The Land is My Ancestor

the land is my ancestor

Patty 

So, anyway, so we're here with Keolu Fox. Chanda had made this comment, quoting you about the land is my ancestor, and that is a scientific statement. And she was just completely taken by that comment. And then so was I. And that's really all I've been thinking about. Because it's just such a, it's just such a neat way of thinking and understanding our relationship with the other than human world and our connection to place, and all of that. And so yeah, so now I'm going to let you introduce yourself. And what you mean by that phrase, when you say the land is our ancestor,

Keolu

Roger that. Aloha everybody, my name is Keolu Fox and my mo'oku'auhau, or my genealogical connection or origin is to the Kohala Kapaʻau  which is the northernmost district of the Big Island of Hawaii. And I'm joining you from the Kumeyaay nation here in La Jolla. And it's a beautiful day, it's always a beautiful day here. But I'm a genome scientist, I focus on all kinds of things. And mostly, I have been really thinking about that idea.

And I've been centering around that idea for a little bit. Because many of you know, there have been a lot of things going on where we live, where we're from the Big Island right now. Our volcano is active, and Pele is letting her hair down. But we have another very sacred place. And that's Mauna a Wākea, Mauna Kea, right? There have been all of these protests in this, this tension that's kind of like, played out in a lot of different ways. Because we have a problem with settler colonialism. And we have scientists, who would rather seek authorization instead of instead of consensus building and taking care to actually asked our people what we want.

And so I thought about this idea of like, what is actually shaping our genomes over time, right? We always have these comments about our, our genealogical connection to the Āina, right? Like one of my favorite online scholars, was a medical doctor, his name's Dr. N. Emmett Aluli., is always saying the health of the land is the health of the people and the health of the people is the health of the land. And when you think about that, historically, it's actually the same thing. So, what our community is saying about a, hey do you need to dig four stories into the Earth, into this Āina, you know, not only our ancestors buried there, and there’s fresh water aquifers, and there's, it's a very sacred place for cultural protocol. But it's also our ancestor.

And so I think that gets lost to a lot of my Western colleagues with a certain worldview, they're, they're willing to accept the idea that, you know, natural selection, and Charles Darwin and these finches on these islands have been shaped by this different geography. But they're not willing to accept it in terms of humans, because they're human exceptionalists. So from our point of view, it's like, we are, the Mauna, the Mauna is us, it really has shaped our genomes. So has the ebb and flow of the moana, the ocean. So has high elevation in the Himalayas.  So in that sense, you know, I think Indigenous people have it right, because we have not really completely separated ourselves from the Āina.

That's why we believe in sustainability. We, you know, indigeneity is sustainability. Like it's the, it's synonymous. And I can give you a bunch of examples, but I think, I think that idea is really powerful, because it allows you to like, with just complete fluidity, connect all of these really important ideas around natural selection and evolution, and also Indigenous epistemology. And if you look historically to like the ways we talk about biological complexity in the Kumulipo, which is an ancient origin chant, which was famously translated by Queen Liliuokalani. And you'll see that like, if you look at where this this, this story starts this chant