S3E17: Submerged No More! Restoring Chemehuevi Land and Traditions

(Uncorrected Transcript)

0:00:00 - (Daniel Leivas): One of the experiences I had out here with the land and animals was we were growing watermelons, and I had a good few hundred watermelons out there. And I was like, oh, man, I'm gonna pick. I'm gonna pick. First thing Monday morning, went home for the weekend, came back and heard the coyotes that morning, I knew they were out here. I come running out here, and sure enough, there's a couple in the fenced in area, and they're leaving.

0:00:25 - (Daniel Leivas): There's some that went under, some that climbed over, but there was a couple of packs of them, and I was yelling at them, getting mad. Darn you. Snob. I was like, it's war. And I noticed there's two big red tail hawks sitting up in the highest willow tree right there. They're watching them. They've seen everything. They witnessed everything. I looked at them, and they seen me. And mad. I get in my truck, I'm gonna go chase them down. So they took to the air like that, and then they went. Flew over them. And coyote was running over this way, kind of towards where we're sitting at right now.

0:00:59 - (Daniel Leivas): And the redtails flew over, and the coyotes were just trotting along like, no big deal. The next thing you know, the redtails were dipping down, and they were attacking them and clawing their backs, and they're yelping, and their butts would go to the ground. Ow. Ow. And they run. And those two redtails just kept dive bombing them and attacking them and yelping them, and they started running and took off like that.

0:01:23 - (Daniel Leivas): Just as I was coming through the other side, I seen that. I think I caught it on video. Just one of them as they attacked, when he's coming this way. It just blew me away. Wow. They felt my heart. They felt my. They seen my work, the work that we put into the land and all that, waiting for a harvest. And then they seen what coyotes did. And then they felt my heart when I was angry. And they were angry, too, because they felt my heart.

0:01:53 - (Daniel Leivas): And they knew that the coyote was no good, that they were bad. What they did was bad. And so they went and let the coyote know. That's bad. To be able to witness that and experience that, it's just. You can't put it into words. You can't express the connection of myself, the watermelons, the coyotes, and the redtail, and the land and the water and the air.

0:02:21 - (newsreel announcer 1): Water in the service of man. It's California's Parker Dam, a 40 million pound project to carry water to the arid plain of southern California. From the dam reservoir, water is pumped 300ft up over a mountain top along a pipeline 400 miles long to bring power to factories, fertility to the farms and drinking water to a dozen great cities to make rich California richer still.

0:02:46 - (newsreel announcer 2): By the 1920s, the communities of the coastal plains surrounding the city of Los Angeles were stymied. Individually, they could not support a new water delivery system, but collectively, a cooperative venture was the answer, and the dream began to unfold. Initially, 13 communities formed the metropolitan Water District in southern California and embarked on a water project of monumental proportions.

0:03:20 - (newsreel announcer 3): The new metropolitan water district launched a bond drive to raise $220 million to build an aqueduct. These metropolitan pioneers would soon start the largest water project in history. In 1933, work began on one of the world's most formidable construction feats ever, the 242 miles aqueduct for one of the world's harshest deserts. Work started on Parker Dam in 1934. This dam would feed Colorado river water into the aqueduct.

0:03:56 - (newsreel announcer 3): Parker Dam was finished in 1938. People came from miles around to see the first waters of the Colorado fill the dam. By June 1941, the first Colorado river water rolled into La.

0:04:09 - (Chris Clarke): Hey everyone, welcome to yet another episode of 90 Miles from the Desert Protection podcast. I'm your host, Chris Clarke. It is really straightforward to find material online about the environmental cost of putting all those dams on the Colorado river that went in in the middle of the 20th century from the 1930s to the 1960s. But there is something that, as far as I can tell, is unmentioned in any of the histories.

0:04:37 - (Chris Clarke): Lake Havasu is the impoundment behind Parker Dam of the Colorado river. It was put in in order to feed Colorado river water into the Colorado river aqueduct. Constructed by the Metropolitan Water District in the 1930s, the aqueduct is really foundational to life in southern California. It underlies pretty much everything you're able to do in southern California. From a lifestyle or economic perspective.

0:05:03 - (Chris Clarke): The place would look a lot different if it wasn't for the Colorado river aqueduct, and you'll sometimes hear about the engineering accomplishment that is Parker Dam, the deepest dam in the world. They had to go almost 250ft down into the sediment at the bottom of the river before they hit sturdy bedrock. It's 320ft high, but only 85ft of that is above water. You can find stories about how London Bridge ended up in Lake Havasu.

0:05:27 - (Chris Clarke): You can find citations that the total capacity of Lake Havasu is around two thirds of a million acre feet. We don't know whether that takes into account the siltation that has happened over the course of the last 90 years. There's even a sort of quaint little story about the Arizona-California war that the building of the Parker dam precipitated with the governor of Arizona calling out the Arizona National Guard to occupy the land on the east side of the river so that they could block construction of the dam. He was upset because that water was going to go to the La suburbs instead of Phoenix and Tucson.

0:06:01 - (Chris Clarke): There are lots of things you can find out about Parker Dam and Lake Havasu online but something that's really hard to find anything about. In fact, in quite a number of days of doing the research for this episode I found nothing on this was the impact of the building of Parker Dam and the flooding of Lake Havasu on the people that lived where Lake Havasu went. I'm talking about the Chemehuevi people in this particular instance. There are other native peoples along the river as well.

0:06:28 - (Chris Clarke): The Chemehuevi, who refer to themselves as Nuwu, farmed and lived for generations on the banks of the Colorado river in the fertile soil that came with the annual floods. But when it came time to build the Parker dam and flood Lake Havasu the concerns of the Chemehuevi people and their continued livelihood there their cultural continuity was deemed absolutely unimportant by the builders. And so the Chemehuevi people were forced. Forced to leave their homes to make way for Lake Havasu.

0:06:55 - (Chris Clarke): They lost almost 8000 acres of tillable land that they had worked for generations. Over the course of the last year or so, I've gotten to know this guy, a son of a friend of mine who's attempting to restore some of the agricultural lifeways of the Chemehuevi. Up above the waterline a mile or so from the western shore of Lake Havasu. I'm gonna let him introduce himself.

0:07:33 - (Daniel Leivas): Hello. My name is Daniel Lavis. I'm southern Paiute Chemehuevi from Lake Havasu, known as Suavet. I'm the farm manager of the Chemehuevi indian tribe. My grandmother calls me mohumputs. That means owl because I always said, who? Grandma, who? So she said, ah, you're my humpbuts sound like a little owl. So I grew up with that as my identity, my humpus. I'd like to welcome you all to the non organic, traditional farm we have here.

0:08:09 - (Daniel Leivas): This farm represents a return to understanding and a way of being of our ancestors. In order to do that, we must honor the likeness and memory of who we are through them. In order to do that, through them. We must remember and recall that our ancestors are beneath the lake. So, in essence, we resurrect their spirit in being through the land to represent a living way that we once lived before the formation of Lake Havasu.

0:08:43 - (Daniel Leivas): Displaced was 7776 acres of fertile farmlands from the people in the formation of the lake. The tribe was established in 1907 and were later removed after the formation of metropolitan Water District and the plan to build Parker Dam for a reservoir for central Arizona and southwest California. As the waters was rising, my grandparents were removed from this land. Not a lot of the people returned to the land after the tribe was federally recognized in 1970.

0:09:17 - (Daniel Leivas): And those that have brought back the hopes and dreams of memories of a place that once existed on a swab that's under the lake. The water. Water is life. It has the power to create and has the power to take life as well.

0:09:37 - (Chris Clarke): Daniel and I meet at the Chemehuevi tribal agricultural department headquarters, which is off a little ways from the houses on the reservation. We hop into a tribal truck and Daniel drives me through the farm area, pointing out a bunch of different interesting things as we go. We drive past a big open field. At the other end of it, against a row of trees, there's a couple of circular patches, maybe about 30ft wide each, and they show healthy looking seedlings of corn and squash and beans and a couple other plants I can't quite identify.

0:10:14 - (Daniel Leivas): Up here. We got the greenhouse high tunnel project. It's an NRCS grant. And we got three greenhouses that we're growing currently on one of them. And we got the power infrastructure being installed on the other one. And one thing I noticed is the soil. Some of them aren't growing as well as others. These ones had more water. So I then reduced the water to these ones that had it jammed off. And so they're getting too much water. But the ones that were getting. I thought we're getting the least amount of water.

0:10:47 - (Daniel Leivas): They grew great. So it's a learning process.

0:10:50 - (Chris Clarke): So that's squash there.

0:10:52 - (Daniel Leivas): That's squash, zucchini. Then on this side we got peppers and tomatoes and one of these. I want to just concentrate to grow nothing but, like, traditional medicinal foods, like traditional vegetables and stuff like that, or dedicate one completely to, like, chilies and salsa, making salsa. We got some dwarf lemon trees that we just put in, 20 dwarf lemon trees. We have these standard lemon trees in here and with pomegranates, and they're just all over those trees. There's a bunch this year because we cleared it out and got all the overgrowth out and found out there's earthworm production in that soil.

0:11:39 - (Daniel Leivas): So it's a living soil in there. And these trees have came back. They were pecans planted over ten years ago, but they weren't getting enough water. But they survived. A few of them survived. And when we cleaned it out I noticed there's pecans on them. They're old and dried up, but they're producers. I was made aware of an 1800 strains of Chemehuevi corn and contacted by native seed search and I found out there's these Chemehuevi strain that was grown from 20 seeds and grown to about 6th generation, then crossbreed with mojave sweet, I believe, and then from those seeds then, now I believe I have a 10th generation seed of a mid 1800 strain of Chemehuevi corn.

0:12:27 - (Daniel Leivas): And our partnership or agreement with them is to get one quarter yield of production so they can grow their seed. And I grew it in circles and bundles. My primary design was the center point, north, south, east, west, and the diagonal points northwest, southwest and so on. And the second circle is a spiral based on the four directions. I've seen some diagrams that have talked about the Big Dipper and the North Star. We have a story of our people about the bighorn sheep and the star, our star.

0:13:03 - (Daniel Leivas): But each season it's in a different position. And if you were to put all those positions together, it'd make the swastika or like the universal life spiral diagram. So I modeled that spiral after that four directional diagram and I planted the corn in that pattern and rings around the outside with squash. And within it, on a planet, temporary beans. And you see the teppery beans growing alongside it.

0:13:30 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah.

0:13:31 - (Daniel Leivas): I might have to hit it with some manure just to bring up some nutrients.

0:13:35 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah. When my wife and I moved into the place we have now, I tried to plant some teppery beans and the iguanas ate them all.

0:13:41 - (Daniel Leivas): Oh, wow.

0:13:42 - (Chris Clarke): They just came in and they pulling them up, eating the leaves, eating the stems.

0:13:45 - (Daniel Leivas): Good. Yeah.

0:13:46 - (Chris Clarke): I gotta say I didn't really mind because it was just, I liked the iguanas so much, it was worth it.

0:13:52 - (Daniel Leivas): To grow it, to see, see them feast on it. Yeah, that's the connection. See, that's the connection out here that I was able to experience. And before it was just these north south mesquite lines and this east west willow line. And this willow line had then been choked out by all the mesquite and growing. There's not enough water to keep them growing well, because they went into shock, too. In 2019, when we had pump issues and a brand new pump put in. It was a EQIP grant for one time pump replacement through nrCs.

0:14:26 - (Daniel Leivas): It was 90% less emissions on this newer pump compared to the old pump on a California EPA standard. We were able to switch it out. My father came in and did a lot of clearing and did a lot of leveling. I came on and worked with them, and we had begun to develop, develop a tree line network, because we noticed the sands and the winds were just devastating any crop putting holes in the leaves and just sand blasted, and sand blows in, blows out, and it'll destroy whatever's in its path. So one way to avoid that is to start these tree line networks.

0:15:05 - (Daniel Leivas): So we built these ditches and let the tree lines evolve. We planted mesquite and willow, and some places they took real good and some places they didn't. But we developed this treeline network to help assist with the wind as wind breaks.

0:15:20 - (Chris Clarke): Daniel's father is Matt Leivas, Sr. He's a good friend of mine. He's a founder and board member of the Native American Land Conservancy and a friend of the podcast. You can hear him taking part in our episode commemorating our mutual friend, Phil Klasky, season one, episode ten. Take a look for that episode. Give it a listen. You won't be sorry. Back to the farm. You got a couple of palm trees that snuck in there.

0:15:47 - (Daniel Leivas): Yeah, there's a lot. The coyotes eat the palms. They eat the seeds, and they plant them everywhere.

0:15:52 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah.

0:15:53 - (Daniel Leivas): And so a lot of those palms, these are the California palms, and we use them, the seeds, they go into our gourds and that we use for our cultural and traditional songs.

0:16:03 - (Chris Clarke): Nice. Those fruits taste pretty good, too.

0:16:07 - (Daniel Leivas): The palm?

0:16:08 - (Chris Clarke): Yep.

0:16:09 - (Daniel Leivas): I never tried it.

0:16:10 - (Chris Clarke): Oh, it's so sweet.

0:16:11 - (Daniel Leivas): Oh, really?

0:16:11 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah, there's no flesh to it. It's just like a sweet skin around the hard seed.

0:16:17 - (Daniel Leivas): Okay.

0:16:18 - (Chris Clarke): But if you see some still on the tree, you don't want to pick them off the ground because a coyote probably ate them. I did that once. I picked one off the ground, put it in my mouth, and realized that it had gone through a coyote first. It wasn't the worst experience I had that day, even, but if you. If you get it off the tree, it's just the sweetest thing in the world.

0:16:41 - (Daniel Leivas): So that's why they eat them, because they eat up my melons. I've been at war with the coyotes for years, just attacking my melons, and they attack them like, I guess I've been picking them too late, and they're ripe. When the coyotes get them, they. They tear them up. They went through that fenced in area. They had hundreds in there one time, three rows of just hundred melons. They went in one weekend, a few.

0:17:08 - (Daniel Leivas): You can see where they dug in multiple areas. We had packs of coyotes coming here, competing for those melons, and they hear them yelping. They go into war, and they come back the next morning. You just see this. The melon carcass everywhere. They're all gone down. Get to go through 100 melons in a night. This area is our cultural area. We have cultural gatherings here, our winter camp. You want to encircle it with our cotton woods.

0:17:35 - (Daniel Leivas): The people come out, and we have our gatherings. And everybody always has a good, good feel. So what we have here is 80 acres of the. Our traditional organic farm. With the formation of Lake Havasu, we had lost 7776 acres of fertile farmlands under the lake. And with that, the living ways of the people that lived with the big cottonwoods within the cottonwoods and the trees and the ecosystem that was there, and the formation of the lake. And then we were removed from this area, and the lake was formed. And my grandparents were here when they were removed. One of my grandmothers went over Whipple Mountain, which we call Wyatt by wagon.

0:18:30 - (Daniel Leivas): And my other grandmother was here. Her name was Pearl Smith Eddy. She remembers the water rising, the birds falling into the water, not making it from all the cottonwoods in the middle and holding my big pow wow. And all the water was rising, trying to just hold on to a way of life. And the way of life was just going before our eyes. So the lake was formed, and my father and his brother, after moving up here, and the tribe was established in 1970. And they had a dream of agriculture here, but we had no rural, fertile farmland. So up here on the mesa, my father and his brother seen the potential for agricultural land if we just develop it.

0:19:16 - (Daniel Leivas): They leased land, and it later then become developed into the agriculture department. And so this agriculture began with the hopes and dreams of people instilled by my grandmother at the time she was here. Into the hearts of my father. They come up here with that hopes and dreams and to give it to the land. So the land can then give it back to the people. And that's where we're at now. And in a way, we're resurrecting. Suava Utz suave is the place of mortars. There's a place of gravel, water, a place of brush.

0:19:54 - (Daniel Leivas): And that was, this place is a sacred area, not just to us, to Aha Macav to the north and Kanal to the south. From the time of creation. Chemehuevi believe our salt song trail began and end here, down by the Bill Williams river, the rock house and Salt cave, where the dreamers drum the song. So, in essence of getting back to land restoration and cultural restoration and linguistic restoration, and even identity, our own self identity, we're always being told who we are by others, that we don't know who we are.

0:20:39 - (Daniel Leivas): When we learn who we are, we stand on that, and it lights the way of understanding. And the picture is. And the picture that I see understand is not a blue lake, but of a green, brushy living area. The people lived in a living way with the water and the land. Ankagapa, red water. Spanish call it Colorado, the Red river. So we were here before the Spanish. We call it red bows water. As I learn, I'm expressing things in a new way, because it's like, in a way, we have to go back to the beginning and learn our creation story and learn everything through that, to the now.

0:21:27 - (Daniel Leivas): And when we do that, we can see the westernized ways or the other ways of influence that determine how we think and how we self identify and how we look at each other now, when we start to understand and take it back, back to the spiral of creation, the great spiral of life, where all life is interwoven through this dynamic connection that's all woven together through energy, through being, through history, through now. It's just the spiral of life is like a basket. And generation to generation overlaps over time and eras, and they're woven together.

0:21:59 - (Daniel Leivas): And what we're experiencing now is at the end of the basket where the weave is frayed. Everything is singular in a way of understanding and separated, just like we are separate from ourselves, from each other in our own boxes, our own lands, and our own labels. When we get back to the center of creation, we begin to reweave the interconnectedness that we have. And we are not as set apart as we are told that we are. Based on these names placed on us, we are more interwoven than we realize.

0:22:30 - (Daniel Leivas): All the people that are connected to the land, that are connected to other peoples, that are connected to the land, are woven together in language and song and being. And being able to understand that through seeing how life evolves out here on the farm. You know, it's really amazing. It's a real blessing to witness the connection with the land and the spirits, the animals. It's just very enlightening. And you see a purpose in a place by lifting the waters and giving the waters to the land, the land gives back and heals.

0:23:02 - (Daniel Leivas): And just understanding that flow of energy, of life in a living way, it's pretty amazing. And here we are. We're just all in the technological advanced way, and we're so disconnected to natural order ways. I've been here for thousands of years, for thousands of years of people's lived in a living way with the land and their place. Just like the animals, we are no different, no better than them. And they're a reflection of us, and we are a reflection of them.

0:23:31 - (Chris Clarke): Is there a place where we could get out of the truck and get away from the engine noise a little bit?

0:23:36 - (Daniel Leivas): Yeah, that's what I was just thinking. We'll probably go down here. You hear flowing water.

0:23:40 - (Chris Clarke): All right, that works. 

We turn onto a side road and head toward those circular patches of corn and beans and squash. It feels good to hop out of the truck, stretch my legs, and get my feet onto the upturned soil. It's been a long day of driving for me at this point. Nearby, a two inch pvc pipe is gushing out water into a small canal that flows toward the tree line. Daniel moves the pipe over a couple of feet so that it floods the beds with the corn and squash instead.

0:24:12 - (Daniel Leivas): These are devil's claw. They grow like an okra, and it's real sticky leaf underneath. And it really stinks like dead, almost like dead something. The devil's cloud we would use for the black on our basket design, our basketry. I believe the roots have some type of medicinal property as far as the aspirin or help heal pain for back pain or something. But the okra, I guess you can chop it up and fry it up when they're still soft and it's edible.

0:24:51 - (Daniel Leivas): Then when the okra dries up, it'll split into two, and that would be the devil's claw. And the seeds are edible like sunflower seeds. And see, this is the spiral right here for the corn. You can see the. Where it goes off, and then it goes out into the spiral, and it goes out. So you follow that one in. Go all the way around right here. And it goes all the way around. Something like that.

0:25:23 - (Chris Clarke): Very cool.

0:25:25 - (Daniel Leivas): Plant some squash in here. Also. Something got to these guys and ate them up. I think maybe a donkey canter, just because there's some of them that were topped off, and I think he chewed some up. So it was really awesome to have the opportunity to grow this strain of trimwivi corn in light of this farm and what it represents to us in spirit as far as suaves and living system ecosystem, where we try to bring some of that back, get some of this soil generated kind of direction, we're going for our green waste as a soil mitigation plan.

0:26:06 - (Daniel Leivas): I just did have the whole plot tested and I got to send those samples in so we can get a picture of the nutrients in the land. And I have a few zones concentrated on to where we're going to grow. Do our primary grow and spin it in here on the other side over there where the tree line, where the citrus trees are. But yeah, but part of the soil mitigation plan as far as green waste we wanted to develop would be composting the green waste to compost.

0:26:37 - (Daniel Leivas): The concept of green waste composting is a fungus based compost that has a lot of benefits as far as creating a web of subsoil communications to the nitrates in the roots of the plants. From the way I understand it, and to in light of a lot of our challenges here with soil, because there's a lot of different materials, there's good sand and good material in here, but if we were to enrich it, it would be that much better.

0:27:07 - (Daniel Leivas): We have earthworms in this plot to be able to grow them and harvest them and cultivate them. That would be one of the benefits of green waste soil. In Richmond, we have a tree nursery on the scope that we use a lot of composting and mulching for. A lot of benefits for all these different aspects to come together and help each other for the same purpose, the same cause. We get rid of our green waste, turn it into soil, turn that soil back into the land, enriched the better.

0:27:39 - (Daniel Leivas): So we just try to come together and develop a plan towards that and carve out this ecosystem. You know, this ecosystem that evolves out here, you know, it reflects a living way, living a way to live with the land and heal the land. And the land will heal you in more ways than one, than mind, body and spirit. It's just amazing to be connected out here to this farm land, to see it evolve and grow from just clear cut to network tree lines and gardens within.

0:28:08 - (Daniel Leivas): You can hear that by the birds, hear that by the animals out here. And you see that by the. Just all the life, there's just so much from the micro monarch butterflies, all these different small birds, different type of birds you've never seen before, never heard before migrating in, migrating out, coyotes, deer, raccoons, rabbits, jackrabbits, little gophers, little squirrels, lizards, blackbirds, dove.

0:28:46 - (Daniel Leivas): Quail. Can hear them over there right now.

0:28:52 - (Chris Clarke): One of my favorites.

0:28:53 - (Daniel Leivas): Yeah, the sound of the quail. And then there's the community right there to the south. And I brought one of the community members out here. They came out to talk about green waste. I gave them a place to dump the green waste and help them grow some trees, too, and get some trim. And I showed them these areas within here, and they were blown away. Wow, I didn't know this is all out here. And we just drive by it every day. We just drive by it every day.

0:29:25 - (Daniel Leivas): It's like, yeah, a lot of people drive by it every day. Don't really come out and feel the land, feel the way the birds sound, the way they make you feel, peace that comes to you just by hearing a simple bird song, bugs flying by your ear.

0:29:40 - (Chris Clarke): Flash flood coming our way here.

0:29:41 - (Daniel Leivas): Yeah, we're right in the middle. Like how the microcosm of all the sand characteristics, and you go drive across the land and, oh, I know how that was formed. All this was formed by water. You can see how it reflects from the micro to the like, to the mountains and the hills that surround us. And that's another aspect that's just amazing to see the land and the water and how they connect and influence each other.

0:30:05 - (Daniel Leivas): Still want to carve out the spiral more in the ditch, and so the water flows. What would be cool is to get the water to flow from each four corner to the center point all at the same time. I think that's what I want to try to focus on eventually in the future when I keep developing these growth circles and stuff, or to have it go to the center out or something like some type of flow, like energy, something about water and energy.

0:30:29 - (Daniel Leivas): It always flows. Frequency, it always flows. Everything has amplitude and amplitude. It's like in life, we're just a flow. The flow of energy, kinetic energy, water flowing over the rocks is creating energy. It's energizing this water to bring life to the land. Anything it touches will bring life. Any seeds that it touches is energized by flowing over the rocks. When water flows over the rocks, it creates energy because of the energy of the rocks.

0:31:02 - (Daniel Leivas): The rocks have energy because they are solid. But the only thing about science, you know, that everything that looks solid just appears solid to our senses. But everything's moving, everything's vibrating, everything's pulsing. And the frequency of life, you see all the different deposits to see. These are heavier, so they collect differently than the rest of it.

0:31:26 - (Chris Clarke): Yep.

0:31:29 - (Daniel Leivas): Got the light sand being pushed very easily. I try to keep this guy from overflowing too much so it can get them. So I'm always filling it in and it's always washing back out.

0:31:42 - (Chris Clarke): Yep.

0:31:43 - (Daniel Leivas): Just to try to get that little level.

0:31:45 - (Chris Clarke): Daniel says he feels the urge to sing to the garden. And who am I to argue.

0:32:56 - (Daniel Leivas): For you, for you, for your. Why you? Why you know, why you. Oyo katangayo song is about west. Well, we call Hawaii. Go and get our water to drink. This is going to be my fire circle. The purpose of this is to build a fire so that ash will be used to put around the stalks of the corn, and that discourages the larva from crawling up to where you get earworms and all that. So that's a hopi practice, I believe, or hopi blue corn.

0:34:47 - (Chris Clarke): This makes me happy right here.

0:34:49 - (Daniel Leivas): Screwbean.

0:34:50 - (Chris Clarke): Yep. In 2020, I planted one in our yard that was a little bit smaller than that, and it's taller than either of us now.

0:34:58 - (Daniel Leivas): Oh, wow.

0:34:58 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah, it's doing really good.

0:35:00 - (Daniel Leivas): These are survivors because these got disced up.

0:35:03 - (Chris Clarke): See?

0:35:04 - (Daniel Leivas): See, like where they got disced up at? Where they got mangled up right here. See?

0:35:09 - (Chris Clarke): Yep.

0:35:09 - (Daniel Leivas): They got mangled up, but then they grew out. They still stayed rooted. Same thing with those. All these got dished up.

0:35:17 - (Chris Clarke): Tough guys, tough roots.

0:35:18 - (Daniel Leivas): Yep. Sure.

0:35:20 - (Chris Clarke): And with that, we got back in the truck. About halfway back to the ag department headquarters, we met a very young coyote. He couldn't have been more than four or five months old. He darted across the road in front of us, sort of leisurely, like maybe darting is the wrong word. And then he went and hid in a large drainage pipe. But he didn't hide very well. He was looking at us curiously with his head poking out of the end of the pipe.

0:35:48 - (Chris Clarke): It was comical, and I have to say, it was a pretty nice moment. If people listening to this episode, we're going to take just one or two things away from listening. What would you want those to be?

0:36:02 - (Daniel Leivas): I guess it would be the connection to the land in spirit, as a people in the past, present, and future, but mainly in this moment, to be able to see the dynamic, symmetric patterns of life and how they interweave and interconnect in the land, in the water, air, animals, spirit, life, the sustainability of living waste and living ecosystem, living habitat. And just to have a peek into that would be good.

0:36:36 - (Daniel Leivas): If I couldn't paint that picture or that connection of the land and the people and spirit of life, that'd be great. Be a gift, a gift of insight.

0:36:49 - (Chris Clarke): If you could travel, like, 50 or 60 years down the road, what would you hope to see coming out of the work that you're doing here today?

0:36:57 - (Daniel Leivas): I'd like to see a self sustained living, all organic, traditional, cultural, learning, farm, a living way, like a gift to the people. Like in 50 years, I'd imagine all of this wash that goes down to catfish Bay Green, all of this land up here, just green all around the mesa, just the greenery, just a rebirth of the land the water drank from the time the water drank the land and life changed forever.

0:37:38 - (Daniel Leivas): So to resurrect that in spirit and to reflect on that in a living way, that'd be something good road runner over there. Nice. A tumaway. So we called ourselves a tumaway run with their head down, nose up, and Chemehuevi were known as good runners. They'd run all over and taking message, taking the information. A pathway for a group would take four or five days up north through the mountain to mountain. Or there's another path that took two to three days for the runners, maybe even shorter. We're good runners.

0:38:15 - (Daniel Leivas): They get the message up north to the people up north that, hey, the group's coming up. Send the hunters out, get something to eat, prepare for a feast, or we're bringing somebody home to sing them home. Singing to the stars. Hey, we got a yagat. We got a cry. Calling all singers and take five days, six days to get from place to place. A few days, three days, from two days, three days from here to tonaline palms, or up the river to Cottonwood island, or down south to Yuma or the Palo Verde bands and groups.

0:38:51 - (Daniel Leivas): A totally different way of living, of just traveling by foot, and it's just a way of life. It goes without saying we walked everywhere, so we were probably pretty healthy to live off the land, to be able to have the strength to walk across it from place to place, migrate with the seasons and the growth and the gathering and the hunting, winters and summers affected both, and so we lived accordingly.

0:39:16 - (Daniel Leivas): And we're just learning of that, of those ways and those connections as Chemehuevi out here. After what happened with the removal of our people from this lake and this land, the disconnect, assimilation to boarding school system, and then come back and try to be whole again when it was whipped out at you, and then they teach it and they try to whip it into you. It's challenging to resurrect the essence of who we are in this place, the Shivawak band and the Sahua Hutz band.

0:39:55 - (Daniel Leivas): I'm Tuva. It's Ngo Wu.

0:39:59 - (Chris Clarke): Thank you for showing me around and taking the time to talk to the listeners a little bit.

0:40:05 - (Daniel Leivas): That was a great morning. Everything I shared with you has just been a long road of evolution. I believe. I have pictures of when there was nothing out there and think there was just two tree lines and everything was just brown and clear cut. To see that, see where it's become now, it's amazing. And we just witnessed that with that little new life, that little coyote coming into the lands. That's what it's about right there.

0:40:30 - (Daniel Leivas): That's what it's all about. We are no greater than the animals. The animals are no greater than us. And we are equals in this land because we both have the desire to live and we both breathe air, drink water, and we're both gather from the land and eat from the land. It's just today in this matrix, we go to the store now. All right.

0:40:57 - (Chris Clarke): And that wraps up yet another episode of 90 Miles from Needles, the Desert Protection podcast. I want to thank very deeply Mister Daniel Lewis for spending the morning with me. He has a lot of work to do on the farm as farms go, and he spent the morning with me anyway, showing me around, letting me be a tourist. It was a really good time and I'm very appreciative and I hope all of you listening were too.

0:41:22 - (Chris Clarke): I would also like to thank Travis Puglisi and Anna Stump and Zachary Peckler for joining our merry band of financial supporters. This isn't Travis's first rodeo. He pitched in some time ago fairly generously, but this time around he noted on social media that he really liked the ancient plants episode and we are glad that he did. I also want to thank Joe Jeffrey, our voiceover artist, and Martin Mancha, our art artist for their contributions to this episode and the podcast in general.

0:41:54 - (Chris Clarke): Our theme song, moody western, is by Brightside Studio. If you are not yet helping to support 90 miles from needles and the desert Advocacy media network that is our nonprofit home, you can fix that by going to nine 0 mile from needles.com donate. You will find a couple of different options for giving us some money there. You can also text the word needles to 5355. That will bring you, in response to your text, a form that you can fill out and pay with whatever you've got set up on your phone. Apple pay, Google pay, paypal, whatever.

0:42:32 - (Chris Clarke): We are nonjudgmental and platform independent around here. You can make a small donation or a bigger one. You can donate recurring on a monthly or annual basis. Or just the one time. We are all about choice here. We hope you liked this episode. We are very, very grateful that you're listening. Take care of yourself. The desert's getting hotter and hotter. Caution as we go outside is ever more important.

0:43:02 - (Chris Clarke): And if we all make it, I will see you at the next watering hole. Bye now.