Full transcript:
NARRATOR 1: Harvard Divinity School.
NARRATOR 2: Bears Ears is Listening: We are Still Here and the Land is Calling us Back, April 28, 2022.
DIANE MOORE: Hello, everyone. It is my pleasure to welcome you to this seminar-- this webinar this afternoon and a really rich discussion about Bears Ears and its legacy of participation in how the communities connected to it have helped reclaim that land and the future that they hold for it moving forward. I'm Diane Moore. I am the faculty director of Religion and Public Life. And it is my great honor for Religion and Public Life to cosponsor this event with the Harvard University Native American Program.
And I want to thank them for their important work and in particular, for the work of interim director Jason Packineau. Harvard University is located on the traditional and ancestral land of the Massachusett and the original inhabitants of what is now known as Boston and Cambridge. We pay respect to the people of the Massachusett tribe, past and present, and honor the land itself, which remains sacred to the Massachusett people.
I invite folks to drop questions into the Q&A throughout this conversation. I'm going to now offer a brief introduction to our two remarkable guests. And then I will turn it over to them to begin this conversation. First, I want to introduce Angelo Baca. Angelo is from the Navajo and Hopi nations, which are tribal nations located within their aboriginal territory in the southwest region of the United States. He is the cultural resources coordinator for the Utah Diné Bikéyah, a nonprofit with an all-Indigenous board and a mission to engage local Native community members to protect their traditional cultures and ancestral lands.
As a filmmaker and PhD candidate in sociocultural anthropology at New York University, Angelo has research interests in Indigenous international repatriation, Indigenous food sovereignty, and sacred lands protection. Our second guest is Cynthia Wilson, who we have the privilege and honor of hosting as a Religious Literacy and the Professions fellow last year and this upcoming academic year. In addition to her work with us, which is actually secondary to her primary work, Cynthia is a tribal member of the Navajo Nation, born and raised in Monument Valley, Utah.
She is of the Folded Arms People clan and born for the Towering House clan. Wilson holds a MS in Nutrition from the University of Utah. She serves as the traditional foods program director for Utah Diné Bikéyah, a Native and nonprofit organization with a mission to preserve and protect the cultural and natural resources of ancestral lands. She is also a founding member of the Women of Bears Ears initiative that seeks to restore Indigenous women's matrilineal roles and to rematriate the Earth.
Her work encompasses traditional knowledge that addresses the environment, cultural, nutritional, and spiritual health of the land and the people. She hopes to strengthen healthy food practices and its ties to reclaim local, traditional food ways of knowing among Indigenous communities. Thank you all for being with us. And again, I'm going to turn it over now to our-- to both Angelo and Cynthia. Thanks, again, for being with us. And we look forward to this rich presentation in our conversation.
ANGELO BACA: Yes, thank you for having us here today. So I'm really honored to be here. And I'd like to invite Cynthia to start us off.
CYNTHIA WILSON: Thank you, Diane and Angelo, for joining me on this webinar. We're going to talk a lot about sharing our work under the Bears Ears National Monument movement as Indigenous grassroots community organizers. So I'll see if I can pull up my slides here or share my screen. Bears Ears is Listening is what I put as our title because I was thinking about my mom and I wanted to bring you all to place here. I'm calling in from Monument Valley, Utah, Arizona.
And Bears Ears is just north of me, where the two buttes sit. And every time I travel that way-- my mom's an herbalist. And before going through the buttes, the Ears, she always yells as loud as she can four times in all cardinal directions. And that's how we greet and let our ancestors know that we are still here. And that we are still here speaking up for them as far as protecting our ancestral landscapes and all nonhuman beings that live there.
So this slide is a map of San Juan County, Utah. If you can see the very lower right corner is the Four Corners region. So this is Southeastern Utah. And the dark-shaded outline is in two parcels. There's one at the left side and then a larger dark blue outline on the right side. So that's an outline of what was designated by President Obama back in 2016, 1.35 million acres, when originally-- I'll step back a few bit.
Utah Diné Bikéyah is a Native-led nonprofit organization, which started from our board of directors in collecting elder wisdom, in interviewing our knowledge holders, medicine people and-- where they documented a lot of cultural mapping of this landscape. And this is how they created a proposal that was handed off to the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition in 2015, using their sovereignty status to request 1.9 million acres to be protected under the Obama administration.
And in 2016, the dark blue outlying boundary is what was designated by President Obama. And then within a year or less than a year, it felt like when Trump administration took over, they reduced the Monument by 85%, which you can see in the light blue color. They called it two separate monuments, Shash Jaa National Monument at the lower light blue color. And the upper light blue color was Indian Creek National Monument. And then in 2021 is when Biden came in and restored Bears Ears National Monument back to 1.35 million acres. Did you have anything to add Angelo?
ANGELO BACA: I think this is a really great map for a couple of reasons. First of all, you may not know who I am. But I am the cultural resources coordinator for Utah Diné Bikéyah. Some of you may already know Cynthia as she's working with you. But she was also a part of our initiative from the community as well and working with elders and traditional folks and medicine people. And so I did a lot of work also in trying to make sure that we had continual voices and representation heard from the community.
[SPEAKING NAVAJO]
So those are my clans in Navajo. I'm Navajo and Hopi. And I grew up here and I live here now. And so this has been a professional, educational, and personal passion project of mine. And I really love that we were able to get a number of different elders and traditional knowledge holders to be interviewed so that they could figure out what were the places that deserve the most protection. And the result was the 1.9 million proposal that the tribes came up with.
And so the Obama designation of the 1.35 million acre, the map that you're seeing now, was somewhat of a compromise. And we had hoped to stay as close as possible to protect the entire region. But we think that for the most part, many of our considerations were taken seriously, and, of course, we-- even during reduction advocated for the 1.9 million as being a restoration option. So this is where we're at right now. It's very close to the old Obama designation. So I just wanted to add that right now with President Biden's reinstatement of the National Monument.
CYNTHIA WILSON: So this work starting from the board of directors with Utah Diné Bikéyah and listening to the elders' voices on the ground within the Indigenous communities, who have ties to the Bears Ears landscape, came up with our overall mission really centered around healing, healing of the Earth and the people, which was really about strengthening our relationships to the land and our culture in actively utilizing and reclaiming this space so that the future generation can learn our cultural ways of life as far as collecting medicines, traditional foods, traditional hunting, and learning our creation stories that derive from this place.
So it has a lot of teachings. And when I interviewed elders, they talk about-- as a staff member within this Native-led movement, they told us not to just speak of Bears Ears as something that is over there as a mountain. But they said, you are Bears Ears. You can't just talk about it. You have to live it. So through our roles, we had to be proactively engaging our knowledge holders and their voices and also engaging with them in ceremony.
So we took a lot of time and energy at the community level in learning and using our language as well. And it was part of the success of this work, which was all about prayer. Prayer is what led up to where we are at now. And it's what has been keeping us going since our board members have been advocating for this landscape. And I wanted to bring up this quote from the Barack Obama proclamation.
When he designated Bears Ears National Monument on December 28, 2016, he specifically stated that, "Traditional ecological knowledge is, itself, a resource to be protected and used in understanding and managing this landscape sustainably for generations to come." And to me, what this meant is traditional knowledge is essential for land management planning, whereas the land itself is essential to each of our cultures. And so when we talk about traditional knowledge, this is actually what created the 1.9 million acre proposed boundary.
As we were doing cultural mapping, a lot of our elders shared stories that tied back to our creation stories. And a lot of our teachings are oral stories that have been passed down over many generations. And they emphasize the importance of keeping our knowledge systems in educating our Native youth so that they continue to use this space and to maintain their cultural practices. And a lot of our ceremonies are also derived from this land.
But one thing I realized in the proclamation language, they mentioned traditional ecological knowledge as an object to be protected. But one thing that, I think, they've been missing is really about the relationship that it's really about restored relationship with Indigenous peoples to the land and to me that's in address to climate change. Because of our disconnections to our ancestral landscapes, we've been put on Federal Reserve land that disconnects us from the margins or the boundaries that were put in our society that created public lands managed by US Forest Service and the BLM.
So when we're talking about Bears Ears as a cultural living landscape, it's really about restoring our relationship to our nonhuman relatives on the landscape. This is where our stories are documented through the petroglyphs. And it's where many-- our various tribes have lived here since time immemorial. And tribes have moved with the seasons. And it's where we depend on for a lot of our cultural resources. I believe it was documented that over 100,000 cultural resources were documented within the Bears Ears proposed boundary. And Angelo, feel free to chime in when you can.
ANGELO BACA: One thing I'll add here, because you did a great job covering it, is the cultural living landscape is really important because a lot of people will think of a national park or a national monument as separate with no people in it. And that is entirely not what we wanted for Bears Ears. We go there to harvest food, medicine, firewood, hunt. There's all kinds of things, ceremony that are affiliated with our daily life as Indigenous peoples. It's really important to us to have access and to continue our cultural practices.
So the people need the land. And the land needs the people. It's a symbiotic relationship. And so that's really important to emphasize, the cultural living landscape piece of it. It's not just about preserving something and then having no human interaction in it as a lot of Americans might be conditioned to think. It's really important for us to protect that relationship and keep practicing our cultural ways. I'm just adding that.
CYNTHIA WILSON: So engaging our voices into these planning process was essential into this movement, especially when the proclamation language was being written. So we wanted to elevate the voices of our knowledge holders. And a model example of that is food. So I'll share a two-minute video here.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
KARLOS BACA: Hey, I'm Karlos Baca, chef and founder of Taste of Native Cuisine. We are here as united tribes from different sovereign nations to put our voices into this fight to possibly strip this place of monument status. The fight for Bears Ears is the fight for food. It's the fight for education. It's the fight for your language. It's the fight for everything that we hold dear that makes us a sovereign people. This is all of our fight. This is everybody in the nation.
It's a national monument. It's not just an Indigenous fight. This was created just as much for you as it was for us. When you can see tribes that sometimes stand in opposition to each other, come together and unite. You know that it's bigger than you. And you know that there's a true, true ancestral happening here. This knowledge that's up and down these canyons is it's Zuni. It's Hopi. It's Snook. It's Diné. It's all the tribes that traveled through here. There's memories engraved here. There's creation stories here. There's everything that should hold importance to people.
But we have this conversation with everything that has to do with the past, the present, and the future, we're at a place and time in our history to where we can be heard in whatever capacity that we have in these movements. Stand up for it. Use your voice. Use your computer. Use your hands. I don't care. Don't take your voice away from the battle, however that looks.
[END PLAYBACK]
CYNTHIA WILSON: So food is a great model example of one of those cultural resources that has been talked a lot among the elders. And when we interviewed the elders, we really talked about food as a living, breathing being. And all our interviews were in fluent Navajo language. We talked about who is this food being, what gifts and powers does he or she has, and how do we act responsibly in reciprocity as we are engaging these plant relatives as well, collecting herbs or medicines on the landscape or using the food source for a ceremony.
And with that, we-- one of the priorities of the elders was always about maintaining that cultural knowledge among our youth. So we did a lot of cultural food workshops, where we engage with traditional hunters. They talked about how they make arrow. They did archery workshop. We talked about the tiny Four Corners potato, which has been dated back 11,000 years of the potato starch residue on an old grinding stone that was found at Grand Staircase-Escalante.
And we also did a workshop with herbalists, who did a lot of plant-- talked about plant knowledge, sustainable uses of how the branches and stems are used for basket weaving or traditional stirring sticks, cooking tools. And we also did a sheep butchering workshop with a lot of local cultural cooks in our area. And we called that an Indigenous healing kitchen. So part of our work in engaging our community was really centered around food, which brings our people together.
And it's an opportunity to engage a lot of that knowledge language. And while listening to the elders in our community and our knowledge holders, our work was really driven based on their priorities in the communities. So when COVID-19 hit, we were prepared in addressing the needs of the communities. And one of the priority was access to water. Living here in Monument Valley, San Juan County, Utah, 40% of our community members still lack access to the running water and electricity.
So when COVID hit, it's not just access to any water, but access to clean water because we have a lot of-- we have big issue with uranium contamination since our-- where we live here still has a lot of unclean, contaminated uranium site that has been impacting our people. So we were able to do a fundraiser to purchase a lot of water tanks, 275-gallon water totes, that we were distributing to our elders that lack access to running water and large family households within-- throughout the San Juan County area.
And as far as food access, we also distributed over 1,500 Indigenous seed packets that were drought-resistant, corn, beans, and squash seeds, and also melon. And we engaged with our local Future Farmers of America program, which high school students volunteered to prepare soil, build fences, and prepare gardens for families looking to restore their gardens. And another food staple for Diné people is-- the meat source is mutton.
So we raised money to support our Diné elders, who still herd sheep to this day, Navajo-Churro sheep. And we were able to purchase over 100 Navajo-Churro sheep from various Navajo shepherds. And then we were able to gift them out in pairs to families looking to restore their flocks and with the idea of restoring their food systems using the meat for food and also the wool for rug weaving and in other uses as well. So this was another example of responding to immediate needs of our communities.
ANGELO BACA: I think that was the long-term sustainable solution that was also a cultural revitalization locally to address interruptions in supply chain, food shortages, fuel prices, distances being covered, interruptions by the pandemic. And we had been talking about that for a while, Cynthia and I, especially when she was starting to get her program off the ground because we were thinking about seeds and preservation of seeds and thinking about how we can galvanize the community into getting back into the cultural ways of farming and cultivation of traditional foods once more.
And so we would source and connect with different other food sovereignty projects, communities, and tribal nations. And that network, I think, really helped us get through that difficult time. And following up on Cynthia's comment about immediate responsive needs, it was such a difficult time for folks on the Navajo reservation, in particular. At one time, it rivaled the same amount of COVID cases in New York City.
So just thinking about the sheer numbers of people being impacted and a lot of the folks who are already health-wise compromised, we gave people a lot of notice and communicated about vaccinations schedules. And we would coordinate a lot of these food drops and get people-- as you see here in the photos, some PPE, masks, hand sanitizer, thermometers, oximeters, a lot of equipment that a lot of folks didn't have access to or otherwise couldn't get at that time.
So we pivoted and switched to from just being a, by definition, conservation organization and help to make it a part of a effort to be a mutual aid organization as well. So this was something that we realized early on is that cultural protection is land protection. But also, protection of the community is cultural protection. So that means our elders, our youth, anybody who is otherwise vulnerable. And so we wanted to make sure that we take care of them first.
So Jonah, here, he's going to bring us through this. He gives a wonderful example in just under a minute about how we do our acknowledgment and our thanks. And he's talking about right after the monument was designated.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
JONAH: Oh, the first thing that we thought about-- or I thought about and then we talked about, today, let's say a prayer. Let's say thank you to our creator. Let's say thank you to Mother Earth, Father Sky, the holy mountains and the holy waters.
MAN: Coming to hide since I got here.
JONAH: And maybe give something, maybe a corn pollen or a corn, give it to Mother Earth or water or stream and say, thank you. We've come a long way. That's what we did. Then we thank everybody that supported us, our staff, our organization, the Inter-Tribal Coalition, everybody that stood with us. So that's how we started out.
MAN: Very good, thank you. Let's go.
[END PLAYBACK]
ANGELO BACA: So Jonah demonstrated right there how important it is to acknowledge all of creation first. He was talking about everything in the environment and the holy beings as well as elements and then people. People were secondary. They were next. And I think this speaks to a lot of Indigenous spiritual traditions in which you can observe that same thing where people are a part of the natural world and the environment. We're not above it. We're not better than it. We're just a part of it.
And you can see that reflected even with the Haudenosaunee tradition of the thanksgiving address. If done correctly, that will take hours, sometimes days because you're acknowledging all of creation before you acknowledge human beings. And you're giving your thanks. So that's the kind of traditional knowledge framework that we're operating from at UDB. And this is an example of Bears Ears summer gatherings.
Every summer, there's a gathering that we've had to help unify the community and bring them together to make sure that they have experience and positive time spent with each other, bonding, building relationships, communication. And you have to realize that the Bears Ears coalition and the Monument itself is fairly new. And that historically, all the tribes there in that coalition have had some conflicts or disagreements or even battles.
And so we're willing to put that all aside and to work together to focus on protecting a shared ancestral land. And I think it's really important to see those images of people in the landscape. Again, it's not devoid of people. We are always constantly there. The Indigenous Advocacy Conference in March of 2019 was another effort, I think, to coordinate with conservation groups and environmental folks, who are in alignment with our goals to protect ancestral lands.
And this was an amazing gathering that we had here in Blanding, Utah because many tribes from different places all over the country came from as far away as Alaska, Nevada, Wyoming, New Mexico. And they came there to learn about how we were able to be successful, what kind of strategy and plans and things did we deploy to help make our campaign successful. And now I think it's one of the most important tools that we can share with tribal folks teaching other tribal folks.
The Wyoming folks, in particular, up in the Arapaho and Shoshone country are really taking this forward and utilizing the things that we taught them now. So that's another rewarding part of this. So part of what we train them on and what we continue to do now is the UDB media orientation guide. We try to correct common mistakes, issues on incorrect spelling on tribes' names, clans. We want to engage the coalition history-- background and ancestral ties. We have a list of recommended terms, things that we want to stay away from so that we can be more culturally sensitive and accurate.
We don't want to perpetuate stereotypes and tropes. And we continually encourage people, especially those from the outside of our communities coming in, to construct some narrative whether that be in text or in images that they should always remember the importance of reciprocity, respect, and having a baseline sense of cultural knowledge and an awareness of the contemporary issues. So far, we've been fairly effective in our own representation when it comes to utilizing our platforms, such as social media.
We actually galvanized a lot of the community here to defeat House Bill 93, which was a thinly-veiled discriminatory initiative to break up San Juan County into a largely non-Native North and a largely Native South. So it's an apartheid-like. And this was just after the Native American majority of the commission, two-thirds of that commission was elected. So it's been really important to mobilize folks and to get them informed and tell them what's happening here on the ground.
And besides doing that, we also are lifting up little known narratives, things that are not as well known that we would people to know, like lifting up women's traditional knowledge, revitalizing certain cultural life ways, and encouraging people to take a look at what's happening on the ground with the community, with the issues they care about. The Bears Ears Prayer Run Alliance is another example of that. They have been coming here for years. And these young kids have run from their respective nations, who are a part of the Bears Ears tribes.
So imagine these high school kids running from New Mexico, coming from-- all the way from Zuni or coming all the way from Colorado in Towaoc or all the way from Hopi in Arizona. They're running literally hundreds of miles to come to Bears Ears. They want to understand what it means, what their relationship is to it. They want to represent the future in that kind of leadership, coordination, communication, and building a positive future. So they're very inspiring.
We presented at the Permanent Forum at the UN in 2018. And we presented our argument for protecting the Bears Ears as it was designated by Obama and sharing this with the Special Rapporteur. And for all the nations that were there, both recognized nation states and tribal nations, there was a lot of respect that was shown towards the Bears Ears initiative. So much so that they actually helped push us to the front so that we could present. And that show of support was very motivating and encouraging.
And also here, me and Cynthia presented at a Salt Lake City United Nations event in which we were also speaking about the importance of the Bears Ears initiative here to a local crowd.
CYNTHIA WILSON: And just like Angelo was mentioning about the Bears Ears Prayer Alliance runners, it's really interesting to me that many other Indigenous groups have been mobilizing on their own because of how significant this landscape means to our cultures. And one of that was the formation of the Woman of Bears Ears, which I'm involved with. And it's a group of women that come from four generation of women.
And we came together with wanting to restore our matrilineal roles as decision maker, cultural barriers, and nurturers of our shared ancestral landscapes. And we come from women of Diné, Ute, and Pueblo tribal nations. And we were recently featured actually just a year from yesterday in The New York Times opinion piece. So there's another source for that.
But to me, I think through the prayer that were first place from the beginning of this movement is being addressed in these groups from our youth, from the elders' wisdom to the women leaders in our communities coming together and elevating our voices so that we continue to take care of our ancestral landscape at Bears Ears.
ANGELO BACA: This is just the punctuation on good news with the Biden administration that Deb Haaland, who came, also, last year this time to visit Bears Ears, was able to finally restore it in October of 2021. And that's a little slide there of just a little bit of the community. There was a lot of people there at the celebration at Moki Dugway while it happened, which is on the southern end of Bears Ears. So I had the distinct honor of being able to tour around with the Secretary and also present to her on behalf of the community to admonish the administration to push for full restoration.
So it's good news after a really hard and tumultuous four years. It felt like there was a lot of challenges and obstacles to be overcome. And it did take a toll. And there are some of those that we lost. And we just want to take a moment to acknowledge them and remember them to some folks that it was just their time, or we're exposed to the pandemic or had to move on to other things in their life. We appreciate them. We think about them. And we couldn't have done it alone.
So also, I also just wanted to extend an invitation for folks that are interested in watching the Bears Ears documentary film short that I did with the New York Culture and Media Program at NYU, the program that I'm graduating from. It's available here online to stream for a couple more weeks. It also has the Saving Sacred Spaces panel discussion. So if you go to the National Museum of the American Indian, you can watch it in full.
DIANE MOORE: Well, thank you both. What an incredible odyssey and journey that you have both lived through yourself and honored your ancestors, who have helped to bring you to this place and also brought you to this moment. I'm going to invite the audience to direct questions if you have any questions for our guests in the Q&A. In the meantime, I would just love to hear both of you speak about what's ahead. And for you, what do you feel most excited about in the next weeks, months, years?
And connected to that, perhaps, is how can people who are non-Native help support the work and incredible vision that you two have represented for the communities that you come from. How can we-- how can people outside of your communities support you in this important work?
CYNTHIA WILSON: To me, I feel like there's a lot of education that still needs to be done, especially with outside non-Indigenous groups working on such national monument campaigns. And I really learned that even listening to the tribal leadership level, they are really-- they have their sovereignty status, and which is why this movement was successful because five tribes united to negotiate with the federal government.
So when there's outside environmentalists or conservation groups working on such campaigns, the tribes don't like to be viewed as stakeholders or being invited into these conversations. With this movement, it was really coming from our elders and our community members, who have, for many years, wanting to protect this ancestral landscape. So that's something unique. And also, now that we are in the planning phases of this national monument, there's some terms that still needs to be improved, such as comanagement.
I know one of the elders from my community was saying, we've been managed by our federal government-- we've been managed by the federal government all our lives. So when they see management, we don't-- we're not taught to manage land. We are just occupants of the land. And the land manages us. The land holds power, which is the result of climate change, where it's based on human acts of putting boundaries and the idea of property ownership.
Placing barriers on a lot of these cultural resources is the result with things like drought and all these other issues with climate crisis that we are facing. So it's really-- it's a unique movement, like Angelo was mentioning before, that we had to wear many hats. Even though I used to work for Utah Diné Bikéyah as a traditional foods program director, but my role was really engaging in being proactive at many levels based on the needs. So that's how I'm thinking about it.
DIANE MOORE: Thank you. How about you Angelo, what do you see as your own priorities moving ahead? What are you excited about? What are you concerned with and also how might people outside of Native culture support you?
ANGELO BACA: I think that's right on what Cynthia is saying about we wear many hats and have different roles. And a lot of us have a limited capacity and bandwidth to do as much work as we do and also, such as the work of nonprofits and NGOs, just broadly. I think a lot of people do multiple things and are always stretched thin with a really minimal budget.
So any time people are really willing to lend a hand, whether that means to do something on the ground with the community itself or work with organizations that are in alignment with the same kind of goals and projects that they see would be beneficial for the community and the grassroots people, that's appreciated. Of course, I think any time, funding, resources, equipment, materials, those kinds of things are always appreciated.
But in terms of the larger scope, I do think that it's important for us to continually push to improve the stories that are coming out of Bears Ears because it serves already as an example for other tribal nations, who are trying to do the same thing to protect their ancestral lands, to have their story at the forefront, their leadership at the lead. And that they are not just considered to be an add-on or an afterthought that they are actually the ones that are taking point on a lot of these discussions.
I've been in conservation circles where entire discussions will happen, but they won't ask you for your opinion. Sometimes somebody will actually have to interrupt and like, let's ask the Indigenous grassroots community what they think. So in every circle, there is a need for improvement for bringing in full participation of Indigenous voices, conservation groups, environmentalists, nonprofits, philanthropists, academics, scholars, journalists, filmmakers, everyone and anyone who's constructing a narrative that are trying to find out whether or not the information is accurate.
It is historical, culturally sensitive. It's responsive. And it's also inclusive and part of the collaboration of the community. I think that's really important because people forget about that. They like to default to their classical training, which Cynthia and I have been constantly pushing people on to rethink the way that they have approached these things, the way that they enact their methodology and try to do a better job of being accountable and following up because everything that we have seen, by and large, can be improved when you're working with Native communities.
DIANE MOORE: Really, really wonderful articulations, both of you. I'm struck in hearing you and sad to hear you, but not surprised, the necessity to continue to restate the importance of centering Native voices, Indigenous voices and not just these questions relevant to Native communities, but especially, I think around the larger questions of what we're facing now relevant to challenges in the world. Always, the nature of what you also even reviewed relevant to how you all responded to the COVID crisis, I think, we have a lot to learn relevant to that.
And the deep ties to connection to each other, deep ties to the land, deep, integrated understanding of our world and our roles in the world is something that, I think, is so critical in so many arenas of our lives. So with that slight segue, I'm going to pick up on one of the questions that colleague Judy Beals asked. And I'm going to preface the question by saying that Religion and Public Life is promoting the public understanding of religion and service of a just world at peace.
And I want to say when I had the good joy to discover Cynth's work and reached out to her a little over a year ago now to invite her to consider being a fellow for us in the Religion and Public Life program, she was very hesitant, recognizing and articulating very clearly that when she thinks of religion and the role of religion, it has not been an arena or a category that has served Native cultures well. And we know that religions are constructed category and a foreign one in many ways to Indigenous communities.
So with that preface, can you, perhaps, one or both of you speak about the role of what you can envision religious communities outside of Native cultures, what can they do, who are eager to support you without the unintended consequence often that happens of undermining the very work you're doing through a religious lens that's often not interrogated?
ANGELO BACA: Cynthia, do you want to take that one since you're in the program?
[LAUGHS]
CYNTHIA WILSON: Well, with our work, it was really about engaging our voices, really focused on the cultural aspect of it. But as far as other religious groups and how they can support, I think, is just-- whether it's a speak movement, I knew I've seen it on the Q&A, too, is providing space. Land Back has been a really huge topic, providing space and opportunities for Indigenous peoples to reclaim their ancestral ties to these places.
And because a lot of our communities have artists like, Indigenous artists, Indigenous cooks, but their work needs to be shown in more spaces or galleries and other areas that-- because right now, we're just limited to Federal Reserve land, where there's not many opportunities to engage our work and our expertise, which is why reclaiming our voices, at least, into the planning process that Bears Ears is a step forward.
There's still a lot that needs to be done as far as policy change in advocating for appropriate language into these planning processes moving forward. I don't know. Angelo?
ANGELO BACA: I think this is a really-- it's a tricky question to ask us because we're already trying to coordinate between several different tribes respectfully, culturally, sensitive ways. And so that kind of negotiation is a new thing. And we're doing our best not to step on each other's toes. So we do have a deep and profound respect for each other's cultural and spiritual practices, our beliefs and our ways that we don't want to impose upon each other.
The irony about all that also is that in the state of Utah, it's largely a Mormon state. And they're having a lot of trouble catching up to have the same respect for us. I mean, even within the Book of Mormon in the religion is a fundamental tenet that eliminates our Native Americans, cursed with a dark skin. Now if you operate from that framework, we're automatically not seen as human. And we're always striving to be a metric that is seen in their eyes as white, righteous, and acceptable.
And we don't want to be that. We are who we are. We have preceded that religion and those outsiders. This is our land. We're connected to it. We have our own religion, our own beliefs, our own language, our own home that we're connected to. And I just would invite people to think of it broadly as an opportunity for healing that historical trauma because we talk about Bears Ears being for healing. And we want to talk about that historical trauma, all the wars, the battles, the disease, the imprisonment, genocide, removal, all of that stuff.
It's really important if we're able to move forward. And there are very little opportunities in other places in this country where we are actually putting that forth and putting it forward and saying, here's a space where we should go and talk about that. We don't see that offered up, not even in places of debate of free intellectual exchange or religion. There's just folks are coming from it from their own perspective rather than, again, foregrounding Indigenous voices and understanding how is it that we can do these acts of reciprocity and healing.
Maybe it's land back. Maybe it's honoring the treaties. Maybe it's restoring and rematriating the land. Maybe it's all of that and more. It depends on where you're at. You can't speak broadly for everyone. But we know that here, this is our home. It's where we belong. We're part of the community. And we do our best to speak and represent for the community in respectful ways when it comes to anything, historical trauma, genocide, and even religion. First and foremost, it's really important for us to respect each other before we can imagine a future where we're collectively moving together in a good way.
DIANE MOORE: Well, thank you. That is a beautiful closing set of commentaries from both of you. I want to thank you, again, for joining us with this webinar, for the honor of working with both of you. We hope that we will continue to partner with you as we learn from you around the ways that we at Harvard, specifically through the Religion and Public Life Program, but the University as a whole, can serve to advance the narratives that you feel are so important to use our platform to do so and also to support your work in that way.
I want to thank, again, our cosponsors, HUNAP, for cosponsoring this wonderful webinar to let all of you who are listening know that there will be a recording available that will be on our website-- Religion and Public Life website. Thank you both, again, for being with us and for illuminating this incredible journey you've been on and giving us a vision of a possible future that we want to support you in acting. So thank you again.
NARRATOR 1: Sponsor, Religion and Public Life.
NARRATOR 2: Copyright 2022, the President and fellows of Harvard College.