All My Relations Podcast

All My Relations, sits down with Oglala Lakota artist Mato Wayuhi for a conversation that moves through sound and story.Mato is known for composing the music behind the award-winning series Reservation Dogs and stepping into a new acting role in The Lowdown, Mato breaks down how he builds story across mediums, from studio to the screen. Mato being selected for the Forbes 30 Under 30 marks his growing impact on Indigenous representation in film and music.Matika and Temryss get into Mato’s musical evolution from early projects like Stone Cold Lover and Indians in the Cupboard to Stankface and the Rez Dogs Theme, Mato takes us through the journey of his sound. He shares insight into his latest album Bygoner and its lead single “Leftovers” (2025), along with his work on the Free Leonard Peltier soundtrack (2025), grounding his artistry in both personal expression and political commitment.Throughout the episode, Mato speaks on his creative process, the responsibility he carries as a Lakota artist, and the intention behind every beat, score, and performance. Featuring compositions from Mato's growing discography and deep conversation, come with us into Mato’s world—where sound becomes expression, resistance, and connection.+++++++A/V Production/Video Edit by Francisco “Pancho” Sánchez @videosdelsanchoMusic by Mato Wayuhi @matowayuhiProduced by Matika Wilbur @matikawilburEpisode Artwork by Kitana Marie @creatortwahnaSocial Media by Mandy Yeahpau @dontguacblocText us your thoughts!Support the showFollow us on Instagram @amrpodcast, or support our work on Patreon.  Show notes are published on our website, Allmyrelationspodcast.com. Matika's book Project 562: Changing the Way We See Native America is available now!  T'igwicid and Hyshqe for being on this journey with us.

What can we learn from water?In this live conversation from Tidelands in Seattle, Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg writer, musician, and scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson joins All My Relations to discuss her new book Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead, our second selection for the All My Relations Book Club.Leanne invites us to listen to water as both teacher and theorist, “Water changes forms from a solid to a liquid to a gas. It expands our understanding of time. It always escapes the container, and it connects us all.” Instead of centering land as the primary orientation point, she turns to water to imagine how we might build beyond the limits of the present.Together we explore grief, creation stories, Indigenous resurgence, and the difficult work of world-making in a time shaped by colonialism, racial capitalism, and ecological crisis. As Leanne reminds us, “Listening to water and thinking through world making means that we have to collaborate with each other… building against this present moment. That’s a struggle, but it’s a relational struggle to give birth to something different.”At its heart, this conversation asks what it means to create futures rooted in Indigenous intelligence, care, and responsibility—and what water might already be teaching us about how to begin.A/V Production by Francisco “Pancho” Sánchez @videosdelsanchoMusic by Mato Wayuhi @matowayuhiProduced by Matika Wilbur @matikawilburEpisode Artwork by Kitana Marie @creatortwahnaVideo Edit/Social Media by Mandy Yeahpau @dontguacblocText us your thoughts!Support the showFollow us on Instagram @amrpodcast, or support our work on Patreon.  Show notes are published on our website, Allmyrelationspodcast.com. Matika's book Project 562: Changing the Way We See Native America is available now!  T'igwicid and Hyshqe for being on this journey with us.

Do you know the true narratives that shape the people, animals and lands of the Coast Salish People?This episode of All My Relations explores Lushootseed creation histories as living knowledge. These stories anchor us in the past, guide us through the present, and prepare us for an uncertain future.Host Matika Wilbur (Swinomish & Tulalip) leads the conversation through the origin story of the new exhibition, Coast Salish Creation Stories, opening at Tidelands, and shares why this moment calls all of us to learn from Indigenous knowledge and come experience the show.As elders teach, “make yourself still and engage your five teachers.” With that invitation, we sit with Puyallup Tribal Language Director Amber Hayward (Puyallup and Salish) and Tidelands Assistant Curator Ashley Frantz (Makah). Amber traces how colonizers recorded Lushootseed creation histories in English, often stripping them of meaning, and how today’s language revitalization movement restores their depth, power, and accuracy. Through her teachings, we learn why these stories matter, how to listen in a good way, and what it sounds like when creation history lives in Lushootseed itself.Ashley joins the conversation to share how artists and language keepers co-created the exhibition with the Puyallup Language Department and eight other Tribal Lushootseed language departments (and Lummi), bringing creation histories into visual form through contemporary Indigenous art.The exhibition opens February 7th at 6 PM. All are welcome to the opening reception and to experience the show through July 2026. Tidelands Gallery welcomes visitors Wednesday through Sunday, 11 AM–5 PM, with full step-free access throughout the space.We can’t wait to see you, relatives.++++ResourcesCreation Stories Exhibition Opening Reception: https://www.thisistidelands.com/event-details/creation-stories-exhibition-opening-receptionThe Puyallup Language Programhttps://www.puyalluptriballanguage.org/ptlp/ +++Credits:A/V Production by Francisco “Pancho” SánchezMusic by Mato WayuhiProduced by Matika WilburEpisode Artwork by Katana SolText us your thoughts!Support the showFollow us on Instagram @amrpodcast, or support our work on Patreon.  Show notes are published on our website, Allmyrelationspodcast.com. Matika's book Project 562: Changing the Way We See Native America is available now!  T'igwicid and Hyshqe for being on this journey with us.

What does it mean to survive—and who carries the story afterward?When writer and filmmaker Julian Brave NoiseCat talks about survival, he does not begin with abstraction. He begins with a story. On this episode of All My Relations, Julian joins us to discuss his new book, We Survived the Night, a father–son narrative shaped in the tradition of a Coyote story—layered, funny, painful, and exacting in its truths.The book traces Julian’s relationship with his father through ancestral structure rather than Western memoir form. Coyote appears not as metaphor but as guide: a trickster forefather who teaches through contradiction, humor, and refusal. Julian describes dark Indigenous humor as a survival strategy honed over generations and carried forward through oral tradition.Throughout the conversation, Julian challenges the language often used to contain Indigenous knowledge. These stories are not myths or folklore. They live and change, told differently depending on who listens, who tells them, and what the moment requires. Multiple truths coexist within them, held in relationship rather than resolved into a single meaning. Indigenous languages, Julian explains, do more than preserve these teachings—they shape how knowledge moves through the world.That insistence on truth also shapes Julian’s filmmaking. The episode turns to Sugarcane, his award-winning documentary co-directed with Emily Kassie, which investigates the legacy of St. Joseph’s Indian Residential School. The film refuses easy closure, instead asking what responsibility looks like after harm, and how survivors and descendants carry grief alongside love.Across writing and film, Julian returns to the same question: how Indigenous people endure without flattening pain into spectacle. Basket Lady and Coyote emerge not as figures of the past but as living teachers—offering guidance for a present still shaped by trickster energy, rupture, and repair.These stories survived attempted erasure.They survived the night.May the stories of Basket Lady and Coyote live on.++++Resources:Purchase We Survived the Night today:https://shoptidelands.com/products/books-rooted-in-fire-copy?_pos=1&_psq=We+Survived+the+Night&_ss=e&_v=1.0 Watch Sugarcane on Disney+ and HuluNational Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition:https://boardingschoolhealing.org/Tribal Boarding School Toolkit for Healing:https://acf.gov/sites/default/files/documents/ana/NPAIHB_Thrive_BoardinSchoolToolkit.pdfText us your thoughts!Support the showFollow us on Instagram @amrpodcast, or support our work on Patreon.  Show notes are published on our website, Allmyrelationspodcast.com. Matika's book Project 562: Changing the Way We See Native America is available now!  T'igwicid and Hyshqe for being on this journey with us.

What happens when food becomes a blueprint for liberation? On this episode of All My Relations, we’re joined by Chef Sean Sherman (Oglala Lakota) and journalist/co-author Kate Nelson (Tlingit) to talk about Turtle Island—a cookbook, a history lesson, and a future-facing manifesto for Indigenous food sovereignty. We get into what it means to remove colonial borders (and colonial ingredients), why Indigenous foodways are global and relational, and how Sean’s nonprofit model is moving real resources back into Indigenous communities—from Native producers to Native jobs. Along the way: moose stew, fir tips, colonized palates, seed keepers, Buffalo Bird Woman’s garden, and a clear-eyed conversation about ICE, labor, and who actually feeds this country. Food is the entry point—but sovereignty is the goal. Just change everything. Feed your people.++++ResourcesPurchase Turtle Island Today:  https://shoptidelands.com/products/books-whereas-copy?variant=47505083924728 To learn about Sean’s work and North American Traditional Food Systemshttps://natifs.org/ https://seansherman.com/  Kate’s Work: https://www.kateanelson.com/ Esquire Article: https://www.esquire.com/food-drink/restaurants/a36474711/chef-sean-sherman-owamni-indigenous-minneapolis-restaurant-profile/ Text us your thoughts!Support the showFollow us on Instagram @amrpodcast, or support our work on Patreon.  Show notes are published on our website, Allmyrelationspodcast.com. Matika's book Project 562: Changing the Way We See Native America is available now!  T'igwicid and Hyshqe for being on this journey with us.

As SNAP benefits face new political threats, millions of families are being pushed deeper into food insecurity—including many of our Native relatives whose communities already navigate the long-term impacts of colonization on food systems.In this special All My Relations + Old Growth Table podcast collaboration, Matika Wilbur and Temryss Lane sit down with Valerie Segrest (Muckleshoot), a leading Indigenous food systems expert and advocate, to unpack what these proposed cuts mean for Native nations and why food sovereignty is central to our collective survival.Together, they explore how federal policy shapes daily access to food, the ongoing fight to restore Indigenous foodways, and what it means to nourish our people when systems fail us.This episode also features on-the-ground field reports from Gray Fox Farm, Suquamish Seafoods, the Native American Youth and Family Center (NAYA), and professional forager Chai Tobar-Dupres (Cowlitz), offering a rich, real-time look at the work happening across our communities to reclaim sustenance, land, and autonomy.This is a conversation about power, policy, kinship, and the future of how we feed one another.Resources/places to donate:www.unkitawa.orgwww.chiefseattleclub.orgwww.feed7generations.orgBusinesses featured in the episode:suquamishseafoods.comwww.grayfoxfarmwa.comnayapdx.orgcowlitzforager++++Credits:Film Production by Francisco “Pancho” SánchezPA Mandy YeahpauEdited by Francisco “Pancho” SánchezProduced by Matika WilburCo/hosted by Temryss LaneSocial Media by Katharina Mei-Fa BrinschwitzText us your thoughts!Support the showFollow us on Instagram @amrpodcast, or support our work on Patreon.  Show notes are published on our website, Allmyrelationspodcast.com. Matika's book Project 562: Changing the Way We See Native America is available now!  T'igwicid and Hyshqe for being on this journey with us.

In this nourishing conversation, Matika and Temryss sit down with Pyet DeSpain (Prairie Band Potawatomi and Mexican), chef, entrepreneur, storyteller, and the first-ever winner of Gordon Ramsay’s Next Level Chef. Fresh from finishing her debut cookbook, Rooted in Fire: A Celebration of Native American and Mexican Cooking, Pyet shares the streams that brought her to this monumental point in her career and together we explore the meaning of being rooted in fire: cooking with passion, with purpose, with seasonality, and with reverence for the land that feeds us. Pyet reminds us that food is never just food — it is ceremony, resistance, community care, and lineage. It is how we remember who we are. With tenderness, she shares the deep spiritual work of reclaiming identity; the moments of grief and illumination that came with saying no to extractive opportunities; and the healing that arrives when we follow the recipes our grandmothers left for us in stories, memories, and the land itself.TW: This episode includes discussion of suicide. Please take care while listening.Filled with laughter, truth, plant medicine teachings, and the joy of returning to one’s roots, this conversation is for anyone longing to reconnect — to culture, to the land, to purpose, or to the fire within. So pull up a chair, relatives. This episode is fragrant with memory, alive with story, and served with the kind of warmth that lingers long after the last bite.++++Credits:A/V Production by Francisco “Pancho” SánchezEdited by Mandy Yeahpau and Francisco “Pancho” SánchezProduced by Matika WilburCo/hosted by Temryss LaneSocial Media by Katharina Mei-Fa BrinschwitzText us your thoughts!Support the showFollow us on Instagram @amrpodcast, or support our work on Patreon.  Show notes are published on our website, Allmyrelationspodcast.com. Matika's book Project 562: Changing the Way We See Native America is available now!  T'igwicid and Hyshqe for being on this journey with us.

This week, we’re getting a little wild — in the best, most relational way. Temryss and Matika sit down with scholar and environmental educator Hailey Maria Salazar, (Yoeme) for a playful, grounded, and deeply expanding conversation on eco-erotics: the sensual, intimate, curious ways we relate to land, water, plants, animals, wind, and all our more-than-human relatives.Building from last week’s convo with Dr. Melissa Nelson, we explore how Indigenous stories, teachings, and everyday practices hold erotic knowledge — not in the Western shame-laden sense, but as connection, aliveness, risk, pleasure, and belonging. From berry-picking teachings, sensual winds, and yes… the infamous earthworm story… we open up what it means to feel deeply with the world around us.This episode is fun, lighthearted, and full of laughter — but also a reminder that joy, intimacy, and pleasure are vital forms of resistance, especially in heavy political times. So take this moment with us to breathe, giggle, blush a little, and remember what it feels like to be connected.Settle in, relatives. The world of eco-erotics awaits.Text us your thoughts!Support the showFollow us on Instagram @amrpodcast, or support our work on Patreon.  Show notes are published on our website, Allmyrelationspodcast.com. Matika's book Project 562: Changing the Way We See Native America is available now!  T'igwicid and Hyshqe for being on this journey with us.

Melissa K. Nelson is an Anishinaabe, Cree, Métis, and Norwegian ecologist and professor focused on Indigenous sustainability. In this engaging discussion, she unpacks the concept of eco-eroticism, asserting our connection with the more-than-human world. Melissa shares stories that celebrate intimacy with nature, highlighting how plants and animals hold critical knowledge. She critiques colonial tourism, championing Indigenous stewardship and ancestral intelligence as pathways to healing. With humor and insight, she encourages a playful re-engagement with the land.

We’re closing out this season of All My Relations with something new and something we’re deeply proud of: the launch of our Author Talk series — the first step in the All My Relations + NDN Girls Book Club.In this debut Author Talk, Matika and Temryss sit down with poet and memoirist Sasha LaPointe (Upper Skagit, Nooksack), whose work explores trauma, healing, punk rock, and the power of ancestral memory. Together, they dive into Sasha’s acclaimed books Red Paint and Thunder Song, weaving in stories of lineage, belonging, and the courage it takes to write the things we’re told not to say.This tender conversation is an intimate exploration of Sasha’s life as an author, where we deep dive into storytelling as a form of Indigenous resistance and remembrance, and the challenges of writing through trauma with clarity and care. Sasha reflects on what it means to be a prolific Indigenous woman author and, reveals the hidden histories beneath the tulip fields of the Skagit Valley, and shares how the stories of her ancestors—and sea maidens—still live in her writing and spirit.This episode is not only the season finale—this episode is big medicine, and it’s also an invitation. We hope you’ll read along with us, join our hybrid book discussions, and help us build a community that supports Indigenous authors. Sign up for the All My Relations Book Club at allmyrelationspodcast.com/book-club to get invites, books,  background materials, and access to our live events.Resources: – Support Sasha’s books: Red Paint, Rose Quartz, and Thunder Song– Join the Book Club: allmyrelationspodcast.com/book-club – Support us on Patreon to watch the full video version of this Author Talk– Learn more about NDN Girls Book Club and the good work they’re doing to support Native authors and youthLove this episode? Text the link to a friend or tell your auntie.Text us your thoughts!Support the showFollow us on Instagram @amrpodcast, or support our work on Patreon.  Show notes are published on our website, Allmyrelationspodcast.com. Matika's book Project 562: Changing the Way We See Native America is available now!  T'igwicid and Hyshqe for being on this journey with us.