All My Relations Podcast

Creation Histories

Do you know the true narratives that shape the people, animals and lands of the Coast Salish People?This episode of All My Relations explores Lushootseed creation histories as living knowledge. These stories anchor us in the past, guide us through the present, and prepare us for an uncertain future.Host Matika Wilbur (Swinomish & Tulalip) leads the conversation through the origin story of the new exhibition, Coast Salish Creation Stories, opening at Tidelands, and shares why this moment calls all of us to learn from Indigenous knowledge and come experience the show.As elders teach, “make yourself still and engage your five teachers.” With that invitation, we sit with Puyallup Tribal Language Director Amber Hayward (Puyallup and Salish) and Tidelands Assistant Curator Ashley Frantz (Makah). Amber traces how colonizers recorded Lushootseed creation histories in English, often stripping them of meaning, and how today’s language revitalization movement restores their depth, power, and accuracy. Through her teachings, we learn why these stories matter, how to listen in a good way, and what it sounds like when creation history lives in Lushootseed itself.Ashley joins the conversation to share how artists and language keepers co-created the exhibition with the Puyallup Language Department and eight other Tribal Lushootseed language departments (and Lummi), bringing creation histories into visual form through contemporary Indigenous art.The exhibition opens February 7th at 6 PM. All are welcome to the opening reception and to experience the show through July 2026. Tidelands Gallery welcomes visitors Wednesday through Sunday, 11 AM–5 PM, with full step-free access throughout the space.We can’t wait to see you, relatives.++++ResourcesCreation Stories Exhibition Opening Reception: https://www.thisistidelands.com/event-details/creation-stories-exhibition-opening-receptionThe Puyallup Language Programhttps://www.puyalluptriballanguage.org/ptlp/ +++Credits:A/V Production by Francisco “Pancho” SánchezMusic by Mato WayuhiProduced by Matika WilburEpisode Artwork by Katana SolText us your thoughts!Support the showFollow us on Instagram @amrpodcast, or support our work on Patreon. Show notes are published on our website, Allmyrelationspodcast.com. Matika's book Project 562: Changing the Way We See Native America is available now! T'igwicid and Hyshqe for being on this journey with us.

Lessons from Trickster: Story, Humor and Survival

What does it mean to survive—and who carries the story afterward?When writer and filmmaker Julian Brave NoiseCat talks about survival, he does not begin with abstraction. He begins with a story. On this episode of All My Relations, Julian joins us to discuss his new book, We Survived the Night, a father–son narrative shaped in the tradition of a Coyote story—layered, funny, painful, and exacting in its truths.The book traces Julian’s relationship with his father through ancestral structure rather than Western memoir form. Coyote appears not as metaphor but as guide: a trickster forefather who teaches through contradiction, humor, and refusal. Julian describes dark Indigenous humor as a survival strategy honed over generations and carried forward through oral tradition.Throughout the conversation, Julian challenges the language often used to contain Indigenous knowledge. These stories are not myths or folklore. They live and change, told differently depending on who listens, who tells them, and what the moment requires. Multiple truths coexist within them, held in relationship rather than resolved into a single meaning. Indigenous languages, Julian explains, do more than preserve these teachings—they shape how knowledge moves through the world.That insistence on truth also shapes Julian’s filmmaking. The episode turns to Sugarcane, his award-winning documentary co-directed with Emily Kassie, which investigates the legacy of St. Joseph’s Indian Residential School. The film refuses easy closure, instead asking what responsibility looks like after harm, and how survivors and descendants carry grief alongside love.Across writing and film, Julian returns to the same question: how Indigenous people endure without flattening pain into spectacle. Basket Lady and Coyote emerge not as figures of the past but as living teachers—offering guidance for a present still shaped by trickster energy, rupture, and repair.These stories survived attempted erasure.They survived the night.May the stories of Basket Lady and Coyote live on.++++Resources:Purchase We Survived the Night today:https://shoptidelands.com/products/books-rooted-in-fire-copy?_pos=1&_psq=We+Survived+the+Night&_ss=e&_v=1.0 Watch Sugarcane on Disney+ and HuluNational Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition:https://boardingschoolhealing.org/Tribal Boarding School Toolkit for Healing:https://acf.gov/sites/default/files/documents/ana/NPAIHB_Thrive_BoardinSchoolToolkit.pdfText us your thoughts!Support the showFollow us on Instagram @amrpodcast, or support our work on Patreon. Show notes are published on our website, Allmyrelationspodcast.com. Matika's book Project 562: Changing the Way We See Native America is available now! T'igwicid and Hyshqe for being on this journey with us.

Change Everything, Feed Your People

What happens when food becomes a blueprint for liberation? On this episode of All My Relations, we’re joined by Chef Sean Sherman (Oglala Lakota) and journalist/co-author Kate Nelson (Tlingit) to talk about Turtle Island—a cookbook, a history lesson, and a future-facing manifesto for Indigenous food sovereignty. We get into what it means to remove colonial borders (and colonial ingredients), why Indigenous foodways are global and relational, and how Sean’s nonprofit model is moving real resources back into Indigenous communities—from Native producers to Native jobs. Along the way: moose stew, fir tips, colonized palates, seed keepers, Buffalo Bird Woman’s garden, and a clear-eyed conversation about ICE, labor, and who actually feeds this country. Food is the entry point—but sovereignty is the goal. Just change everything. Feed your people.++++ResourcesPurchase Turtle Island Today:  https://shoptidelands.com/products/books-whereas-copy?variant=47505083924728 To learn about Sean’s work and North American Traditional Food Systemshttps://natifs.org/ https://seansherman.com/  Kate’s Work: https://www.kateanelson.com/ Esquire Article: https://www.esquire.com/food-drink/restaurants/a36474711/chef-sean-sherman-owamni-indigenous-minneapolis-restaurant-profile/ Text us your thoughts!Support the showFollow us on Instagram @amrpodcast, or support our work on Patreon. Show notes are published on our website, Allmyrelationspodcast.com. Matika's book Project 562: Changing the Way We See Native America is available now! T'igwicid and Hyshqe for being on this journey with us.

When Food Is a Right, Not a Ration

As SNAP benefits face new political threats, millions of families are being pushed deeper into food insecurity—including many of our Native relatives whose communities already navigate the long-term impacts of colonization on food systems.In this special All My Relations + Old Growth Table podcast collaboration, Matika Wilbur and Temryss Lane sit down with Valerie Segrest (Muckleshoot), a leading Indigenous food systems expert and advocate, to unpack what these proposed cuts mean for Native nations and why food sovereignty is central to our collective survival.Together, they explore how federal policy shapes daily access to food, the ongoing fight to restore Indigenous foodways, and what it means to nourish our people when systems fail us.This episode also features on-the-ground field reports from Gray Fox Farm, Suquamish Seafoods, the Native American Youth and Family Center (NAYA), and professional forager Chai Tobar-Dupres (Cowlitz), offering a rich, real-time look at the work happening across our communities to reclaim sustenance, land, and autonomy.This is a conversation about power, policy, kinship, and the future of how we feed one another.Resources/places to donate:www.unkitawa.orgwww.chiefseattleclub.orgwww.feed7generations.orgBusinesses featured in the episode:suquamishseafoods.comwww.grayfoxfarmwa.comnayapdx.orgcowlitzforager++++Credits:Film Production by Francisco “Pancho” SánchezPA Mandy YeahpauEdited by Francisco “Pancho” SánchezProduced by Matika WilburCo/hosted by Temryss LaneSocial Media by Katharina Mei-Fa BrinschwitzText us your thoughts!Support the showFollow us on Instagram @amrpodcast, or support our work on Patreon. Show notes are published on our website, Allmyrelationspodcast.com. Matika's book Project 562: Changing the Way We See Native America is available now! T'igwicid and Hyshqe for being on this journey with us.

Loud Indigenous Food with Pyet DeSpain

In this nourishing conversation, Matika and Temryss sit down with Pyet DeSpain (Prairie Band Potawatomi and Mexican), chef, entrepreneur, storyteller, and the first-ever winner of Gordon Ramsay’s Next Level Chef. Fresh from finishing her debut cookbook, Rooted in Fire: A Celebration of Native American and Mexican Cooking, Pyet shares the streams that brought her to this monumental point in her career and together we explore the meaning of being rooted in fire: cooking with passion, with purpose, with seasonality, and with reverence for the land that feeds us. Pyet reminds us that food is never just food — it is ceremony, resistance, community care, and lineage. It is how we remember who we are. With tenderness, she shares the deep spiritual work of reclaiming identity; the moments of grief and illumination that came with saying no to extractive opportunities; and the healing that arrives when we follow the recipes our grandmothers left for us in stories, memories, and the land itself.TW: This episode includes discussion of suicide. Please take care while listening.Filled with laughter, truth, plant medicine teachings, and the joy of returning to one’s roots, this conversation is for anyone longing to reconnect — to culture, to the land, to purpose, or to the fire within. So pull up a chair, relatives. This episode is fragrant with memory, alive with story, and served with the kind of warmth that lingers long after the last bite.++++Credits:A/V Production by Francisco “Pancho” SánchezEdited by Mandy Yeahpau and Francisco “Pancho” SánchezProduced by Matika WilburCo/hosted by Temryss LaneSocial Media by Katharina Mei-Fa BrinschwitzText us your thoughts!Support the showFollow us on Instagram @amrpodcast, or support our work on Patreon. Show notes are published on our website, Allmyrelationspodcast.com. Matika's book Project 562: Changing the Way We See Native America is available now! T'igwicid and Hyshqe for being on this journey with us.