“We can’t heal the Earth our mother and leave our sibling starving.”

Cody Sanford: Welcome to the Livable Future Podcast, where we engage in insightful discussions with experts spanning multiple fields, including but not limited to sustainability and environmental science, conservation, and policy. My name is Cody Sanford, and I’m one of the creators, alongside Kaydee Barker.

Kaydee Barker: The goal of our podcast is to offer unique perspectives on the challenges facing our local and global communities today, and how we can work together to create a better, more “livable” future. This episode marks the beginning of a new chapter for the Livable Future Podcast, and we’re really excited to continue this journey and share it with you all! So, man, Cody, can you believe it’s been over a year since we were on the mic together?

Cody: I honestly can’t, in part because we’ve been doing so much hard work behind the scenes. Kaydee and I have been conducting interviews, fine-tuning audio, building connections with partners, and doing the podcast-related planning that we need to. There’s a lot of work to make a podcast, but it’s 100% rewarding.

Kaydee: Couldn’t agree more. It’s been such a rewarding journey.

Cody: So, Kaydee, what have you been up to over the past year?

Kaydee: Well, I guess a lot has happened. I graduated with my Bachelor of Science from Colorado State University last May 2022, and have since moved across the Pond to the UK, where I’m now working on my doctorate in Earth and Environmental Science at the University of Manchester. Needless to say, this has been a time of transition for me, adjusting to a new place, getting to know new communities of people, and of course planning out research! So, what about you Cody, what have you been up to?

Cody: Awe Kaydee, as your friend and partner in this podcast, I have a lot I could say but I want to keep it short. Congratulations and I’m proud of you for all the work you’re doing, and I’m just happy to be making this podcast again with you.

Kaydee: Awe thanks Cody, I’m really glad to be making this podcast with you!

Cody: So, appreciate it – I’ve been developing as an environmentalist/environmental scientist as well. I’m not doing a PhD like you yet. I am now splitting my time now between Denver, Colorado, and 10,000 feet above sea level in South Park, Colorado. The contrast between the mountains and the city, I absolutely love. I’m also happy to say I’ve been invited to join the Mountain Sentinels, which we’ll talk about soon. Some of the highlights from this are being able to meet people from all over the world devoted to mountains and being able to study mountain sustainability at this level. Kaydee, on that note, would you want to introduce the new series?

Kaydee: Yeah, let’s do it! So this new series is on a topic near and dear to my heart, and I think Cody’s as well as he just kind of hinted at. We will be releasing several episodes on the topic of mountains and the communities in and around them. In these episodes, we’ll hear from community leaders and mountain scientists about the challenges facing these unique communities and ecosystems, and – as we always try to include – how you can get involved and be a part of solutions!

Many of our guests in this series are part of the Mountain Sentinels Alliance, which is an alliance of international networks dedicated to mountain research and action. We hope to tell you more about them in future episodes, but for now, there will be a link to their website on this episode’s webpage, so you can click through to learn more about the Alliance.

Cody: Alongside with the new series, we’re introducing a new format. Well, it isn’t that new. As always, we like to start the episode with relevant context. That’s staying the same, but we are introducing our closing conversations where we, as the hosts, will discuss the episode’s topics in more detail.

Kaydee: We hope you’ll enjoy these discussions, but better yet, want to join in! We’d love to open these discussions and discuss not just between us as hosts but as discussions in our broader community, and that means you! So please jump into the conversation as we open discussions on our website and social media.

Cody: Want to know the easiest and most beneficial way you can help our podcast? Just hit subscribe.

Kaydee: So now without further ado, we’re so pleased to introduce you to our first guest of the new series, Tiffany Pyette.

Cody: Tiffany was one of the amazing people I met through the Mountain Sentinels. Tiffany and I attended mountain sustainability conferences together and her love of the Appalachian Mountains is moving, and personally, makes me want to take action. We are so glad to have her on the podcast.

Interview

Cody: Tiffany, I was very impressed with the way you’re able to communicate and use a diverse communication platform to really express the voice of the Appalachian communities. And I know you’ve done a lot of work building and focusing on the community you live in. Would you be able to elaborate on this and tell us more about the Appalachian community?

Tiffany Pyette: Yeah, absolutely. And thanks for having me on. I think Appalachia is a really cool place, because we use arts and culture here all the time to shift power from people who are using power incorrectly back into the hands of the people. We always have used art forms to connect with each other and to hold traditions as Indigenous people or from other communities. I think Appalachia is so rich in those cultural forms and all I have ever wanted to do is to preserve those and to help carry those on and to give people more ways to connect. So that’s what I do, whether it’s with art or community organizing. For people who don’t know what community organizing is, you can think of unions. In West Virginia, you may know the famous Mother Jones quote that’s “fight like hell for the living. Pray for the dead, fight like hell for the living,” and that’s kind of like our motto out here is that you put everything you can into protecting the people. And as a native person, I also put everything I can into protecting the land.

Cody: Thank you for that description, Tiffany. I know you are a part of the native community in the Appalachian Mountains, and I feel like this is often overlooked when people mention the Appalachian Mountains. Would you be willing to go into more detail about this?

Tiffany: It is overlooked and that’s because of colonialism. Much of Appalachia is not currently inhabited by the original tribes because they were forcibly removed. Of course, there are exceptions to that, like the Eastern Band and the Kuala Boundary in North Carolina. But aside from that, most Indigenous community is scattered, and is people finding each other in a more urban context, even though it’s not an urban area. And I think there’s so much beauty in the resilience of that, but it is terrible that we have to do that. A lot of times people think that natives weren’t here because they didn’t hear about it, or they’ve heard the myth that this was just a hunting ground, but that myth was created by a land prospector who was benefiting financially from that lie. And he was coincidentally killed by a native. So it’s pretty easily dis-proven that there were no natives in Kentucky anyway.

Yeah, I think it’s very sad that people don’t realize the land that they live on. Anywhere you live in the United States is Indigenous land and has deep ties to the people who lived there. And even if a people are removed from a place, they will always have a spiritual connection to it. Indigenous people, we believe that our ancestral lands are important to us, even if we’re moved thousands of miles away from them. We would always advocate for their well-being.

Cody: One of the things I took away from CSU, is how powerful a land acknowledgment can be. I know that these are the ancestral homelands of the Ute, Arapaho, and Cheyenne people where I live right now. Could you share with us which ancestral homelands your mountains are, your lands are?

Tiffany: Yes. These are Cherokee, Shawnee, and Yuchi Nations territories. And I think it’s important for people to know that territories overlap, because territory bonds for Indigenous people are not the same as colonial boundaries. And it’s part of why borders are concepts that we don’t necessarily agree with all of the time. Because caring for a place is a very different thing than being like, “this is my line and you get over there.” And so multiple tribes can all have a spiritual connection to the same place. And like whenever I do a land acknowledgment, I make sure to acknowledge all of the places, all of the people, all of the names that the rivers were called. And, you know, speak that back into the land.

Cody: Well, thank you so much for sharing that background information and context into the Appalachian community and yourself. I think that’s very important that the message is written, I guess, that it’s spoken and that people that it is shared with people because we can’t expect anyone to evolve if we’re not working with them. So thank you.

Tiffany: Yeah, of course.

Cody: So yeah, once again, we met at the Mountain Sentinels Moving Mountains Summit. This was a focus on the climate change impact and working with Indigenous knowledge in the mountain communities and making the stepping stones we need to advance mountain sustainability. Would you be able to talk about how climate change is impacting the Appalachian community?

Tiffany: Absolutely, and it’s a multifaceted thing that all kind of goes to the same place. For context, Appalachia is largely a mining community and has been exploited by extractive industry for quite some time. And as we know, those extractive industries cause climate change to be at the degree that it is. And in the past, anytime our community had had flooding, our mountains had protected us because it provided better ground, it provided protection from slides. But as time has gone on and more strip mining has happened, we have lost the tops of our mountains. And that left people at the mercy of those mudslides in a catastrophic flood this past year. 39 people died, the last body was found in October during the cleanup. And it has been very difficult for a poor community that is poor because of extractive industry having used and abandoned it.

We have this confluence of problems of climate change being started by extractive industry, the extractive industry taking away our protection from climate change, and then there’s also the additional fact that the high ground is not owned by people. It’s not owned by individual homeowners in most cases. So, the high ground where people could have lived or gotten their property to, that was owned by corporations. Some of them were corporations that are extractive industries.

And so I think when we think about how climate change impacts some of the communities you don’t hear about as much, you have to factor in that we have been deeply exploited for a very long time and that it will hit us harder and in a different way. Like you won’t be able to see the damages easily, but we’re still helping people get the mold out of their homes. There are still people living in tents where their homes used to be in some situations. So yeah, climate change has hit Appalachia hard and some may blame us for being part of an extractive industry, but it’s crucial that people understand that when an industry presents itself as the only option for work, that is what people will take. There is nothing wrong with people doing the best that they can.

Kaydee: In case some of our listeners haven’t heard of this type of extractive mining that Tiffany is talking about… Strip mining, which is also called surface mining, is a process of mining where everything above a strip of mineral or coal is removed, including all the forest, vegetation, rocks, and soil.

One extreme form of this that has been deployed in Appalachia is called mountaintop removal mining, and that is exactly what it sounds like – removing the entire mountain above whatever you are trying to mine. This involves clear cutting and burning the forests before using explosives to loosen the rock and soil to make it easier to remove, and then finally trucking it out.

Mountaintop removal was flagged as a hazard back more than 25 years ago by Bloomberg journalist Peter Galuszka but has still not been fully stopped. A study commissioned by the Appalachian Voices Organization and the Natural Resources Defense Council in 2009 reports that at that time, almost 1.2 million acres from over 500 mountains had been removed in the Appalachian Region. While another comprehensive survey hasn’t been done since, a study from Matthew Ross and colleagues in 2016 found that the entire region of Central Appalachia is about 40% flatter because of mountaintop removal mining.

This is pretty tragic, honestly. The Appalachian Mountains in the United States are or were some of the oldest and most biologically rich mountains in North America, and also the source or headwaters for many natural streams that many species, including humans, have depended on. According to The Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute, there are more salamander species in Appalachia than anywhere else in the world, so when their habitat is destroyed or the water polluted, many of those species could be lost forever. The Nature Conservancy also reports that 64 high-priority bird species, along with iconic mammals such as bears, moose, elk, and bobcats, all migrate along Appalachia and depend on what we call a corridor of continuous habitat in Appalachia for their survival.

Of course, the loss of these forests and mountaintops also represent lost carbon storage and the loss of stability and water filtration that these usually provide. So without them, the area is more vulnerable to flooding and landslides, as Tiffany said, and we probably don’t need to tell you how devastating those can be.

There are also general public health concerns. While it’s difficult to draw direct causation from mining to public health, environmental studies have documented water and air pollution in residential areas close to surface mining, and scientists observed higher death rates from cardiovascular and lung diseases in mining communities in Appalachia. We’ll link those studies in this episode’s webpage on our website, so check them out.

Cody: So, what are we doing about this? Well, here’s a quick US environmental law lesson on strip mining. In the United States, the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency), is responsible for the enforcement of federal environmental laws and regulations.

The EPA has enforcement through the Clean Water Act the Clean Air Act, which as the name states, regulates the pollutants in surface waters and air. As well as the National Environmental Protection Act, which directs environmental assessments and impact statements. As a result, the EPA has meaningful authority to regulate the impacts of strip mining on water and air quality and to enforce penalties against mining corporations that violate environmental laws.

While the Department of the Interior oversees public lands and the use of natural resources, including mining and enforcement of the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977. This law establishes a “nationwide program to protect society and the environment from the adverse effects of surface coal mining operations,” and mandates mining companies to acquire permits, design reclamation procedures, and post bonds to ensure that mined land is reformed.

The United States Fish and Wildlife Services oversees the Endangered Species Act, ensuring that mining companies comply with environmental laws and regulations to minimize impacts on wildlife and their habitats. Each state will have its own laws on extractive mining practices with varying levels of protection. Plus, every other country will have its own mining practices. If this is something that’s interesting to you, please dive into it more, because we’ve only touched the surface. And now back to the interview with Tiffany.

Cody: What do you think is needed to uplift Appalachia?

Tiffany: I think what is most crucial for the outside world to do, and it’s something that I spoke about with everyone at the Mountain Sentinels meeting, was that I want us to see each other as “mountain siblings” and I want people to see Appalachia as part of their land because it is. And if you see us as your sibling, which, you know, Indigenous people see each other, everyone as relations. If you see me as your relation, then you will listen to me.

And Appalachian people need from the world to be listened to, not assisted from afar. We need to have people believe us when we say something. So we know what we need. If we say we are asking for support with a Just Transition legislation so that we can put our coal mine workers into jobs that will restore our land, we need outside support for that. We need other people to back us in keeping that part of the legislation in and writing their government officials. We also need, when we say that there’s a mutual aid need, we need people to believe us and help us fund those things. You know, sometimes it’s like, everybody right now, everyone needs socks because they’re out rebuilding their homes in the cold. And when someone meets that need, that’s listening to what a community has asked for. I have been taught that leadership of the most impacted is a really powerful thing, and if you see a community that is- heavily impacted by something, the best thing you can do is ask what they need, because they know.

Cody: That advice I’ll take home, I know. Is there any sort of supply chain or any sort of network in the community that you see that’s helping each other out, or how are issues being resolved right now?

Tiffany: Absolutely. We have a really incredible network of mutual aid that has popped up in Eastern Kentucky. I mean, it’s been around but has really carried a lot of the heavy lifting of getting people what they need. It’s called EKY Mutual Aid. And this holiday, we’re having a get-together at one of the community centers with music and just all kinds of stuff. And people can just come and get what they need, what they want, and have a good time and kind of forget that there’s a climate disaster happening. Because I think that it’s important that we also save space for joy, and I think that’s something else that Appalachia is good at. But yeah, I think sometimes just funding people who are already in the community doing the work, local efforts is so powerful and so helpful and so deeply appreciated. To anyone who may have donated to EKY Mutual Aid, I would like to personally say as an Eastern Kentuckian, thank you. Thank you for helping my neighbors.

Cody: And Tiffany, you do a lot of work in this space. Or you’ve told me about the work that you’ve done in this space. And you’ve mentioned it at the beginning. Can you talk more specifically about some of your, like poetry and artwork and working in the community as an activist?

Tiffany: Sure. Yeah, I do a lot of different things. I think with, poetry, what I love to do is to use it as a community connector, to use it like a conversation. We call them porch talks. So like whenever you’d be over at someone’s house and you’d be sitting on their porch and they’d just be having like a comfortable candid conversation with you. I like the ability to turn that into a poem with the consent of the other participant. And that was my project for Mountain Sentinels, was to talk to people about what “safety in the mountains” meant to them, whether they had it, whether they didn’t have it, and just kind of explore that.

And it was a really beautiful process to show people their reflections with mine and put that together because then that gave them anonymity, and they also got to see that they’re a poet, everyone’s a poet. And I think that we all have so many reflections inside of us and especially about our homes and I think  there’s so much to be seen and to be shared. And when we put it out, like as a zine, people were really excited about it, like “oh, other people felt like I felt,” or “that resonated with me” about like, you know, little lines that either people were feeling accepted by or rejected by their home. What did and didn’t feel safe, what felt safe in the middle of a pandemic, because that was when I did the project. I think using art forms as a way to give each other some healing, to give each other some connection… I think that’s all I’ve ever wanted to do with my life. Yeah.

Cody: I’ve read a few, I haven’t read all of the poems from the collection, but I’ve read a few and the diversity of what safety means and what it can mean in the mountains, I think is an important development that I learned from your poetry, so I would recommend everybody read this.

You mentioned you are from the Native community, and one thing that I learned from meeting you and through doing my research, my due diligence for this interview, is that you are a Two-Spirit person. Would you be willing to talk about that?

Tiffany: Yeah, and I can only talk about it to the degree that it’s what I know and what it means to me. I want to fully recognize that Two-Spirit can mean different things to other Indigenous people, so I want to make sure I’m not overstepping. But Two-Spirit is a term that was coined in 1990, so it’s a modern term. But it kind of over-arches people who are Indigenous who don’t identify with the Western binary of gender or sexuality. Could be one or the other, because in our individual tribal nations, there are different words for our identities. And so, when we would get together, like in 1990, when there were Indigenous people who weren’t straight or weren’t CIS, they wanted a word that they could use, that A, wasn’t going to be everybody trying to remember a whole bunch of terms.

And also, in some cases, colonialism has made it so that we don’t have the original words anymore through religious conversion and the colonial eradication of words that did not fit with the society that America was trying to create. Some people can’t call themselves the names that their ancestors would have used for them, the sacred words that their ancestors would have used for them, because we don’t know them anymore. And in those cases, Two-Spirit is a really wonderful placeholder for that. So people use it for different reasons. Primarily, I use it because it’s a good identifier to other natives of, you know, “ah, yes, me too.” And it’s kind of a community connector word for us. And then you can have more individual conversations past that of, “oh, yes, like this is the word for what I am,” but it is a really complicated thing to use. Because for some tribes that may mean that you have a masculine and feminine spirit. For some tribes, that just means that you would identify as more of a Western idea of non-binary in general. Could be sexuality related, it can be a lot of different things.

Cody: I thought I knew a lot about this through some of the classes that I’ve had, but Tiffany, you just schooled me, so thank you very much.

Tiffany: You’re welcome.

Cody: As an LGBTQ person, I’ve always appreciated the Indigenous and Native communities and their acceptance of non-binary and different sorts of sexuality. So I find it fascinating and thank you for being willing to talk about this and explaining it to the audience. I think that’s another important thing that you’ve done here.

As a follow-up, a focus of one of the summits we attended was to find ways to close knowledge gaps of the contributions of Indigenous and local knowledge to environmental science. Do you have any advice on this?

Tiffany: I think it’s really important that the people who keep what is often called Western science, but you know, the more academically focused sciences, it’s really important that they hold traditional Indigenous knowledge and local knowledge as very important and as a resource that they don’t need to be extracting from, but that they need to be lifting up. I think if we allow the mindset to shift from “what can we take from Indigenous communities to support our research” and make it, “how can our research support Indigenous communities already preserving the land,” I think we will make tremendous, tremendous shifts in how the land will heal, because there are different goals at play, you know?

Cody: Completely, and so much focus is usually on one specific aspect of any sort of academic research that anything else outside of that purview definitely gets overlooked. And it’s one of my, I don’t know if complaint is the right word, but it seems like a lot of academia doesn’t have a lot of impact and benefit in connection to the community. And I think maybe starting with indigenous and local communities is a great starting point where you can see the impacts the soonest. When it comes to adapting to climate change, Tiffany, how do you see the Appalachian community accepting or dealing with the adversity that’s probably at hand?

Tiffany: I think more is definitely needed. I don’t think that there has been meaningful investment in a Just Transition in Appalachia yet. I think that it is something that people have asked for. I know because I’ve been a part of those conversations. And I also know that it is something that has not received National backing as a real dire need, because ultimately if people are going to make a living in these mountains, they have to be offered another way to earn money. And that way could be, if we have a Just Transition, it could be in efforts to repair and to do things that are focused on clean energy. And I think there’s a lot more interest in it than people expect there to be. I think for some reason people have ideas of what they think the Appalachians are and they think that everyone is like completely a monolith and completely, you know, gung-ho for extraction. But at the end of the day, people just want a living wage. And I 100% back workers’ desire for a living wage. I also 100% back clean energy so that we can stop contributing to the problems that are only going to hit our community the hardest. Because we don’t have the same safety nets that some places do. We didn’t need them before.

Cody: Tiffany, you’ve mentioned the term Just Transition a few times. Could you give us an overview of what that means to you?

Tiffany: Yeah, so what that means is a transition from fossil fuels to clean energy practices and land practices, land and water practices that involve Indigenous care. And it, the “just” part of it means that it is just to everyone and that includes the workers of extractive industries. So when we say Just Transition, we mean we want to transition from fossil fuels, but we will not leave the workers behind, because many people are willing to do that and that would not be just to our communities and that would not be treating everyone as our relation. We can’t heal the earth, our mother, and leave our sibling starving.

Cody: One of the hopes that I have in this conversation about communities like Appalachia and other mountain communities is the strongest asset that the mountains have is the people who live there and love them. And I think a Just Transition will be successful when there is that support, when there is bring to uplift the mountains, because as we mentioned earlier with safety, there are so many different ways that people can look at safety, but there are so many different ways that the mountains also need to transition in this space as far as like what is an economy in the mountains? How can we actually make it where it’s not just extractive industry and tourism for the wealthy? We need to actually have mountains have more of an economy.

I guess it’s… you know, at times like this, when there’s a lot of problems, challenges, yeah, we have a lot of work to do, but it also means that there’s a lot of opportunity to make an advance, to make progress, to grow, because I really do feel like fossil fuel is at the end of its life for communities in Appalachia and other mountain communities. So, the Just Transition is – I’m hoping that we can get there and I’m hoping it’s not just a catchphrase that’s used for decades and decades and we’re all just sitting here waiting for a Just Transition or getting somewhere, because the mountains are beautiful and so are the people.

Tiffany: They are, and I know one of my friends who’s a wonderful activist, her son, he asked one time, “when are the mountains gonna grow back?” And I remember that being just one of those moments where like, you had to really sit with the fact that like our mountains have been sliced clean off and we can’t give this child a good answer.

And ultimately the power that coal has provided isn’t even going here, you know, most of the time. It powers other places. And those places have blamed Appalachia for much of the crisis, and so it’s elevating the understanding for people that there are lots of reasons why extraction happens, and there are so many reasons why we could turn away from it. And there are people so interested in doing literally anything else – they just want to be able to put, you know, food on the table for their families. And when we talk to people in the community, when I do community work about Just Transition, once people know what you’re talking about, they’re like, “oh yeah, I’d put in solar panels, that sounds great,” you know? People aren’t necessarily opposed.

And they love the mountains as much as anyone. Anybody who lives here loves this place and cherishes it, and people who work in the mines are dedicated, good people. They are not bad people. They’re just doing what they can, and we need to give them more options. We need to give all of us more options. There are so many things in Appalachia that could make money. I’m not a heavily capitalistic person, but we have such talent, and unfortunately, we lost a lot of the places that, you know, people made instruments and things, but some of the best instruments you’ll ever see are made in Appalachia. You know, there’s artisan crafts that would blow you away. The food is incredible. People have saved seeds through generations that you can only get here. There’s so much to be valued in mountain communities that doesn’t have anything to do with a fossil fuel. So I think there’s more to see.

Cody: Yeah. That phrase or that question, “when will the mountains grow back?” That’s going to stick with me. People have been on these mountains and have been here and on these lands for thousands and thousands of years. And so, the fact that in just a few short years and in such a short timeframe, we can wipe it clean, lose all the benefits that the mountains provide, and then look at the next generation and have to look them in the eye like your friend has to do and say, “I’m sorry, it’s not happening. We can’t provide you the same benefit that we had.” It’s not that people of Appalachia’s fault, but it’s the people of Appalachia’s problem now. But the people who did this now wiped away so much heritage and so much meaning from the world.

Tiffany: It has, yeah, it has tremendously harmed our community. And as a Native person, I also have to acknowledge that the loss of our mountains is loss of sacred sites, whether we have those registered or not. The inability to protect those places because they are profitable to someone else is something that weighs heavily on me. I think that, you know, there is the obvious beauty of the mountains and then there’s also the like, you know, really important things happened in these places to people and they’re gone now. They’re completely gone.

And we have a lot of what are called abandoned mine lands. So, a mining company will mine and then they will leave. They will not clean up as they are commanded by law to do, and they will not surrender the deed back to the public or to state or tribal control. And so, those mines will have runoff into our water, into the ground, and we are left with the toxins of that. And they won’t pay their workers sometimes. Sometimes the workers have to strike for their remaining wages like they did with the Black Jewel mine, which is a good thing to look up if you haven’t.

But it’s very sad that they just use it and leave it, and then we can’t even access it to clean it up. We’re not legally allowed to do so, whether it’s a neighboring land or not. And I think that is deeply troubling that you are required to have permission to care for land. And I think that there needs to be, in some ways, an outcry of support for people who are trying to do rehabilitation work to abandoned mine lands because usually if you hear “AML funds” in government talk in the US, what that means is that they are going to put money away and say it’s for rehabilitating the land after an abandoned mine land situation. What that usually means is that they are going to put something on top of it. Right now, they’re trying to put a prison on top of it. So those aren’t healing the land. They aren’t what our communities have asked for. It’s not a solution. And it’s important to acknowledge that people show resistance to those things and that there’s work to be done for sure.

Cody: Thank you Tiffany for coming on the podcast. Do you have any final thoughts?

Tiffany: I would maybe add in to when I was talking about being Two-Spirit, that Two-Spirit identities weren’t just “accepted” within their tribal context, that we were sacred. We often held spiritual roles. And I just want to highlight that it wasn’t just, “yeah, you can be part of us too.” It was, “Creator has blessed you.” And I just want other Native kids to know that if you’re Two-Spirit, Creator blessed you.

Closing Conversation

Kaydee: Wow, what a powerful perspective Tiffany brings! I am so excited that we got to have her come on this podcast. That’s amazing. What did you think of this conversation, Cody?

Cody: Yeah Kaydee I completely agree. I am so happy that us as a podcast is sharing this conversation. There’s so many important parts that I took home with me. For example, when Tiffany and I were talking about what it means to be a Two-Spirit person, that’s by far the best explanation I’ve heard about this topic. I’ve had college professors with PhDs in cultural anthropology talk about this, and it was like not even half as good as what Tiffany said. And there’s so much more to talk about, you know, like a Just Transition, but Kaydee, what are your thoughts on the interview?

Kaydee: Yeah I agree, I really thought that was so powerful how she explained the Two-Spirit identity and kind-of the placeholder that term is. And I also just really connected with how she talked about bringing the community together and considering each other as mountain siblings… and having art as a community catalyst, as actually we had previously talked about in an episode with Emmanuelle Vital, absolutely agree with all of that. So many things really hit me hard. When Tiffany was talking about the inability to protect a place from those who can profit from it weighs heavy, that really resonated with me.

Cody: A Just Transition is moving from an unsustainable, high carbon economy to a sustainable, equitable, inclusive, and one that supports the workers who are moving, that worked in these sectors, in the mines, in the communities that have relied on these industries. We need to recognize addressing climate change and promoting environmental sustainability is needed, but we also need to include social justice. And this is an overview of what it means, but the concept goes so much larger. I know Kaydee, we’ve talked about how the community you come from could really use a Just Transition. Do you have thoughts on this?

Kaydee: Yeah, Cody, so for me, the topic of Just Transition is very personal and one of the many points of tension that I have with my background that I come from, because I grew up in a community with heavy dependence on coal mining. Like many mountainous communities in the US and especially in Colorado, mining for precious metals brought settlers there originally, and I mean European descendant settlers – the Indigenous peoples were here much longer. But coal mining has been a mainstay of the settler economy since the 1880s in my home county. And as teenager, I hung out at the local 24-hour diner that served coal miners, and had friends that worked in the mine and supported their families with that income. My middle and high schools were heated by coal until I think my junior year, end of my junior year in high school, when the system then was switched to burn biomass from beetle-kill trees instead of coal. And yeah, all of that to say that I also come from a community that outsiders might judge as contributors to the problem, right, but who I know as people just doing their best to support their families.

So just to kind of illustrate some of the things that I saw in my young adulthood with the mining community that I grew up in is we had some setbacks at the local mine that I remember as everyone being really worried about, what would people do when they were laid off? And then some of my friends were laid off and they had only a skeleton crew at the mine, and my friends had to go mine in another state or find another way to feed their families. Which, it’s easy to say that people could do something else, right. It’s easy to say that “well, mining is hard and dangerous work that’s bad for their health anyway. They should just do something else.” Yeah that’s all true, but it isn’t always easy to find something else, particularly that pays above minimum wage without a university degree.

So there is that, and then there’s also our dependence on the mines is clearly problematic from a community perspective in this way that not only do people sometimes don’t have many other options, but also the mines continually let them down. For example, again in my local county, the local mine (or rather semi-local since it’s owned by a larger company with mines across the States) declared bankruptcy and failed to pay property taxes in 2016, and that almost caused my local school to shut down. The one that I went to from kindergarten all the way through high school. Because – another system of inequity in the US system, but that’s a conversation for another day – the US system bases school funding on property taxes, and the largest property owner in the county is this mine. So if that corporation fails to pay, there isn’t enough money for school.

Of course, things worked out for the school this time, because the school was able to apply for a bailout and raise funds to keep going, and it turns out the mining company was also sort of bailed out. They were given a new land lease in 2017 to expand their mining. But this just kind of illustrates the point of how difficult it can be on the local communities, and I can’t speak for the whole community, but my feeling from growing up there is that we do need to do better not to leave people behind as we search for a way forward.

Cody: Kaydee, we always talk about how this impacts the worker, how we need to think about the person, but the way you’re able to illustrate how your whole community was impacted by the likelihood of missing out on education funding when the mine moves out – that’s a social consideration that I wasn’t considering before. It seems like there needs to be a better solution for this. I know hopefully we’ll be able to do more talk about a Just Transition in the future, because this is such an important topic when we’re looking at climate change action and climate change policy, we need to make sure that it’s not going to devastate the local communities when we’re making these shifts.

Kaydee: Yeah I really couldn’t agree more and I think there are so many perspectives. Really, I’m so grateful that we got Tiffany’s perspective on here and I hope that we can get more peoples’ perspectives on this topic in the future.

Cody: Yeah. And just an example of another sort of Just Transition that we haven’t talked about is whole countries, whole societies who are so heavily dependent on oil and gas will need to go through a similar, larger scale, Just Transition. So this affects everyone at an individual level, at a community level, and at a global level.

Kaydee: Absolutely. Yeah, you couldn’t have said it better. Yeah, it affects everyone from the school child, all the way up to entire countries. So at multiple scales, a Just Transition is something that really everyone should pay attention to. So, actually, that does kind of lead into a point of action for our listeners. We’ve been talking about kind of the depressing part, right, but the good news is there are things you can do about some of this stuff. You can bring up Just Transition to your local politicians – if it’s not on their docket, bring it to them!

Cody: Also, it’s great to educate yourself on what a Just Transition means where you live. It’s important to remember that the solutions that are effective will vary depending on the needs of the community. And as Tiffany was mentioning, listen to your siblings – your mountain siblings – on their needs. There are a lot of mutual aid groups where people are supporting each other. This is especially critical in mountain communities. You can donate money, time, and resources. You can educate your family and friends, and raising your voice in public comment will have a larger impact on your local community.

Kaydee: Yeah, absolutely. To bounce off what Cody is saying, you can share your ideas and thoughts about Just Transition directly with your politicians, often your local politicians, and scale it up, or there are often town hall meetings and public comment. So for example, before the mine that I was talking about in my community was granted that land lease from the US Bureau of Land Management, there was a window for public comment, for people to come and say their piece about whether they thought this should move forward or not. So that is an option, you can do that, you can be involved, that makes a big difference. And there are also some really great groups out there, such as the Climate Justice Alliance, which has a Just Transition program. And we are putting all of these links on our website, so if you’re interested in any of these things, we’ll have a little more information you can check out after you listen to this podcast. Go see the supplemental on our website.

Cody: Well, thanks everybody for listening to the podcast. Please remember to subscribe, follow us on social media, say hi – we’d love to begin the conversation with all of you, and thanks for listening!