AC Discussion | Co-Becoming: On Art, Animals, and Place

 

On September 28th, Ashley Ahearn, Sarah Rowe, and Lee Running sat down to talk about how creative practice redistributes anthropocentric hierarchies of dominance and control through co-becoming with our more-than-human neighbors. Watch the full conversation, or read through the transcript below to find links to additional resources, and share your thoughts in the comments section.

Title of Discussion: Co-Becoming: On Art, Animals, and Place

Panelist 1: Ashley Ahearn

Panelist 2: Sarah Rowe

Moderator: Lee Emma Running

Date of Discussion: September 28th, 2022

List of Acronyms: [AA] = Ashley Ahearn; [SR] = Sarah Rowe; [LR] = Lee Emma Running; [PF] = Peter Fankhauser

 

Transcript

 

[AA] Hey folks! It's Ashley Ahearn. I was out herding cows and I'll be on camera in about 10 minutes if you can give me that time. I'll be here on mute until then.

 

[PF] Perfect. I think we'll go ahead and get started then now that Ashley's joined us.

 

Welcome everybody. I think we’re going to go ahead and get started. My name is Peter. I work here at Amplify and it’s great to have you all here for tonight’s Alternate Currents panel discussion, Co-Becoming: On Art, Animals, and Place with our three incredible panelists Ashley Ahearn, Sarah Rowe, and Lee Running. Lee will also be guiding the conversation and they’ll introduce themselves to you in just a minute. 

 

Before that, for anybody who’s joining us for the first time, or for those who are new to Amplify, we’re a nonprofit arts organization dedicated to supporting artist-driven change.

 

Alternate Currents is one program that helps us do that by contextualizing national and international issues in the arts with responses from people working on the ground. Tonight’s discussion is one part of a year-long investigation of place and the environmental, economic, and social dimensions that shape our understanding of what it means to be in, of, or from a place. 

 

Our panelists will be in conversation with each other for 40 or 45 minutes before we open the floor to questions, but the Q&A and chat functions will be active throughout so please feel free to share your thoughts anytime. 

 

I’ll also mention quickly that a video and transcript of tonight’s discussion with links to additional articles and more resources will be posted to the Alternate Currents Blog in a couple weeks. You’ll be able to find it, and a lot of other great discussions like this one, under the ‘conversation’ tab on our homepage at www.amplifyarts.org.

With that, thank you all again for being here. We really appreciate your participation and willingness to engage in critical discussion with us. Thank you to the Sherwood Foundation whose support makes Alternate Currents programming possible. Lee, over to you.

 

[LR] Thank you so much. I'm so excited about this panel. It's an excuse for me to meet Sarah whose work I love. We live in the same town and it's a wonderful thing to meet other artists who live in the same place that that you do. I am connected to Amplify Arts through the Alternate Currents Working Group cohort this year that is working with place. My own work as a sculptor is based on the collision between the animal world and the human world. I'm working this year, and really for the last five years, with roadkill deer. I work with these animals that I find beside the road, in ditches beside the road, a space that's called ‘the verge.’ I collect deer from the space and take care of their bones and clean them and polish them. Then, anything that's missing, I repair with kiln cast glass and re-articulate the skeletons often standing on two legs so that they feel very human and so that we approach them face to face and body to body in the gallery.

 

I'm interested in what this work does to build empathy between the human and the animal world and to draw attention to an act that happens hundreds of times a day in the US, something that we are taught to drive right by. I'm curious about what that says about our relationship to wildness in this country. That's a little bit about me. I live in Omaha, Nebraska and have lived here for just over a year and a half. I'm new to this city and um I'm grateful to the community that Amplify has opened up for me here.

 

Sarah, do you want to introduce yourself?

 

[SR] Thank you. I'm excited to be here. This is such a cool conversation. I am Sarah Rowe. I'm a multimedia artist living and working in Omaha. I've collaborated with Amplify many times over the years and it's always a wonderful, dynamic conversation. My work spans a lot of different mediums but it's always community based. I always try to include participatory elements in my work. I'm a painter, printmaker, and I also do performance, ritual, and immersive installations. I love storytelling, play, healing. I'm a mother and definitely an animal lover and I guess that's me in a nutshell. Can we pass it over to Ashley?

 

[AA] Sure! I am untacking my horse, speaking of co-creating with animals, as we speak. Can hear my mustang in the background? He's all excited I’m home.

 

I was a reporter for NPR for years covering science and the environment and natural resources for the city of Seattle where I was based for seven years. Then, frankly I kind of got tired of the grind and parachuting into a lot of rural communities where a lot of these natural resource decisions have direct implications for people who live there. So, my husband and I decided to leave Seattle four years ago and now we live on 40 acres of sagebrush in the reddest, most conservative county in Washington state. I have to say it's been one of the best things for my art and for my work and it's expanded the way I look at stories. It's also been powerful to have animals in my life in a meaningful way.

 

I have two horses. I have a mare named Pistol who was given to me for free when I moved to the valley, which is just like a free puppy for anybody who's thinking a free horse sounds like a great idea, what could go wrong? She's great but she's definitely a green broke. Then I adopted a Mustang from the Bureau of Land Management. The Federal Government will give you a wild horse for $125 in this country, which feels like a pretty great birth right for all of us to have. These horses have given me access to a community of ranchers and backcountry packers and hunters and a way of being with animals that is so fundamentally different. It has been really inspiring. It's uncomfortable sometimes and I welcome questions about that. I was out gathering cows off public land all day today with Pistol and I've gotten to know some of those fourth and fifth generation ranchers that a lot of folks love to hate in the more urban environments where I used to live. So, it's been a real shift and when Lee got in touch about the concept for this panel, I was like, “hell, yeah.” It's such a great idea. It's something that I think about every day, and I have a lot to share, especially about the journey I'm on now with this baby Mustang. He's actually hugging me right now. He comes over and he just kind of puts his head on my shoulder and just visits. I can feel my heart rate drop whenever he does it. It's like the happiest thing. I'll stop there and let Lee take it.

 

[LR] Thank you both for those introductions. I'd love to start, leading off Ashley's description of this hug that's happening with her horse, by asking more about how you feel the influence of animals impacts your creative work. For me, it really is a body-to-body relationship. I've been thinking about that so much with the bones that I've been collecting. Ashley and I were just at a residency together in Oregon and one of the things I was doing there was collecting a wider range of animals’ bones than I've worked with before—coyotes, deer, sheep—and the similarity of the armature that holds up all these living things feels like such an important part of it to me. I wondered if anything resonated with either of you about the idea of true body-to-body contact we have with animals.

 

[AA] I'd love to jump in having gotten to watch Lee work firsthand with her bones. Spending that week together on the ranch, I would visit with her and see that it was like a sacrament. The reverence and care you show to animals that we don't value; we don't cherish, we don't mourn we slay with our vehicles every day. There was such power and reverence and humility in the way that you would spend hours polishing those bones until your hands cramped. I'll never see roadkill the same way again. When I drive around and see shards of tires—Lee was gathering shards of rubber tires on the side of the road for another part of her installation—I’d think, “I should grab that for Lee!”

 

I was talking with a girlfriend today who I was riding with all day looking for cows. She has a Mustang too and I think of Mustangs as old souls because they live in the wild for at least a couple years before they come into our world, so they've figured out their own path before they're forced to walk ours. I think there is a similar reverence that I have for my Mustang. He didn't choose to be here with me but hopefully we can find some semblance of freedom together if I can learn from him and try to walk his path with him and be respectful. It's not just about cowboying. A lot of the folks I hang out with it’s like, “Get ‘er done. Train them and break him. Make him do what you need him to do. He's going to be a good little cow pony one of these days.” I don't know if that's what his path is going to be. I hope it he wants to do that with me. They probably all think I'm a big hippie, but I don't really care because I know that when I spend time with this horse, he chooses to trust me. There was a very distinct moment where he was in a pen hiding on the other side and wanted nothing to do with me. Then one day, he came over and he put his nose out and I put my hand out and we touched. If you ask anybody who has Mustangs, there is a moment when they choose to walk into your world. Most of them don't get that option. They’re forced to do it. But it was important to me that it was as much of a choice for him as possible. As I build a relationship with this horse, there are times when I'll hang out with him and it's almost like we're vibrating at the same frequency. It's hard to describe. For anybody who has a dog, it’s like when you just have one of those days and you get home and lay down on the floor with your dog. You just love them, and you forget about everything else that's going on in your world and you just focus on massaging their jaw—those simple moments where we forget about our otherness. I've never felt that so profoundly as do working with this young Mustang. I'm now making a podcast about Mustangs and a kids book about mustangs so he's, in terms of my creative process, fuel for that process. That connection has inspired me to make some cool stuff in the next year.

 

[SR] That connection is everything. Certainly, the Native person in has very reverence for all creatures. When I pass by roadkill, I can feel my heart shatter a little bit and I say a prayer. If I can move something off a path or the road, I will put it in a more respectful place. It's not always possible. Lee is really raising the bar in that way.

 

It is so incredibly important to honor their lives and their passing. I was brought up to see animals as our kin, our literal relatives, and the way we speak about animals and plants very deeply effects our relationships to each other, to the Earth. Kinship is sacred and working with horses has been really healing for me. I'm a city girl. I hope I can end up on a ranch someday, but I've painted horses into my life. I've never owned property and I’m raising a child by myself, so I live vicariously through my friends who have horses.

 

I've worked in a lot of clinical settings practicing healing arts and I've learned more about equine therapeutic riding, which I've introduced my 17-year-old to now. Shifting from a clinical office setting into a barn setting has been really exciting and a new thing for me. It’s helped me heal from some rough patches in my life more than any sort of therapy ever has. It's interesting painting these horses. I have to say, I love that we've mentioned deer and horses because deer is a symbol of gentleness in some Native cultures. I paint deer as a symbol of gentleness. In my last show, I did a few large paintings. One was depicted four horse heads for the four directions and is titled Gentleness is a Strength. I feel like it's the most important strength. When a being that big trusts in you and you give it space and respect, gentleness is more powerful than violence. To have that trust with another species is incredible.

 

[LR] I just wrote this down “gentleness more powerful than violence.” It is such a beautiful thing.

 

[AA] yeah oh well and I think what I love about working with Pua'a, which is my mustang’s name. It means friend in Paiute. The Chairwoman of the Burns Paiute Tribe shared that with me when I asked her for help naming him. They make us better. If I walk into the round pen to try and work with him and I'm brooding or impatient or angry, it's a non-starter. When you talk about gentleness, that's exactly what's required. If you're going to ask for anything, it's a form of reverence. To me, that is the only way to make progress together by coming with your hat in your hand. I think that runs directly contrary to patriarchal dominance-based approaches to nature that assert control—it serves us and provide us with what we need—as opposed to being reciprocal. That was never as real to me until I lived rural and saw it firsthand in my relationship with this horse.

 

[LR] Sarah, do you have any follow-ups to that?

 

[SR] I think the most powerful thing that animals teach us is humility and respect. There's no greater lesson. I'm taking English riding lessons because I love the challenge of it. Every tedious little movement of your heels makes you one with your horse. I wanted to learn those very tedious things and to know that a horse can sense where you're looking or if you're leading with your core. It’s mind-blowing. They’re so much more in tune than we are. When you connect in that way, it readjusts your internal compass on this land that we're really disconnected. We need their help reshaping the land and restoring ecosystems.

 

[LR] Even the ranch that Ashley and I were on, there were so many deer there all the time. I was walking between the studio and the house on an incredibly dark, moonless night and I was coming back at about 2:00am from the studio and there was this huge breath I could feel in the path. It was a mule deer who stood up and came towards me. I couldn't see it, but I could hear it breathing and it was just this embodied presence and wildness that is unlike anything else. I was immediately untired, immediately in my body. It's such a beautiful thing. I don't have experience riding like both of you, but I'm interested in those means of inter-species communication. Humans place so much weight on words and I’m interested to hear more about communicating through the body with another species.

 

That brings up another question about the importance of the small, repetitive, tedious, imperceptible, and unnoticed acts of co-becoming. You’ve both talked beautifully about the repetitive acts that make that possible and I’m curious Sarah, about how ritual and repetition resonate with your work.

 

[SR] Ritual is inherently important because it’s something you do with intention. I don't think it needs to be anything elaborate. It probably shouldn't be. If it's all for show, then why are you doing it. I think it's important to revisit what rituals we do and why we're doing them, so they don't lose their meaning. Sacredness is very simple.

 

I'm sitting next to two nano fish tanks right now because I can't have animals in this place that I rent with my daughter, but we need animals to feel like home, so I got her some fish tanks. I was hoping that this betta fish would co-exist with a snail who would help eat the algae, but the fish kept catapulting this poor little snail off his perch, so I had to buy a whole new tank for the snail. Then, I felt bad that the snail didn't have a buddy. So, we went from one fish to two tanks for these little, tiny creatures. Honestly, feeding them is one of the joys of my day. I have these two beautiful little ecosystems that live in my dining room. Ritual can be as simple as that. The micro/macro relationship shows up a lot in my work, like the Earth and Cosmos or working with these tiny snails and then going and working with horses. The stress of your life falls away when you're caring for other creatures in that way. I hope that that's reflected in my more traditional artwork. I try to really use the space of the canvas to honor that connection we have with animals.

 

[LR] Ashley, do you have any thoughts?

 

[AA] I appreciate what Sarah was saying. My days are better because they start in service to my animals. When I lived in the city, my day started in service to myself. Everything was about me. Now, I feed my horses by eight thirty every morning. There is a sacrament to it. I don't know how else to explain it. They come first. Even today, I was late for this panel because my horse gets fed first. She gets watered first. She gets untacked. Then, I take care of my needs. That's the only order of operations for any cowboy. Even if you ask some of the most conservative who beat the crap out of their horses, they eat before the cowboy eats at the end of a long day. I think it'd be interesting to unpack that because I'm constantly wrestling with why that. You know when you make your living moving cows or ranching, your animals are also your tools. Some of the country we ride in, you can't get an ATV. You can't gather your cows in except on foot. There's no other way to get them out of some of this High Country where I was riding today. So, it's a slippery slope between seeing an animal as a revered creature and seeing an animal as a glorified ATV that you need to do your job. That's been a hard line for me to walk. I don't beat my horse if she doesn't do what I want her to do, you know? But I'm around that and I try to be respectful of different cultures and different backgrounds and understand that they grew up very differently from the way I did around animals. I grew up riding English, Sarah. It's a different approach. That has been hard sometimes. But in turn, I see how necessary the animals are to do what folks do on the land out here.

 

[LR] For me, so much of making sculpture is trying to build relationship between me and an object. That object being the bones of an animal makes it more than just an object. It is a physical weight too. It is me carrying a body out of a canyon or it is me carrying a body out of a ditch and that relationship of moving a body to from one place to another. It's not so much inspiration as it is the physical action of moving bodies.

 

[AA] What drew you to roadkill originally and that that ritual? What made you want to climb into ditches and carry out dead things?

 

[LR] I was looking through a bunch of old family photographs and there's a photo of me at 13 when my family had driven to New Mexico. We were camping but we'd stopped to see Georgia O’Keeffe’s ranch and I saw a cow skeleton in a ditch. I was like, “You have to stop the car so I can draw it.” My family went on and saw the ranch and I stayed in the ditch and drew the cow skeleton. So, I've been collecting bones my whole. Later, I learned to make bookbinding tools with bone and steel. So many tools used to be made with bone—the buttons on our clothes, the needles that we use to sew, the boning in corsets—all of that was animal material. From there, I started working with it. Polished bone is more beautiful than anything. I challenge anyone who works with plastic to pretend that it's ever as beautiful as bone. I started finding them a lot. Once I saw them, I couldn't unsee them. I was running a lot in rural Iowa and would pass the same deer every day on my long runs, and I hit a moment where I couldn't just let it lie there anymore. I couldn't unsee it.

 

[AA] And now you're helping so many other people see them, which is really a beautiful thing.

 

[LR] Art does that. It opens that space for us. I loved hearing Sarah say that she painted horses into her life. I think that happens with creative work. Something starts and have to follow it.

 

[AA] I work with sound and I recorded the moment when I first touched Pua'a. It was just on my iPhone, like a voice memo app. Crappy audio. But those moments become audio sketches. I'm making a podcast series that explores the larger issue of Mustangs in the American West, and how we manage them, or frankly don’t manage them, effectively as a country. I’m using Pua’a’s story to tell that larger story and explore those larger questions. It feels like a very convoluted and complicated issue but I hope that, like Lee's done by helping people see the ways in which we overlook roadkill, that maybe those audio snapshots of this horse on this individual journey will help more people want to see his world and understand what's going on with the tens of thousands of wild horses on public lands across the West and what that means for all of us who care about public lands.

 

It’s funny. Lee and I never talked about this when we were at the artist residency. I never really thought of myself as an artist. I've always been a journalist. We deal in facts and we deal in information and truth and post-Trump, what does that even mean anymore? For every set of facts I can present to my climate denier neighbors, they have a set of facts from their sources that they feel are equally valid. It's disheartening as a journalist to live in that world, but I found solace in moving toward art and the emotional realm that can come from good storytelling and human experience. When I look at my community and where I am right now, I've made my friends through horses and tagging along with ranchers and learning to see their world through their eyes and form those connections. Animals were the connective tissue when I think about it. Having the door open to those kinds of conversations has helped me realize that my horses are my muse, but also my medium. They’ve opened doors for me to start telling stories that might actually change more minds than any amount of facts or figures or things I would have put on NPR when I was filing my stories by 4 pm every day for All Things Considered. That was just that was what I did for a paycheck. My heart I wasn't getting what it needed. I think that's where moving toward the power of story and the power of art can connect to deeper truths that than any facts we might trot out to support our personal beliefs.

 

My last series was about regenerative ranching and I traveled all over the west and interviewed women ranchers. It's called Women's Work, if you're looking for a podcast. There's eight episodes and it's about women ranchers who are changing the way we raise livestock in this country. There are a lot of good news stories that don't get told and, perhaps no surprise to present company, women seem to be leading the charge on many of those new practices or sometimes very old, more sustainable practices. I think that came from the more artsy-fartsy side of like public radio. It's kind of old school documentary. It's immersive audio. It's hanging out on a ranch for four or five days and rolling tape and coming home and piecing it together into something that tells a larger story or shows us a truth that maybe we couldn't have seen in the minute details. I think a lot of journalists, myself included, in my previous job didn't have the time to go and do that and just sit with someone else's experience in a way that might actually change another person's perspective. In in this instance, cows and how we raise them.

 

[LR] Sarah, I’d love to hear more about storytelling in your practice and more about performance. I'm interested in what performance does for presence. Creating a space that requires presence and reflection is more important than a passive like experience.

 

[SR] In any space I work in, I transform that space into something else. I shift the space and the energy of the space too. It's always a challenge but it's a good challenge. I try not to put myself at the center. It's not human-centric. It's not my story. It's just way to create a haven for people that I hope feels open and safe for shared storytelling. It's loose performance when I'm creating those spaces. A lot of times it requires physical engagement from the people in the room to help transform the space and it becomes something bigger. You see marks that are not mine. You can come in later and see that something happened there. It charges the space. We are all artists and storytellers. We just have to find our medium. It doesn't matter what it is.

 

[LR] I love that both of you have talked about medium as material but also as a conduit—medium of storytelling, the medium of painting, the medium of performance as a connective tissue both in a human community but also between us and the animal world.

 

Ashley's working on her children's book, which I can't wait to see. Sarah has two huge projects happening right now in Omaha. How are animals guiding your practice? How are they present in your upcoming work, your upcoming projects

 

[SR] I've directed my first film with a woman on the Umóⁿhoⁿ reservation who has built a huge community garden with the school. The school and the reservation have their own farm stand. It's just the most magical place. Anyone near Omaha, go and support their farm stand. You're getting the best organic fruits and vegetables and supporting important education. These kids are learning the most important things you can learn.

 

There's a bison herd there. I think it's very important to talk about bison. My tribe (Ponca Tribe of Nebraska) doesn’t have a reservation. I'm Ponca. But we have two small herds. Restoring the prairie is so important. It's as important as the ocean and the jungle and the mountains. We need the prairie. Sadly, as much as I adore cows, they are an invasive species. When you reintroduce bison, it helps to restore the prairie and the ecosystem and the soil. We're in a dire situation, as we all know. You can see the way that plants are growing differently, or not at all, or rotting because of the soil and lack of rain and depleting groundwater. So, I loved interviewing this woman. There are beautiful things happening within Indigenous communities and it's really important for us to seek out that knowledge because that our kinship with land and animals, that's our future. These programs that are happening and the bison returning are the glimmer of hope.

 

[AA] I would add something really exciting. I'm researching this new series now about Mustangs and I've long been a huge fan of Indian Relay. I think it's so badass. If you ever want to go down YouTube rabbit holes, start watching Indian Relay. The Colville Tribes’ reservation is about an hour and a half east of me and there are many horse people there. Kids learn how to do relay races where they race horses around the track. They jump off, they ride bareback, and they paint the horses beautifully. They jump off the horses at a gallop. The rider jumps off and jumps on the next horse and continues around for another lap. The team on the Colville Rez just won the Nationals of Indian Relay. This is where horses again connect me to people that I never would have met.

 

There was a horrible wildfire, speaking of climate change, burning every single day here. I hauled a bunch of hay over to the county fairgrounds where folks over by the Rez were getting donated hay to feed their livestock because their pastures had all burned. I met a woman, Naomi, who is a Colville member, and I became friends with her on Facebook. Turns out her brother's big into Indian Relay. She told me kids go out and catch the wild horses and they learn how to do relay on these wild ponies that rip and tear around. And it was so cool because I never would have met her if I hadn't been connected to the horse and ranching communities in the valley where I live. To show up and try to help after a tragedy like the wildfire, it's the ways that animals connect us. I'm so excited to Showcase Indian relay in this podcast series as a way to celebrate Mustangs. It's also a revival of Indigenous pride. This is like your hometown football team going to Nationals basically. In the parties they had on the Rez to welcome them back, the horses are heroes, and the riders are heroes. They're local celebrities. I'm really excited to show a wider audience a good news story you know from Indian Country that centers the horses, the animals, and the connections that these kids have with these wild ponies.

 

I agree with you, Sarah 100 percent that cows are an invasive species. Again, it's hard to watch how cows are treated and think about co-becoming with animals and being with animals. The stuff I see happening, the way cowboys treat them, it turns my stomach. But I also will say, in the time that I've lived in the valley where I live, more of them are switching over to grass-fed, grass-finished instead of sending them to the feedlot, which is a horrifying place for an animal to spend the last part of its life. So, you start to see little changes in the good old boy network when they hear things like podcasts about women ranchers, or they ride with hippies like me and I tell my horse she's a good girl whenever she does anything and I don't care if you make fun of me because she's a good girl.

 

[SR] The matriarchy, we're coming we're coming.

 

[AA] Damn straight. Honestly, you learn pretty quickly in any ranching community that you go to the wives if you want to get anything done. They're the ones who are in charge. It’s just like in a herd. The mares call the shots. The stallions are the loud ones everyone listens to but the mares are actually the ones making the decisions.

[LR] I love that. We just have a few minutes left. Let’s open it up to questions

 

Here’s one:

 

“What advice would give to somebody coming into their own awareness of what co-becoming with animals means?”

 

[SR] For me, it started with rescuing animals as a child. I grew up in a family that rescued all kinds of different animals. My daughter and I have rescued many rats over the years and that helped her to learn how to care for another being and to see beyond the idea of vermin. Rats are so intelligent and clean and sweet and loving. I think starting with smaller animals and children; however we can engage in that way to start kids young and foster generations of humans that care for animals of all species. Volunteer at a shelter and it'll blossom from there.

 

[LR] I would second that. I also feel like people are not outside enough. Having your body outside in the world and having your feet off asphalt also helps build connection to the animal world. That sounds super basic, but I feel like I've learned so much about deer and about the way that they move in the landscape by walking in the Platte River, walking in creek beds, walking along verges. Being in the spaces that animals are in with my body shows me how incredibly tough they are. The undergrowth in a midwestern forest is really prickly and hard to move through. To think that animals just move through the landscape interests me. I'm also interested in what happens when we listen in a landscape, and I think animals teach us how to do that.

 

[AA] Anyone who's ever scared a turkey out of a prairie knows that. You're suddenly confronted with a flying bowling ball.

 

We all need to be outside more. We need to ramble more outside. I think that's one thing a horse really helps you do. Sometimes I drop the reins and we'll see where Pistol takes me. Sometimes it's back to the trailer when she's feeling lazy. Sometimes, especially after dark, she finds her way home. Not having a purpose or an end in mind when you're interacting with nature, that close observation, and unstructured interaction with it, is important. I think you can do that in a city. I firmly believe you can. I just didn't learn to do it until I was lost in the sagebrush and had to rely on my horse to help me. Pistol moseys. She walks really slowly. I could kick her the whole time and try to make her go faster, or I could slow down because there's a lot I need to learn from my horse. It's that unstructured, unhurried time that's been really important to me.

 

The other thing I would add, in terms of finding that connection, is what we eat. I don't want to be preachy about it. But you know, I buy a share of beef from rancher in my community now and I know exactly how that cow lived its life. I know that it had one bad day and otherwise, it was grass-fed. That's where I'm finding a union with that animal. I am voting with my dollars about how I want animals to be treated in in my world. I feel like that's another side of the coin and finding that oneness, whether it's with a rat, which I think is really cool, or with what you're putting in your body, what you're spending, what kind of economy we're voting for if we are going to eat animals.

 

[SR] I agree. I call myself a vegetarian because that's how much of an animal lover I am, but if I'm in a place where I know an animal has been cared for and has lived the most natural life possible and has been respected, or if I if there's bison from the Rez they harvest once a year, that's a gift. That animal was respected. I won't get preachy about it either, but voting with your dollar is the best way that we can vote because it's the easiest way to create the world we want to live in. How will animals directly benefit from who we support?

 

[LR] We do have one question in the Q&A maybe we can wrap up with. Someone asks,

“Are there any authors, writers, artists, or thinkers whose work has influenced your understanding of co-becoming? Looking for any recommendations of additional resources any of you would like to share.”

 

[SR] I always have to say Braiding Sweet Grass. I think a lot of us have read that at this point, but I feel like that's a must read for everyone. It's like science, poetry, storytelling. It's practical. It's beautiful. That's my number one.

 

[LR] I loved Gathering Moss. I feel really sad that I don't have more to offer. I will put together a list. Temple Grandin!

 

[AA] Derek Jensen's “Coyotes, Kittens and Conversations” was really important to me. It came out probably 20 years ago but it's brilliant and all about interspecies communication. That was that was formative for me.

 

[LR] Those are all good recommendations. Thank you for sharing those. I think we'll sign off!

 

[AA] Thank you so much! Lee, well done and so great to meet you, Sarah.

 

[SR] Likewise. This is great hopefully we’ll have more conversations, and all go out and work with animals together.

 

[LR] Thanks everybody. Have a good night!

 

Additional Resources:

*This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

About the Panelists:

Ashley Ahearn is a public radio and podcast journalist who has been covering science, the environment, natural resources and climate change for more than a decade. Her stories have been broadcast on Morning Edition, All Things Considered, BBC World Service and PRI. She co-created the podcast Terrestrial with NPR and member station KUOW in Seattle. The show explored our personal choices in the face of climate change, and has close to a million downloads. In 2018 she left KUOW and started her own podcast production company. Now she freelances for NPR and helps clients make great podcasts. One of her great passions is helping scientists better communicate their research to the broader public, so she does workshops with Compass, a nonprofit that organizes trainings at universities and research institutions around the world.

Sarah Rowe is an interdisciplinary artist based in Omaha, NE. Her work opens cross cultural dialogues by utilizing methods of painting, casting, fiber arts, performance, and Native American ceremony in unconventional ways. Rowe’s work is participatory, a call to action, and re-imagines traditional Native American symbology to fit the narrative of today’s global landscape. Rowe holds a BA in Studio Art from Webster University, studying in St. Louis, MO, and Vienna, Austria. She is of Lakota and Ponca descent.

Lee Emma Running makes sculptures and drawings using roadkill animal bones, glass, paper, fabric, fur, raw pigments, and gold. Her training as a traditional papermaker allows her to manipulate materials and process as well as maintain the discipline of a fine craft. Her sculptures, installation and performance work are deeply connected to place. Her work has been exhibited internationally, at the National Taiwan University of the Arts, Taipei, Taiwan, The Morris Graves Museum, Eureka, CA, The Dubuque Museum of Art, Dubuque, IA, Western Carolina University Fine Art Museum, Cullowhee, North Carolina, the Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, IA, and The Charlotte Street Foundation, Kansas City, KS.

 
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