Calling in the Healers

In Part Two of this special series on migration and belonging, I sit down with my neighbors, Chuck and Camille Olcese, to explore the journeys that brought them to Lawrence and the experiences that shaped their commitment to welcoming "our newest neighbors."

Together we trace stories of family migration, international education, faith, community, and the surprising ways that "home" is created across generations and across continents. From California, Oregon, China, Chicago, and Southeast Kansas to the neighborhoods they now call home, Chuck and Camille reflect on what they've learned from a lifetime spent alongside international students, immigrants, and refugees.

We talk about:
• The migration stories that shaped their own families
• What international travel teaches us about belonging
• Why diversity felt like home to their daughter
• The difference between living next to people and truly being neighbors
• Faith, hospitality, and the deeper meaning of the Good Samaritan
• Refugee resettlement as a community practice, not an individual act
• What it means to build a place where everyone can thrive

At its heart, this conversation is about remembering that community is not something we inherit. It's something we create together, one relationship at a time.

Today we've got a special two-part conversation about migration, belonging, and what it means to make a home in a place.

Over the past year, conversations about immigration have become increasingly visible in Lawrence and across the country. While our community members have been experiencing the harmful impacts of immigration policy for years, new policies, enforcement actions, and public response trainings have brought community members together around this reality in a new way.

Together we're asking difficult questions about who gets to feel safe? Who gets to belong to our community?

Today's guests remind us that these questions are much older and much deeper than any single news cycle.

This two-part series explores those questions from two different angles.

• In Part One, we're joined by Mariel (of Sanctuary Alliance LIF), Chuck, and Camille (of Assistance to Immigrants and Refugees) to talk about what is happening right now in Lawrence. We discuss the realities facing immigrant and refugee families, how local organizations are responding, and our dreams for an ever-longer community table, where belonging is not something people have to earn but something we practice together.

• In Part Two, we slow down and go deeper into Chuck and Camille's personal story. We explore their own migration journeys, the lineages and communities that shaped them, and what decades of working alongside international students, immigrants, and refugees have taught them about being a good neighbor.

Together, these conversations invite us to send our hearts, hands, and feet past headlines and toward a more fundamental question:

• What does it look like to practice creating a place where people can truly belong?

So settle in, grab your favorite beverage, and join us in dreaming of a future here in Lawrence where we can all belong.

To learn more, follow their work @Sanctuaryalliancelfk on IG and Facebook and go to AIR's website (www.airrefugeeslawrence.com)

This week on Calling in the Healers, I sit down with Mona Cliff (Aaniiih/Nakota) — multidisciplinary artist, seed beader, and community member — to explore creativity, responsibility, and what it means to carry culture forward in a world where it can feel like (another) apocalypse might be just around the corner.

In her work and life, Mona emphasizes indigenous joy and resilience alongside the, as she puts it, "heavier things." Through the materials she works with, Mona introduces us to a way of making inspired by the continuous processes of reinvention and reclamation. Both ourselves and the world around us. From lessons gathered while scraping buffalo hides with her grandparents to reclaiming discarded computer motherboards and transforming them into future regalia, Mona shares how the teachings she's been given are expressing themselves through her without losing their integrity. Her work asks a powerful question: what will our sacred objects be in the generations to come? What are we leaving behind?

Together we talk about:

• “Beautiful messes” — play, experimentation, and letting materials guide the work
• Craft as ceremony — why beadwork, regalia, and making are living knowledge systems
• Reclamation — noticing what’s available and honoring what others discard
• Indigenous futurism — creating artifacts for futures where Indigenous peoples still exist
• Knowledge as responsibility — why learning takes time, relationship, and worthiness
• Parenting and creativity — about the work and joy of raising self-sufficient kids 
• Visibility as healing — why public art matters for belonging, memory, and community identity

Calling in the Healers uplifts hyper-local stories that help us see healing as a collective project — intergenerational, ecological, and rooted in place.

Available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, and iHeartRadio.

This week on Calling in the Healers, I walk the fields with Amy June — seed keeper, farmer, community member, and co-founder of Goodway Farm — to explore how seeds, soil, and the slow rhythms of land stewardship can change our inner lives and the ecosystems we share.

Amy June invites us into the deeper memory held inside every seed: a lineage carried across continents, braided into hair during forced migration, tended by ancestors who refused to let culture, nourishment, or hope disappear.

Together we talk about:

• Why seeds are past, present, and future
• Food access as healing — how Goodway Farm offers free, abundant CSA boxes to neighbors through local partnerships
• Slowness as medicine — how seasons, weather, and labor reshape the mind, soften the nervous system, and teach interdependence
• The shame many families carry around agricultural work — and what it means to reclaim farming as skill, heritage, and liberation
• Networks of practice — why building community across differences strengthens our capacity to solve problems together
• The joy of contribution — how showing up, even imperfectly, grows belonging
• The vibrant ecosystem of Lawrence — a community full of people nudging in the same direction, each carrying a piece of the work

Amy June’s story is a reminder that healing is not abstract. It's in bodies that plant and harvest, in relationships, in neighborhoods fed, and in the seeds we choose to carry forward.

Listen if you’re curious about:
✓ Seed keeping and food sovereignty
✓ How land-based practices transform mental, emotional, and physical health
✓ Regenerative agriculture in hyper-local communities
✓ Place-rooted healing, mutual aid, and community networks
✓ What it looks like to build a local food system grounded in care rather than extraction

✨ Calling in the Healers uplifts hyper-local stories that help us see healing as a collective project — intergenerational, ecological, and rooted in place.

🎧 Available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, and iHeartRadio.

This week on Calling in the Healers, I sit down with Moniqué Mercurio: Ohlone Costanoan Esselen Nation, Detribalized Mission Indian, Indigenous entrepreneur, mom, creative, and community builder, and Director of Operations at Douglas County CORE.

Moniqué invites us into the deeper story behind her work: how entrepreneurship, when grounded in ancestral values, becomes more than transactions, it's a path to opportunity that should be accessible to all.

Moniqué has spent her life reclaiming her voice, honoring her kin, and today is creating a more inclusive platform for all entrepreneurs of our community.

Together we talk about:

• What native-led entrepreneurship looks like
• How ancestral teachings shape decision-making, pricing, creativity, and relationships
• Why community investment, not competition, is an Indigenous business norm
• The healing that comes from making with your hands, your land, and your people in mind
• How Lawrence can become a place that truly supports creatives and leaders of all different backgrounds

Moniqué’s story is a reminder that building a business can also be a form of cultural continuity, individual and collective healing, and sovereignty in everyday life.

Listen if you’re curious about:

✓ Indigenous entrepreneurship

✓ The intersection of creativity, culture, and livelihood

✓ Place-rooted healing and community wealth

✓ What it looks like to build a business with spirit and responsibility

✓ How Lawrence can show up for the entrepreneurs of its community

Calling in the Healers uplifts hyper-local stories that help us see healing as a collective project—intergenerational, ecological, and rooted in place.

This week on Calling in the Healers, I sit down with Dr. David Tamez, philosopher at the University of Kansas and co-lead at KU’s Center for Cyber-Social Dynamics, to explore how artificial intelligence and human communities shape each other—right here in Lawrence, Kansas. From courts and classrooms to hiring and city services, David helps us ask better questions: What decisions belong to tools, and what decisions must remain human? How do we protect dignity, accountability, and care as AI enters everyday life?

We talk about:

• Decisions and norms: Why the hidden “rules of thumb” in a community matter more than abstract principles when AI meets real people.

• Keeping judgment human: The difference between information and wisdom, and how to design processes that include review, appeal, and repair.

• Street-level AI: Practical examples—eligibility scoring, grading, hiring, benefits—and how to build contestable systems with clear accountability.

• Elders & digital safety: Deepfakes, scams, and the grief of not knowing what’s real—and how to protect our most vulnerable neighbors.

• Metrics vs. meaning: Using data to inform decisions without letting metrics replace the values we actually want to live by.

• Role dignity: What we lose when we offload judgment to algorithms—and how professionals can reclaim craft, presence, and care.

• Community design: “Nothing about us without us”—co-creating AI policies with impacted people, not just experts.

• Place-based ethics: Why a local lens (Lawrence) helps us see global issues clearly—and act with humility, courage, and reciprocity.

If you work in schools, healthcare, government, nonprofits, or any team making decisions with data, this conversation offers grounded language and simple guardrails to keep people at the center as technology evolves.

This week on Calling in the Healers, I sit down with Vanessa Johnson (Diné), Assistant Director at Lawrence Montessori School and proud Haskell alumna, to reflect on her journey from New Mexico to 20 years of community-rooted life in Lawrence, Kansas. Vanessa tells us about her journey as an , partner, mom and educator and her work supporting families and peers in early childhood, Vanessa brings wisdom about balance, healing, and the everyday magic of raising children in community.

We talk about:

• Growing up “making it work” and how it shaped Vanessa’s skills of resourcefulness, gratitude, and persistence.
• The role of Haskell Indian Nations University as a beacon for Native students seeking both education and family.
• The Diné teachings of Hózhó (walking in beauty) and what balance means in spiritual, emotional, physical, and community life.
• Montessori as a healing philosophy: independence, empathy, and natural consequences as pathways for children (and parents) to learn new ways of being.
• The crisis in early childhood education—cost, scarcity of care, educator burnout—and the deep healing that comes from trusted, community-rooted schools.
• Vanessa’s own healing journey after a running injury, and what it means to embody “She Who Runs” in a new season of life.
• The Diné tradition of the First Laugh Ceremony, and why laughter is medicine that connects us to ancestors, community, and joy.
• A shoutout to young Indigenous entrepreneur at Apache Selections, and the power of Native-led fashion and business.

This week on Calling in the Healers, I sit down with Travis Campbell (Cherokee, Choctaw, Delaware), Director of the Haskell Cultural Center & Museum, to reflect on the transformation of Haskell - from a federal boarding school built to erase Native identities, to a living space where students from 574 tribes gather to celebrate culture, language, and community.

We talk about:

• What sovereignty looks like at the institutional level — why it matters for Native nations to run their own museums and cultural centers.
• Sustaining cultural institutions: the challenges of funding, staffing, and long-term planning in Native-led spaces.
• The treasures and responsibilities held at the Haskell Cultural Center & Museum — from 700-year-old pottery to student yearbooks that help families trace ancestry.
• The “Haskell Rebellion” of 1919 and what it teaches us about resilience, resistance, and identity.
• Mixed identity, family heritage, and the privilege and challenge of navigating how others perceive you.
• Navigating bureaucracy as a survival skill for underfunded communities — asking for help, adapting, and finding creative solutions.
• The need for more spaces in Lawrence to practice solution-oriented dialogue and listen deeply across differences.

We already intuitively know that food is more than fuel. We know that it is real medicine on so many levels! It is energy, nutrition, health, memory, beauty and straight up YUM.
So why do we need to be reminded so regularly?

In this conversation Ashley Ferguson Combs reminds us to SIT, SAVOR and HEAL (instead of grab and go).

Mom, founder of Breda's Bentos, and Holistic Nutritionist at Atma Integrative Health Clinic here in Lawrence, and I together explore how our meals get to be invitations: to slow down, to reconnect, and to spiral upward into what it feels like to be our best, most radiant selves. 

From the philosophy behind Breda’s Bentos, to Filipino recipes like adobo, bibingka, and lumpia, Ashley teaches us the ways that nourishment can come through so many relationships that we have with our food.

We talk about:
• Why slowing down to sit and savor changes everything
• How “spiraling up” starts with one nourishing choice
• The medicine of recipes passed down through family and community
• Rethinking nutrition beyond restriction and deprivation
• What social media is getting right and what it's getting wrogn about how we can feed ourselves well

In this episode of Calling in the Healers, host Nick Pineda sits down with Rebekka Schlichting (Ioway)—filmmaker, Professor of Practice at the University of Kansas, story keeper, and community healer in Lawrence, Kansas.

Rebekka shares about how tending stories across generations and the land is part of generational healing, navigating the challenges of growing up native in Lawrence (for her mother) and growing up on the Reservation (for her) and joys of raising children in Lawrence today, working in film, and living in a world that's colonized.

Whether you’re passionate about community care, decolonizing leadership, Indigenous wisdom, or place-based healing, this conversation will remind you that healing is relational, intergenerational, and deeply rooted in place.

Listen if you’re curious about:
✅ Storytelling as a tool for personal and collective healing
✅ Navigating the preservation of traditions and cultural protocols
✅ How to connect with your lineage and local land
✅ What perspectives we get to see through native-made film
✅ An invitation to step-up how it centers the native members of its community

✨ New episodes of Calling in the Healers drop weekly, sharing local voices and hyperlocal healing stories rooted in Lawrence, Kansas—ancestral Kaw, Osage, and Shawnee land.

🎧 Listen now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music or iHeartRadio.