We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Cristina Mormorunni a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Cristina, appreciate you joining us today. It’s always helpful to hear about times when someone’s had to take a risk – how did they think through the decision, why did they take the risk, and what ended up happening. We’d love to hear about a risk you’ve taken.

In March of 2022 I co-founded INDIGENOUS LED. I had a secure job, but the world was cracking open around issues of equity and justice. I recognized that this was the moment to bring every creative fibre of my being to the task of re-imagining what our relationship to the natural world could/should be. INDIGENOUS LED exists to protect, heal, and celebrate our wild relatives and their homelands. There is little doubt that the current crisis we are living through–biodiversity, climate, social justice–is at its core a relationship crisis. Healing or restoring relationship is ultimately a creative act that requires us to suspend disbelief, imagine the unimaginable, be sensitive and undaunted. For me the riddle rests in how do we look to the past and the cultural and spiritual teachings of our ancestors through the lens of this crazy moment we are living through and imagine a totally different collective future? Ferocious, unrelenting creativity is what I brought to the challenge and a year+ into our organizational development we are doing and affecting more than I could have ever dreamed of.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

The idea of conservation as something a person could devote a life to was seeded on school trip to a small wetland on the edge of San Francisco Bay: a glistening green jewel long since buried by I-80 and the rise of concrete towers devoted to insatiable human desire. Two things sealed my pact with the wild that day: 1) the salty snap of pickleweed in a naïve urban mouth; and 2) the cold weight of limp duck body, the hard plastic of a six-pack noose biting into sun-warmed arms that refused to let go.

The oath seemed simple at the time. Nature was a gift of magnificent wonder, one that fed the human spirit and brought out what is most beautiful and virtuous in us. Yet I had also learned that in humans similarly lived the power to extinguish this wonder—to end the life of a duck, a wetland, the planet—without so much as a whisper of gratitude. And so I committed to uplifting one form of humanity, quieting the other.

Today, conservation is so much more complicated; so much more freighted than a girl vowing to fight for wild nature could ever have imagined. Yet finally conservation’s origin story is starting to be told, exposing the fault lines of systemic racism and injustice at its roots. It is being told in bits and pieces, fits and starts, in hushed voices in small rooms. But these voices are growing bolder, louder, more confident by the day, and they must continue to do so.

If there is anything that my 25+ years in conservation as an Indigenous woman has taught me, it is that this reckoning is long overdue, painfully overdue. Our voices have been quiet or quieted for too long. Our stories and ways of knowing ignored or erased. Yet today, awareness is growing that conservation’s history is not a simple one, immaculately conceived from the pure love of a wild creature. Conservation is wrestling with the reality that to the contrary, it has often served as a global force for colonization, a vehicle for securing the needs of capitalist settler societies regardless of the costs to the land, animals, or First Peoples.

I find hope and possibility in this painful awakening and associated truth-telling and transformative potential. As the loss of nature, climate chaos, and a global pandemic bear down on the hegemony of Western thinking, a bright light is shining through the cracks showing a different way: a way that I posit is native to us all and grounded in an entirely different set of values embodied in all forms of life: relationship, respect, reciprocity, rematriation, and reconciliation. Values that are core to the emergence of a just and equitable world that will endure regardless of the shadowy side of humanity.

Conservation’s ferocious history of otherness, of dispossession and displacement, of violence born of the privilege to assert power over people and nature and wrest our lands and relations from Native arms, was not entirely successful. And what the twined biodiversity and climate crises are illuminating is how resilient we in fact are and how critical our Indigenous voices and ways of knowing are to the survival of this home planet we share with all of humanity.

Nearly all of the world’s remaining biodiversity (80%) is found on Indigenous Lands. Our intact homelands are also key to averting the climate catastrophe: a savagery not yet fully known, but whose power is already wielded in never before seen triple digit temperatures, mass species extinctions, cataclysmic fires and hurricanes, devastating droughts and biblical floods. And the answer isn’t to impose western conservation models or western ways of knowing on these remaining lands and waters. No, the answer is to listen. To respectfully ask why and how and what? To query the path to meaningful and durable solutions and be willing to be changed by the answers, the worldview, the values. To be humble and face the depth of what we don’t really know, can’t know: our ignorance of what it truly means to be in relationship with the wild to call Buffalo brother, Wolf sister. To realize that all of our stories are embraced in conservation’s painful history and thus entwined for eternity. The future is one that we can only create together by asking: Where am I in this story? Where are you? Where are the people who belong to this land? Who belong to Jaguar, Crane, and Turtle and are their relations? And maybe most importantly, how do we collectively make visible the stories and storylines that have been silenced, but have been singing and trying to call to all of us home since time immemorial?

The opportunity that stands before us is enormous, daunting even, but it is an urgent one and a challenge facing us all. Let’s work collectively to take the figures, stories, and legacies from our respective pasts and draw on this wisdom to craft a vision we are all in collective service to, and map a very different future for humanity and the wild beings with which we share our mother, our Earth.

Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

The privilege and responsibility to know your work is guided and is so much bigger than you.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.indigenousled.org
• Instagram: indigenous_led
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/indigenous-led

Image Credits
Louise Johns