Kiliii Yüyan: 80% of Palau’s exclusive economic zone is part of this marine protected area. So I figured, “Oh, hey, this is the answer. We create this marine protected area.” And I knew it was going to be a little bit deeper than that, but when I went over and spent some time with the former president of Palau, who was actually a contributor to the book—he wrote one of the epilogues. And he’s a very environmentally forward guy, and he brought Indigenous values front and center into the politics of Palau. But one of the things that I learned very quickly was that, while it might be about the values—and that’s the front-and-center bit of it, it’s the part that’s really easy to see—because when you go to Palau, there’s a little declaration that you get stamped into your passport that says, “I am going to protect the reef, and I’m going to protect the reef for the people of Palau and for all of our grandchildren,” and then you sign it. But as you go into it deeper, what I found was true is that, yeah, the values are just the very beginning of where it starts.

Mike DiGirolamo: Welcome to the Mongabay Newscast. I’m your 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, National Geographic photographer Kiliii Yüyan returns to the show to discuss his long-awaited book, The Guardians of Life: Indigenous Knowledge, Indigenous Science, and Restoring the Planet. Years in the making, this book was released on February 15, and in this conversation, Yüyan highlights some of the most significant lessons from his travels to nine different communities across the globe, documenting traditional ecological knowledge and how Indigenous communities share it, integrate it, and innovate upon it to repair, protect, and restore nature, as well as reform modern governance. The book itself, it need not be said, features stunning photography, but the contributions of community members themselves offer an illuminating glimpse into the lives and cultures of people in relationship with nature in a way that society at large arguably could learn a great deal from. Yüyan shares some of these lessons and his reflections on how sovereignty plays a role—not just in protecting communal freedoms, but how it’s critical to sustaining nature itself—and also the ways in which ceremony, and indeed spirituality, enhance everyone’s mandate to protect that which sustains all of us: the natural world. I can scarcely summarize the wisdom shared in this conversation. I find myself continuously going back to a statement from contributor Erjen Khamaganova featured in this book: “We are not separate from the Earth. We are the Earth.” Kiliii Yüyan, welcome back to the Mongabay Newscast. It’s great to have you with us. I think it’s been three years since we had you on the show, so it’s a pleasure to have you back.

Kiliii: It doesn’t seem like it’s been that long, and it’s great to see you, Mike.

Mike: Yeah.

Kiliii: Yeah. Looking forward to this.

Mike: Yeah. We talked about this project that you were about to—or that you were in the process of doing—and you’ve completed it now, so we’re going to talk about the completion. But I think it would be folly for us to assume that people listening have heard our previous conversation, so I wanted to do just a little recap about what traditional ecological knowledge is and why it’s so important. There’s a phrase from the book that I want to just highlight really quick for people, and it says that—oh, yeah—TEK. This is one of my favorite ways to talk about it: “TEK is an uncountable number of continuously evolving conversations embedded in particular societies in particular places.” I just thought that was beautiful. But Kiliii, can you expand on that wonderful description and what traditional ecological knowledge is?

Kiliii: Yeah. I have to say, first of all, that sentence—and most of the really amazing sentences in the book—was written by Charles C. Mann, who is a bestselling author, and he is the person for whom I did a lot of interviews and did a lot of the writing of the major chapter essays for the book. He has a really excellent way with words, making sure to include all the nuance behind ideas, but at the same time getting across the real thrust of hard-to-grasp ideas. Like, “traditional ecological knowledge” is a mouthful, right? That’s why we say TEK, or “tek.” And that’s part of why—Mann and I like using “tek”—because it does draw a comparison to “tech,” like T-E-C-H, right? And there’s the idea that Indigenous knowledge is also equally on the same standing as the thing that everyone’s all excited about.

Mike: Yeah.

Kiliii: Which is the tech industry. Yeah. And traditional ecological knowledge really is a—it’s a—we say it, and I’m always a little bit loath to say it because what it does is… it’s a community’s knowledge about the place that they live in and how they relate to it. And that knowledge informs how they are practicing all the things that they do with their life. It’s their way of living, it’s their way of relating to the land. In some terms, it’s their—I’ve had lots of conversations with people where, in a way, you can say that Indigenous ecological knowledge is basically everything that Indigenous peoples do, but then it just gets to be too vague. It gets to be too vague and we don’t know what we’re talking about. So we say “traditional ecological knowledge” because it’s about ecological knowledge. It’s about knowledge of place. So when we’re talking about Indigenous peoples, it’s about Indigenous peoples and their knowledge of the place that they live, the place they have lived for a really long time, and how they get along with it.

Mike: And you have been to a very diverse—an amount of places for this book—and I am just curious: how do you feel now that you’ve completed this book?

Kiliii: It’s funny that you say that. I guess, in a way, this kind of work feels like it is the work that I will be doing for the rest of my life, and what I’ve just done—getting to the book—in a way has just opened the can.

Mike: Yeah.

Kiliii: Opening the can. Opening Pandora’s Box. But yeah, it’s an amazing thing. There’s nine communities in this particular book, but these nine just happen to be ones that we chose for the project. Everywhere I go, I encounter more and more communities doing amazing stuff, and I’m like, “Oh man, that would be amazing in the book, or in another book, or whatever.” And yeah, it’s a little overwhelming, actually, how much cool stuff is happening. And so whenever people say to me, “Hey, this is really cool—is it scalable?” I’m like, “Yeah, actually, of all these communities that are doing it, they totally—they’re…”

Mike: Yeah.

Kiliii: It’s already happening.

Mike: Yeah. It’s all over the world. And something you said to me last time—and it’s funny to hear you say that, “Oh, you’re just opening the can of worms,” because you did spend quite a long time making this book—but you said to me, and I’m paraphrasing you hardcore here, something along the lines of: the most important thing you have as a journalist is time. If you don’t have time, you can’t properly tell the story. And so I find it refreshing that you just told me you feel like you’re just opening Pandora’s Box. So can you talk about how the amount of time you spent shaped the stories in this book and the communities you highlighted, and what were some of the lessons you learned along the way?

Kiliii: Oh yeah, for sure. A lot of what I do, when I start to work on an assignment or a project of some kind as a photojournalist—or a documentary photographer, rather—is: I go and do a bunch of research at the library, I talk to people, and all of that. And then I have an idea. I have an idea of what it is that I’m going to do, and what I’m interested in—like, why do I choose this particular place to go to? Why am I going to Mongolia? And then I reach out to the community and we talk for a little bit, and then we have some meetings over the internet. And then I go there and I have this idea in my head of what it is that I’m looking for, and the community’s already talked to me, so we’ve shaped some idea. And then I get there, and in the first week, a lot of what I see is exactly what I thought I was going to see. The longer I spend there, the less it is like what I thought it was going to be. And by the end of the time I leave, typically I have thrown away 80% of what it is that I thought I knew.

Mike: Wow.

Kiliii: And it is all completely different. And in fact, I think actually when I go to a place, I find that if I work on an assignment and I’m not surprised, I have my suspicions that I haven’t done a good job—that somehow I’ve missed something—because it’s so rare for me to go into a community and actually understand, and have my expectations match what I’m learning on the ground all the time. Sometimes the vague contours of a story are what you would expect, but that’s about it. When we start to get into the details of how it is done, I’m really surprised. A great example of that would be Palau. So I went to Palau on the recommendation of lots of other Indigenous friends, and then I went there and thought, “Oh, here, this is the story of this giant marine protected area—one of the largest marine protected areas in the world.” And 80% of Palau’s exclusive economic zone is part of this marine protected area. So I figured, “Oh, hey, this is the answer. We create this marine protected area.” And I knew it was going to be a little bit deeper than that. But when I went over and spent some time with the former president of Palau–

Mike (note): And his name is Tommy Remengesau Jr.

Kiliii: —who was actually a contributor to the book—he wrote one of the epilogues.

Mike: Yeah.

Kiliii: And he’s a very environmentally forward guy, and he brought Indigenous values front and center into the politics of Palau. But one of the things that I learned very quickly was that while it might be about the values—and that’s the front-and-center bit of it, it’s the part that’s really easy to see—because when you go to Palau, there’s a little declaration that you get stamped into your passport that says, “I am going to protect the reef, and I’m going to protect the reef for the people of Palau and for all of our grandchildren,” and then you sign it.

Mike: Wow.

What Kiliii is referring to here is actually called the Palau Pledge, and just like he says, it’s a stamp in your passport book, and is reportedly the first of its kind from any nation. The pledge itself was written with the help of Paulauan children, and the version I found didn’t quite match Kiliii’s words here, but as of 2017 the pledge literally reads

“Children of Palau, I take this pledge as your guest, to preserve and protect your beautiful and unique Island home. I vow to tread lightly, act kindly and explore mindfully. I shall not take what is not given. I shall not harm what does not harm me. The only footprints I shall leave are those that will wash away.”

Kiliii: That is powerful. That’s so cool. It’s powerful. That’s really cool. No, yeah, right at the beginning that’s what you’re getting into.

Mike: That’s the—

Kiliii: Co-signing what—discover over there.

Mike: Sorry.

Kiliii: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Totally. But as you go into it deeper, what I found was true is that, yeah, the values are just the very beginning of where it starts. There are lots of places in the Pacific for which they do have those values, but the real magic that I discovered there, as I started talking to people, was that the traditional governance structure that they’re all used to over there is what makes it work. What makes it work is family ties. What makes it work is traditional government. So a great example of this is: say the chief has declared a bul, which means that there’s a section of the reef that is now closed for fishing, because the chief went around and swam around out there and saw that there’s not a lot of parrotfish right there anymore. So he’s like, “Okay, they need to recover. Let’s shut this area down.” And when that area shuts down, another area opens up. The chief plants a woven coconut-fiber mat in the middle of town, and everyone drives by and they see, “Oh, there’s been a change in the bul,” or the closure. And so everyone knows, and they very quickly figure out where to go. But then, how do you stop the young boys that get on their boat, go out in the middle of the night, go to this place that’s been resting for two years—suddenly it’s full of parrotfish again—how do you stop them from swimming over there, diving down, spearfishing up 25 big parrotfish, and then taking them back and selling them and making money off of it? What happens in Palau is that the first part of it is the traditional governance. You know that there’s a bul and there’s that coconut-fiber thing sitting in town, so you know it’s there. There’s no denying it. You can’t miss it. You live there—you can’t miss it. But the other part about it is that someone has seen the boys driving there with their car, loading the boat, or whatever it is, and so word gets out. Auntie finds out that the boys were out there that night, and they know what’s going on. They know what’s going on. Yeah. So when one of the boys goes home, Auntie finds him and is like, “What the hell were you doing when I saw that your car was out there?” And the boy pretty soon wishes he was never alive. And you know that feeling that you are in trouble with a relative who’s not going to let something go, right? Yeah. That’s the kind of thing: would you rather go to jail, or would you rather have your auntie yell at you for a month and your family bring it up every time they see you for the next five years? They both sound bad.

Mike: Yeah.

Kiliii: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I think a lot of the kids would rather go to jail than have their auntie yell at them in that family structure. Part of what makes it work is the family.

Mike: Yeah. So just to clarify, because I read this section—and correct me if I’m mispronouncing this—but it’s the Hotsarihie Reef, right? The—of giant clams. The Hatohobei people.

Kiliii: Oh yeah. But I was actually talking about all of Palau. All of Palau.

Mike: So this is a system—

Kiliii: That—

Mike: Works for—

Kiliii: All of Palau.

Mike: Yeah. Entire. But just to clarify, this is literally in the governance structure. Like, it’s actually state sanctioned, right?

Kiliii: Yes, it is. Exactly. It is state sanctioned.

Mike: And that’s the part about it that I found so fascinating. Like, just imagine if, in Wisconsin, it was state sanctioned for your neighbor to chew you out if you cut down a tree or something like that. Like, that kind of—it’s like a community watches out for nature and each other and is willing to pull each other up when they’re not being good stewards.

Kiliii: Yeah, that’s exactly right.

Mike (note): Just to clarify for people, the act of a family member chewing you out for catching fish in a protected area is not state sanctioned. Kiliii clarified this with me. The part that is state sanctioned is the traditional fishery management system, the bul, that’s the part that’s state sanctioned. Not your Auntie chewing you out. That is gonna happen no matter what. According to Kiliii.

Kiliii: Exactly right. And it’s also about—that was part of why I accent sovereignty so much. When we’re talking about all of this, there’s so many of the communities that are in the book—maybe not so much, but a very large percentage of the communities in the book happen to be sovereign Indigenous nations or sovereign Indigenous communities to a large degree, and especially the ones that are their own nations—Indigenous-majority nations—where the nation’s laws and culture are built around the values and the traditional systems they came up in. So Mongolia and Palau and Greenland—these are places where, like in Greenland for example, you can’t own private property. There is no private—sorry—you can’t own private land. There is no land ownership, right? Fundamental to the way—

Mike: Yeah. That’s—

Kiliii: Like modern industrial societies exist. Yeah, the ownership of the land. Yeah. You can’t own land in Greenland. It’s considered to be the property of everybody. But in order for that to happen, you as the people have to be sovereign. You have to be able to make your own laws that are based on your own rules.

Mike: Hello listeners, and thank you for tuning in. Today’s conversation is about the book The Guardians of Life from Braided River. If you want to purchase a copy of this book, you can do so at guardiansoflife.org. Again, that is guardiansoflife.org. A link to this will also be in the show notes. If you want to listen to my previous interview with Kiliii Yüyan, which won an award, you can find the episode in the summary at mongabay.com. Back to the conversation with Kiliii Yüyan. That’s a great jumping-off point. Let’s talk about that, because I want to talk about the Inughuit community in Greenland.

Mike: This is—there is a really incredible story in here that I read. But from what I read in the book, this kind of goes back historically more than a hundred years. With the introduction of westernized outside technology, it allowed the community to take their traditional hunting skills and begin to overdo it and amass wealth. And what used to be a community that prioritized sharing bounty began to stockpile money. The way I read it in the book was that the community elders really got concerned about that, and so in 1927 they began forming councils of respected elders who pushed more traditional values of sharing the hunt, sharing the bounty. And I found that really inspiring, because it’s a bit like the story you just told about Palau, where that traditional knowledge—that way of doing life—that prioritized community health was actually integrated into the governance structure. So can you talk about how it’s like now, and what you saw there?

Kiliii: Yeah, definitely. The structure—even the governmental and formal organizational structure for Greenlandic hunting and subsistence. One of the things that Greenland does that’s really interesting is that to be a subsistence hunter is a profession. So you can make a living as a professional hunter or a fisherman. And so there’s actually particular classes or categories for which you have a license or not. So if you’re licensed as a professional hunter—which means you’re a full-time hunter, there’s a full-time and a part-time hunter—then that means you can make a good living doing it. Some hunters make the equivalent of maybe $80,000 or something like that. That’s pretty good. Yeah, it’s pretty good. It’s a good living. And so for that reason, the structure of society doesn’t fall apart like when you have people transitioning from hunting and gathering to a global monetary economy. Subsistence remains a huge part of the existence of things. And because there is subsistence, people have their hands in the water, so to say. They are constantly still monitoring the narwhals and watching and paying attention to them and loving all of the things that come with hunting narwhals and being a hunter. Like, when you’re a hunter, you can’t take too much. If you do take too much, next year there’s not going to be more. And those communities have learned that over a long period of time—they’ve long ago figured it out. And places that are close to the edge in terms of balance, especially places like the Arctic, where if you take too much, you’ll immediately feel the effects of it in years to come—they know. They remember what happened. And so because the hunting has not gone away, they don’t go down that road. But you also have people—because subsistence hunting is a good living—people still really depend on it for food too, and that’s another big part of it. In the community, you have not only the money that it brings in, but you also have status, and that’s really important. A big part of how a lot of these communities work is that the people who are managing the resources—the people who are hunting—are also very high status. It’s high status to be a hunter, and that means that if you are a hunter, you really have to take care of your profession, and you have to take care of the land. You have to take care of everything around you.

Mike: Yeah.

Kiliii: Yeah. I think I’ve gotten off track here a little bit, though. I’m trying to remember what you were originally asking.

Mike: No, that was in line with it. There was a part of it where I read that if you are, let’s say, a hunter and you did really well, you have an obligation to share the bounty with hunters that struggled. That’s what I read at least. And I found that to be, one, just really awesome, and also… why can’t we just do that in other places, in other societies? I feel like it would solve so many problems. And so it was really nice to see that being done here. Your thoughts—anything you want to expand on that?

Kiliii: Yeah. The way that they make sure that there is sharing, for example, is that the hunters in Greenland all have their own hunters union, as it’s called. So the hunters union in Qaanaaq, in northernmost Greenland, is composed of 30-something hunters—30, 35 hunters—and they are the council. And they are representative of all the other hunters, and most of them are important hunters in the community. So they get together and they talk about this stuff, and they’re constantly hashing it out. And it is hilarious to go to these things because you’ve got hunters yelling at each other for various things. They’re mostly good buddies, right? So they talk and they reminisce about good hunts and things like that, but they’re also talking about serious stuff. And you’ll hear one of them yell at another one: “Hey, I saw that you were out there and you’re talking about using traditional kayaks, you’re talking about doing all this stuff, but look—isn’t that your son out there with an inflatable, like a tire inner tube for a float instead of the traditional seal float?” And so it gets up in there—they’re talking about that stuff. And they keep each other accountable to these values that they espouse. And when we’re talking about things like sharing, for example, if they see that somebody—especially a young hunter or something—has not shared, that they’ve gone and taken in narwhal and they have wasted some of it, or that they haven’t shared it, then the axe comes down. The elders get out there and talk to those young people and they’re like, “This is not who we are. This is not what you do.” And because the societal fabric is still very tight, those elders are who the young people look up to. You don’t want them yelling at you. That’s not cool. That means that you screwed up.

Mike: That is so cool. That is really—yeah—that is so cool. Wow. I’m really inspired to hear that. It just seems like a very good way to keep the social fabric of a community, of a society.

Kiliii: It is. Definitely. Yeah. Having the official designation does matter a lot, though. You see the difference between places like Greenland and Canada, for which Canadian Inuit and Greenland Inuit are very closely related. But over in Canada, there is no option to sell the meat of a narwhal that you’ve hunted, or of a seal that you’ve hunted. You can’t sell it at all, even to your own community, so you have to share it. The idea in Canada is that if there’s no profession around it—if you can’t sell it—then sharing will continue. And they’re right, in one sense, that there is a bit more sharing happening in Canada among Inuit peoples. But the differences between Greenland and Canada couldn’t be more stark. The Greenland stocks of narwhals, et cetera, are doing better. They are hunting more traditionally. They’re doing all these things that are different because they didn’t just shy away from looking at the modern world and realizing that in order to hunt—to be a hunter, and to be a good ethical hunter, to be a great hunter—we have to keep those people alive. We have to keep them going. Because if they can’t keep going—if they quit and get a government job—then their ethics won’t spread. Their ethics won’t continue down the line. They won’t get passed on because they’re no longer doing it. And that’s a big difference.

Mike: Wow.

Kiliii: That’s a really big difference. So they’re not just—when we talk about traditional ecological knowledge, I think the part that is often a little bit not quite right is the “traditional” part of it. There’s a lot we want when we say traditional, because we want to say there’s a tremendous amount of knowledge that came from thousands of years. But people continue to innovate as the world around them changes. And the smartest ones are balancing how to deal with the changing world—being in the changing world and dealing with a monetary economy—but still finding ways to make sure that the values and the traditions are passed on.

Mike: Yeah. I really like how you just made that distinction there. Because the word “traditional” itself carries this certain type of weight or meaning, and you’re saying that it’s actually more adaptable, integratable into society as we see it today. So I really want to talk about the community you visited in Mongolia. And correct me if I’m mispronouncing her name: Erjen Khamaganova. Is that how?

Kiliii: That’s pretty good.

Mike: Okay. Erjen Khamaganova wrote possibly my favorite line in the book about Mongolia’s Altai Peoples. She wrote: “A graduate student once asked me if our ceremonies were important for conservation. The question was sincere, but it revealed a deep misunderstanding. I replied, they’re not important for conservation. They are conservation. The very idea of conservation implies a separation between humanity and a nature that must be managed from the outside. That separation is an illusion.” I really loved that line. I loved it. Can you tell me: how were the ceremonies performed by the Altai Peoples conservation itself?

Kiliii: Ha. Erjen probably says it better than anyone that I know. She has a real way with words. It’s amazing to me—considering that English is not only not her first language, it’s not even her second or third language. Yeah, she’s amazing. I think she says it best in—well, I will actually have another quote that is even better, that helps to describe that. Actually helps to talk about why that is.

Mike: Okay. Please do. Please.

Kiliii: So she says—and I love this because I use this in presentations sometimes—Erjen says: “Westerners describe conservation with technical jargon—biodiversity and CO2 emissions and stuff like that. And from there, our spiritual perspective seems irrelevant, but we don’t see it that way. That’s because science can’t give us purpose, nor can warnings of abstract environmental doom. They can’t provide the emotional wellspring necessary for the long, hard work of taking care of the land around us. But here in the mountains by the sacred fire, when we hear the shaman’s prayers, we can feel that purpose in our hearts. Ceremonies are conservation.” There you have it.

Mike: Yeah. Yeah. For those who can’t see, I’m shaking my head like, yes. Yes. I just had this conversation with Megan Mayhew Bergman about the emotion integrated into the writing of science being critical for communicating it and getting people to actually care. And it’s not the science itself or the data that changes people’s hearts and minds. So this is—yeah. Wow. I’m so glad that you pointed that out. Because I think it’s important to highlight here: the needs of the survival of nomadic communities, or communities that live in places like Mongolia, are so dependent on natural living conditions. That’s true for all of us in the world—we’re all dependent on natural conditions—but particularly in a community where every decision you make has giant impacts. So I was wondering if you could talk about that, and how they manage that and communicate the importance of that to each other.

Kiliii: Before we go down that, I have something interesting that I think you’ll find interesting that relates to this previous conversation also.

Mike: Okay. Yeah. Go ahead.

Kiliii: Yeah. One of the things that I’ve been finding out recently, which I am really excited about, is this notion of exactly the stuff that Erjen is talking about: how important animism, or böö mörgöl, is for Mongolians. What I’m starting to see all over the place—and this blew me away—the deeper I go into Indigenous practices, the more I’m starting to realize that secularism has actually destroyed a lot of our ability to be stewards of the land. So in places like Mongolia, which was formerly a communist country—in the ’90s it stopped being communist—and when that ended, communism was forced secularism. You weren’t really allowed to worship the spirits of the land. Once communism ended, people returned to shamanism. That number has risen dramatically—the percentage of people that are shamanistic—and so you see that also rise back in the care for the land and that kind of thing. And I now hear stories about this happening all over the place. The pink river dolphin in the Amazon: when Christianity came to some of the peoples in the upper Amazon, when Christianity came over and started to really take over, that pink river dolphin—which was a really important being in their spiritual life—it ended, and it went from being a sacred being to being food. Ooh. And the pink river dolphins started to suffer dramatically. Numbers declined really quickly, and it’s been really tough. But there has been a resurgence in traditional beliefs about it, and the pink river dolphin is coming back. It’s amazing.

Mike: Yeah, that is—yeah.

Kiliii: And—

Mike: Yeah. I’m so glad you brought that up. Because it’s a conversation I don’t think we have a whole lot: this connection between ceremonies and land, and the bond that creates, and how you view the wildlife—it really does impact it. Thank you for bringing that up.

Kiliii: Yeah. It’s just one of those things that I get excited about because it counters what I learned when I was growing up. There are some deep-held beliefs, right? Like, “Oh, you grew up thinking religion is bad, terrible, whatever.” I didn’t grow up thinking religion was bad. It’s more like I just didn’t grow up with religion. Period. But then as I go down this route, I find that this is true in more and more places, and that there’s a lot of this association going on. And so the breakdown of spirituality is a really big deal, and I think that this is pretty significant. It’s one of the reasons that science has trouble addressing things like conservation.

Mike: Yeah. Yeah, I will say, Kiliii, I did grow up religious. I was raised Catholic. I’m no longer Catholic, but my former religion did not actually build any sort of sense of meaning with land or nature. And so I find, personally speaking, more of a religious experience with nature—even though I’m not part of an organized religion, even though I’m not part of a spiritual denomination, so to speak. Just being somewhere, like going to the Blue Mountains here in Australia—to me it feels like a religious experience. Seeing a koala in person feels like a religious experience to me. There’s just something mystical about them—something that I’m drawn to, something that I want to protect. I think that while not saying that all religion will help you connect with the land, it wasn’t my experience growing up that that was the case, but clearly something about spirituality for many cultures and communities does, and that is something that I don’t think we talk about enough today. So thank you for highlighting that.

Kiliii: Yeah, that’s exactly right. And a big part of it is that it’s place-based spirituality, right? You have this pink river dolphin, which exists in the spiritual practice as a specific entity that’s called out. When you look at something like Christianity, how many animals in there are the animals that you see in your backyard?

Mike: Yeah. It’s tough.

Kiliii: Not a whole lot of them.

Mike: No. It’s not really a thing. Sitting in a suburb in Ohio, I didn’t really have a connection to the animals that were talked about in the Bible. But yeah, I do want to talk a bit about the ceremonies of the Altai Peoples and how that helped sustain their nomadic way of life. Can you fill us in? How did that work?

Kiliii: One of the things about the ceremonies is that when shamans do the ceremonies, it brings everybody together. And so when there is a really big ceremony, like the fire ceremony—which is being done again—the sacred fire brings everyone together in the late spring, and people come from all over, nomads come from all over, to come and be a part of that experience. And so then you have a shared spiritual experience and a shared cultural transmission where everyone’s on the same page about this. And it’s a moment in time to remember that you are there. Because fire is an important element on the landscape, but it’s also important that you are sending offerings off to the spirit of the snow leopard and to the spirit of the mountain—the particular Altai mountain. And these are the particular places and the particular creatures and the particular things of which everyone is on board, and they’re reminded by each other how important those things are, and that those things are sacred, and how to cherish them. I found it amazing when I was over there: Buyanbadrakh (Buyaa) Erdentsogt, who is one of the major shamans in Mongolia, took it up when he was just 18, and he led the first return of the sacred fire ceremony, and we did it. A whole bunch of people showed up. Even though shamanism hadn’t been practiced in a long time—or had been underground, basically—a whole bunch of people showed up out of nowhere. They did the sacred fire ceremony, and in the morning they woke up to snow on the roofs of the gers, the roofs of the yurts, and there were snow leopards sleeping on a lot of the—

Mike: Oh wow.

Kiliii: That doesn’t happen every day. It’s very rare. And they were all just completely blown away by it, and they thought, “Aha, we’re onto something here.”

Mike: That is so cool. I want to make sure—we are taking up way more time than I thought we would, way quicker. So I want to make sure we talk about this one aspect of the book before we run out of time. Cool. So you covered the Karuk, the Yurok, and the Hoopa activists who helped get the Klamath Dam removed. And this is just an awesome story. We’ve covered it here at Mongabay. For those who haven’t read it, Liz Kimbrough covered it for us—I’ll link that in the show notes—but I want to talk about the moment in the book that was described where members of the Yurok, Karuk, and Hoopa communities showed up to a shareholder meeting of Berkshire Hathaway, which was, I believe, the owners of this dam, in Omaha, Nebraska. And people might be familiar: the multibillionaire Warren Buffett is the owner of Berkshire Hathaway. But anyway, they showed up with traditional garb under their clothing, and then when it was time for shareholder audience questions, they revealed their traditional garb. And they asked Warren Buffett why he was destroying the Klamath River. And he tried to dismiss their questions, but they kept asking. And the part—this is the part I really like—so they left, and someone from Berkshire Hathaway called one of the activists, Leaf Hillman, and they were like, “Hey, we really didn’t like that. We’ll take the dams down, but you gotta promise to never come back to a shareholder meeting.” And he was like, “I never wanted to go there in the first place.”

Kiliii: That’s right.

Mike: And I thought, that’s—

Kiliii: Right.

Mike: Yeah. So one, funny, but also, oh my gosh, it works. Protesting works. Showing up, having your voice heard, works. And I thought this was one of the most inspiring parts of the book. And so I wanted to hear your thoughts about that, because you photographed Leaf Hillman and Lisa Morehead Hillman, which is one of the most beautiful images I’ve seen in the book, where they’re in front of the newly uncovered reservoir. You can just feel the decades lifting off their shoulders, that they’ve been fighting for this. Can you talk about this? What was it like to speak with them and photograph them?

Kiliii: Leaf and Lisa are just absolute powerhouses, and they’re really beautiful human beings—just, like, everything. But they’re very authentic and honest, and they’re very open about whatever they’re feeling or thinking about—that’s what we’re talking about. And that’s the sort of thing I really love. And I think that’s also—I’ll just say—what the great power of the book is, in a lot of ways: the power of photography. We do a lot of stuff in the conservation world where we talk about these things and there’s plenty of jargon, plenty of all this and that. But actually seeing it—what does it mean when we’re talking about shamanism? What does it mean when you remove a dam? What does it mean to the people? How does this kind of stuff work? And you see it in people’s faces, and you see the fish—all of that—that’s what really, I think, makes why the book has been so well received so far. And it’s not even officially released yet. Reviews have been pretty amazing. Leaf and Lisa—I love them to death. We went down there and they were so happy to be down there because it was their first time down on the banks of the wild river, all the way down there. And you could smell it. I had been there previously many times when it was still a reservoir, before the dams were removed, and it smelled like algae and a little bit like death.

Mike: Yeah.

Kiliii: Then when we were down there, it smelled like mayflies, and it smelled very alive, and it smelled cold. And so those two were just laughing and messing around. I had Leaf and Lisa stand in the river because I thought, “Hey, maybe they will feel something, and I’ll be able to capture that through the photograph.” They did. And part of it was just because they got that sense of childlike play, where they were just squishing around in their shoes in the river. And Lisa’s kissing Leaf, and they’re just lovable. You can tell that the moment of being in the river, feeling the river through sensory—that just, it’s in their bodies. And when you take that photograph, it’s in their faces, it’s in their body. It’s a really beautiful thing. And Leaf is such a great storyteller. I love his stories. He’s so hilarious. They’re both great storytellers. But one of the stories that Leaf told me that is in the epilogue for the book, which is a corollary to the story that you just told there, is that they asked him—asked Leaf and Lisa—to lead a tour of the removed dam sites, like a tour of the Klamath River for all the heads of all the state and federal agencies that had removed the dam. And Leaf was like, “Okay, sure.” And so they went, and they go down there, and there’s 25, 30 of them—there’s a whole bunch of them. They get out there, and several of them run up and give Leaf a big hug, and they’re like, “Hey, we did it. We did it.” And Leaf, in his head, is like, “I remember you. I remember when you fought us bitterly and said that removing the dams could not be done, that it was impossible, that it was a pipe dream.” But he didn’t say anything. He just gets that look on his face that he does when he’s not talking. He goes down there, he shows them around the dam removal sites, and they get there and several of them burst into tears, and one of them comes up and gives him a big hug and is crying. And Leaf thinks to himself: “That’s it. This is one of those people that fought us the entire time, and now they’re here with us celebrating the removal of the largest dam removal in the history of the world, with us here.” It happened. They had to do the work. It was something that eventually all of us came together on, but the main part was that we had to lead the way. Indigenous people had to lead the way to make that possible, and to believe in it. And I thought: wow. That’s a really beautiful, hilarious story, but also very inspiring.

Mike: I have nothing to add to that. I’m just going to let that one sit. That is incredible. Just so many reflections on that.

Mike: We are running short on time, but all good. One last question I had for you is that you spent some time with the Siksikaitsitapi peoples in North America, and the story of the American bison is often told as one of recovery in one sense, but there’s some complicating factors here that aren’t talked about a whole lot in regards to the situation. Leroy Little Bear says in the book, “I say that the buffalo is the best environmentalist you can have.” Can you explain what Leroy Little Bear meant by that?

Kiliii: Yeah. Leroy’s talking about the buffalo in many different ways. There’s a lot of different ways in which it is the best environmentalist, but one of the things that people don’t understand about the bison is that, unlike cows, the way that it grazes on the plains is actually carbon-absorbing—net carbon-absorbing. So it goes and it eats the grass, but it doesn’t eat it all the way down. And as a result, you end up with these native grasses that are better able to recover, and they pop out and they absorb a lot more carbon.

Mike: Kiliii further clarified this with me after our call. While Buffalo do promote native grasses, it’s actually because they trample the native grasses that causes grass to store more carbon down into their roots, greatly increasing carbon sequestration in the soil.

Kiliii: So it’s a really interesting set of studies that have been done looking at that. Bison are basically able to attract a lot more carbon into the ground, and they’re able to bring back a lot of the native grasses because they will eat out the invasive grasses and leave a lot of the native grasses in a way that stimulates their growth. For native grasses, when you eat them down to a certain level but don’t eat them all the way, it makes them grow faster and taller and better. But not so with the invasive grasses. And so when you have bison on the land, it is restoring the plains. And when the native grasses come back, so do the sage grouse and all the other crazy critters that live in the plains areas. So you have this tremendous explosion. The bison—it’s really hard to imagine the sheer numbers on that, but we are talking about hundreds of millions of buffalo, which is now down to tens of thousands of buffalo. It’s actually back up to tens of thousands of buffalo, but that’s just the start.

Mike: Yeah.

Kiliii: And there will be hundreds of millions again. But think about the effect that hundreds of millions of them will have on the plains. It’s an incredible thing. Yeah.

Mike: Yeah. I feel like our time has been too short, but is there anything else that you want to highlight about the book for our listeners?

Kiliii: My hope is that people check out the book and are able to see the photographs and see all of this stewardship in action. But also one of the things that I really love about the book is that we have people’s direct words in there as much as possible. So there’s more than two dozen Indigenous contributors who have contributed their own direct words into the book. And so you’re reading what they’re thinking, et cetera. And as we try to move around and present this material through public speaking and stuff like that, there will be exhibitions rolling around the world, and the communities themselves will be having their own exhibitions. They’re doing their own talking for their own communities in their own places. And we’re going to bring everyone together for an event of some kind where they will get to mingle with each other and hang out and talk and share. And so that’s really exciting. Also, a portion of the proceeds—at least 10% of the proceeds—are going towards the Cofán Survival Fund. So that is for the Cofán people of the Ecuadorian Amazon, who have done an amazing job and continued to be essentially the OGs fighting the oil industry and preserving huge sections of the Amazon, safeguarding huge sections of the Amazon on basically no money at all. They’re fighting very well-funded cartels and things like that with basically no money. And they have been doing an amazing job. And so every little dollar that goes there gets you a lot further than it goes in lots of other places. Just as a very brief example: Yosemite National Park and the Cofán lands are about one and a half times the size of Yosemite. The Cofán do about the same level of services that Yosemite park rangers and personnel do. The Cofán manage their lands on about $30,000 a year currently. Wow. Yeah. And it’s $300,000 now, but Yosemite National Park is managed at $33 million a year.

Mike: Wow.

Kiliii: Every single dollar that goes to the Cofán is vastly more useful and vastly more helpful than every dollar that goes to Yosemite. So when we’re talking about bang for your buck, I hope the book gives you an idea of how effective people are when they are defending the place that’s their own home.

Mike: Wow. Thank you for highlighting that. Where can people—or where would you direct people to go—to preorder a copy of the book?

Kiliii: Oh yeah. There’s plenty of places to get it, of course—all the usual places that you can find books—but also you can order and preorder it from guardians-of-life.org. So guardians-of-life.org.

Mike: Kiliii Yüyan, thank you so much for joining me again. This was a fabulous conversation, and I hope that people check out the book. Thank you for speaking with me today.

Kiliii: Yeah, thanks, Mike. It was great. Always great to chat with you, man.

Mike: All right. Have a good one.

Kiliii: Love the smile. All right.

Mike: You can find links to purchase a copy of Guardians of Life in the show notes. And if you want to listen to my previous conversation with Kiliii Yüyan, you can find that in the episode summary on mongabay.com. As always, if you’re enjoying the Mongabay Newscast or any of our podcast content, we encourage you to spread the word about the work that we’re doing by telling a friend and leaving a review on the platform you’re tuning in on. I cannot emphasize how much this helps elevate the profile of our show. It is one of the best ways to help expand our reach. But if you want to support us more directly, you can become a monthly sponsor via our Patreon page at patreon.com/mongabay, as we are a nonprofit news outlet. When you pledge even a small amount of money, it really makes a big difference and it helps us offset production costs. So if you are liking what we’re doing here and you want to help us out, go to patreon.com/mongabay to learn more and support the Mongabay Newscast. And you can also read our news and inspiration from nature’s frontline at mongabay.com, or follow us on social media: find Mongabay on LinkedIn at Mongabay News, and on Instagram, Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon, Facebook, and TikTok, where our handle is @mongabay, and on YouTube at Mongabay TV. Thank you, as always, for listening.