Indigenous Earth Community Podcast

What does it mean to “discover” a place where people have lived for thousands of years? And who is protecting the sacred places and waters that are still here today?

Robert Rosa is a Taíno leader and a member of the American Indian Movement who has spent years protecting Native burial sites and wild places across Florida. On this Indigenous Peoples’ Day, he takes us back to where the Taíno story begins: who they were, how they lived, how they traded all the way to Florida, and why so many words we use every day came from them.

Then Robert explains why calling 1492 a “discovery” is so offensive, and corrects a myth about the Taíno that has been told for hundreds of years. Finally, we come home to Florida. Robert talks about his work using federal law to help the Seminole and Miccosukee protect burial sites from developers, and why Shingle Creek, the headwaters of the Everglades, matters for every person who drinks Florida’s water.

This episode is for students, teachers, and anyone who wants the real story behind Columbus Day, and practical ways to protect the land where they live.

 

The history behind the holiday
Columbus’s arrival in 1492 began one of the largest losses of human life in history. Through violence, forced labor in mines and fields, and new diseases, the Native population of the Caribbean fell by about 90 percent within a few generations. Spanish priest Bartolomé de las Casas, whom Robert mentions in this episode, wrote eyewitness accounts of the cruelty he saw. Still, the Taíno were never fully erased. As Robert shares, Taíno women carried the language, stories, and identity forward, and their descendants live on today in Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and across the diaspora.

 

What You’ll Discover:

Where the Taíno came from, and the other Caribbean peoples who lived alongside them

Why Taíno society was matriarchal, and how women kept the culture alive
How the Taíno traded with Florida, using ocean currents historians said they couldn’t navigate

Why the Taíno settled disputes with a ball game before going to war
Taíno words you already use: hurricane, canoe, manatee, hammock, and more

Why “you can’t discover something that’s been there for thousands of years”

The myth that the Taíno thought the Spanish were gods, and what really happened

How Robert uses NAGPRA to help Florida tribes protect burial sites and sacred objects

Why building on Shingle Creek’s wetlands affects floods, sinkholes, springs, and drinking water

How you can get involved, even if you’re not Native

Chapters:
0:00 Introduction
1:18 Where the Taíno came from
3:59 Daily life in a Taíno village
8:35 Taíno words we use every day
11:21 What “discovery” looked like from the beach
13:55 The biggest myth about the Taíno
15:12 Protecting sacred sites in Florida
17:47 Shingle Creek and the headwaters of the Everglades
22:04 Robert’s advice: how to get involved

Resources:

Protect Florida’s land and water
Protect Shingle Creek: [https://protectshinglecreek.com/
Friends of Split Oak Forest (Save Split Oak): https://friendsofsplitoak.org
Friends of the Everglades, founded by Marjory Stoneman Douglas: https://www.everglades.org
Florida Springs Council, a statewide coalition of springs groups: https://www.floridaspringscouncil.org
Florida Springs Institute and their Springs 101 guide: https://floridasprings.org

Learn about sacred sites and Native rights
What is NAGPRA? The 1990 federal law that protects Native burials, funerary objects, and sacred items (National Park Service): https://www.nps.gov/subjects/archeology/napgra.htm
Taíno: Native Heritage and Identity in the Caribbean (Smithsonian): https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/culture-once-believed-extinct-flourishing-180970101

For teachers
Native Knowledge 360°, free lessons from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian: https://americanindian.si.edu/nk360
The Taíno People of Boriken, a free classroom reading (Teaching for Change): https://www.teachingforchange.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Taino-Lesson-Reading1-2.pdf
Young Friends of the Everglades and their Educators Exploration Kit: https://www.everglades.org
This podcast was reviewed by Common Sense Media: https://www.commonsensemedia.org/podcast-reviews/indigenous-earth-community-podcast

Classroom discussion questions:

Robert says you can’t discover something that’s been there for thousands of years. What word would you use instead?

Which Taíno words did you already know? Why do you think they survived?

Why do you think the Taíno story was left out of so many history books?

Where does the rain at your school go? Trace it as far as you can.

A note for teachers and parents: this episode discusses colonization and genocide in age appropriate terms, suitable for middle school and up.

📚 Support This Podcast & Indigenous Youth Workshops: When you purchase books through our Indigenous Earth Bookshop, you directly support independent Indigenous booksellers AND fund our hands on workshops for Native youth worldwide. Every book purchase helps preserve traditional ecological knowledge for the next generation. 🌱

Connect with Indigenous Earth:
Newsletter: https://www.indigenousearth.org/newsletter/

Topics: Taíno, Indigenous Peoples’ Day, Columbus Day, Columbus myth, Caribbean history, Boriken, Puerto Rico, Taíno words, NAGPRA, sacred sites, Tequesta, Seminole, Miccosukee, Shingle Creek, Everglades, Split Oak Forest, Florida springs, Floridan aquifer, wetlands, teaching resources, Native American Heritage Month

What happens when the first fresh fish your people have eaten for ten thousand years stops coming up the river? And what do you lose when an entire generation grows up never tasting it?

Cindy Wagner has lived on the Annette Island Reserve in Metlakatla, Alaska for 56 years, the only Native reserve in the state and the only one in the world sitting entirely on an island. Her husband Louie is known as the hooligan man. She is the Grease Lady. Together they have spent their lives on the Unuk River, teaching children, grandchildren and now great grandchildren how to live off the land.

In this episode, Cindy explains what the hooligan is and why people once called it the savior fish, lining up four blocks deep for eight hours to get a single bucket. She describes finding oil drums and pallets thirty miles up a river that only Canada sits above, watching two natural lakes fill with mine tailings until blood red water spills over the top with every rainfall, and losing the marbled blue glacier water where the best trout used to hold. She walks through what it takes to render pure hooligan grease, why the Unuk is the only river in Alaska closed to the very people whose inherent right it is to fish it, and what is coming next: a proposed tailings dam 780 feet tall, five thousand workers, fifty five years.

This is for anyone who wants to understand what a mine upstream actually does to the people downstream, told by someone who has watched it happen for a lifetime.

What You'll Discover:

Why the hooligan is called the savior fish, and what makes it different from salmon

How hooligan send scouts ahead, and why Cindy believes they can never go extinct

What abandoned mine tailings look like twenty years later in a temperate rainforest that gets 14 feet of rain a year

How to render hooligan grease, and why it is treated like truffles

What one five gallon bucket per household per year means for a community that is 90 percent Native

Why a closed fishery costs more than food, and what happens when a generation never learns the work

The connection Cindy draws between mining, the herring collapse, and the last wild salmon runs on the continent

What she says the Canadian government has to do, and what listeners anywhere can do

Resources:

Southeast Alaska Indigenous Transboundary Commission (SEITC): https://www.seitc.org/

B.C. mining in the Unuk watershed, from Salmon Beyond Borders: https://salmonbeyondborders.org/bc-mining-unuk

ICT reporting on the transboundary mining boom, featuring Cindy and Louie Wagner: https://ictnews.org/news/modern-day-gold-rush-mining-projects-opposed-by-alaska-tribes-get-boost-from-canada-british-columbia-and-first-nation/

📚 Support This Podcast & Indigenous Youth Workshops: When you purchase books through our Indigenous Earth Bookshop, you directly support independent Indigenous booksellers AND fund our hands on workshops for Native youth worldwide. Every book purchase helps preserve traditional ecological knowledge for the next generation. 🌱

Connect with Indigenous Earth:

Newsletter: https://www.indigenousearth.org/newsletter/

Topics: Unuk River, hooligan, eulachon, ooligan grease, Metlakatla, Annette Island Reserve, Southeast Alaska, transboundary mining, tailings dams, wild salmon, subsistence rights, Indigenous food sovereignty, SEITC, water protection

What happens when a place your people have prayed at for a thousand years becomes a uranium mining site? And what can one voice actually do to stop it?

Sumaya Quitugua, a young woman from the Acoma Pueblo in New Mexico and Chamorro from Guam, grew up at the Sky City, in traditional adobe homes on top of a mesa, where her grandfather taught her that we don't own the land or the water. We protect them. 

In this episode, Sumaya breaks down the fight for Chaco Canyon, a place protected by President Theodore Roosevelt over a century ago and named a UNESCO World Heritage Site, now targeted for uranium mining right up against its borders. She explains what's really at stake, what mining does to land and water that can never be undone, and how a seven-day public comment window turned into a hundred and fifty days because people refused to stay silent.

This is for anyone who's ever wondered whether speaking up actually changes anything, and anyone who wants to understand sacred land from the people who carry it.

 

What You'll Discover:

What actually makes a place sacred, and why it's a feeling, not a spot on a map

Why the "buffer zone" around Chaco matters as much as the site itself

What uranium mining really does to water, air, and the people who live there

How seven days of public comment became a hundred and fifty

How to visit a sacred site with respect, including what to do and what to say

Why choosing not to learn is choosing to be part of the problem

 

Resources:

Follow Sumaya Quitugua on Instagram

Learn about the threat to Chaco Culture National Historical Park (NPCA)

Discover Chaco Canyon's dark skies, stargazing, and archaeology (National Geographic)

📚 Support This Podcast & Indigenous Youth Workshops: When you purchase books through our Indigenous Earth Bookshop, you directly support independent Indigenous booksellers AND fund our hands-on workshops for Native youth worldwide. Every book purchase helps preserve traditional ecological knowledge for the next generation. 🌱

Connect with Indigenous Earth:

Newsletter: https://www.indigenousearth.org/newsletter/

Topics: Chaco Canyon, uranium mining, sacred sites, Acoma Pueblo, Indigenous land rights, public lands, water protection, UNESCO World Heritage Site, environmental justice, tribal sovereignty, public comment, land conservation

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY NATIONAL PARK SERVICE

Hey friends, it's been a while. Like many of you, we've been navigating a lot on the environmental and overall news front lately, so today I'm doing something a little different.

I think back to those early days kayaking with friends here in Florida, searching rivers for trash. Some days we'd arrive and the water was pristine. We almost felt bad, like we had nothing to do. My mentor smiled and said, "just enjoy it,  sometimes we need to remember why we do what we do."

That's what this episode is. No interviews, no talking. Just the sounds of the living world.

This nocturnal soundscape was recorded deep inside Kichwa tribal territory in the Ecuadorian Amazon by artist Rafael Diogo. Bats cutting through the dark, insects surging into something almost electric, a monkey rustling unseen branches, a distant howl, and underneath it all a stream threading through the night.

A beautiful reminder of what we're working for.

Big thank you to Rafael and our friends at Earth.fm — a nonprofit repository of over 1,200 pure, immersive natural soundscapes from around the world, recorded by the best artists. Based on empirical evidence as well as numerousrecent studies from all over the world, listening to natural soundscapes has a great positive impact on our wellbeing, and potentially on our respect for nature. However, these soundscapes are increasingly scarce as we humans continue to destroy the natural ecosystems which produce them. That's where Earth.fm comes in: as well as sharing a new natural soundscape every day, they're actively helping the community go out in nature more often and discover a deeper, more direct connection with the wonders around us. Visit www.earth.fm and download their app on Android or Apple devices.

Stay tuned! exciting interviews are lined up. And if you have questions or just want to say hello, it genuinely means a lot to hear from you. (send me some good vibes!)

Find me on Instagram @frankoscarweaver or email [email protected]

aguye!

Feeling overwhelmed by climate change and disconnected from nature? What if the solutions we need have been here all along, in the wisdom our ancestors knew, in the plants growing in our backyards?

Laylalanai Gocobachi, a Pascua Yaqui woman and Unity Earth Ambassador, learned this from her grandfather who sent her into the Arizona desert with grocery bags to "shop" for dinner. He taught her the desert is like our pantry, and that Native people were the first scientists.

Today, Laylalanai shows us how to bridge traditional wisdom and modern science. You'll learn how she combines climate data with elder observations about disappearing plants, and why the Earth is constantly speaking to us, through snakes climbing trees before floods, through plants receding, we just need to remember how to listen.

This is for anyone who's felt like one person can't make a difference, anyone searching for hope in these challenging times.

What You'll Discover:

How to start listening to what the Earth is trying to tell you (practical signs to observe)

Why "water doesn't separate us, it connects us"—and what that means for your work

The exact process for braiding Indigenous knowledge with Western science

How to overcome imposter syndrome when you're the only one in the room

Why showing up matters even when you doubt yourself

Simple ways to reconnect with nature and find knowledge keepers in your community

Resources:

Follow Laylalanai Gocobachi on LinkedIn and Instagram

Watch for her documentary on Planet Forward about traditional crops across the border

📚 Support This Podcast & Indigenous Youth Workshops: When you purchase books through our Indigenous Earth Bookshop, you directly support independent Indigenous booksellers AND fund our hands-on workshops for Native youth worldwide. Every book purchase helps preserve traditional ecological knowledge for the next generation. 🌱

Connect with Indigenous Earth:

Workshops: https://www.indigenousearth.org/p/indigenous-earth-workshops/

Newsletter: https://www.indigenousearth.org/newsletter/

Music Credit: "Pascola Dance - Mamna Cialim (Green Spinach)" performed by Musicians and Singers from Old Pascua Village, Tucson and Rio Yaqui, Sonora from the album Yaqui Ritual and Festive Music (Canyon Records, 2002). Published by DMG Arizona Music/Public Domain.

Topics: Traditional ecological knowledge, intergenerational learning, Yaqui culture, climate assessment, Indigenous youth leadership, desert wisdom, water sovereignty, environmental science, knowledge braiding, listening to Earth