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Indigenous Wisdom in Climate Care with Rachael Cavanagh and Melinda Adams
- 2025/04/10
- 再生時間： 1分未満
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Good Fire Podcast by Amy Cardinal Christianson and Matthew KristoffStories of Indigenous fire stewardship, cultural and social empowerment and environmental integrityIndigenous Wisdom in Climate Care with Rachael Cavanagh and Melinda AdamsEpisode highlightIn this episode, Rachael Cavanagh and Melinda Adams talk about the role of Indigenous fire stewards in managing climate change.ResourcesRachael CavanaghMelinda M.AdamsSolastalgia to Soliphilia: Cultural Fire, Climate Change, and Indigenous HealingON FIRE: The Report of the Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management CommissionIndigenous Fire Data Sovereignty: Applying Indigenous Data Sovereignty Principles to Fire ResearchSponsorsCanada WildfireIndigenous Leadership InitiativeQuotes20.51 - 20.56: “Our law is still in the land and it’s in all of the stories that have been passed down to us by our Elders.” 40.27 - 41.08: “It comes back to our relationship. Us as First Nations people or Indigenous people, we have a very respectful relationship with fire, but then if you look at non-Indigenous people… everything is from fear… If you look at the language they use, it’s… suppression and it’s firefighting and… all of their language is based around reactionary responses whereas if you talk to Indigenous people across the globe, it’s all about care. We come from a place of care and guardianship, and this is our obligation.” Takeaways“Cultural obligations as guardians and custodians” (03.19)Rachael Cavanagh is a Minjungbal woman from the Bundjalung/Yugambeh Nations of South East Queensland and Northern New South Wales. Rachael’s family name means ‘the wind’, and she runs a consulting business working with First Nations people across Australia to change the narrative around caring for the land using First Nations-led cultural environmental practices. She plays a large role in “bringing back cultural fire practices as well as reintroducing women as the caretakers of our waterways”. Her work also involves bringing children along, and is the cultural curriculum creator of the first bilingual school in New South Wales which will be a fully cultural immersion school. “How to be a better relative, good human and good ancestor” (06.10)Melinda is a member of the N’dee San Carlos Apache Tribe in what is present-day Arizona and is an Assistant Professor at the University of Kansas. She got her PhD from the University of California, Davis, where she spent a lot of time with cultural fire practitioners and continues to do so in the second year of her work. She believes that all Indigenous people have a relation with fire, whether historical or through reclaiming practices now. She is very vocal about how Western science is only now catching up with the ecological benefits of cultural fire practices, and gives a platform to others to voice their climate plans.Culture and caring for country (10.24)Fire for Racheal’s community is the role of the matriarch, so she has always taken her daughters along for cultural burns. Her older daughter can now independently lead a burn. “We live in a society where our kids still have to maintain the Western ways of doing things”, she laments, but her family prioritizes cultural burning to care for the land as much as she does, even when the education system doesn’t understand why children must lead the solutions. Inclusivity of several generations (13.44)Melinda’s son would accompany her on burns in California and would learn from Elder practitioners. California is a fire rich place and her son belongs to a tribe native to California, so she moved here to help him establish a connection with his lineage. However, burn windows are changing and it is important to have a commitment to the land so Elders and children can be invited out to the land to care for it. “This is a generation that is going to pay the consequence of a lot of climate decisions that were made without them in mind”, she notes.Breaking colonial constructs (17.44)Rachael explains how women were rarely seen in the broader fire network of 250 tribes revitalizing cultural fire practices in Australia. Different tribes have subgroups that have different law systems, protocols and processes around fire, but more women have been coming along to a point where women-only workshops are organized to make them feel culturally safe to have conversations and share fire stories. This helped the women see their role in the cultural fire practices. She feels lucky to have had her female ancestors teach her about fire as cultural and environmental.The environment is our kin (23.40)Rachael observes that even though fire is the key to bring together, it’s the conversations that heal. They share knowledge and stories, and discuss specific solutions. The 2019-2020 fires in Australia have been an added impetus to advocate for putting people back in the forests, which Indigenous people have been advocating for since colonization. While ...