Podcast: Crossing the River

The Manifest

Crossing the River is a podcast in which we hear from Indigenous leaders that defend life on earth every day, in their own words, because they are the protagonists of their stories. The world must listen to the voices of Indigenous leaders in order to make the collective decisions that define our present and future. Indigenous leaders have crossed the river from shore to shore many times and have used different strategies to talk with Western society, but the West continues to do so with violence, colonization, extraction, and destruction. This podcast is an exercise to change this dynamic.

Although a degree of idiomatic interpretation is necessary, this podcast amplifies Indigenous peoples’ voices; it does not explain them, it does not translate them. Here, you will hear directly from Indigenous leaders because the exercise of listening involves paying close attention to the way they pause, breathe, and emphasize their words — and to the weight they carry in their voice.

“Speaking is not only transmitting words.”

“Speaking is not only transmitting words,” says Juma Xipaia, the first leader we spoke with this podcast. “It is also transmitting energy, knowledge, memory, and anger. And it hurts. It hurts because nothing changes, because few listen.”

We do not hear Indigenous voices in cities because we have spent too much time turning our backs on the river, disconnected from nature, extracting, consuming, discarding. This podcast centers their voices so that more people listen.

Crossing the river means understanding Indigenous peoples’ struggles. It means going to the places where Western conceptions of development and progress have violated Indigenous rights and their territories, where colonization and extractivism have intertwined to ravage the land. We cross the river to witness Indigenous resistance, to see how seeds are reborn and how they protect their lives and those of non-human beings. By crossing the river, we understand that hope does not appear but that it is built daily — and that a tree will not be born if the seed is not planted.

Crossing the river is also dismantling the supremacy of Western knowledge and science that justifies the current collective calamity in which we live. We hear from Indigenous leaders to learn from the mobilization strategies they have used to redefine justice, law and politics so that these institutions no longer exist without them.

This is why we want to cross the river. Because there is no possible future if Indigenous peoples are not centered and their lessons aren’t heard on both shores. We invite you to cross the river, to connect and meet with Indigenous leaders and their peoples. It is in this exercise of attentive listening and practice that we plant our collective seed with them.

Crossing the River is a podcast that recognizes the long and ongoing history of exclusion and erasure of Indigenous peoples all around the world. We wish to acknowledge that New York University — the institution at which the MOTH Project primarily sits — is located on the unceded territory and ancestral homelands of the Lenape nations, of which the Lenape people were forcibly dispossessed. We wish to honor the significance of this land for Lenape people throughout time and to express our respect and support for Lenape nations and leaders, past, present and future. And we also honor the struggle of all other Indigenous peoples, including those who participated in this podcast, that fight for their rights and for the protection of their lands.

The team behind the podcast is: Carlos Andrés Baquero Díaz (MOTH), Goldy Levy (070 Podcasts), and Natalia Arenas (070 Podcasts). The episodes have also been commented on by César Rodríguez Garavito (MOTH). The music is by Cosmo Sheldrake, and the art is by Nefazta. Special thanks to Jonathan Beker and Diego Forero for the original pictures we use in this project.