 Kia ora fanna, my name is Joshua Fouts. I am executive director of a sister organization to New Frontiers called Bioneers. It's a 30-year-old nonprofit known for an annual conference hosted outside of San Francisco every October, highlighting practical solutions around social and environmental justice. And there are so many members of our family here, and the interconnections between these two organizations make me feel like I've landed in an extended family. And I really want to thank Matthew and Brian and Yosef and Nisi and the ancestral Māori who have given permission for us to host and be part of this gathering on their land. Thank you all for making this possible. So I'm going to do a little bit of a diversion. We've heard a couple, so many powerful stories about interspecies communication. Severin just spoke about human and plant communication, and I'm going to talk about human and non-human communication. So I've told you a little bit about Bioneers, and this is my 12th birthday, or this is a picture from my 12th birthday. A little bit of background, my parents were part of a research project in the 1960s that through the, dare I say, hubris of humanity, wanted to differentiate what it was that made humans special. And much of the contemporary research at that time was that what made humans special from the rest of the planet and the rest of the living species was that we had the capacity for language. And my dad likes to say that humans are always trying to divide these differences in degrees rather than listening to the words and wisdom of first peoples who have always understood that humans are integrated into our all species, all beings in our planet. Anyway, chimpanzees and are our closest living relatives. We are more chimp than we are human. I am more chimp than I am anything else, and chimps are more us than they are guerrilla or orangutan or any of the great apes and primates. They have a high capacity for non-verbal communication, but they don't have a capacity for voluntary verbal communication. So the way that chimps vocalizations occurs through their limbic system, and a limbic system is totally involuntary. So an example would be if I had a glass of water and I dropped it on your foot, you wouldn't look down and say, that hurts, you'd say, ow! And that's how chimps vocalize. It's highly adaptive for the wild. If you're in one side of the jungle and you see food and the first thing that comes out of your mouth is the food bark, ah, ah, ah, ah, then the other chimps and the other side of the forest will know and gather and they'll have food. But we also noted, scientists also noticed that chimps had a high degree of non-verbal communication. They would raise their arm if they wanted to be groomed or met. Other chimps and other parts of the African continent would use different signals to signal that. And so my parents' project was, based on the premise that they should take a culture, take a species on its own terms. If the species can't actually speak verbally, but they do have a capacity for non-verbal communication, why not treat them as though they were a human? How is it that humans learn their language? We're born into families that we love and we want to communicate with our parents. And whatever language those parents might be speaking, whether it be sign language, or Farsi, or English, or Māori, we learn that language. So they adopted a, a rescue, I guess I should say, this in the genre, in the language of today, an infant chimp who was part of the United States Air Force Space Program. She would have otherwise been sent up into a rocket, but instead she was adopted into a family in Reno, Nevada. And they immersed her in sign language and surrounded her by people that she loved. In fact, my dad, who was not an original member of the project, was specifically hired by Wachow. Wachow was the name of this first chimp. And the way the hiring process was, is that my dad was applying for a PhD and he needed an assistantship to pay for his, his graduate research. And, and he actually went to meet with this, with a professor who was leading the project and a professor and he came in as a young 21 year old and said, I, I'm, I'm passionate about psychiatry and clinical research. And the professor looked at him and said, well, I, I, I hate psychiatry. I hate clinical research, but since you've driven all the way here, I'll at least invite you to see our project. And so my dad crestfallen and dejected, thinking he's going to have to go back and be a teller in a bank, walks over to, with the, with Ellen Gardner, who's this professor to this small playground. And there's a little fence and there was a little black creature in the playground. And she saw the two gentlemen walking toward her, leaps over the fence, runs to the two gentlemen and jumps not into the arms of what would have been her father, but into my dad's arms. And the man looked over at my dad and said, well, you're hired. And that essentially set the trajectory. So fast forward, what I want to do now is tell you, so we had a, had an interesting experience this last week, where one of my colleagues at Bioneers said that she was going to be giving a speech about me. And I said, thank you. And what might this topic be about? She said, it's about how you have decolonized the patriarchy of organizations. And I said, I said, well, thank you for that as well. How might you, and she's a first people. She's the co-director of the Bioneers Indigeneity Program. And she said, no, you have allowed me as a first person, as a first member of the first peoples, and as a woman to feel completely empowered and not under the thumb of a patriarch or leader. And I said, wow, thank you. And then I began to ask myself, why is it that, what is it about me? What is it about what formed me in my upbringing that might have influenced or shaped that? And I started to look back at the decades that I was immersed in my parents' project. And one of the, so one of the things that happened, so I'm gonna accelerate the time, given the nine minutes they have to go. So fast forward, my parents end up, the project grows, there are now five chimpanzees. President Reagan is elected. Reagan decides that all federal funding for behavioral research needs to be cut. My parents end up having to create a non-profit in order to feed the chimps. So our family goes from a family of five humans to a family of 10 primates. My parents refer to us as, they said that the chimps are actually my aunts and uncles because my dad views them as their siblings. He viewed his relationship with Washo, who hired him as his big sister. And that was the sort of hierarchy of our family. And so we were never to refer to the chimps as chimps, but as non-human primates because guess what? We're all primates. So, but because they had to create a non-profit, we were enlisted to dumpster dive at the back of grocery stores. It turns out that while humans are very particular about the color of bananas or fruit that they eat, chimps are very happily eat a brown banana or an apple that might not be in its most perfect ripeness. And so the first story I wanna share with you, I'm gonna share with you three stories. This is me with my aunt Tatu. Interestingly enough, I was thinking how the Tatu is actually a, I lost my, what's the word? Anyway, it's an East African language, forget the aphasia. Anyway, so this is my aunt Tatu. And I'm gonna tell a story about three stories. One is about the lesson of humility. So the chimp I'm gonna tell you about is not in this picture. This is a chimp named Bui. So fast forward, we're now living in the state of Oklahoma. My dad is now teaching graduate students about how to teach chimps sign language, how to immerse them, how to take chimps on their own terms. But he's the big alpha professor. And so he would take students out and they would interact with the chimps. And the chimps unfortunately at that time had to wear a lead somewhat of a leash around their neck. It wouldn't have stopped the chimp from doing anything because a chimp is eight times the strength of a human kilogram per kilogram. So a 40 pound chimp is basically equivalent to a, or 40 kilogram chimp is equivalent to a 240 kilogram human in top physical condition. So my dad says, okay, the class is over and the chimp he was with was named Bui. And he said, okay, Bui, it's time to go back. And Bui didn't wanna go back. He was having such a good time. So he climbs up in a tree. Well, my dad, being the young alpha male professor, wasn't going to let that chimp show him up. So he wraps his arm around the lead and he says, Bui, come down now. And Bui reaches down from the branch he's sitting on the tree with one arm and lifts the lead up. So my dad is now swinging there. But in a moment of humility, my dad says, Bui, I'm sorry. I forgive you. Bui is so thrilled at this moment of compassion, leaps down out of the tree into my dad's arms and they went away. The lesson I took away from that is one of the importance of humility. If you use later wash-o, the lead matriarch becomes pregnant. Interpregnancy, the chimps, unfortunately at that time were living in cages because, and I'll tell you after the talk, I can explain those details, but it was not our desire to have the chimps live in cages. And in fact, my parents at this point, more or less, to sermon this was a project that should never have been done because it condemned a sapient creature to a life of imprisonment because of the hubris of us wanting to understand what was the differentiated us for them. So unfortunately, wash-o's newborn baby gets sick because of a rust in the cage, catches pneumonia. Wash-o takes a toothbrush and tries to clean out her child's throat. At this point, throat's been lacerated and the humans have to intervene and take the baby away. The baby ultimately dies. Wash-o goes into what would be considered a clinical depression. She refuses to interact with people. Every time my dad would come see her, she would say, baby, baby, with the eyes raised. And my dad would say, nope, the baby's finished, baby's finished. So as, and finally they found an adoptive son for Wash-o who was actually featured in the previous first slide that I showed you on my 12th birthday. But what this story of Wash-o's depression taught me was one of compassion and empathy and the importance that we as humans distinguish our own emotions from the emotions of non-humans without realizing that all creatures experience the same level of grief and emotion that we do. Okay, so my third and final story takes us to the present day. So the project goes on for some 40 years and then my parents retire. Three of the chimps ultimately die from undiagnosed viruses in their 40s. Part of the problem there is that while the chimps had a high capacity for sign language and could express a lot of things, they couldn't explain the nuances of what it meant to feel pain and to hurt. And so my parents decided that the chimps had spent enough time being observed by humans and deserved our retirement. So the two final chimps were retired to a chimp sanctuary outside of Montreal in Quebec. So my life went on and I got married and had kids and moved across the United States. And a decade goes by and I hadn't seen the chimps. And so last October, my wife and I decided to go up to Montreal and visit the two remaining chimps. Mary Lee Gensvold, who's the new executive director of my parents' projects, warned me. She said, you know, Tatu, who is featured in this picture, gets very angry when people see her, people who come to visit her, she's known from the past because she feels abandoned. She didn't ask. She was told that she was gonna be moving to a new place and then all of a sudden she ends up in a new place. She doesn't know anyone there. And so when people show up who were part of her day to life, she gets really angry. So I had my expectations low. But we went in and Lulis, who was in the first picture, came down, he's in his late 30s now so he's no longer an infant and he was playing with us a little bit. We had, he was in a, there was a glass divider so we weren't actually physically interacting. And then Tatu came down and she stayed sort of in the far distance and didn't come close to us, but she didn't yell. And she just sat in the corner of the room and signed, friend. And that moment when I realized that the level of empathy and the depth of relationships that we have with all creatures and the interdependence that we have with all beings on this planet, be they plant or animal or earth, we're all one and integrated. And these messages that were shared with us at the expense of five and really thousands of chimpanzees who have had to spend their lives in captivity, hopefully our messages that will help us to understand or appreciate that these are experiments that should never have been done. That the hubris of humanity to relearn the lesson that first peoples have always known that we're all interconnected is a message that we should all carry with us. Kia ora.