Neighbors Along the Riverbed Episode 2: Accessibility

Neighbors Along the Riverbed Episode 2: Accessibility

Mickey Morgan 0:07
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, a Nishnaabeg scholar and storyteller talks about the idea of ecosystems that encourage learning in her writing “Land as Pedagogy”. She tells a story about a kwezens, a young girl, who discovers the sweet maple sap that is used to make maple syrup through observing an ajidamoo (red squirrel). Kwezens then shares this knowledge with her community, who encourage her to demonstrate what she has learned about tapping the maple tree. This shows a few things, how discovery is not just a one time event, but also begs the question, how much of the ecosystem is disrupted when people cannot access this way of learning from the land and water? Or when most people can't access this knowledge, whether that is because of physical barriers, or property or lack of community to support this shared knowledge?

Would you say that there are any barriers for you to sustainability? Or like habitat conservation, or like restoring native species?

Speaker 1 1:19
Maybe like accessibility, like, I feel like the things that I'm aware of are usually happening across the coasts. And if you're somebody that lives in a city like Oakland, or or Berkeley, there's not much accessibility to those places. Like if you don't have transportation, maybe. So I'd love to have more education and access places that are more accessible to folks.

Mickey Morgan 1:42
What do you know if you know much at all about, like, local, and specifically native salmon?

Speaker 1 1:52
I don't know anything about local salmon? Yeah.

Mickey Morgan
Okay!

Speaker 1
So I'm very new and fresh to this topic. Yeah. But I wish there was more like, education, maybe like in national parks, and like other regional parks and things about like the land we're on. Like, California, there's like these massive trees that have been near here for years and like, huge mountains. And I'd love to know, like, who has also looked at those trees and what kind of like, ways to honor those trees like have have existed. Coming back from Yosemite, I was like, obsessed with it, and I still am. And I was looking at, like, documentaries and stuff. It was all, all the documentaries I found were like, John Muir, this John Muir, that, which I get it, he was like a huge advocate. But it's also like, oh, but what's the original name? And like, who was here first? And who discovered it first? And? Yeah, what was happening there? So I feel like those things are still super missing. Yeah, especially like, I'm not from California. So I, yeah, I'd love to also be somebody that can not just move to California but can move to like a place to like, know the lands that I'm on and the people that are coexisting with us.

Mickey Morgan 3:23
Even more basic than bureaucratic or personal motivation as a barrier is the simple ability to do anything else. What about basic access to clean drinking water or working double shifts to make ends meet? How does the situation cause a lack of access to both knowledge and the ability to make a difference in local salmon conservation?

Speaker 2 3:46
So you know, a caring about the community and being of the water, we have to drink water. and some of the pipes that are not re-done, you have to boil that water. Put what is it? Clorox or whatever in there.

Mickey Morgan
Yeah, chlorine?

Speaker 2
Chlorine in there, to purify that water does not taste good. And your water, you have to have water to live. 87 percent of your body is water. So you have to have it.

Speaker 3 4:19
I would say our group went on a slightly more pessimistic negative slant to to start off, I think our minds immediately went to you know what it's like when their habitat has been completely destroyed and like, have no say in it and our minds a little bit went to other communities who might experience like that, who don't have a voice or political power. And kind of drawing that theme there. And then and then it devolved into rants about microplastic and water rights. So it escalated for sure.

Mickey Morgan 4:51
You know, language is also acting as a barrier to us knowing like these things. Like I don't know what the, in the like, native name for this land would be, like how the first peoples like called it before us. Like we're speaking in the settler tongue and we know like settler language for these, like, I'm talking about salmon, I don't know what it would be in in the language that people first spoke here. And so that in itself can be a barrier because you you're just thinking about, it's like it puts a lens through, like how you see things.

Speaker 3
Yeah.

Speaker 1 5:30
I think about language a lot too, as somebody that, like I speak Spanish. And in Argentina, I grew up in a city very much like Oakland, but bigger. And there, yeah, the indigenous, like history and culture is like, basically erased, like I learned about it in school as a kid, but it was very much like othered and not really, like, implemented. Like, I went to a school that had like the name of a person that like, colonized like Latin America. So yeah, that's that piece is, it's missing. And the more I traveled as like an adult, like, throughout Latin America, and within the US, that's when I started to learn more about that, and the connection of people in land and, and that's also a privilege itself, because I was able to travel and not feel like discrimination and things like that when I traveled. So I was able to, like expose myself and learn about those things, and also question those things. And I also grew up in Oklahoma, which is very, and I grew up in like, smaller towns where, like, the native population is really involved. And you see, like, the language all over the place. So I feel like I was also made more aware of like the existence and, and connections with that too through that exposure. And I was like, so surprised to move somewhere like the Bay Area and and I think it's like progressive in the sense that, you know, people use land acknowledgments and things like that, which was not something that I grew up with. But at the same time, I was living so ingrained in it, like, it was part of kind of normal life to know that those things existed. I'm not erasing the fact that, you know, there's discrimination and things like that. But it was like surprising because I was like, Oh, I thought I was like in a progressive place. And like nobody really honors or knows, like any, they don't make it part of like everyday. Yeah, like, especially me working in a global context. Like the work that I do is international. It's global based. So it's from a very neutral like US-centric point of view. But I'm thinking like, what are some ways to honor the lands that we're working on and with?

Mickey Morgan 8:23
If you have any questions or want to add to this conversation, email salmonneighbors@gmail.com.