 And please join me in extending a very warm welcome to Sherry. Thanks so much for being here. Thank you, Abby. It's so nice to be able to see you all. I was becoming quite spoiled by my frequent visits to Vermont. And I feel like 2020 has really robbed me of, you know, my bonding time with the folks in your fine state. So I'm missing being able to be there with you all during this event. And I just want to thank you for including me in this time with you. And so I just want to introduce myself in my language. And I'm from Hamaquacet, and I'm from Pasalda, and I'm from Kahuasus, and I'm from Pasalda, and I'm from Nagakakugus, and I'm from Zibaik. So my family is Bear Clan from the Penobscot Nation and Crow Clan from the Paswa Quattie Tribe at Zibaik. And Alita Huzziou and I, and I'm very happy to be with you today. And so I'm glad to be able to invite you into this beginning phase of this new community that I'm forming here. I just recently purchased 213 acres in a farm in our original territory. That was given away by the state of Maine. The year it became a state and a land grant to a man named Moses Goodwin, who lived here on this land for 150 years, 155 years. Well, he didn't live here for 155 years, but his family did. And then it went to the Maso family who was here for 45 years. And so the reclaiming of this territory 200 years out from when we first lost this land is very symbolic to me. It's also symbolic to me that there have been only two other families that have lived here and who loved this place very, very well. And I am going to plug in, I apologize. I am losing battery very rapidly for some reason. So let me just plug in. Okay. Can you still see me? Okay. I'm sorry about that. Now I'm getting a little bit of feedback on my end. So you're some of my first guests here to sit around my fire with me. So I'm glad to have you joining today. I have a number of questions that I was asked to talk about. And so I'm gonna go down through that list. And the first one allows me to get into a bit of storytelling mode, which I'm very happy about. The question is, where are we philosophically in this moment? And I have held a number of webinars and have done a lot of public talks with different people around the world, not just around the country, but around the world who have stories and insights to share about the times that we're living in. And I have had the incredible honor of participating in the creation of two books that are both out right now. One of them is All We Can Save, which is a book that I'm incredibly proud to be a part of. And it's a book by 60 women all writing about climate change. And so if you have the opportunity to pick that up, I would encourage you to do so. It's a bestseller. It is one of the most beautiful, stunning books I've ever read. And it would make an incredible gift for somebody who needs to have a sense of hope right now. All We Can Save is based on kind of a reverse image of a poem that talks about looking at all that I can't save in this moment and grieving over all that can't be saved in this moment. And I think that many of us have been experiencing incredible grief during this time, not only because there are things that we are, the title of the book Rod is All We Can Save is the top title and it's Catherine Wilkinson and Ayanna Elizabeth Johnson, who are the two editors of the book. And where not only are we grieving what's happened in this country over the last four years, we're also grieving the incredible loss of life and we're grieving our way of life. For many people are grieving their way of life because the way that they have been accustomed to living is no longer available to them during the pandemic. And so they're having to face themselves, some people are having to face themselves for the very first time in their lives without distraction. And it's a very complex and challenging time as we heard in the beautiful words that were offered to us as an opening. It's a very complex time. There's no simple cause and there's no simple solution. And so I wanna share with you a story that I've told many times during the pandemic that I think is really important right now because it helps us to be mindful our place within the larger scheme of creation. And so within our tradition, we have a story of the first illness. And in this story, which is a very, very old story, it gets passed down generation to generation. So my great, great, great grandmothers grandmother told her this story who then told her granddaughter who told her granddaughter who told her granddaughter who in turn told me my grandmother. So this story is a very old story and it's just so astounding to me how time and time again our stories end up reflecting the reality that we're living in. And so these are not just stories. There's an elder, Trisa Sapir, who's from one of our other Wabanaki nations. And before she told a story, she used to say in the language, this is not just a story that's really happened. And so I'm saying that to you right now that this is not just a story that's really happened. And now it's happening again and we're experiencing it. So in this story, human beings who are the youngest species on the planet have begun to walk away from all of the other beings in creation. And this story is often told during our midwinter gathering and we've already had all of our creation stories told by the time this story is told. And so in all of the creation stories, the animals and the plants and the trees are instrumental in our ability to survive and sustain ourselves on Mother Earth as human beings, the youngest species. And so we've begun to walk away from our relatives in the natural world and not only have we walked away from them but we have started to create things that are actually harming our relatives. We have begun to behave in ways that are causing other living beings to have their lives taken away from them. And so to tell the full measure of this story, we would need a whole day sitting at this fire. This is just the snapshot as my friend Kevin Deere says the reader digest version of the story. And so the animals are pretty dismayed by what's going on with the human beings. And so they go into council together to say, what are we gonna do about our young relatives here who are behaving so badly? And they really deliberate for a long time because a lot of animals offer their lives for us to be able to live and survive upon Mother Earth from the very beginning of time. And they care greatly for us as their younger relatives. But they recognize that there needs to be something. Something needs to happen in order for human beings to recognize their connection to the rest of creation and to stop believing that they're somehow separated. And so in my humble opinion, I believe that there was a mention of original sin that this notion of original sin is really just about othering. It's about us starting to see ourselves as something other than the rest of the beings within creation. When we started feeling like, oh, I'm something other than you. To me, that interest in that Christian story is not the eating of an apple. It's the moment when the human beings felt like they had to cover themselves because they felt like they were something different from the rest of nature. And so we have fallen into this illusion of othering that we're starting. We've been starting to wake up from collectively. And so the animals decide after long deliberation and a lot of grief that they're going to have to give the human beings illness in order for the human beings to recognize their connection to the rest of creation. And so they give the human beings illness that man-made medicine can't cure. And the only way for them to get well is for them to make some substantial changes. And so after seeing the human being suffering for a long period of time, the trees and the plants began to take pity on them and they start to feel sad for their young relatives that they're suffering so much and so many of them are dying. And so the trees and the plants go into council together and they talk about how can we save or help our young relatives get through this challenge without taking away the benefit of the lesson from them? And so they talk for a long time and they decide that what they're going to do is they're gonna send out a message through the dream time to the human beings and tell them that if they will only relearn the language of the plants and trees and reconnect themselves back to the natural world, then the plants and the trees will tell them where to find the medicine that they need in order to heal themselves. And so they float that story out on the dream and one of the grandmothers catches that story in her sleep and when she wakes, she tells the others what she's dreamt of and she said, I'm going to the forest to reconnect myself with the plants and the trees. And so she goes into the forest and she spends time and she reconnects herself to the plants and the trees and asks them humbly over and over again, may I benefit from the knowledge that you carry so that I'll learn how to heal my people once again? And we can be restored to our rightful relationship within this larger scheme of creation. And so after a time, the plants and the trees begin to see the sincerity of this grandmother and then they begin to communicate with her again and she relearns the language of the plants and the trees and then they tell her which plants that she needs to be able to bring her people out of this illness that's been given to them by the animals. And then they learn which trees and specific foods are gonna strengthen their bodies once they turn the corner from this illness and they can get strong again. And so she takes that information back to her people and they prepare the plants and the trees have taught her not only which medicines but how to harvest them honorably and respectfully, how to prepare them, how to dose them so that the people can get well again. And the people in her community begin to get well and then they begin to tell others about what has happened to them. And so some others choose to also go back and to renew their relationships with the plants and the trees and the people of that grandmother they decided that they were gonna move back closer to the forest, they were gonna simplify their lives and live once again within this equitable balance with the rest of creation. And the way that I was told the story was that we were the ones who were of the people who went back. And so right now we're being given this amazing opportunity to contemplate our place within creation as a result of an illness that has been given to us by the animals. And so as we've been going through this at the very beginning of this, one of the things that I did every single day was I, you know, I went out and I prayed and I made offerings to ask for guidance from the winged nations, W-I-N-G-E-D winged nations to ask them, what is it that we have to learn? And I had this incredible experience with about 10,000 starlings. And what those starlings taught me was that we need to be moving right now as one biological entity. And as my friend Rivera-Sun would say, a leaderful movement that allows us to, you know, shift directions and adapt as needed to the rapid changes that are coming towards us in response to what the perceived threat is to us as human beings and to the rest of life, which is climate change. And so we all know that climate change is something that needs to be at the top of our radar right now, that it's the one thing that we all are experiencing collectively and that we will all experience, though not in the same timeframe and certainly not to the same degree. There are populations of people who are being terribly threatened by climate change. And so, you know, this moves me into the next question, which is, how can we be a climate change movement rather than being part of a climate change movement? How can we become a climate change movement in and of ourselves? And there's a fantastic book that was written that came out a couple of years ago which is Drawdown. Paul Hawkins' name is on the cover. My friend, Catherine Wilkinson, did a majority of the writing and editing for that book project. And it has a hundred solutions, a hundred most promising solutions to climate change. And within that, there is something for everyone. And so you can, I would encourage you all to, you know, contact your local library, see if you can get a copy of Drawdown or look for it in your local bookstore or ask your local bookstore to order it for you. It's really phenomenal. And there will be a follow-up that will be coming out eventually. But that book is based on the best science that is available to us today that allows for us to find our space within all of these different potential solutions to climate change because we can't all do everything. But what we can do as a collective is we can begin to move ourselves into a way of living. Thank you, Lily. We can begin to move ourselves into a way of living that is not so damaging to the earth. And that's what I'm doing here by building this community here at Wujukum Toltena. Wujukum Toltena Kinship Community is the name of the community that I'm building here. And Wujukum Toltena means let's help one another. You know, we want to be able to live in this way but we can't do it individually. How many of you just raise your hand would love to be living a low impact or no impact environmental life? How many of you would like to be living low-grid or completely off-grid lifestyle, right? And how many of you are obstructed or challenged to do that because you live individually, right? And so, you know, I think that the majority of us want to be living in a way that is less damaging to the earth but our individualized lifestyles are not designed to allow us to do so. And so, the more we chase this illusory dream that's part of this illusion of separation that we've fallen into is we need to start moving away from individualized living and moving back into communal living. And I've been saying this, Abby can attest to this, I've been saying this for years. This is something that has been obvious and it sounds like, yeah, oh, okay, yeah, we all know this, right? But how are you taking steps to actually do that? How are you moving yourself in the direction of living a more communal life? Do you have a food sharing option set up with a group of five neighbors? Do you have tool sharing? Do you have a whole litany of other sharing options that you have incorporated into your daily way of life that is actually reducing your consumption and increasing the amount of communal time that you're living in and allowing you to take away some of the impact of your life, your footprint on Mother Earth. And so there are a lot of ways for us to be able to do that. And some of those ways are in that book. Some of those ways are actually a little bit prohibitive for us during COVID, but actually in some ways, COVID is allowing us to move further along the line. In relation to that, because people are staying home more, they're not traveling. People are learning a very valuable lesson at this time. The second book that I have had the incredible opportunity to be a part of, which I am one of the editors on, is a book that's just out this month. What is the date today? It'll be out in three days on December 8th, and it's called Corona Transmissions. And Corona Transmissions is a book that has all of this input on what is being talked to us during this time of the coronavirus. Everything from the physical to the medical physical. So there's doctors and all kinds of people from all walks of life were included in this who are providing essays on what coronavirus has meant to them. And so that leads me into the next question that's on my list, which is, what is it that this time is teaching us? And what this time is teaching us, of course, the primary thing that I have been learning as a result of this time of quarantine is what I can live without that I thought was essential to my happiness. What is it that I can live without that at one time I just felt like I really had to have? And so we're being given this incredible opportunity to learn how can we pare down our lives in a way that allows us to reduce our impact on the earth. And I think that this is an exciting opportunity. Another thing is that people are having such a difficult time because they're so accustomed to being able to be with people. People who live alone are especially having a difficult time which is really highlighting and illustrating. There's been a lot of huge increase in suicides and mental health crises that have emerged as a result of COVID. And that's because this time is also highlighting for us that we were not meant to live alone. We were not meant to live alone. And so when you're in this completely isolated way of living for six, seven, eight months and you haven't had time to prepare your community in order to shift enough to adapt to this rapidly changing world. Yes, family support is incredibly important but there are a lot of people who don't have connection to their families of birth who need family of choice. There are a lot of people who have been very happy living individual lives until suddenly they're sick and they need something. There's nobody to check in on them to make sure that they're okay. That this whole aspect of community is really being highlighted for us in ways that are unexpected. And maybe you haven't been impacted by that yet but I'm sure that at this point most of you have someone in your circle who has. I have a number of people that I know who are people that I love who have lost family members to COVID. I have a friend who's husband survived pancreatic cancer, one of the worst types of cancer that you can get and had been cancer free for nine months and got COVID and ended up dying within three weeks and because of a compromised immune system. And so there's this incredible grief and this incredible pain, but also in the vulnerability of the moment it's causing us to sit up and say, the ways that we have been living are really not in alignment with us being able to survive into the future if COVID is just the introductory lesson which is what our prophecies tell us is that COVID is the introductory lesson. This is the bell that's ringing that's telling us all how we need to shift, how we need to be moving and realigning our lives so that we can be prepared to survive into the future by making these necessary changes to the way that we're living. So we're learning that what we thought we couldn't live without maybe we can, we're learning to pare down, we're learning that community is critically important whether that's family of birth or family of choice. We're learning also that this belief in separation that we've been operating under, this illusion is simply that it's an illusion. We have as a whole been more connected and had more conversations with more people over the last six, seven or eight months than many of us have had in our entire lives. I have people who they're just homebodies, they've never really traveled anywhere, they've never gone anywhere. And they said that they have been introduced just by following some of my webinars and that online Healing Turtle Island gathering this year where we had 45,000 viewers and speakers from 30 different indigenous nations. There are people who tuned into that who had never had any type of contact with anyone outside of their small circle of people living within a 50 to 100 mile radius of them. And so we're learning that this notion of separation is an illusion. I've been in events where there's a great distance between the people who are facing each other on the camera. And then I've been in others where we start out with a moment of conscious connection with one another where we actually feel like we're really in the room with one another. And so recognizing that we can enter into a space within us that sheds the distance between us and actually connects us in tangible ways. That is helping us to move beyond this illusion of separation. And so there's all kinds of things that COVID is teaching us. Certainly it's teaching us that we have infringed upon the habitat of our relatives in the natural world to a degree that is so significant that the animals now have no choice but to give us illness to help us to understand, to respect their right to live their lives unmolested by human activity. The land also has the right to sovereignty. The land has the right to live without the expectation of productivity imposed upon it by human beings. And so when we start thinking about all of the things that we're learning during this time, we're starting to think about what can we do as individuals in order to become part of a larger climate movement. I think that building community collectives where maybe you can't have face-to-face contact with your neighbor, but maybe your neighbor can drop bread off on your doorstep and you can drop a casserole off on their doorstep and you can still be working to share food in some way now that we know that COVID is less likely to be transmitted through food or hand-to-hand contact as opposed to respiratory contact. And so now that we know a little bit more about how it's transmitted, we can take precautions and we can still go back to sharing food with one another. You know, maybe you isolate yourselves and you find a way to live connected to your own pot of people where you're all supporting one another in getting what you need to be able to survive and to sustain yourselves. Maybe you're initiating conversations about what it is that you're learning to live without during this time that really wasn't necessary to your ability to have a full life, even though in the past you thought that it was, you know, maybe it's a Starbucks coffee, you know, whatever it is. So those who know me well, here's my iced tea not in a Dunkin' Donuts cup and it's delicious. And I love it just as much as I loved my easy grab-and-go Dunkin' Donuts. And so, you know, when we start to think about those simple things, it's easy for us to see what we can do individually. It's easy for us to see what we can do collectively. And as we're doing those things, as we're taking it upon ourselves to look through the hundred solutions to climate change and see what fits within your community. Can you form an energy collective within your community where everybody is contributing to a community grid system that helps to move a whole block of people off grid? You know, are you contributing to recycling programs? Are you committed to helping to restore the soil? Are you committed to protecting the waters as a collective? What is it that you're willing to commit to that you can tune into with a laser sharp focus? Because when we try to do everything, our laser becomes diffused and we're not effective at anything. But when we can, with one group of people, focus our energy on solving one thing that's within those hundred solutions and really working on that as a collective, what we can accomplish is amazing. I just finished working with 150 people from across the United States, developing a strategic plan for climate change under the ACE framework from the UN that has been presented to President-elect Biden. And, you know, there's so many things, so many things that grassroots people can do in order to address the challenges that we're facing. We need to bring carbon back down to earth, right? It's not about eliminating all the carbon. We just don't want it up in the atmosphere. We want to bring it back down. So that's the whole principle behind drawdown. We're drawing it back down. Look into what does that? What can you plant that is gonna draw carbon back down? How can you participate in this global drawdown effort? How can you protect the waterways? Right now in Minnesota, Enbridge, who is a terrible actor, they have an atrocious track record is building what they're calling line three to replace an old damaged pipeline that they don't wanna bother cleaning up. And it's gonna go right through all of these beautiful lakes in Minnesota, right? Right through the lakes region. And it's gonna go right through the wild rice lakes, right through Anishinaabe territory. So they always have to, you know, bring these pipelines through an indigenous territory. And then it's gonna go under the Mississippi River, right? And so when you're thinking about, you know, this country of yours, America, you know, the Mississippi River is part of your folklore, right? And the destruction that is being created as a result of this is catastrophic to the environment and completely heedless about the safety to the human beings who are there. And so they also will have to bring hundreds of people in from some of the areas that are hardest hit, these workers are gonna come in from the Dakotas, right? Where the last pipeline was built and they're gonna come over to Minnesota, hundreds of them, and they're going to be contaminating all of the people who live in these very, very small towns in Minnesota where they have very limited access to healthcare and very, very few hospital beds. And so imagine the catastrophic outcome that this whole project could have, which is being very carelessly fast-tracked. How can you learn about things like that and get involved in that? Good friend of mine, Tara Huska, who's with the GNU Collection, G-I-N-I-W, they have camps on the frontline. You can give to the GNU Collective and help to support them as we're bracing for a quiet holiday season, because we can't gather with our families. They're bracing for a brutal Minnesota winter in this frontline camp to try to stop this pipeline from coming in to destroy their entire territory. And so these are the things that you can do as an individual. You can get on your phone and you can call and you can say, demand that your representatives stop what's going on here, because this has been fast-tracked, permitted by the Army Corps of Engineers under the Trump administration during this lame duck session in order to try to move this forward and get it to the degree where it cannot be stopped, because of these legal principles of equitable stop. So anyway, we won't get into all that, but those are things that you can be doing as individuals to be making a huge difference because not only is it impacting the people in that territory, but everywhere that that water flows. I mean, in that area, in those regions, are some of the largest aquifers that supply water to a huge population of the country. And if those waterways are contaminated by, Dakota Access Pipeline, by Enbridge Line 3 and Keystone XL, they're all coming right through what's called the heartland, where all of those tributaries spill out to feed. And we really need to think about that metaphor. The heart is pumping the blood, the lifeblood of Mother Earth is our sacred waterways. And so when we think about the heart pumping blood and moving all of that water from the heartland out to the people, and it's contaminated by tar sands, which tar sands pipelines always leak because of the bitumen, because it's so viscous, right? And we know this. And so getting involved in those types of activities right now is critically important because there's been a lot of activity that's been taking place while people are distracted by COVID. And they're trying to just quietly move through and wreak this destruction on the land here without anybody noticing. And I think that that's really critically important. And the last thing that I'm gonna answer before we go to question and answers for the last 15 or 20 minutes is how did this election impact us? And what does it mean for our movements? And I think that the easy answer to that is it's too early to tell, right? We all know that Joe Biden has been a big supporter of hydrofracking. What he does going forward remains to be seen whether people can put enough pressure on him to be able to do something differently is something that we're not sure of. And like I said, we have presented him with this ACE framework that is a grassroots nationwide effort to address climate change across a broad spectrum of platforms, you know? I mean, he doesn't have a great track record. He doesn't have a great track record on race relations. He doesn't have a good track record on indigenous rights. He doesn't have a great track record on the environment. But some of the people that he's putting in place have done better and hopefully they'll have an influence on him. So I just really don't think that we know yet what this election means, but one thing that I do know that it means is that now is the time to put your foot on the Fred Flintstone pedal, right? We don't wanna put our foot on the gas, but just put your feet to the ground. Like here is where we need to be making friction so that we can create movement, not sitting back and saying, oh, thank God we have a new president. Everything's great because the distraction of the distortions of the Trump administration, there's no way Joe Biden would have been elected if we hadn't had a Donald Trump. Just the extremes are the only thing that really got Joe Biden elected if we're being honest about the political situation. And so we can't be distracted by that. We have to recognize that now is the time because all of them have been moving us further and further and further to the right. All of them have been supporting increased destructions of Mother Earth, every single one of them, right? That we've had for the last 50 years has really not moved the arrow on social justice, racial justice, economic justice. And so this is not the time for us to sit back and think that things are gonna be okay. Now is the time for us to say, okay, now is the time for us to really move because we know that there are at least people surrounding the new president who have historically made better choices than the politicians that we've had thus far. And if we can influence them and influence our congressional leaders and hopefully a brand new Senate, let's hope that Georgia comes through for us again, then maybe we can move this arrow back in alignment with sustainability of life on this beautiful earth that we all share. So I'm going to stop there and then I'm gonna open it up for questions. Great, thank you so much Sherry for those words. It's so great to hear from you again after all this time. Yeah, we're collecting some questions, so feel free to add some to the chat, but maybe we'll start with one that feels like you touched upon it, but would love to hear a little bit more about incorporating healing into activism and ask suggestions for how you think that can be integrated thoughtfully and effectively. Yeah, I think that this is really critically important. One of the things that often obstructs our most sincere intentions and our greatest plans for collective action is our lack of willingness to actually do the healing work that needs to be done in order for us to properly connect with one another and to see one another that the training that Abby is talking about that she and some others participated in is one step towards doing that and there are multiple levels of that at this point in time that are now available. Healing the wounds of Turtle Island is another step. Like really getting into looking at what is your history of trauma that you're connected to? And it's not just your ancestral trauma, but what communities have you been connected to that have history of trauma? Because we all have been traumatized, right? We have all either been experiencing, inflicting or witnessing incredible violence and our ancestors have as well for millennia. And so what are the impacts of that trauma on us? How has it influenced us and caused us to see one another in a way that is distorted? Looking at each other through cloudy glass, we might look really scary, but if we're able to clear that lens and really see one another, then we have a greater opportunity to be able to connect and to work with one another effectively toward solving the problems that we're facing rather than fighting over who's got the better idea, right? It's kind of like kids on the playground who say, well, you know, if you're not, if you don't do this, I'm gonna have my dad beat you up and my dad's bigger than your dad kind of stuff, right? We have these built in and ingrained ideas that have influenced the ways that we've related to other people. Maybe we've been taught that this particular group of people over here is dangerous, right? I always say that we have been so conditioned to feel that dark is dangerous, that we apply that to everything. We have been very, very conditioned. I think that it's, you know, the people on this call, the proverbial choir, so to speak, but majority of people on the planet have been conditioned to believe that the forest is dangerous, that the natural world is a dank and dirty place that you just don't wanna be connected to. So there's all kinds of conditioning that we have to be able to undo, you know? It's decolonization if you're here in this country, especially I think most of the people on this call right now. It's really about decolonizing your minds in really powerful ways. And so we have to decolonize our minds. We have to be able to understand the difference between colonization and oppression. We have to recognize that colonization is always attached to an indigenous population who have been in some ways displaced from the lands that are being occupied. And so, you know, going through this process of decolonizing our minds we can look at all the ways that we have been conditioned and entrained to see one another. And sometimes, oftentimes, the very solutions that we need as being dangerous or terrifying is the first step. You can't really go into the other work unless you've been willing to really look at how have I been trained to think by my society, my educational institutions, my religious institution, you know, and whatever social gospel is prominent, how have those things conditioned me and how has punishment conditioned me to view myself and others and behave accordingly, right? That conditioning that comes with punishment that we also heard about at the very beginning from Marisa that was just, you know, so how do you say your name Marisa? Marisa, you know, that we have been really conditioned to be punitive. And we're oftentimes calculating how can I punish this person for doing X, Y, or Z, right? Whether you are the newly appointed queen of the land of passive aggressivo or whether you are really, you know, the king of assault, right? And so we really need to be able to look into all of these things that are keeping us from connecting and, you know, this, somebody just posted this that we can't heal without spirit or I couldn't see all of it, I just saw a little portion of it. I'm assuming they said spirit. They could have said spirulina for all I know. But I saw SPIR, so I'm assuming. Spiritual growth, no healing is possible without spiritual growth. And that's absolutely true. I mean, one of the illusions of our time is this belief in the separation from spirit, right? And that whole rationalism period of time that created this elitism of being somehow more intelligent and more worldly if you're not attached to specific spiritual beliefs, which is really religiosity, right? And we have to recognize the clear distinction between religiosity and spirit and the difference between being attached to religiosity and being attached to a true process of spiritual growth as well. So let's move on. Thank you so much. Yeah. Thank you for that. I'll jump to Marisa's question since you mentioned her and she has one in the chat. Marisa says that she found that drawdown solutions primarily focused on converting our current lifestyle to a techier or more renewable version, but not as much actually changing the way we live and wonder about your thoughts on that. And if you can suggest resources that might address some of the more fundamental changes like you spoke about communal living, changing our separation worldview and what those resources are that you might point to in addition to drawdown or if you also, and if you also found that about the book. So one of the things that I've done in the past two years, I can just say one organization that I did this for and I can say this now because I'm on their advisory board is Neatero who is working all over the world. And I have also done trainings for two of the other biggest conservation climate change orgs on the planet and had to sign an NDA about it. So we won't talk about them, but we will talk about the fact that there has been an effort being made to completely restructure policies and procedures from the inside out for these organizations. And one of the things that I have found in every single organization that I've worked with from the biggest to the smallest is that climate change organizations on a global scale oftentimes are moving people into a marketplace. They're adaptation strategies for climate change. It's not just greenwashed technology, right? It's moving people away from ways of living that are in alignment with the sustaining of our lives. So working with indigenous populations from Amazonia, you know, all the way to Africa. And looking at what are the climate change strategies that have been put forward by the peoples who are most impacted by frontline climate change at this time. All of those solutions have been greenwashed solutions that move those people away from the way of life that has been identified as preserving the greatest amount of land and waterways on the planet and toward a way of life that is actually in alignment with the destruction of the planet. I mean, this is insanity, right? This is insanity where not only are we doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome, but we're actually moving people away from solution-based ways of living toward ways of living that are aligned with problematic ways of being in relation to life. And so I think that this is a huge problem and it's not just in one area. It's not just in one climate change organization. It's across the board that this is happening. So, you know, you're right on the money, Marie, so that this is a problem that needs to be addressed. And what we need to be doing is we need to be looking at climate change adaptation that's in alignment with the cultural values of the people who are being removed, but also that's in alignment with ways of living and ways of being and ways of knowing that are more connected to the Earth, that are more respectful of other living beings and that are moving people back towards a more indigenized relationship with life. So. Thank you. I missed that first resource when you started and I wanted to write it down. It sounded like, yeah. Mia's tarot is what it sounds like to me. Nia tarot is the organization that I, that I was able to name because Nia tarot, I'm on, you read it that I'm on there advisory. Great. Perfect. Nia tarot does incredible land guardianship work for indigenous populations all over the planet. Great. Yeah. And so that was something that we talked about and we addressed that, you know, we can't be moving people into, you know, you can't go and take an indigenous population. We'll just say in the middle of the Amazon, who has been affected by deforestation and they've been completely displaced and then try to move them into some marketplace economy way of living that's completely foreign to them, but also is in alignment with the destruction of the planet and call that a climate change solution because it's not a climate change solution. It's not a climate change solution. It's not a climate change solution. Any more than creating a cap and trade market for our air. Under carbon, carbon credits is a climate change solution. That is the biggest smoke and mirrors scam that has ever come along. And that's why I was like, okay, fine. I'm not mad that we're not in the Paris agreement because everybody agreed to it because it's a creation of a, of a commodities market. And the commodity is our air. It's our, our supply chain. So we have to think and think about, what is a climate change solution? And what is not a climate change solution. And stop promoting the go along to get along. False promises that green wash solutions are providing to us. That's a perfect transition to a question from Isaac. It sounds like you already somewhat answered it. But he asks it. Do you think the attempt to maintain economic growth, globally, is a barrier to understanding our society's need for more transformational change, including our need to reduce consumption and live collectively. Absolutely, I do, 100%. And, you know, the whole premise of what you can tell Tina here, this kinship community is moving away from an exchange economy, right, because there's always winners and losers when we're working within an exchange economy because the world is a small place, but it's too big a place to create equitable parameters that are not going to be morphing into inequity and injustice over the grand expanse of our various societies. And so, really moving yourself as an individual, one of the most powerful things that you can do. And that's what the whole system is going to be based on here at what you can tell Tina is really looking at a maternal economy. And so, we have to put in our imagery, what is a whole healthy loving mother do to care for her children? A whole healthy loving mother makes sure that her children have enough, right? And I talk about this in sacred instructions, I talk about mama bezu and ala bezu. And so, mama bezu means I have enough to live my life with dignity. I have enough food, I have enough shelter, I have sense of belonging, I have a sense of security, everything that I need to be well and to be whole so that whatever I'm carrying within me can actually rise up and come forward and benefit the whole rest of the community, right? And the whole rest of life. And ala bezu is does everyone have enough, right? And we recognize that mama bezu can't exist. I can't have enough if ala bezu isn't true because part of my sense of well-being is connected to the well-being of all others. So, if I have this false sense of well-being, but all others don't have that same sense of well-being, my sense of well-being is not full, it's not whole. And so, the two of those things go hand in hand. And so, how can you create a community structure? One of the stories that I tell all the time, many of you have probably heard me tell this story before, if you've heard me speak before, of, you know, growing up and being a little girl where one of my grandparents, because I was essentially raised by my grandparents, one of my grandparents would grab me before the sun came up. And when it was my grandmother, she would bundle me, I have, I just have this memory of being really small and her yanking on the strings of my hood of this coat that I had a hood on and tying it tight and bundling me all up and talking to me the whole time and sending me with a bag of food in one instance, a bag of winter clothes, winter boots and gloves and mittens for a neighbor and telling me, you know, I want you to go this way and walk past this person's house and then I want you to cut up through the woods. I want you to put this on their door handle and then you take a, you know, a branch and you wipe away your footprints in the snow so they can't tell where you came from. And then you walk back around this way, you know, and the whole time you wipe in your footprints because I don't want anybody to be able to figure out that it was you. And, you know, having me ask her later, why don't you just give these things to them and let them know that you're giving them to them? And her response was, I don't want them to be embarrassed if they see me on the street. And so, you know, she was preserving their sense of dignity. She didn't want them to feel like they had to ask for something in order to have everything that they needed to be okay. She wanted to make sure that they were provided with that without any expectation to give something back to someone else. And I have 65 first cousins. My grandparents had 14 children and we are a prolific group, right? And so, she made sure that we all had enough. But then she also made sure that everyone else in the community had enough. She was the living example of that. When she passed, they talked about her in regard to this really pure form of love, right? What is the word? Somebody knows the word. I know the word. I just can't think of it right now. Agape? Agape. And so, she just had this pure form of mother love where there were hundreds of people at her funeral talking about how when they were a small child, she always made sure they had winter boots because their parents had a big family and they couldn't afford to make sure everybody had good winter boots, gloves, hats, mittens, coats. She made sure everybody had those things. And that's really what it's all about. And we need to move away from this thinking about an economy in return in regard to winners or losers. Something else that I talk about in the book is this concept of competition. That we have, we always had competition within our traditional societies. But for us, competition never determined someone's ability to be able to live or die, right? Someone's ability to be able to sustain themselves. We now live in a society and have an economy that's based on this sense of competition where people are, the outcome of that competition is going to determine whether somebody keeps their home, whether they keep their job, whether they're able to feed their family, whether they have to choose between food and medicine, whether they have to choose between heating their house and feeding their kids. There needs to be an elimination of all of those forms of competition that have those types of outcomes. And the economy that currently exists is based on the development of greater and greater aspects of competition and an equitable exchange balance, an equitable power balance that can never get us to the place that an economy based on maternal love, maternal economy that has principles of Mamabizu and Alibizu balanced can deliver to us. Thank you so much. I wonder if you have time for one final question and then we want to make sure that you have time to prepare. Yeah, we want you to prepare for the storm as best you can. And we so appreciate your time and you've given us so much to think and talk about. But maybe if we can end on a question that really focuses on centering justice in the work that we're doing as climate activists and organizers and how we do that well, especially for those of us who are white or have other privileges. And there's some questions about how that might be similar or different when we're talking about the work of decolonization and anti-racism or the flip side colonization and oppression and like working to dismantle those because there are similarities and differences. But whatever your final thoughts are on that bundle of questions, we would so appreciate it. And then and then we will be also talking about those themes and questions in smaller breakout groups and really for the entirety of the work that we're doing. So we don't expect you to. Yeah, these are these will this will launch us into our small group. Well, you know, obviously I can't answer the whole thing. But I would like to say to the debate that's going on on the chat that it's really a good idea to not get locked up in terminology and to just, you know, recognize where is the convergence of interest, right? Because that's another form of competition. Well, I like to say this. No, I want to say this. And you know, we really need to start thinking about that. If we're going to start thinking about justice, we need to start thinking about the ways that we engage one another and the ways that we engage life and and how can we have conversation about something that's really critically important. Our lives literally depend on how we engage this conversation right now. The the life. So I'm a grandmother now. Some of you may not know that. And so, congratulations. Yay. Yeah. And so I have this amazing two year old granddaughter who I want to be able to not only survive into the future and someday be a mother herself, but I would love for her to be able to thrive. That's not possible if if I can't get over myself and show up for the work that needs to be done. And so, so when we're talking about justice, I mean, it starts with an individual, right? But also, the centering of social justice issues is at the heart of the problems that we're facing. If you look at environmental destruction, environmental racism has been a huge problem. And, you know, back in the 1930s, Felix Cohen said that the American Indian is the miners canary and signaled the the shift from fresh air to poisonous gas in our political systems. And, and here we are, you know, in 2020, still having the same conversations. And, and not having learned from what those who have been on the front lines have been trying to warn about forever. I mean, when I was a little girl, you know, back in the 70s, they had that commercial of that fake Indian guy from Sicilian guy with the one tear coming down his face, right, to demonstrate, look at the pollution out here so that we could get a clean air act and clean water act passed in in Congress. And now here we are with one administration, three and a half years of functional, I don't know if we can call it leadership, functional governance that has unraveled some of our most important protections environmentally 50 years, right. And so, you know, when I, when I'm talking about this stuff, there's a class that I teach online, it's available on my website called the cultivation of warriors or talk about soil, right. And, you know, what does the soil need to grow, there's this whole list of things, but there's also a warning, you know, because it's really about how do we cultivate the soil that we're growing our future leaders in, that the soil can be contaminated in one day, one line three Enbridge Pipelines bill can contaminate the soil for a generation. You know, and also, thank you Julie, there's there's also a class that I'm teaching right now on, if you go to my website that Julie's just posting on the front page of it, it'll say check out this new class teaching a class that starts on the 15th and there's only 100 spots open in that class and I've gotten I've gotten a lot of emails from people saying I'm going to register for your class. And so, you know, it's first come first serve because it's all done online. And I'm teaching the six week seminar with a colleague of mine, Dr. Darren Ranko, who is the chair of the native studies program at the University of Maine. He is one of the most brilliant thinkers about this. These issues that that I've ever worked with. And he and I have a lot of respect for one another and we're going to teach this course together on racism colonization and other distortions of thought. So, you know, there's whole glossary of terms that's going to be included with that seminar. And it's important for people to understand how can I be an effective ally? How can I navigate issues of race and colonization and oppression and privilege and understand the distinctions between all of these different things and how they intersect and how I can be an effective change maker in the midst of all of this confusion because it gets so complicated and people don't understand the terminology. You know, one of the catchphrases of the day is let's decolonize decolonization because everything's being labeled decolonization and not everything is decolonization. And so, you know, there's a there's a minefield to navigate as we're moving through this time. And so this course is specifically designed to address that issue, Abby. And we're doing it in a six week seminar. So, you know, being able to understand look for some resources that help you to understand all of the terminology be willing to do the work and and be willing to learn to educate yourself and ask a lot of questions. I think that, you know, one of the things that I talk about as a core value and sacred instructions is being humble. And the key to good leadership is being humble. And what that translates to is being willing to learn, right, continuing to have an openness for learning, because if you take on a leadership role and you're unwilling to listen to anyone else, if you're unwilling to learn, then you're going to be a terrible leader. You're not going to be an effective leader, you're going to have a very limited scope, because the wealth and the breadth of information that's available to you out there is going to be lost to you if you're unwilling to ask, if you're unwilling to learn, if you're unwilling to question yourself and to encourage others to question you, you're never going to have full flowing expression of creative intelligence moving through whatever it is that you're doing if you if you can't allow yourself to continue to learn. And I've seen a lot of people who are old line activists who are just like, ah, you know, I just I'm too old to change. I'll leave that to the younger people. But you're still in the movement, you're taking up space. If you're going to take up space, then you need to take up space from a perspective of being willing to learn and to grow and to move with what's going on. Otherwise, you're hindrance to the to the movement, you know, in some ways. And, you know, maybe you're just a teacher in the movement of showing everybody else how how, how things need to change. So, you know, I think that that this is something that people really need to be thinking about and looking at that everything that we're leaving to the young people is going to crush them. Right. And so we need to really hold up our part of the sky right now. And everybody needs to be doing that everybody needs to be holding up their part of the sky and that means really centering social justice work, you know, in regard to racial equity, economic equity, looking at the disproportionate impacts of climate change on certain populations, whatever that is that needs to be a central part of the discussion. Otherwise, you're going to be completely ineffective at doing network. So thank you so much, Sherry. Thank you all so much to think about and continue learning and discussing and we're so grateful for you sharing part of this snowy or rainy afternoon with us. Yeah, thank you for having us near your fire. Yeah, it's it's wonderful and there's a there's actually a good solid coating of snow out there. So I'm excited it's going to crunch under my feet. You can imagine it when I go out and I pick up some snows. So thank you all so much for having me and for being in this work. Thank you for showing up in a time that is so challenging in a time where people are struggling to just get through their day to day life. Thank you for continuing to show up because the work that you're doing in regard to climate change with 350 Vermont, this work is for the benefit of us all. And I just want to acknowledge and honor you for doing that. So thank you very much. Thank you so much.