 It goes like this, for those of you who like to sing, you're going to sing, and for those of you who don't like to sing, you're going to sing. Day and by night, sing praise to the hills, sing praise to the hills, the hills and their glorious heights, surround us by day and by night, sing praise to the hills, sing praise... Little experiment, now watch me, one section, two section, three section, one section. The hills and their glorious, the hills and their glorious, the hills and their glorious, surround us by day and by night, sing praise to the hills, sing praise to the hills... The conversation about change the format a little bit here, and I'm going to start in smaller groups, so I'm going to offer a couple things first, and then we're going to do some sharing. Number one, if you can, be conscious of speaking your voice forward, if you're able, some people are having a hard time hearing in there, and also for the recordings for HowlRound, so if we could all get used to using the outside voice, that would be great. Thank you for the people who just offered all the beautiful thinking, and that was just, that was really incredible, so, an announcement to that. We have some beautiful folks who we invited to be part of this land narrative conversation, and what we're going to do is, we're going to break into some smaller groups right now. The folks who were invited to speak to how the land inspires their work, and how they incorporate the land into their work, are going to do that with you in a smaller context. And then we are going to all participate in a story circle, whereby everyone in the group will get a chance to tell a story of their own about the land, hopefully inspired by what that person prompted for you when they're sharing. That'll be the first section, and we'll come back together as a large group and report back from those story circles. The people who will report back are the folks who were invited to present about their land and their work, and there'll also be an opportunity at the end to have a little bit of a dialogue with those folks teasing out some of the perspectives that they have. Cool. So, I want to lean into two things. One, who are people here who have experienced a story circle? Good. So, I'm going to ask that the collective knowledge in the room really help out those smaller circles for people who haven't participated. But I just want to say, before we break into the smaller groups, story circles are technology that I learned from our great friend and teacher, John O'Neill. Many people use it. It was a means that John was using it in his theater work, and the Free Southern Theater and SNCC were using it in their work organizing to hear the perspectives of people and to hear the stories that they had and allow those stories to collectively envision the art they wanted to make. It's a very simple technology whereby you sit in a circle. Everyone has a chance to tell a story based upon a prompt. You start, the stories are timed, so there will be a timekeeper in every group. Today, I'll tell you the time once I look at the time and we break into the groups. Let's say it's three minutes a person. That person tells a story. The person next to them can either tell a story or pass. Silence is a story, so you can allow that to be. You go around the whole group. Some of the guidelines we think about is when in doubt, tell the story that comes from the deepest place. It's a process of active listening, so there's no journaling or typing. You're just sitting there, being present with the story as it is composed in the ears, as John would say. Once everyone goes around the circle, then there will be a period of what we call crosstalk, whereby you can ask questions of people, talk to them about what they said, etc. Those are some simple guidelines that I know anybody else want to add to the circle before we break about the story circle. You said you're participating by listening. That's the most active way to participate. Only one person is participating, so everybody's participating by listening. Can I have the people, the standards you are able, that we're invited to be part of the land narrative discussion? Can we just see you all? So there's one, and two, and three, and four, and five, and six, and seven, and I will be eight. So I'm going to go around, and we're going to count off in eight. Kerry will be the ones, Chantaro will be the twos, Matt will be the threes, Chip will be the fours, the fives, Bobby B, the six, Monique, Rene, the seven, next slide. And then I said there were two, and you were backed up. And the eights will be keyed up. So let's go start it with Carlos. You're up. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. One, two, seven, eight. 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 7, 7, 7. Anybody else? 8. 8 with Jay. One more time. One. One's right here. Two. The two's, the three's with Matt. Four's with Chip. Five with Bobby B. Six with Boni. Seven with myself and eight with Kira. This is how I'd like you to do it. I'd like us to try to do it in silence, if we can. Just quietly pick up your chair and let's make a little group over here. Let's make another group over there. Let's go to this circle that was set up intuitively for us by the double-edged people. And let's have three groups in here. That's good. So, yeah, just pick up your chair and follow your leader. Thank you. Which one of you guys can do? Which group are you going to show us? I'll follow the channel. Alright, folks who are leaders of the groups, you're on the clock for five to share a little about your work, your relationship to land. So you're on the clock right now for five. You kick it off to the group, share the little bit of narrative we talked about, and then I'll come back and tell you when we'll start this story circle, alright? So go ahead. Yes. Good to be with you all. So my name is Matt Farty. I'm an artist, writer. I direct an organization called Art of the Rural. I started six years ago as a blog to look at contemporary rural arts and culture. I was writing a PhD at the time and very frustrated with the process. And it was my way out to make it have a connection and feel that the things I was thinking about had some sort of bearing on the life around me. I'm also a member of a group called N12. We could be called an art collective, we could kind of call ourselves a studio. We do a lot of our work. We're getting into the isms here, but like post studio work that doesn't fit in the gallery, that's outside in the community, it's in the landscape. It's in some sort of site beyond like official institutional structures. I'm actually leaving here to go to Des Moines and we're working on a project at Iowa State Fair in the horse stall. So it's kind of a sense of kind of what we do, where we work, and we're really focused on the actual culture of rural communities right now, whether it's agriculture or moving beyond that, what it's like to live in communities of transition, a lot of rural communities are. I am from Appalachian, Ohio. I grew up on a farm. My family's been in one town for about five generations on one piece of land. My family lost their farm during the farm crisis. We still have the farm that's kind of there. My family was living on. My brother is an organic farmer now there. But that experience, I think kind of is why I'm here and want to do this work. And that early on it was like a feeling of knowing that there was some kind of land based heritage, which was part of my history. But sort of feeling dissociated from and displaced from it because we travel all over. And I think as this relates, there are so many amazing questions in what Nick and Matt wrote for this. What I think about a lot with this question of land narratives is the context and then what we see in terms of the reality in rural America versus the perception of it. So the context that we have in rural classes, and I think this is just something that makes it all the more remarkable what's happening here at Double The Hatch. Rural America is 20 to 25 percent of our population. It receives 3 percent of American philanthropy every year. So that's a loss per capita of 20 million dollars a year. There are other sort of federal blind spots in terms of how rural communities can be supported versus urban ones. There are 15 different federal definitions of rural. So rural essentially is this large, it isn't even misunderstood, it's talked about in so many different ways. And sort of largely deeply underserved and in an unequal position to the systems of how rural. While also sort of suffering population change and migration. While at the same time the last sort of roll out of census data tells us that 83 percent of population growth in rural America is people of color. And I say that because we have a lot of easy go to images and assumptions about what rural culture is, what it looks like. We're going to see them all for the next three months in the presidential campaign. Trump is going to be in front of a bar and talking about making America great again. That kind of thing, it's very sentimental. The reality of those communities is often different. Sensing that I have 45 seconds left. What I think about a lot in all of this work and I think it pertains to these awesome questions that they asked us, originally asked us to think about is that. Like it's a place that's like a radical transition. And I think so many of the projects that would be included in this larger conversation from rural space. I think that they really bring that to life. You know, a lot of roots work, double edge, M12, it is a space of radical transformation. Like what I think about the moment where this was sort of brought home to me was a drive that I took through. You guys have been to North Central Iowa, Mason City. I live in Minnesota right now. I live in Winona, Minnesota. You can't drive through that area or through North Central Illinois. I love that landscape and the culture there. And not feel that it's an area that we don't really talk a lot about. But the signs of transition are sort of everywhere. Economically, these are communities that are getting smaller as the scale of agriculture gets larger. And that's not because of the desires of those people in these rural communities. It's because of the desires of like urban consequence. And that's ever since commodity agriculture was opened up globally. That's sort of what has happened in the last 200 years. That all of that is happening at the same time as many of these communities in rural Iowa and in Illinois are becoming, in some cases, like radically diverse really quickly. So you have not only that transition, but you have a social and cultural transition in an economic gap where these communities are already looking very different. They're grappling with their own history, often in very contentious ways. In economic labor and have space where there is not going to be a middle class in those two kinds. So, I mean, I'm totally not even talking about my own work. I mean, that's the question to some degree, is like that's the level of the challenge that we have as artists or as people talking about it. Is that how do we come together to talk about that? How do we share those stories? And how do we begin, since America is so large, how do we begin to comparatively learn from each other about very different regions in rural experiences? Have you heard so far from, like, I mean, I could talk about, like, what we do at Art of the Role. I mean, like, we're interested in exchange, human-to-human exchange, particular across rural and urban space, which is something I could talk more about. We look a lot at thinking about creative place-making as a word that is everywhere right now. How do you do that in a culturally responsible way in rural America? We don't have the language for that yet. We don't have the support structures for it. We're hoping to help the solution with that with lots of other people. You know, and lastly, like our other major initiative is looking at the Mississippi River. And about that has a continual set of sort of series of communities or series of siloed ways of talking about the river. We bring folks together across disciplines, you know, economy, culture, history to talk about the experiences and how we bring those communities together. So many of them, whether we're talking about Hannibal, you know, West Helena, Winona, Patasca, are thinking through similar issues just in different backgrounds. That's a little bit about my story. I guess there wasn't a five-minute phone. So I'm just going to assume that it was five minutes. Curiosity, and we open to a lot of people who went through all this story. And in that, this healing process, so like, you know, we have a lot of conversations about how to open that out. I have a question about your work. Yeah, what does that mean for art of the world to be like, happening in a city? Right, that like, you're not headquartered in a rural place. You know, this gets to like one of, and this is kind of within my own story, is that I'm really interested in how you can talk about rural and cultural participation. I mean, I might talk about, like, I come to all this as well from like, Irish studies. Irish studies? Irish studies, yeah. No, it's crazy. It's crazy, like, river. Like, you know, I'm a creative writer, and I come out of, like, looking like Irish cultural studies, that's kind of where I really began to think about Appalachia and where America was actually living, and how they don't know what Irish had for a while. You know, and Irish identity in America is super fluid, and people actually claim it and exercise it in some kind of ways. I mean, unfortunately, on one day of the year, for the most part, but it's there as a conversation, and we don't really have that in the bigger studio with the notion of rural, although all of that is much more accessible to us. You know, I'm Irish. Great, great, great. I'm not even wrong or something. But I think within that, you know, if you look at like the 20th century as a real century of migration, you guys just start to sort of... Can I continue that later? Yeah. Sure. So did Nick? How do I keep it off? Yeah. OK. We have questions here. Nick, how much time? How is it informing or how is it fine? It is 12 to 4. Three-minute stories. Everyone gets to start. I think we can start. Sorry? We can start however you want to. How does land influence or are you stuck? In any kind of physical and any way. And so, in a sense, like you're saying, I carry it wherever I am, like a nomad. And so, and I don't expect to ever actually find a place where I would myself into a territory that's like, and so in a way, it's opportunistic, like a nomad, going where temporarily, wherever I get sent. I guess I'll start where I'm from. That may help me. I'm from Manhattan, New York. And I've lived there for 20 years now. And I think whilst being there at such a bustling city and I've had all the options at my fingertips that I kind of feel the need to hold myself all the time. I feel the need to hold so much information in my mind and all my feelings in my heart because if I show any of that on the street, it's kind of fatal. And so I have to walk and hold myself in a way where I know where I'm going and I know who I'm going to see and I can't back down. Otherwise, I'll fall apart. And actually right before I got to this theater farm, it was like that for a long time and there was a frame to help make that happen. And we all did that with no money. So it was purely like wanting to do it. And then we engage all these people. And I wish there had been a way to measure what the impact of that and that's something I would like to do in the future. But it was another way and people were invited to include local playwrights too. So their local sensibility was represented. And the way people organized their events was also very local. Like for instance, Perseverance Theater in Alaska did a reading, a site-specific reading at the foot of the glacier. So they really used what was around there, their own resources to create something that would speak specifically to their people. So even though I think that's another way where the conversation between the local and the global can be successful because we provided something that was kind of from all over and then we said, please add whatever you want so you can have both conversation and what you do can be really rooted in the community you're trying to serve. Now I'm done. I feel like that's five minutes. Do you have any questions? Do you want to comment? I'm part of the A2A. She's awesome. It's just exciting to hear the work that you're doing and the intersection of the things that she's doing as well. Is there an online space to learn more about the project you were just telling us about that was with multiple communities, 25 countries? Yeah, it's on my personal website right now. Eventually it will live separately, but if you look my name, you'll find it. It's called If the tab is to CCA, you can change the interaction. What are you finding the most successful ways of researching all these Arctic countries and the work about them? What are you doing? I go. I make sure to go and to talk to people who live there. And then I do research. I do some research beforehand too. I talk to scientists. I try to talk to people as diverse as possible and I don't have just one point of entry. And usually, actually the first play, I started with an idea and I got company thrown out the window. And then this most recent play, I had a vague idea and this one I think I'm going to be able to pursue, so it varies. And then I don't know ahead of time what the next play will be because I just follow the opportunity. So once I have a chance to go somewhere, you know, it's in my head. I know what the eight countries are. So when I see, you know, residencies or fellowships or something, I'm like, okay, this is going to be, if I get that one, this is going to be the next one. Have you found an intersection in your creative work with other like civic institutions or civic work around climate change? I haven't been able to create any lasting relationships. And that has partly to do with the fact that I don't self-produce. So once I've developed the play, it goes to a theatre in a community that I don't know. So I try to encourage them to partner and the most that we've had is post-show conversations or even pre-show conversations with local organizations. And I'm still trying to figure out how I can do more given those circumstances and I haven't quite figured it out. So that's a tricky one. And I feel like the engagement needs to happen over time, too. But, you know, if you give people information once for half an hour after a show, it might not be enough. But if they, if there was some kind of, you know, if they want to self-organize or something, if they have information over time, it might be more useful. But I'm not quite sure how to do that yet. It seems like I'm just thinking of the big environmental organizations and Environmental Defense Fund, NRDC, National Natural Resources Defense Council. I don't know which, I don't know what their primary goals are, but I'm a climate change person. But it's an opportunity for them to engage in, to be a part of their getting our story out there, message it. Right. I've engaged, I've presented at Scientific Conferences, which one of the most successful ones, they used excerpts of one of my plays as the keynote for the conference and then they extracted the news from that and those became the talks after. So that was it. Yes, that was a really great merge and it set the tone for conversation that was a little bit more open than it just straight signs. And I like bridging those communities also. Probably open a pathway for different kinds of conversations. Hopefully it can bring the folks to a little bit more humanistic. Yeah. Scientific offices can be hostile. The folks a lot of like raises the facts and numbers as opposed to a good culture that can change Yeah. Yeah. And sometimes it just provides a slightly different understanding like we presented a play at Kansas State University this past February and people from the sciences told my friend who directed the play who lives there and teaches there. They said to her, you've just said in two hours what we're trying to teach her but it takes a year to teach her kids. So it's like how do the facts apply to real life? Like how do the facts affect us and emotionally, you know, and our values and our behavior as opposed to just these are the numbers and this is what we need to do practically. This is so safe. So you're here, you're learning and you have to go back and re-associate yourself. You're separated from the land living in New York which is originally called Minahatta. And there are very few places in New York where you can fill the ground and for both of you being separated from where you actually might feel more comfortable because there are relationships there that transcend land but you're here now and this is real. So I guess the question for me is you know, I think, you know, in Brazil São Paulo is horrendous. I live in Rio and Rio has its own problems but São Paulo is total I can't even describe it. It's amazingly awful. It's surrounded by amazing beauty. So is that, I mean, is this relationship more shaped by our discomfort or by our disassociation? You know, I as a person who is separated from my land I feel that has shaped me significantly but for those, you know, is that what's shaping? I think for a lot of us here it's capitalism and colonialism that have shaped our relationships to land and even the idea this is indigenous land is in reaction to a colonized life and the fact that my parents were immigrants was the kind of avenues that capitalism opened up for them and their people had been within probably a 20 kilometer radius for about 2,000 years and yeah, so I think that's a common thread in our relationship to land. Also, I think something that really puzzles me coming here and especially to this place which is a farm and which is isolated in a way from the world is the fact that to me this is not isolation like my dad owns a farm in Brazil and there are no roads there are no paved roads there are dark roads that people car and there's definitely no phone service or Wi-Fi or anything and people that live around that area really have no access to a supermarket or anything just recently like in the past 5 years but you couldn't ride cars you definitely couldn't ride cars and I think here there is a false sense of isolation because and maybe it has to do with colonialism and also the advance of technology for sure but just the fact that we can get to here or even talk to people here and the government knows that this exists I think it's also a disconnection from what the primitive idea of land means to me at least and I don't know what I don't know how to revert that or how to get that that sense of connection without these lights I look at these lights and it's like technology and it's more of a question I guess I think it's there's a certain constancy about land and at the same time a certain constant morphing about the thought of land I think for the first few years when I came here as a student home was and as long as my mother was alive last year as long home was where the parents were yes we are working here we are doing all this but then you go home in December but then but then when mom passed then it really shifted then what is home it really shifted and then we realized that it's like my friend in Minneapolis he's been here for 40 years he will not buy a snow blower because then he's deciding that he'll stay there he's been there for 40 years home of what is the turning point of the oven but really that was to me a turning point where we realized that we just have to acknowledge that in at least over 25 years and so instead of having this nostalgia of you know that my friends over there are real friends and over here it just associates that really that sort of artificial you know nostalgia shifted to an intentional acknowledging and building community it has affected me in a way that we are to accept that this is home now and that is also home and we have to build a community here which was always happening I guess but never really said that this is we have to build with intention community here because then mind shift of being a visitor to belonging for a long time never felt that you know belonging for various reasons but I think we arrived at a place now in our career it's about research and you arrive at a place where we are not shaped by others acceptance or rejections or definition but it's a place of arrival and so then with that consciousness of the land then we build community much more intentionally now than when in my head I was like a visitor it's all in the head nobody is telling me not to but at present that's what I feel reflecting on that and how my family is spread all over the country and so where is home and for me it will always be Montauk but I don't live there and how many of us don't live where we're from and that discomfort again and building community over it's the two of us and our son and we've never lived in a place where we have a large number family so we have to build community and attach ourselves but at the same time neither my husband or I ever intend to be buried in Boston but we haven't decided where that next place is so we're essentially becoming nomadic intentional community for a long span of time and then intentionally uprooting ourselves and moving someplace else and so what does that mean we were in Michigan for 15 years and then we moved to Boston and now we have been in Boston for 16 years so now we're going to have one more year and then we have a son who's graduating from college and where are we going to go after that I don't know if it has anything to do with my age but I don't know at this point in my life I just feel like I'm floating a lot because I don't want to go back home and I don't know where I'm going but it's like I have this draw to build a community for myself and I don't know where I'm going so sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry yeah the poverty rate is like 2-3 times the national average the teen suicide rate is 2-3 times the national average and people are dealing with issues of self-esteem you know and so it's important to me as a physician I'm working in the clinic to create an environment of wellness and people can realize their aspirations but with this project in the community I'm also trying to put a positive vibe about you know and create an environment of wellness and yeah so that particular image yeah it's interesting how the image of the image becomes another story yeah right yeah yeah you're hiding you're hiding it what is the relationship between the Navajo Nation and the land currently yeah yeah okay so in talking about the Navajo people it's like I can talk about any community you're not talking about a limited group within the culture there are the traditionalists there are Christians and then there's another religion that's practiced called the Native American Church but the Native American Church and the traditionalists have a land-based religion the traditionalists will wake up in the morning and meet the rising sun with corn pollen and they say with beauty above me with beauty below me with beauty all around me may I walk in beauty and aesthetic knowledge basically leaving things as they are you know using aesthetic acknowledgement I didn't call it that but I like that with the basic acknowledgement yeah leaving things yeah but now I like that thank you I'm going to start using that yeah yeah unfortunately I think it's a bit of a stereotype that indigenous people are all about the land and one of the things that I also see you know as people dumping trash in areas that are natural beauty but the more traditional people still live a very simple humble life connected to the land for example I'm thinking of there are two women I guess the mother of the group doesn't still live in this way but people have sheep camps and they will move their sheep from one camp to the other depending on where water is and vegetation is one but they live in structures made out of wood called hogan's and they have an earthen floor and it's a one room structure but there are still a few people who live in this way who choose to live without water without electricity and to live off the land but that population is shrinking yeah I think the bad ones have really shrunk in terms of living like that but it's still I would say it still has a fairly dramatic opportunity but I was thinking about the Guarani or the one I visited in Argentina's area that was so planned to get handled of the earth and I think there's still a lot of people who are living a traditional way but they're probably the new generation of people there's a lot of them younger people are moving to the towns yeah and it's also pretty in baiting tours and other things and they started having reservations a lot later so people don't want anything yeah it's over there a conversation with Carlos a lot of the artists from Argentina come to the reservations to take year olds and that was their observation that the indigenous culture in the states is very different from that in Argentina there's still a lot more for additional yeah I think that's true although maybe there's more integration between or like housing choices and things like that with a traditional way of living in Argentina which I think is interesting somehow promote some possibilities or hope because as we've invaded these places there isn't really opportunity it's like a buffalo can't just roam around the earth anymore so we have to deal with how people can have their tradition their life their ways and still have everything that we've constructed one of the things that informs my art also is something I had an opportunity to witness what is the name what is the name of the man from India he spoke to this but within the Navajo traditional culture there is ceremonies are still done using various colors of sand and they're called sand paintings and I guess different cultures people up to bed also do it I had an opportunity I had a patient actually a 2 year old girl who had a seizure and it was what's called a febrile seizure meaning she didn't have epilepsy but because her fever rose quickly she seized and it's a disconcerting thing for a parent to see your child seizing so the parents brought the child into the clinic we evaluated the child fixing the fever to go up we treated that and told the parents the child would be okay and wouldn't need to be placed on seizure medication but the parents wanted more done so they arranged for a sand painting ceremony to be done and it was a really powerful thing it occurred in the context of a hogan which is a relatively small structure with an earth and floor and I got there around 7 in the morning and as I walked into the space there was an older man probably in his 70's and his assistant I think was his daughter who was probably in her 50's and they were on their knees dropping sand onto a very intricate pattern they were recreating deities within the culture and they've been working on this painting the entire night and the little girl and her parents were off on the side and the healer, the medicine person sang a prayer and then they told the parents to take the girl's diaper off and put her in the sand painting so he could finish the prayer finish singing the prayer and as he was singing the prayer she was a 2 year old girl in brightly colored sand who is now destroying this night of work but it took me probably 19 years to really appreciate what I witnessed in that environment in that my art project, for example is paper placed out doors on these structures and they too are very ephemeral but it's the intention with which it's done with love and humility and full sacrifice to create again healing and wellness so that doesn't come so much from the land but from the culture from the community yeah but sand from the land that's it that's the thing I've always seen a lot of people really Louisiana is so different than rural Colorado exactly and you guys have went on Heartland too, didn't you? We went on Heartland every single place and it was like Heartland, Culture and Friends really informed you're trying to figure out like you did one what did you did one? festivals, we did this no, no, no, it depends on the organization and we did festivals around the country that were hyper multidisciplinary festivals that celebrated that place and so we did them in Detroit just like to gather up all the community spirit correct I think that's a good spot I love it are you moving in? or do you need to be here? I can just sit on the bench is that better? alright, alright I don't mind the bench I like that we'll cut it out alright, y'all thank you for doing that and I hope that was fruitful I'm going to lean into our facilitator leader folks so I'll just be calling you I just want to hear one thing that was illuminated to you from that conversation you just had and I might ask you a question about your own practice and work to let us hear a little bit more from you individually and we're going to move this train to lunch and I promise you at 1.30 we will be moving to lunch so I wanted to start with our friend Chip I want to make the point that we are not as equipped to share right now, we are but it wasn't in this to be sharing a lot of images and a lot of digital material but Chip's work is beautiful and I would encourage you to go over to him and a break and just ask him because he has a best hits folder he's got like a favorite hits so you don't even have to stay for long you just get in and see it move on Chip, I just want to invite you to just offer something from your circle the temperature of your conversation something that was illuminated to you in there about this conversation I want to thank you for sharing what you did because I appreciate that the context out of place here I am a visual artist and I don't necessarily come from a performing arts at the background so bear with me as I share those I thought it was interesting in our group that people looked at the influence of land in just terms of taking time to be present in it similar to taking the two minutes as we started this morning just to be in that space one of the people commented on a concentrated observation that comes from being outdoors and just noticing what's immediately in front of you and we also looked at the impact though of our influence on the land our relationship to it in terms of exploiting resources that the land might hold and the response to to that people coming in on nature stimulating a radical imagination again from just observing and being present in it and the appreciation of nature as one gets older in our youth we might not be as observant of the wonders of nature but just as we age appreciating some of the southeast that we missed earlier so yeah Keeda so one of the things that was for me came out of this conversation is the sense of spirituality connected to the land but that we also hold that within ourselves that most of us are not in those places that we are spiritually familiarly connected to and so holding that space within ourselves regardless of the discomfort that it brings often of not being on stable ground not allowing the land to hold you up even though it is not comfortable especially with people who are immigrants or people who are here this is not a comfortable place always and so how do you make that relationship the questions really were about how do you build that community and that relationship to the land so that you are more stable so that you have hope going forward so that you can be in a grounded place I would say that our conversation had this really awesome stories about one not feeling having roots in a place and what does it feel like to be rootless and how does that rootlessness also get mimicked in the way we have colonized land and the rootlessness of the colonizer but also this real root you have when you meet land that you maybe didn't understand and then you meet an ancestor a father or a brother that was part of that land and how your personal relationship with another human can teach you to love through their history in their body of that land and we talked about the very painful way in which sometimes it's hard to what we have done a lot of people who have come to land and colonized land and brought that particular body to land and how can we go back further and further to access a part in our self that has a relationship to the land that isn't as painful or isn't as harmful or damaging so those were some of the things we talked about we also reflected upon the wonder of paying attention to the little lessons there are and being on the land and just quietly and subtly checking that stuff out and see if there's some wisdom in that for the way we do our work in the world with my group's permission I'd love to just share some snapshots without identifying so story circle as a way of witnessing stories and of developing material and images of me freeing the ashes of my grandmother and ancestral place walking into space hearing singing realizing it's the way I want to live I'm in the right place walking a mile out to a place that is normally underwater to immerse myself and be in a different environment to fully be me to fully be encompassed engaging with our as a daily practice immersing myself in the water sinking me deep into the mud to know that it's neither the mud nor the water and what am I in that the honoring and remembering of our seeds of the sacred economy of our seeds and the reverence of the seeds that maybe we've forgotten but we bring back into place for banking for the future a different kind of economy through the seeds when I don't know what to do I go to the lake and it tells me what I need to do it gives me what I need journey into nature following a guide finding stillness and violence and transmission of knowledge of things that I'm taking away from our moment together our conversation was about a lot of things one a couple things that really stood out is that we are the land wherever we are and if we can occupy space then that is our place I'm paraphrasing there the fear of land there are toxic situations whether that be landmine or oil waste facility or you name it there are dangers in the land and that relationship and there's also systems that we were talking about earlier in the day that have been put into place that are affecting those relationships that should be healthy but are not in our creating more connections the responsibility of a place even if you're not necessarily from there but if you're living in that place you accept that responsibility and how you learn to love a place and that kind of goes back to you are of the place where you are and how you can there was this occupying of people in a place the occupy movement civil rights movement actions where people are really holding space I'm leaving out a lot also just how with the idea of sculpture how you're not changing it but enhancing the place I don't think I'm saying it right it felt kind of abstract when I was hearing it but I understood it in the sense of like yeah to be some place but to not change it's definition just yeah thank you hey I break a protocol and ask everyone else who's on the group to call me as a meander through this little bit we had a really powerful conversation I think if we had like three or four more minutes it would you know our rhythm of thought was really getting going I think a couple themes that I think were expressed across our conversation I think like talked a lot about moving between places and moving between different identities in places everything from moving to an urban to a rural area and what are the implications for that or the ethical implications of that but also being in a place which in and of itself is in transition and what does that mean oftentimes when artists or the drivers of that transition to one degree or another that felt like a major thread in a lot of our stories but also how to deal with our own personal histories in those places and how do we deal with them over time as our relationship to those changes with our experience and as our own experiences encompass other folks' experiences I think a big question that came out in the last couple minutes for our group was like what is within those two words themselves land and narratives and to what degree does that word narrative since it comes first does it almost precondition certain stories and certain responses to what is a really complicated set of relationships and circumstances those were just a couple of things but I know there were others we also talked about narratives and we talked about language and dominion over the land how the language for instance the word real estate how that strange way of describing a place we talked about connecting with nature with your hands in an urban environment what it means to have a community garden and be actually able to make something grow and watch it grow and eventually eat it I guess we talked about connecting to a place through history when it has been in your family for generations and then what does it mean if that place is threatened by climate change and people in my group do want to help because I'm blanking about the rest I think it's just a bit that's great Maldi rather than explicitly share from our group I'm just feeling moved to hold the space of silence for a bit so I'm going to let you pick it back up when you'd like to and just invite folks if you'd like to close your eyes and train your eyes on some part of the land open your ears and other types of awareness we have about a little bit of time before lunch and I want to take can I just say have those sounds been going the whole time yeah they're cricket courts turn that on I've got the speakers in the ground over here this is part of the performance I have to say one time I was here I hope I'm not stepping out of line telling this story but one of my deepest experiences of being here was one time coming here and realizing that they had trained some pigs for the odyssey they were like pigs in the odyssey and then one time I came back and I was like wow this bacon is so good those were the pigs from the odyssey I thought about cycle of life you use the things that are y'all are truly doing it here I want to close this circle I want to invite everyone who was individually part of this narrative to share a nugget of wisdom that you find through your work with the land or your engagement with the land and your work and I'm going to introduce you all as we do this and invite you with some economy given our time of 20 minutes to just put one lesson you've learned because I think that's nice to have the collective wisdom of the group and maybe we'll just lean into these seven beautiful individuals here as we close the space so I'm going to put you on the spot here and start with my man to the right I'm really moved by this man's work in the world his name is Robert Martin as you know and has for years been stewarding this piece of land in Kentucky hosts a very beautiful festival called the Clear Creek Festival and an enormously powerful band called Land, Water, Food Stories and it does excellent organizing in this community as a real teacher of mine and I just would invite you to start by maybe offering a little lesson a little lesson you learned from the land I try to learn the lesson of getting out of my own way I try to learn life long lesson of just deep listening deeper listening deeper listening picking yourself back up once the land squashes you realizing that you've just gained a lot of knowledge and that like the lake you just have to go out there and all the information is there if you can get out of your own way in order to listen and it can be deeply fearful it can be those those darkest places but those are the places for me that I need to show up for in order to lean into my edge for the work I need to constantly show up for that it's vital like the water that comes out of the mountain beside our home and it's sustaining like the water that comes out of the mountain by our home and it's necessary to know my relationship to that and to hold that with utmost reverence like the water that comes out of the mountain beside my home that's what I can offer in this world perfectly modeled Bob great timing I'm Monique Vardan who some of you are going to get to know this is just this amazing film called My Louisiana Love which you should see and has been as tireless of an advocate about coastal land loss in the world as someone could be it's just a really integral part of what's happening in Louisiana and it's using photography and filmmaking to tell our stories and just a deep inspiration so maybe you share a little wisdom with us I didn't share with my group that I'm working on a new project called the Land Memory Bank Conceit Exchange I'm trying to come to terms with letting go of land in that we are losing land at one of the fastest rates on the planet with that what else are we losing our culture, our ways of life I guess my lesson is that and we're talking about land we're kind of like lowlanders so wetlanders you know the water as Bobby was saying we have the coast we have the bayou it's that magical mix of fresh and salt there where so much life comes from and I think that I've been the bearer of bad news for a really long time I said this to my group the land is sinking the water is rising the oil is coming it's always that but there also is this other layer which is that the land and the water and the life is resilient and powerful and can heal itself if we allow it to do what it's supposed to do so I'm trying to hold on to that healing piece and to use my personal story and the stories that I know to raise that awareness of the importance of a place and how it's a microcosm for all of these other places if my place is not healthy you know if we keep doing what we're doing in South Louisiana the Arctic is going to have to deal with our side effects and vice versa our friendship who I told you right after we finished this because it's a beautiful chip I apologize to the people in my group because this is the story that I told at the very end but as a physician I had a 2 year old patient on the reservation who had a seizure and the parents took the child to see a medicine person to do a ceremony the ceremony was a sand painting ceremony using sand that area similar to the story you were telling this morning I was invited into a ceremonial space called the Hogan which has an earthen floor I arrived at 7 in the morning and an older man and his daughter had been working all night on creating a very beautiful intricate presentation a part of the cosmology for the people and the ceremony had been involved putting the 2 year old girl in the middle of the sand painting and a prayer then was sung for her while she was in the painting but as she was sitting there she started playing in the sand and destroying the pattern and took this older man and his daughter most of the night to create this but the lesson that I learned from that was to create with good intention and with love and then to let it go and that's what I attempt to do in my work Mr. Matt who many of you would know from reading his bio but might not know right now I've got a big old vision a project called Art of the Rural which everyone should know about because it's a very big expansive vision and organizing effort to bring together the people who live in rural areas and are doing really amazing work I kind of want to go back to something that you said earlier because we were kind of talking about this last night how grateful we are to be in a room with folks who are performing and who are thinking about fear because you all are so much more in touch with your body and correct the writers so much true I think you know and I think that's really powerful because it gets to sort of what I have been thinking about so a little bit about my story is I'm from South Eastern Ohio we have a farm that my families lived on for five generations now my parents had a separate farm that I was raised on and we lost it during the farm crisis so my experience as a kid and really like a young adult up until very recently was to feel sort of uprooted which was something that came up in a lot of our stories too in a field of transition and so I had this very very complicated emotionally complicated relationship to the place where I was born which was you know I was there I grew up there, my former members were there it was a straight line and I was reclaimed and the house for a while was there it was an angle and it was a place which was both there and not there and for a long time I had a lot of sort of very simplistic moralistic readings of that situation you know and I think probably since I started to R the Royal and began to hang out with folks like you all I think I've begun to have a deeper the tip like a little tidbit it's like a little card that I get out to folks and we talk about land there's a landscape writer named J.B. Jackson and he says that landscape is a concrete three-dimensional shared reality and when you're in a group of like landscape architects they're like oh yeah it's like the economies are shared and like transit and this, that and the other but in this space that word shared means something much bigger and I've been really moved by hearing that word shared gets to I think is the thing that like I have to deal with we all have to deal with in very different ways in our own context which is to say that land that I was on I share that with the person who destroyed it we share that in some way and I think the beauty of this dialogue is that being with you all in this space takes me closer to that point of equanimity with that situation Chantal is the great aggregator of people to come together to write about climate change that I know of and by inviting artists to respond to the theater in the age of climate change you can check out a lot of that writing through our friends at HowlRound and it's just been like tireless we're going to talk about climate change and it's so necessary and so awesome so we should all check that out and here you are so I would say that I feel the most alive when I'm in a place where I don't see any signs of human civilization in very remote places where the possibility of me dying are also very high I think there are two things about that one is there's something primal I think to be reconnected with the fact that if you can't find food for yourself if you can't navigate in the wild those basic instinct and you have the possibility of encountering very dangerous animals you're screwed you walk out wherever you are and it's all there for them to take you and the other part of it is also when I'm in a place like that it reminds me of how small we are and I find that very hopeful because I feel like if we could all remember that in our daily lives we would do less harm it's when we forget that part that we become arrogant or we don't think about the consequences but when you're reminded physically how small you are it's just like oh yeah I'm part of this bigger thing and it's taking care of me not the other way around who calls herself a recovering environmental justice lawyer who has managed to span a career of having a deep relationship to justice and social justice in the environment and now such a perch to see so many artists doing their thing and supporting us in the way that she does one of the things throughout all these conversations is we're talking about our relationship to the land I go back to the environmental justice definition of the environment which is that place where we live or play for some of us it's prey this is prayer around us go to school so the land is what sustains us the land is what keeps us surviving but it is also the community that we are a part of the land is actually a vital member of that community and so as we as biopetal mammals need to remember that we are also part of the environment and so that is part of how I go forward every day is remembering what change I can do to make that community better I am also a water person and so to be near the water for me is always a source of strength and replenishment and I realize that I'm not a person who looks at a glass half empty or half full I look at it as a vessel to be replenished and that's where my relationship with the land my relationship with my community is that form of replenishment with your prompt being about lessons and insights I would actually invite people back into silence to say some things if you'd like me to say some things I would like you to do whatever you want but I just want to point towards this one thing that I think is so interesting about the relationship that Bob and Kerry have on the land that they work and steward on is that they are simultaneously coming at this question of how to be with the land through the lens of art and organizing very deeply and very very impressively both they both bring the full courage and strength and imagination of the art and the full wisdom of the organizing and I've watched just in a little time that I've been around them real change happen in their community what's Clear Creek like? yeah and brief, I don't know Clear Creek Kentucky it's in the foothills of east Kentucky which is the western edge of the Appalachian Mountains old old old mountains the place where we live is forested and wooded predominated by oak trees but dozens and dozens of beautiful deciduous species of trees we live at one of the headwaters of Clear Creek two or three beautiful mountain springs that flow from there and speaking Nick to what you were identifying a bit I think one of the things that I came to in the end of our story circle was this thought you know when I Bob and I both are from Kentucky grew up in Kentucky and we went away for about a decade and we returned to Kentucky and found home again in Kentucky within the last five to ten years and many people in my organizing world when I left to go live off grid to go live in the woods experienced that I received the feedback of like leaving the movement like having the privilege to go away and to escape something and what I was really experiencing it as was like a returning to figuring out how to do the work in a more meaningful way to me that was not about a fight and a struggle and a this but was to find a way to be in here and I was reflecting on that as we were sharing the story circle really reflecting on I had a few years to start to gain that once we settled in Kentucky before a land man showed up about a year and a half ago a land man asking for the mineral rights on our land on land that was coal and at one time it was on the outskirts of coal and and it now is at the far western edge of what the industry is calling the play of the Rogersville shale and so I was very conscious in our circle toward the end of like we don't escape the world as it right like that land man literally drove up into our land way back off the road right up to our doorstep and back me up to our door to demand our mineral rights right and yet because I had had the time and space to come to reconnect for the land just to reorient myself just a few years the way that I reacted and responded in that moment was so different than the way that I would have reacted and responded when I was living in another environment and I still I still don't fully know how to express it but it it did come from a place of love and it and also in an engagement and an interaction that is a struggle and so I and so I'm holding both of those both of those things in this conversation there's a great poet in New Orleans his name is Moose Jackson taught me more about the land than anybody probably and he's a Detroit boy who somehow knows more about Louisiana than everybody else and he always says we are nature Nick and it is not our nature to destroy ourselves and he wrote this beautiful poem and I feel moved to share the words it says now at first I lean back half head in those hairy cypress of almost human warmth and width I take in the clicks and the grinding chirps surface sploosh and zydeco rhythms drifting across the slew the swamp don't just incorporate you it becomes you breathes you spooks you unlocks and unfettered loves your baser needs your demise and your decay feed it the Moe rotten the Moe better baby man I love that little hero how she sits so close to the water gliding like a gator going for a baby deer the swamp is a creed a purgatory of water a pilgrimage of land a holy immaculate after birth the river swamp is me at my best running wild through Cyprus and Tupelo, Nutscherrat and Armadillo crawfish and crabs man I live like a king you let them fools tremble when they hear me sing it's getting close to feeding time tonight we party down a new old age question of a couple of people before we wrap up is that alright or do you want to respect if you would like to I would like to hold this because it's lunch in the time but Matthew's coming to ask you because that's all it's one third facilitate his privilege I'm taking it Dupontra do you have do you have the bells I gave it to Matthew things about displacement and grief and rootedness and longing and reverence and fear of change destruction and other things that have come up and there's also some people here like Matt and Chantel and others who are very connected to lots of amazing models of innovation of permaculture of returning and trying new things and I think this is a great space to find out more about those models and disseminate them I for one would like to hear about them and I think others do too one minute we have comments and feedback if there are lunch logistics may they be now we have about 5 to 10 minutes to stretch