Indigenous Earth Community Podcast

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

Want a green career but worried you'll have to compromise your values? Andrea Everett from the Pueblo of Ysleta del Sur shows there's another way.

Andrea shares how she turned her midnight business decision into MatriARC PROJECTion LLC, a drone and GIS mapping company that serves communities instead of extracting from them. She reveals why she turns down high-paying work that doesn't align with her Pueblo values, and how that actually attracts better opportunities.

You'll also hear the inspiring story of how a group of Pueblo women came together after Feast Day to reclaim their traditional farming roles. They secured land, built two hoop houses, and are now growing ancestral seeds: Hopi corn for ceremonies, Pueblo chiles, tobacco, and marigolds for Day of the Dead. Healing in community while creating a foundation for the next generation.

What You'll Discover:

How to break into GIS and drone careers 

Why staying true to your values attracts the right work

Starting a business with just faith and a grant that showed up unexpectedly

How youth learned to fly drones while connecting with sacred sites and elders

Traditional farming techniques: three sisters planting, waffle gardens, soil preparation

Why healing happens in community, not isolation

The power of starting small, even a few plants in pots

Resources:

Books: Braiding Sweetgrass, Radical Cartographies, Muskogee Tools of Futurity

Video: Native Cartography - Challenging Western Notions of Place

Connect:

Andrea Everett Story Maps.

https://borderlore.org/a-sacred-rivers-sovereignty/

indigenousearth.org

Topics: Green careers, GIS mapping, drone jobs, Indigenous agriculture, seed sovereignty, rematriation, traditional farming, values-based business, career advice for Native youth