Dreaming Back Knowledge with Autumn Cavender

On this episode of the Art of the Rural podcast, meet Autumn Cavender. She is a Wahpetunwan Dakota midwife, artist, and community leader focusing on the intersections of art, birth, and storytelling.

Raised amidst community historians, Autumn initially focused on Dakota language and cultural revitalization. This background brought a unique perspective to her birth work, first as a doula, and then as a student midwife. After establishing a private midwifery practice, she joined forces with Indigenous midwives nationally, culminating in the creation of the National Indigenous Midwifery Alliance, geared towards addressing reproductive care barriers and perinatal health disparities in Indian country.

Autumn’s artistic journey began as a porcupine quillwork apprentice under Elder Master artists rooted in her oral history training. She focused on Dakota artistic methodology, resulting in globally recognized digital art. Her work has graced prestigious exhibitions like Miami Art Basel and earned her the National Indigenous Media Arts Experimental Moving Image Award.

She is a 2024 Bush Foundation Fellow and also currently an Art of the Rural Spillway Fellow. We are honored to present her exhibition Hinapapi — Emerging this fall at the Winona County History Center, and we are grateful for the support of the Jerome Foundation in this work.

Autumn lives near her home reservation of Upper Sioux with her partner, two kids, a German Shepherd, and the occasional chicken.

During this podcast, Autumn shares her personal journey and artistic practice as one animated by a commitment towards care and cultural revitalization. In this wide-ranging conversation, she discusses how blockchain, decolonization, storytelling, and childbirth are connected points in her practice and the futures it brings into being.

We move in this space from talking about NFTs to Native sovereignty to the legacy of Oscar Howe in a way that feels both truly unique, but also deeply grounded in cultural tradition and contemporary experience. Our conversation concludes with Autumn’s thoughts on how the phases of childbirth might offer us teachings on how to navigate and to be with the overwhelming complexity of this current moment in the world.

Episode Resources

• Episode transcript
• Autumn Cavender’s website & Instagram
• Autumn Cavender: Hinapapi — Emerging exhibition
• Juleana Enright, “Glitching the Glass Wall: A Conversation with Autumn Cavender-Wilson” (Mn Artists)
• “The Howe Legacy Across Four Generations Exhibition” (University of South Dakota University Art Galleries)

Transcript

Episode Introduction

Autumn: When we talk about cultural revitalization and cultural revitalizing work, what we're really talking about is this very deep metaphysical process of dreaming back knowledge and ha being in active conversation with knowledge and cultural ideas as persons, as people, and inviting them back, creating space for them within these contexts.

Matthew: Hello and welcome to the Art of the Rural Podcast. I'm Matthew Fluharty. On this podcast, we gather with artists and culture bearers from across rural America and Indian country to encounter their creative and cultural vision. To hear new stories about life beyond the city, and to be inspired to bridge divides across the places we all hold Dear, if you enjoy this conversation, please join us at artoftherural.org.

Where you can also subscribe to our newsletter featuring resources, gatherings, and lots of links to exciting creative work happening across the country. You can also find us on social and on Substack. At Art of the Rural, we are grateful to folks from across the country who've made tax deductible contributions to Art of the Rural to make this conversation possible and to the Ford Foundation and Good Chaos Foundation for their support of Art of the Rural’s media programs.

Today's guest is Autumn Cavender. She is a Wahpetunwan Dakota midwife, artist and community leader focusing on the intersections of art, birth, and storytelling. Raised to miss community historians. Autumn initially focused on Dakota language and cultural revitalization. This background brought a unique perspective to her birth work.

First as a doula and then as a student midwife after establishing a private midwifery practice. She joined forces with indigenous midwives nationally culminating in the creation of the National Indigenous Midwifery Alliance, geared towards addressing reproductive care barriers and perinatal health disparities in Indian country.

Autumn's artistic journey began as a porcupine cool work apprentice under Elder Master artists rooted in her oral history training. She focused on Dakota artistic methodology resulting in globally recognized digital art. Her work has graced prestigious exhibitions like Miami Art Basel, and earned her the National Indigenous Media Arts Experimental Moving Image Award.

She's a 2024 Bush Foundation fellow. Autumn lives near her home reservation of Upper Sioux with her partner, two kids, a German Shepherd, and the occasional chicken. Autumn is also currently an Art of the Rural Spillway Fellow, and we're honored to present her exhibition, Hinapapi – Emerging, this fall at the Winona County History Center.

We are grateful for the support of the Jerome Foundation in this work. During this podcast, autumn Chairs her personal journey and artistic practice as one animated by a commitment towards care and cultural revitalization. In this wide ranging conversation, autumn discusses how blockchain, decolonization, storytelling, and childbirth are connected points in her practice and the futures it brings into being.

And we move in this space from talking about NFTs to native sovereignty, to the legacy of Oscar Howe in a way that feels both truly unique, but also deeply grounded in cultural tradition and contemporary experience. Our conversation concludes with Autumn's thoughts on how the phases of childbirth might offer us teachings on how to navigate and to be with the overwhelming complexity of this current moment in the world.

So without further ado, please get comfortable and enjoy this conversation with Autumn Cavender. Autumn, welcome to the podcast. I'm so grateful for your time.

Interview

Autumn: Oh, thanks so much for having me.

Matthew: Yeah, thank you. I'm wondering as kind of like a, an aperture into the conversation ahead and our time together.

It's a big question, but like, I'm kind of wondering like how you frame your own personal journey and how it's shaped your evolving creative work.

Autumn: Yeah, I think with any person, any kind of one experience, anything that they move into create is ultimately kind of shaped very much by the entirety of their life story coming, coming to this moment, right?

The perspective that I bring to birth work and to the traditional revitalization of indigenous birth practices is very, very much influenced by. My background in cultural revitalization more broadly. Um, specifically Dakota language revitalization, which is very much influenced by the way I grew up, which was, um, you know, very much steeped in hardcore anti-colonial decolonization politics.

Um, being raised by indigenous academics, trained both in western and traditional, uh, storytelling medium. And so from the time I was a little girl, I always really understood the power and the value of story, and that it really mattered how a story was told and what was the medium through which a story was told.

One of the, the few gifts that I, I joke that I, I really do have is I'm very, very good at rote memorization. Um, I was one of those kids who could like really just recite an entire movie after having seen it twice and, you know, just call it up in my head. And that, that skillset of being able to remember the, the actual bits and pieces of a story, but then to be able to turn around and, and relay it in a way that was compelling in a way that moved people was a really crucial part of my activism.

Um, and the work I was doing, particularly as a, as a young person, um, as a teenager and doing, you know, what would begin, what would eventually become, uh, doing things like collegiate lectures. Right? Um, but at the time it was mostly just to my teachers, to my friends, you know, at the occasional, you know, occasional community speaking gig or, you know, I was one of those speech and debate nerds in high school.

Kind of bringing all of those then perspectives and, moving it forward. Then understanding that cultural revitalization comes within the context of colonization and conquest and the individual personal stories that we all bring to these things, which then manifests as different people's both triumphs and struggles, um, in reviving cultural practices, in reviving language.

Even what it means to, to speak Dakota for different people is very much rooted in these deep seated intergenerational cultural experiences. And then when we come to birth, obviously like, you know, it sounds obvious to say it, but when we really think about it, every single child that is born is really this, this cumulative point of so much legacy in history, right?

We are only here, um, each one of us individually because our great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great. However, many times removed grandparents made it. Made it long enough to have children and then their children made it long enough to have children again. And so we are, we are ourselves.

This culmination of, of story and what's, uh, very interesting to me. I, I was talking with a friend of mine, you know, who's a, who's a pastor, actually, when we were talking about the power of birth story, and one of the things that people always talk about. You ask any person who's given birth at some point or another, they're going to end up telling you their birth story of how they birthed their children.

And it's just such a fundamental piece of the personal narratives that we carry forward into our lives. And it was because of my pregnancy, um, because of my, the birth of my first son, specifically that I got into artwork. Um, if you had asked me 20 years ago, I was not an artistic person. I didn't do art.

That was something that talented people did. I could talk really well, I could write fairly well, but that wasn't art, right? That was, that was something different. Um, but it was, when my first son was born, he needed a pair of moccasins and I needed to be able to make them. He needed a bonnet. He needed a star quilt.

He needed all of these things from a cultural perspective to enter this world in a, in a welcoming and loving way. And I was the person who needed to make those things, and I didn't have that skillset. So I needed to figure out how to do it. And that very much launched then where I, I've gone with the rest of my art has been because of these different experiences, and I wouldn't have ever engaged in that if I didn't believe in the cultural revitalization in the first place.

So the idea of artistic practice and cultural rev revitalization are very permanently linked in my head. Um, and so this, you know, obviously we'll talk a little bit more about it in a minute, but the idea then of moving that into the digital sphere and doing high tech or modern, um, modern technological indigenous art is more, for me, more or less a continuation of those things, you know, and where, where it all goes next then is, is of course going to be rooted very much in these, in these cultural experiences or in these lifetime experiences that I've had.

But then again, how they're interacting and playing out in real time.

Matthew: Autumn. I'm really, I'm really grateful for that. And, you know, for those, the ways in which those tethers between artistic practice and cultural revitalization, like in your life, in your work, in your way of being, like, it helps us as folks who have been moved by your art, kind of contextualize the ways in which it isn't counterintuitive for a singular artist to be both a quill work apprentice and an individual minting NFTs.

Mm-hmm. Do you, do you know what I mean? I think, and I think maybe from the outset for some folks that might seem like hard to put together, you know?

Autumn: Yeah, absolutely. I, I think if, if I'm gonna talk about NFTs, I, I think there's a, a personal family story that might be helpful to talk about this with. And so when my, my great-grandmother, Elsie Cavender, was a little girl.

She was being raised by her grandparents, and her grandmother was named Isabel Roberts in English, or Maza Okiye Win in Dakota. And, um, my family has kind of made the story of Maza Okiye Win quite, quite locally famous. Anyway, she was eight years old at the time. She survived the 1862 Dakota death march. Um, her narrative of that, that experience, um, has been widely published, widely researched, widely cited at this particular point in time.

Um, and so she's, you know, fairly, fairly well known. My great grandmama talked about this quill work basket that Maza Okiye Win had in her home. To hear my, to hear, my great grandmama tell it, it was a masterpiece of work. Um, it depicted a village scene, um, where, you know, you had women working on hides against tepe lodges in the background.

You had a man coming in from the hunt with a deer slung over his shoulder, like it was an incredible masterpiece of, of quill work. And it was beautiful, and she loved that basket. She loved it so much. She wanted to pull it down off the shelf all the time. She wanted to look at it and just admired it and loved it so much.

And one day she comes home and it's not there anymore. And she asked her grandma about it, and her grandma told her that some wašíču folks, some non-Native folks, had come to the house and they had also seen this basket. And they had also admired it. And they had asked her for it, and she sold it to them.

And my great grandma was heartbroken. She said, “You know, Grandma, I, I wanted that, you know. I wanted this in our family. I wanted that.” And her grandma apologized to her. And that's kind of the end of it. And to this day, I have never seen this basket. I have no idea where it is. I don't know the people who came and bought it.

I don't know what happened to that collection. I don't know whether they were representatives of a museum or some other, some other institution or just they’re rolling deep as private collectors. What I do know, however, is that within traditional Dakota cultural context, it is like hospitality rules are, are high placed.

Right. You know, there is a lot of rules about the obligations that you have as a host when you have somebody in your home. One of the general things, and we kind of still culturally joke about this, even if it's not done quite as much anymore, is that if somebody compliments you on something, on anything really, um, especially clothing or something that you're wearing or something that you have in your home, it is considered good, right, and proper to immediately give it to that person.

This is a lot of ways in which generosity was promoted, you know, communally, it's a way to do, uh, wealth redistribution and gift economy, but it's, you know, this idea, a very deep cultural idea that your personal values should never be tied or rooted to things. And so that if somebody admires something that you have, you know, even a pair of earrings, the correct traditional Dakota response is to immediately remove them and hand them over.

And then you add this additional layer of the power dynamic between the colonized and the colonizer, along with the poverty that went along with that particular era. And I can see how this played out in my grandmother's home. One of the things that's fascinating about NFTs or the non-fungible token. Is the ability to track a piece of artwork as soon as it has become minted, and that piece of artwork is then tied to this non fungible token, this digital signature that exists on the blockchain.

There is, at this point, an unhackable traceable route that any individual art piece is taking. I can track it as it passes through hands of ownership. I can track how much it's sold for, how much it was bought for. Also, as an artist, there's a really cool feature where I can automatically get a cut or a percentage of every single sale that that piece of artwork has.

We see this all the time in Indian country where heirloom quality items are bought for pennies of what they're worth. Then sold for several thousand dollars amongst non-indigenous private collectors, museums, auction houses, the like. Right. Somebody was joking. You're not joking. They, yeah, it's not actually funny.

Nevermind. They weren't joking. Um, they were traveling in Las Vegas and they went to the, the pawn shop from that, you know, TV show, pawn Stars, and they were like, you know, doing the whole, doing the whole thing. And they get in there and they see a child's vest, you know, fully beaded, like, you know, beautiful, beautiful work.

And it's on sale for like nine grand in a pawn shop. Right. I would bet a lot that, that is not anywhere near what it was originally acquired for. Right. So in my search and in my quest and in my, uh, you know, journeys around looking at displaced stolen. Illegally traded indigenous items that have now ended up in museums, literally around the world.

I was literally just at the Humboldt Forum in Berlin, um, and witnessed this kind of like firsthand in a very real way, our things, our heirlooms have traveled all over the world and we no longer have access to them. We can't even see them, let alone interact with them. And if we've, you know, and these, and this goes true for ceremonial items as well.

So you have items with a huge amount of spiritual, cultural meaning attached to them. And they're so far away from us now that we can't even visit them. Right. And so the NFT aspect for me is like a really fascinating cultural answer to this idea of provenance. Where does a piece come from? Who has had it?

How has it appreciated or depreciated in value and where is it now? And so as a native person then with this kind of this, this intergenerational trauma of having your shit stolen, this is a very appealing, interesting, and borderline seductive idea. The thing that also like bears mentioning is that the vast majority of museums, or even um, if you're looking at auction houses or you know, you're looking at anywhere where they're buying and selling native items, the provenance on these pieces is awful.

They cannot tell you actually who the artist was or who first owned it. Provenance begins with the first white owner. The provenance begins with the first colonizer who had it in possession, and they don't even have to tell you how they got it. Authenticity is assumed, right? And so like what does that do in terms of actively devaluing the work, honestly, specifically of indigenous women?

Because most of the quillwork, the bead work, the hide tanning, the weaving, you know, culturally, from a global perspective, most of those things are either women or indigenous, queer arts. And so by erasing the artists, let alone who those pieces were specifically made for, but erasing that huge amount of artistic work is an active devaluing of the labor of indigenous women and indigenous queer people.

And that really sucks.

Matthew: I think it's really interesting that in terms of, um, the conversation around crypto or the blockchain or NFTs. Which, you know, we're publishing this podcast, you know, it's, it's out on the open. I also think these are technologies which are pretty profound, probably long term, uh, for artists, for culture bearers.

You know, we're in a moment though right now where we're definitely kind of in a, a low point of the public, public perception of, of these technologies, uh, for a whole host of reasons. None the least is the way that the current administration is sort of, um, kind of blatantly profiting o off of these technologies in a really shallow way.

And I'm really grateful, you know, for your presence because Autumn, like you've been one of the people who's really opened my eyes to like the really profound potential for these technologies, you know, to be real portals towards representation and sovereignty kind of writ large, you know, once we're using these technologies as tool towards outcomes that we're seeking, you know, and I'm just, I'm just like curious.

Um, you know, we're talking in the fall of 2025 right now. What would you hope for the future of these technologies for your work, but also like, you know, for, for these interlace questions of representation and sovereignty long term?

Autumn: Honestly, it depends upon how long term you're looking. One of the, you know, I'm just gonna come out and kind of point blank, say it in a, you know, as a, as a way to kind of frame the rest of the conversation moving forward.

And that is this idea that any non-sustainable technology is inherently incompatible with indigenous worldview. Right. If it doesn't decompose, it's not inherently good. Right? Um, we, we have to very seriously question the inherent morality of something if it can't decompose or if it takes, you know, 73 million years to do so.

Right? So there are very, very real concerns having to do with AI and with rapidly developing technology as it currently exists. That are completely separate from what we could maybe call the politics of the current situation, right? We can talk, you know, people talk about, oh, you know, AI I mean, it's true.

AI uses a ridiculous amount of energy, right? Blockchain tech uses a ridiculous amount of energy. Now, what's funny to me is like, you know, the, the folks who are oftentimes making those critiques will talk about other forms of digital art as being so, as having a carbon footprint that's so much less than that, as if silicon mining wasn't like a massive health hazard in so many places in the world, right?

Just because it's digital doesn't mean it has a low footprint, right? Um, the impact of it is still incredibly real and it's disproportionately impacting the colonized. You know, other people will frame it in terms of race, in terms of, um, you know, folks of color or folks in the global south. But really when we're looking at it in, in terms of the global history of places, it is places that are heavily colonized.

And where the colonial footprint, even if you know, political control has been quote unquote handed over, where the long-term colonial footprint is still very real and still very actively being felt by the people on the ground. So all of that being said, right, we are then left with this kind of, so that that's like long-term, right?

So my long-term vision, my long-term goal is that we actually don't need any of this tech and we're not actively using this because we are once more actually living in connection with, as in connection with local ecosystem, right? And when you're living in connection with local ecosystem, you don't need something that's silicon based.

So now we're looking at the kind of like medium to long term. What is the value of these things? Now I've kind of already talked about the artistic ability to track. There are also ways that I think are, are really fascinating to do legal contracts on blockchain. It's the, you know, it's the big, it's the big blockchain thing, right?

Don't trust, verify we, you know, to have these ability to have a record, um, an immutable record of ownership, right? For different places. Like, there's some really interesting places that we as native folks or you know, people who are working in activist communities more generally, like that we can weaponize this technology to forward a future that we, we want, who owns something?

How do we certify ownership? Right? And it makes a lot more sense to certify ownership on something that can't be hacked. And that, what does that mean for things like the redistribution of wealth? Like everything else though, this is all a tool. Um, the whole phrase of like, you can't, you can't take down the master's house with the master's tools.

I'm like, well, how the hell else do you expect to take it down? I hate that phrase. It doesn't actually hold any water. It does not work either in a literal or metaphorical sense. Right. We have done a lot in, particularly in activist communities, where we apply a lot of morality to various things. It is good to be hardcore into like woke identity politics, for instance, and it is bad to be against it.

Even technologies, strategies and the, the, the argument about strategy is actually consumes many activist communities to the point of immobility. We forget. We have to remember that all of these things are tools. Morality is defined by how you apply them. The same hammer can be used to build a house, shoo a horse, or break a window, right?

It can be used to kill somebody. The tool. Is not inherently good or bad. How you use it is so in the immediate short term, understanding that there are tools that we are actively using right now that are causing a stupid amount of harm on a local and global basis, like digital technology, for instance, like blockchain, like ai, like all of these things, they're causing a ridiculous amount of very real environmental harm.

Right now. If I boycott that, it's not gonna stop being used. Like my, my personal usage of it is not. It is not even a drop in the bucket compared to the surveillance state that we're actively living in. You know, we could all immediately stop using AI tech right now, and that's not going to stop the surveillance state from actively employing it.

Right? Like we are not the primary users. No, absolutely. Right. Like it, it is using us. But, um, so yeah, like how, how we use these tools in the, in the immediate, in the immediate future and in moving up into this like long-term goal of local ecology and land-based ecology, again, we have to be able to be fluent in and use the tools that are at our disposal.

Otherwise, we're really just gonna end up hand ringing. Um, to the point of immobility and that like, we really can no longer afford to be doing that.

Matthew: I, I'm grateful for this, you know, and I think maybe this kind of connects, connects a bridge to another room. Uh, you know, as we think about your work and, um, you know, the, you know, the, the range of experiences which are sort of called forward into those spaces.

Like, I mean, what I'm kind of hearing between the words of, of what what you just shared is a tool is a tool, and we can talk about tools as metaphors, but it's important to understand the distinction, almost to the distinction between the noun and the verb of something. And this, this connects me to another part of the way that you show up in the world.

And, and you know, this is as, as a midwife. And I'm wondering if I could ask a question about that, maybe as a bridge towards, um, that work. But then also, um, some of the artistic work, the creative work that you have, uh, been up to these last couple years. And for me, it made me think back to when you were in Winona.

I think it was earlier. It was, yeah. It was like earlier this fall when you were in town to, um, install the Hinapapi – Emerging installation. We had this really beautiful chance with our friends at Winona State University’s Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies department, and also the Turtle Island Student Organization for you'd be welcome to campus and to spend some time with students and to give some public talks.

And it was really illuminating for me to hear you speak on your work as a midwife and an activist in that context. You know, which, which feels in many respects of, of a similar tonal register to what you, you've just shared. One of the elements of your lecture, which really stayed with me, has been how you spoke about the health impacts of decolonization and land reclamation.

And I think when we think about the tools and the metaphors, this leads me like, through your experience as a midwife to ask, like when we're speaking of decolonization, what does that definition to you, you know, and, and what, what does it look like in the world?

Autumn: Decolonization has really become a fun buzzword.

Everybody's out to decolonize all the things which, you know. Cool. One of the things though inherent about the definition of decolonization is that it is not fun. It's actually not a particularly enjoyable thing, and to look at some academic definitions, it actually has the potential to be quite violent.

Not necessarily in terms of interpersonal conflict, but even in terms of the, the personal amount of work that is required to actively decolonize. To back up a little bit, what is colonization, right? We talk about it a lot, but colonization is a process by which a, a mother country or a mother's nation state sends out satellite colonies to different places for the purposes of wealth accumulation for the mother state.

And so what that usually implies, because nobody's usually thrilled about somebody they don't know, showing up at their house and saying, “Okay, all of your stuff now is mine, and I'm gonna go send it back to make my cousin over there rich.” Nobody's thrilled about that process. So what it requires then is a subjugation of the population that they encounter and all of the social norms and rules that go into that.

And then there are social systems that are put in place to uphold the power structure of the colony. Because again, you can't actively have the, you know, in this case, indigenous residents of a place, you know, fighting back against you, right? Because you're here for the purpose of, of resource extraction.

You're here for the purposes of wealth building, right? So you, you know, it's inconvenient at best to be constantly fighting with somebody over that. So you have genocide as one of your possible solutions to this. But um, as it was, you know, I'm trying to remember the year that this happened. It was actually debated on the floor of Congress how much it would cost to kill every single native person in the United States.

And it was literally just deemed too damn expensive because of the military campaigns that it would require into remote areas. It was going to be much cheaper to assimilate, educate and Christianize them that is cheaper by trying to minimize, diminish, devalue the worldview then of the population you're trying to subjugate.

And in the process, turn them into the lowest rung of a caste-based system that you have developed now, because now, now you can subjugate them because they believe that they need to be subjugated, right? They're not going to actively fight against you as much. This starts to sound real scary then, right?

This doesn't sound fun. You know, you create things like classism, you create things like racism. You create things like sexism, misogyny, homophobia. You create all of these other things to devalue and subjugate their, your target populations so that they buy into the goodness, the righteousness, the di divine, the divine aspects, the divinely mandated aspects of your cultural subjugation.

So that's colonization to decolonize. Then what do you know? I, you hear this, you know, again, buzzword, everybody likes to use it. So to decolonize, let's say a hospital does not actually mean, have more brown people work at it, does it? Because one of the things in colonization, and one of the things I talked about in my lecture at Winona State.

Is that if a people has the ability to heal themselves, you need to take away that ability and you need to take away their faith in their ability to self-heal so that then they have faith only in your system of healing, your system of medicine, right? Because you can't actually trust them to do that on their own.

That has far too much revolutionary potential, far too much self-sustaining autonomous potential. So to decolonize a hospital, the way you do that is that you get rid of the hospital, and that's a lot scarier of a proposition. That's a lot more difficult, isn't it? And so when we talk about decolonizing western medicine or decolonizing NGOs, or decolonizing all of these other things, it makes me laugh because it's like, you don't actually mean what you think you mean here, right?

You don't mean what you're saying because to decolonize, you know, the nonprofit industrial complex not only means getting rid of nonprofits, but it also means getting rid of the social systems that require them to exist as a functional member of society. Because our society depends upon charitable organizations to work because the society isn't communally taking care of its residents.

When I, when I talk about like decolonization or anti-colonial politics, like those things are different, right? Decolonization versus anti-colonial, like anti-colonial is much more about sovereignty, who has governing power over a place. And so anti-colonialism is removing the colonial powers influence over a particular place.

You know, it could be said, and obviously this is a much more nuanced political situation than I'm that I'm talking about right here, but at its most basic, you know, Ireland trying to get rid of Great Britain and the, and the United Kingdom on, you know, and to reunite the Irish Isle, that's fundamentally a, an anti-colonial struggle.

Matthew: And yet isn't fundamentally decolonial if the structures themselves are still in place with the different body politic.

Autumn: Totally. And again, I, what, I'm going back to our previous conversation and about the placing of morality on things. I am not placing a higher morality, at least right now, on decolonization versus anti-colonialism.

These are responses of the colonized to the colonizer. These are responses of the oppressed to the oppressor. It should never, like, I, I would hope to never be so arrogant as to assume to tell other people how they should best fight off their oppression. Right? We need every tool in our toolbox, and for some people, anti-colonialism is what they want.

For some people, decolonization is what they want. It depends, and that ultimately has to be the, the choice. And for, you know, honestly, some people don't want either of those things. They want assimilation. Right. You know, because of, because of all of the things, right? These are all real. And I, you know, we could even argue healthy responses to the colonial state, right?

People, different people respond differently to the same traumas, right? To the same situations. And those, you know, that happens both on an individual and also on a collective level. You know, these are not, these are not incorrect responses to the violence being done by the process of colonization. But different people are gonna land in different places about what they believe is appropriate.

Now, I am being told, and I'm unfortunately having to agree, is that I am losing the battle on the, the li the linguistic battle on decolonization that people, these like people, people have taken the word, it doesn't mean anything anymore. You gotta move on autumn. And I'm like, don't tell me that. Um, yeah, and I, you know, what it, what it then kind of means for like the broader population right now, right?

Because we can't. Like, people just can't go back to Europe. Right? Like, you know, what, what does that mean then in terms of like land back and, you know, other, other, you know, indigenous politics. Like, we really do have to have a serious conversation of what tribal sovereignty means in these situations. Um, you know, talking about ecology, something like what 80% of the world's, um, like intact ecosystems and diverse ecologies are in the, the hands of the ridiculously small amount of native people that still exist globally.

One of the things we know for, for climate change purposes is that you want land to be protected in ecology, to be protected. It should be under indigenous control. Like that needs to be priority number one.

Matthew: And that has a huge health impact for the entire planet.

Autumn: Absolutely, it does. Um, but kind of circling it back then to, to health.

Then health when it comes to native people is very much impacted by the colonial situation. It's not just race-based. And that's, you know, that's the big thing that we've been, that has been pushed a lot in the United States is that if we just resolve racism, then these issues, these other issues will take care of themselves.

Will they, you know, dealing with racism will resolve perinatal health disparity. We know that that's not the case in native communities, right? Because ultimately, while racism is a tool of colonization, it is not the end all, be all of what's causing the disparity in native, in native populations, right?

Like Dakota, people coexisted along and co-evolved along with this land base, this specific land base here in Mni Sota Makoce for at least 26,000 years. If we are like dating based on our own stories and astronomical references within them, my body is evolved to be in relationship with this land base, which means that of all places in the whole entire world, this is where I'm going to be healthiest.

If I am allowed to live as a proper, you know, as a top predator within a functioning ecology, this is where my body is going to be healthiest of all places in the world. And so when we talk about the resolving of perinatal health disparities, yes. I mean, you know, clearly this is something I work in. We desperately need the revitalization of indigenous birth practices.

There's very specific reasons why particular medicines, particular ceremonies, particular rituals, particular technologies were used at different points of the labor and birth process and the pregnancy and preconception and postpartum and, you know, all the things. And without the land base that those things are connected to, they lose a significant amount of their power to heal.

Matthew: This takes me in, in a, like a rivulet of conversation that is totally inspired by the way that you bring things together, like in your life and your creative practice. This actually takes me to the installations that are currently a part of Hinapapi. It makes me think about “The House of the Skin Painters” and that installation.

I think in, in particular through the installation’s invitation to be with the piece, you know, to sit within the piece. When you articulated just the centrality of that relationship to the land base, the image of that installation appeared in my mind and the intimacy of it and the invitation of it.

You know, as a space where you said before where what's presented is the ability for one to heal oneself, you know, to understand the capacity to heal and to be in presence with beings in a, in, in a way that feels really generative. And I should say for folks who are listening to the podcast, we'll have links in the show notes to Autumn's work.

But also to these individual installations. Autumn, please add a deep degree of nuance to what I'm about to share. But one of the real kind of centerpieces of this installation is an installation called “The House of the Skin Painters.” Like a really significant memory for me in this period, this, this moment we're living in right now, which, you know, we could define it however we want to define it, was us putting up that installation and then this moment where we, we sat down on, uh, the bison hides and it was as if like, all of this weight left my body.

It's like almost hard to describe with words like how powerful it was for me. What I'm realizing now is that, you know, the power of what I experienced in that moment probably was an inkling, a germ, a small seed of an awareness of that ability that we can't heal each other, we can heal each other together, we can exist outside of these hierarchies in a way that's fundamentally more, more grounded to where we are.

I know that you, you know, you're gonna be able to add so much depth to that, but like, I'm, I'm curious about the path to that piece, the House of the Skin painters, and just how, I mean, through this whole journey that, that we're talking about, you know, your work as a midwife, you know, work your work through both these traditional practices, but also these modern contemporary sort of blockchain practices as well.

They all kind of converge in that installation. Like how did that come about?

Autumn: Again, we've already kind of talked about this idea of accumulation of pieces or of experiences or of journeys that lead to a particular moment. I had this really amazing opportunity to be a, a fellow through the Springboard for the Arts’ Rural Regenerator program.

And in that particular iteration of the fellowship, I was able to make connections with, uh, another, uh, Oceti artist named Keith BraveHeart. And Keith was working as a curator, um, for, um, an exhibit about the work of Oscar Howe. And so, um, where he was compiling a bunch of, a bunch of artists and to, to create pieces in response to Oscar Howe's work.

And for those of you who are unfamiliar, when we think about contemporary indigenous art, really you're thinking about the work of Oscar Howe. He was an incredible, incredible artist and painter specifically, but he did mural work as well. But what he really did was pushed the envelope on what it meant to be an indigenous artist.

And he pushed back on the notion that we still have to fight against today, that indigenous people, because, um, remember, because of colonization, native people can't really exist. Right? We must always be a thing of the past, or we must be continually disappearing. Otherwise, the narrative around manifest destiny doesn't really work.

And there's a cognitive dissonance to the rightness of it if native people are around, right? Because it meant that, you know, if native people are still around, then they kind of have to be removed in order to have access to native land. That's a whole other, whole other thing, but it deeply influences this idea and the impacts around native art Then.

Native art must also always be historical. It must always be ethnographical. It is. It is the subject of ethnographies and archeology and anthropologists is always something that exists in the past, and so native people as artists are not allowed to exist in the present. Right? We can't use contemporary mediums because that's a violation of this kind of agreement about what native art is, which is always kind of relegated to really anything.

Like it can't be anything later than about 1900, right? It must be beadwork, quillwork sewing paint, like hide painting, like there's a very specific list, like category list of like what qualifies as native art, right? Under this kind of paradigm. Oscar Howe really pushed back against that. He was a contemporary painter working with contemporary medium, and he was damn good at it.

His work really just screams for recognition because it is so powerful and so moving. And he would actively have to fight against people telling him that it wasn't real native art because it wasn't hide painting, right. Because it wasn't bead work or quill work. Right. We as like a collective group of indigenous artists owe so much to the foundational work of Oscar Howe.

And so I was going through a lot of Oscar Howe's work, um, and I remembered one of the paintings that I was going through was actually, um, I remembered that my, one of my grandmas had had a print of this painting up in her house and it was of an old man and he was, he was working on painting a hide and these like lines of energy were moving around him and the piece is entitled “Skin Painter.”

I loved that painting. Um, and I loved the various iterations of it that, that how had worked on over the course of his life. And so this was, this was really the pieces that I, I wanted to be in conversation with or in response to. And when we're talking about Hina bpi, this idea of emergence to be emerging is something that I, I really, I really love.

Um, because again, coming from this kind of weird meandering life of working on cultural and linguistic and medical revitalization within a Dakota context, there is this idea of the dreaming that takes place, this very profound metaphysical aspect of dreaming. And that before a piece is made, it exists elsewhere.

It exists in kind of the great, you know, we, we could joke the great beyond, right? But you know, from a, from a Dakota perspective, which sees personhood as not something that's relegated solely to humans, right? Ideas, concepts, objects, other animals, plants, rocks. All of these also have personhood. These ideas and designs also have personhood, and they come to us in dreams to be able to tell us how, how they want to be portrayed.

And so really, when we talk about cultural revitalization and cultural revitalizing work, what we're really talking about is this very deep metaphysical process of dreaming back knowledge and ha being in active conversation with knowledge and cultural ideas as persons, as people, and inviting them back, creating space for them within these contexts.

And so for me, “The House of the Skin Painters” is a full installation of, first of all of bison hides on the floor. So again, talking about being in, in relation or in conversation with ecology. Bison, like Dakota people, we are buffalo people, right? We are in active relationship with bison.

Bison gave us our social structure. We model our social structure off of bison, right? They are one of our, our first and biggest teachers as, as people, and we are to conduct ourselves as bison do within their herds and within, you know, within their families and communities, right? And so the relationship that we have between them, you know, every, you know, when a bison is killed, every single part of that buffalo is used.

Um, every, there's a point and purpose to every single piece. Nothing goes to waste, right? Um, you know, even like, even like the, like ankle bones are used as like toy horses for kids because like, that's what they look like, right? Every little piece. So we are coming from this like really intense relational history with this animal, and I can count on my fingers and toes the number of times I've seen one in the wild.

Part of the process of colonization is also about undermining indigenous relationships with land. But when you, you know, that's really difficult unless you like, you know, kill off huge numbers, huge pieces of its ecology, right? Like the bison herds of North America were legendary, right? As far as the eye can see in every direction, there are these moving bison, bison herds across, across the plains.

Like, I can't imagine that, right? Like that, that defies my comprehension. It's never something I've seen in my life. Most of the bison I see are behind barbed wire fences also, because of the accessibility, um, of, of bison, bison hides themselves. Now hold particular level of gravitas. In native communities, like, you know, the ceremony is real damn serious when they busted out the bison hide.

It's this, it's a thing that's very important. There's a, there's a weight to pulling this out and being in recognition of this particular relationship. And so one of the things that I have found to be very profound in my life though, is reestablishing the day-to-day connection with these things, with these bison hides and by extension with this animal.

Right? And so the, you know, making points to take my family, to take my children to go visit Buffalo wherever we can, right? Even if they are in, in, in captivity. But for the hides themselves to remember that we used to make babies on these things. We used to birth our babies on these things. We, when we died, we were wrapped in them.

This is a profound day-to-day piece of our lives that we have in many ways, been stripped of connection with on a day-to-day basis. Right now it's only brought out for high ceremonial purpose. And so for me, one of the big connections that I wanna do or wanna make with my artwork is reconnecting people to the day-to-day nature of this, of these things.

And so in “The House of the Skin Painters,” the floor of this house is buffalo hide. And you know, there's an, there's significant enough space on that buffalo hide where people can come into the lodge that's constructed there and sit to be on that hide again. And you know, I was listening to an elder who has since passed on talking about like the power of sitting on the bison hide is honestly, you know, when we talk about it in birth, some of the same, the same physiologic things that happen when a baby is brought skin to skin to chest with a parent, right?

Like heart rate becomes regulated, breathing becomes regulated, like blood pressure stabilizes. Like people relax in a very deep and profound way. The more. Flesh contact they have on, on the big giant fluffy, right? Like, you feel great on these things. And you know, it's always funny, you know, the, the big thing with, you know, anthropology in native communities is like, oh, you know, the primitive technologies of native folks.

It's like, I'm sorry, this is peak technology here. You cannot improve on this, right? Like, this is, this is a weighted blanket of physiologic regulation that I have just by like, laying on the floor. It's real hard to top this. And so being in this house, then looking at, um, looking at then a bison hide that is turned flesh side up.

So the fur is down below. And that moment of the skin painter of, you know, this elder, this historical recorder, this somebody who is an active communication with the spiritual world of ideas and the, and the metaphysical aspects of, of that relationality. What is the moment right before they actually put paint to hide when it is nothing but potential, when it's nothing but potential for story.

Right? Which story, which design, which thing is coming forward in this moment wanting to be told? We have a really amazing tool with projection, right? And where we don't have to settle on a single image. And so the, the digital, the digital piece that accompanies the house of the skin painters is very much about this, is this idea of the dreaming.

The dreaming that comes in that moment, the waking dream that comes right before that paint is put down. And you know, the possibilities begin to collapse, right? It's that moment of, of timelessness where we get to enter into that space where all things for, you know, all things are possible once more within this home, within this guarded, safe periphery of these animals, these other persons, these other people who really do have our interests as humans at their heart, right?

Like bison have our best interests at heart. That's part of the relationality between us to be in this kind of like created ceremonial space within the middle of an art gallery to be held safely while we dream these things back. And so really that's where the title, um, of the installation or of the exhibit came from, of hinapapi.

This idea of emerging, literally in Dakota, “they emerge,” but emerging as trees do from the mist in this kind of slow, gradual process where something eventually becomes solidified. As I said earlier, the process of cultural revitalization is in many cases, making space for this knowledge to come through, making space for the designs to come through, making space for things to visit in this waking dream, to be manifested in a much more real concrete sense.

People who are engaged in language revitalization talk about the spirit of the language itself coming through, and how do you work with that spirit, be in communication with it so that it can, so that it has the space provided that it needs in order to manifest itself in a physical way. And so if I'm getting hella philosophical about…

Matthew: I'm here for it.

Autumn: …About, you know, all of the art, that's really where, where it kind of comes from.

The same thing actually is very similar to another piece that's hanging, in this installation called “Wi Hiyaya,” or the “Passing of the Sun.” I actually developed that piece in, in connection with my oldest son. His name in, in English is Dacian…When he was little, he would just kind of like make these little pen drawings and we kind of used them as, as stamps and kind of constructed these, these land, these digital landscapes and moved the, the stamps, you know, utilizing AI tech, kind of where, where these different stamps should be in these places.

And it overall, you know, over the course of all of these different images, you know, I think it's like over 4,000 images at some point or another. It creates this illusion of the passing of time and the passing of all of these things and what are the movements of people and of bison and of ceremonies and of death.

Um, and like where do all of those things fit in, in, in the passing of the sun. And again, it's this projection. It's a projection, it's a digital projection of, of time passing. In this case it's a, it's an elk hide. Um, that's, that's on, um, that's on exhibit there. It's this idea of like what emerges when you allow that, when you allow that passage to happen, um, when you acknowledge kind of your own impermanence on the landscape and just sit back and, and watch that and kind of revel in it, like glory in, in your impermanence with that, how does that, how does that project and move forward?

Matthew: I'm marvel at how this installation or this collection of installations, how it can transform a built physical institutional environment.

Autumn: Yes. I mean, to a certain extent you have more experience with that than I do. It's there. It's with you right now. Yeah. I, and maybe this is a conversation for another time, but I'd be really interested to see how it, like how has it transformed that space and the way people interact with it versus other standard kind of, you know, it's, it's also, you know, the, his history center is also like a historical museum.

So there's does all of the history things of the items and the glass cases and people walk through and move through. Is it different? How, how do people, how do people interact with it?

Matthew: Yeah. I, I think from my experience, slowly at first, you know, with, with curiosity, um, 'cause the gallery, uh, really with, I think any art exhibition in the gallery of the museum, you know, there there's sort of, um, a taking stock of like, well, what's here?

Like, I, I didn't expect something to be here. What's here? And there's a real sense of imitation to the piece. And what I think is powerful is as folks certainly spend time with the installations and, you know, the other pieces that are in the show, I think what it can convey regardless of a person's cultural background or, or lineage is.

A sense of that space. I think the power of an installation in a space, like a history center or an art institution or a building, that that stands and you know, and represents certain things, varying things to different people, is that like we can make these spaces in these institutions, institutions outside of these institutions, like we have the capacity to make space.

I think that's a really important reminder I think for a lot of folks in this moment. Autumn, I'm so grateful for your time today in this conversation, and I have really one more question and I think it, it sort of meditates around that making of space and that potential for story that you were just sharing.

And it takes me back to a moment where we were having a conversation together, um, by the Mississippi River the summer, um, as we were, you know, thinking through elements of your exhibition here in Winona. You asked me like a pretty basic question that I feel like I myself have asked folks like in the last couple months, and it's essentially like, what's up?

How are you doing? Like, what's happening in your work? What's happening in the arts field? And, um, I find myself, when I ask people in my family or people in the world this question, it's really hard for me to articulate like, what exactly is happening. Like, it feels like a jumble of words. Uh, like I'm trying to use words to approximate a feeling in a moment that is like hard to approximate for whatever reason, with words for me, you know, this moment we're in right now, you know, it's like how, how do you begin to describe it?

But you brought so much focus to like, I just like, I just like gave you a rambling jumbling of words like, as I am right now, this is basically the same thing. And um, but you shared some really deep knowledge and experience with me and it. Came out of your role as, as a midwife, like what you articulated in this moment As I was like searching for words and just trying to kind of just establish like what is like happening, how for myself, for my family, for my community, for these relationships I'm in.

Like, what are we doing in this moment? You were like, you know, this is like the phases of labor. That was like, kind of like, what, what you dropped on me in that moment, and I was so grateful to hear that. And I'm wondering if just for our listeners, you could share more about that notion of phases of labor in these spaces of transition from your experience.

Autumn: Absolutely. I, I feel, you know, whenever you get super nerdy about anything, you know, your, your whole life kind of revolves around it and you can root anything back to that one thing. And in order to be insane enough to be a midwife, especially a home birth midwife, you've gotta kind of be that level of obsessed and crazy about what it is that you do.

And if you talk to midwives, literally everything ends up being a birth metaphor at some point in time. So, you know, grains of salt with what I'm about to say, because ultimately at the end of the day, I am a birth nerd. But what people caveats, um, but what people often talk about, you know, when, when we do, when we ask people, you know, how are you doing right now?

There seems to be this, um, kind of exactly what we were talking about this, you know, I, I don't know. Um, you know, I was talking to another friend of mine about it, you know, oh, how are you? She says, oh, well, you know, bombs are dropping in Gaza, but my garden's doing really good and my rabbit is bringing me a lot of joy right now.

And, you know, we're about to run out of snap benefits, but. It's a beautiful day out. I'm, you know, it's all of these kinds of conflicting things, these conflicting emotions, and there's this idea or, or, or sense of feeling that we're all kind of building up towards this culminating moment. We don't really know where we're going with that.

And really, it reminds me so much of transition in labor. So, you know, for those of you who are unaware, you know, labor is conventionally broken down into, into four parts, more or less. You have your first stage where you are contracting, where your uterus is contracting. And it, what it is, is building up muscle structure in the very top of the uterus called the fundus.

And it's pulling all of the things it needs to out of the way so that it then can push baby out in what's called the second stage of labor. And so the second stage is pushing, you know, pushing until the baby's born. And then the third stage is when the placenta comes out. And then the fourth stage is, you know, in the first hour after that.

But there's a moment in between that first and second stage where that baby is right about to begin. Its process of emergence that they call transition. And transition is a wildly uncomfortable place to be from a physiologic standpoint, because you're going from this moment of gathering muscle, of gathering strength, and doing all the work of gathering strength, which is a very real thing and a very real process.

And now you're going to direct all of that energy towards pushing. And when somebody's in labor, this is where you hear, I can't do it anymore. I'm done. I, I can't, I can't do it. I, I don't have the strength. Um, if people think they're gonna die, this is the time they think they're gonna die. Right. Um, it's a really intense and sometimes quite traumatizing place for to be for people.

As a midwife, personally, I have a, a very real soft spot in my heart for, uh, for people who are what we call grand mal tips, people who've had five or more babies because they get to transition and they're right about to push. And what's funny is their contractions will sometimes just completely stop and they'll say, “I don't wanna do it anymore. I don't wanna do it. I don't like this part, I'm not gonna do it.”

And as a care provider in these circumstances, I, I have a choice, right? I have a choice on how I'm going to respond to this person going through this massive transition in their, you know, literal transition in their lives. This is the moment that they actually stop being the person who they were before, and now they're going to be the new parent of this child, right?

This is the before and after moment for people, right? Because no longer right at this point, you're no longer pregnant, right? You are, you're no longer the person you were when you were pregnant. Now you are beginning this process of parenthood because your baby is about to emerge into this world. And the ego death that goes with that, and the grief and the mourning of all of the, the person who you were or you could be is now, you know, the, those possibilities are collapsing because from now forward, you will be the parent of this child.

And usually in, in hospital situations, um, you know, as a doula, this is something I would see a lot. Somebody gets to 10 centimeters, okay, we're pushing now. That's what's gonna happen. Now you, your 10 centimeters dilated, that cervix is all the way outta that. Let, let's push, right? And that transition period is oftentimes.

Taken away from people because they're just being told to push whether or not they have an urge to Right. Whether or not they feel like it's time for them to push. Now you 10 centimeters, you better do it. But being in this place of transition is actually crucial because as I've learned from these grand mal tips, having their babies, we don't get to be done until they decide to take up the work.

We're gonna sit and transition, and I tell people this, it's like, okay, cool, you don't wanna do it anymore, that's fine, but we don't get to be done until you do it. I'm, I'm, I'm gonna sit here for as long as it takes for you to decide that this is something you wanna do. But we don't get to be done until you do it.

Because ultimately, the only way out through any of this, the only way out is through. There's not a detour, there's not a sideways ev. You know, even if we go in for a surgical operation for a cesarean section at this particular point, you still gotta go through that process to come to the other side.

Right. There's not, there's not an easy out to this one. At the end of the day, the only way out is through, and sometimes it takes it. I think the longest I've ever sat with somebody was two and a half hours. You know, checking on baby, checking on heart tones, making sure you know, everything's good.

There's no emergency happening, but we're gonna wait until you're ready to push. And inevitably what always happens is they go, all right, fine. And then they, you know, sneeze and a baby comes out. Right? You know, it's like two contractions, right? Like kids right there. But there's this moment of autonomy, right?

This moment of needing to take up that choice and that the transition point can be really scary and you don't know what's happening. You know, it's an incredibly confusing time, and we live in an incredibly confusing time right now where we have a, we're bombarded with different sensations and different stories and narratives all the time, and it's very difficult to make sense of it.

And then we have our physiologic response to all of those things happening. And, you know, our, our brains are actually not wired to understand that a genocide is occurring on the other side of the world. And also it's a beautiful day and my kids are laughing, right? Like, we're not good at that kind of bridge, right?

The, the cognitive dissonance of those things we're not good at that comprehension, and it's an incredible, incredibly difficult place to be, but it's also a really beautiful moment where there is so much potential. Everything that could be born at this moment, everything that could emerge full circle at this second.

And it would be a waste if we succumbed to the despair of that confusion because life is always confusing and there are always gonna be dirty dishes in the sink and you know, the dusting that needs to be done. But right now our children are laughing. And how do we make it sure, make sure that children can laugh everywhere, right?

That children can play everywhere, that everyone is fed. That if one of us is suffering and hurting and unable to make ends meet, it is because we are all in that boat together, not because there is a caste system that has differentiated you from me, your children versus mine. How do we take the power of this moment and transition into something beautiful?

Because we can sit here in despair and confusion and refuse to move for as long as we want to, really, but we're not gonna come out to the other side until we choose to push.

Matthew: Autumn, thank you so much for that.

Autumn: Of course. Thank

Matthew: And thank you for sharing that with our listeners. I'm so grateful for this conversation.

And we really just have one more question, which is the question that we, we ask everybody who joins us here, and it's a fun, beautiful question, you know, which is, what is moving you right now? What's giving you energy and inspiration? And that can be anything from food to art, to books, to music, to websites, to practices, to anything really.

Uh, you know, and are there any recommendations you'd, you'd leave for listeners, but Yeah, what's, what's moving you in this moment?

Autumn: Oh, as I may or may not have made clear up to this moment, definitely my kids right now. You know, I'm, I'm a hockey mom, so hockey season is in full swing. Whether I'm ready for it or not, that is definitely moving me, even if I don't necessarily always have the energy for it.

Um, and, uh, you know, my oldest is, um, I, I'm actually like, just always consistently amazed by this kid's creativity, but he's kind of like in this moment right now where he's trying to make a comic book a day and Yeah. And he's in this kind of like, cool, I mean, I don't really get it 'cause it's not really like my genre of humor, but things like dog man and cat something or, you know, like the, yeah.

He's making kind of like those style comics, but, you know, taking pictures and printing them out and then putting 'em in comics and writing his own like narrative. So he's got this whole world right now called Weird vil, and like somebody just crashed this guy's bus, so he's gonna go save his bus that he's like low key in love with, but there's an avalanche.

Like, it's so, like, it's great and like this kind of relentless creativity. And then, uh, my youngest is, he's so funny. He's got this kind of like curmudgeonly but relentless generosity to him where like, he doesn't wanna be hugged, he doesn't wanna be like kissed or snuggled or like really touched that much, but you know what?

He is going to like go get everybody a treat from their Halloween candy and, you know, everybody, we're all gonna sit and eat our treats together. And, you know, this aspect of togetherness and the, and the love and the sharing that comes from, from these moments, making sure that everybody has enough in that.

That really brings me, I think, you know, also to ceremony. I've been doing a lot of ceremony in the last year. You know, both we could say like fun community ceremony, but also a lot of death ceremonies and the, the mourning that goes with that, but also really loving and and leaning into the opportunity that that brings to bring together, um, you know, we say birth and death are some of the last real ceremonies that we, we have left to us in the, in these industrial societies, um, everything else is really scheduled, right.

You know, birthdays, we do birthdays when we have time, right? Um, we do coming of age ceremonies for, for our kids, but we often like schedule that weekend, right? Um, it's not like whenever, when a child first begins to menstruate, we don't drop everything and do that ceremony right. Then we like, you know, schedule it.

But birth and death are, are those things where they, they don't stop for anybody. And so you, you have to take that moment to, to be together and, and stop everything else to give this precedence and priority. And there's something very beautiful in that. I've been doing a lot of travel lately. Um, and that's, you know, I mentioned being at the, the Humboldt Forum in, in Berlin.

And so I, I just got back from that trip, which actually, you know, in terms of the energy for my, my work and my imagining really, I'm doing a lot of, um, comparative theology and comparative cultural reclamation studies right now. And I am, you know, obviously doing that with other like native folks and how other native folks have, have worked on these things.

But I'm actually looking a lot at, um, the revival of Western Esoterism and various European scholars in particular that are, are utilizing even texts like biblical texts or religious texts from different parts of the world and doing excavations into those texts to talk about like pre-Christian or pre abramic religion.

Uh, spiritual practices, um, like based on how these kinds of things are discussed. And so that, that is actually really, really inspiring and gives me a lot of strategies for when I, myself, am going through different anthropological texts. I, I joke one of my favorite books out there that I can seriously recommend to absolutely nobody is called, um, and you're about to find out why is called, uh, The Labor amongst Primitive Peoples in the Lesser Breeds of Whites by Dr. George Engelmann, written in 1882. Now, clearly that's a terrible. Terrible freaking book title, but it's incredibly valuable for the revitalization of traditional birth practices, right? Because this is one of the only ethnographic texts that was written about childbirth. You know, it's mostly surveys by different Indian agent doctors.

They have no idea what they're seeing, but they're describing it and it's being published by this guy. So when I go through this book, I'm having to unpack all of that colonial crap, the racist projections, all of the, all of the terrible things that this person is interpreting. Like that's the lens that he's seeing these things through.

But that doesn't make what he's seeing any less important or valuable. And that is, is the gold that I'm sifting out. That's the rice that I'm winnowing out of. The chaff here is, is that piece. And so to see that practice in action. In other parts of the world, in other contexts where they're sometimes trying to reach back thousands of years into the past to pull something forward, to dream that knowledge forward.

Like that, that's incredibly inspiring and, and helpful for me, even if it's not necessarily super culturally applicable. Like I'm, you know, a lot of western esotericism is not, it's not particularly useful to me. Right. Um, but the methodology, the process is, and the excitement that people are bringing to that study is a kind of energy that is sometimes really lacking, um, or at least for me, lacking in a lot of native circles.

Because if we're, we're so kind of weighed down sometimes by the, by the trauma of it, by like the day-to-day bullshit of it, that the excitement of it where people are sometimes uncovering or reconstructing a ritual for the very first time and being so over the moon about it. We're like, oh, okay, cool.

Like, it makes me so much more grateful for the fact that we still have, you know, to say that we have a continuous tradition of spiritual practice and stuff like that in native community is, is not entirely accurate, right? Like, there's definitely certain things that have been pulled through, but it's mostly an amalgamation of pieces that people have accumulated and, and brought together and pushed forward, um, that are now coming down to us as living traditions.

But at one point they kind of had to be amalgamated if for no other reason than because in 1862 when they rounded everybody up, one of the first things they did when they reached the concentration camp in Fort Snelling is they rounded up everybody's bundles of spiritual items and burned them. We have so few of things that are, I mean, not even ancient, right?

Like that's just 150 years ago. Like we don't have anything really that predates that because it was all very intentionally destroyed. And so we sometimes kind of get weighed down by the immediacy of that violence. But it does make me insanely grateful for the things that we do have for the narratives that we do have.

And so, you know, it keep definitely keeps me from that level of despair by seeing the excitement of other people doing this same kind of work in a different field. Reaching so much farther back and having to remake everything more or less from scratch is, it's incredibly inspiring to me.

Matthew: Autumn, thank you so much for your time today and for this conversation.

Autumn: Well, thank you again so much for having me. And yeah, this has been a real pleasure.