Rediscovering Indigenous Roots: Rematriation and Stewardship in Massachusetts

with Kristen Wyman of the Eastern Woodlands Rematriation Collective

The following interview was recorded for the Poor Proles Almanac podcast with guest Kristen Wyman of the Eastern Woodlands Rematriation Collective. The Eastern Woodlands Rematriation (EWR) is a grassroots collective led entirely by Indigenous two-spirits, indigequeer, womxn, and tribal families of what is now known as “New England.” They collectively comprise peoples and families of Maliseet, Mi'kmaq, Passamaquoddy, Penobscot, Nipmuc, Massachusset, Wampanoag, Narragansett, and Mohegan nations, and include urban, mobile, displaced natives and indigenous peoples in diaspora. 

Andy:

Kristen, thanks so much for joining us. I stumbled across the Eastern Woodland Rematriation Collective probably a year or two ago and it's been on my to-do list to reach out, so I'm really excited to have you here.

Kristen Wyman:

Thanks so much. Super excited to have this conversation. Thanks for having us.

Andy:

First, I want to start with the name, and that's what got my attention the most, because you see a lot of various mutual aid, Indigenous projects, and so on, but the focus on eastern woodland rematriation is a really interesting concept, so I don't know if you could talk about that a little bit.

Kristen Wyman:

Yeah, sure, it is a pretty long-winded name. We really wanted to ground ourselves with the territories that we're from. So my name is Kristen. I'm Nipmuc, a descendant of the Thomas Bean line. They're original proprietors of Natick, Massachusetts, which is where my ancestral territory is. Nipmuc are freshwater people. My grandmother also married into the Mashpee Wampanoag community. They're coastal, they're known as people of the first light, and, yeah, we're woodland people.

This is a particular area of Turtle Island where our origin stories come from. We have a particular context and historical relationships that span thousands of years. I think colonial settlement and the change over the past few hundred years can really drown out our identity, and so we wanted to hold first to that.

Now, in the story of rematriation, we see it as a process. It's not something that's stagnant; it's a way of being that we're continuing to relearn. We know that we come from a matrilineal people, and you know we're curious about what that means in today's context. So we understand that we're all impacted by settler colonialism and living in the structures and systems that we're struggling to dismantle, but we don't really know exactly what it looked like before.

We can only kind of imagine, and so we believe rematriation is a process. It's a process of returning to a matriarchal way of being. It's a process of relating to the landscape in a different way than what we've been taught or known to do over the past few hundred years. We don't have it all figured out, and that's why it's really this verb of rematriation. It's something that we're only hoping we can leave in a better way for our grandchildren, and it's this constant state of evolving.

Andy:

Yeah, that's really insightful. I'm down towards Plymouth, so I do some work with the Wampanoag here. It's really interesting as somebody in this kind of permaculture regenerative space. One of the big things that's kind of come up in the last couple of years is, you know, the conversation about Indigenous versus invasive species right, and how easily folks can kind of find somebody that's Indigenous, that speaks to their perspective and that becomes Indigenous voices, as though it's a monolith and it speaks to like this really weird discomfort that exists, I think, for a lot of people. Like, hey, let's talk about this, it's messy, it's complicated, you know, white people have done some pretty terrible shit here, and like people want to do the right thing, but it's so uncomfortable for a lot of folks, they don't even really know how, how to engage, at least from like a settler perspective, a colonist perspective.

With the work you're doing, how have you felt? How have you been able to connect with the majority white population, that is, Massachusetts?

Kristen Wyman:

The end goal is to care for the land and to do the right thing. You know, there are just some folks that I don't think are going to align with us or, you know, still have that belief that, you know, we should have gotten over things a long time ago, and there aren't really any real natives here anymore anyway, and I would just say, like we don't really spend a lot of our time trying to convince those folks, like we know who we are and really anyone that's not willing to understand and embrace that history of this place is missing out.

Quite frankly, I look around every day, and my existence is like this is very much an indigenous place, this is an Indian place. We see native names on street signs. Places are still, in our traditional language, named after the landscape, and you know we choose not to try to convince folks who really aren't willing to see that. And the ones who are, we do believe we can align on this common value of caring for the place, the value of caring for the place.

So Eastern wilderness rematriation does engage a lot in the mainstream around the conservation movement. It's interesting that you brought up the difference between indigenous and invasive species, and you know that's a really great place to pick apart, right?

I tend to say a lot of the conservation movement isn't embracing Indigenous history and bringing Indigenous folks into the leadership of the work that they're doing. Their analysis is incomplete, and so you know, history didn't start with settlement. We have thousands of years in our oral histories, our languages, our artistic traditions are time spent getting to know folks, and the idea of it, you know, being messy and complicated, I think, is just the reality and the nature of the struggle that Indigenous folks face on day-to-day.

Eastern Woodlands Rematriation predominantly spends a lot of its time trying to organize within tribal communities and really trying to break through the barriers and the way the system has created silos and division amongst ourselves and the way it taught us to move towards an individualistic mindset and so we're really trying to break apart with that idea of collectivism.

And what does that look like, and how do we do that when we're hurting and when we're really trying to rediscover who we are and when we still don't have access to a lot of the traditional knowledge or even the places, the physical spaces where we need to be, to relearn, to make mistakes, to have ceremony, to pray, to connect with one another, and so this is just a complicated and messy situation for us, and this idea that everything needs to be easy and romanticized is something that's just not real, and so our call to folks who are trying to navigate ways to connect and integrate Indigenous folks into their strategies or their plans or their hopes and their dreams, is to keep at it just the way that we need to.

It's not going to be super easy all of the time. It's not always going to feel good. We need to learn to make mistakes together and to learn to care for one another through that process. It's not easy for any of us, right? So the idea that somehow you know you're going to someone might turn away from doing the hard work because it's too messy or complicated is really—I would say, what's the word? It's like it's just the easy way out, and we're not really left with that choice. We don't have the choice to do that.

Andy:

Yeah, I think it really boils down to the idea that if it were easy, it probably wouldn't be worthwhile. We don't have the choice to do that, and there's no simple solution from a number of different perspectives.

That gets magnified by a number of other things outside of just the simple question of who is responsible for the landscape and how people reconnect with their culture or who is responsible for the landscape and how people reconnect with their culture. One of the messier parts of land back, and if you look at the landscape here, especially in Massachusetts, so much, so much of it has been destroyed ecologically speaking, not just in terms of species diversity. I live in Eastern Massachusetts, and you cannot eat freshwater fish. Basically, there's no easy solution for that, right?

There's no easy way to just say we're going to restore this landscape. I mean, you're talking about chemicals with half-lives of thousands of years that we don't even really know how to mitigate. So, even from a functional, ignoring the emotional and psychological components of this, the very functional aspect of rematriation and restoration is wildly difficult here, especially here in the Northeast.

Kristen Wyman:

Yeah, I agree. This reminds me of my participation in the advisory committee around the question of whether or not to remove the dam at South Natick Falls, and it was a year-long process. They brought in a whole group of experts to really analyze all of the different components, from the engineering, the scientific, the ecological restoration viewpoint, the economic situation, recreation, and, you know, upstream and downstream property owners and how this would impact their views and their experiences and their safety.

I really kept remarking; I can't believe we're spending a whole year contemplating whether or not that we should do this, especially when the ecologists came in and were like, listen, once you remove the dam, it's only a matter of a couple of hours when biodiversity starts to return. And it's like this is a no-brainer. Everybody. You know we're spending a whole lot of money on this, and that is the trigger point. Right, it's really hard.

So you said, just stepping back to that comment, I love it of like putting the social and kind of emotional dynamics aside in the functional piece. And yes, we have to do that on a daily, but it's so difficult. It's so difficult to put that emotional piece aside because I'm going through this process, and we're very under-resourced people. You know, we have a lot of dreams and hopes, and we have a lot of work to do to redo what's been taken from us. Just knowing the amount of money and resources that were going into that process alone, um, was really difficult to go through. I would say that that's a form of land back as well, really giving the rights over to the river.

Specifically, I wanted to mention this experience when they asked me to give a presentation on the cultural and historical considerations of this dam and what we see, as Native people, as the best way forward. I had mentioned that you know, we have a fish species that historically needs to be able to pass through and swim upriver to spawn and to have their babies. And you know, some people responded like the fish are never going to come back.

And you know, it was that point where I said our teachings are that when the fish are thriving, we're thriving as well, and so that's why I'm here. Whether you think they're going to come back or not, my teachings tell me to continue to be relentless that they will return, and everything that I do today is a struggle towards that sort of vision or that trajectory for our people because when we know when they return, we're OK and we won't stop until that happens.

I think it really impacted a lot of people because I noticed that people were talking about additional dam removal so the fish could return. So once you remove that dam in Natick, you still need the Watertown Dam to come down. But this is what we're talking about, right like it's a reframe— we have to rethink. And so, yeah, it's going to take a lot of years to undo all of those dams, but it's happening right, and we're so conditioned to believe we need this kind of immediate satisfaction over our efforts.

But in our cultures, we have many oral stories that talk about years and generations of work and struggle so that the folks who do come up in those future generations have what they need. So it's no stranger to us to say, hey, this might take a lot of time, but you still do it because that's what we're taught.

Andy:

As you describe this, I was thinking about this idea of multi-generational thinking that I think is so lost for a lot of the West around. I will do this thing and I will never see the benefits of it, and that's okay. It's an honor to be able to be a part of that process. That idea of slowing down, tapering expectations, not in the sense of what the end goal is, but rather what you will accomplish as you're part of the piece. That probably speaks to a lot of the hyper-individualization that we see in society and so on.

And it made me think of, actually, The project’s interview with Aaron that we were talking about before we recorded, and he had made a comment, I think it was him or Sole who made a comment about autonomy for Indigenous people,e and someone corrected him to say cooperation and collaboration of Indigenous people. This idea of how a lot of Western anarchists kind of perceive the idea of anarchy and autonomy as really individual-based into a collective that self-regulates and organizes, when reality, I think for non-westerners, it's kind of the opposite. It's like the community holding you accountable and it's not a question of how do I live to my potential, but rather how do I find my place within a greater network of community. And while those might seem very similar, they're very, very different in kind of what the pressure points are, if that makes sense.

Kristen Wyman:

It does. It's really emotional and moving to have that experience named because I think our daily reality is struggling to fit within this other way of being that is totally contradictory to being our true, authentic selves. And so, when you were sharing that, I thought about how I usually introduce myself as being a mom and a daughter. Like, I'm not an activist, and I'm not like you can assign these names to us, but most of us are doing this work because of exactly what you named, and we belong to a collective of people.

When we think about the generational piece of it, we know that we're here for just this small moment in time, and we're here for good reason. We're, you know, our moms carried us in the womb for nine months, and even before they carried us, they dreamed of us. We have gifts that we're born with, and we're named around those gifts, and it's a beautiful thing for us to be able to live to our full potential and be part of that trajectory because that's really what I'm talking about is like going back to our cosmovisions, our birth stories as a people, and I believe Eastern Wilderness Rematriation is really living, trying to live through that trajectory, through all of this madness and this chaos.

So, coming back to that very basic concept of being birthed and born into this kinship network, and it's not just people, it's like a kinship network of where we belong, right? I started off by talking about I'm a Nipmuc person, and we're freshwater people, and you know, my grandmother married into this other community, and so, through that process, I become, I belong in that way, and I have a responsibility to them as well. I have this responsibility to this network of waterways, and I talk about it like I just talked about it with the fish with our riverways.

Free our river, help the fish come back, because they're part of us, and we're part of it, and you know we want to do well by that. We need to survive, and so that brings in this understanding that all of this is beyond just one individual, and you know, it's part of it's this responsibility to the collective that I think is lost on a lot of folks, even tribal folks, and that's why I continue to emphasize rematriation is a process. It's a process of unlearning and relearning. I just know that when we're doing this work, like we're representing our family lines, who are super important, right, because when our family lines go away, that's what the dominant society tries to do.

That's when the dominant society claims our landscapes, territories, and livelihoods. Right, because my children are in a Western system that continues to teach them individualism and all of these things that contradict who they are. As much as we can, we need to exist, we need to continue to work against that momentum, and, yeah, the collective piece is really difficult to navigate.

Andy:

Yeah, like now, and it's funny, as you were talking, it reminded me of the thing that I was talking about earlier, and I was like, I forgot where I was going with this. It reminded me exactly of where I was going with it. And it's this question of, and I think you kind of pointed to it here, this idea of like, all right, I belong to a community that isn't just human, and what responsibilities do we have to the landscape that's been here for 10,000 years, including the fish?

Even if the fish don't come back, it is our responsibility to give them the opportunity to do that, and that's kind of how I feel. To get back to what I was saying before about native versus non-native species or invasive species, our job isn't, you know, isn't to say this is what the landscape is supposed to look like, but rather our job is to give the species who have called this landscape home for thousands of years the opportunity to return to it and find their place in this new ecosystem. That will never go back to what it used to be, but at the very least, we should honor them and give them that opportunity to find their place.

Kristen Wyman:

And there's so much learning in that. I mean, as somebody who works the land and I continuously say I'm a beginner at this, I will be a forever beginner land worker, farmer, producer, and fisher person. I am just completely humbled by what I learned from season to season from the land and what it needs, and sometimes that feedback loop is really long and can take a while. But I think what we're talking about is the essence of rematriation. Right, you asked about that word, and I think you know. I think what rematriation?

I think what rematriation does is replace patriarchy, which is this kind of dominance and control over what we know better than or like we. We need to do this for the land. We have the power over the land. This is what we need. So we're going to do this to the land, right, where I think rematriation is way more fluid and reciprocal in its relationship to humans and non-humans and more of a “What do you have to teach me, and how can I care for you in that process? How can I see you as a complete being, right, human and non-human? How can I see you as a complete being and care for you in such a way that I am humbled enough to learn from my mistakes and what I need to do to shift and change?” In some ways I'm like, am I romanticizing this completely?

Andy:

I think what you've described is really beautiful, and I think that's really the relationship that many of us want with other people and the world around us in a way that I think is, in some cases, physically beaten out of us as children, in other cases, emotionally, psychologically and so on. But I do think that this is really an intimate way to relate to the people and world around us that we are so trained to wall off. It's really beautiful.

Kristen Wyman:

I'd make the point to going back to the conservation movement, and that's what I see is void in that space, right, and that's why I'm saying it's so interesting, because you know there's these percentages over like. What is it? You know, 80% or more of the world's biodiversity is within Indigenous hands, and then I feel like in a place like New England, so developed and, as you said, destroyed in so many ways, and we've been disconnected from that ability to caretake, as opposed to another territory within the world where Indigenous people have continued to hold that hand and hold that land and have more biodiversity. I'm sure everyone is impacted by settler colonialism, but there may be more biodiversity there than in a place like New England, right?

So how does that, how does that idea of just you know, let Indigenous people lead? I think there's this expectation that we all know everything still, and no, it was intentional to make sure we didn't know and that I do have to learn from white farmers or that I do have to learn from white scientists and conservationists. Like that's the reality.

What we're talking about right now—that beauty— I don't want to be romanticized. I don't want people to listen to this and say that it is such a beautiful concept and thing and then think it just magically appears. No, it's through struggle, it's through humiliation, it's through making mistakes, it's through having to have these difficult conversations and difficult relationships to see through to the other side, to a place where we are relearning how to care and respect one another. And that is going to take time.

I think that sort of care is void in the conservation movement, right they remove humans mostly from that work unless you're studying it or you have some sort of power control over it. I think that is what's missing and could end up in the long run. Likely will all of our teachings tell us that when you're stewarding the land in that way, you're building in that generational component of care, and so you might not need a conservation movement eventually, right, if we're all living in that way, I think everybody's going to be a conservationist.

Andy:

I hope so. I hope you're right. Everybody's going to be a conservationist. I hope so. I hope you're right. But one thing you did say that I thought was interesting is that you talked about humiliation, which I think is one of the things I harp on a lot: this concept of being humble.

But humiliation, I think, is actually much better than having humility because it speaks to something that, especially in a social media world, is so difficult to embrace and accept that we fuck up, that we do things, that we look back at and cringe terribly and say I cannot believe I did or said or thought or whatever right?

And the other side of that is the acceptance of that humility, that humiliation of that poor decision or whatever right? And I think both of those are lacking, and I don't think we've created space to allow people to be humiliated and to embrace, um, embrace that, that that realization of change and um, grow right. So, like to your point at the very beginning of this, you talked about, I don't have all the answers, I never will, um, but it's a learning process, and we love the idea of a learning process and becoming smarter. We don't like the bumps. In real-time, you can experience that feeling of like you don't have all the answers and like I'm going to do really bad things, and we have to figure out a way to create space for that, right?

Kristen Wyman:

I agree. Yeah, I have a hard time with it, too. I think it really comes down to ego, and I feel like individualism and ego are so tied together.

Andy:

There is some kind of tide of change that people are aggressively searching across social media to figure this out. For example, this morning, I happened to see something pop up on my phone, and it was like more people than ever are searching for friends, which is really sad but also hopeful.

To that humiliation concept, the idea that everyone feels like they don't have friends is really humiliating if you don't feel like you have friends, right? Everyone else has friends, but I don't like them; what's wrong with me? But accepting that and then starting the process of figuring how do I make friends at 35 years older, you know, whatever it might be right, that means you have acknowledged this thing and are trying to fix it.

A lot of this work really comes down to relations and our ability to empathize and build a sense of community, in some sense, like in a digital space, but also in real life, in a way that we can find our footing on the landscape in the world around us that we engage with every day, not just the social media feed that spits back my own feelings, and I think that's really important and one of the more difficult steps to trying to address some of these issues.

Kristen Wyman:

I agree; I think we're going to constantly have to have this struggle and be able to realize when we, when colonialism is doing its job, right to embolden ego and to make this about the individual and to distract us from the real work that needs to be done. And as we were talking, I was thinking in my head like yes, this is all great, like let's, let's do it, let's humble ourselves, let's be, let's accept our humility. Again, I just want to emphasize that this humility takes place in relation to relation around humans, but it also takes place in relation to the natural world.

In agriculture, we're so conditioned to have to listen to the experts or to do everything right. And I want to just emphasize that you can't learn to get it right until you make those mistakes. And it's kind of me speaking to myself at this moment because a lot of my teachers, I think, are trying to create room for that mistake.

But having known how to do it better, I think there's that control dynamic, right? There's that individual. I feel responsible, I made these mistakes and so I don't want you to make those mistakes. No, sometimes we need to allow space for that to happen, but we need tools throughout the process, and I think this conversation is just illuminating, like, yes, let's go this direction, let's practice humility, let's practice acceptance, let's be more reciprocal in our relationships, but we need the tools. And I think the tools are largely absent. And so you know, you asked at the beginning, like, what's the big call? Right, I guess?

The big call is, “Let's all equip ourselves with these tools,” right? I think in this sort of work, we need our elders, or we need our elders who can help guide us in terms of what they learned and give us that space and that grace to make mistakes and to relearn. But we need to be able to go to them for guidance. And we need our young people.

I see this distance in my community between elders wanting things to go their certain way and, the same thing, young people seeing a different way of being and really being anxious and impatient for getting there, and so we need that sort of space and generousness from both sides. What is largely absent is that we don't know how to communicate with each other, and so when we're experiencing these isolations, right of like not having friends, how do I go find them? When going through conflict or being humiliated, where are the tools to help us through those processes? Where are the tools to help us communicate better? Where's the spaciousness for us to be able to learn from each other and support each other through this learning and through this evolution and transformation collectively?

Andy:

How do we relearn to be human really fundamentally right? That's really what a lot of this boils down to: how do we be people that live in a community? And what concerns me, and this is a little bit on a tangent, so we don't have to talk about this further if you don't want to is, I think for a lot of people they've turned to therapy to learn how to have relations right, and I do worry quite a bit about that for a number of reasons. Not that therapy is as a whole a bad thing, but I'm really hesitant about this like systematic thing that teaches you how to be in community.

It's not through experience; it's not through relations; it's through the powers that be and a codified system of how people relate. That is really messy and complicated, but not for a good reason, in my opinion, unlike what we're talking about, so that, to me, is a little bit concerning as people try to figure this out. But that is an entire tangent. We don't have to talk about that.

Kristen Wyman:

You're saying there's not a trust in the system where we would tend to like to go to therapy, right? If therapy is talking about, like, all right, how do you engage with this, what are the things we should do, and so on?

Andy:

While those might not necessarily be bad, the solution is ultimately contextualized through this individual and their training under a framework of capitalism, which is super problematic because— for many in therapy, but not all— our problems aren't individual; they're with our relations. So solving them individually is, by definition, not solving them, even if it might give you some tools that are effective. How is the already problematic healthcare system and its understanding of mental health going to give you answers to deal with capitalism or how we relate with each other? It's kind of silly, like when you really think about it.

Kristen Wyman:

Yeah, I mean, you may feel like you're going off on a tangent, but I would say you're naming some of the key central focus points of Eastern Wilderness Rematriation, one of our biggest struggles. As we're trying to build collectively, there are so many of us who aren't well; there's no shame in that. We're kind of the product of this environment that we've been raised in, and so it's no surprise that we're really not well and we're on this healing path.

There's this healing journey component to it as we're rematriating, and EWR has really struggled with not having the tools right, not having the folks that can help us through trauma, through just everyday struggles, or even through conflict with each other, and so I sort of do reject that system, although I do believe there are really talented individuals that can do this work who are in the system. Finding them is really difficult, and so it is a goal of EWR to really start to do that search but also to build this sort of team. So if we have anyone that's listening, that is like this is their art, this sort of work is an art in many ways, you know, there are gifted people who know how to do this work.

We're really trying to build a team of folks and anyone who wants to resource that work as well. But it is kind of a vision and a dream to have this team of folks that can coach, that can provide therapy, that can help with conflict because all of those things are getting in the way of our collectivism, and so, yeah, we're surviving right now, but in order to thrive, we really need those magicians in our life yeah help us through yeah, and I'll iterate.

Andy:

I'm not saying that, like therapy as a whole 100%, all of it is bad, but rather I think like there are, there are issues with this, the system that has perpetuated your alienation and mental health anguish, giving you the medicine for said problem.

Kristen Wyman:

So, another podcast?

Andy:

Yeah, we can start drinking and we can talk about that.

One of the things you've talked about on your website, and I do want to shift gears a little bit, is this idea of food sovereignty. You make the case that food sovereignty projects are largely unsustainable. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about this and how you believe we should better try to address some of these solutions or problems.

Kristen Wyman:

I think it's really hard to be food sovereign just because of the capitalistic system, right? So I'm a good example. I have a full-time job, but I'm also managing a 64-acre parcel and doing a lot of other projects and support. Right, there's the collective, and I'm also growing food producing, processing, sharing, helping with the distribution end, and I have to work full-time, interestingly, for an anti-hunger organization, and you know I'm taking vacation days to go do the actual work, and so you know, I'm just like this is a bizarre world to live in.

It's just so strange, like why can't I just do this work right and still have a livelihood and a salary? Well, you know, that's the reality that we're in and that I always say this is why we can't be food sovereign. You know, when we're done with this call, I still have about five more sea bass I need to process because that sea bass is going to be stored and shared during the winter. I just last week needed to get on top of a bunch of hickory nuts that were falling but I missed the harvest time because we have all these other things going on. And so, you know, again, just like rematriation, it's this constant process and struggle of hoping to get to that endpoint.

I think that that's the case for food sovereignty. I believe it's possible, but I believe we need to transition to a whole other system, and I have a lot of hope in Indigenous principles of a just transition framework and how we might navigate that. How we might, you know, abandon this current system that we're in. And again, this is a really great example of how we may never see this in our lifetime, right, but it's our responsibility to keep working towards this goal because we know that the alternative is death. It's destruction.

Everywhere that we're turning today, whether it is, you know, manmade, like war and militarization and imperialism, whether it's just naturally occurring, like our hurricanes, we are seeing death and destruction all around us, and we need something different. To say, “I am not allowing this to continue, for you know our great great grandchildren to experience.” You know they're going to look back at us, and we have the responsibility to act accordingly, and the best way to do it is to continue to model it, even if it's impossible. Show everybody what it is, show them the models, show them the way out, and so you know, food sovereignty is possible.

In that respect, we're going against the grain.

It's like the fish swimming upstream right, like it's a difficult, arduous journey, but we have to get there and there's a lot of joy and celebration in between. Being part of food sovereignty efforts is really beautiful, and in my full-time work I'm really I'm a director of a global movements program, and we source and resource food sovereignty projects and efforts all around the globe. And so, as much as there's a struggle and there's pain, there's just beauty when we're able to tell the story of seeds being reclaimed or shared or protected, when we're able to have our traditional knowledge validated, like, for instance, the wildfires that we see happening and occurring today.

We know that our Native folks knew about the dangers of this and, you know, had their ways of working the land that would mitigate extreme, you know, fire damage. So it's a beautiful time to live in in terms of us remembering that kind of recall of what our great ancestors taught us and the way to take care of ourselves. But we're still really far away in terms of where we need to be to actually be food sovereign.

Andy:

Yeah, I would agree with all of that. It's difficult, and I don't know if, to your point, we'll ever really see the dial change in our lifetime. I think we're about the same age, so we're already halfway out, so to speak, and that's okay, right? One of the things I think a lot of people struggle with is the idea of getting older because that means your time is more limited. You blink, and you're already, you know, 35, 40 years old, whatever it might be, right?

I hate cold weather. I am a warm-weather person. My parents are from Southern Italy, and they'd never seen snow before they came here. My blood is made for that weather. But one of the things I, especially since I started this podcast, I've tried to really embrace is my feelings for it, for winter, and learn to find the pieces of it that I enjoy, right, and to bring this back to this idea of, like us getting older, finding the ways to embrace and enjoy our age and where we are, and you know, as a 40-year-old, the role I can play with younger kids just learning about this stuff, where I can help them skip, you know, some of the really difficult growing parts of like figuring out kind of who you are and what resources are available if you're interested in food sovereignty and so on.

Maybe we may not have had leaders or elders who could have guided us through and tried to find ways to enjoy that kind of ushering. Part of me still thinks I'm 21. But the other part of me has like kind of really embraced that role but then kind of thinking about this as a nested system. On the greater scale of things, trying to find ways to appreciate our pivotal role in the landscape as climate change rears up, as American capitalism continues to edge closer to unsustainability, and appreciating that this unique moment in time and the things we can do, whether that's being a part of destroying a dam that you know will change the landscape forever and, you know, hopefully someday people don't even know about that dam.

Thinking about how do I embrace this really difficult space that I'm in? This place in time, you know, in the belly of the beast, so to speak, and come to terms with who we are and the reality, the limitations of the time we live in, extrapolate those great pieces of it, which I think does go back to this whole mental health piece. How do you address mental health? You find your place within community, and going back to the first thing we talked about of autonomy versus this community sense of collaboration, these are all the same thing, just in different facets of our identity and of our lives.

Kristen Wyman:

Everything that I'm hearing you say, I just keep thinking we're so conditioned to believe it's about us. Through our birthing, we know we're important, we know we have gifts to share, we know we're needed, and we're here, and at the same time, it's not about us, right? I think our ego gets in the way so often. And when we're going through those struggles, even in those times, the darkness, right, the winter, the darkness, or even just symbolically, the darkness in our life, or the times that we're really feeling alone or isolated, you know, just remembering, like, what is it that I'm supposed to learn through this moment? And that it's not about me and my discomfort at this time. It's actually that discomfort that's gonna help me get to the other side, and there's always a teaching in all of it. Right, I'm from here, but I also struggle with the winter.

I believe you need to go someplace warm in the winter because your blood is telling you that. I struggle with the darkness, too, and the only thing that gets me through is remembering this is a time; there's a time for this, right? Traditionally, that's the time that we're dreaming, we're visioning, we're making, we're sleeping. You know, we're sleeping and letting our bodies rest, let the soil rest and all the roots are doing their job and their work through this time when everything else is asleep. Remembering there's an occasion for everything, and even in the difficult times, that's our time to shift and make adjustments, or rest and reflect and understand what it is. We need to learn at that moment so that we can correct it for the collective Right so that we can get it right for the collective.

Andy:

For folks who are inspired by your work and your thoughts, where can they find the Eastern Woodland Rematriation Collective? Where can they support you?

Kristen Wyman:

Yeah, we are on Instagram. Our Instagram hasn't been active for a little bit, but we're hoping to revitalize that and rejuvenate it, so it doesn't hurt to follow us. And we're also fiscally sponsored by Why Hunger is actually the organization that I work for as well. They're based out of New York City, but you can go to whyhunger.org and also look up Eastern Wilderness Rematriation. We have a donation link and don't hesitate to reach out to us.

You can find us on our website and contact us via the website. we have lots of kinds of projects that are affiliated with EWR that I think are worthwhile. So you know we're throughout New England, and you know, if you're based in a certain area and you want to know about projects that are happening near you, we can point you in that direction, and all of those projects are worthwhile to invest in as well. And so, yeah, reach out. We'd love to uplift the work that we're doing and get to know you, and we really appreciate this platform and this opportunity to share.

Andy:

Thank you so much.

Kristen Wyman:

Thank you.

To listen to this interview, tune into episode #229 of the Poor Proles Almanac.