80% of Indigenous people sit on 80% of global biodiversity and 25% of land—but make up only 5% of the population.
So, what can we learn about regenerative agriculture from the Native American farmers who’ve been managing our land for millennia?
Dr. Michael Kotutwa Johnson has a PhD in Natural Resources and is a traditional Hopi dryland farmer. Dr. Johnson regularly lectures on the topic of dryland farming and advocates for indigenous farmers with the Natural Resource Conservation Service, and his work is featured in the documentary film, INHABITANTS: Indigenous Perspectives on Restoring Our World.
On this episode of Reversing Climate Change, Dr. Johnson joins Ross and cohost Rebekah Carlson, Agriculture Supply Lead at Nori, to explain how his ancestors learned to raise crops in the arid environment of Northern Arizona and what we can do to honor the long heritage of regenerative agriculture.
Dr. Johnson discusses the benefit of applying Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge in federal decision-making, sharing his place-based approach to land management and endorsement of the cooperative model.
Listen in to understand the hurdles Native Americans face in accessing government conservation stewardship programs and learn how Dr. Johnson raises crops to fit the environment rather than manipulating the environment to fit the crops.
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Resources
INHABITANTS: Indigenous Perspectives on Restoring Our World
Nephi Craig on Reversing Climate Change S2 EP55
Regenerative Agriculture Conference
Native American Agricultural Fund
The University of Arizona Indigenous Resiliency Center
Morrill Land Grant College Act
Full Transcript
Alexsandra Guerra: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by the team at Nori, the carbon removal marketplace. This is a show about the innovators and entrepreneurs developing solutions to climate change.
Ross Kenyon: Hello, and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I’m Ross Kenyon, and I’m the creative editor at Nori’s carbon removal marketplace. Rebekah Carlson, you are back, Nori’s agriculture supply lead. Thanks for co-hosting with me today.
Rebekah Carlson: So happy to be here. Here, as always.
Ross Kenyon: Now, you’re my resident farmer-agronomist person. I tap on your shoulder when I need some backup here, which I definitely do today, because we have the pleasure of having Dr. Michael Kotutwa Johnson on the show. If you saw the film Inhabitants, which is a fantastic documentary, he’s featured quite prominently within it. Dr. Johnson earned his doctorate in natural resources and conservation. He’s a Hopi farmer, Northern Arizona, and boy, are those shots gorgeous. And yeah, Inhabitants, if you haven’t seen it, that’s what we’re talking about today. So, thank you for being here, Michael.
Michael Kotutwa Johnson: You’re welcome. Thank you for having me.
Ross Kenyon: It’s our pleasure to have you here. I mean, you start out the film. So if you turn the film on and watch it, I think the first shot is this beautiful drone shot of what appears to be quite arid farmland, some of that you might not expect. One, it probably isn’t even farmland. It probably just looks like desert to you, but you actually somehow have a farm out here. How is that even possible?
Michael Kotutwa Johnson: Well, you know, we’ve been in this area for a while, over years. Sometimes some people in our place would say since time immemorial. And so we’ve learned to raise crops in this very arid environment with only an annual precipitation of six to ten inches. And so we’re able to raise things like corn, beans, melons, squash, and even a form of cotton, but that has its own scientific name, by the way. And so we’re very arid out here, and so we’re able to do that. And that’s just, you know, thousands of years of what I would call Indigenous ingenuity and just living with the environment, you know.
A lot of Indigenous populations throughout the United States are all place-based. And so if you live in a certain place for a number of years, for ours it’s over 3,000, we get to know the environment pretty well, and so we’re able to manage it in a good way.
Rebekah Carlson: Okay, so jump into dryland farming. So my background is like the Great Plains, right, where dryland farming isn’t the desert. And so, watching the film, you talk about planting corn like two feet down to get it in. I mean, how do you even tell people that that’s an okay thing, to plant that far deep in such an arid environment? And how long does it take to emerge?
Ross Kenyon: So, for comparison, Rebekah, what is it in your work?
Rebekah Carlson: In my work? I think it’s, right, yeah, like planting at an inch, at most. And so, like, translating what I do to yours is like a whole different thing.
Michael Kotutwa Johnson: Well, you know, when I was at Cornell University I had the same, for my undergrad, you know. Because I majored in agriculture there, the agronomists asked me the same question, you know. I don’t know if the audience is very familiar with, you know, parts of the corn as it comes up, like the epicotyl, you know, with the growing region of the corn for the seed to emerge. Ours can extend out to something like 33 centimeters, you know. It’s been documented to do that.
And so a lot of our varieties have adapted over, you know, thousands of years to come up from those types of depths. And so all the techniques that would allow that to happen, most of them derive around making sure that we have enough soil moisture in the ground. And so soil moisture can be found sometimes in a dry year at those depths, and we’re able to determine that not necessarily with the temperature probe, you know, our moisture probe, but we’re able to look at the vegetation that exists on the ground. We know our environment so well. We know what plants have shallow root systems, and if there’s an abundance of those, we know that we don’t have to plant that deep.
You know, the two-foot depth is an extreme depth, right? And so I think in conventional agriculture we go one inch, 14-inch rows, and then we only go down an inch, and we only plant one kernel per hole. Ours is the opposite of that. We plant ten to twelve kernels per hole at certain depths. Our spacing between our rows is about six feet, rows, maybe six feet between each plant, in clusters of plants. Then over time we thin those out to leave six or seven. Like in July, we’re thinning those out, keeping that soil moisture constant.
And so it’s all basic agronomic principles that have everything to do with soil moisture. And because we do plant in clusters, they’re able to help push through the surface. We have what they call sandy clay loam soils, which is perfect for corn, pH levels around [unclear] to 8.3, things like that. But to me, it’s just the ingenuity of our people that have allowed it to come to that, because you have to have our own form of basically plant breeding, some of the genetics behind that and so forth, and just the whole gauntlet of things.
And so I always tell people, little kids, when they come to visit me, that you can be anything. You could be a hydrologist. You can be an agronomist. You can be a botanist. You can be an environmentalist. You can be anything. And so, because we learn all those things basically at Hopi as little kids.
Ross Kenyon: How did you actually come to be a farmer? Because it seems like it wasn’t a direct path.
Michael Kotutwa Johnson: For, you know, it wasn’t, you know, my dad was in the military for the longest time. During the summertime, out of the three children that my parents had, I was the one who got dropped off out here at the age of eight, you know, spent my summers out here and started to farm. And I used to kind of hate that, you know, because I was like, that was boring. And I told my grandfather one time that I was bored, and that was the last time I said that, because next time, at 5:30 in the morning, I was up pulling weeds again, fixing fences. And I never said that again.
But you know, I learned how to farm at a young age. And so I just, it’s a continuing process. I think, you know, I’ll never be a perfect farmer, you know, like a lot of things in the world, but I’m getting pretty good at it. And so it’s just something that is ingrained in our value system and our Hopi. You know, we’re a faith-based society. Everything we do, we were supposed to have faith behind, you know, and so that includes that.
In fact, when the kid is just only, you know, when he’s first born, there’s a baby-naming ceremony at Hopi. We’ll raise that child up to the sun early in the morning. We’ll place a small little piece of sweet corn in their mouth, to remind them where they’re from, to ground them into our own ways, in our own belief systems. And a lot of people don’t have that. And so, you know, but that’s who we are as a people. We are like corn in a lot of ways. That’s one of our sayings, that we are like corn.
Ross Kenyon: And you indeed are. And I really have come to believe that over the years. You speak about this in the film, that you had some trouble with alcohol and recovery. We had a former guest on, Nephi Craig, who I believe is Navajo and Apache, and he’s a chef out on the White Mountain Apache land. And he talked about connecting with people’s foodways as a healing process, and that coming back to the land. Since both of you have said similar things, I wonder how common an experience that is, and if you could reflect on that.
Michael Kotutwa Johnson: You know, for us out here, it’s because of some of the situations that we derive from, you know, with lack of a lot of things that could help us succeed. We tend to sometimes, a lot of us tend to go into that dark hole. We forget a lot about culture, forget a lot about the things that we’re supposed to be doing, you know. And so for myself, and I know Nephi pretty well, you do too, but for myself, you know, it was just kind of always trying to fit into a society that basically I knew little about. But out here, you know, I got to ground myself into what I do and what really meant something to me, and I worked my way out of that.
I worked my way out of that, and so I was very fortunate to do that, because a lot of my friends who I know, they just don’t do that. But to me it was just getting more involved in my culture, getting more involved in farming, that allowed me to overcome this.
You know, I think, if I wouldn’t have done that I wouldn’t be, you know, I wouldn’t have finished my PhD. I’m in consideration to be offered another academic job. And none of this would have ever happened if I wouldn’t have stopped. But by doing that, and by working with what I do, it allowed me to basically look at the successes that I’ve had instead of the failures that I had, right? And so once that happened, then I was on the right track again, and I continue to be on the right track. Thanks for asking about that. You know, I really appreciate that.
Rebekah Carlson: And I’ll follow up with that. So it’s not like you forgot about, you know, where you came from and those practices, but forgot, or, like, told not to remember?
Michael Kotutwa Johnson: It wasn’t that I was told not to remember. It was just that I had forgotten, you know. I’d forgotten all of the other things that I was taught when I was a young child, because there was so much out there in the world, you know, there was so much other things out there, so much of a different culture, you know. But I was very fortunate to work my way out of that. And so it wasn’t that I, you know, it just wasn’t, you know, told not to. I just totally forgot, you know. And so farming brought me all back to that.
Rebekah Carlson: So, like, regen farming is so much bigger than the land, right? I feel like whenever people go back to farming and working with the land as the land should work, it’s so healing, personal, cultural, so many different ways. So you talked a little bit about how the farming was, like, that hook to get you back in, and how it’s the whole, the whole regenerative, you know, generations and things like that.
Michael Kotutwa Johnson: That is just that, you know, when you’re out there working with the soil, you’re actually learning responsibility, you know. You’re putting your effort and your thought process into something other than yourself. I think that’s so important, that we do that, you know. It gives you a chance to slow down and really think things through. You go away feeling tired, but not the kind of tired from, you know, reading magazines or doing too much homework, but the tired of just the physical, for physical things like that.
And so your whole body starts to adapt. Your whole body becomes like corn. Like it is, you know, you’re kept in the underground for a period of weeks, two weeks, you know, exactly, and able to emerge from that and come up into this new world. And you’re able to nurture that, you’re able to nurture other things, I mean, your plants that are out there. They’re like, we have this very intimate relationship that we have with our crops. They’re treated just like humans. They’re talked to, they’re sung to, you know. And it’s kind of just getting that out of yourself.
And one of our biggest identities is to practice the art of humility, you know, because if you really think about it, humility removes all that egotistical thing that’s about a person, and everything that can cause them to go awry, you know. But just by being a humble person, you know, and so that’s what I try to do today, is I try to practice that. But a lot of that is done, you know, just my experiences based upon my work in the cornfield, and other parts of my life that I’ve become aware of.
Ross Kenyon: For someone listening who doesn’t have an Indigenous heritage, that is so, I’d imagine any group of people, if you go back far enough, had a really strong connection to their native land and native area where they lived. Is there any way to recreate that now, or to experience some of this rootedness that we’ve lost?
Michael Kotutwa Johnson: That’s always a good question. I’ve always had people, you know, nowadays there’s a big move in trying to tap into Indigenous knowledge, you know, to look at that, to help them with the environment, and look at some of what we practice, you know, look at some of our management techniques. But you know, when I have friends that ask me, like, how do you remain so grounded? How do you do this? I always tell them, you know, why don’t you take some time and go look at where you come from? Where did you originate from? Look at the cultures that you were a part of, you know, rather than trying to adapt something from somebody else.
Why not look at yourself? Why not do a self-examination, a process of where you’re from, what your ancestors are, you know, things like that? Because I think, you know, a lot of people in America, they seem to have lost that identity, and they just don’t have that, and they’re searching for something. They’re really searching for something. I think most Americans are looking for a place to kind of fit in, a place to try to bring some value back into their lives, you know. And so I always say, just look within, it’s all there. I believe, you know, as human beings, we all have our answers, right? It’s just, are we willing to take the time enough to investigate ourselves, you know? And that’s basically my advice on that one.
Ross Kenyon: I think it’s solid advice, certainly. And beyond just personal advice, it seems like there’s a lot to learn for policy implications too, especially because you had sent this to us, this memorandum for the heads of departments and agencies about Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge and federal decision making. And it seems like some of these insights that we’re talking about on a small-scale level may ripple out to much greater ones. Is that what’s happening?
Michael Kotutwa Johnson: Yeah, I think it’s happening right now. I think the only part that holds that back is just that a lot of the agencies don’t have guidelines in place. That’s always a problem when new policies come out. And this information starting to be captured and gathered, will there be a place to house some of this data, you know? A lot of this would go back to what they call intellectual property, to some extent, you know. And so, are they ready to house the data? And are the tribes, you know, willing to give this data freely? That’s the other thing.
Is there going to be a bit more building of relationships? Is the consultation process going to be fully enhanced? Is the consultation process going to be streamlined, rather than agency to agency? Because, you know, right now you have an Army Corps of Engineers that has a different consultation policy with tribes than the Forest Service does. And so, you know, people do different things, right? I think people tend to forget that we are wards of the federal government, you know, and we do have a political relationship with the federal government, unlike any other minority. And so those things need to be enhanced, and self-determination needs to be pushed forward.
That memo that I sent you, I think, was a beautiful way to start. You know, because for the longest time my work is trying to show that our experiences and our replication through our practices are anywhere from 2,000 to 10,000 years old. And as a scientist, I know that replication is one of the key ingredients to make sure something is valid or not, you know. Can you prove this experiment over and over again? And we’ve done that, right? And so I’ve been trying to create ways, and one of the other papers is trying to show that what we do has the same conservation outcomes as what the Natural Resources Conservation Service had.
So why aren’t we able to receive funding? Why? Because our practices aren’t scientifically validated. And in my opinion, we should be accepted as the ones who are validating the sciences, not the sciences validating us, you know, because we have more experience. And it makes sense, right? It makes sense.
But a lot of people don’t listen, you know, and I think people get upset because, you know, you name your own thing, and territories get territorial, and so there’s no open-mindedness when it comes to this type of stuff. But I think we’re searching for something. Look at our environment. My God, man, Indigenous people sit on 80% of global biodiversity, on 25% of land, with only 5% of the population. Here in the United States we only sit on 2.6 percent of the total [unclear], but yet we are also locked into 5.4% of key biodiversity areas here in the United States. That’s amazing, you know.
And so that shows us that we’re still managing our land the way it should be managed, that people can actually live there. You know, we’re not like Leopold and Muir, you know, where land could only be pristine or conserved, conservation can only take place in the absence of humans. That is such a crazy thing to say. We’ve proven that, we’ve done that, and things like that. But yeah, so that’s kind of where I’m at on that.
Rebekah Carlson: So at Nori, we’re rewarding regenerative practices, and, like, the modern sense of regenerative, right? Going back to no-till, and like you were saying earlier, you’ve been doing something that soil probes are just now measuring. When you’re planting at depth, you’re looking at the plants, not some fancy technology, to measure the soil moisture, right? And so, you know, it’s like having all these older practices, but they’re not backed by this fancy science yet, that makes it seem like it’s actually not working, right?
So, like, in modern agriculture, like, oh, we’ve been doing corn on corn on corn for the past 30 years, and this kind of built up into this system. If you look back to like 50 years, actually it worked pretty well. We didn’t have the fancy tools to capture it. And if you look back for millennia, people have been stewarding the land very well and with very traditional practices. And that’s actually how we can get this kind of full ecological benefits from the land. In this memo, we want to value the practices of generations. However, a lot of people who are trying to get into it don’t have the generations of knowledge, right? So what kind of ways can we translate what you’re doing to people who are getting back into it, or are apprehensive of breaking a system that’s only 30 years old?
Michael Kotutwa Johnson: I think the biggest picture, the biggest thing that I find the most troublesome, is just the market, the market analysis that USDA has done, you know. They’re based upon efficiency and quantity, you know. They have to be efficient, and you have to have a lot of quantity. And so when you do that, you wind up having to come up with an agency called the Natural Resources Conservation Service, which was basically designed, in my mind, to help fix the problem that people were creating on all different levels, right? And so we need to move away from that a little bit.
You know, I think the small farmer, the tentative approach, I think is a good one. But, you know, we also have to figure out what, well, well, here it is. But you know, how are we going to subsidize those farmers who are moving away from conventional to regen, when there’s about a three-to-five-year window there where they won’t be making any money? And as I know, the farming budget has a very slim margin in order to be profitable. But getting back to your basic question about, you know, can this be learned, this thing, I don’t have a real answer to that. I mean, it took us three thousand years, and still we’re still adapting, you know, to get to that point.
And so I don’t think you can rush nature, right? I don’t think you can look at it like that. And I think, you know, trial and error has always been part of everything, right? Observation, you know. And so I don’t know if I really answered that question, but I think the movement’s good. I just think that we need to just kind of slow down a little bit and just kind of sit there, think, and find out what our end goal wants to be, you know. Is our end goal, will it be profitability? Is it like some cooperatives? Or do we farm just to take care of the land, you know? But as long as we’re going towards that efficiency-quantity part of agriculture, I don’t think we’ll ever get there, you know, because we’re too much invested in that. That’s a big problem.
Rebekah Carlson: I agree. So how did, like, in the smallest of ways, right, there’s so much Indigenous knowledge that is more valuable than, I think, like, efficiency, way more valuable. But how do you share that knowledge in a way that honors its heritage? I feel like I’m in conferences and they’re like, and this is the father of regenerative agriculture, like, regenerative agriculture didn’t start in 1962. I think somebody else actually provided that knowledge. So how do we honor the heritage of the people who’ve been doing it for millennia, and learn from it to actually adopt it?
Michael Kotutwa Johnson: You know, I think you just need to bring recognition to those things. I think, you know, nowadays there’s land acknowledgement, everybody seems to be doing land acknowledgements and areas, things like that. I think, you know, that’s very important. But, you know, taking the next step would be inviting some of these practitioners into your conferences, you know. Like over there at the Regenerative Agriculture Conference in Albuquerque, I was invited to come in and talk about some of these practices and things like that. And, you know, just do it that way. I think just getting a voice at the table. The person doesn’t have to have a PhD, you know.
There’s a lot of nonprofits out there that work directly with small farms, small Indigenous farmers, such as the Native American Agricultural Fund, you know, the First Nations [unclear], the Indian Land Tenure Foundation. There’s just a number of organizations that I’m sure would have contact information, that you can send an invite to your conference and set aside a little time, put them on a panel somewhere, you know, just so long as they have a voice, because I think, as you know, our stories are still having trouble being told.
You know, I mean, for example, just recently the Department of Labor just released Indigenous employment statistics. Never been done by a federal agency. Never been done. And so, you know, that’s important, because for the longest time, and it still is, to this day, we are just a forgotten society, you know. Our pictures are plastered all over museums, you know, but they’re not [unclear], they’re not like Inhabitants. Inhabitants was a great film only because it showed us in a contemporary setting, in this century, not in 1800, you know. And so that’s the beauty of the film there. It’s just, you can see that we’re still here and we’re still doing what we’re doing, but we still need to tell a lot of our stories. If the community would open up more, then we could do that, like today’s podcast, you know. Those are things that I’m grateful for.
Ross Kenyon: One of the stories that comes through, and this is probably the dominant theme of Inhabitants, is just how managed, maybe you like that word, maybe you don’t, but how much involvement human activity and decision-making played in what later Europeans deemed as wilderness, that’s just untouched. Is that part of the story that you think needs to be told?
Michael Kotutwa Johnson: Yeah, that’s part of the story. It’s just, you know, managing is living within what the environment gives you. You know, one of my favorite sayings is, Hopi is a place where we fit the corn, where we raise the corn to fit the environment and don’t manipulate the environment to fit the corn. You know, that really makes a lot of sense, right? And so that’s kind of what we do out here. That’s kind of what most Indigenous practices involve. They involve this intimate relationship with the environment, you know, from living there for a long time, the place-based approach of doing things. What grows well in this place? How can we help this?
You know, it’s not about a take-take-take relationship. It’s a reciprocal relationship. You give something, you take something. For example, out here at Hopi, you know, when I was asked to go gather some stuff for one of our [unclear] ceremonies, you know, take some sand from it and bring it back to the kiva, you know, we left a small prayer feather there, you know, as our way of giving back. And so it’s this, that type of approach, right? It’s that type of looking at things, you know. And I think that’s important. But I think one of the most important things about that film was just the concept of, we’re doing this for survival. We’re not doing it for economics. We’re doing it to survive, and to make sure we have another generation, you know. And so I think that was another key message I got from that whole entire film.
Ross Kenyon: How much of agriculture is this, man was not made for the Sabbath, but the Sabbath for man, kind of inversion, where we’re trying to force crops that don’t actually grow in a place? Rebekah, I’m sure you’ve seen some farms in your work, and I’m sure you have to, Michael, being like, nothing you’re doing here matches the environment that you’ve set these plants in. And even just corn, I’m thinking about corn, and thinking about corn in an arid environment seems foreign to me, but when we think long-term, that’s where it came from, where I think of it planted shallow, thousands of acres in the Midwest. And so it’s what belongs where, I guess.
Michael Kotutwa Johnson: You know, I think everything to me is keeping moisture, you know, everything needs moisture. Germination needs moisture. We need moisture. Our bodies are made up of 90% water. And so, you know, when you’re absent of that, we cease to exist, right? And so, but I think, you know, like I said at the beginning of the podcast, it’s our faith, you know, it’s who we are. It’s part of who we are. And so, you know, there’s a difference there. I mean, if you live with something for a long time in the environment, does that then, you know, we don’t have, like, for example, we don’t have thousand-acre fields out here, you know. We have a hundred, 125 acres is probably the biggest that we have, and so that fits within our niche, you know.
And so you can grow a ton of food. Pre-colonial contact, you should have seen it. Now you see the reduction out here, you know. We have records of Spaniards, that when they came in here, we had thousands and thousands of acres of different types of things, fruit trees, you know, fields, all combined, you know. And it’s just that type of approach, and we weren’t exhausting the environment, you know. We weren’t hurting the environment. We were able to feed ourselves. I mean, it wasn’t until, in my mind, we got the introduction of cattle that came to Hopi that we started kind of going through privatization.
And I’m not knocking privatization at all. But I’m just saying that it kind of breaks down the community, you know, as far as, you know, everybody getting together and having my version of a 14-row John Deere planter, having 14 Hopis with John Deere hats and their planting sticks going down the field, right? And so, you know, it’s just that type of innovation. But I just, I can do it. To me it’s just all about place-based, and getting to know it, and having a certain value system in place also, that makes sure that things become truly sustainable.
The mechanization of agriculture is just hard. I mean, it’s expensive, but it just takes away the value of some things. Where at Hopi, you know, we still plant a lot of things by hand, but the labor is intense, right? The labor is intense, but look what comes out of that. There’s a whole human wellbeing aspect of it. You’re able to become physically strong, you know, you’re eating the right things, you know, you’re doing all these things that you’re supposed to be doing. It’s way off the charts. When you went to do a, whatever they call, [unclear] analysis, whatever, if they were to put human wellbeing in it, ooh, that would be fantastic, you know. The quality of food that’s raised, my God, you know, there’s just tonnes of stuff that potentially could happen. It’s just a matter of harnessing it and moving it forward throughout the United States.
Ross Kenyon: You mentioned this at the beginning of the film, and it sounds like maybe you want to recontextualize some of those comments, because you said that privatization and introduction of cattle was really the beginning of the end of this way of thinking, and that really was a huge problem. But I’d be curious to know how you think about private property rights on reservations, about how farmland should be treated, how it’s done now, and if you have any policy thoughts on that.
Michael Kotutwa Johnson: You know, private property rights on the reservations is a nonentity. We have allotted lands. We have like six different types of land classifications on the reservation, which has a bunch of jurisdictional issues. You know, I think one of the main things that hurts American Indians and their involvement is this case called Johnson v. M’Intosh, which is basically the doctrine of discovery. You know, it basically gives us a right to occupancy, but not the right, the title, to our lands. If you don’t have the right to title to your own property, then what can you do with it, you know? And so it’s one of those barriers that kind of still stands in the way.
And I don’t know if we’ll ever solve that problem. I have nothing, no regrets or bad things to say about, you know, private property owners and things like that. But to me, things are better managed when things are held in common, you know, and depends upon what you’re doing. But for us, you know, we still do a lot of things, we still make a lot of decisions out here on consensus. What kind of society is going to want to stand around, come back five or six times, still not reach a decision, and then finally get a decision? That’s consensus. Everybody leaves like they’ve accomplished something, and things are a lot stronger that way and stuff like that.
But yeah, so I don’t know. I don’t have a problem with private property, you know, and I don’t know if I answered that question fully, because we do have, as far as farmers are concerned, you know, I think if you’re able to take care of that land, and I think private property does bring some sort of responsibility, because that’s yours, right? I mean, it’s like me building my house. You know, I’m going to take care of that house because I built it. You know, it’s like if you have a piece of farmland that you’re profiting from or you’re surviving from, you’re going to take care of that.
I mean, we’ve done that for thousands of years, when, you know, we don’t claim it. We don’t claim it, though, you know. We just manage it, because that’s part of our belief system, it tells us to do that, you know. This whole stewardship concept rather than ownership concept. And so, you know, there’s a difference there. And so, you know, I find out that the stewardship thing seems to work a little bit better, you know, because it allows me to get out of myself more than anything else, things like that.
Ross Kenyon: So I can definitely see that. I think if you take the policy out of it and just talk about living well, I can certainly see the stewardship angle being very beneficial. It sounds incredibly difficult, though, to not have title to something that you might occupy, in essence own. How could you take a loan out? How could you prove that the stuff there is yours? It sounds like it’s really hard to have economic development and growth with. How would it even work? Or does it?
Michael Kotutwa Johnson: It doesn’t work, you mean? I mean, you’re right, you know. For example, you know, every time we have a natural resource, like the coal extraction or something else, we have to have permission of the federal government to do that. They have to be the signee on the contract, you know. There’s ways around that now that we’re able to try to figure out, you know. There’s different laws that are in place that would allow us to do that, but a lot of them are very technical in nature. A lot of them are very bureaucratic, heavy paperwork, you know. And unfortunately a lot of us out here don’t have those skills.
Some of us, let me see, 2% at least. A lot of people don’t even have, six percent of the population on most reservations don’t even have internet access, you know, or running water, and then things like that. So how do we expect us to participate in these programs? We don’t even know how to get through the paperwork, you know. Who’s going to turn to, you know? It’s kind of a nightmare in a lot of ways. But there are ways, you know. We have this beautiful administration now, or people up in Washington, D.C., trying to make things, you know, Janie Simms Hipp, who’s now the general counsel, and she used to be the CEO of the Native American Agricultural Fund. She’s making a lot of headway.
Exactly. And who’s also a part of the Farm Service Agency, who’s the administrator there, Zach Ducheneaux, who’s also started to work at some of the paperwork problems. And so we’re making headway in it. We shouldn’t have had to do that, but we are making headway in that, and that’s a positive thing. That’s always going to be a positive thing. But we need our own people in order to do that. You know, we need people with backgrounds to do that. And so, but we’re making headway. It’s just a long process, man.
Rebekah Carlson: I had a professor once who said, like, a good community, a good sign of a healthy community is having a community pool. And this is where I went to undergrad, in California. Everybody had their own pool. Everybody, like, this is my pool, it’s only owned by me. But actually a healthy community has a place where everybody’s invested, everybody can gather. And, like, it actually shows communion on all levels, interest, stewardship and everything. What’s like the parallel of, like, an agriculture community pool? Like, how are we sharing all this knowledge?
Michael Kotutwa Johnson: Well, I think, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of co-op models, cooperative models. I think that’s the way to go, honestly, because everybody’s involved in the process, you know. Here at Hopi, you know, everybody out here has traditional, everybody has a role in the agricultural system, from the gathering to the seed selection to everything. And so it’s just an amazing thing, you know? And let me give you a shout-out on this one. You know, I mean, this is something that people don’t know that much, but, you know, at Hopi, I’m a farmer, but I don’t own my field. I don’t even own the harvest. I’m just out there maintaining it. Everything belongs to the women, to the house. It’s a matrilineal society.
It’s not so much that we define our gender roles, but it’s just, we do define them in such a way that it brings balance to our society, you know, and I think that’s so important. And I think cooperatives can do that in a good way too, is that whole sharing concept, you know. What is our end goal want to be, you know, and things like that, and move towards that. It could be economics. It could not be economics. It could be something like that. And so, you know, we just have to figure out different ways to get there. But I really like the cooperative model that I’ve seen or come across in a lot of ways, as far as moving down the road with agriculture.
Ross Kenyon: Anything else, what’s the consensus model look like? I’m sure you’ve been in some meetings where you’re like, all right, come on, we’re talking about the same thing. Or maybe, maybe it’s part of the fun and part of the togetherness of it, is working through some of that. But surely sometimes it’s frustrating and hard. Because that’s right. It’s a silly question.
Michael Kotutwa Johnson: No, it’s not a silly question. I mean, just people, people, you know, we’re all individuals, right? You know, thank God we’re not clones and have the same thought process, you know. I mean, we’re able to do what we like to do. And to me it’s just really about, you know, for us it’s about reaching consensus at Hopi. You know, that’s a very hard thing to do, but I think it’s a very valuable thing to do, because then everybody has a nice place in what you want to get accomplished. And so, but yeah, I mean, I’m just really happy about cooperative models, you know. I think, you know, because we’ve had that out here. Indigenous people have been doing that for a long time, you know. Everybody’s contributing. We all have a certain goal that we want to do and things like that, but I think that’s the way to go, in my opinion.
Ross Kenyon: How big are these groups of decision-makers typically when they convene? What’s an example, perhaps, of something that you’ve decided this way?
Michael Kotutwa Johnson: Cool, that. At Hopi it would probably be maybe 20 people or something like that. Oh God, one of these things, you know. But I’ve been to conferences where there’re just more, you know. There’s all different types of co-ops out there, food co-ops, you know, business co-ops, you know. I would like to have, I actually would like to start a tribal energy co-op here in Arizona at some point, because we have so much, we have so much land base, and we sit on a third of the land of Arizona as reservations. And so, you know, we could do something really impactful. And so it’s just a matter of organizing that, though, you know, having a heavy kind of something, a hard tribal energy co-op.
Ross Kenyon: And then you could have the people decide who they want to buy their energy from, given that your practices are so resilient.
Michael Kotutwa Johnson: Yeah, I would, I would choose myself. Yeah, but you would, you know. It’s things like that, and you know, it’s just, but it’s just, you know, a lot of this stuff has to be, you have to work with the council. You have to make sure that their wishes are respected first. I think that’s what a lot of people forget. You know, you just don’t come onto a reservation and expect things to happen. You have to get to know the people. Trust has to be built up, and so forth down the line, and things like that.
Ross Kenyon: So actually I grew up in the Phoenix area, ASU and U of A time, and I’ve been up to Canyon de Chelly and Chinle. If you were the head of a new energy co-op, is it solar? Is that what you’re doing at all, or do you have something else in mind?
Michael Kotutwa Johnson: Okay. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: And you certainly have the land for it. I mean, it’s a big land footprint. I wonder, would that actually be thought of in an appreciative way by your countrymen and women, or would it not be?
Michael Kotutwa Johnson: Well, I think it would, you know. On a reservation like we have, you know, there’s, we have a pretty good size land base. And I think, you know, as long as you move things away from our villages, you know, the centers of population, kind of put them out there, I think that could be very palatable, things like that. But I just think the whole organizing of the 23 tribes in Arizona to do something big like that, you know, I think would really, really bring the equity argument to the forefront, and see how many obstacles we’re going to have to go through when we start to do something like that.
Because I think that’s going to tell a lot, you know, about this whole equity argument that everybody seems to be talking about right now. But it’d be interesting to start something like that and see where it goes. You know, why not? You know, I really, I mean, for the last, since 1492, you know, we’ve had to deal with all these assimilation policies, you know, trying to make us become more civilized, you know. But yet we were always civilized, more than a lot of people out there, in my opinion, you know. We’ve done a lot of great things, you know. I mean, Jiminy Crickets, when the Aztec pyramids were being built down in South America, the black plague was going on in Europe, you know.
And so, you know, these are some of the comparisons that I like to make, not to discredit or make fun of anybody, but just to show that we’re still here, you know. We’ve done a lot of positive things. It’s just that we’re viewed a little differently, but we’ve made a lot of great contributions to the United States and to other parts of the world. It’s just that we continue to go unrecognized, and I’m here to bring that back, to get our story on the table, told.
Rebekah Carlson: Exactly, exactly. Exactly. Yes. Yes. Yes. Michael, in the paper, talking about the Indigenous traditional and ecological knowledge and the memorandum, do you think this will actually create change? Will this be accessible, so that any people can adopt these practices?
Michael Kotutwa Johnson: I don’t know how much adaption people can do, because like I said, everything’s place-based, and I couldn’t expect people to raise a farm like we do out here on Hopi, in Iowa, because they wouldn’t be economically viable. But I think a lot of small farms, you know, can adapt different areas. And I would encourage, you know, people to find out, if you notice, that paper talked about, you know, three different tribes in three different regions. You know? And so there you have, I would try to find out what some of the tribes are doing, what they traditionally have been doing, you know. Unfortunately a lot of them, you know, don’t live in their original areas anymore because of forced relocation, but they still carry some of that knowledge with them.
I think one of the main things that I’m trying to do is that we still carry a lot of our seeds with us. These seeds are just like us, they adapt, they’ve adapted, you know, and things like that. And so, you know, I would encourage people to do that more than anything. But, you know, like I said, you know, people just need to really focus in on and learn who they are. I always tell people to love yourself, you know, first, because if you don’t, you know, you can cause all kinds of other problems, right? So, you know, I always tell people to do that, and you know, and that all comes with just time, you know.
Rebekah Carlson: Do you think, like, so meeting people, meeting like government programs where they’re at, like the Conservation Stewardship Program, the EQIP program, like ways that they’re trying to drive change? But in your paper you talked about, like, there’s a lot of bureaucratic hurdles that these Indigenous people groups can’t overcome to actually access those. And so what do you think is that bridge, of the bureaucratic ways of accessing these government programs, with the fact that those are actually rewarding farmers for doing these practices?
Michael Kotutwa Johnson: Well, you know what I’m thinking about, and I’m going to put a paper out on it pretty soon, it’s the last part of it I’m writing, is looking at what I call the Indigenous field office technical guide, a regionally based Indigenous field office technical guide. For those people who don’t know what a field office technical guide is, you know, the NRCS has a field office technical guide where all your standard practices are in there, all your conservation practices. They’ve all been validated.
Now, let’s just say that, for example, we have an Indigenous, a second edition, an Indigenous field office technical guide, which has our practices in there, which don’t have to be validated, you know. It gets around that whole scientific requirement, and yet we’re able to still access those funds, you know. Not only are we doing conservation practices, but we’re also building up our human wellbeing at the same time by doing that, you know. We’re able to use these conservation dollars to actually employ people to do some of the labor-intensive stuff that we’ve been doing, right? And so it creates incentives for more of our people to go back there. And it’s kind of like what I would call the Renaissance of the Indian culture, you know. I’d like to have something like that move forward.
And so things can be done. It’s just a matter of how far we can take it. And I’m not just talking about working with the federal government. I’m also talking about the various nonprofit entities out there, like the Environmental Defense Fund and the Nature Conservancy and the Walton Family Foundation. I’m talking about involving more of those philanthropic organizations, because right now I think only 0.003 percent of their money goes to Indian people or Indian organizations. And so we need to figure out, well, here we are, you know, we need help too, you know, and we’re not asking for, like, you know, another form of welfare, but just, you know, some support to move a lot of these initiatives forward, just like equal opportunity. That’s all it is, more or less.
Rebekah Carlson: It’s just, again, bringing you to the table at the same level.
Michael Kotutwa Johnson: Exactly.
Ross Kenyon: Good stuff, though, Michael. I’m really enjoying this conversation.
Michael Kotutwa Johnson: Same. Thanks. You know, I mean, this is, you guys are pretty laid back, you know, as far as I’m concerned. It’s just a good thing for everybody to hear, you know, even the part where I’m talking about, you know, my drinking. I think that’s important, that people hear that too, because I can be, hopefully I could be a mentor. And I think, you know, as long as I’m able to instill some of that in people, then I’m good. You know, I’m happy. It’s really not about myself, it’s about everything else. And so, but you know, you guys taking your time talking to two of the agronomists, you know, that’s a good thing. If you’re a social scientist, I’ll throw a dirt comment in there. But no, well, you know, I got a little of that.
Ross Kenyon: I think people want to connect with someone as a person more than as a scientist or as an intellectual. I think knowing that that’s been a big part of how you even came to be is a great part of why people listen to shows like this.
Michael Kotutwa Johnson: Yeah, you know, and I kind of want to pitch a thing out there for, like, you know, the University of Arizona has just recently established this Indigenous Resiliency Center, which is going to touch a lot in agriculture, food systems, and data sovereignty. It’s going to encompass a lot of things. A lot of policy is going to be generated from there. A lot of pilot projects are going to be coming from there. And it’s a good thing, because I think, you know, these land-grant institutions, you know, a lot of them, there’s one in every state, but a lot of them were enacted under the Morrill Act, you know, and a lot of them are still profiting from the land that was ceded to them way back in 1862.
And so, wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could have these anchor institutions kind of take a little bit of responsibility and offer native youth free education, tuition waivers to attend these land-grant universities, rather than trying to come up with something that would supplement, give money to the tribe? Give it to the native youth, so they can go get a free education. Why not? Because, you know, we have a political relationship with the United States government. No other minority has that. We have a political relationship with the United States based upon treaties and everything else that we’ve done over time. So that’s something I really push for, once this thing starts moving down the road a little bit.
Ross Kenyon: But yeah, it sounds like your work has a fair amount of support from the Bureau of Indian Affairs and other groups.
Michael Kotutwa Johnson: Oh yeah, it does. You know, it’s just good. You know, I think the best things I did for myself, besides stop drinking, that was the number one thing, of course, but it was just, you know, continuing on and getting my PhD. You know, there are very few of us out there. And I think, you know, we need to put, you know, more of us into not only these institutions but across the board, like I mentioned, and so they can have a voice. You know, it’s hard to forget me. I know you guys won’t forget me anytime soon. It’s especially my laugh that kind of gets everybody going. So, you know, that’s just part of me. I always welcome these type of opportunities to talk about a lot of different topics.
I just happen to be a practitioner, right? I happen to be, you know, going into academia, but I’m also practicing what I’m talking about. You know, that’s hard to find, that’s rare. It’s very rare. And so when I talk to people like, them that do the grains and stuff like that, they kind of look at me like, what’s he talking about? But, you know, I have a little different respect because I am a farmer like they are. I just don’t do things like they do. But, you know, they could understand, you know, I can understand what it feels like when we lose a crop, you know, or things like that, or how hard it is to actually raise a crop, you know, and things like that.
So we have, they’re just, coming out to you, all farmers to me. We all have this very different way of looking at things, you know. We’re all trying to support our families and do what we can, you know, and so it kind of, it’s a common thing, you know. But, blah blah, I could, I can only say that I’m like a 250th-generation farmer. They go back about 10,000 years. But anyways, so it’s been fun talking to you guys.
Ross Kenyon: It’s been great for us too. We can wrap it up there. Surely there’s more to say, but we can put a nice pin in it for now. Michael, Dr. Michael Kotutwa Johnson, thank you so much for being here.
Michael Kotutwa Johnson: Thank you. Thank you, sir. I really appreciate that. And you guys have a wonderful day.
Rebekah Carlson: Yeah, thank you. Michael, such a pleasure. Learned from you. Thank you.
Ross Kenyon: If you like the timbre of this conversation, you should absolutely go watch the film Inhabitants. It covers a lot of the themes in greater depth than what we’ve done, and also in different ways from what we’ve talked about here. If you like the show, please give us a great rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Thank you so much for listening. Tell a friend, and have a lovely day.
Thank you so much for listening. If you could please subscribe and give us a great rating and review on Apple Podcasts, or a rating on Spotify, that’d be much appreciated. It helps us get our content out to more people. You can sign up for our newsletter at nori.com. Follow us on social media. We will catch you next time.
