Kiliii: There’s a really strong perception in the Western world or just in the industrialized world that nature is best left to itself, left to its own devices, that all the damage in the world would be repaired if humans aren’t in it. But actually what we see throughout the world is that native peoples have found ways to make nature more productive, not just for human purposes, but actually for other creatures.

Mike (narration): Welcome to the Mongabay Newscast. I’m your co-host, Mike DiGirolamo, bringing you weekly conversations with experts, authors, scientists, and activists working on the front lines of conservation. Shining a light on some of the most pressing issues facing our planet and holding people in power to account.

This podcast is edited on Gadigal land. Today on the newscast We bring you a special conversation with National Geographic photographer, Kiliii Yüyan. This originally aired on March 7th, 2023. But, Kiliii was so good at answering my questions that the conversation was given an award by the Indigenous Journalists Association this year under the category of Best Coverage of Indigenous Communities on a Radio or Podcast.

We talk about his recent storytelling initiative, Guardians of Life: Indigenous Stewards of Living Earth, made in collaboration with Gleb Raygorodetsky. This initiative highlights the Traditional ecological knowledge of several Indigenous communities across the globe. It is a massive undertaking. I absolutely love this conversation, and I re-listened to it recently.

And something that struck me about it isn’t just Kiliii’s contagious enthusiasm, his charisma, and his knowledge, but his deep appreciation for storytelling and the potential for journalism to make an impact and also just how well he summarizes that. I can’t emphasize enough how important his advice is in this episode for reporters covering Indigenous communities or any subject that’s related to the environment.

His work speaks for itself, and it does a great service to highlighting priceless traditional knowledge that confirms what the global scientific community is acknowledging. Indigenous peoples are the best and most effective conservationists.

Mike: Hi Kiliii. Welcome to the Mongabay Newscast. It’s great to have you with us.

Kiliii: It’s nice to be here.

Mike: First, can you please tell us what the Guardians of Life is about?

Kiliii: Yeah, so Guardians of Life is a project, right now that is funded by both National Geographic Society and the Amazon Climate Pledge, but the basic idea behind it is that, right now, in the world, we all know the environment is, in some trouble and, climate change is a big deal, but basically, very few people know that the majority of the world’s natural places that are left worth protecting are on Indigenous land and, that land is stewarded by Indigenous peoples. And so we stand to gain the most for the least amount of money or the least amount of effort, by simply supporting native peoples, on their land. And so it’s basically a project that looks at Indigenous cultures throughout the world on five different locations and looks at their stewardship efforts, to help people understand that the guardianship or stewardship of land and sea, is important.

Is this amazing human thing that people have been doing for forever and people know how to do it really well. And we wanted to just look at different ways that people do it. So, you know, from the stuff that we might’ve heard about, like, you know, stewarding the Amazon rainforest to stuff that people haven’t heard about, like how, something which is contradictory in the Western idea, like how hunting narwhals might be actually really good for narwhals in Greenland. All these kinds of ideas, that come from the Indigenous world are ideas that we are trying to capture and help people understand that it’s a combination of cultural priorities, as well as Traditional Ecological Knowledge that leads to just an amazing amount of conservation.

So there’s a lot of great lessons to learn. And I think ultimately, at the end of the day, to our final message, of course, is that, if you want to protect the land and the sea and everything in it, the best and easiest way to do that is to support Indigenous peoples, you know, to support, land rights and sovereignty, like by caring about humans that’s the easiest way to care about the environment.

Mike: And how did you come to meet and eventually work with Gleb Raygorodetsky on this project?

Kiliii: Gleb, you know, I have run across Gleb many times just sort of randomly, thinking about different things that are related to, about, environmental stewardship.

You know, but really, we started talking, especially after he, wrote Archipelago of Hope, his book about Indigenous solutions to climate change, and I think we just connected because there’s not very many of us that are working in this area around Indigenous stewardship, and he’s written basically the book, you know, on that topic.

And so, Gleb and I also share, we share some background. I’m Siberian native and Gleb grew up in Kamchatka. So, you know, we have that in common as well, but I think we just, both of us just care very deeply about, about, traditional ways of life on the land.

Mike: And so you kind of alluded to this a little bit earlier, but what sorts of stories are you and Gleb exploring with this campaign?

And what’s the big one that will be published in 2024? Can you share any details about that?

Kiliii: Yeah, so the story is slated for National Geographic magazine, and it’s a big story, definitely a very big story, it’s a minimum, of two years of work, it’ll probably be about 20 months of field work, before the story comes out, so it gives you an idea of how deep some of these big National Geographic stories are.

But yeah, it’s, we also are doing a book that’s coming out through Braided River, as well. The whole thing is just going to be a large campaign around it. And, we are looking at a whole bunch of different locations. So it’s north Greenland and northwestern Australia and the tropical Australia, Palau, which is in Oceania near the Philippines.

We’re looking at the Altai Mountains of Mongolia, which is near the border of Russia and China and then Ecuador in the Amazon portion of it. So yeah, five very different places with very different kinds of issues and problems, but also five different really five different people and all of these places pretty much are some of the most pristine places on Earth.

And there’s a really good reason for that. It’s because they have these intact human communities living on them.

Mike: That sounds really exciting. I’m looking forward to that. you have quite a storied resume in your time as a photographer so far, you know, from camping in the Arctic with Inupiat whalers to, living in the wilderness with nothing but survival skills and your camera.

I’m curious if when you started working on this project that you had a favorite memory or from a time from when working on those previous projects?

Kiliii: Oh yeah, for sure. Gosh, well, I somewhat, so much of it is so dear to me and, while I have a, like a lot of really cool, wildlife stories, my favorite ones are always with the people.

Like recently I remember, being in Palau. And I was running around photographing coconut crabs and this crazy, coconut beetle that, eats the, kills the coconut trees. And while this was going on, while I was making those photographs, and the community was kind of helping me out with that, I saw that the kids were playing on this island, in this atoll in the middle of the Pacific, is one of the most pristine reefs in the world, in this coral atoll. And, we’re in this tiny little island with a population of 40 people, and the kids are playing in the water and I look over, and I see them splashing around, and there’s an outrigger canoe that the community fishes with.

And they’re all just sitting on top of the canoe, or splashing around, with scuba masks, and chasing after the fish and just messing around. And I just thought like, Oh, just, it’s just the most beautiful human interaction, with each other and with the land and the sea. Like, it was just like, you could just, everything about it was like, this is the way that humans are meant to live, you know?

And so I just abandoned the coconut crabs–which weren’t that attractive anyway–and went down and just, splashed around in the water and played with the kids. And of course I was taking pictures too, but the pictures really show how carefree those moments are . I can’t help but look at those pictures and be reminded that Just how in the moment everyone is there and how humans and the natural world like just meshed together It’s like seamless almost, you know, and it just reminds me how how cool that was. Seeing all of that as our in our element. So that’s one of my recent lovely memories.

Mike: I was curious if you had any reflections as someone with Indigenous ancestry yourself, from working on this project. If you had any reflections afterwards or during, that you wanted to share with us.

Kiliii: Oh yeah. Yeah, for sure. gosh, that’s, that’s pretty much, it’s, I feel like this is all I think about sometimes and especially because talking about it with people who are interested like yourself, –you know, I’m in podcasts and that kind of thing–you do think a lot about your own perspective, and why it is that people find it interesting. Like, for me, I’m just who I am. And my perspective is all I have, you know, it’s, I don’t really know any different.

But now that I’ve spoken about, I’ve met a lot of people and talked about it a lot. I, I’ve really started to understand that, a lot of the way that Indigenous peoples view the world is very different, especially to the, modern industrialized world, but most especially to the Western industrialized world.

So being part Chinese too, there’s a lot of things in the way that I grew up and especially around Indigenous communities that I see within Asian cultures that are really not that foreign either, you know, even globalized industrialized Asian cultures too, but I think from the Indigenous perspective one of the biggest takeaways is that–it’s easy to say a little bit hard to understand–it’s very simple people are not separate from nature, we are part of it. And, you know, I think it, this is one of those things that’s tough to understand. For example, when, recently I was, I did a story on sea otters and, I did one half of the story on sea otters. So I did the Alaska portion versus the California portion, which my friend Ralph Pace covered.

And, in California, the story is that basically sea otters run on life support. They can’t, they’re, they’re not doing very well. They can’t survive. Great white sharks figured out how to hunt them down there. They were reintroduced and, they just, yeah, they just really need, a lot of help down there and they haven’t been able to really expand their population very well.

But in Alaska, where I was covering it, the sea otter population has just exploded since the reintroduction and they’re, they’ve been growing, an almost exponential rate, you know, so there’s now some 30, 000 of them plus some 8, 000, off of Vancouver Island in Canada and so, and they’re really not in like a huge area.

When you think Alaska, oh, it’s an enormous area, but the areas that they’re in, in Alaska is actually not that big relative to their population. So it’s probably getting pretty close to what it was before Europeans arrived in the Americas. And, what’s interesting about otters too, is it’s important to remember that otters basically came over to the new world at the same time that humans did, you know, so, humans have always been managing sea otters and, I’m talking about all this because, I think it’s, it’s just really important to remember that, humans have always managed the land and the sea and everything around us.

Like we sort of think there’s a really strong perception in the, the Western world or just in the industrialized world that nature is best left to itself. Left to its own devices. That all the damage in the world would be repaired if humans aren’t in it. But actually, what we see throughout the world is that Native peoples have found ways to make nature more productive, not just for human purposes, but actually for other creatures. There’s this kind of weird patchwork thing that happens, you know, you see it in forests all the time, but where native peoples have lived, you create little patchwork ecosystems that end up being a lot more productive for other species as well, in the same way that kind of beavers do, you know, beaver fells, some trees and creates a pond, then all of a sudden it creates a little mini ecosystem that is so rich with other creatures and humans did the same kind of thing. You know, they’d fell an area and, plant huckleberry bushes or something, you know. And those huckleberry bushes draw a tremendous amount of wildlife, it’s clear, so other plants grew up there and it’s the same thing with sea otters too.

So, you know, traditionally, Unangan or Alaskan Native peoples, often would basically, hunt sea otters in a 30-mile radius around human settlements. And this is something that we’ve basically, people have been saying for a long time, but science has recently, through research, found the same thing, both in Alaska and in Canada.

And so you’d like humans been hunting otters, but like a very low level, you know, like, you need a couple of furs here and there to keep warm, but you’re basically hunting them, or even just sort of discouraging them from eating the shellfish that are in the areas around human communities.

And, what happens is you see an archeological record that the mussel shells are way bigger. All the clamshells are way bigger in this radius. And then, once it gets outside of the human settlement areas, then the muscles and all the clams and everything, they get way smaller. And, the richness of the marine environment was just a lot more in these areas where otters are kept out of them because otters eat their multiple times their body weight in a single day because they don’t have blubber to stay warm.

So they, they’re just little eating machines and they definitely have a place in the natural world. It’s important. You know, they’re really good, top predators and they keep kelp ecosystems alive, et cetera. So they, they have an important place, but I think it’s, an important Indigenous perspective to remember that humans also have a place by keeping otters away from the shellfish beds, which they depended on, they created ecosystems that were richer and better for other forms of life also, you know, creating a sort of more varied ecosystem. And, I, it was a really, I guess not a surprise to me, but there’s a lot of backlash over the idea that otters need to be managed.

You know, that the whole idea that otters should ever be not just left to their own devices, but what you actually see in nature, if otters are completely left, untouched, what happens is they essentially eat an area out of shellfish and they slowly start starving themselves to death and they spread out to other areas.

And, you know, the young ones will get kicked out first and they just keep spreading, but they eventually get to the point where they’re starving themselves out so much that they actually completely abandoned the area. So there’s no shellfish left. And when they do that, it takes, over a decade before the shellfish revive enough for them to actually come back into it.

So it’s interesting to see, that, people have this sort of, I guess Westerners particularly have this mistaken notion that nature is perfectly harmonious like in a Disney movie, but it’s not. You know it’s a tumult and chaos and things are always changing and human beings have a role to play. Taking care of the natural world isn’t just important from our own purposes, but it’s good for the natural world itself, too.

Mike: That’s really great that you bring that up.

I actually was wondering about your opinion on something. In 2022, we spoke with Dr. Sarah Iverson on this show about a term that was coined by Mi’kmaq elder Albert Marshall for the concept of combining Western science with Traditional Ecological Knowledge for a research project with his community, which was undertaken with Dalhousie University that aims to better understand the movements of lobster, eel and tomcod in two ecosystems on Canada’s North Atlantic coast.

I was going to ask you if you had witnessed this blending of Western and Indigenous science as a part of your work, and it sounds like you, sort of alluded to it a little bit, but do you care to elaborate more on that?

Kiliii: Yeah, sure, definitely. I actually love this, this, the whole, the whole Mi’kmaq, perspective on it.

It’s fantastic. I talk about it, actually, frequently, this notion of seeing, “two-eyed seeing”, which is what they, they call it, certainly. Like, science is one eye, Traditional Ecological Knowledge is another eye. So the world is certainly a lot better seen with both eyes open. I love it, and I see this all the time, actually.

I mean, more and more scientists are learning to work with Indigenous communities. They’re starting to realize, or maybe be forced to realize, that there’s more to gain by working with native communities. But native communities long ago figured out that science had something to offer, and that in combination would work really well.

And actually, it’s a big part of the modern management strategies that the native peoples have with their place. Like, in Palau, for example, the Traditional Ecological Knowledge they have, it helps them to, they have these traditional governance structures that allow them to shut down certain areas, for fishing when the chief decides that, that place needs to recover.

And so whenever they shut down one place, they open up another. The reason it works is because, the culture all agrees that it should be done that way, and it has been done that way for thousands of years, and so they know it, and they believe it. It’s in their blood, you know? And, that two-eyed seeing, that Traditional Ecological Knowledge comes from the fact that the chief basically is just hanging out, and then his cousin comes over and is like, “Hey! I was fishing today and actually we, we haven’t been seeing a whole lot of, you know, like we haven’t been catching very many grouper over in this area” and the chief will say, “Oh yeah, cool.” And the next time he goes out fishing, he’ll swim around, you know, and, go spearfishing and he’ll see that there’s not a lot of groupers there and they know what to look for, right?

It’s a real different than when a scientist like drops down and is like armed with, to the teeth with gear and equipment. But, it just doesn’t have a baseline for understanding what is going on. Like here, , the Palauans have been watching that particular spot, that one chunk of the coral reef, their entire lives, like every day are swimming and fishing in it.

Their entire lives. So they have this very holistic, understanding of it and know that during certain seasons, yeah, there’s no groupers there, but that doesn’t mean that the groupers are less. It just means that they’re not there right now because that’s not when they’re supposed to be there.

But they know other times there should be a lot and we don’t see them that’s not good. But what the Palauans have also done is they’re really big on the science too, for example, they commissioned a study about the value of sharks. And I think they kind of already knew a little bit that sharks were important, but they wanted to be able to, you know, be able to say to their government and to international governments, sharks are important.

And so they did the study. And what the study basically shows is that if you fished for a shark, it was worth a lot of money over, over a period of its lifetime and all the, all the money would make down the chain. Each shark was worth about 30,000 dollars a reef shark. But the funny thing is that if you left it alive, then that reef shark in terms of the tourism dollars that it would create and the fishing dollars from the like healthiness of the reef, all these kinds of things that they were able to actually quantify–you know, it sounds a little bit vague because, I’m not the scientist who wrote that, the study–but essentially, the sharks were worth over a million dollars a piece, right?

And this is, the Palauan’s knew that looking at it by quantifying it would make this knowledge more powerful. They themselves like, already know that sharks are really incredibly important, but having, done the work, done the science, then they can go back and say, “Hey, this confirms our Traditional knowledge and understanding, and we can work with the traditional governance system that we have to actually make something out of it.”

You know, yeah, sure. We know that sharks are important and they’re worth a lot of money, but in lots of other places, it would be like, “Oh, so what, what can we do about that?” You know, like, Oh, let’s make some regulations, but the regulations don’t matter because the local people are going to poach the sharks anyway.

You know, but with the Traditional knowledge, you have a system, and a people who will voluntarily agree to be part of this system that takes care of their place because they realize that’s important. So, two-eyed seeing. It’s great. I love it.

Mike: And to that end, is there anything you wish storytellers would do more when sharing the stories of Indigenous communities, their culture, and the knowledge they have?

Kiliii: I think that I wish one, I guess one of the things that I wish people would do more, working with Indigenous communities is that they would spend a bit more time, trying to actually gain insights, A lot of what storytellers do–and I primarily mean non-Indigenous storytellers, but even for Native storytellers–it’s like, you can just as easily be ignorant or not understand what it is that you don’t already know. You have to kind of know, not just what is going on in a place that you’re reporting on or talking about, but you also have to know what other people understand, you know, what your audience, who you’re talking to, what they know and what they might not understand. And so, I wish that, people were able to look more for the insights that the audiences need to hear. Right now, a lot of what the reporting happens from that as you know, just historically happened in Indigenous communities, a lot is repeating stereotypes or telling us stories that we already know, you know, they might be true, but if we just keep going around and just, talking about the same kinds of things that everyone already knows, these stories that we already know, we don’t really gain any knowledge.

People are bored by the stories and, you know, it’s just like “what is the point?” Of doing that kind of work other than you get a cool trip to go to this cool place, and hang out with people and make pictures or whatever, you know, when we’re looking for sort of like, I don’t know, concrete isn’t the way to say it, but for more like actual change, for more, like, for actually moving the needle as it were, you know, searching for insight is key and searching for insight involves talking to people, understanding what it is your assumptions are and really searching deeply so that you understand that your assumptions are–many of them– are probably wrong and being open minded enough to explore what those, what the opposite of your assumptions might be, you know, and that’s really hard. It’s a very, very difficult thing. We’re all blinded by our cultural biases, our assumptions, you know, and being open to seeing a different way is, it’s exceptionally important.

And I find, I catch myself doing it all the time, you know, in the opposite direction to like, Hey, Indigenous peoples do this amazing thing or that amazing thing, and, nothing could be wrong, you know, but then, I sometimes I’m surprised, oh yeah, well, we overlooked this community overlooks this thing or that thing, you know, but, but keeping an open mind and really looking at all of this gives you great insight over time. I guess I would say, like, if, what’s the solution, you know, to gaining insight? You know, like, if storytellers really want to gain better insight, and tell stories that are fresh and not just a repeat, then it involves, open-mindedness, of course, but the big weapon is time.

Like, that’s what you have to wield, against a world of ignorance, is time. If you don’t have time, you just can’t understand a place and a people, and especially a different culture. You just, it’s just not possible.

Mike: And In speaking about, you know, moving the needle, it does seem that government leaders are beginning to listen more and more to Indigenous leaders and recognize their autonomy and land rights, especially over the past couple years.

And Indigenous people are increasingly being elected to office or appointed to government positions like in the United States and Brazil. But obviously there is still much more work to do and many rights still go unrecognized, both in word and in practice, despite the pledges that have been made to protect our planet’s biodiversity, such as 30×30.

So do you think that storytelling has the potential to break through and make an impact on Indigenous representation in policy and government, and influence the further protection of our biodiversity and lands upon which it sits?

Kiliii: Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, storytelling is, public opinion or what people know, like, you know, the kind of like cultural fabric that we all breathe in and the air that we don’t even know, all the biases that we have.

That’s the foundation on which everything else is based, you know, leadership are breathing that same air that the public is breathing. We all, but we don’t know how we know what we know, right? And storytellers have this ability to change the very foundation of what the public knows, what people know and understand.

And it’s sort of subtle. It’s hard to point concretely at things and say like, Oh, I worked on this story and that made this change, you know, and, in a way that’s almost kind of even better because it’s, it’s harder to demonize it, you know, it’s harder to kind of root that out and be like, Oh, it’s sort of insidious.

It’s, it’s wonderful in that way. We have to help people change the sort of these fundamental cultural assumptions, and it’s a really, really tough thing, but when you are able to make shifts on fundamental cultural assumptions it’s a way bigger longer lasting effect that will eventually be reflected in the legislation, you know, or policy or leadership, you know, like it’s sort of I guess it’s kind of a chicken and an egg sort of thing.

But like I think it’s a one great metaphor is the way that say, LGBT rights have unfolded in the United States. you know, there were lots of efforts at trying to legalize, say, like gay marriage. And, but, politicians really, even sort of pro LGBT politicians and presidents really didn’t make it a thing.

They didn’t try to pass those laws because they basically knew that it wasn’t really going to work until the public was on board. And then all of a sudden it’s, it’s like when the gay marriage laws were passed, everyone was like, wait, this came out of nowhere. It seems like, how did this happen? It wasn’t legislation.

It was that the public had already changed its mind. It had gotten over a critical threshold and that took a couple of decades, but eventually got to the point where that critical threshold happened and then the legislation followed. You know, the legislation was made possible because public opinion had already shifted.

And it was impossible to avoid. You know, and that’s kind of like one of the reasons why it’s irreversible, really. You might have some legislation that kind of pushes it back, you know, it’s like two steps forward, one step back. But, it’s a battle that’s not going to be lost. In the long run now. The fight has moved on, you know, it’s you’re now looking at transgender rights and queer rights and the things like that that are farther down the line, but the question of LGBT being accepted within society that in America, that’s a done deal.

You know, I don’t see that switching the other way unless it’s another, like, major overhaul of public opinion, which would take, again, decades to go the other way.

Mike: Going back to Traditional techniques, you are a contemporary skin-on-frame kayak builder carrying on Traditional knowledge in shipbuilding.

Can you talk about this? And what would you like people to know about it?

Kiliii: Well…well, the first thing is I’m a boat builder. Rather than a ship builder, haha. Ships are big!

 

Mike: Haha. Small correction. Yeah.

Kiliii: No, no, it’s all good. It’s all good. But it is, I think it’s also kind of funny because it’s one of those things where it’s just a semantic thing.

Like, when I’m in Greenland, Greenlanders will actually correct me when I say boat, because, for Greenlanders, a kayak is not a boat. It’s a kayak. For them, a boat is, is an open vessel. And so it’s very different. It’s not a class that they, they don’t, you know, they’re a different class altogether.

Very interesting. I mean, I love making skin boats, and they’re a big part of my culture as well, and they’re something that has been largely colonized out of us. When I began making them, I actually didn’t even know that Nanais built skin boats. I was building them, and then realized that, that our boats are, originally birchbark skinned and then what I learned over time is that actually that technology went further north to the Arctic and spread, but it actually came back down to us as we realized as a birchbark is actually not that easy to come by the big trees that you can, skin a canoe with, you know, skin a kayak with and, it’s a lot of work and they’re not as durable.

And so we learned that technologies came back down to us in terms of being able to use seal skin. And so we began to use seal skin to skin our kayaks as well. So pretty cool. I love the sort of spread of knowledge and sharing of culture that happened. But with skin boats, it’s been an amazing thing in my life.

It’s been a huge way for me to connect even as I’ve worked in Alaska with Indigenous peoples, they, the very first, like times I went up there, people knew that I was legit and they didn’t really treat me in the same way that they treat a lot of outsiders. You know, yes, I’m Indigenous, but like, if you’re not part of the community, you’re not part of the community, you know, you didn’t grow up there and you didn’t grow up there, but what happened is people very quickly figure out that I belong there. You know, the young people, for example, we would be out on the ice and, one of the sleds would break that’s nailed together, you know, they would, the young people would be tasked with fixing it. And they wouldn’t have any nails, they wouldn’t have any hammers, and they’d be like, how do we fix this thing?

You know, and I could pull them aside and say, hey, we’ve got some cord, let’s do this the old way and show you how to lash it together, you know, and that’s all, technology from skin boat building. And so I think, a lot of the elders and the, the people who are a bit younger than that recognize that, all of those ancient technologies, they’re what really bond us, that knowledge that comes from the land, you know, that’s your sort of universal language that we all speak.

Mike: And so, earlier you mentioned that Gleb was working on a book with this project. Are there any more details about it that you can share with us?

Kiliii: Yeah, so the book, through Braided River, which, yeah, the Guardians of Life book, it’s going to have, a bunch of things. So the National Geographic story is primarily international in scope. So it’s looking at those five places we talked about, but the Braided River book is going to include a lot of North America and Alaska as well.

That’s more of like the Braided River home base of audience, but it’ll include, stories that I worked with, these different communities for our, Turtle Island sovereignty story. And so I’m looking at the Tla-o-qui-aht of Canada, Vancouver Island, the Sikaitksisitapi, from Blackfeet, you know, Montana and Alberta, and the Klamath peoples in California, and just like amazing stories of, stewardship, like the fact that the dams on the Klamath River are going to come down later this year, is an incredible thing.

It’s the largest dam removal on Earth. Ever! And it’s just an incredible thing to see that that’s happening because of 30 years of pushing from Indigenous peoples, you know, like, and because of sovereignty. So, so I don’t include all that kind of stuff. And I think it’s going to be, it’s mostly going to be a picture book.

It’s like a picture book where each of the sections is going to have a segment written by Gleb, and then we’ll kind of tell that story through the pictures and captions as we go through it. So I think the idea, part of it is that, the photographs themselves, will make it compelling enough that it should be able to be, to sit on someone’s coffee table, you know, and be beautiful.

People will hopefully be, you know, that we want, we want the, the sexy people, the, sorry, the sexy pictures. Ha ha ha ha ha ha. Sexy pictures of the sexy people to pull people in, you know, to pull our audiences in. And, you know, it’s just kind of sort of a National Geographic model in a way, you know, like no one goes into a National Geographic story and it was like, Hey, cool. I want to read this from one end to the other. Like very few people are like that. They’re like people flip through, they look at the pictures, then they decide whether they want to read the story or not, you know? So we want to hook them that way. And hopefully it illustrates a lot of the things that we’re talking about.

So a lot of this is very abstract. We’re talking about environmental stewardship. Just all of it is so abstract and the pictures ground it in reality. That’s so helpful.

Mike: And you’re also working on a website, too. Can you tell us when this website is going to be up? When can people access it?

Kiliii: The website will probably actually come on about the same time as the book comes out.

It’ll all have to come out at the same time because of, different embargoes. Like, we have to, the Braided River, book, for example, can’t come out until after the National Geographic story, three months afterwards. You know, there’s all these sort of like, different, rights that we have to make sure to respect.

But yeah, with the, the website, we’ll have a lot of stuff that we can’t do in the format of a book. we’ll have like original audio interviews. So you can hear from people’s own words, when they’re talking about stewardship. It’s so cool to hear from, you know, someone in Greenland, whose second language is English, translate into English their notion of what stewardship is. And a lot of what they say is, surprising. Even though you know the gist of what it is they’re saying, to hear the details in their own voice is really wonderful. So cool. It just gives you a sense of how deep the knowledge of their own places.

Well, we’ll kind of, I think the website is going to be laid out a bit like the book where basically it’s going to be a series of photo essays, that kind of flow throughout the website, but we want to make it, as like entertaining, but, but deeply journalistic as we can. You know, we really want to, to actually have a lot of substance there.

Mike: That sounds great. Is there any place that you’d like to direct listeners to, to get more information about the project in the meantime?

Kiliii: We don’t have anything, up about it yet. Following me on Instagram is probably the easiest way because I’m regularly publicly posting about this kind of stuff. So if you can spell my name, which isn’t that easy, it’s a K I L triple I Y U Y A N. So that’s my handle on Instagram, just my name. You can always follow me and there’s, I’m regularly posting on my Instagram stories about what we’re working on for the project and you get glimpses of the, of the different places we’re working and all of that. But, also National Geographic, in, gosh, December Pictures of the Year issue, which was two months ago, and on also online, I did write a thing, about a sort of like a summation of a lot of the stuff that we’ve talked about today, but I’m looking at it from the point of view, especially of Greenland, what it is, why stewardship is important.

And there’s, you know, just drop in a few statistics there, kind of help people to understand how incredible Indigenous stewardship is and how overlooked it is. And so, yeah, there’s little bits and pieces of it, but the easiest way is just to find me on Instagram and follow. And, I say to people also, don’t be shy, like, I am often on assignments, so I can’t respond to everyone right away necessarily, but I almost always respond to everyone, that, sends me a message, unless it’s spammy.

Mike: Well, Kiliii, thank you so much for joining us. It’s been a pleasure having you on the show.

Kiliii: Great. Thank you, Mike. Banyalan. Much appreciated.

Mike (narration): If you want to learn more about Guardians of Life, I have put links in the show notes. As always, if you’re enjoying the Mongabay Newscast or any of our podcast content, like our sister series, Mongabay Explores, and you want to help us out, we encourage you to spread the word about the work that we’re doing by telling a friend.

Word of mouth is definitely the best way to help expand our reach. But you can also support us by becoming a monthly sponsor via our Patreon page at patreon. com forward slash manga bay Mongabay is a nonprofit news outlet, so even just a dollar per month makes a big difference and it helps us offset production costs. So, if you’re a fan of our audio reports from nature’s frontline head to patreon.com/Mongabay to learn more and support the Mongabay Newscast and all of our podcast content. You and your friends can join the listeners who have downloaded the Mongabay Newscast well over half a million times by subscribing to this podcast wherever you get your podcasts from, or you can download our app for Apple and Android devices.

Just search either app store for the Mongabay Newscast app to gain fingertip access to new shows and all of our previous episodes. But you can also read our news and inspiration from nature’s frontline at Mongabay.com or you can follow us on social media, find Mongabay via our accounts on LinkedIn at Mongabay News or on Instagram, Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon, Facebook, and TikTok where our handle is @Mongabay or on YouTube @Mongabay TV.

Thank you as always for listening.