustion that I’ve experienced in my life. My best moments in life were when I had nothing and all I had was animals that I worked with...”
What does it mean to expand our perceptions of wealth — and question what it means to build freedom and security in life? How might we re-ground our understandings of democracy in traditional ecological knowledge? And how do we embrace an all-of-the-above approach when it comes to our possibilities for systemic change?
In this episode, we are honored to welcome Joseph Gazing Wolf, who offers a wealth of wisdom drawing upon his life experiences growing up in landless, abject poverty.
Join us as we explore how what it means to become “uncontrollable” in the eyes of mainstream systems, what we can learn from the diverse Indigenous knowledges rooted in different places around the globe, and more.
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About our guest:
Joseph Gazing Wolf is an interdisciplinary Indigenous philosopher. As a scholar in the academic and nonprofit sectors, Joseph partners with Indigenous communities to support the revitalization of their ancestral lifeways, ecologies, and epistemologies. As a land steward in the conservation and agricultural sectors, Joseph works to provide technical support for Indigenous land stewards.
Artistic credits:
Song feature: “My Rebel Spirit” by Adrian Sutherland
Episode artwork by Kamea Chayne
Dive deeper:
Listen to a podcast episode with Joseph Gazing Wolf on the Heritage Lands Collective
Watch “Indigenous Values and the Preservation of Western Democracy”, a talk with Joseph Gazing Wolf
Voices of Indigenuity, a book edited by Michelle Montgomery
Expand your lenses:
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episode transcript
Note: Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Kamea Chayne: Part of your earlier journey was situated in landless abject poverty and starvation. And throughout later parts of your journey as well, as you lived and learned different biocultural ways of more land based living, you've also had to navigate and engage with different levels and forms of wealth and resourcefulness.
So with your background and experiences at heart, I'd be curious to hear about how growing up with limited monetary resources and learning firsthand, or through your collaborators in different communities on what it means to live with place, how has this influenced your relationship with monetary wealth and other forms of wealth, and also what you understand as a census of security and abundance and fulfillment to come from?
Joseph Gazing Wolf: I love that question. I think that’s one of the things that I see as very different in me as compared to those that surround me, especially as I pursue education, and I'm surrounded more and more by people who grew up in lavish wealth compared to what I've known in life. For most of them, they consider themselves middle class or something like that. But compared to most people in the world, the folks that you tend to find in the academy, for example, have grown up with incredible amounts of wealth.
The biggest difference between them and I is that there's a lot of things that cause them a great deal of turbulence and anxiety about life that don't do much for me. And there's also a lot of things in their lives that kind of control them in terms of wealth, in terms of job security and things like that where they're limited in what they can and can't say, what they can and can't pursue in life because they're terrified of the idea of losing all the wealth that they have. Or losing their position at the university or wherever they happen to be.
Because of the experiences I've been given in life, I've come to understand those things as incredibly fleeting and really not valuable in terms of what's truly meaningful in life. The more I have worked to build my way out of poverty, the greater the levels of worry and concern and anxiety and just general exhaustion that I've experienced in my life.
My best moments in life were when I had nothing and all I had was animals that I worked with. I had my horse who was my partner and I followed buffalo who lived themselves on meager lifestyles, meager diets, and lived very unpredictable lives. So those were my favorite days. My best memories were the times when I lived out of a tent in the middle of nowhere with absolutely no wealth whatsoever, or when I was in garbage city eating rotted bread and people's trash. Those were the moments where I felt truly free because I had nothing to lose. And I've carried that spirit with me through my work. For some people, when they experience me in the academy or in places where people come from backgrounds of wealth, I tend to be received in two ways: either as a person who represents the liberation that some folks are looking for, or as somebody who's extremely threatening.
When you understand what truly liberates you, when you achieve true liberation from the things in this life that tie you down, you become, to most people, extremely threatening. You become uncontrollable.
We can't control you with wealth. We can't control you with threats. We can't control you with prison time. We can't control you with death threats or anything else because you've already nearly died many times. You've already lived in abject poverty. There's nothing that we can threaten you with, so there's no way to control somebody who has experienced what I've experienced in life.
And it provides true liberation, but it's also an uncertain place to be for me because I never know how people are going to react to me. Some folks are wonderful and kind and understand where I'm coming from, at least theoretically. But most folks, especially if they have privilege, tend to see me as threatening because I threaten their systems. Because my presence and existence threatens the system, the very fact that I'm alive threatens the system, the system is what creates places like garbage city. The system, economic, governmental, genocidal, and supremacist systems of the world, are what create places like garbage city.
A child who grew up in garbage city is supposed to just die and die quietly. Just like a child who grows up in Gaza, they're supposed to just die quietly, and not make noise. But the fact that some folks survive those situations and then even more rarely survive those situations and then work hard and rise and also just experience random luck and chance (which I've experienced a lot) and are able to build something out of their lives where they have some kind of a platform, where kind people like you give a nobody like me a platform to speak, that threatens the system. It threatens the narrative that people expect. The poor are supposed to just die. The helpless are supposed to just die. They're not supposed to exist in the system. It's only the rich and powerful. So for many, my existence is just threatening. And so, to your question, it's what I value.
When you have nothing, what you learn is that the only meaningful thing in life are the sweet moments that you get to experience.
And it's the sweet moments you get to experience with other living beings. So when I was hungry and living with other homeless kids from garbage city, we would laugh and play with each other. If I was able to get food that day, I would share it with other, maybe smaller kids that weren't able to get any that day. Things like that. We would comfort each other. And it goes on from there. All the sweet moments that we get to experience in life with our pets, with our loved ones, with our partners, that ultimately provided meaning for me and made a life worth living. Everything else is chasing after the wind. Everything else is going to go away and be done. The only thing you're going to savor in this life are those sweet moments.
Kamea Chayne: That's really powerful. The values that you just shared are things that I think most people would agree with, but I think the dominant systems teach people so many superfluous things to value, and things that aren't really necessary to our fundamental senses of health and wellbeing and life satisfaction and so forth, but that have been indoctrinated and taught to people as things that people should value and offer most of their time and labor and attention towards in order to be able to earn their security.
What you shared reminds me of this recent article I read from indigenousaction.org on ways to become ungovernable. They share a lot of things you said in terms of learning to take care of each other so that you render the system obsolete and not needing to rely on it. I also think it's true that if people were reliant on the system to live and get all of their needs met, then it does make sense that their abilities to do well within the confines of the system can bring them a sense of security or insecurity and kind of be the basis of that. But when you've learned to derive your ways of living and sustenance and knowledge and sense of community in alternative ways, that is very threatening to the system and what it's been teaching people, and also very freeing.
I would definitely not say that you're a nobody, because we love learning from people like you and we're very honored to have you here. And I would also say that a lack in certain forms of wealth, valued by the system, also isn't everything, because I know you're incredibly rich in many other forms of wealth, like relational wealth and wealth of alternative forms of knowledge and so forth.
And to kind of expand on this a little more, I know you've collaborated with Indigenous communities across different biocultural regions of the world. And as we learn more about what it means to honor place, what would you like to share in terms of the common denominators of Indigenous knowledges and Traditional Ecological Knowledge across different communities, as well as what can really only be syndicated but not replicated, because they have to honor the diversity of species and history and dynamics in place?
Joseph Gazing Wolf: There are a few commonalities when it comes to Indigenous knowledges, which really come from Indigenous experience on the land.
I'm a person who learns from life. I don't read much. If I see somebody who has wisdom, I pursue that person rather than pursue the books that they've written, so my reading kind of supplements the experience I've had. And I’ve worked a lot in Latin America, throughout Africa, Southeast Asia. The global south has been my primary focus along with here in the States.
The one thing that's really common with communities who still live their traditional ways… is relationality — relationality to place, relationality to living beings around them. [This] is an important caveat because many communities have either been coerced out of their traditional way of life or have been wooed by the green eye of macroeconomics.
The perception that everything around you is alive, and that there isn't a category of biological life versus non-biological life. But everything is alive and everything is interconnected via their lived experience.
There are a lot of stories in many different cultures that tie in all the different aspects and elements of place. If I'm in the Amazon with Kichwa and Waorani relatives, for example, the river is central to their story and the narrative, because it's the source of life and it breathes life into everything else around it. All the stories of different tree species and different animal species are all interconnected and ultimately take place within the context of the river, the land, the soil, etc. All things are interconnected and relational. And so they are relational in a sense that if one being, let's say a tree, acts out of place or acts in ways that trees are not supposed to act perhaps, then that tree may suffer consequences or it may create reverberations throughout creation, or throughout place, that are either powerful and meaningful and positive, or could be incredibly negative. The idea is that there are many different actors in this story of relationality in place that influence one another in many ways. And all have volition, all have will, all are able to act, all are able to influence each other.
In other words, the human is hardly or rarely ever central to the story. The human is often part of the story–a very important part of the story– but not the center of the world as you find in non-Indigenous cultures. The human is not called upon to conquer the world and dominate it and regulate it and manage it. Rather, the human is understood as having some important part of the story in place where they're supposed to behave and act in particular ways that are reciprocal. respectful and relational to other beings within that place. And so humans do have and often play an important role, but that important role is dependent on the roles that all the other beings in place play as well. In other words, there's no human superiority.
When it comes to things that are syndicated, that depends on place. So if I am with the Nubian people in Egypt, the Nile River is an incredibly important part of the story where both the Nile and the desert are important parts of the narrative for Nubian people. The specific species that they might fish or the species in the deserts that they might hunt, those are unique to those people. It's not unexpected, for example, that for the Nubian, the lion is a big part of the narrative for them. And that's because there are plenty of lions in the Saharan desert.It's somebody you live with on a regular basis. So depending on where you are in the world, different communities will have different beings that are very central to their story. For the Lakota (my father’s people), the buffalo is absolutely central to how we understand the world, how we live, how we breathe, how we walk across place. How we move across our places was determined by the buffalo.
There are unique relationalities that take place within different situations, within different landscapes where particular beings can play pivotal roles in the lives of the humans that are there. The commonalities are, the idea of respecting all living things, respecting the land that you're on, not seeing them as commodities or resources, but rather as relatives, as kin. The idea of kinship is very important in most Indigenous cultures. And it's not just important, it's real.
If I'm an Amazonian Indigenous person, for example, the Anaconda has an extremely important and real, not just symbolic, role as a kin member of mine, as a relative of mine. And so the idea of butchering Anaconda like Europeans did when they came into the Amazon because they represent satan or whatever, would never occur to the Indigenous person in that context. In fact, quite the opposite. The snake is representative of a part of me. That's a part of me as a human being. My story and the snake's story are one and the same.
Kamea Chayne: I'm very interested to learn about Indigenous spirituality and Indigenous mythology because at the end of the day, like you shared, I think they teach people how to relate to place in more relational ways. I think honoring that place-based diversity is really vital, especially during this time when there are aligning trends of language diversity loss, cultural diversity loss, biodiversity loss, and that's not a coincidence at all. It's because they're all interwoven together.
Lately I've been thinking a lot about this observation of a sort of ungrounded diversity in thought permeating society, which basically speaks to this idea that with information overload, with the institutional bias of research and knowledge, knowledge production and also with the manufactured consent of state and corporate media, the diversity in thought arising from this deeper disorientation and disorientation and delusion feels very ungrounded. And so there's this attempt to take into account everyone's views in order to best understand, for example, what solutions to implement, or how to best support some particular shared goals, that bigger picture story itself can become misleading.
Oftentimes people are operating from entirely different understandings of reality. So it's not that diversity in thought is bad, because diversity is so vital, but I'm more so looking at that layer of dissociation and disorientation underneath that have become the basis for people's diversity in thought, if that makes sense.
This leads me to ask: in a world which seems to privilege universalized knowledge and impose certain gauges of credibility, also ones that have been shaped by particular cosmologies and born out of particular social and power structures (making it not at all neutral but deeply political), what would you like to elaborate on in terms of what it means to reground our knowledge and education in ways that can feel more rooted and in our place?
Joseph Gazing Wolf: I can only speak from my perspective as an Indigenous person, but I would say, a returning to place based knowledge via the Indigenous lifeways of local communities would be what you would ideally shoot for as a population. Let's say we were trying to return to more grounded knowledge rather than the epistemic superiority of Western or European knowledge, then we would want to return to the original stewards of the place in which we live and seek their wisdom and knowledge as to how we should be living our lives in this place. The idea is to connect with local Indigenous communities and then seek their guidance in terms of, how we live with the beings in this place.
How do we remedy what we've destroyed, here in the States and elsewhere? Everywhere I've been, humans have kind of scarified the land.
There's a whole lot of land scars that have been created via European colonization, and general human colonization in the name of so-called human advancement. And so how do we readjust our priorities and readjust our relationship with Mother Earth in a way where it's mutually reinforcing?
Where we see the beauty in her and what she gives us. She continues to give us the life that we need to exist in harmony with one another and with the Earth itself. So in that sense then, returning to Indigenous communities and seeking their guidance and how we live would be the primary way to do that. In terms of academic institutions, they would utilize whatever privilege and power and wealth and political sway that they have in order to move towards that vision of working with local communities to have their systems of education be guided by local communities.
In one of the papers I'm going to publish soon, I worked with a group of Indigenous scholars and the idea that we collectively came up with is:
If we want to move towards reconciliation, both reconciliation between communities but also reconciliation between humans and planet earth, we have to uphold the voices of the marginalized —
beginning with the most marginalized voice, the voice of Mother Earth and all of her children. And so understanding that plant and animal life, plant and animal relatives that live around you, have just as much a right to life and to place as much as you do. Beginning there under the guidance of Indigenous communities coming up with a way to conceptualize how we do education in place rather than inside a classroom, is important too. The paper that we wrote together highlights how you pursue reconciliation via the sharing of power, the sharing of decision-making, economic power, the return of lands to Indigenous nations. Moving toward that direction would be would behoove all of us if we want to continue to live in relative peace.
Unfortunately, I think it is quite late when it comes to climate change and the impacts that climate change is going to have on all our lives. But we can mitigate a lot of that and learn to adapt to a lot of that by pursuing the guidance of Indigenous nations that have lived through a lot of that already and have lived through genocide, extermination and having been dispossessed of their lands, and have survived. And many still thrive today despite all that. So it would be great to move education in that direction in order for us to have any hope for a hopeful future where people could be excited about their children's prospects. In 40, 50, 60 years from now, rather than everybody living in climate angst and worrying about what the world's gonna look like in 10 to 20 years, let alone, you know, 40 or 50 years, we need to start doing that work and we need to move towards that vision rapidly.
Kamea Chayne: Even when it comes to climate solutions, there's such a wide range in perspectives on what people should do. And I feel like a lot of that does come from people's different understandings of what led to the problems or what the root causes are. And also different exposures to different framings of the problems as well. And that kind of goes back to the question of how we reground our knowledge. Because even the most idealized forms of democratic politics would still fail to support our collective well-being if our forms of knowledge and ways of knowing that are shaping public values and understandings are not also democratized and rerouted in place. And as you mentioned, really centering the voices of communities who have been the most marginalized.
But there's a lot more to unpack here as well when we talk about democracy, which people often believe to have Western roots. And I know this is a big topic, so I welcome you to share whatever comes to mind.
Especially during these times when a lot of people are kind of waking up to the illusion of Western democracy in many places with the rise of people's movements and student movements being punished and suppressed, what would you like to add in regards to why so-called Western democracy seems to be failing their purported goals of centering the people and also what inspirations can we take from re-situating Traditional Ecological Knowledge as you name being resilient embodied democracy?
Joseph Gazing Wolf: The trouble is that, and again, it's about these systems. The problem is when you erect a system and you say, “here's what the system stands for,” but in reality, what the system is standing for is something completely different. When the so-called founding fathers of the United States wrote things like “all men are created equal”, but they're writing that while owning slaves, that's what you call being full of crap. That's what you call hypocrisy at its foundation, at its heart.
There's an ancient saying, which I believe is Buddhist or South Asian, saying endings are contained in beginnings.
If you start something hypocritically, if you start it pretentiously, there's only really one end to it. And the ramifications of that end are what we are seeing now.
The students right now are saying “don't use my money to go kill women and children.” And they're being arrested. They're being beaten. They're being excommunicated from the university. An Elder Jewish mentor of mine was literally body slammed by the police simply for being there for her students. It's ridiculous what these systems purport to be and yet clearly action speaks louder than words. And what they stand for is nothing as to what they speak for. So there's the part of suiting the action to the word and the word to the action. If you're going to say that this is a democracy, then we need to understand what that means.
It goes back to the question and the point that you made, which was wonderful, that we really have to emphasize marginalized communities. And empowering marginalized communities to have equal voices to everyone else within the population. Because that's what democracy is. So I think it begins by understanding what the heck we're talking about when we're talking about democracy.
Democracy was not invented by Europeans, not even close. It was borrowed, stolen, appropriated from Indigenous people here in the States and elsewhere. You know, the Greeks and the ancient Alexandria and Athens were kind of the philosophical birthplace of the ideas of democracy. Separately, but at the same time the Indigenous people of the Northeast here in the States and in Canada were people that also purported conceptualized ideas of democracy that were taken by the so-called founding fathers. And so what is democracy, first and foremost? Where does it come from? Well, it comes from those places and those people, but what is it? “I can vote therefore I have democracy.” No, it's not. It’s not “I have a nice house and a nice car therefore I have democracy.” “I have a Second Amendment right. I can shoot people.” No. “I have a First Amendment right. I can say whatever I want.” No, none of those things are democracy.
Democracy is power and it's not power to the people. Because if it was power to the people it would be, there's a word in Greek for that, anthropos. So why is it not anthropocracy? Why is it democracy? Who are the demos in Greek?
If you come to my neighborhood and walk down the street and see Black people living in tents because they're homeless and the community cares less about them, those are the demos. The demos are the most vulnerable amongst us.
The demos are the least resourced amongst us, the least powerful amongst us. Those are the demos, in Greek philosophy. So kratia is power. It's not power to the people. It's not power to white people that live in white suburbia. It's not power to you and I who are privileged to be here and be able to have this conversation with one another. It's not power to us. It's power to the poor, to the disenfranchised. To the children of Garbage City. When those who are the most disenfranchised and have the least power amongst us have equal power to the Donald Trump's of the world and the Elon Musk's of the world, that's when you have democracy.
How do we achieve that vision? How do we move in that direction? It’s hard to say because, when you've set up systems in such a way that they're only meant to privilege certain folks, certain cultural backgrounds and the wealthy, it’s difficult to create reformation that can come via any peaceful means. Which I think younger people are beginning to understand. I've written many letters about what's going on in Gaza for decades. I've written the senators here in California, in the Dakotas, wherever I've lived. I've written people all kinds of letters about the brutality of killing Palestinians? Saying, stop this, this is stupid. And all that happens is they send you a generic response back in a pre-written letter.
So the system is not set up to hear your voice or mine, let alone the voice of the underprivileged, of the marginalized, of the people that are struggling. I don't know of any peaceful way to change these authoritarian systems that we live under in order for them to actually value the voices of the people that should be in power or should have equal power in order for us to have a democracy. I don't know how that happens without violence, without the dismantling of systems of violence. I don't know how you pursue that without those things.
I was one of the people who helped co-organize the revolution in Egypt. I think even when people move in the direction of trying to overthrow systems or dismantle them, that has to be done in particular ways and it has to be done wisely. Otherwise, all that ends up happening is a worse dictator, a worse authoritarian ends up taking place as you have today in Egypt. So there are ways to move towards democracy, but that really takes experienced, intelligent leadership and experienced, intelligent followership because in order for you to have to be worthy of good leaders, you have to be competent followers.
Many times people ask like, how is it possible that we got somebody like Donald Trump elected in the late 21st century? My response is, well, he's the leader that the people of the United States are worthy of. If not, he wouldn't be there. So the idea is that if we want good leadership, we have to understand what that looks like. What is good leadership, and how do we take good leaders, put them in positions of power, and then learn to follow them as competent followers? That's gonna take a whole lot of work on everyone's part.
But seeing students organize is something that's brought a lot of hope to my heart because they're not giving up, they’re not quitting. They're continuing to raise their voices. They're continuing to occupy campuses and they're continuing to do this work.
And that's really important because what it does is it de-glorifies the system. It tells the system you are not God, you can be challenged, and perhaps someday you can be taken down. And that's kind of the message that the students are sending. And I hope they're sending that message competently, and I hope they continue to send that message, not just with particular issues, but holistically and systemically. So that it's not the idea of us constantly waiting until we're in crisis, until there's a genocide, then all of a sudden we rise up and we occupy places.
It's good that people are responding this way, but why wait until there's a genocide? Where were people earlier in the month of October of last year where Gazans were still under occupation for decades and decades where were people then? Why weren't people protesting and occupying spaces then? Where were people when women still had the right to abortion via court case? Why didn't we continue to push to solidify that right to where it can't be overturned? Why did we wait until it was overturned for us to all of a sudden care about women's health? We have to really change our mentality when it comes to how we live our lives. If we continue to just be responsive when there's a crisis, when we're attacked, look how that's worked out for you.
Kamea Chayne: This feels challenging too, because I feel like a part of it is systemic as in when people are increasingly having to work like two, three jobs, their capacities to engage with political education after a long day of work is kind of dwindling. When people get home, they just want to watch some entertainment and then go to sleep or spend some time, a little time with their family and loved ones and then go to sleep. Not to say it's mutually exclusive because it's often the most marginalized communities who are the most politically educated. So it's definitely not mutually exclusive, but just another layer of challenge for people to work through in the face of what feels like systemic narcissism in a lot of ways. Much political gaslighting going on and pathological lies really just spread by political establishments
Like you shared, I don't know how we can compost the existing order and system without there being violence. And also when I say that, I acknowledge as a lot of people do as well, in that the norms and the status quo are already violent. And it's just kind of become a sort of normalized violence that people have come to accept as just how things are. And therefore, when there are reactions to that systemic violence, people then demonize those movements rather than acknowledge that those are actually just reactions to the violent norms.
When it comes to academia and your inspirations to move beyond the classroom, which you name is where education goes to die, you share that your dissertation focus is on “how do you fit indigenous knowledge into the same system that you raise them, and yet they have pretentious inclusion agendas that don't have any genuine relationship. The only way to deal with a system of erasure is to dismantle the system”, end quote. This is kind of expanding upon things that you just shared here, but as we think about questions of working within and outside of electoral politics of a place like the United States, I think a lot of people are rightfully feeling very jaded and dissatisfied with the kind of illusion of choice filtered through the political establishments where it always seems like a lesser of evil option because there are systemic barriers that push much more radically minded people out of that system before they even have a chance to be on the ballot.
There was a recent poll showing young voters despairing over U.S. politics where people named it as a dying empire led by bad people. I'm still inconclusive thinking through different theories of change and how collective transformation can really come about. Like you shared, there are certain strategies to learn and be mindful of, but I would be curious to hear your thoughts on dismantling versus reformism for the more immediate term, or perhaps if there are third ways and fourth ways that people really haven't been offering much attention to.
What questions would you invite people to sit with when thinking about the possibilities of what that actually might entail, especially when people think about accelerating collapse as a way towards systemic composting?
Joseph Gazing Wolf: I would say all of the above is kind of the answer. Because to try and dismantle systems today, which are immensely wealthy and immensely powerful, it's going to take one, it's going to take the majority of us, it's going to take a large number of people. Not staying home, not staying in classrooms, but getting out on the streets and it’s gonna take all of the above. Those who can participate in immediate reform should do that. Meanwhile, many of us who let's say, have a partner, or children, or have people you need to take care of and have got to earn your living and do all those things like you mentioned, and maybe don't have time to become more politically active, to join the revolution if you will, that's fine. What you can do is put your power to work, put your work to power in other words. Put your work to gain you power within the system. So work hard in order for you to gain more monetary wealth, more systemic wealth, more institutional power and wealth. And as you move through the system, you become the person who can now be the level, who can pull the levers and make more decisions.
So try to essentially hack the system in every possible way that you can, whether by rising through the system and dismantling it from the inside out slowly. Some stopped short of dismantling the system holistically because we just don't have the people power in place and the organization in place. What we can do is enter the system and kind of create pockets of disruption. As an academic, I'm a walking pocket of disruption. I walk into spaces and the white dominant culture and white supremacist way of being and knowing doesn't get to dominate. Because when I walk into a room, I point all of that shit out. My voice becomes loud. My voice speaks over the people whose voices are always heard. And so I become a pocket of disruption. And then I bring more of my people into that context, which is what I did with my dissertation work. I brought together Indigenous and Black scholars or Indigenous and mixed race scholars. And we created these pockets of cultural disruption.
In other words, the idea is…
Do whatever it is you're capable of doing and don't look up at people that are more politically involved and don't look down at people that are less politically involved. Do whatever you can do within the contextuality and situation that you're in.
If you have six kids at home that you need to feed, I'm not going to blame you for being a full-time single mom who's taking care of your kids and don't have time to focus on political stuff, but you can still remain conscious and you can still remain educated about what's going on in the world. And you can use your vote as your voice. You can use your dollar as your voice to support certain businesses over others. So there are many things we can do collectively. And that's why I say it's all of the above. Whatever you can do, you should be doing.
And don't think of it as doing for others necessarily, although that's what you're doing. But think of it as doing for yourself and for the future of any people that you care or love. Because like you said, if we continue to go down the road that we're, the path that we're on, there's nothing good to come. There's nothing positive that's coming down the road. Only more of the same and more of what we've been seeing. If we don't keep trying, it's just going to get worse. And hopefully people have learned in recent years that things can get worse really quickly because the veil of rights, the veil of human dignity is so incredibly thin and fragile. It can be easily fractured by a single person in a position of power, and bby him or her calling out their supporters that have been waiting for decades to express their values and their ideas. So just keep in mind, don't rest.
That's what I was talking about earlier, the idea of “we won a court case, okay, now we can rest and everything's okay”. No. Try to find other ways to solidify the vision that you have for your community and society and keep pushing to the point where the things that you want in life cannot be reversed.
That shadow, that veil, that cover of human dignity in your society should be so thick that it takes years and years and years and decades for anyone to try and crack through it.
Unfortunately, that's not how we've been living and how we continue to live.
Kamea Chayne: Well, Green Dreamer, we are coming to a close here, but we will have more references and resources from this episode linked in our show notes at greendreamer.com. And for now, Joseph, thank you so much for joining me on the show today and for all that you do and inspire. It's been a pleasure and an honor to welcome you here. As we wrap up, what final words of wisdom do you have for us as Green Dreamers?
Joseph Gazing Wolf: If there's one lesson that I've learned in life it’s to
Take every opportunity to experience those sweet moments and to create them for others, because that's really what life comes down to.
We can achieve all kinds of wonderful things societally, but the truly valuable thing in our individual lives is turning to a loved one and kissing them, turning to a child and hugging them. Showing compassion to those around us and being a loving, a person of loving presence to others, that's really what matters.
