BOBBY FOSSEK, BROSNAN SPENCER, & MEADOW SPENCER on Remembering Together How to Be a Human Here | Kinward 03 🌕

My family and I have just returned from a canyon deep dive: an equinox celebration of blossoms and home rivers. Our journey into the canyon came right on the heels of the evening we spent with Bobby Fossek, Brosnan Spencer, and their daughter Meadow. These neighbors-across-the-mountains are the space-holders and weavers of Naknuwiłama Tiiča̓mna (Caretakers of the Land), an Indigenous-led organization currently based in Cove, Oregon, serving land and community: the Native people and species of the Big River (the Columbia), and the relationships that have always sustained mutual thriving here.

The final results of Naknuwiłama Tiiča̓mna’s 2024 Hide Tanning camp: gorgeous buckskin and beloved community. Photo courtesy of Brosnan Spencer

I met Bobby, Brosnan, and Meadow about five years ago, when I dropped in on their second annual camas bake in the Grande Ronde valley, where people have gathered to harvest and cook this beautiful blue lily since time immemorial. Since then, I’ve helped out occasionally with Caretakers’ land restoration projects as the organization has grown and found its stride.

Bobby, Brosnan, and Meadow have very deep roots in this part of the world, and deep perspectives to share on the ongoing experiment of learning and relearning, together, what it means to repattern ourselves and our economies in accordance with the offerings and needs of the land, weaving many voices, skills, and stories into the baskets that will hold water and food for our kids.

Meadow Spencer. Photo courtesy of Brosnan Spencer

I got some feedback from my wise brother (thank you, John!) that it might be helpful to frame up these episodes by sharing some of the big questions I’m grappling with as I enter into these conversations. 

So! I want to share that the muse — not always the topic, but the muse — for this first season of Kinward is the Columbia River — Nchi Wana, the big river — and her basin: many headwaters arising in many mountains, including my home river flowing out of my home mountains, and her many stories, many beings, many peoples: the people who have been here forever and have always counted on her and her salmon and the abundance of these lands; and the newcomers who also count on her. 

Among these many peoples, here as in so many other places, there’s a painful and still reverberating recent history of theft, displacement, fragmentation, and erasure of the Indigenous people who have always called this place home. In my life these days, as a parent, and a gardener, and someone who has worked in conservation, I’m always sitting with the ongoing trouble of coming, myself, from a lineage of newcomers and colonizers — while also trying, in an also ongoing unfolding way, to trust that I too am a person of the Big River. I love these lands that raised me, too, and I’m trying to belong to them.

There’s a lot there. Bobby and Brosnan and Meadow graciously hold space for this difficult tangle in this episode, and while of course we don’t resolve it — it’s life work just to hold it — I hope that others who are sitting in this tangle of troubles appreciate the threads that Bobby and Brosnan wove when we spoke. 

Bobby and Brosnan work a hide. Photo courtesy of Brosnan Spencer.

These good humans, who do so much good work, weave many other threads and affirm many relationships in this episode. They speak a lot about weaving, about tending land and community and tending conflict; about deprogramming from mechanical rhythms and coming back into rhythm with land (an ongoing inquiry for Kinward); about learning from the seasons and flowing with nature to shape the future we want for our kids. I hope you learn something beautiful from this conversation: I certainly did, and always do, whenever I have the honor of talking with these folks.

Enjoy!