Spotlight: Parks - Yellowstone

We’re sharing an episode of the podcast Parks, which explores the truth about the creation of U.S. National Parks, retold alongside Indigenous peoples. This, the first episode of Parks, dives into the history of Yellowstone Park with guests Lynette Saint Clair (Eastern Shoshone) and Shane Doyle (Apsáalooke Nation). They share stories about Indigenous stewardship of this land from the Ice Age to the present, and speak about the U.S. treaties made and broken with local Indigenous peoples in advance of the establishment of Yellowstone Park. We’re grateful to the Parks team – Mary Mathis, Cody Lee Nelson, and Nia Tero’s Taylor Hensel – for their great work, their transparency, and their generosity. 

Content advisory: This episode includes a discussion of Indigenous residential schools and colonial violence. 

Seedcast is a production of Nia Tero, a global nonprofit which supports Indigenous land guardianship around the world through policy, partnership, and storytelling initiatives.

Enjoy the Seedcast podcast on the Nia Tero website, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and your other favorite podcast platforms.

Keep up with Seedcast on Instagram and use the hashtag #Seedcast.

Transcript

 Jessica Ramirez: [00:00:00] Hey listeners, this is Jessica Ramirez. Right now we are busy producing more original Seedcast episodes. So this week we wanted to share with you a new podcast our team is loving - the Parks Podcast. I want everyone to listen to this podcast.

[Theme Music By Mia Kami]
 
 Jessica Ramirez: [00:00:39] When you choose to be a tourist at a national park in the United States here on Turtle Island, it's important to understand the history of the land you're on. Not just what you may have heard or learned in the history books or in school, but the the real history of how those lands were [00:01:00] taken, how people were forcibly removed, and how Indigenous peoples are still trying to take care of those lands today.

[00:01:10] Each episode of Parks features the backstory of a national park on Turtle Island, but from an Indigenous perspective. In this episode, you'll hear about how Yellowstone came to be established as a tourist attraction and how Native peoples of today are trying to reclaim the history of their ancestors. Parks Podcast is one of the top 90 documentary podcasts listened to in the country right now. And our Nia Tero team colleague, Taylor Hensel, is a story editor on the project.

[00:01:46] Thanks to the co-creators of Parks, Mary Mathis and Cody Nelson, for what they and their team do to educate us all about what we should not only be thinking, but doing when we find ourselves on Indigenous lands. [00:02:00] We hope you enjoy the very first episode from Parks Podcast. Check out their website, https://www.parkspodcast.com/, for more episodes as well as ways to learn about how you can support their work. And thanks for listening!

Mary Mathis: [00:02:19] I want to take a second to explain what's behind Parks a little bit. Parks aims to be a radically transparent journalistic project. One that details our ethics and processes openly. As an entirely independent venture, Park's relies on donations to compensate all involved for their labor and knowledge. So all donations will go towards both covering our production costs and making financial contributions to organizations supporting the communities covered in this podcast. Parks aims to uplift Indigenous storytellers by creating a platform where truth can be shared openly while understanding that one person's identity and history cannot speak for all Indigenous people. Each perspective is [00:03:00] individual and should be respected in that way. Guests have reviewed their conversations with us after recording, and we stand by our intention to facilitate reciprocity in journalism and show respect for their stories. 

[00:03:11] For a lot more information on how we're trying to make Parks an equitable piece of media, you can read more on our website, https://www.parkspodcast.com/. This podcast is coming to you from the traditional homelands of the Tewa people, along with the traditional homelands of the Coast Salish people. We also want to acknowledge that many other tribes and Pueblo people have claims and deep connections pre- and post-colonization on this land.

[00:03:45] Episode One - Yellowstone. 

[00:03:51] One of the main places visitors go when they're taking a trip to Yellowstone is the town of Jackson, Wyoming. It's the biggest city in the Jackson Hole Valley, [00:04:00] tons of wealthy tech executives and celebrities have houses in the mountains. Others visit to go skiing or use the town as a base for trips into the Grand Tetons or into Yellowstone National Park.

[00:04:10] The town has all the comforts of a suburban outlet mall. Some Jackson Hole signs and buildings are made to feel like you're transported to an old Western, all focused on cowboys and guns. There's even one event called Old West Days with a parade featuring colonial horse-drawn covered wagons and another called the Jackson Hole Shootout.

[00:04:29] You can grab a Wendy's burger down the street, once you're done watching. That might be why Lynette St. Clair, an Eastern Shoshone woman who lives in Fort Washakie, Wyoming, feels uneasy when she visits Jackson.
 
Lynette St. Clair: [00:04:41] When you go through Jackson, it's kind of ironic because I feel like an outsider in Jackson Hole. And then just a couple of years ago. They were still doing shootouts and having crazy little activities where they had people dressed up like Indians. And you know, this is of course fanfare [00:05:00] for tourism and everything. But to use people to perpetuate that stereotype and to perpetuate that whatever that Hollywood Indian typecast, it did not sit well with me.

Mary Mathis: [00:05:12] Lynette lives and works a couple hours away from Jackson as an Indian education coordinator at Fort Washakie School. And she facilitates developing materials for Indigenous education for students there 

Lynette St. Clair: [00:05:24] And you know, the greater Yellowstone area, Jackson Hole, and the valleys in between - that's Indian Country.

[00:05:30] But our people move constantly back and forth, hunting and gathering medicines and collecting obsidian, you know, going over the mountain to see our relatives in Idaho. We continue to move back constantly for different purposes. And so this is our way of life and many of our relatives in Idaho and Montana, Oregon, Nevada, Utah, we all shared the traditions, the culture, and the language.

[00:05:54] And growing up I heard, "these mountains are for our people." They have medicine, the [00:06:00] water has power. These are the stories that we have to share with our younger generations, so that they can also understand the power in those spaces that we share with our ancestors and the white people. 

Mary Mathis: [00:06:13] Today, Yellowstone, the first national park in the world gets over 4 million visitors every year.

[00:06:19] They visit the geysers like Old Faithful, hike in the canyon or camp in their RVs. But there's a much more complicated history than you'll find in the park service brochures they hand out at the entrances. Crow, Shoshone, Blackfeet, Bannock, and 24 other known tribes have lived, hunted, and foraged in the greater Yellowstone area for millennia.

[00:06:41] We're talking since the time of the wooly mammoth. They thrived in the ever-changing landscape for generations until the first European colonists arrived to the west.  

Shane Doyle: [00:06:51] Quite frankly, there was an ethnic cleansing on this ground and the cleansing was not just the people and the culture, but it was also the memory. [00:07:00]  It was the history. It was the way of life that existed for thousands of years, to all of a sudden vanished.

 Mary Mathis: [00:07:19] European settlers irreversibly changed the Yellowstone region and its people when they arrived in the early 1800s attempting to wipe out Native cultures in an effort to obtain land. But as you'll hear in this episode, Indigenous roots run deeper than outsiders know. To really understand what happened in the place we now call Yellowstone National Park, we need to go back to the beginning of human history there - more than 10,000 years ago. Our first guide to this past is Shane Doyle. 

Shane Doyle: [00:07:47] I'm a member of the Apsáalooke Nation. I grew up in the town of Crow Agency on the Little Big Horn River. I currently live in Bozeman and I work as an educational and cultural consultant. And so [00:08:00] my work takes me to a lot of different places, I guess, around the region. And I work with a lot of different groups around the region, environmental advocacy, education, the arts. And so, uh, stay pretty busy in the greater Yellowstone area. 

Mary Mathis: [00:08:16] Growing up, Shane didn't know much about the Yellowstone region or his ancestors' place in it.

Shane Doyle: [00:08:22] I didn't really understand my connection to it and it wasn't until I became older and, you know, as an adult. And I learned about my family history that I quickly realized that, uh, basically Yellowstone was in my backyard and that all my family had a very deep, rich connection to that place. And we had just been separated for so long and so far away, that a lot of those connections were kind of lost to someone like me. 

Mary Mathis: [00:08:47] That changed as Shane went to college to get a Master's in Native American studies. 

Shane Doyle: [00:08:52] I had already began to gain an interest in my tribe's history in the region and other tribes' history in the region. [00:09:00] And, uh, just looking at the maps, I mean, just basic maps of like the very first treaty that my great-great-grandfather signed.

[00:09:08] That land that was guaranteed by the federal government, much of that land was in the Yellowstone Park where Old Faithful sits right now. That was part of my- should have been my inheritance. Really had the law been followed. Had the law been adhered to- that would still be part of the Crow Indian reservation.

Mary Mathis: [00:09:28] A few years ago, Shane was a part of a discovery that changed the way he'd think about his people's history on the land.

Shane Doyle: [00:09:35] I got a call one day asking me to go to this site over there, just north of the Yellowstone river, because it was an archeological site and they'd made a discovery and they wanted to share with me. And that's when I was brought into this extraordinary story of, uh, the 12,600 year old boy that had been discovered just north of the Yellowstone river.

[00:09:53] Really a day's walk from the Yellowstone Park. And the genetic sequencing that had been done on that boy showed that at [00:10:00] 12,600 years old, his family were the original, some of the very original Native Americans on this continent.  

Mary Mathis: [00:10:08] He was known as the Clovis boy, identified in 1968. His remains have since been repatriated to the area that he was found in, following support from Montana tribes and Shane himself.

[00:10:19] Shane says the research surrounding the discovery showed that pretty much everyone living from the far Northern reaches of the North American continent, all the way down to Tierra del Fuego, the southernmost tip of South America, shares DNA with these native people.

Shane Doyle: [00:10:35] And that was like a revelation, that was like, wow. I mean, not only I have my great, great grandparents been here, but in fact, my family has been here for about 13,000 years.

[00:10:47] And, you know, in all that time, we took care of the water. Kind of emotional, you know. Took care of the water, took care of the land, the animals, you know, that's an [00:11:00] achievement and, you know, we lived vastly in peace as Native people. And that's another thing that gets left out and out of the modern conversation of Yellowstone Park.

Mary Mathis: [00:11:15] The tribes that lived on that land in the past had a vastly different natural world to contend with.

Shane Doyle: [00:11:21] Going back 12,600 years to when this boy died, the Clovis Boy, everything was so different back then because the animals were all different. You know, you had Pleistocene animals and they had to share space with some of the most terrifying creatures that ever lived.

[00:11:38] Really, quite frankly, you know, the short faced bear was a bear that stood on its hind legs, like 20 feet tall. I mean, it was like three times the size of a modern grizzly bear. They could run like 40 miles an hour and they were, they loved to eat people. And so that was one of the animals that they had to deal with.

[00:11:56] They also have to deal with the sabertooth tigers, [00:12:00] dire wolves. I mean, the list goes on and on, of the predators that they had to compete with. And, uh, oh yeah. You know, they were also hunting wooly mammoths, which is an 11,000 pound animal that can run 35 miles an hour. Uh, has ivory tusks that are, like eight feet long.

[00:12:16] That was well equipped to defend itself with, so this was not an easy animal to hunt. I mean, this was in fact an extremely dangerous animal to the hunt, and it would take a team of people to take an animal like this down, but yet these people survived through all that, and it was also the ice age. So kind of remarkable that they could survive all that in some ways, they're kind of some of the greatest survivors our planet has seen really.

[00:12:42] And then of course, when the climate changed, what we know now is that the terrain, the Northern Plains, a great plain, switched from an area that was largely populated with four plants, leafy plants to a train that was covered with [00:13:00] grass. And, uh, that change in the terrain is what caused the cascade effect of the Pleistocene animal die-off.

[00:13:08] So you first had the wooly mammoths die-off and then a whole bunch of others of course, that went along with it. And out of all that the animal that ate grass was the one who reigned supreme. And of course we know that that was the bison. And so about 10,000 years ago, things shifted to a new type of animal, a new type of life.

[00:13:32] You know, they didn't actually, come about with a bow and arrow until much, much later, but they learned how to use the climate to their advantage, through drying their foods, storing them, making them last throughout the year. They understood how to find niches in this area, where to go for the winter to escape the winds, uh, to be close to the water, to have fuel for your fires.

[00:13:56] They understood that when the springtime came, you had to leave those areas and [00:14:00] go up to drier ground where you could find trade partners and other resources to draw from. Eventually, they were able to come up with a sign language, a universal language that could transcend their linguistic differences. So it was quite a remarkable cosmopolitan history that is not really revealed through our history books.

[00:14:21] And it was like that going right up until the colonial era.

Mary Mathis: [00:14:33] Okay, let's take a second to consider what Shane is saying. More than 10,000 years of Indigenous people learning the land and living through an ever-changing climate, but a more contemporary challenge was when settler colonists expanded into the greater Yellowstone area. In this region, the ravages of colonialism hit Native communities, a century and a half before any settlers actually stepped foot on the land.

Shane Doyle: [00:14:58] 150 years before [00:15:00] any white men came here, the colonial era began to appear here through trade. Even before Lewis and Clark showed up here in 1805. These communities had been shattered by smallpox, diphtheria, typhoid, but especially smallpox. Because that was the virus that was easily transmittable. It was passed along to them.

[00:15:21] Once they received it, it was very difficult for them to get rid of it. It was mass die-off, and then it was all downhill from there. You know, their societies were shattered by disease. Then the horses and rifles and food shortages. As they were being empowered with new technology, they were being destabilized from a lack of, uh, wisdom in their higher ranks, from incessant competition on all sides for a dwindling food source, things got pretty nasty up here in the upper Yellowstone region by the mid-1800s.

Mary Mathis: [00:15:55] European colonists, like those in the Washburn Party, claim to discover [00:16:00] Yellowstone in the 1870s and said that the land was quote pristine, or their way of saying without people. They claim that tribes like Blackfeet, Sheepeater, Shoshone, and Crow, simply pass through the Yellowstone region and attempted to position Indigenous people as having lived in the past. Even after the Washburn party had come into contact with Crow people throughout their expedition and had brought military escort into Yellowstone because of their fear of Native people.

[00:16:28] In reality, tribes had thorough knowledge of the land and contributed to the thriving ecosystem there, like with seasonal burns of underbrush. Settlers failed to see the spiritual relationship and mutual respect that natives had with the land and animals. Shown clearly in the knowledge of maintaining the land in a way that allowed for growth in Yellowstone.

[00:16:49] Once the U.S. government decided that this land should be quote preserved as a national park, some tribes signed treaties that'd shift them north or east of Yellowstone's boundaries, creating [00:17:00] reservations while also guaranteeing tribes the right to hunt on the parks' grounds. But as with many treaties between the U.S. government and tribes, these treaties were broken.

[00:17:10] And because Yellowstone served as the model for national parks, future parks followed this same practice of breaking treaty rights. There are many complicated stories of removal in this period. Shane describes what happened to the Apsáalooke or Crow people. 

Shane Doyle: [00:17:24] Well the first way that we were forced off the land was that our reservation was moved. The external boundaries were changed. In the original 1851 treaty, which came about because of the California gold rush - the vast majority of them were traveling to California through the south pass and Wyoming. And so most of Montana was still not considered to be desirable. The whole state was really divided up into Indian Country.

[00:17:51] And then when gold was discovered here in the 1860s, of course, all that changed. And that's when the government came back and told the tribes [00:18:00] here, the federal government that is, that we're going to renegotiate the treaty. We want to change the maps so that the miners can get through so that they can have access to the gold.

[00:18:10] And so that was when we first lost, uh, the vast majority of our land that was guaranteed through treaty. And then, you know, that was the first, I think, piece of the colonial puzzle that started to come down here in terms of separating us from our land. The next phasees came when, you know, the bison were eliminated and we really didn't have any ways or means to, to come and hunt.

[00:18:38] And besides that, we were confined to the external boundaries of our new reservation, which were much smaller than the original one. And we were outlawed basically from going into the park. And so really all the tribes were outlawed from going into the park as early as 1868, because that was when that second treaty was signed. And the [00:19:00] park didn't actually become an official park till four years later. 

Mary Mathis: [00:19:03]  1872 was when Yellowstone was officially deemed the first national park.

Shane Doyle: [00:19:08] But there is a strong correlation there between those dates. And when you look at some of the worst, I guess, tragedies. Slaughters that occurred here in Montana. The one that folks remember a lot is the Marias Massacre. 

Mary Mathis: [00:19:23] The event was when in January 1870, the U.S. army attacked and killed some 200 Blackfeet people on the Marias River in present day Montana.

Shane Doyle: [00:19:33] Those same troops from the Fort here in Bozeman, went down into the park and surveyed it and accompanied a scientific expedition.

[00:19:41] And it's hard to say that those events aren't correlated, you know. The Blackfeet slaughter, the Crow boundaries changing, and then the eventual creation of the Yellowstone Park. You know, those were all kind of happening at the same time. 

Mary Mathis: [00:19:56] During this period, colonists were inflicting all kinds of violence on [00:20:00] tribes in the Yellowstone region, including the Marias massacre. Not only violence, but treaty boundaries were renegotiated or simply broken to make way for gold miners, railroads, and the creation of Yellowstone.

[00:20:12] For tribes like Shane's, that meant less and less reservation land. 

Shane Doyle: [00:20:17] So as the settlers came in from the Eastern direction, they would seize land and then they would push the natives back to the Western edge of their homelands. My tribe, we lost land from the Western end and we just kept gone getting pushed further and further east until finally, we ended up along the Little Big Horn River.

Mary Mathis: [00:20:37] That's the river where Shane grew up in the little town of Crow Agent. 

Shane Doyle: [00:20:41] As kids in my generation, we learned a little bit from our elders about the history, but the details were left out. It just kind of broad strokes. And one of the anecdotes I tell in an essay, I wrote about my connection to the area occurs when we're traveling to the state tournament with my uncles.

[00:20:59] And, uh, [00:21:00] we drove past Columbus, Montana - which is about a hundred miles to the west of Crow Agency. My uncle said, you know, just kind of in passing. Oh yeah. That's where your grandpa was born. And you know, that was kind of it. And I was left to wonder, you know, sitting in the backseat, how was my grandpa born over here?

[00:21:17] Like, what was he doing around all these white people? Why would he have been over here? Not knowing that these white people were the ones who came way after my grandpa, you know? And because I had just, I had grown up in such a colonial schooling or the education I received and the culture that I consumed left out my native history.

Mary Mathis: [00:21:37] While it wasn't until many years later, Shane did learn more of his own native history when he went back to college for a Master's degree and he read and studied all he could on his own family's past.

[00:22:05] The Crow people, aren't the only tribe that experienced dispossession from their land near Yellowstone. There's so many stories like this that include broken treaties, land theft, and more forced removal. It's really difficult to piece together some of that history because so much was going on, but signs tell us that this was intended genocide of Indigenous people. 

[00:22:25] To tell this story, I want to bring back Lynette St. Clair, the Indian education coordinator at the Fort Washakie school in Wyoming. Her ancestors, the Shoshone people, were forced out of Yellowstone and onto the Wind River Reservation. 

Lynette St. Clair: [00:22:40] After the establishment of the reservations in 1868, the efforts to civilize the Indigenous peoples of Wyoming became one of the main initiatives of the United States government.

[00:22:55] And by civilizing our people, they were in [00:23:00] essence turning them into, I guess, a caricature of themselves. And so when this establishment of boarding schools occurred, our people were removed from their homes. They were removed from the safety of their families and they were placed in boarding school systems.

[00:23:16] Several of our grandparents were sent to Carlisle. Several we know were sent to different locations throughout the Western United States. You know, they were punished for speaking their language. You couldn't speak to Shosone, you couldn't practice our spirituality. Couldn't sing the songs. You know, you couldn't do anything that was remotely Native or Shoshone.

[00:23:39] Cause you know, you were punished. A lot of our kids that were placed in boarding school systems, they ran away, you know, because they couldn't take it. It was, it was spiritual and cultural genocide. And a lot of our kids ended up, you know, in the, in the middle of winter, some froze from leaving the boarding school, trying to get home.

[00:23:59] Some [00:24:00] died of sicknesses that they contracted from closed quarters. Some were beaten to death for speaking their language. And so there were all of these various atrocities that our ancestors, our grandparents suffered from just trying to retain what was our identity. And so, you know, when that happened, of course they were almost successful, but there was a lot of people who retained that knowledge who would go secretly and they would congregate outside and they would meet and talk about, you know, the different things.

[00:24:33] They would retain that, those stories and those songs. And so fortunately, for our people, they were able to retain that they were able to keep that language. 

Mary Mathis: [00:24:43] However that wasn't the case for everyone. 

Lynette St. Clair: [00:24:47] Inevitably, what happened was you had a series of generations, some who lost it, some who willingly gave it up because they didn't want to speak their language or keep their [00:25:00] spirituality, because they didn't want their children to suffer the same consequences that they had when they were in those boarding school systems.

[00:25:07] Those people or those families who defied not speaking the language, they were able to retain that knowledge and that language, unfortunately, for the people who followed the rules and who were afraid of their children getting hurt, they lost that, that language piece. 

Mary Mathis: [00:25:25] Lynette says that by understanding how generations of people were disconnected from their cultural lifeways helps with what she's doing today to help educate and preserve the Shoshone language and culture.

Lynette St. Clair: [00:25:36] We are working on developing a Shoshone language curriculum that basically breaks everything down into a system that will be easy for our students to learn the language and acquire the language. And we're doing that at every level. So preschoolers will learn, you know, one aspect of it. They'll move into the secondary area where they'll begin to learn additional words, but [00:26:00] also be able to build the sentences.

[00:26:02] And by the time they get into middle school to high school, they should be able to converse in a two-way conversation mode. You know, what I do here is really about the life and existence of Shoshone people. Our language is synonymous with who we are. Everything that we do is connected to our spirituality, our language, our beliefs.

[00:26:25] And so when we talk about these different pockets of locations on the reservation and really on our homelands. Those places are at some point we're connected to those spiritually. And so we have to know the land's name. We have to know the location, you know, the place names for those. And we have to know the medicines that come from those areas or the things that help us exist.

Shane Doyle: [00:26:52] I always say my dream is that hundreds of years from now, thousands of years from now, people can walk right up to the river, bend down and [00:27:00] cup their hands in it and drink right out of it. You know, not have to worry about any kind of chemicals. You know, waste that was put in there. When we reach that point, then we will know the wisdom that those people had a long time ago.

[00:27:15] Then we'll, then we'll come to a place where we can enjoy our lives without constantly having to fight against what feels like elements that are trying to destroy it.

Mary Mathis: [00:27:33] Now that you've heard the first of many stories we'll bring to you. We hope you can start to understand why we're at such a devastating place with environmental justice issues in this country. We want you to take this information into your communities and use it to inform your vote, advocate for native communities and their land sovereignty, and pay attention to how historical choices have led to systemic issues in this country.

[00:27:57] And if you're interested in educating yourself [00:28:00] further, some amazing podcasts are Seedcast, the Red Nation, and All My Relations. Some great books to read are Dina Gilio-Whitaker's 'As Long As Grass Grows' and 'An Indigenous People's History of the United States' by Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz to get started. 

[00:28:17] In this episode, we covered some information about boarding schools. And in light of the news of the bodies of 215 Indigenous children found on what was the Kamloops Indian residential school in Canada, we encourage you to educate yourselves on the history of boarding schools and their contribution to genocide of Indigenous communities. You can go to https://illuminatives.org/ to learn more.

[00:28:42] Parks would like to thank Lynette St. Claire of the Eastern Shoshone tribe from the Wind River Indian Reservation, along with Shane Doyle of the Crow Nation for their generosity which made this story possible. We also want to give our gratitude and recognition to the Eastern Shoshone Blackfeet, Sheepeater, [00:29:00] and Bannock tribes as well as the Crow Nation who are all referenced in this episode.

[00:29:04] For this episode, Shane and Lynette helped us decide to make donations to Wyoming Indian high school's senior scholarship and Mountain Shadow Association. If you want to support independent forward-thinking media and Indigenous organizations like these, you can go to https://www.parkspodcast.com/donate.

[00:29:22] Parks is hosted and co-created by me, Mary Mathis, and produced and co-created by Cody Nelson. Our story editor and consultant is Taylor Hensel. Our music is by Mitch McAndrew. Special thanks to Mark David Spence, Isaac Cantor, Rajiv Golla, Maura Fox and Kiliii Yuyan. Kenyon Ellsworth designed our website,which is https://www.parkspodcast.com/.

[00:29:46] You can email us @helloatparkspodcast.com. And please share this podcast if you liked it. You can also give us a review and subscribe wherever you're listening to this show. Thank you for listening. [00:30:00]

[Theme Music By Mia Kami]

 Jessica Ramirez: [00:30:20] Nia Tero is a Seattle-based foundation. We are both Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples with a mission to secure Indigenous guardianship of all vital ecosystems. That means we provide support to Indigenous peoples globally who are protecting their homelands from colonization and destruction. Their practices are one of our best guides for making earth livable or humans and other species for generations to come.

To learn more about Seedcast and our work at Nia Tero, please visit our website, https://www.niatero.org/ and follow Nia Tero on [00:31:00] Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Have thoughts to share with us? Or like what you heard? Email us@seedcastatniatero.org.

[00:31:10] We would love to hear from our listeners. This episode was mixed by Rachel Lam. Our producer is Felipe Contreras. Our consulting producer is Julie Keck. Our fact checker is Roman Lee Johnson, marketing and social media support from Hill Ossip and Tracy Rector. Theme song by Mia Kami.  

I'm your host Jessica Ramirez and we look forward to sharing more stories with you all very soon.

[Theme Music By Mia Kami]