In Context with School for Advanced Research

What connects Pueblo pottery in New Mexico with rainforest restoration in the Peruvian Amazon? For Santa Fe-based filmmaker and longtime SAR collaborator Adam Shaening-Pokrasso, the answer lies in storytelling, relationships, and the importance of sustaining cultural knowledge across generations.

In this episode of In Context with SAR, Adam joins Brittany Goodrich and Rob Weiner to reflect on his work documenting the voices of Pueblo artists for SAR's Grounded in Clay exhibition, his evolving understanding of service, and how these experiences connect to his personal work alongside Shipibo-Konibo communities in Peru.

From creating space for Indigenous storytellers to share perspectives to supporting reforestation and apprenticeships that bring young people and elders together, Adam explores what it means to listen, learn, and build relationships rooted in reciprocity.

In this episode:

• Adam's creative collaborations with SAR, including documentary film production for Grounded in Clay
• Storytelling, Pueblo pottery, and the relationships that give cultural objects meaning
• How returning to New Mexico reshaped Adam's understanding of success and service
• Learning from Indigenous communities and navigating questions of cultural exchange and reciprocity
• Peruvian nonprofit Pacha Nishi's work in Amazonian reforestation and cultural continuity

Key Takeaways:

• Meaningful storytelling begins with listening, trust, and creating space for people to share their experiences on their own terms.
• Creating an intimate recording space can help storytellers move beyond the pressure of being filmed.
• Objects can hold meaning within relationships and cycles that extend beyond their material form.
• Cultural continuity depends on opportunities for young people to learn directly from elders and their environment.
• Personal and professional success can be redefined through curiosity, service, and reciprocity.
• Ecological restoration and cultural continuity can reinforce one another, creating opportunities for community stewardship and meaningful livelihoods.

“I think nature is a principal teacher for all of us, and it's one of the softest voices out there.” — Adam Shaening-Pokrasso

About Adam Shaening-Pokrasso: Adam Shaening-Pokrasso is a Santa Fe-based filmmaker, director, producer, and creative entrepreneur whose work explores the intersections of storytelling, education, culture, and community. Through his creative agency, 12FPS, he has collaborated with the School for Advanced Research on numerous projects, including documentary storytelling for the traveling exhibition Grounded in Clay: The Spirit of Pueblo Pottery and audio recordings of its accompanying catalog. His work with Indigenous artists and storytellers reflects a broader commitment to listening, learning, and creating meaningful connections across cultures. Adam is also a founder of Jakon Nete, a US-based nonprofit. Together with Peruvian partners (Pacha Nishi), Adam and Jakon Nete’s team work alongside Shipibo-Konibo communities in the Peruvian Amazon to restore rainforest ecosystems, support the transmission of Indigenous knowledge, and create opportunities for younger generations through land stewardship and apprenticeship.

Connect with Adam Shaening-Pokrasso: 

Website: https://www.pachanishi.org/ & https://12fps.com/ 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-sp/ 

Connect with Paul Ryer & School for Advanced Research:

Website: https://sarweb.org/ 

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@sarsantafemultimedia 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-ryer-4a4889156   

Show notes by Podcastologist: Francine Poblete

Audio production by Turnkey Podcast Productions. You're the expert. Your podcast will prove it.

In 1980, a young linguistic anthropologist searching for his place in the world met a Maya shaman named Sebastian Castillo Mo (known as Don Chabo) in the Yucatán Peninsula. What began as a chance encounter became a remarkable 16-year relationship that would transform his understanding of language, spirituality, and what it means to be alive.

More than four decades later, William (Bill) Hanks reflects on Don Chabo’s extraordinary teachings, the power of breath and prayer, and a worldview in which words don't simply describe the spirit world—they bring it into presence.

Listen in on a journey that moves between a life of scholarship and a dedication to spirituality, through language and lived experience, and across visible and invisible worlds. Along the way, Hanks invites us to consider questions that reach far beyond linguistics: What makes something real? How do we come to know what we cannot see? And what might another way of seeing the world teach us about our own perspectives?

In this episode:

• Deictic expressions and linguistic universals
• Maya language, space, perspective, and perception
• Colonial archives, translation, and the emergence of hybrid worlds
• Reducción and the reorganization of Maya society
• Shamanic prayer, breath, and spiritual presence

Key Takeaways: 

• Small, context-dependent words can convey precise meaning by relying on shared relationships and circumstances.
• Maya deictic systems encode distinctions about space, perspective, and perception in ways that differ from English.
• Reading historical documents aloud and examining their linguistic form can reveal meanings that translation alone may obscure.
• Colonial translation reshaped Maya language and society, while Maya communities also adapted and appropriated those transformations.
• Studying breath as both a physiological process and a lived experience can open new ways to explore the relationship between language, signs, and being.

“For the breather, it's not a sign. It is life. You breathe, you live.” - William (Bill) Hanks

About William (Bill) Hanks: Professor William (Bill) Hanks is the Berkeley Distinguished Chair Professor in Linguistic Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. He earned his Ph.D. in Linguistics and Anthropology from the University of Chicago in 1983 and has conducted extensive fieldwork and archival research in Yucatán, Mexico, focusing on Yucatec Maya language and culture. His research explores how language shapes social relationships and communication, how ritual and shamanic practices connect religion and health care, and how Spanish colonization transformed Maya society through translation, religious conversion, and colonial discourse. His interdisciplinary work bridges linguistic anthropology, history, ethnography, and the study of religion. His books include Referential Practice: Language and Lived Space Among the Maya (1990) and Converting Words: Maya in the Age of the Cross (2010).

Connect with William (Bill) Hanks: 

Profile: https://anthropology.berkeley.edu/william-f-hanks 

Connect with Paul Ryer & School for Advanced Research:

Website: https://sarweb.org/ 

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@sarsantafemultimedia 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-ryer-4a4889156   

Show notes by Podcastologist: Francine Poblete

Audio production by Turnkey Podcast Productions. You're the expert. Your podcast will prove it.

Passenger pigeons, wolves, and bison reveal how humans transformed America’s wildlife, and why a wilder future may still be possible. Originally recorded as SAR’s 2023 President’s Lecture, an annual presentation in Santa Fe featuring today’s leading thinkers, this talk with Dan Flores explores the ideas and forces behind those changes and what we can learn from them.

In this episode:

• North America’s deep natural and human history
• Indigenous ecological relationships and animal kinship
• European colonization and human exceptionalism
• Market forces, wildlife exploitation, and extinction
• Conservation, zoos, wild horses, and restoring wild spaces

Key Takeaways: 

• Our ideas about animals shape how we treat them, and the ecosystems they inhabit.
• Indigenous communities sustained relationships with wildlife through kinship beliefs, cultural practices, and ecological limits.
• The commercial exploitation of wildlife helped drive widespread species declines; the bison story was not a secret government plot.
• Zoos have helped prevent some extinctions, but preserving animals in the wild remains an important conservation goal.
• Remembering what has been lost matters, but so does experiencing and protecting the natural world that remains.

“Mindless human destruction and loss aren't inevitable; that we can, in fact, choose to change and to save the world.” - Dan Flores

“We are one species among many, and yet the way we have interacted with other species has been challenging.” - Sara Dant

About Dan Flores: Dan Flores is a Mexico-based writer and Professor Emeritus of the History of the American West at the University of Montana. Based in Santa Fe, he is the author of acclaimed books including American Serengeti, Coyote America, and Wild New World, exploring the history, wildlife, and landscapes of the American West. His work has appeared in publications including The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Texas Monthly, and he has received multiple honors for his nature and science writing.

About Sara Dant: Sara Dant is an award-winning writer, historian, and distinguished professor emeritus specializing in the history of the American West and U.S. environmental history and politics. She is the author of Losing Eden: An Environmental History of the American West, which explores the relationship between people and nature across 25,000 years in the West. She was formerly the Brady Presidential Distinguished Professor and Professor and Chair of History at Weber State University and served as a historical advisor and interviewee for Ken Burns’ The American Buffalo documentary.

Connect with:

Dan Flores’s Book: Wild New World: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1324065915?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback  

Sara Dant: https://www.saradant.com/homebio 

Connect with Paul Ryer & School for Advanced Research:

Website: https://sarweb.org/ 

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@sarsantafemultimedia 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-ryer-4a4889156   

Show notes by Podcastologist: Francine Poblete

Audio production by Turnkey Podcast Productions. You're the expert. Your podcast will prove it.

What if ancient footprints in New Mexico proved humans lived in North America during the Ice Age? In this conversation from a presentation at SAR in 2022, discover how the White Sands tracks are reshaping archaeology’s biggest debate.

In this episode:

• Discovery and scope of the White Sands footprint sites
• Interactions between humans and Ice Age megafauna
• Dating methods and debates around pre-Clovis chronology
• Erosion, climate change, and the race to document the tracks
• Collaboration with tribal and Pueblo communities in interpreting the site

Key Takeaways: 

• White Sands preserves tens of thousands of human and megafauna footprints across ~80,000 acres, forming one of the largest known Ice Age track archives.
• Footprints offer unusually intimate evidence, revealing presence, movement, age profiles, and behavior in ways that stone tools and bones rarely can.
• Radiocarbon-dated seed layers bracketing footprint horizons indicate repeated human visits roughly 21,000–23,000 years ago, well before the classic Clovis horizon.
• The prints are rapidly threatened by drought, erosion, and wind-driven sediment loss, making documentation and digital preservation an urgent race against time.
• Collaboration with tribes and Pueblos is reshaping interpretations, informing ideas about movement, equipment, camping patterns, and oral histories tied to extinct megafauna.

“We've all made footprints. We can all connect to footprints in a way that perhaps you can't connect as well, dare I say it, given that there are archaeologists present, to a stone tool, because very few of us have actually made stone tools, but we've all made footprints.” - Matthew Bennett

“It's literally thousands and thousands of prints, tens of thousands across 80,000 acres, but with that you get to see so many incredible stories of different animals and people interacting with each other, and people and people interacting and other incredible stories.” - David Bustos

About Matthew Bennett: Matthew’s passion for geography has taken him from Snowdonia to research projects across the Arctic, Africa, Mexico, and the United States. A leading researcher in human footprints, glaciology, and geomorphology, his work includes the Ileret footprints and groundbreaking research at White Sands National Park. He also developed DigTrace, a forensic footprint analysis tool, and has authored several textbooks on his fields of expertise.

About David Bustos: David Bustos is the resource program manager at White Sands National Park and a wildlife biologist by training. A graduate of New Mexico State University, he has spent more than a decade investigating ancient human and megafauna footprints throughout the park, leading efforts to locate, document, and preserve tens of thousands of tracks across the former basin of Paleo Lake Otero.

About Vance Holliday: Vance Holliday is an archaeologist and geologist specializing in geoarchaeology and Paleoindian landscapes across North America. A University of Arizona professor since 2002, his research examines how past societies adapted to changing environments. His work has received several prestigious awards, including the Rip Rapp, Kirk Bryan, and Fryxell Awards.

Connect with:

Matthew Bennett, Ph.D.: https://staffprofiles.bournemouth.ac.uk/display/mbennett  

David Bustos: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/David-Bustos 

Vance Holliday, Ph.D.: https://anthropology.arizona.edu/person/vance-holliday 

Connect with Paul Ryer & School for Advanced Research:

Website: https://sarweb.org/ 

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@sarsantafemultimedia 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-ryer-4a4889156   

Show notes by Podcastologist: Francine Poblete

Audio production by Turnkey Podcast Productions. You're the expert. Your podcast will prove it. 

From informal settlements in Bolivia and Arizona to recycled water in Singapore, this conversation reveals why solving water insecurity takes more than technology—and how our ideas about what’s safe, fair, and worthy of trust shape the systems we build.

In this episode:

• Modular, adapted, decentralized (MAD) water systems and piped water skepticism
• Singapore’s “Four Taps” and New Water recycled systems
• Water insecurity, emotional distress, and mental health
• Cultural meanings of water: trust in science vs. trust in nature
• Anthropology, optimism, and reimagining water futures in the Anthropocene

Key Takeaways: 

• Water solutions that work must align with people’s actual political, economic, and cultural realities, not just technical ideals.
• Emotional distress around water often stems less from physical scarcity than from unequal systems of access, exchange, and the social meanings attached to them.
• Different societies place their faith in different things: some in the purity of “nature,” others in the reliability of science, and these trust patterns shape how new water technologies are received.
• Anthropological perspectives help “denaturalize” our assumptions about what counts as normal or inevitable in water systems, opening up space for more ethical and locally grounded alternatives.
• Even amid climate change and inequality, small-scale experiments in water sharing, infrastructure, and community reciprocity point toward futures that can still be meaningful, dignified, and hopeful.

“Anthropology asks us to pay the same amount of attention to understanding our own assumptions. Right? What do we take for granted as natural about a water situation, and how can we, with the benefit of listening to others in the world, denaturalize it a little bit?” - Martha Kaplan

“I'm interested in is how humans build meaning and social systems and exchanges under situations of extreme duress.” - Amber Wutich

About Martha Kaplan: Martha Kaplan has been a professor of Anthropology at Vassar College since 1990. A cultural and political anthropologist, she earned her PhD from the University of Chicago and has conducted research in Fiji, India, the United States, and Singapore. Her work explores colonial and postcolonial societies, globalization, and the cultural politics of water, and she has authored several influential books and articles on these topics. Supported by organizations including Fulbright and the National Science Foundation, Kaplan teaches courses in anthropology, postcolonial studies, globalization, and environmental culture.

About Amber Wutich: Amber Wutich is a Regents Professor, President's Professor, and Director of the Center for Global Health at Arizona State University. A MacArthur Fellow and member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, she is a leading expert on water insecurity whose research examines how communities adapt to water scarcity. Wutich has authored more than 200 publications and nine books, leads major collaborative water equity initiatives, and has secured over $80 million in research funding.

Connect with Martha Kaplan: 

Profile: https://www.vassar.edu/faculty/makaplan 

Connect with Amber Wutich: 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amber-wutich-38210b62/ 

Profile: https://search.asu.edu/profile/951251 

Connect with Paul Ryer & School for Advanced Research:

Website: https://sarweb.org/ 

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@sarsantafemultimedia 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-ryer-4a4889156   

Show notes by Podcastologist: Francine Poblete

Audio production by Turnkey Podcast Productions. You're the expert. Your podcast will prove it. 

You never think about it…until it fails. Universal electrification, microgrids, storage, and the politics of batteries- this episode dives into how the power system we barely notice shapes our daily lives, our sense of fairness, and our climate future.

In this episode:

• The hidden history behind the power grid you rely on every day
• Why electricity is as much about people and politics as it is about engineering
• The surprising reason utility companies were designed as monopolies
• Could neighborhoods generate and share their own power?
• What AI and data centers mean for the future of electricity

Key Takeaways: 

• The electricity system is not just an engineering problem; it embeds social values, ethics, and inequalities that accumulate over time and remain visible in its infrastructure.
• Monopolies and utility structures were historically engineered into electricity provision, and any realistic reform has to grapple with the grid’s roots in profit-making as much as in public service.
• Smaller, interoperable, islandable systems, where neighborhoods, buildings, and communities share and coordinate power, offer a powerful alternative vision to purely centralized models.
• Massive new loads from data centers, AI, and electrification are straining timelines and capacities, pushing the system to experiment with self-supply, new generation, and using flexible demand as a balancing tool.
• Storage is more than just big batteries; gravity, heat, and clever use of time (like making ice or heating water off-peak) show that aligning when we use electricity with when it’s produced can be as transformative as new hardware.

“The electricity system is a cultural, which is to say that it reflects who we are and the values that we have socially. The cool thing about it, in my mind, is that because it's so slow to change, like a lot of infrastructure, it holds all of the values that we've had through time in its form.” - Gretchen Bakke

Episode Resources:

• The Likeness: Semblance and Self in Slovene Society - https://www.ucpress.edu/books/the-likeness/paper 
• The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between America and Our Energy Future - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26073005-the-grid

About Gretchen Bakke: Gretchen Bakke is an anthropologist and writer specializing in the cultural, political, and ethical dimensions of electricity infrastructure and energy systems. She is the author of The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future, a widely recognized work that examines how electric power systems shape, and are shaped by, social values, historical decisions, and institutional structures. Her work bridges academic anthropology and public scholarship, translating complex energy systems into accessible narratives about infrastructure, inequality, and climate transitions. Bakke has held academic affiliations in European ethnology and cultural anthropology and contributes to interdisciplinary research and public discussions on energy ethics, electrification, and the future of grid systems, including collaborations and engagements with institutions such as the University of St Andrews’ Energy Ethics research network.

Connect with Gretchen Bakke: 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gretchen-bakke-485067135/ 

Connect with Paul Ryer & School for Advanced Research:

Website: https://sarweb.org/ 

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@sarsantafemultimedia 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-ryer-4a4889156   

Show notes by Podcastologist: Francine Poblete

Audio production by Turnkey Podcast Productions. You're the expert. Your podcast will prove it. 

What if the real story of the border isn’t about walls at all? In this episode, we explore how rivers, irrigation projects, and trade routes have bound together and divided the U.S., Mexico, and Canada over nearly two centuries.

In this episode, Paul and C. J. discuss: 

• Personal roots in the U.S.–Mexico borderlands and origins of the project
• Transformation of the border through massive construction and engineering
• Paradox of closed-border policing vs. open-border trade and transportation
• Water infrastructure, irrigation, and the creation of migrant labor demand
• Systemic flaws, compensatory infrastructure, and the disfiguring of the Rio Grande

Key Takeaways: 

• The U.S.–Mexico border is not a single, uniform place but a 2,000-mile span of diverse ecosystems, cultures, and landscapes that defies simple political narratives.
• Over the last 175+ years, the border has been physically made visible and “legible” through mega-projects, dams, canals, roads, and fences, layered one atop another.
• Water engineering and irrigation projects have not only transformed rivers but also generated powerful economic magnets for migrant labor, tightly linking hydrology to human movement.
• Many contemporary crises at the border stem from earlier grand projects and policies; new “solutions” often serve as compensatory layers that attempt to fix problems those very systems created.
• The most profound environmental damage along the border has been done to the river itself, especially the Rio Grande, whose flow, shape, and ecology have been radically altered, challenging us to rethink our relationship with the more-than-human world.

“The border has always been open, and the border has always been closed. The only question is, to whom and to what and when?” - C. J. Alvarez

Episode Resources:

• Book: Border Land, Border Water: A History of Construction on the U.S.–Mexico Divide - https://utpress.utexas.edu/9781477319017/

About C. J. Alvarez: Dr. C. J. Alvarez is an environmental historian whose work explores deserts, the built environment, and the U.S.–Mexico border. He is the author of Border Land, Border Water: A History of Construction on the U.S.-Mexico Divide (2019), a deeply researched study that connects border infrastructure, such as survey markers, fencing, and surveillance systems, to the history of river engineering and large-scale hydraulic projects. His current book project, The Arid Heart, traces the history of the Chihuahuan Desert from the end of the last Ice Age, drawing on Indigenous oral histories, archaeological evidence, and environmental data to craft a multi-millennial narrative and experiment with ecocentric approaches to history. His work has been supported by an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship at the School for Advanced Research, and he has served as a visiting fellow at the Tanner Humanities Center at the University of Utah. Alvarez earned his doctorate in history from the University of Chicago after studying art history at Harvard and Stanford, and he continues to draw inspiration from his upbringing in Las Cruces, New Mexico.

Connect with C. J. Alvarez: 

Website: https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/mals/faculty/ca29356 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/c-j-alvarez-5935ba37/ 

Connect with Paul Ryer & School for Advanced Research:

Website: https://sarweb.org/ 

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@sarsantafemultimedia 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-ryer-4a4889156   

Show notes by Podcastologist: Francine Poblete

Audio production by Turnkey Podcast Productions. You're the expert. Your podcast will prove it. 

In this episode, Paul and Gabriella discuss: 

• What Gabriella Coleman means by “sturdy knowledge” and why the concept matters in today’s epistemic crisis
• How misinformation debates often rely on a “naive liberal epistemology” that oversimplifies how knowledge is produced
• Why is scientific consensus difficult to achieve, even without political polarization
• Why AI boosterism reflects the same epistemic blind spots as science absolutism

Key Takeaways: 

• Establishing reliable knowledge is never simple or automatic, even in the absence of political polarization. Scientific facts emerge through contested processes shaped by uncertainty, debate, and institutional structures.
• Treating facts as obvious or self-evident often deepens mistrust rather than resolving disagreement. Absolutist claims leave little room for nuance, making public corrections feel like evidence of deception instead of scientific evolution.
• Knowledge is always produced within social and political contexts, and pretending otherwise undermines credibility. Transparency about positionality and process strengthens trust more than claims of pure neutrality.
• AI boosterism repeats the same epistemic mistakes as science absolutism by framing technology as a neutral source of truth. Without humility and accountability, AI risks amplifying, not solving, the current epistemic crisis.

“And you know this notion of sturdy knowledge, as we've explored. And you put so well, is anti-arrogance, it's like pro-humility.” - Gabriella Coleman

Episode Resources:

• Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective”
• Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social
• Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France
• Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor
• Naomi Klein, Doppelgänger

About Gabriella Coleman: Gabriella (Biella) Coleman is a full professor of Anthropology at Harvard University and a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. Her work focuses on the politics, cultures, and ethics of hacking, and she is widely regarded as one of the leading scholars examining hacker communities and digital power. She is the author of Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking and Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous, the latter named a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2014 and recipient of the 2015 Diana Forsythe Prize from the American Anthropological Association.

Coleman’s current research examines the relationship between hackers and the state, including a Ford Foundation–, NSF-, SSHRC-, and FRQ-funded project on the professionalization of hacking from the mid-1990s through the 2000s, co-authored with Matt Goerzen. She is also co-creator of Where Warlocks Stay Up Late, an interactive research website and map, and the founder and editor of Hack_Curio, a video portal on the cultures and politics of hacking.

Beyond academia, Coleman has contributed to major outlets including The New York Times, Wired, Slate, MIT Technology Review, The Atlantic, and Huffington Post, and presented her research to audiences such as the U.S. Congressional Internet Caucus, Brookings Institution, ACLU, and NASA. She delivered the 2022 Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures at the University of Rochester, previously held the Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy at McGill University, taught at NYU, and earned her PhD in sociocultural anthropology from the University of Chicago.

Connect with Gabriella Coleman: 

Website: https://gabriellacoleman.org/ 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gabriella-biella-coleman-285aa4161/ 

Connect with Paul Ryer & School for Advanced Research:

Website: https://sarweb.org/ 

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@sarsantafemultimedia 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-ryer-4a4889156   

Show notes by Podcastologist: Francine Poblete

Audio production by Turnkey Podcast Productions. You're the expert. Your podcast will prove it. 

In this episode, Paul, Carl, and Heidi discuss:

• What it feels like to live in Minneapolis amid intensified ICE and Border Patrol operations.
• The role of legal observers and rapid response networks in documenting enforcement activity.
• The power and limits of social media in organizing, surveillance, and public accountability.
• How churches, small businesses, musicians, and neighborhood groups are reshaping civil society in real time.

Key Takeaways: 

• Minneapolis residents describe the current ICE presence as feeling like a “military occupation,” yet alongside fear and exhaustion, there is a profound sense of solidarity and shared purpose.
• Legal observers play a critical role in documenting law enforcement actions, providing evidence for court cases, and countering official misinformation.
• Social media has become both a democratizing force for transparency and a potential tool for surveillance and misinformation, highlighting the need for in-person organizing alongside digital tools.
• Universities and institutional leadership may lag behind grassroots movements, even when faculty, students, and community members are deeply engaged.

“Everybody just wants to figure out some way to help, and all you have to do is give them some opportunity to do that, and they will leap in happily, willingly.” - Carl Elliott

“There is so much power in people standing up for their rights and supporting their neighbors.” - Heidi Reynolds-Stenson

Episode Resources:

• Cultures of Resistance: Collective Action and Rationality in the Anti-Terror Age by Heidi Reynolds-Stenson
• The Occasional Human Sacrifice: Medical Experimentation and the Price of Saying No by Carl Elliott

About Carl Elliott: Carl Elliott is a professor of philosophy at the University of Minnesota, where he joined the Center for Bioethics in 1997. Originally from Clover, South Carolina, he trained in both medicine and philosophy at Davidson College, the Medical University of South Carolina, and the University of Glasgow. A Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Award, Elliott has also held fellowships at the Library of Congress, the Rockefeller Center in Bellagio, and the School for Advanced Research. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, Mother Jones, and The American Scholar. He lives in Minneapolis with his wife, Ina, and their three children.

About Heidi Reynolds-Stenson: Heidi Reynolds-Stenson earned her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Arizona in 2018 and soon after joined the faculty at Colorado State University Pueblo. Her research focuses on social movements, protest, and policing, and she is the author of a book and several scholarly articles on these topics. Her current projects examine the impact of Black Lives Matter protests on police reform, historical shifts in protest policing, and legal consciousness surrounding family responsibilities discrimination.

Connect with Carl Elliott: 

Website: https://www.carl-elliott.com/ 

More Information: https://cla.umn.edu/about/directory/profile/ellio023 

Connect with Heidi Reynolds-Stenson: 

Website: https://www.dr-hrs.com/ 

More Information: https://www.csupueblo.edu/profile/heidi-reynolds-stenson/index.html

This is a link to download a PDF that includes Rapid Response Phone Numbers for all 50 states if you ever need assistance: https://www.cliniclegal.org/file-download/download/public/80156 

Connect with Paul Ryer & School for Advanced Research:

Website: https://sarweb.org/ 

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@sarsantafemultimedia 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-ryer-4a4889156   

Show notes by Podcastologist: Francine Poblete

Audio production by Turnkey Podcast Productions. You're the expert. Your podcast will prove it. 

In this episode, Paul, Barbara, Phillip, and Robert discuss: 

• Why Chaco Canyon drew people for centuries, and why it continues to remain a powerful symbol of the ancient Southwest.
• What social network migration has revealed about Chaco Canyon throughout the centuries.
• How science, oral tradition, and indigenous epistemologies can better work together to interpret sacred places like Chaco.
• The importance of Chaco and the need to respect all peoples involved. 

Key Takeaways: 

• We want to be careful not to polarize the past with modern understandings of categories. For instance, the roads show how interconnected religion, politics, and economics were all interwoven.
• There are different stories and different perspectives that need to be acknowledged and treated with respect as we try to find the balance between preservation, development, and indigenous peoples.
• Chaco matters to different groups. While there may be different views on the best way to protect Chaco, the shared sentiment is that Chaco is powerful, sacred, and significant, and we should all do what we can to ensure its health.
• There are many different reasons why people may have left Chaco, ranging from droughts to astrological phenomena to clans dying out and more.

“All of us have to be very, very careful that we don't take our Western European education and template and try to lay it down on a group of people that might as well come from Venus or Mars. We don't know what they were thinking; we don't know their judgment, values, and such things. We’ve got to be careful of not trying to interpret ancestral people in our everyday framework.” - Phillip Tuwaletstiwa

Episode Resources: 

• Evaluating Chaco migration scenarios using dynamic social network analysis
• Parallel roads, solstice and sacred geography at the Gasco Site 
• Lidar Reveals Sacred Roads Near Chaco Canyon

About Dr. Barbara Mills: Regents’ Professor of Anthropology at the University of Arizona and Curator of Archaeology at the Arizona State Museum, Dr. Mills is one of the foremost experts on the social networks, migrations, and ceremonial practices of Chacoan society. Her work integrates dynamic social network analysis, ceramic studies, and Indigenous collaboration to explore why people gathered — and eventually dispersed — from Chaco Canyon.

Connect with Barbara:

Website: https://anthropology.arizona.edu/person/barbara-mills 

About Phillip Tuwaletstiwa: A Native archaeologist and geodesist of Hopi heritage, Phillip Tuwaletstiwa collaborated with Anna Sofaer to scientifically validate the astronomical alignments of Chacoan buildings and petroglyphs. His work underscores the engineering and cosmological sophistication of the Chacoans — and his own DNA has been linked to ancestral burials within Pueblo Bonito.

About Dr. Robert Weiner: Postdoctoral Fellow in the Dartmouth Society of Fellows and a specialist in ritual landscapes, Dr. Weiner studies the roads, rituals, and cosmologies of the Ancestral Four Corners societies. His recent lidar and fieldwork at the Gasco Site reveals previously unknown parallel roads aligned with solstice sunrises and sacred mountains — transforming how we understand Chacoan movement and meaning.

Connect with Robert:

Website: https://dartmouth.academia.edu/RobWeiner   

Connect with Paul Ryer & School for Advanced Research:  

Website: https://sarweb.org/ 

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@sarsantafemultimedia 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-ryer-4a4889156