Beau Bree Rhee in dialogue with Heather Tanana, an indigenous water-rights activist, law professor and a nationally recognized expert in Federal Indian Law. The first chapter of our conversation focuses on language as a form of relation & being-in-relations, Navajo words for water & how water activism now relates to historically indigenous matrilineal societies.

Heather Tanana, a citizen of the Navajo Nation, is a nationally recognized expert in Federal Indian Law, with particular expertise in tribal water rights and the intersection of the environment, health, and Indigenous peoples. She is Assistant Professor at University of Denver Sturm College of Law. She is also an Associate Faculty member with Johns Hopkins Center for Indigenous Health. Her scholarship and advocacy focus on water challenges facing Indigenous communities, from climate impacts to Colorado River governance. She also leads the Initiative on Universal Access to Clean Water for Tribal Communities, which seeks to ensure reliable access to clean, safe, and affordable water for Native families.

Sometimes, after a long period of mulling, things come together in a work of art, or a manifesto, in a lightning rod moment of creativity. I am compelled to share my latest Dance Manifesto. I think it also addresses an urgent & pertinent question: What is the role of art in the context of global climate catastrophe? I also speak about the role of beauty, beauty as an oracle.

"Dance is a vessel for ancient-future myth-making that imagines paradigms beyond oppressive colonial extractivism: my dance honors ancestral and indigenous spiritual- ecological beliefs while moving towards more liberated and life-affirming futures.

The body is infinitely entangled with the biological processes of life and death; it is a living site in radical dependence to the world."

This episode is a celebration of a 55 year relationship between human & turtle. Oliver Kellhammer & I discuss intimacy, kinship and communication. How we feel incompleteness and/or completeness through relationships, both human relationships and interspecies. We also discuss caretaking, stewardship and joy. Feeling nested within the web of other lives, and the importance of dispersing our narcissistic idea of the self into interspecies selves. Oliver Kellhammer is an artist, permaculture expert, professor at Parsons School of Design in the Sustainable Systems program. We are friends and we teach together. 

Did you know: Kelp, a type of algae, is one of the fastest replenishing organisms on earth that sequesters CO2 & filters water simultaneously? Join me (Beau Bree Rhee, artist and professor at Parsons School of Design) and dive into conversation with the amazing Alexandra Gosiewski, who is a designer, biomaterial pioneer and innovator, entrepreneur, co-founder of Algiknit, a biomaterials company creating fibers & textiles from algae. The company has been featured in Forbes, WWD, Design, I-D and is the recipient of a National Geographic Chasing Genius Award. We discuss the evolving role of the designer (as climate change becomes increasingly more extreme), what a regenerative material means, the future of material innovation, and what questions can guide creative practitioners towards sustainability, or perhaps, even a regenerative model of material revolution. 

Did you know according to the UN, in 60 years we are projected to lose our topsoil on planet Earth? My solution: Universal Soil Reciprocity. Musings on soil. Intersectionality between our relationship to land, lawns, racism and white supremacy. Did you know air and soil are lovers? <3 B 

Body-Space-Ecology is an overarching set of ideas that my work and research centers around. This week I respond to Anti-Asian hate crimes and thoughts on Asian Invisibility, White Supremacy, Colonialism and our relationship with land/food/soil and Fascism. Fun topics! Enjoy!