I feel so grateful to Dr. Mark Miller for introducing me to his extraordinary friends and colleagues – among them Robin Whyatt, DrPH, whose work on environmental chemicals and cognitive deficits in children I have been reading and citing for decades. She is a Professor Emeritus of Columbia University where she worked with an all-star group that includes Dr. Ricky Perera and Dr. Virginia Rauh. While at Columbia, Dr. Whyatt served as deputy director for the Columbia Center for Children’s Environmental Health (CCCEH) and co-director of the Exposure and Biomarkers Core of the CCCEH. Dr. Whyatt has been highly involved in elucidating the risks to children’s brains from environmental exposures with Project TENDR and continues that work even as her passions have turned to Native American people in Montana, where she now lives. She studies and writes about Indigenous causes like the LandBack Movement and the epidemic of violence against Native American women. She is a non-Indigenous resident of the Flathead Reservation of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes (CSKT) in Western Montana and a member of the CSKT Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons Work Group. I am in awe of someone who has dedicated so much of her life to serving others in areas we both discern as among the most essential.
Figure 1: Dr. Robin Whyatt in Montana
JMK: Dr. Whyatt, thank you so much for dedicating your life to two incredibly worthy causes – protecting children’s neurodevelopmental health and bringing awareness to Indigenous women and the challenges they face.
RW: That’s what I’ve been doing during my retirement – learning about Indigenous History in general. I’m a Quaker, and that’s been a big issue that the North Pacific Yearly Meeting has taken on.
I grew up in Tacoma, Washington. My family moved East when I was going into eighth grade. But then, as a child, we camped all over the West. At that point, there weren’t camping sites – we used to come out to Wyoming a lot and Montana. I just have always loved Montana. There is just something about the shape of the hills that to me is so beautiful. My background is where we’re living right now. And then the view to the south is the gorgeous Bison Range. And then the view to the west is a whole slew of additional mountains.
JMK: It’s gorgeous! I really appreciate your sharing your time with me today. Mostly, I want to hear your stories. I have had so much pleasure in talking with Mark Miller, Bruce Lanphear, and Brenda Eskenazi, and now you. I tell my kids, meet your heroes and get their stories.
The first question is what first prompted your interest in Children’s Environmental Health (CEH)? Is there some story from your childhood or early training about how you got interested?
RW: It was a bunch of things. My grandfather on my father’s side was well-known as the head of the Ornithological Department of the Museum of Natural History. He was a famous naturalist and lived on Long Island. And he just started walking all around Long Island. He would evidently walk 40 miles a day so that he knew the natural history of Long Island backwards and forwards. And then they started spraying DDT. We visited with him a lot, and I just recently learned that he was the main witness in the case of DDT spraying on Long Island, which had huge ramifications. I always thought Rachel Carson was the key scientist.
JMK: I’m teaching that now! [Holding up Silent Spring.]
RW: Rachel Carson was a shy person, but they would talk with her at the end of every day about the case. When I was a kid, because he really knew Long Island, my grandfather was able to show us what had happened to the fiddler crabs, insects, and lightening bugs. He was able to document what happened; he had studied and seen the decimation that it had caused.
My parents ate organic food, so I grew up in a family of environmentalists. My grandfather on the other side was Head of the New York Zoological Society. In 1944, the year I was born, he wrote the first book on Effects of Population Expansion. He did a huge amount of work in Africa on setting up the Serengeti plains. My husband Tom and I started as environmental activists, volunteering when we were very young – and then I became Executive Director of Scenic Hudson, a very important environmental group on the Hudson River. Tom was named the first river keeper of the Hudson River, and then he was Environmental Director of Clearwater, which is the group that Pete Seeger founded.
My daughter was born when I was 36, and I stopped working with her. I went one day to work, and then I just quit. And then they asked if, since I was home, I would put together recommendations for a toxic hotline for the EPA. So I did. I started a group called Citizens against Arial Spraying.
When my daughter was about two, I was just trying to think about where I wanted to go. One night, I was mulling what to do – on a beautiful moonlit night. My daughter had gone to bed and Tom was in the house, and I just wanted to be outside and think. This is a typical Quaker thing. It came to me very, very distinctly. “You are going to work on the effects of environmental chemicals on children.” In the early 80s, no one was thinking about children – work was mostly focused on cancer and the health of the environment and its impact on all species. I had not been planning anything like that, and I spent the next 35 years on it – and I am still doing it. I was then in my 30s; I am now 80.
JMK: Amazing.
RW: I needed training. I had a BA in English. So first of all, I went back to school and did inorganic and organic chemistry and biochemistry. I did a lot of research about where to get my training – and decided Columbia was the only place I wanted to go. So Granville Sewell, the director of the program on environmental conservation, knew me because I had been doing environmental work, and it’s a small world. My grades weren’t all that great in college, and I don’t think I had grades from high school because I went to the Meeting School, a very small Quaker school around a farm. So he said, we’ll bring you on as a special student. I did the undergraduate work that I knew I had to have, and I really put my heart and soul into it and got straight A’s in everything I did from that point on. I really answered your question!
JMK: I love these stories!
RW: I’m a deeply spiritual person, and some of that comes from growing up Quaker. Quakers have a sense of guidance from within. There is a real sense of being spirit-led in the Quaker way of looking at the world. I investigated a lot of different religions all through this period and did a lot of meditating.
I went all the way through the PhD at Columbia, earning a doctorate in Public Health, and really worked my way all the way through. We were broke environmentalists and raised our kids on about $25,000 a year. So I picked up the phone and called Granville and asked – can I TA this summer? I will bring my baby with me with a sitter. My instructions were to bring him in immediately if he cries. I would just pull up my top and breast feed – it was really fun. It brought the whole class together. Then I got a call from Karim Ahmed at Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), saying he needed someone to write two comments – one on ozone and one on cadmium for a regulation that was being proposed. So I finished my Masters, and then at NRDC, someone had a baby, and they asked if I would be interested in sharing her job – and I said I would.
At that point, there was finally starting to be some interest in pesticides and food. Still, no one was thinking about child exposures, but pesticides were on the radar since the DDT case. When I started at NRDC, NRDC had just finished this market basket study, where they had gone into a supermarket and collected a handful of fruits and veggies and had them analyzed – and published what pesticides were found in it. John Adams, the head of NRDC, had been given a grant and wanted to replicate that in New York. I said John, that is not the way to go – it’s not statistically significant. If you want to work on pesticides, you should be looking at children’s exposure. He agreed, and he gave me the job to do it. I hired Granville Sewell’s son, Brad Sewell. He got his MPH and law degree at Columbia. He and I went to visit people at the National Academy of Sciences (NASEM). They had just finished the first study on pesticide exposures for people – and it made a big splash.
For a few of the pesticides they had required a market-basket survey – which is your best data – because it’s how much is in the food that people were eating. We put out a report about pesticides in the diets of children – it got picked up by 60 Minutes and caused an uproar over the entire country, which was really a shocking experience to go through. I was on TV and getting attacked constantly, right and left. But it was a really important report – in almost every case, children’s exposures were vastly higher than the mother’s exposure on a mg/ kg basis, which now we all know. But nobody knew that then.
The NRDC started a similar study, and actually, two people who were on my advisory board pulled out so they could work on the NASEM study, which was really important because we got killed. But NASEM said basically the same thing – and didn’t get attacked. And it eventually resulted in the Food Quality Protection Act, which was focused on the protection of children. That’s when the 10-fold children’s safety came into being.
The report started the Alar scare – that’s what 60 Minutes focused on. The 60 Minutes story pushed us into the national headlines. At that point it was huge – every newspaper in the country wrote about it, though for me, it missed the key significance of the report. This employee at EPA got fired after the 60 Minutes segment. He did a brave thing – he talked about the way the law was currently set up. This was before the Food Quality Protection Act, and a lot of the issues he discussed were addressed in that law. He said, if Alar came out today, it would not be put on the market, but once a pesticide is on the market, I don’t have the ability to get it off, despite health effects we know about. The 60 Minutes interviewer said, “That’s crazy! You’ve got a carcinogen on the food, and you can’t take it off the market?” He said, “Yes. That’s a paradox of the statute.”
By the time I finished this in 1989, I was totally burned out, as you could possibly imagine. It was really grueling. It was good because I got used to being attacked and could stay calm under fire. By the end of it, I was able to just listen to these people really attack me and say, “Well let me just tell you how we did the report.” We were hit hard on the risk assessment because we were an environmental group being raked through the coals by the pesticide industry.
I realized that in order to evaluate the actual health effects of environmental contaminants, you have to have better measures of exposure. At Columbia, both Ricky Perrera and Regina Santella were using biological markers in samples collected from humans. That really interested me. They were focusing on carcinogens – Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAHs), which are, as you know, definitely problematic chemicals. They are an air pollutant that would get attached to small particulates. Ricky has done a lot of work on PAHs. So I went to get my doctorate there, and I was always intending to go back to environmental work, but I just loved research, so I didn’t. I did my doctorate on PAHs because that was the chemical with which they had developed ways to estimate exposures, but it was the methodology that was key for me.
Something else happened that was hugely important environmentally. And I don’t think people necessarily focus on it as much as it should be focused on – and that was that Richard Jackson took over the environmental science laboratory at CDC. You know his name?
JMK: Absolutely – I interviewed him about the Biomonitoring Project. He’s on my blog already – a delightful man, and that project is crucial.
RW: Yes. That just changed everything environmentally. All the work I did while at Columbia, I did in collaboration with CDC. Ricky and I were more interested in kids, and then NIH and EPA put together these incredibly important children’s centers. Eventually, there were 12 of them – and they ran for a long time – Children’s Environmental Health Centers. We got one of those and started enrolling pregnant women. And they were specifically set up to look at the effects of pesticides on children. And that’s when I started really writing a lot of articles that got published and got reasonably well known as a result of all the work I was doing.
That really came out of the report done by NYPIRG – the New York Public Interest Research Group. They worked at the state level of New York to get exterminators to report pesticide use in gallons and pounds. And what came out of that report that was really surprising to everybody is that pesticide use in New York City (NYC), particularly of chlorpyrifos, was huge. I knew a lot about organophosphates and carbamates. I said we’ve got everything we need. We could measure them in the same blood samples of baby and mom. It was a complicated story, and they are still following the kids. My last paper off of that was around 2017, and they were just becoming teenagers at that time.
JMK: I saw an article you published with Bruce Lanphear in 2018. It got a lot of press for the organophosphate pesticides, recommending that they should all be banned.
RW: Yes. I am still doing things with Project TENDR. The two big things I did with Project TENDR – I worked with Irva [Hertz-Piccioto] on that paper in PLOS Medicine after I retired. That was an important paper. I did a lot of work on pesticides, mainly chlorpyrifos, then later on, the pyrethroids – and that work is still going on at Columbia.
JMK: I have been reading your work for a long time, and I am extremely grateful. Following up, could you tell me more about the Children’s Environmental Health Centers?
RW: The twelve Children’s Environmental Health Centers ran for a long time. Brenda [Eskenazi] had a good one; Irva had a good one at UCLA. They were all across the country. A lot of people were using the CDC lab, which is the most reliable in the country. That was Richard Jackson’s doing – he gets a huge amount of credit for getting the money from Congress to set that up. They have quality control methods that are really stringent. Millions and millions of dollars that went into that, and it’s taught us so much – it’s how we have all learned about how much exposure we have.
JMK: Yes, I remember when we first started hearing in the popular press reports coming out about the biomonitoring lab.
RW: Yes – for good reason. Both Richard Jackson and Phil Landrigan went to the National Academy of Sciences (NASEM) to work on an incredibly important study. They found the same thing we found in our study; actually, they asked if they could use our methodology. One of the things we did was look at cumulative exposures in raw food only – because we knew it degraded during processing. We put everything into chlorpyrifos equivalents and found that a large percentage of children were being exposed above the legal limit, which was based on acetylcholinesterase inhibition. This is the same basic methodology the EPA is now using.
JMK: You know, chlorpyrifos is the chemical that my family was exposed to. I have experienced acute effects of chlorpyrifos myself, and we strongly believe that’s what caused my daughter’s cancer. And so I am very grateful to people who worked on chlorpyrifos. It ruined our lives.
RW: I’m so sorry. Did you get heavy exposure?
JMK: Thank you. I was exposed before pregnancy in an apartment, and they sprayed so much on our counter. I wiped it up with bare hands, and it absorbed through the skin. And then we were made ill again by heavy exposure to mosquito spraying. We just couldn’t believe it when we found out what was being sprayed. So I am really grateful to people who are working on this – these deaths are just so needless.
RW. I’m so sorry. I’ve heard of lots of experiences like that, and I got calls at Columbia from people like this all the time. It often causes multiple chemical sensitivity – and behavioral changes. The heavy exposures just really mess people up. I’ve heard terrible stories, the kind you are talking about, especially during pregnancy, getting huge exposures and really suffering. Is your daughter okay?
JMK: No – she died of her leukemia. And the thing is, she continued to be exposed because we did not realize that they were spraying. We only put it together after her first bone marrow transplant, and then it was too late. So she died at age eight. I’ve dedicated my life to this ever since. I usually don’t even think about my own health effects, but I lost thyroid function. I was acutely ill, struggled to breathe, and had heart arrhythmias for years from the acute exposures – as well as chemical sensitivity. I just hope to get the word out. I’m on the CHPAC right now and think it’s promising that they chose me even though they knew my story.
RW: That’s wonderful.
JMK: I told Michal Freedhoff, the head of the Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention (OCSPP) Office, my story to her face. I want to make people aware that there is a human cost to this.
RW: Good for you – wonderful.
JMK: I couldn’t do this without the research you and others have done, because otherwise – well, many would say you can never prove that association – but there is very substantial evidence.
RW: Yes – exactly. There is certainly plenty of evidence to take regulatory action. Did you have other kids too?
JMK: Yes. When she died, I had a 5-year-old, and my son probably has some ADD as a result of it, but otherwise is healthy. Knock on wood. And then we adopted two children from Russia, because, knowing I had been exposed to so much, I didn't feel that I should be pregnant again.
RW: I’m so sorry.
JMK: Thank you. I’m not the only one.
RW: I get calls like this all the time. Because of my parents and that experience with my grandfather, my parents must have been among the first to eat organic food in the early 50s – there was only one place in the whole country – Walnut Acres. I was really careful with my own kids because we knew. That’s when I ran food co-ops because organic foods were so expensive at the health food stores. I worked with Tina Seeger a lot at these organic co-ops. She and I both had young kids. So that was fun.
JMK: I was always aware that these exposures could be dangerous. And we fed our kids organic baby food and filtered the water during pregnancy. We did all these things, but we had no idea that these chemicals were being sprayed for mosquitoes. It’s just crazy.
RW: I’m so sorry. Your story is such a common one. And it’s just heartbreaking.
JMK: It is common – and especially for farm workers and their families. You know Brenda Eskenazi’s work.
RW: Yes. Herb Needleman is another person to talk about if you can. Richard Jackson, Bruce Lanphear, and Phil Jackson – all would have talked about him. Herb Needleman was way ahead of everybody else. First of all, he was just such a caring person. I got to know him – he was on my advisory board when I did that study at NRDC – so I’ve known these people for years. His decision to get these kids’ baby teeth was just brilliant.
His career was really ruined by industry. They just went after him. And then there were a total of nine longitudinal birth cohort studies to look at the effects of lead – and they all came out with the same findings. Bruce Lanphear really did a lot of that work, putting all nine together to look at the dose-response. That’s why the CDC has just lowered the action level of lead in blood again and are saying there is no safe level of lead in blood, end of story. The International Society for Children’s Health and the Environment (ISCHE), which Phil and Mark are really involved in, just gave a Herb Needleman Award.
I used to be really active in ISCHE – now my main focus is Indigenous people – but I still do TENDR – I read and sign letters. I’m not doing any research anymore – but last year, the NRDC did a suit on perchlorate in drinking water, which is really important. And I knew a little bit about the report. When NRDC was putting this together, they asked if TENDR would put together an amicus brief. We all brought expertise, and I was one of the people who was asked to be on that. We had about three days to do it. It was chaotic, but we all brought the expertise we had, and they won the case. I worked with Melanie Marty.
JMK: I heard she just passed away.
RW: Yes, and she was another just wonderful person.
JMK: I can well believe it. I do think this profession selects for really amazing, brilliant, driven, purposeful, and just plain good people.
RW: Well, I certainly have many dear, dear friends in this field. Stephanie Engel is one of my really close friends, whom I just adore. I’m no longer a scientist in the same way anymore. But I was a really good scientist – incredibly exacting and determined. I worked very hard and was very conscious of the importance to make sure not to make any mistakes.
One of the things in epidemiology is that you try to get the statistical findings to go away – if you cannot make them go away, then you start to think they are real. But you really have to work at it. You want to think it through so carefully and try to put the right things in the model. I didn’t put much weight in findings at p ≤ 0.05 level because you can flip those back and forth pretty easily. But when you get 0.001, then there is no way you get that kind of association to go away.
I was really careful, a very assiduous scientist. My grandfather was a really good, really exacting scientist, so I had that experience too.
JMK: There is so much fear and guilt surrounding environmental contamination and sick children. You mentioned that like me, you feel some guilt about your children – what mother doesn’t? This subject raises a lot of guilt and fear among parents. How do you have that conversation or phrase that message, so that you can educate people?
RW: I’ve had to phrase it a lot. So much of my research has been on pesticides. I always say be sure to wash your fruits and vegetables. Don’t use soap because you don’t want soap residues. You can use good warm water. You can get some of these rinses, which are OK. Watch your diet. Make sure the kids are getting a really well-balanced diet. Food is incredibly important to a child; do not avoid fruit and veggies because you’re afraid of the pesticides.
Life is full of risk, and it’s important to understand the difference between an individual risk and a population risk. I always say you can have a small risk on an individual level and that if everybody across the population is exposed to that small risk, it has large effects – and very costly effects.
But I won’t say these risk factors are small. We saw reductions in IQ and increases in behavioral problems with both phthalates and pesticides – powerfully so. For phthalates, we saw a 7-point drop in IQ between the highest and lowest exposed quartiles. That’s a big risk. But it’s one study. You need to look at the different studies because the next studies will either confirm or refute. What is the whole history in terms of studying that cause?
Of course, that’s a lot to ask of parents. Most importantly, I tell parents, a lot of things are going to affect your child, but we know that the one thing that is most important is how your child is stimulated – your relationship with your child. So play with and read to your child. Work with your child. That will have more positive effect on your child’s learning ability and behavior than any of these compounds. All of the studies that have looked at reductions of IQ for all the contaminants use a model called Caldwell’s HOME Scale – if they don’t control for that, then they are not controlling for what the Caldwell HOME scale picks up: hardship, poverty rate, education level. We put lots of different things in the models that can affect increases in problematic behavior or reductions in IQ. It’s challenging to do because you have to make a home visit. There is a questionnaire and an observational tool – it’s well validated and really terrific at getting at cognition. Consistently, that would show the strongest effect on the IQ – or subscales of the IQ – more than anything else.
There have been studies that have shown that even rats exposed to pretty high levels of lead – if stimulated by an enriched environment – can overcome the effects. That’s the main thing to stress – love and play with your child – read to your child, interact with your child, stimulate your child – that has more good positive effects than all of these negative effects. That is one of the most important things to communicate to parents.
JMK: I will try to make sure that’s part of my messaging with students because I share this bad news with them that they have never heard before. But I do tell them there are things they can do to skew their odds,
If you had magic powers and could single-handedly recreate US policy on environmental chemicals, what would that look like?
RW: I will answer that by saying what I have learned from studying and working with Indigenous people. Our whole society has been built on getting money as the primary goal. And the Earth has been used as a tool for getting that money. And many, many decisions that have been made because of that are extremely harmful – of course, climate change is the main one.
We have to go back and rethink the basic way we have been operating – what is most important to us? What matters? And we have to change. Or we won’t get out of this climate mess. It’s been interesting because I have done a lot of research about Indigenous people and colonization. I’ve been doing research and teaching about – who were the settlers? Who were the people who came here? What was their consciousness like? My paper on this asked, who are the Indigenous people before colonization? What was their world like? What was their consciousness like?
In many ways, my heart goes out to the settlers, and I have some understanding. Europe was in terrible shape – there were huge disparities in wealth – enormous poverty levels – and people were starving. There were huge amounts of violence. And the Catholic church was so focused on spreading Christianity – they really believed it was the only religion, and that it needed to be spread everywhere. In these Papal Bulls that they put out for various monarchs in Europe, they talked about taking the land, enslaving the people, killing them – it was all so violent. Just like today, all the wealth was concentrated in the hands of a few. The lust for power and wealth was huge.
This is where they came from. So we came here, and in a very, very short time, we have so degraded the Earth that our very existence is in question.
JMK: It’s interesting – in my past book, I was asking these questions – wondering how we could have been so stupid as to destroy the only known life-sustaining planet in the universe. And it’s interesting because as I was looking for cultures that have better and different metaphors, I went back to the European Middle Ages, and I also found so many connections to Indigenous peoples, in those cultures where they see life as a whole – an interconnected, intergenerational web. å
RW: It’s just a completely different way of looking at the world. You can see that, going from environmental work to looking more deeply into who are we, and how we got here.
I’m living on the Flathead Reservation. The way we ended up here is my son and daughter-in-law. My daughter-in-law is an organic farmer. She went to McGill – and then learned about running organic farms. Then, when my grandson was born in 2019, we moved up here to Missoula. We take care of my grandson every day. They are farmers. We are grandparents.
My daughter-in-law is working out of the Tribal Land Office in Pablo, and my grandson is going to a wonderful little school here – half Indigenous, half not. He’s having a wonderful experience at such a sweet school. It was around the same time that I started really looking at Indigenous history. I’ve always known a little bit about it, but nobody who has grown up white in the U.S. knows Indigenous history because we have been fed so many lies. You can see that consciousness from being an environmentalist.
JMK: Absolutely. I believe that thought and cultural work are really needed.
Looking forward, what do you think will be the status of children’s environmental health in the year 2050?
RW: We will either have survived or we won’t have survived. If we make the changes we need to make, this will be a better world. If we don’t, it will be just horrible. We can see that already. We’re on a cusp.
My son when he was young got interested in Indigenous issues and shamanistic awareness. He would go to this wilderness school and spiritual institute – the Omega Institute in Upper New York. Shamans would come in from all over the world. He studied in the Black Hills with a Native American medicine man who had been raised by his grandfather and a long line of medicine men. That was just an incredible experience for my son and for me too because my son taught me a lot. One of the things the Shamans would say struck me as hopeful. When the condor and eagle fly together, then we will be okay. The eagle is the intuitive, Earth-centered creature. Black Elk says that every step you take on the Earth should be as a prayer.
JMK: That’s beautiful.
Figure 2: The Condor and the Eagle Prophecy (Kundalini Yoga School).
RW: Right? The condor is the rational mind. So we’ve focused on the rational mind, but you have to wed them so that they become one.
JMK: I love that!
RW: That has been a wonderful image for me in terms of asking, how do we get out of this? I feel that the Indigenous people have a lot to teach us. It’s not just me – this whole Land Back movement is important. There was a wonderful article in the Yale Magazine that talked about giving parkland back to Native Americans because of their ability to make it thrive. They were thriving when we arrived, with huge trade routes all over the place. They are incredible farmers who built these phenomenal buildings and towns. They did all this with care for the Earth.
JMK: It's so interesting about the Condor and Eagle representing this union between science and humanities, spirituality and cognition, feeling and rationality. I think that is so true. And it's interesting how, in your life, you have always united these things. I can’t help but wonder about people in power who are fighting environmental protection – you wonder about people who are themselves dwarfed and handicapped by their own inability to have a spiritual connection to the Earth. They can’t understand someone can do both those things.
My last question was just to ask if you had any questions for me about my experience or the project.
RW: I’m delighted you’re doing it. You know, I probably wouldn't have done this if Mark hadn't told me about you, but I adore Mark. I feel a real sense of connection to you so instantly. And I just feel your heart is in the right place and believe in that.
JMK: I really appreciate that. I do feel like there is a comfort in the community that I am finding. One thing I’ve written already in the introduction is that when I educate my students about this terrible and unavoidable contamination, I open this whole other world – an apple with a poison worm at its heart. And it’s very hard to see that and to share that with them. But I also share that there are people who have worked hard and who are living their life the right way – altruistically, and dedicated to the truth. And that is a community too. That’s part of the world too. And I do think that is important to focus on. We cannot accomplish the work we need to accomplish unless we’re coming from some sort of strength. And I think that strength is in community. And I just love getting a peek into your community of lovely, lovely people. It’s been a privilege and a pleasure.
RW: Good. I do not blame Indigenous people being furiously angry – they should be, they have a right – and by and large, they really are not. I don’t meet anger here – I meet with caring. Indigenous people have a huge amount to teach us. But there is no them/us. It’s all us. It’s all connected. In my view, we just have to accept what is. We’re obviously at a huge crossroads, but we can’t dismiss others – it’s a whole. That’s why the eagle and condor mean so much to me. There are a lot of gifts that have come from the rational mind that have been used. There is no them/us.
I’ve been giving a series of lectures with the Missoula Friends. The North Pacific Yearly Meeting put together a Minute in support of Indigenous people. They ask Quakers to learn this history, and I’ve been doing that with the Missoula Friends. It’s a brutal history, and everybody is suffering. They asked us to learn the history, and I really studied it – fortunately, when COVID came along, my husband and I sat in the house for two years, and I studied.
JMK: We bookworms were fine with shutdown. [We both laugh.]
RW: I downloaded material from the Columbia library and did a lot of research. I read a lot of books, and I had a great old time. The next thing it asks in that Minute is that all Northwest Quakers take action to support Indigenous people by supporting the LandBack movement or in other ways. What are we moved to do? Another thing that is similar to many Indigenous groups is that Quakers work by consensus – in the spirit-led sense of the meeting. The whole next meeting will be focused on Indigenous issues. That will be really interesting.
JMK: Thank you so much for this rich conversation! It’s been such a pleasure getting to know you.
RW: I feel the same way. I feel this incredible sense of connection – you’re just a delightful person. I’m so sorry about your daughter and all the pain you’ve gone through.
JMK: Thank you. I just hope to make things better for some unnamed children who never get sick.
RW: Pain is a great teacher. You are obviously somebody who has been deeply moved to do this work, and it’s really important. So I honor you.
JMK: Thank you. It is good to have purpose in this world.
RW: Let us all just do what we can do.
JMK And thank you again for your work.
