For The Wild

This Slow Study Course is a series of lectures and practice prompts from Bayo Akomolafe's 2021 edition of "We Will Dance With Mountains: Into the Cracks!" wherein 1000+ people gathered. It is a carnivalesque course in postactivism, a matter of fissures, fault lines, cracks, openings, seismic shifts, endings, and fugitive marronage. This learning journey is available for you to explore from home at your own pleasurable pace. Visit our website at forthewild.world to learn more.Support the show

The Mountain Valley Pipeline, which runs through West Virginia to Virginia is on the verge of completion following intense legislative and legal battles. This episode reminds us of the danger in this, and amidst such battles, Appalachians Against Pipelines shows us what might be possible if we allow ourselves to imagine a world outside of extraction. Lark Elodea joins Ayana to discuss the relentless and direct activism Appalachians Against Pipelines has been doing to stop the pipeline, build community resistance, and advocate for the needs of their communities in the face of developers, oil and gas advocates, and a continued disregard for Appalachian voices. Lark roots the conversation in reverence for the land and the complex legacies of violence and oppression within it. Fighting against the pipeline is, as Lark says, “not only fighting for a world with no pipelines, but also no borders, or prisons or colonialism.” Our decisions here matter for communities and matter for the collective future we are buildin

This week guest Tusha Yakovleva calls on us to remember our millennium-old relationship with weedy beings and the gifts of wild and invasive plants. It’s estimated that worldwide spending on invasive species exceeds one trillion dollars annually. But if we were to cease our violent relationship with weeds and invasive species, what might we find? Cultural cooperation between plants and people? A whole slew of plant-relatives that are thriving in increasingly challenging landscapes? We are challenged to think about our capacity, or willingness, to know invasive plants - Tusha queries listeners to ask “Do we know their reasons for making home in unfamiliar soils? Or what gifts and responsibilities they carry?” We are left with much to think about in the realm of curiosity and acceptance, two muscles that need an exceptional amount of exercise in a time where so much is rapidly changing environmentally and socially.Tusha Yakovleva is an educator, gatherer and ethnobotanist whose work revolves around generating s

This week, guest Yoalli Rodriguez brings us to the Chacahua-Pastoría Lagoons in Oaxaca, Mexico, to investigate deep connections with land, ongoing colonial violence, and the grief that comes alongside loving a place. The Chacahua-Pastoría Lagoons have long been vital spaces for Black and Indigenous communities, but continued colonial strategies have altered and quartered off the landscape in favor of nationalist and capitalist interests. The conversation dives deep into an understanding of Mestizo geographies and the politics of refusal in the face of oppressive power. Despite the institutional acts of violence that limit sensual and sensorial relationships with the land, people continue to make spaces of their own and lay claims to land that go against colonial rule. With this context, Yoalli and Ayana come to a heartening conversation about the importance of ecological grief, rage, and sadness.Yoalli’s work pays deep attention to the everyday lives of those who live around the lagoons, and she notes the car

Breathing in the joy and lessons of the plant life surrounding us, Ayana and guest Antonia Estela Pérez share an enriching conversation on the power and magic of coming to know the world around us. Antonia dives into the tension that exists in living in and caring for lands that have been violently colonized, calling listeners to understand plants both in the ways that colonization has affected their legacies and within anti-colonial structures that suggest there are other ways to engage with the plants around us. The natural world is, in fact, not separated from any one of us, and in detailing her work with Herban Cura, Antonia brings her insight on connections to plants and land within urban settings expanding the horizons of intimacy between humans and plants across human-imposed boundaries. As Antonia shares more about her New York City and Chilean roots, she reminds us of the value of connection to places for spiritual, ancestral, and medicinal means. Cultural and ancestral knowledge are vital to everyon

Guided by her curated work Open In Emergency (a “hybrid book project” including a Tarot Deck and a “hacked” DSM), Dr. Mimi Khúc and Ayana share in a deep conversation touching on mental health, collective unwellness, and the power of communal care. Mimi provides listeners with a reminder of joyful slowness and the vitality of finding the agency to care for self and others.Mimi’s work is grounded in the question: “How do we find new ways to talk about what hurts?” Flipping diagnosis on its head, Mimi guides us to find new ways to name what we feel and to decolonize the language of feeling itself. How is what we feel a reflection of what we have been told we must feel? How are our understandings of wellness centered around a productivity that benefits expansive capitalism over humanity? Together, Mimi and Ayana reflect on the ethical callings and commitments to care for each other and begin to unpack the systems that must be dismantled in order to truly care for one another and find vulnerability together. The

This week, Ayana is joined by filmmaker and author Dr. Brett Story. Together, they ponder justice, accountability, and interconnection in a complex and rapidly changing world. In this intellectual and timely conversation, Brett begins by unpacking how carceral logics and conceptions of the “criminal” work, mark and dictate the world spatially, while at the same time explaining the socially-constructed nature of crime. Brett’s work examines the ways we individually and collectively metabolize our anxieties, and through this lens, she makes connections across the broad issues of our current reality from changing climates to criminal justice systems that were designed to enforce control rather than to produce true justice. At the center of the conversation is the question of interdependence– emphasizing the need for community and collective action in the face of neoliberal individualism. Mass-incarceration and climate change are not crises of the individual, but of our culture. The abolitionist imagination may

This week, guest Dr. Claudia Serrato opens our minds to the sensual, political, and vital nature of our relationship to food. Our bodies are a landscape in their own right and with Indigenous feminist theory in mind, this episode bears wittness to the cycles of gastronmies and of life that keep us tied to the earth. Claudia turns to her own landscape to remind us that there are times to dry up and times to bloom. To consume food means that we enter into a relationship with it, we physically embody it. In this conversation Claudia and Ayana dive into what that relationship could be, and how embodiment may be a spiritual quest. Honoring foodways and the gifts of the earth is about more than just changing our diets, but is rather a cultural, spiritual, and political project. How might we honor both where we came from and where we are now in ways that respect traditional foodways alongside place-based geographies/ food ways? Decolonizing the body and the landscape also means decolonizing the kitchen.Through the

How might we steward relationships of generosity, see beehives beyond the human-imposed gaze? This week, guest Ang Roell leads us to better understand bees and our entangled relationship to them. Bees, from the honeybees we may be familiar with to the wide variety of bees local to areas across the globe, are a vital participant in our ecosystems in ways that go beyond pollination or agricultural production. Together, Ang and Ayana unpack the often colonial and capitalist assumptions behind the language we use to describe bees (from the “busy bee” to the assumptions Euro-centric views of hives make). The internal workings of the hive are far more complex, more collective, more wild than many have imagined.Ang introduces listeners to the magic of the beehive as a superorganism – revealing the complex relations within the hive and the multitude of lessons if we listen rather than impose. Rooting into the rich history of beekeeping and the folk traditions of their ancestors, Ang reminds us of the deeply interconn

“The fugitive is the figure of the Anthropocene, a political invitation to unlearn ‘mastery,’ to fall to the Earth, to learn how to commune with soil… In a sense, the fugitive answers the question that is hidden within the words of my Elders, when they say: ‘in order to find your way, you must become lost.’” In this week’s episode, Bayo Akomolafe guides listeners on a journey to lose oneself and leave behind the ties that bind us to world views that do not serve humanity’s wholeness. Touching on the historical roots of fugitivity, Bayo challenges us to lean into the “political un-project” that is fugitivity, blurring societally-imposed binaries, in order to better understand the human territory and to make more-than-human sanctuary through post activism. If justice is an action and not a static state, how can we embody it? Twisting and turning through the contours of human consciousness and understanding, Bayo and Ayana dive into meaningful and existential questions. Rooted in trickster philosophy and abunda

In this new episode of For The Wild podcast, Ayana and guest Dr. Clint Carroll, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, discuss the mobility of Cherokee ethical frameworks as they are applied to environmental governance projects for Land Back. Exploring various forms of Cherokee relationality throughout time, Dr. Carroll pushes back against dominant settler histories about Cherokee migrations and relations to homeland and provides insight into what audience members ought to glean from Indigenous philosophies imparting practices of deep reciprocity, responsibility, and relationship to the land and each other. This episode shares about Cherokee Nation’s historic plant gathering agreement with Buffalo National River Cherokee Treaty Lands and details of the Cherokee Environmental Leadership program, spearheaded by Dr. Carroll. We learn of Cherokee treaty history, Cherokee relations to more than human kin encoded in origin story, Cherokee place names, and Cherokee linguistic concepts central to the Cherokee Environment

This week we are joined by guest Alexis Shotwell to discuss how we might turn from the purity politics that govern many of our lives and this hurting world toward collective struggles for transformation and liberatory futurisms. Rather than forfeiting our complicity and implication in a world with mounting problems, we learn of a helpful heuristic for transforming inaction or the urge to be the perfect activist to a ground where we might be better- equipped to stick around for the long hall in struggles for social justice. According to Alexis, this practice calls for admitting our mistakes and centering repair. In this episode, we dive into the relationship between purity culture and white supremacism, our complicit locations and implications in violence, and the importance of showing up to repair our broken and harmed relations inherited or otherwise. Alexis elucidates that it is only through the messy process of owning up to these broken relations throughout time and seeing how we might participate in and

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In this episode of For The Wild podcast, we plumb into racial karma and healing systemic trauma in the American context with guest Dr. Larry Ward. Covering the neuroscience of trauma, the habit of racism, and various typologies of systemic trauma, Dr. Ward provides insight into how we might consciously choose to activate our neuroplasticity toward justice rather than collectively rewarding our neuroplasticity for violence and oppression. We are reminded in this episode that we are more than our colonial traumatic memory; we are, in fact, part of the one living reality of the natural world. According to Dr. Ward, cultivating a spiritual practice of awareness of our embeddedness with the world allows us to transcend the conditioning of the colonial mind. Harkening to the potential for anima mundi, the creation of a new world soul, we are invited to lead in the direction of the positive deconstruction of the current world order and to be vigilant in putting our minds and behaviors toward creating generative poss

This week we are rebroadcasting our interview with Dr. Kyle Whyte originally aired in January of 2020. The United States has more miles of pipeline than any other country in the world. Pipeline construction is one of the many ways in which the U.S. continues terraforming the land in support of ongoing settler colonialism. On this episode of For The Wild, we are joined by Kyle Whyte to discuss this very issue in connection to the vast extractive energy network that surrounds the Great Lakes area. Kyle Whyte is Professor and Timnick Chair in the Humanities in the departments of Philosophy and Community Sustainability at Michigan State University.Music by Cary Morin & Bonnie "Prince" BillyVisit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description,references, and action pointsSupport the show

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This week we are rebroadcasting our interview with Linda Black Elk originally aired in April of 2020. On this week’s episode, we speak to Linda Black Elk on traditional medicine, community wellness and systemic transformation amidst pandemic. Our conversation begins with hands-on measures we can take to boost our wellbeing and what honorable harvest looks like during times of panic. How can we deepen our actions so that they are no tjust a response to fear, but are rooted in the promise of collective wellbeing? In addition to these questions of right now, Ayana and Linda discuss what will be left in the wake of COVID-19, how will we tend to the wounds of disposability? What systems will endure? What must we dismantle and what will we grow?Music by Matti Palonen & Chris Pureka.Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action pointsSupport the show

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This week we are rebroadcasting our interview with Rowen White originally aired in July of 2020. Across Turtle Island, seeds have long been passed down through the generations — accompanied by ceremony and prayer, reverent seed cultures, and sustainable food growing practices. Through eras of colonization and acculturation, however, we’ve seen the consolidation of seeds into a handful of corporations and the production of a soulless industrial food landscape. This system is failing us and, as centralized infrastructure strains and buckles, we turn to the embrace of our community and the nurturance of seeds at the local and village level. This episode is all about renewal and reanimation, as our guest Rowen White shares her thoughts on Indigenous food sovereignty, seed restoration as rematriation, and what it means to bring seed relatives home. Rowen White is a Seed Keeper and farmer from the Mohawk community of Akwesasne and the Educational Director and lead mentor of Sierra Seeds.Music by Madelyn Ilana.Visit

This week we are rebroadcasting our interview with Tiokasin Ghosthorse originally aired in June of 2021. If we need the Earth, does the Earth need us? This week on the podcast we dive deep into the relationship amongst ourselves and the Earth with guest Tiokasin Ghosthorse. We begin our conversation by talking about the savior mentality that can arise when we act to address the many issues that threaten Earth and kin at this moment. Recognizing the trickiness of interrogating this mentality that is often intertwined with emotions of loss, love, and protection, Tiokasin offers that perhaps rather than being guided by solutions and salvation, we acknowledge where we are at in this consciousness and how we can challenge ourselves to give back to the Earth without intrusion. Tiokasin Ghosthorse is a member of the Cheyenne River Lakota Nation of South Dakota and has a long history with Indigenous activism and advocacy. Tiokasin is the Founder, Host, and Executive Producer of “First Voices Radio'' for the