Bite size highlights from 2025: Chaco to Wind River & Heading Home

Our curtain-raiser series of bite size highlights drawn from the 2025 wrap up episode continues, with two of the most extraordinary ancient places and cultures we visited. And last stop with a legend and friend in California.

Here are the voices, places and tunes you're hearing:

0m - Dana Scott (ep 264 and 265), Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, with Chauen, by Angel Salazar (from Artlist).

1.38 - Xavier Michael Young (ep 268), Wind River Tribal Buffalo Initiative, Wyoming

2.23 - Jason Baldes (ep 269), Initiative Director

2.59 - Paul Hawken (ep 270), California

Title image: Buffalo kin at the Wind River Tribal Buffalo Initiative (pic: Anthony James)

To access all episodes, including the full 2025 highlights package in ep 289, head to the website (where there’ll often be photos with each episode), or wherever you get your podcasts. 

With thanks to our wonderful guests and the musicians who generously granted permission for their music to be heard here.

And thanks for listening and supporting the podcast!

Chapter markers

Chapters

• 0:00 Rituals Of Reverence
• 0:44 Sweat Lodge And Found Family
• 1:43 The Meaning Of Buffalo Recovery
• 2:22 Kenya, Wildebeest, And Epiphany
• 2:58 Grief As Inner Opening

Transcript

Dana Scott: 0:00

I don't wanna make any claims for cultures that I don't identify as my own culture, but they're felt very similar, like a reverence. Um that this wasn't just packed away like oh crap, we've gone too far, you know. This this was very carefully put to sealed off, you know, and I I can imagine the reverence of building a structure as magnificent as this, uh a same level of reverence in the sealing it off and understanding of why we're doing it. I mean, I was with a bunch of people I didn't really know, I just went with a friend, but man, you come out of that thing after half an hour, 45 minutes, and you love every single person that you were sitting in there with, and I can't explain it to you, but the feeling of love is real, and you just you come, you walk into those sweat lodges, total strangers, you walk out, family.

Xavier Michael Young: 1:43

And so, you know, that story, the really it's of such an iconic species that a lot of Americans really value, highly value is it's not just an indigenous history, really. It's it's something that all really people can connect to. I mean, all I mean as a buffalo we went from a couple dozen to now we're at 500,000, right? Um I mean they're still ecologically extinct, they don't exist on large landscapes across large populations, but we're working, we're getting there, and and and you know, we're up to about 25,000 genetically reputable animals and about 20,000 tribal animals as well.

Jason Baldes: 2:22

That was always an interest to me, but it wasn't until we got over there, traveled around a bit together in Kenya and Tanzania and witnessing the wildebeest. It was the light bulb moment, it was kind of my life's epiphany, probably. Realizing that, you know, we could travel that far in amongst this herd of wildebeests, and that was less than five percent of what the bison was here, that blew me away. Because we drove for over a hundred miles, and as far as you can see in every direction is wildebeest. And that seems like a lot.

Paul Hawken: 2:58

So grief actually is an opening to To a deeper truth. Yeah. Yeah, which is within you, not as somebody's book or me or someone. No, it's within you. And that's why where to go from here? Oh well. Here.