Colonization & Ancestral Healing: Why did We Forget to Eat Acorns? with Elspeth Hay
Reese Brown (00:00.142)
Elspeth, thank you so very much for spending your time and energy with me today, this morning, this afternoon. I'm so excited to dive into Feed Us With Trees, but also be sharing this space with you and learn more about you and connect.
Elspeth Hay (00:22.13)
Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.
Reese Brown (00:25.71)
Absolutely. Well, my very first question to hopefully set a good tone for our conversation together is what is one thing you're grateful for right now?
Elspeth Hay (00:36.506)
I'm feeling really grateful for where am right now. I'm at a pond house with a bunch of friends and family. And it's a tradition that we started during COVID when you couldn't go far. So this house is actually only about five minutes from where I actually live. I can walk here. And it was so much fun the first year that we did it to be in this place that's so much a part of our lives, but to have a different experience of it, that we've done it ever since.
And yeah, I'm just really grateful to be where I am.
Reese Brown (01:11.65)
I love that. That's so beautiful, too, when you get an experience with a place that it's like, I've always seen this, been here and experienced it, but now it's a new light and a new iteration of what this place can mean. That's so beautiful.
Elspeth Hay (01:29.65)
Sorry, I just glitched out for a second and I couldn't hear you, but I think I can catch up.
Reese Brown (01:34.558)
that's okay.
Okay, okay, no worries at all, no worries. Well, my first question to hopefully break our conversation open a little bit is what is your story? I know that that's a hefty question and you get into a little bit of it throughout the book as well. So we'll certainly explore some of those themes, but whatever you feel called to share here in this space today is perfect.
Elspeth Hay (02:01.958)
I would say that I've been asking the same question my whole life in a variety of different ways, which is basically like, what's wrong with us as human beings? Why are we so out of place in the living world around us?
And I think it started as a kid. My parents are bird watchers. So my whole life they've been watching and studying birds. My dad leads bird watching tours all over the world. And we spent a lot of time when I was a kid going to different places in Maine where I grew up and looking at birds in their habitats. And as a kid, I noticed that every bird was perfectly adapted to their habitat. They could get all their food in that habitat. They had everything they needed for building a nest. They could meet all their needs in these ecotourism.
ecosystems. I remember sap suckers learning about those and they live in the forest and they drill these neat little rows of holes into trees and you know that's how they meet their needs and their body is perfectly adapted for it. And then we would go to the grocery store where we were getting our food from farms that I knew were destroying wild places where these other species lived.
And I just couldn't understand, I don't think I could have articulated it, but I just didn't understand why we didn't have that same relationship with place and why we seem to be the only species that didn't really fit into the living world around us. And so, you know, in high school, I went to a semester program studying organic farming. We lived and worked on an organic farm. And that was kind of like my first attempt to figure out like, well, what?
Is there a way to be part of our place in a different way? In college, I wrote this whole thesis on sense of place and American restlessness. Then I went on to become a reporter for NPR on food and the environment. So I think without realizing it until maybe kind of more recently, I've just been asking the same question a bunch of different ways. And it wasn't until I learned that we can eat acorns that some answers started falling into place.
Elspeth Hay (04:11.922)
So that's kind of been my journey up until the last few years. And then it was like this rapid period of rewriting old stories and discovery.
Reese Brown (04:12.908)
Hmm.
Reese Brown (04:22.518)
Yeah, I absolutely love that. do think that most of us, when we look back at our lives, it's so funny when you said that immediately, I was like, I have one question that is kind of my central focal point too. So I really resonate with that. And what a great exercise for listeners too. Like, what is the question that we keep asking, right? I think that human beings are naturally so curious that it's like, there is something that we want to figure out. And I think those questions tend to be the ones that
We can't really ever answer. Of course, I'm tempted to ask you, what is wrong with us as human beings in our relationship with place? you wrote a whole book about it, right? As an attempt, as a striving for the answer. But I suppose a bit tongue in cheek, do you have a response to that right now? And of course, it's not, I will not hold you to this being concretized in any way, but does anything come up as you think about
how you're currently asking that question post writing, us with trees and what you've learned through that process that colors the way you're asking that question now.
Elspeth Hay (05:34.257)
I think I'm maybe on to a new question. Like, because I think that the answer to that question is actually there's nothing wrong with us. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with us. We have all the tools that we need to be part of an ecosystem. We can also be just as well adapted to a huge variety of places as other species.
Reese Brown (05:45.422)
Hmm, right.
Elspeth Hay (05:58.259)
but we have lost our way and we have forgotten the skills and the stories that we need to do that. And so I think I've kind of, a little bit, I'm at peace with that question. And my new question is sort of like,
It's a little bit unformed. I guess it's more like, okay, so how do we shift? know, if we can be in relationship with our places in a completely different way than I had ever thought was possible, how do we do it in large numbers? You know, not just one person, but as a culture and as a society.
Reese Brown (06:23.02)
Hmm.
Elspeth Hay (06:41.106)
And it's easy to look backward and see how other people have done it or to look around and see how people in other places are doing it. But what's harder and what I think is communal and intergenerational work is to figure out how to move together toward a new, you know, not new in the sense that we have to reinvent the wheel, but a future, a present and future way of moving back toward that type of relationship with place. And that
Reese Brown (07:10.37)
Yeah.
Elspeth Hay (07:11.174)
is a big, big question. And I definitely don't have all the answers. And I don't think any one person ever should or could have all the answers. So I'm sort of sitting with that question with myself, with friends, with family, with readers, just really with anyone who wants to connect on it.
Reese Brown (07:35.309)
Yeah, I love that. And I love that even in that, course, so much of writing and academic work, research work, creative work is so personal and isolated that sometimes we get so in our own echo chamber. So I love hearing you say, I'm sitting with this with friends and family because the question in its nature is communal.
we should be asking it in this communal way. And I think that that's really, really powerful that it's like in questioning, we also have to be with the question. We have to change the way we're asking the question if we want to change the answer. And with that, in hearing all these different questions, the metaphor that you use so often in the book and that is coming up for me right now is hunger, right? Like questions inherently are a hunger for knowledge.
Elspeth Hay (08:27.184)
Yeah.
Reese Brown (08:32.034)
hunger for understanding, a hunger for truth. And I think that that striving for truth is so, so, so human. And the very first thing, I mean, so many things in your work is striking is the best way. I can put it was my reaction to so many moments that I was just like struck and I had to set the book down and like take a breath because I was just like, my, like, I just felt struck, you know?
And the very first moment like that in your book is the dedication for me. I always love starting with titles and dedications and epigraphs because I think it really colors so much of how we orient to this work. But for all those who hunger to belong. And when we think about this idea of place, it's like inherently it is about how we belong in the world, in community. And I think this question of belonging is
often reduced to just other people, just friends, family, and human communities. But of course, community is such a thing than just humans. When you talk about for those who hunger to belong, what does belonging look like for place in this broader sense?
Elspeth Hay (09:42.896)
Yeah.
Elspeth Hay (09:54.491)
I think it looks like understanding the network of relationships that you're part of in a place as a living, breathing person who needs food and shelter and heat and, you know, fibers, whether it's for tools or clothing.
I think that a lot of us are really lonely and disconnected. And I think that, you know, often when we talk about that in our modern dialogue, we're talking about, you know, we're on our phones too much, or we're not having the same kind of community events that we once had. But I also think that we're really, many of us are maybe without realizing it, missing a connection that we used to have to the material world around
us. Not just the human world, but the more than human world and
so much of what I ended up exploring in the book. My first interest was like, okay, how do we feed ourselves in place? But then it was like, I got to know these other species, like, you could not just feed yourself, but you can make the tools that you need. You can create a basket, you can build a house. And I think that true belonging involves a feeling of being networked in place, not just with your own species, but with all the other living,
beings around you and understanding how to relate in a way that's reciprocal and balanced and can be ongoing isn't, you know, sort of a one use and you've exhausted the resource and because that's not really a relationship. That's just sort of a hit and run for lack of a better description. A relationship is like ongoing and there's give and take and
Reese Brown (11:39.202)
Mm.
Reese Brown (11:51.618)
Right.
Elspeth Hay (11:56.581)
I think that for, you know, without going into it too far, and we can decide whether we want to go further into it or not. But for those of us of Euro-American descent, there's a big conversation that we're not having around belonging and around how we got to this continent in the first place, and what's happened since we got here. And that was a big part of writing the book for me was sort of grappling with that in my own lineage and
trying to understand how we got to this disconnect that we're so present in today. And that I think so many people are starting to kind of question and feel their way out of because it's feeling so bad that people are ready for something else, I think.
Reese Brown (12:36.14)
Yeah.
Right.
Reese Brown (12:42.54)
Yeah, we have to realize that it's not working in order to want to change it. And I think that that absolutely is kind of a cultural awakening slash reckoning we are having. I absolutely agree. I can feel it. And I think earlier you mentioned something about in moving forward to the future actually being a returning to
perhaps an older, a more ancient, a more traditional, I don't know what word maybe you would choose to describe it, but way of relationship with place. And I do think that let's get into the colonization conversation because I think that it is so integral to this dialogue around belonging because when we think of
colonization, first coming to the West and Western civilization, it was stripping away belonging that other people had to place. And if we as a people are rooted, founded in taking away belonging, how can we ever hope to attain that for ourselves?
There's not a super direct question in there, but I would love to know any reactions or immediate thoughts about that kind of exchange of belonging that happens through that process.
Elspeth Hay (14:17.168)
Yeah, I think, you know, as I started learning about humans eating acorns, the first thing that I was, and this is, getting to the question, I promise, but, you know, I was really struck by the fact that people all over the Northern Hemisphere in so many different cultures had at one point, you know, whether they still had it or had lost it, this really key connection with oak trees, you know, so many cultures have called them the tree of life,
Reese Brown (14:28.629)
No, you're perfect.
Elspeth Hay (14:47.092)
gods and goddesses and myths, so many stories center on these trees as the givers of life and so many human cultures have eaten and tended to acorns and oak trees as staple food, staple crops. And what I couldn't understand as I first started researching was, okay, how come some people have held on to that connection and some cultures have just become completely severed from it? And so I started...
following my own ancestry back and looking for a rupture and trying to understand how we got to this place where we are today where, you we've gone from a people who revered oak trees and worship them to people who don't know you can eat an acorn, wouldn't think twice about cutting down an oak tree. And it's not like you just wake up one day, right, and decide, yeah, these trees are like meaningless. I guess we'll move on. And
The first, you know, as I trace that thread back, the first history that I got to was the history that you're talking about of people of Euro-American descent dispossessing indigenous people all over North America from their ancestral lands. And it's a bloody, violent, awful history. And so much in there that I never learned in school that I was completely unaware of. You know, I didn't know that starting in the 1850s in California,
there was a bounty on the head of indigenous people where our government was paying settler soldiers to bring in scalps and to prove that they had killed indigenous people. And that's just one example of such a long, you know, 300 plus year history of this violence. But I was also at a place in my life when I was researching this where I was just sort of done believing what I had believed my whole life, which is what
that there was something fundamentally wrong with humans and we were just kind of born bad. And so I started wondering, okay, well, why were people like my ancestors doing this? know, what's going on here? Because I noticed that there were some communities that were really hell bent on spreading grain farming and sort of dominant American culture through this violence. And some communities that were in these really...
Elspeth Hay (17:10.93)
communally oriented tree based systems. And that's not to say that there's always, know, grain based systems are violent and tree based systems are not. That's not true. But I just noticed this dichotomy that didn't make a lot of sense. And so I kept tracing that thread and I kept pulling on it. And what I got to was this whole history of internal colonization of Europe that happened before Europeans ever came en masse to North America. And
Reese Brown (17:19.093)
Mm-hmm. Sure.
Elspeth Hay (17:39.525)
I was completely shocked by that history. It was never something that I had heard about from my family, never something I had heard about in school. I had always understood that most Euro-Americans came here because it was a land of opportunity, right? And that's the mythology that I grew up with. And even when there were stories about people sort of leaving Europe for, because of religious persecution or sort of maybe like environmental degradation, it was always painted as like,
Reese Brown (17:53.688)
Right.
Elspeth Hay (18:07.696)
this was an amazing place to come. And so people wanted to come here. But that's really not true for most Euro-Americans who came here during the 1600s and 1700s, during the early colonial period. 75 % of early immigrants from England came because they had been dispossessed in their own homelands and lost access to communally managed, not just woodlands, but farm fields and so many other landscapes.
that had been their own homelands for hundreds of years. And as soon as I understood that, a lot of these belonging questions started to come into focus because trauma, know, that original trauma has now been getting perpetuated and passed on. And some people were trying to recover by kind of recreating what they had lost. And some people were just pushing the same trauma onto other people. And I think that it's a history.
that if we ever want to heal our relationship with the land and between different cultures in North America and just with our own sense of belonging, it's really something that I think we need to grapple with.
Reese Brown (19:24.246)
Yeah, no, I absolutely agree. And I think that the pattern of, you know, for for to be super trite, like hurt people hurt people. But it is very that that it is this repetition of the traumatic cycle that it's so interesting to see the way that these interpersonal relationships play out on really big scales, too. And I think we can see that
in our modern society as well, that we know what it feels like when a good friend or a family member hurts us. But even on this broader sociopolitical scale, how do those same relationship patterns ripple outward in impact? And I found your discussion of agriculture specifically so fascinating because I completely agree with what you were just saying, that it's this revelation almost of things that
were not discussed in school, were not made blatant, and if anything, are lauded as achievements, right? And one of the biggest things I remember from my world history classes was how agriculture allowed us to settle because we had the surplus of food that allows this added innovation, and that's how we can get this population growth. And it's all because of agriculture, and yay, agriculture.
food surplus and thinking about that plus one quote that again just so struck me that you use in the book is from Vandana Shiva. It is a recipe for starving people, not feeding them. And ooh, even just saying it right then I gave myself goosebumps because it is such a flip of the narrative that we have been told that in order to
I mean, you talk about abundance in the book, right? In order to feel safe and secure, we must have this abundance. We must have this surplus. We must hoard. We must have enough. And inherently, that comes from fear. It comes from that lack mindset, which I think we can absolutely trace back to exactly what you're talking about, this trauma of belonging, of things being stripped from us. Of course, when things have been stripped from us, we have that fear. Talk to me a little bit about this,
Reese Brown (21:51.465)
agriculture of it all. And with how you're saying the nuts versus grains, it's not exactly a one-to-one, but there is a strong correlation there. Why do you think it is that this pattern of belonging trauma comes at times really reflected through settled agriculture?
Elspeth Hay (22:15.836)
I think that a monocultural field of grain is a lot easier to quantify and control and tax and do so many other things to than a complex, lively, integrated ecosystem. There was some interesting history that I didn't end up getting as deep into in the final draft of the book as I did in some of earlier research and drafts,
But there are some really interesting history books. I think James Scott, I want to say, is the author of one. And I'm spacing on the name, but if you can put it in the notes, that would be awesome. Just about the history of almost all, if you go back through sort of Western history and you look at the Roman Empire and you look at this connection between intensive grain farming. And I just want to really be clear, because I just got another email from a reader the other day saying, like, not all grains are bad.
Reese Brown (22:57.934)
Absolutely.
Elspeth Hay (23:14.738)
could not agree more. It's like this intensive monocultural, industrial style grain farming where like, that's all you're to be incentivized to grow. That's what the, you the state, the government wants. That's what I'm talking about when I'm talking about this, not like somebody having a subsistence patch of corn or, you know, feeding their community with wheat. That's different. But there's a really interesting parallel history of the rise of
these sort of domineering states alongside the rise of grain agriculture, and they kind of rise and fall together. One historian who I talked to for the book, and I wasn't really expecting to get into this green stuff with him, his name's Paolo Squattriti, and he had done a really interesting book about chestnut history in medieval Italy. And it was all about how it was really enslaved
laborers and the slavery system that allowed for grains to become so widespread in the heyday of sort of the Roman Empire and that as soon as that system fell apart, the peasantry, who sort of had a renewed access to land and ability to choose what they wanted to grow, went back to chestnut trees because it was just so much less work.
and that wheat and wheat bread were sort of this bread of the elite and the bread of empire. And when they actually were choosing how to produce food for themselves instead of paying taxes and grain and other things that were acquired by the state, they went back to trees because it's less work and it just made more sense on the landscape. And I think that it's different, but when you look at the history of the United States,
We tend to think like, well, it's natural because like humans, you know, we had the agricultural revolution and now we just grow grains and that's how we feed ourselves. But our government has at every turn incentivized grain agriculture in these really intense ways. know, land that was given out through the Homestead Act, you had to farm it in that way in order to get title to the land. And, you know, that was land taken from indigenous groups and given to Euro-Americans.
Elspeth Hay (25:32.051)
And even today with like corn subsidies and soy subsidies, we are financing a very specific type of agriculture and it's coming directly from the government. So like it's not an accident that we're growing our food this way and it's not the only way to grow food. It's just what our government is investing in. And it's interesting to look at the history and see that that has been true.
Reese Brown (25:58.767)
Thanks for watching.
Elspeth Hay (26:00.221)
for really long time. And that often when sort of strong centralized government falls apart, people tend to revert to these tree based systems, not to say that they're only growing food on trees, but it's just a lot less work. instead of fighting against an ecosystem, it's a way to work with it. And all of us only have so much energy. So there's a lot there to unpack, but there's some really interesting history.
Reese Brown (26:21.617)
Mm.
Elspeth Hay (26:30.042)
And also places like Corsica where political resistance for a long time has been tied to chestnut trees and chestnut cultivation. There is this connection between people looking for little more freedom from an overbearing government and tree cultivation.
Reese Brown (26:51.704)
That's so powerful and such a cool connection. I think it's really interesting to tie back to something you said earlier, that this monocultural agriculture on this really large scale is easier to tax, right? Because one of my questions is going to be, why? Why does government state those in control
What is the motivation behind financing this specific type of sustenance, this specific type of farming? Would you agree with that, that it is because of this ability to control and tax or are there other motivations there? Is there something I'm missing?
Elspeth Hay (27:42.555)
I don't think there's anything you're missing. think that that's part of it. And then I think it's also just as humans, like when we get into a system and then we go deeper into the system, we tend to stay kind of stuck in that system until something pushes us out of it. And so I don't think it's necessarily just that grains are easier to tax or I think that they are, you know, they're more orderly, they're more organized. It's easier to see what's going on in a grain based system than like
Reese Brown (27:59.512)
Mm.
Elspeth Hay (28:11.652)
a forest filled with mushrooms and game animals and nuts and you know, it's complicated. But I think also at the time, you know, as I was tracing some of that farm history back and trying to figure out, okay, what happened to my ancestors? How did we go from a people who grew grains and also had these complex ecological and food-based relationships with wooded ecosystems? You know, we were doing both for a long time. So why did we suddenly...
go all in on the grain side and just sort of throw out the woodland side. That didn't make sense to me. There was this period during sort of early transition to capitalism, you know, as financial agreements were changing and as charging interest on a loan, which used to be considered this sin on par with like murder, like not acceptable at all. And as that was sort of socially okayed and became acceptable, there was this...
push on farmland to make farmland ever more productive. And I think that part of what has happened with grains and with grain-based systems is in a way that we haven't done with trees, we have been trying to get more and more grains off of the same piece of land now for several hundred years. And that's a function of our economic system, right? Because if you have a system where
the amount of, know, where it's based on interest-based money creation, you always have to find more. So you're never gonna have enough by just doing the same thing forever. That's not good enough. You have to produce more all the time. And I think that grains, because of their short life cycle, respond to these sort of pushes in intensity in a way that it's really hard to do with like an oak tree or a chestnut tree, where they have this lifespan of...
know, decades or centuries or in some cases, you know, over a thousand years, you're not going to be breeding quick returns on those trees in the same way that you can with grains. And so I think that that is a part of it. And that's something that's a real challenge for a lot of farmers today who are trying to transition to perennial crops is that they do require some startup time. So it's not like you can just put them in the ground and the next year you'll have a big crop, you'll pay back your loan.
Reese Brown (30:28.087)
Hmm.
Elspeth Hay (30:32.658)
And some people are coming up with really innovative ways around this and that's really cool to see that people are realizing, okay, the financing when you have to wait five to seven years for your first harvest and maybe 15 to 20 years until you really get up to production and then yes, you could be there for 300 years once you get there, but you got to get there. So it's cool to see people kind of seeing that as a hurdle and finding innovative ways to work around it. But I do think just that.
Reese Brown (30:54.316)
Right.
Elspeth Hay (31:01.488)
Life cycle piece is a huge part of it.
Reese Brown (31:05.324)
Yeah. No, I think it's so fascinating. And even hearing you talk about the push for production and kind of squeezing these patches of land dry to get as much as we can out of it, it's so reflective in how we treat the commodity of human beings too, right? And how we oftentimes treat ourselves and how much time can I put into this one thing. And
the way capitalism does work is just so focused on this production and more and more and more and more. And one thing that was also occurring to me as you were talking was how in agriculture, one of the things when I was being taught about all these things that it was being celebrated was, well, it frees up more people to be able to go do other things and innovate.
We don't need everyone farming for their own food. So now we have science and medicine and all of these other things. And when you said trees are actually a lot less work, they actually already free up some time. I just think that's so powerful in that actually we've been told that this one system allows innovation.
Elspeth Hay (32:11.814)
Yeah.
Reese Brown (32:29.334)
when actually the power, the control is put back in the hands of the many, we gravitate towards the things that do allow for more innovation and more time and more rest and recuperation too, not just for human beings, but also for the land. In this kind of parallel, because I think there's such a beautiful like exchange between like the socioeconomics of it all.
and also humans and then earth. But earlier you said our relationship with trees, there's also this conversation that's more than human happening through the book as well. And I think that when we think about nature, for so many it is tied to the divine, to the sublime, to myth and legend. And even you have a chapter called the magic of twigs, which
I just love because of course when you think of a twig, I'm like, it's like a little wand, right? Like when you think of a magic wand, it's basically just a twig. And I think that that's really powerful. In this parallel connection between the human experience, I think we often see like spiritual bypassing too, where those who have this deep connection with spirit or higher power will then say, well, we're all one, so we don't need to worry so we can release.
And like, we don't need to fight. We don't need to ruffle feathers when actually that is such a call to get our hands dirty and dig in. I would love to know your thoughts on this interconnection between this thing that feels more than human, that's bigger than us, and also why that ties us back to the earth, to this lived reality, to...
the here and now.
Elspeth Hay (34:29.574)
I think a lot of us have lost touch with...
Well, let me rephrase that.
I think we tend to confuse, we were just talking about economics, right? And our economic system and the way that it's evolved to push ever more out of us. And we often talk about economic rules as if they fall into the same category as ecological rules and laws. And I think we get confused about it. And when we talk about our relationship to place and what is and is not possible, we're often looking at it within the confines of our current economic system.
But we made that up. We made that system up. It doesn't have rules the way physics does or gravity does or ecology does. It's just completely made up. And I can't say that enough because like we just made it up. It's completely fictional. And I think that when we talk about sort of that spiritual bypassing that you're mentioning, what we're really talking about is
Reese Brown (35:22.348)
Right.
Elspeth Hay (35:37.735)
breaching sort of the rules of ecology and of human relationship. And I think that both of those, if we want to build any kind of meaningful future, we can't avoid either one. So, you know, in any human relationship, I've been working for a number of years now with my kids and my partner and in friendships with this practice that, you know, people call active listening. And it's sort of like,
The basic idea is like, if you want someone to hear you, like you also need to be able to hear them. And I think that when we're talking about what's happened in the past and we're not being honest about it, know, like we were talking earlier about so much that we haven't learned about indigenous history, about Euro-American history, all these truths of history that have been kind of swept under the rug. I think, you know, on the one side, there's that.
and reckoning with that truth and really hearing each other and hearing what that experience has been like for different people is really important. And then on the other side of that, integrating the circumstances of the present where we are this intermixed global society at this point, and that's real and it has real ecological and societal impacts, right? You we've shared diseases between plants all over the world.
We have shared cultural practices from different human societies all over the world. And I think we're all a little bit confused right now about how to integrate what we've shared and how we've heard each other and what we've learned from each other into a coherent relationship with place in the present. And when you talk about getting your hands dirty, I think that I've
The things I'm most excited about right now and the people who I'm most excited when I talk to are people who are in their place where they live experimenting with, okay, what do I know about my own culture, about other cultures that have lived here and about the ecology of this place? And how do I integrate that knowledge into a meaningful way of meeting our needs and working with this place ecologically right now?
Elspeth Hay (37:59.015)
You know, so like, what does that look like? I just talked to, I was at the Northern Nut Growers Association annual conference a few weeks ago, and I met a young woman who had just been in England learning about hedgling and her ancestors are from England and she was, you know, she's working on a bunch of farms in the Midwest and she learned about this ancient practice of hedgling and went and apprenticed with someone in England for three weeks to try to figure out, okay, what would it look like?
to try to do hedgling here in this completely other landscape with species that are native to North America. And that's just one example, but I think that doing the work requires intercultural dialogue, and it also requires a really solid understanding of ecology and place. I don't know if that answers your question, but that's where my mind went when you started moving in that direction.
Reese Brown (38:58.24)
Yeah, absolutely. No, you know, I think with all of these questions, there's not really a direct question or a direct answer. So it's all so fruitful. So no, it's perfect. And in terms of this idea, you said what really makes you excited about building a meaningful future. And of course, this meaning is the piece that really captivates me. I mean, the podcast is called Making Meaning.
And of course I think that meaning in and of itself to make meaning on one hand is such a privilege because in order to slow down and think about how we can step into meaning and be able to do those things, our basic needs have to be met first. And so I think the work you're doing is so powerful because it speaks to those basic needs being met in a more accessible way.
while also doing this work of meaning, that it's not just, okay, we need to get these needs met so that we can move on to the meaning piece. It's, no, the meaning is imbued throughout the process. It must be, it has to be to make every action meaningful and this engagement with place meaningful. I know you mentioned at the very beginning that it's been kind of this question that's driven
your life. And now of course the question is evolving into some new questions, but why do you think it is that you are so captivated by this process specifically, by Acorns, by this specific approach to meaning? And why do you think it's so important that this is the work we're doing as we try and make a meaningful future?
Elspeth Hay (40:53.807)
I think it's...
impossible to have true meaning separated from place. I think that our bodies are tied in every way to the places where we live and even to other places far away. When you see rainfall patterns and there are ponds on Cape Cod that were acidified by acid rain coming from cloud systems thousands of miles away.
we are connected not just to our own places, but to places everywhere. And I think that we were talking a little bit earlier about hunger for knowledge and the way that questions are changing right now and the way that sort of dominant Western culture is having this awakening about the questions we're asking and what we're looking for. And I think that when I think about meaning, it's really cool to see the ways that researchers
are starting to ask different questions. And I think that that's driven by this realization of how connected we all are to each other, to the places where we live. And I think that we've been avoiding that for the past several hundred years in a lot of ways in dominant Euro-American society. I think especially in the past like 60 to 70 years since after World War II, but for a while. And I think that that all connects back to this trauma.
Reese Brown (42:04.119)
Hmm.
Elspeth Hay (42:25.114)
of losing our home landscape and for so many of us being forced off it and coming to this new place and trying to figure out what it means to live here and do we want to live here or you know for generations where people just wanting to go back where they came from and I think that for me a meaningful future is one where we're reconnecting to our places and healing that sense of
loss and really finding an intercultural interspecies sense of belonging.
Reese Brown (43:06.094)
I absolutely love that. And one thing that came up even before you said the word and then you said it and I was like, I'm right there with her was this idea of healing, right? That in order to move forward into the future, there is such a call to acknowledge, right? At least be aware of and then acknowledge in order to heal. I think a lot of the time,
just acknowledging in and of itself can be so healing when it's been something that has been brushed under the rug. I think also in this language around healing, again, so often it's discussed in this solo way and everything that you just talking about is about this connection, this community. How might we imagine in a collective way healing
Elspeth Hay (43:34.107)
Huge.
Reese Brown (43:59.993)
both our own ancestry and lineage, but also the harms that we have perpetrated against other communities as well.
Elspeth Hay (44:12.324)
I think, as you just said, one first step would be honesty. I think that it would look really different in our culture if kids learn the truth in school about what's happened here over the past few hundred years and also why they're here. I think when we get into arguments about, I'm not gonna have all the current terms, but people who are really worried about...
white kids feeling bad about the history that they're learning in schools, I think it's sort of a misguided conversation where like what's important is truth and if we're learning the truth then it kind of explains more to everybody, you know? We're all losing out when we're not learning the truth. I mean there's so much that I've learned in the past few years that would have been helpful to me as a young person, would have
Reese Brown (45:01.826)
Yeah.
Elspeth Hay (45:08.998)
helped me understand the context that I'm in would have helped me understand, you know, how to move through it. And I think, hold on, I've just lost my thread for a moment. when I, where was I going with that?
Elspeth Hay (45:30.62)
Sorry.
Reese Brown (45:32.702)
No, no, you're all good. You were discussing collective healing and how truth is this, the strive towards collective healing. I don't know if that calls anything back.
Elspeth Hay (45:37.605)
Yeah.
Elspeth Hay (45:43.859)
Yeah, I... It does a bit. There was something else, somewhere else I was gonna go, but maybe it'll come back to me. But I think, you know, first talking honestly can be really helpful. Because if you're hurt and then someone is denying that they hurt you, I mean, I think all of us know from personal experience, there's nothing worse than someone saying, well, it's not, it wasn't a big deal or why are you so upset about that? Like, it was a big deal. I am upset about it.
So just say, yeah, I can see why you're so upset about that. think that, and that starts with telling the truth about what happened. And then I think the other piece is like sitting in community where we are today. And the second piece is really hard to figure out. It's okay. So now you're in a town or a city or wherever you are and...
you look around and you see the people that are there and you see what your relationship with the land is like in the present. And there is not one way to, you know, wake up the next day and be like, well, we had a meeting and we figured out what to do and that's great. Now we can just do it all. And what I think is really encouraging is that there are so many people working on different approaches right now.
And I think that we need that. And I think that starting where you are with the people that you know and working outward from there is, you know, as good a place to start as any because it's where you are. And there are, I mean, there are just one thing I was really fascinated by as I was and excited by as I was writing the book was
You know, I started with this simple question of like, why aren't we eating acorns? Right? And that one question led in so many different directions and introduced me to so many people working on different pieces of this puzzle. It connected me to people in wildland fire, in indigenous communities and Euro-American communities and, you know, working on it because of wildlife and working on it because of food production and so many different aspects of this one thing, you know, fire, biochar production.
Elspeth Hay (47:59.015)
So that was just sort of like one little side question that led to all these people doing that work of trying to figure out how to work in relationship with each other and with place. And the same was true as I learned more about the relationship between nut trees and weaving. And the same was true when I started talking to people processing acorns and trying to figure out how to make oil or turn black walnut hulls into dye. I think that what's
exciting about the time that we're in is the same thing that's challenging is that there's so much we need to relearn and there's so many connections that we need to rebuild and there's so many different ways to do it and what's overwhelming about that is like god how are we gonna do that that's so much work but what's exciting about it is like well you don't no one can do it all and so what you can do is find the little part of it
Reese Brown (48:51.789)
Yeah.
Elspeth Hay (48:54.704)
that makes you excited and brings you joy and brings you back into connection with the place and the people where you live and start there and move outward. And I have found that once you do that, people start connecting with you who are also doing that work. And it sort of creates a ripple effect that's really joyful.
Reese Brown (49:10.818)
Hmm.
Reese Brown (49:17.292)
Yeah. I love that. That's so beautiful. And one of my questions that I almost always ask guests is, OK, so what do I do? Right? Not just me personally, but also listeners. It's like, what is the next step? Because so much of this is beautiful to be having these conversations. But again, we need to be grounding into the action and getting our hands dirty and stepping forward. So I love that. I love that reminder of start where you are.
and also follow what is exciting to you. There's a reason why certain things light us up. And I think almost anything that is exciting or engaging to someone, I would imagine, please correct me if I'm wrong, but there would be a way to connect back to this work of place and healing that, yeah, we can connect with.
Elspeth Hay (50:02.844)
Definitely. Definitely. And I think sometimes it's unexpected. Like the two things that I'm doing the most right now around acorns, or with what started with acorns, are not actually, don't involve putting my hands on actual acorns most of the time because it's...
wildland fire and going on prescribed burns and weaving with willow, both of which sort of started out tangential to my original quest and understanding of like, why are we eating acorns? How do we eat acorns? But then it was like, okay, a lot of these oak ecosystems need fire. Well, how do you do that? So I went and got trained and now I've been going on prescribed burns and I'm learning so much every time I go out and
you know, burning with such a diverse group of people and learning from those people and learning from the place. And, you know, I also learned that a lot of nut trees are also basket tree species, but then I couldn't find anyone teaching basket tree with those species in my area. They were only teaching willow. So I learned about willow basket tree. And now I do a lot of that because willow has a lot of the same amazing ecological properties as some of these nut trees. It's a keystone species, which means
species as it's important to its ecosystem as the keystone in a Roman arch, right? If you pull it out, the whole thing falls apart. And one thing that I've been saying when I've been talking with people and they've said like, well, what can I do? I think a great first step is to get to know the keystone plant species or animal species in your area and to learn more about them and to learn more about what historically our human relationship with them has been like. Because anytime you're
Reese Brown (51:39.022)
Mmm.
Elspeth Hay (51:48.281)
working with a keystone species and encouraging it on the land or in the water, whatever it is, you're automatically bringing more life into your place because those are the species that support the most life. And so it's a great, if you don't know where to start, just finding out what those species are is such a huge entry point. And I guarantee you, if it's a keystone species, wherever you are, humans have a relationship with it. And there's a lot to learn there.
Reese Brown (52:04.035)
Yeah.
Reese Brown (52:20.098)
That's so beautiful. And also, you know, in thinking about tying this back to different passions and, and callings, of course, there's such an immediate connection to cooking, right? And one of my favorite parts to read about was your relationship with yummy nuts, your grandmother's recipe. I thought that that was so lovely that it's like not only is it this connection with our ancestry and lineages of people, but also this
really direct relationship that you have with someone doing this work and just that reconnecting and going back to the past to create and forge a meaningful future. It just was so lovely. But also to think about weaving and how that connects with like craftsmanship and that could be furniture and clothes and there's just so much opportunity there. One question before I dive into our final questions.
You mentioned that you're a mom and you have kiddos and a family and in thinking about, know, forging a meaningful future, I would have to imagine that this work informs the way that you're raising your kids and helping them be educated. Can I ask about that experience and how that has maybe changed or informed what it's like to not only be doing this work yourself, but also
leading a family.
Elspeth Hay (53:46.107)
Yeah, it's been really exciting to see how much can change in a generation. I didn't grow up. Really, I'm trying to think what kind of meaningful relationships I had with plants in my yard as a kid. we picked blackberries, we used to make rose hip jam, but most of the world around me did not really feel connected to my family and our everyday needs.
and it's really fun to watch my daughters. You know, I'm still so excited about all the plants we can connect to and all the ways it can happen. And they know so much about it. They're almost a little bored with it. Like they're like, yeah, we know, like everyone knows. And I'm like, no, not everyone knows that you can eat these things or that you can make a basket out of that or that that plant can be turned into cordage or that you can, you know.
Reese Brown (54:34.295)
Right, right.
Elspeth Hay (54:41.016)
make a chair out of this wood and not that wood. Most people don't know this. Most people did know this at one point, but most people in our culture today don't know this. And so in addition to talking to the point that I annoy my children about how exciting that is, I also take kids out foraging through an afterschool program. And I've recently started working with a group of young women in my community to keep those connections.
alive and present and sort of evolving for the next generation. And it is just so cool to see how every day it has become for my kids and how different it is their feeling, you know, and their relationship to the world around them is from what I grew up with.
Reese Brown (55:32.034)
That's so beautiful. I also just love the, you know, in talking about all the different mirroring and connection with nature and humans and the bigger spiritual myth that exists around this. It's also, what a beautiful connection that it's like mother nature, but also a mother and being able to experience that with your kids. It's just, what a beautiful thing to be able to pass on through.
this book that you're sharing with so many people, but also in that direct relationship in your own community too, and this afterschool program. think that that's, it's just so wonderful. To, yes, of course, of course, to guide us into closing out the podcast. Firstly,
Elspeth Hay (56:06.94)
Thank you.
Reese Brown (56:20.406)
Everyone listening, please go read Feed Us With Trees. It will be linked down below anywhere you are listening or watching as well. All of the places that you can find Elspeth and her work. Go check it out. It is, as you could hear, just a wealth of information and knowledge, but this conversation was only the tip of the iceberg. So definitely, please, please go support Elspeth and read Feed Us With Trees.
But in light of this conversation, is there anything that we didn't touch on that you think we need to go back to, clarify, add in, re-emphasize, or introduce that we haven't gotten around to yet?
Elspeth Hay (57:02.034)
I think the only thing that I would add on and maybe re-emphasize is that one thing that I really hope that people get from the book is that when I was a kid, I feel like the narrative around what we needed to do for what the adults around me called the environment or nature and what I think we should just call the living world, because that's what it is. We're not separate from it. It was always about sacrifice and about making ourselves smaller and about
stopping doing all the bad things that we were doing. And I think early on in the book when I was researching, I talked with a farmer named John Kempf who gave me some just advice that I think about all the time. And he said, it's much more powerful to be for something than against something. And I think that the environmental movement for decades has just been against things without offering a lot to be for. And one thing
that I learned through talking with, you know, indigenous knowledge keepers and scientists and farmers and so many other people for the book was sort of
what we can be for. And there are so many ways that the land needs us and that the land does better with our presence and that our interaction can be a positive force instead of a negative force. And I think that when we think about moving forward and the future that we want to create, it's much more powerful and compelling to think about what we should be doing than what we shouldn't be doing. And that's not to say that there aren't things that we need
to stop doing. There are plenty of things that we need to stop doing, but we need something to move toward and we need a vision that makes us want to move toward us, toward it. And I think that this work, instead of being about sacrifice and sort of being a bummer, basically, can actually be really exciting and joyful. And I hope that that's something that people take away from the book.
Reese Brown (59:08.506)
I adore that. think even in how you framed that at the beginning of for so long, this work has been about making ourselves as humans smaller, there is not only is there a world where this work is about stepping into the wholeness of who we are as humans, but it's stepping into the wholeness of the living world of this relationship, right? The back and forth, not just the
obliteration and using up of these resources, but how can we expand collectively in community with one another and also with everything that is around us? And it is about growing larger, not getting smaller. And I just, that is so inspiring and exciting to me to think about it in this way that this work is really one of joy. Cause I mean, anyone who's stepped out in nature recently and just
you know, put feet in soil, knows that feeling of joy and expansion that it can bring. My very final question, just to hopefully put a little bit of a bow on everything that we've talked about, is what is one word to describe how you are feeling right now?
Elspeth Hay (01:00:26.834)
com.
Reese Brown (01:00:29.91)
Hmm, I love that. No, but it's perfect. It's perfect. I asked that question and sometimes I think it throws people off because it's a little bit of a curve ball, but I like to, it's kind of a pulse check for me. But I love that. And I concur. It's the excitement that's also calming, but it's like, we don't need to be in a hurry, but we can take these steps forward with joy.
Elspeth Hay (01:00:44.123)
Yeah.
Elspeth Hay (01:00:59.366)
Yeah, I've been thinking about the phrase recently, urgency without hurry. Like we have an urgent, we have some urgent challenges, but let's not hurry in a way that makes us kind of fumble our way toward them. Let's move toward them calmly and with purpose.
Reese Brown (01:01:06.286)
Hmm.
Reese Brown (01:01:19.286)
I love that. It's very much like when the fire alarm goes off, you know, they don't tell you to run screaming. It's no, stay quiet, get the single file line and we walk out calmly and that's how everyone stays safe as we do this. Well, Elspeth, I cannot thank you enough for sharing your time, sharing this virtual place with me today and sharing this work with Acorns with Feed Us With Trees. It was such a pleasure to read this book. It's such a pleasure to
sit down and chat with you today and thank you.
Elspeth Hay (01:01:51.558)
Thank you so much for having me.
Reese Brown (01:01:55.223)
Absolutely.