Full Transcript of this episode:

Emily Race  0:13  

Welcome to the Founding Mothers Podcast, where we're imagining new ways of living with one another and our planet. I'm your host, Emily Race. This episode is a conversation with Layel Camargo. Layel is a descendant of the Yaqui and Yoreme/Mayo tribes of the Sonoran Desert. They are cultural strategist, Land Steward, filmmaker and artist. Layel, a transgender and non binary person, have spent the last decade advancing climate justice through storytelling.

Layel Camargo  0:40  

So in 2019, Nico calls and he says, Hey, I've been looking at this international conservation organization, I hate it. They're getting all this money to do all this stuff that isn't actually helping our communities and they're actually just continuing to profit and make all these big billionaires look good. With the mentorship of Eric Schneider and then me with Fabiana Rodriguez, who is climate justice activist, we decided to create Shelterwood.

Emily Race  1:06  

Layel the impact producer for the North Pole Show, Season Two with the executive producer Rosario Dawson. They produce and host "Did We Go Too Far?", a podcast with ecological justice organization, movement generation justice and ecology project. At the Center for Cultural Power, they created climate woke: a national campaign to center BIPOC voices in climate justice. Layel co-founded Shelterwood Collective, a land based organization that focuses on advancing a new worldview through forestry, artist investment, and healing. Most recently Layel was named on the Grist 2020 Fixers List and recognized by Yerba Buena Center of the Earth. 

Good morning, I think I gave you the heads up, but I am horizontal because I'm still on bedrest after giving birth five weeks ago, so this is how we're doing it today.

Layel Camargo  1:59  

No, it's great. You know, traditionally, you're supposed to not be doing anything for 40 days after you give birth.

Emily Race  2:05  

Yeah, that's what I'm technically practicing. But this podcast falls within things that nourish my soul. And since my mom was here helping with the babe, I'm like, “let me get this conversation in.” So thank you.

Layel Camargo  2:21  

Yeah, thank you. I'm sorry for being late. I have three volunteers trying to get us all into stable housing. We've been up here living since the beginning of the year, and we've been living in cabins that are rundown. So I've been working on all of our infrastructure renovation.

And this is the week that things have gotten to a certain point where people can actually live in homes. There's still a lot of work getting done; we're finishing grouting a shower right now so that somebody who lives there can actually take a shower. This morning I couldn't really skip a beat in regards to taking advantage of all the help we have today. It always comes with questions or “So what am I doing here? How do I do it?” So yeah, thank you for your patience.

Emily Race  3:10  

No worries. I know, patience seems to be the keyword in my life, at least these days.

That jumps into what I wanted to ask you; it sounds like you have actually moved on to the land that you all were able to purchase?

Layel Camargo  3:27  

Yep. So we purchased it in July of last year, and we all agreed to live here, starting January.

So in January, we I hauled my partner and our two dogs into a small 200 square foot cabin that has rotting baseboards and rotting floorboards underneath the bathroom, but somehow we've been able to make it work for six months now. And same with my co-founder, Nico, he moved up here.

Also since then, one of our board members moved in; he's our resident anthropologist, he's helping document these beginning stages of our work so that other people who want to do this kind of work can do it, and they have a little bit of a blueprint. And then one of Movement Generation's directors moved in at the beginning of April, and she's our resident farmer. She's helping us do soil testing and identification of potential food sheds on the land to sustain the community that lives here.

Emily Race  4:37  

Wow. Lots of growth, literally and figuratively.

Maybe we take a step back. It's beautiful to hear where you all got to now, and I've been following your journey online. But I'd love to zoom out for listeners and share with them, who is Shelterwood Collective and what was the origin story?

Layel Camargo  5:02  

Our origin story starts at a very homemade hot tub in a Buddhist temple near Albany, New York. Nico and I met at Soul Fire Farms’ LatinX and Black Farmers immersion. We met up there and we weren't actually talking as much. But as soon as a group of us went on a walk to a Buddhist temple, him and I started stripping down really quickly, as soon as we saw this beautiful cement, fire burning, heated hot tub, and everybody else was looking at us a little bit like "you're gonna get in?" And the caretaker of the land was like, "you guys should use it. Of course, you should use it."

So we're sitting there in the hot tub, and everybody's just putting their hands and I looked at him, and I was like, “we need to do a project like Soul Fire farm”. And he was like, "Yeah, I've been thinking about that a lot." And I was like, "especially for us in the West Coast, we don't have a lot of BIPOC-led land projects that are at the scale that Soul Fire farm does."

But even then, in my oppressed mind, I was like, “I think I think an acre or two acres would make me happy”. And he said, "I want 10,000 acres." And I was like, "Whoa!" And then later I found out he's actually a forester. He was currently finishing up his master's degree in forestry. At the time, I was a climate justice activist who was also really leaning towards storytelling.

We parted ways in 2017. And then I ended up creating something called Climate Woke. Climate Woke is a specifically focused black indigenous people of color storytelling platform. We did convenings, but I also did short form content through comedy. And I got the chance to visit a lot of indigenous communities that were leading in solar technology, I got to visit a lot of young people who were leading their climate activist work in their local communities. And I got to do it through comedy.

One thing that always kept coming up was this conversation, because at the end of the day, the biggest solution we can do is returning the land back to its original peoples and returning the land back to all peoples who have been disenfranchised from stewarding land. A lot of it is because if you have control of your water, air and where your foods coming from, you can really thrive as a community. And that's where capitalism has been able to keep us, for lack of better words, hooked on working their systems.

And so my deep down in my heart, even though I was doing storytelling, my passion for returning to land was always there. And because I got to visit a lot of indigenous communities, that theme always kept coming up. So in 2019, Nico calls and he says, "Hey, I've been working at this international conservation organization, I hate it. They're getting all this money to do all this stuff that isn't actually helping our communities. And, in turn, it's actually just continuing to profit and make all these big billionaires look good." So, he, with the mentorship of Eric Schneider, and then me with the mentorship of Fabiana Rodriguez, who is a climate justice activist, we decided to create Shelterwood.

When we started meeting, it was two months before the shutdown. Our goal was to have an organization and a land project in three years, I like to think that COVID created a portal that we walked through. It cut that timeline in half. We ended up creating our 501 C3 by the end of 2020. We had one seed funder that had committed us for three years. And in July of 2021, when we found Camp Cazadero, we were told we had three weeks to transition it over. We fundraised and our seed donor contributed the full amount we needed. We had built up some other donors to help us with the infrastructure, which we're currently renovating now.

But at the end of it, the COVID shutdown allowed us to create an organization. We really hunkered down as if we were already living on land. We would run through scenarios around governance, run through scenarios around crisis, and we started creating our bylaws. All the boring things that go into creating a nonprofit, because we couldn't go see land because of the shut down,. We really just played in the realm of imagination for a good six to nine months. We were also entertaining conversations with potential funders.

I think that's the reason why we were able to do this work; we had the space and time to do it. Instead of hating the shutdown, and dwelling on not being able to see our loved ones, we put our energy towards creating Shelterwood.

Emily Race  10:27  

That's a beautiful. First of all, I didn't realize that some of the origin story started with Soul Fire. The work they do is so amazing. Can you actually, real quick for listeners who have no idea who Soul Fire Farms are, can you talk about what that work is and the connection?

Layel Camargo  10:44  

Soul Fire Farm is a black-owned 50 acre farm that works on food sovereignty; returning access to good healthy organic food back to black communities and POC communities, people of color communities. They also provide food in Albany, New York, which is an area that does not have access to a lot of affordable budget vegetables, for lack of better words. They're led by an amazing black woman named Leah Penniman and her family.

It's a very traditional farm. There's a dad, there's two kids, but they also have a 501 C3 component where they bring in emerging builders now, and traditionally emerging farmers, to help learn around the radicalness of food sovereignty and the importance of having access to clean food.

Emily Race  11:42  

Beautiful. I want to get to more about the visioning, imagination, dream space, because that's so crucial here. But what comes to mind is the way that one vision can inspire another and have that duplicative effect that you see in nature, growing from one seed to the next.

It's perfect to dive into the vision piece, because that's really what this podcast is about, to help unlock that imagination space, and also the collective visioning that we can use to build and actually step into the portal, so to speak, of a new world here and now. I know that can sound heady, like, “Whoa, what do you mean”, but I would love to hear more about the visioning process for you all.

I also read that you seem to be doing these visioning circles or you're hosting more visioning sessions with with members of your community to help build out what Shelterwood Collective could look like, is that correct?

Layel Camargo  12:43  

Yeah. We were very fortunate enough that before the end of the year, we were able to host four in person sessions. We had ones specifically dedicated to artists, one specifically dedicated to communities of color, another one dedicated to organizations that have been following our work or who are interested in similar work, and then another one for the local Cazadero community. And then we held a virtual one for everybody who couldn't attend. In these community visioning sessions, we've worked with the facilitation team to help create a space where people can start to dream about what could this land look like for them, and how could it serve their communities? We had an architecture firm also putting up some infrastructure, mood boards that people can vote on; what do they want it to actually look like?

The goal of it was that before we jumped into renovations and fundraising for renovations, we want to actually have a clear idea of what our communities need. We don't want to jump in and build something that looks pretty for us, and that feels nice for us, and then at the end of the day, it doesn't end up serving our communities of color, queer folks, folks who are disabled. In these visioning sessions, we actually realized that everybody was yearning for Shelterwood to exist. Specifically in our people of color day, it was a normal circle up and we had a circle of introductions; there were at least seven people who, in their introductions, they started crying, because they had never dreamt that they would see an indigenous person — I'm indigenous and Mexican— and then a black person, Nico, stewarding this large scale of land.

We’re sitting on 900 acres and property lines don't mean anything, but for lack of better words, that means when you cross that gate, there's somebody on the other side who understands your experience, who is going to be understanding of you wanting to be in the outdoors.

I think that our vision really is about climate resiliency. Our people are constantly facing the brunt of climate change because they don't have access to understanding what's happening to the lands and how they can pivot for the resiliency. Having this scale of management of 800 acre forests allows us to bring our people in to do everything from being in relationship with fire to tending to fire. And we're in an area where it's been hit by very devastating wildfires, pretty continuously, in the last five years. So we also have relationships with the local communities where they can start to heal.

It's actually pretty traumatizing up here. While we were in a short window of preparing for wildfire season, everybody's doing burns, everybody's cutting down trees. We'll start to learn how effective that is and how it's actually going to harm parts of our ecosystem. And we're here, we're here to learn, and we're here to teach.

Our vision is to be able to pass on stewardship practices that can help return redwoods to this place, which is a multi generational process, as well as holding space for cultural workers and artists to integrate into this land and help create content, create art pieces, that is showing our vision, that is showing what we want the future to look like.

Our central community is foresters and people who want to be in relationship with the forest; and because I'm an artist, also artists and cultural workers, mostly because we do believe, I think all of us at Shelterwood, that culture precedes political action and economic action. And what we're trying to create is a culture of returning land to indigenous and POC hands. We're trying to create a culture of you can tend to an ecological system that is in the 1000s of acres of space. That's what our indigenous people did. That's what our communities have done. That was robbed from us, but that's how we were able to have such a healthy thriving ecosystem. Large scale management allows you to be able to look at an ecosystem beyond your backyard, and so you really see how “if I cut a tree here, it's actually going to impact this area that's about an acre away because of shading, because of root decay, because of fungal growth, because now all the beetles and the termites are going to move to this one decaying tree". And it's going to help alleviate this other struggling area.”

So there's so many things that we still have to learn, and so many ways that our communities are going to be involved. Our vision is, off the bat, it's about climate resiliency. And then when we look at the nooks and crannies, it is about creating a new culture, and it's about actually putting people's hands to work at a scale at which we don't have access to.

Emily Race  17:46  

I have chills myself. Even in that initial anecdote of the seven folks who were brought to tears that the mere fact that Shelterwood exists, that is so powerful. I really acknowledge you for your part in bringing Shelterwood to life because I feel like, at least from my perspective, there's a bit of courage that one has to have within them to actually take the actions to bring this to life and step into that unknown. I don't know what you would describe it as. But I really acknowledge you for the work you're helping to steward.

Is there anything else you could share around some of the things that were born out of those visioning sessions? I'd love to help paint that picture a little more clearly for folks listening.

Layel Camargo  18:39  

The thing that's very interesting is — I learned this few years back when I started creating content in local indigenous communities — that people always expect this — even I did the same. I'm going in, I'm asking about solar and how much it changed their life and what it gave them access to or, how disadvantaged people are and how an off grid system can help them and all these things. And they're like, "I just want to watch movies and stream Netflix." And it's like, "Oh, yeah!"

When we started this process, this visioning session, I had already set my tempo that what people are going to ask for is actually going to be very simple. It's not going to be this big thing. And what we heard is people want to have hot tubs. So we're looking into the most ecologically aligned hot tubs we can find. People want to just R&R. They want to come here and they want to relax. They want to be rejuvenated and they also want to learn about the land. What people want is access and space to do what other people who have access to outdoor space get to do, which is relax.

The thing is, and I know this for a fact, I used to be an avid hiker, I was training for Mount Whitney before the shutdown. I was doing 13-14 miles and really high elevations, and the thing that I was nervous about when I first started wanting to do this is to be surrounded by white people, “how do I know where I can pee? How do I know where I can poop?” Because when you hike that long, you have to figure out all these meticulous things. And there's still this encroaching of white supremacy and the way that our country culturally works and that people of color feel watched all the time,. Probably the only place we don't feel watch is in our homes. And I think that the fact that we exist means that people can actually be freely connected to the outdoors, not feeling like they have to justify their lack of preparedness or lack of wear, or even the fact that maybe they might go off trail, all these things where we have to do all this research so we show up super prepared so that we don't have to be interacting with other people. So what people want is just the fact that we are stewards of color, they already feel comfortable and safe.

To that merit, folks also want to have ceremonial and rightful relationships with the land. This summer, I'm going to be working with an indigenous fellow from whose Diné from Navajo, and we're going to walk the lands. We're going to spend 10 weeks just listening and documenting everything from what signage could look like on a particular trail in regards to species identification, to suggestions around offerings and prayers and historical markings of the indigenous people across Cheyenne, Southern Pomo, who were once here. We're also allowing the outdoor education to be well tended to and rightful recognition of the historical context.

What people want is to rest, to be able to take off the armor that they carry every day, and, they want to see the ceremonial and the sacredness of relationship to land return. So we're doing that by working with this one fellow, and additionally, we will be setting up a cultural easement that is going to be complementing an easement and protection of the forest here to allow access to the Cheyenne, the Southern Pomo people here to this land in perpetuity.

That means that indigenous people can hit us up and say, “Hey, we have this ceremony, we want to host or we want to bring up our whole tribe. We're hosting a tribe”. It's because of the easement we are making, as long as Shelterwood holds this piece of land, we’re forever responsible for shepherding those folks back to the land.

People just want right relationship to land, at the end of the day, that's what they want. And that means so many different things for everybody, but we're approaching it in the way that we understand it to be.

Emily Race  23:28  

I am so moved by the vision, because it's so clear, and it also feels like rich, fertile soil. The things that can be born from some of the things you were describing; the future that could be born from that.

I want to go back to when you described the experience of crossing over onto the land that is Shelterwood Collective and what I was feeling in my body is a feeling of safety for black indigenous people of color and the queer community, to feel like you said that they're not being watched, that they're out of the gaze of white supremacy or colonization, to have an actual space where that experience can happen to me feels so powerful in what that can create as a foundation.

What are you looking to create from that? Is it that you're just looking to stop with this 1,000 acres, or is there a vision to expand even beyond where you are currently?

Layel Camargo  24:40  

Yes, we are. We have our resident anthropologist; we are hoping to instigate more large scale management for Black Indigenous and People of Color. And that instigation is going to be a surprise of what it is. Originally, we thought, we could create this handbook and just let a bunch of Shelterwoods exist. And that is great. And also, we want people to feel audacious and bold enough to dream the way that we were allowed to dream during the shutdown when we created this.

We have been approached about potentially taking on a title of a different property, and there's people who want to transition land. So I don't know what the future is going to be for us. But we definitely want to help as much as we can for other stewards to take over. And the reality is that the infrastructure isn't there. It's projected that in the next 5 to 10 years 95% of the land that is currently harvested for food and for homesteading is going to transition because of the way that the economic system is shifting. We know that there's going to be a lot of land going up for sale very soon. We've already been seeing it. So we want to make sure that at a larger scale, we're empowering ourselves as activists and organizers to help instigate other people to take that over.

We don't want to monopolize anything, but we're definitely here to help. And if we have the infrastructure, the time and the knowledge to be able to support, by either holding a title onto our name, but being very clear about who's taking care of it, and what indigenous people have access to it, or by hosting a yearly conference for a week where we can bring anybody who's trying to create a land collective onto the land so that they can just dream. Maybe we support through some organizing, maybe we can support by connecting them with donors.

We know we want more projects like ours. We don't necessarily need more Shelterwoods. We just need more people willing to be able to live on land.

I don't think it dawned on me what my life was gonna be like until January; I was flying a lot before the shutdown, I was creating content, I thought maybe I'll go into LA and try to shift perspective through the Hollywood industry. But that wasn't where my heart was, I felt very displaced. When I got here in January, I realized, “Oh, I am taking care of 900 acres of forest in a county that is predominantly been impacted by wildfires. I can't leave as easily, I have to stay here.” So this wildfire season, we cleared out half of a lot of the defensible space around the homes where people will be and I remember there was a weekend where everybody was like, "Oh, we're gonna go hang out with this Kashaya artists for this weekend." And I was like, damn, I have like a two week window of three hours allowed a day to burn. And I still had a lot of things to burn. I was like, “No, I'm actually okay staying, I'll catch up with him later.”

And I burned my pile. It felt so satisfying to know that I took care of the home that me and my family were going to live on, that I had to rake a little bit more, but that I spent those three to four hours. I think that's what returning to land is, with the reprioritization of what we're doing. Knowing that what we do has impact, because we're creating defensible space around the homes here. We know that when wildfires come near us, they will not burn down the homes. The forest may be a different conversation.

And in California, specifically, we need to get really good about our relationship with fire. We need to use it to prevent large scale burnings. We also need to be weary of it, because of the heavy drought that we have in the whole state, it's getting exasperated at a scale that we can't even imagine.

The reality is we do need to return land back to indigenous people and allow for black and people of color to steward land because of the healing that it does for us, as well as the healing that it does for the land, which we're realizing now, it's symbiotic. It's not separate. If we heal with the land, the land heals with us too.

Emily Race  29:38  

That's beautifully said.

One thing that came to mind is this tension that I sometimes feel — and you kind of addressed it by saying we're not looking to monopolize or have Shelterwoods everywhere, but more so it seems like to provide a framework or an inspiration for others to create within — and that's something I've questioned around land ownership in general. If colonization brought in this idea that you can “own” land and everything that falls within that, the extraction and whatnot, where do you all find yourselves having to challenge some of the inherited ways of thinking from colonization and white supremacy as you're bringing in new governance models and creating this way of living? Where's that tension showing up for you, if anywhere?

Layel Camargo  30:37  

Individualism is so deeply ingrained in us that being a collective is a big challenge, and we're constantly reminded that we're not. Right now, our challenge is that we have a very low capacity, but a high demand for more infrastructure specifically, but also our forest as we continue to learn more about how much help it needs.

We're deeply encroached by Doug Fir, and the redwood has been completely logged out of this area. And that's our most resilient tree species here to a wildfire. So that's the one that we have to help grow and Doug Firs competing on that. There's a lot that we are learning.

Anyway, individualism is something that we are constantly trying to challenge as there's so much high demand and our capacity so low, that sometimes we have to do things alone. And we forget that collective action can help us move things faster, but it means prioritizing something over something else. And that means that what somebody else thinks is important has to be set first.

So, we're constantly juggling the demands, and constantly juggling what each individuals thinks is important, that we're not like, “What I'm doing is more important.” It's just like, “We need to get this done”. And they're like, "Okay, why don't you go find a contractor for this, you find a contractor for that, and we're gonna do this particular work, and then we'll come back together, and then we'll see what else is priority."

There's a lot of ways in which we've been colonized to think in regards to resources and who has access to more power that we are mindful of. When we created our governance documents, I decided to create a space called the tension meeting. That happens quarterly. But at times, it can happen monthly, depending on how fast paced we're working. I was a transformative justice practitioner for six years. and I learned a lot through that. So we create a set of agreements and values that we're all held to in the tension space. Everything from respecting when people say, to being willing to take action if you're given feedback on something that needs to change.

There's a lot of things that we created the framework for in this time where we didn't have to take care of land, which was a very precious time for us. This tension meeting operates through a talking stick, which is a traditional form of being in council, and we each get to share our grievances. We've had at least 10 of them at this point. And most of them are us owning up to where we think our shortcomings are, which is very interesting. And people will either say, "Yeah, you know, I noticed that but don't be so hard on yourself." It's so beautiful how we are so hard on ourselves more than other people.

Having a space to talk about conflict and tension in regards to how we operate as a governance has allowed for us to shift a lot of these white supremacy ideals of individualism, of scarcity, so that we can talk about the tensions around cash flow —there's a lot of tensions around money. The reality is if I think something's important, and I'm the one managing our budget, what's gonna get done? What I think is important, not what you think is important.

In these tension meetings, we actually personalize all these bigger institutional decisions that we have to make, everything from how we spend money, to how fast we work, to what deadlines are set— that has impact on us. It has impact on health, it has impact on our morale. And I do think that's what catches all these white supremacy ideals, scarcity and individualism are the two things that are constantly coming up, whether we call it that or not. And it creates interpersonal dynamics.

The land is so abundant; we have grapefruit trees in some areas, and then fruit trees, and then there's all this Bay Laurel that's constantly giving out nuts, so we we feel the abundance; and the property’s hugged by two streams of water that are year round. We know, "Oh, my God, the abundance is here, we need to challenge the scarcity mentality that there isn't enough time, that there isn't enough resources, that there isn't enough for anything and just think about planning” or think about it like, “Okay, do we really want to do that? Let's just do it in six months, when we have a little bit more energy."

Those two are our biggest deterrents. I do think that the tension meeting space that we've created has allowed for us to move through them a little bit more easeful. They're not perfect, and they definitely have come with some hardship, but somehow they seem to be working with our small, collective. I know that things will have to evolve once we have more staff, but I'm not going to stress out about that just yet.

Emily Race  36:16  

I love that as a model. Imagine if the whole country was operating under versions of these tension meetings, and how the way that we view conflict could shift. Also, not to erase that scarcity is a mindset or a thing, but to address it when it shows up and then shift consciously to that abundance mindset or reality. It's so powerful.

I could go on forever asking you questions around the work that you're doing.

I think we're gonna have listeners who, depending on how they identify and in the work that they're doing the world, may either completely understand why centering Black Indigenous People of Color is important, and others may have questions around it. Especially in environmental spaces that are predominantly white-led, there's this idea that, “Oh, we're doing really great work”. But there's a complete lack of awareness around the problems in that structuring, and not weaving in and including, especially Indigenous perspective.

Can you boil it down real simply, why is this important to center Black Indigenous People of Color in the work that that you're talking about here?

Layel Camargo  37:38  

For the last 500 years on this country, in the United States, there has been intentional eradication of indigenous people and an enslavement of black people, and a displacement of people of color, due to the global capitalistic system. We have been the labor force that has been extracted from to create the wealth and the power that exists on the planet. because we are seen as less than.

And it's been created by white people who have had access to power either through the church or through the state, through their government structures. And so there has been an intentional accumulation of wealth and power, through the extraction of labor of black indigenous people of color, which has created the removal of our access to land. We have been forced into cities that have been forced into reservations; we have been pulled on boats from our homelands.

Now it's normalized; immigration is something that we do to survive. But that means with the loss of culture and means with the loss of language, and we lose a lot through that. So we center black and indigenous people of color, because we all deserve to have access to our well being and have a fair chance to that surviving and adapting, specifically climate change, but really where are we headed in the next 100 years? We don't know. Our climate system is collapsing, our Mother Earth is no longer inhabitable for our species. And that's not going to change anytime soon, with the lag effect. We're seeing the impacts of pollution from the 70s and from the 80s.

If you're an environmentalist, you might know what this is, but basically, pollution takes a while to impact the ecosystem. And so when there's a lot, we have to catch up on a lot of things that are at this point, out of our hands.

So we center these communities because our governments and our economic systems have been abusing us. And we deserve a rightful chance at survival and that hasn't been prioritized. You can see this through things like when Hurricane Katrina hit, there was a predominantly black communities that were the most impacted and the most left behind. We''re not prioritized. It's time that people like us start to have access to power, and can shift wealth to our well being. That's why we prioritize those folks.

Emily Race  40:15  

I would assume, and maybe you can add to this, that there's also a certain kind of leadership that can emerge from these communities, not only because of the experiences born out of that oppression has over the generations, but even if you trace it back culturally to the indigenous roots, there's wisdom in those cultures. Is there anything you want to speak to regarding the leadership capacity there?

Layel Camargo  40:45  

Specifically talking about where Shelterwood sits on, Cheyenne, Southern Pomo, it's projected that there was close to 10,000 years of forest stewardship. And this is at the micro scale, forest stewardship, knowledge that created the ecosystem that allowed for redwoods to thrive, which came with indigenous people taking care of lands and doing burns to help limit and or help instigate certain seed growth. And that’s the way that our ecosystem was shaped, specifically here. There should be a lot more redwoods, there should be a lot more sequoias.

There's a lot of ways that you can look at a big ecosystem and then see “Oh, there's a lot more of this. There's a lot more Doug fir. Why is there bamboo here? That's not even here, why is there so many eucalyptus in North America, that's not okay.”

When you removed indigenous people from these lands, you remove the burning, you remove the cutting, you remove the selective species encouragement and selective species limiting that actually created this ecosystem that allowed for water to thrive, that allowed for bugs to thrive, that allowed for certain bird species, and certain keystone species to thrive.

The European mentality is that if you just leave it, nature will thrive. The reality is, we're knowing now, no, that's not actually how it worked. There were indigenous people there before you came. Yes, you think we are the problem because of what we do, because of a post-colonial way of living, which uses a lot of power. We use a lot of produce, a lot of waste. We don't have a lot of knowledge of how to be in relationship with trees, for example, or water.

But when you criminalize humans, and make them seem like they need to be away from an ecosystem, in order for it to thrive, the people who will use it are people with wealth and people who can control the government. That's how you have so many pipelines. That's how you have so much water pollution, is that all these corporations use it for their own use.

By returning indigenous people to the land, you're returning those ecological stewardship practices like burning, like trimming, like selecting, like water protection, like ceremonies. It starts to push at the edges of what corporate interests have been using to extract from the natural world. And so yes, it's also a strong resilience strategy to return people of color, specifically indigenous people of the whole planet.

There are some of us who do not— we're all indigenous, I'm indigenous from a desert that crosses to the United States, and it's also in southern Mexico. But also on my other side, as a Mexican person, I'm also indigenous, we just mixed with the Spaniards for 200 years. Black folks are also indigenous, they were just forcibly removed from Africa. And they’ve been here for so many generations that now they're from here.

The reality is, we all have so much to offer. One of the things that Pomo elder told us is he said, “We lost a lot of songs because of the colonial project. But a lot of my ancestors believe that if you sit by the river or by the stream, we can get our songs back, if we just listen.” So what we're hoping for is for a generational activation of ancestral ways of living so that we can survive, and that is going to be tapped in through cultural connection. But returning indigenous people is the most resilient strategy we have. And a lot of people are indigenous to different places that are not allowed to say that.

Emily Race  44:45  

It's a win win, for lack of a better term, for all of us, for the entire ecosystem. Thank you for breaking that down.

Before we start to wrap things up here, how would you define what it means to be a steward or stewardship?

Layel Camargo  45:07  

I'm still learning. I'm very freshly new to stewardship, but just from listening to other elders— to be a good steward, I think the number one rule is you have to be willing to listen, and you have to be willing to move at a slower pace.

If I can look at one tree that is near my home, and I can see how many birds live there, are there a lot of thriving insects around there that I like, or I don't like? Is it busy blooming in the summer? Is it better for me to cut it? Is it better for me to just trim it a little bit more so if there's a wildfire that comes, it doesn't burn the roof of my house down?

And to be a steward, you have to listen, and you have to move slower, and be okay with the fact that a year might go by before I really understand whether I should pull this Agave out ,whether I should really help these little three redwoods; maybe they're getting a little bit more shade, and that's why they're growing so slow. Let me try to trim the side of this other tree.

To be a steward means to listen to the land. And you can do this in your backyard. Just look at your backyard, if you happen to have one, or your front yard, or your local community garden. What kind of grasses grow there? Have you dug through the soil? Is it rocky, are there worms, when you dig through the soil? Do you want there to be worms?

To be a steward is really to reconnect with the earth and listen to what it is from your very small, small understanding of it. Or maybe you you're an agroecologist, engineer or something, and you understand it, but have you really taken the time to observe and listen? Because everything is different.

We want to put crops and soil here, but we have a very clay soil, and we have a lot of rock. Similarly, there's agave and bamboo in different parts of here. And I know it was some guy who thought he was gonna experiment with something, but it's like, “Okay, well, how is it doing in the rainy season? Does it look really happy in the summer? What is that?”

Everybody deserves and can be a steward, reconnecting with the land by listening and by having patience. And try not to make too many decisions around things that impact Mother Earth without really giving it a proper chance to show you what you should be doing.

Emily Race  47:48  

That may be the answer to this next question; is there an inquiry or an invitation you have for listeners to take away from today's conversation?

Layel Camargo  47:58  

Look us up, follow us on Instagram. We're trying to just teach people things. We’re doing a lot of that through Instagram right now; what we're learning we want to share out with the world.

If we could take anything out of Shelterwood, it's that we want to instigate people to be more curious about being in connection with land, and being okay with the fact that at some point, we're going to need large scale management of all land of people by people of color, because white supremacy has been doing that for 500 year, and now we're at this global catastrophe. So it's time for us to take that power back.

The other thing is, if this feels too overwhelming for you, start small, grow something, go find your local community garden, find your local park, start hiking, be okay with the fact that maybe things aren't set up perfectly for you, but use the outdoor space. Mother Earth, the soil, the trees, the flowers, they need you.

There's a Lakota poet, his name's Mark, and he told once, he said The earth wants us to return back as much as we want to return to it." So by us being out there, and smelling the soil, touching the tree, hugging a tree— don't be embarrassed to be a tree hugger, I learned how to be a tree hugger from my Mexican Aunt so I'm telling you, our people been hugging trees too— a connection to any natural ecosystem that you have access to; that's great. That's amazing. And that makes an impact, even if it's small.

Emily Race  49:41 

How can people support the work that you all are doing or get involved directly?

Layel Camargo  49:46  

We have an info@shelterwoodcollective.org. If you would like to be added to our list serve, just email us there and we'll add you. You can follow us on social media. And we're constantly accepting donations; everything from $1 to $1,000 helps.

Right now is our year of rooting. Last year was our year of landing, because we were arriving to land; now that we're here, we’re rooting. So we really need a lot of financial support, to be able to continue adjusting the infrastructure, so we can have the bodies living up here full time that can help with the scale management.

And also, if you have any skills that you'd like to offer, and maybe come volunteer, you're welcome to also email the info@shelterwoodcollective.org and we are located in Northern California in Sonoma County.

Emily Race  50:41  

Amazing. This is such an inspiring conversation for myself, and I'm sure listeners who have been with us, I thank you again for all of the work that you're doing and in the model that you are living by.

I will let you get back to the land.

Layel Camargo  50:56  

Thank you, yeah, happy recovery and congratulations on the baby.

Emily Race  51:01  

Thank you. It's time to go feed this one, so I'm gonna go do that.

Layel Camargo  51:05  

All right. We'll talk soon. 

Emily Race  51:07  

Thanks, Layel. Bye.

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