This is the fifth article in my series about our changing Earth from interviews with Native Americans shared in We Are the Middle of Forever: Indigenous Voices from Turtle Island on the Changing Earth, edited by Dahr Jamail and Stan Rushworth (USA 2022). My presentation does not follow the order of the interviews.

#5: Lyla June Johnston (Diné [Navajo], Tsétsêhéstâhese [Cheyenne])
      (Chapter 5, pp. 61-72)

Lyla June Johnston is a Native American poet, singer-songwriter, hip-hop artist, human ecologist, public speaker, and community organizer of Diné (Navajo), Tsétsêhéstâhese (Cheyenne), and European lineages. She’s originally from Taos, New Mexico. Her multi-genre presentations focus on Indigenous issues and solutions, supporting youth, inter-cultural healing, historical trauma, and traditional land stewardship practices.

She has a Bachelor’s degree in Environmental Anthropology (with Honors) from Stanford University (2012) and a Master’s degree in American Indian Education (with Distinction) from the University of New Mexico (2017). Following her 2021 interview with Dahr and Stan, she earned her PhD from the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Her doctoral research focused on the ways in which pre-colonial Indigenous Nations shaped large regions of Turtle Island (aka the Americas) to produce abundant food systems for humans and non-humans.   

Having grown up with an Indigenous worldview, coupled with her education, Lyla June’s personal goal is to “grow closer to Creator by learning how to love deeper.”

In speaking generally about the converging crises of climate disruption, ecological harm, social instability, and the global pandemic, she said (p. 62):

It’s understood by Diné people that we’ve been through the destruction and rebirth of several worlds before this world we’re currently in. One of which was destroyed by a flood. You see that story replete throughout cultures across the globe, which leads me to believe it’s not just a myth.

Each time that the people came to an impasse, they faced a decision to evolve and change, or perish.

She pointed out that Indigenous peoples have earned their wisdom the hard way. Long before Columbus arrived on Turtle Island, her people experienced epidemics, collapse of social and ecological systems, slavery, caste systems, warfare, and discord. In her view, the drought that destroyed their civilization in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, was a blessing since it forced them to change their ways. “[W]e left that place, that place where we tried to play God, that place where we fell off the path,” she said (p. 63). They left and never looked back.

As an anthropologist, she believes that the depiction of Indigenous peoples, as portrayed by Western archaeologists and anthropologists, is distorted and inaccurate. She noted (p. 63):

We densely populated the land. We managed it extensively, through everything from seasonal burns, to thinning of the forest, to propagation of edible plant species, to the maintenance of whole watersheds. We managed the land on regional scales.

Moreover, for thousands and thousands of years, societies have risen and collapsed at different times across the planet. But now it’s different. We’re experiencing collapse on a unified global scale. She believes that “from those ashes, something will be reborn.” She added (p. 64):

[It is] the only thing that will help us change. The only thing that will wake us up. We can have all the science, and all the charts, and all the parts per million, all the atmospheric projections in the world, but apparently that doesn’t inspire us to change. And it was prophesied long ago that when we arise from this, generations later, as was prophesied long ago, that this world would end and a new one would begin if we did not heed the messages of the Earth and the messages of the ancestors. It would be reborn, and that’s happened many times before.

Lyla June explained that in Diné understanding, we’ve already been through four specific worlds. It was fear, spread through our brother Coyote, that got us to this point. She believes that to free ourselves, we must let go of our fear and trust in Mother Earth to take care of us. She said (pp. 64-65):

It was fear that caused men to hoard, and it was hoarding that caused our planet to die. So only when we trust that there is enough. When we find mechanisms like Coyote stories or prayer, ceremony, then we can release fear from our societies, the way that our societies learned to do after the collapse.

She believes we must find the mechanisms in our world today that empower Coyote energy to spread fear, and to change them. While it’s essential to transform our fear into courageous action, she sees our current global crisis as a gift (p. 65).

It is a gift to humanity to give us the courage to change so that we can hand something to our children that they can be proud of. They can be proud looking back at what their ancestors did.

Lyla June spoke of the courage required to let go of the fear. She shared her own healing process as someone who was sexually abused as a child (p. 71):

It is hard to have true courage unless we take the time to shed the boxes that this world puts us in and arise as what we are. From what I understand, this is done by reviewing our lives and rejecting all the ways our childhoods and lives taught us something wrong about ourselves. And that is something each and every person has to address within themselves. It’s a microcosm of the larger phenomenon of intergenerational trauma. And it is through that healing of the self that we see through the lies and have deep courage and trust in the goodness of our being. I am not there yet, but this is what I have seen some others do.

She concluded her conversation with Dahr and Stan by speaking of the importance of humility (p. 72):

In Diné culture, the word ‘ajoobá’ means humility. That was the guiding star, the North Star of the people. And so when we try to walk that way, we bring health and wealth to everyone.

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Click on links below for previously featured interviews:

#1: Raquel Ramirez (Ho-Chunk, Ojibwe, Lenca) – Awareness
#2: Alexii Sigona (Amah Mutsun) – Stewardship
#3: Terri Delahanty (Cree) – Sacred Feminine and Sacred Masculine
#4: Shannon Rivers (Akimel O’otham) – Balance

I invite you to watch Lyla June’s TEDx Talk (duration 13:27minutes), “Three-thousand-year-old Solutions to Modern Problems,” given in 2023 after the publication of her interview with Dahr and Stan. It’s a message of hope that comes from her doctoral research of what Native people have proven is possible. Her PhD dissertation, “Architects of Abundance: Indigenous Regenerative Food and Land Management Systems and the Excavation of Hidden History,” University of Alaska Fairbanks, December 2022, is available on her website.