Episode 61: Blackwater Swamps
“My people value water in ways that are different than a simple commodity or hazard. I wanna make sure that those values are present in conversations about what do we do going forward in this era of climate change, pollution, and flooding.”
A conversation with professor Ryan Emanuel (hydrologist, Lumbee tribe member, Duke University) about Indigenous survival and resilience across swamps, plains, and blackwaters in Eastern North Carolina. Released November 15, 2024.
guests on the show
Dr. Ryan Emanuel
Ryan Emanuel is a Lumbee hydrologist and community-engaged scholar from North Carolina. A tenured faculty member at Duke University, Ryan leads a research group based at the Duke River Center that studies how humans and our non-human relatives affect (and are affected by) water and environmental processes. Ryan’s research group studies complex relationships across academic disciplines, including ecohydrology, watershed science, environmental justice, and Indigenous rights. Ryan’s group is based in the Nicholas School of the Environment and is one of four research groups inhabiting the Duke River Center. His work promotes environmental justice and Indigenous rights through research, teaching, and public engagement. Ryan collaborates with tribal governments, Indigenous organizations, and other groups to promote environmental justice and Indigenous rights. He also serves on advisory committees and boards that advance these goals by informing policy and public conversations around energy, food, water, and sustainability.
Ryan is a former professor and University Faculty Scholar at NC State University, and he was a 2020-2021 Fellow at the National Humanities Center. He has written or co-authored more than 60 academic articles. Ryan’s book, On the Swamp: Fighting for Indigenous Environmental Justice (UNC Press, 2024) is now available for purchase online and in bookstores.
TRANSCRIPT
Faith Kearns
This week, we're talking with Ryan Emanuel, and I think Sam and Mallika and I all probably know of Ryan already because he's been in the hydrology and watershed science community for a long time. I know he was also at North Carolina State before he moved to Duke and so he was at the Cooperative Extension school for North Carolina for a while as well. I also know Ryan through some of his students who have worked with him in North Carolina, and have seen some of his beautiful pictures from the field, so that's one of the things I'm really excited to talk about.
I have this secret love of swamps, even though I have not really been in many swamps, I'm super fascinated by this black water swamp type ecosystem. And really have it on my bucket list, as a thing that I would very much like to visit. And Ryan's book On the Swamp is incredibly vivid and evocative of a landscape that I don't know that much about. So I'm really excited to talk with Ryan a little bit more about his home landscape and the work that he is doing there. How about you, Sam and Mallika?
Mallika Nocco
I'm with you, Faith. Ryan is someone whose work I've just admired from afar for quite some time, so really excited that he's written this book now, also excited to talk about swamps on Water Talk! We've never talked about swamps on Water Talk before. And this is, again, a cool thing with shifting and expanding our scope is thinking about the southeastern portion of the country, a completely different landscape. I have, I would say the most amazing and spectacular experiences I've had of going into a new ecosystem and just feeling awe.
There's a cypress swamp in southern Illinois, and it just feels unlike any other ecosystem. It's so interesting, and it's so cool, and you're right, there's this feeling of the murky water, and it just feels very, very different from other ecosystems and just eerie. Because I think, you know, we all grow up hearing about swamps as places that are creepy, and it does have a little bit of that for me. But then I also went into it thinking it was going to be eerie, and I was surprised at how beautiful it was and just how spectacular it was. So yeah, very excited to think about and talk about swamps today as well.
Sam Sandoval
And for me, I'm really looking forward to talking with Ryan. I know his work in cooperative extension, ecohydrology, and I'm very happy to see that he's really forward on community engagement, that is an intrinsic part of his work. I'm always looking forward to becoming a better Indigenous community ally.
One of the things that I've learned through all of these different episodes with the people that we have talked with. Now we have a book. There are some documents, but one of the best ways to become a Indigenous community ally, to listen, to learn, and to pass those experiences or those learnings to others. So I'm really looking forward to listening to Ryan, and I'm also really excited about the swamps.
Faith Kearns
I think it's interesting that we're looking at both these issues of people who have existed in a place for a long time, and then this interesting overlay to have a scientist who works in the place that the people, the Tribe that he's a part of, are from, and how that might change his perspective on the place and how he works there. So without further ado, we will hear from Ryan Emanuel.
Welcome to Water Talk for today's episode, we're talking with Dr. Ryan Emanuel. Ryan is an associate professor in the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University in North Carolina. He is a member of the Lumbee Tribe of eastern North Carolina, and his research focuses on community engaged approaches to hydrology, environmental justice and Indigenous rights. Ryan is the author of the recent book On the Swamp: Fighting for Indigenous Environmental Justice. Welcome Ryan. We are so happy to have you on Water Talk!
Ryan Emanuel
Thanks, Faith. I'm happy to be here with you.
Faith Kearns
So I just gave a very short outline of your career and your accomplishments, but we'd love to hear from you in more detail about your career path and what led you to where you are today.
Ryan Emanuel
I have been working in hydrology for a very long time. I actually started working for the US Geological Survey the Monday after I graduated from high school. I mean, there's a whole tale that goes along with how that came to be, but suffice it to say, they had a big influence on my decision to pursue hydrology within the environmental sciences. I always loved being outside, and I wanted a job that allowed me to be outdoors, but also do fun and interesting things inside, computers, GIS, things like that. Hydrology just gave me the ability to fulfill all of those things that I wanted.
After graduate school, I spent many years working, just as my other hydrology colleagues did, on field sites and modeling studies, mostly in places where we went out of our way to find the absence of people. We were looking to isolate processes in this Western reductionist approach to science. And so, I had no background whatsoever in community engagement, certainly not in environmental policy or environmental justice, until about a decade ago, when the North Carolina Commission of Indian Affairs, which is part of our state government that advises the administration and the General Assembly on all matters related to Indigenous peoples, decided to form an environmental justice committee, and they asked me to be on it. I said yes. And then I thought, what did I just sign up for?
I really sent myself back to school, through self study, through talking to colleagues, and a lot of reading to figure out what environmental justice actually was, the history of it, current policies, how it intersected with issues that impact Indigenous peoples, particularly, and that opened the door to this bifurcation in my work. I still have a hydrology lab on campus at Duke, but we're also deeply engaged in community based work, both related to water and related to environmental justice, Tribal engagement and related topics.
Faith Kearns
I'm excited to get a little bit more into those topics that you cover so well in your book On the Swamp. But before we talk in depth about that book, I just want to speak for myself. I've learned, this morning, for Sam and Mallika as well, that we're all fascinated by swamps, and I myself have only experienced what I would just call swamp light. I've been in a couple swamps, actually, in North Carolina, but I have not been in the blackwater, really super interesting ecosystems that you describe in your book. So, just given the very evocative language that you talk about your homelands, I was wondering if you could just tell us about the swamps and the ecosystems of eastern North Carolina, and then also their importance in your Lumbee culture.
Ryan Emanuel
Yeah, I'm so glad that you brought up blackwater, because that is one of the defining characteristics of our swamps. And so blackwater is what scientists and managers typically call the streams that are wholly contained within coastal plains, particularly coastal plains in the southeastern US. So instead of carrying sand and silt down from the mountains, they're actually carrying high loads of dissolved organic matter, and that gives them this deep, rich color that, for some people, is scary and creepy, but for me, it's lovely. It's the color of home.
If you take a mason jar of it and scoop some out, it would look just like tea, and that's essentially what it is, because that water has been steeping in all of this organic matter in the wetlands that line either side of all of our streams. But we have two kinds of wetlands in our territory. We have riparian wetlands, which are predominantly bald cypress forests. So if you've ever seen these huge cypress knees coming up out of the soil, stereotypical of the South, we have loads of bald cypress trees throughout our territory, lining rivers on both sides. We have far fewer cane breaks. These are riparian river cane ecosystems, and the reason why we don't have so many anymore is because they need regular disturbance, typically through fire. For centuries of fire suppression, we've lost a lot of that river cane habitat, which, of course, is a culturally important plant for us.
We also have these non riparian wetlands that sit in between rivers. And North Carolina is ground zero for this landform that is sometimes called Carolina Bays. They're oblong depressions in the landscape. They kind of look like someone mashed their thumb into some wet sand or clay, and they, at one time, were shallow lakes, but through time, they filled in with organic matter and eventually became wetlands. Some of them actually became really thick peatlands with scrub, shrub vegetation, and then, unfortunately, in the past 80 to 100 years, many of them have been ditched and drained and converted into agricultural lands.
But these are also just really beautiful wetland ecosystems, and both types of wetlands are important to Lumbee people and to our Indigenous neighbors, sources of food, medicine, shelter. This is really where a lot of the biodiversity in our region lay in historic times and still exists today. And even though we've seen a lot of ditching and draining of wetlands in our homelands, we still have about 25% of the Lumbee River watershed covered in wetlands, so we still have a lot of wetlands today, thankfully, and they're still part of our part of our story, part of our culture.
Faith Kearns
Just a quick follow on to that, before they started being drained, I mean, how did Lumbee and other Indigenous people live within that ecosystem? Yeah, curious about that?
Ryan Emanuel
The landscape here almost has a grain to it, if you imagine wood grain with the striations moving in a common direction, most of our swamps drain towards the southeast, and what happens is it leaves these fingers of higher and drier land in between every single swamp. It really can be difficult to get from one of those dry plains to another, especially prior to highways and railroads and those interstitial areas in between the swamps were where our communities were actually located. So while we talk about being on the swamp and being from the swamp, we, our ancestors, were smart enough to build their homes on these high sandy plains in between the swamps, but close enough that we could still walk right into the swamp, down to the water, to fish, to bathe, for ceremony and things like that.
Faith Kearns
I guess that's a good segue into my next question, which is really about your book On the Swamp, which is about many, many things, including the place that is home for you, how it's changing, and the role of settler colonialism in your homelands. We'd love to hear just more about the book and what inspired you to write it.
Ryan Emanuel
If it's okay, I'll start with the second question. First, I wanted to write a book to celebrate the shared connections that Lumbee people and our neighbors have for our culturally important waters. I realized this through my interactions with folks from the Commission of Indian Affairs. So interacting with people from other Tribal communities, I began to see all these commonalities and the ways that we thought about and experienced and cared for water, and I really wanted to celebrate that, but at the same time, I didn't feel like I could tell those stories of of good connections to water without also acknowledging all the challenges that we face when it comes to protecting these landscapes.
Things like fossil fuel pipelines, factory farms, devastating floods that have come in recent years. And then I realized I also had to talk about how all these phenomena are connected to one another, right? So fossil fuel consumption drives climate change that brings these horrible floods to our communities that spread industrial livestock waste all across the landscape. I pulled all those ideas together in a framework of environmental justice and Indigenous rights. That was an intellectual framing that I chose to talk about all of these issues, and I also turned back and used historical discussions to talk about how all these phenomena are related to colonialism and how they're all repetitions of the same theme that goes back centuries. And because we are descended from first contact, or near first contact peoples, that history of colonialism is quite long, more than 400 years for some of our relatives.
Faith Kearns
I'm curious how you talk about environmental justice and Indigenous rights. Like, do you feel like the term environmental justice doesn't incorporate Indigenous rights? How do you think about those two things together?
Ryan Emanuel
I actually do think that Indigenous rights are represented in the broader framework of environmental justice, and I think that our rights show up in the concepts of procedural justice. So who has fair and meaningful access to decision making and why? And that's a super important theme within environmental justice and also within Indigenous rights, thinking about free, prior and informed consent.
Indigenous rights are also represented in the theme of recognition justice, which is concerned with whose values get to weigh in on any given decision. And because my people value water in ways that are different than a simple commodity or a hazard, I want to make sure that those values are present in conversations about what we do going forward in this era of climate change and pollution, flooding, things like this. So I certainly see Indigenous rights woven into environmental justice, but I also acknowledge that there are many environmental justice conversations that don't involve Indigenous peoples, and so I wanted to be one way that I was sensitive to that was by framing this book as a book about Indigenous environmental justice.
Faith Kearns
Yeah, that seems really important. And I guess I heard you mention your Tribal relationship with water. Can you talk just a little bit about how that might be different than how most settler societies, or your common Westerner, views their relationship with water?
Ryan Emanuel
Sure. I'll give you a quick story to illustrate. So for us, water is a place, just as much as it is a substance. Even though we've lost a lot of our ancestral cultural practices, we have managed to preserve some and then generate others in the centuries that we have been isolated to this pocket of our once expansive homelands. And one of those stories that arose during this time was about our Civil War era hero, Henry Berry Lowry.
Lowry was a Lumbee freedom fighter and leader of a band of guerrillas, notably a multi racial band in the Civil War and immediate post Civil War South and they fought the local white elite power structure who were trying to continue to enforce white supremacy even in the aftermath of the Civil War. Lowry's gang waged this guerrilla war for a decade, and then he disappeared without a trace. And because we don't know for certain what happened to him, for many Lumbee people, the entire river is a memorial to him. And so we may look at this river and say, this beautiful place is worth conserving for scenic beauty or biodiversity or carbon or what have you.
But for us, it is worth preserving because that that river is the memory and the legacy of this powerful hero who encapsulated so many of the values of our people, and so I think that's one solidly Lumbee value about water that's not often discussed in conversations about wetlands in our territory or elsewhere.
Faith Kearns
Yeah, thanks for sharing that story. I also loved how you started it, which is just like water is not just a substance, it's also a place which was a really beautiful encapsulation of that idea. So we're going to ask you some more specific questions about the content of the book, but before we go into that, I noticed right away that you dedicated this book to your grandmother, and I have a very soft spot for grandmothers, including my own, and I just wanted to ask you about her and why and how you decided to dedicate your book to her.
Ryan Emanuel
Yeah, thanks for that. My grandmother, Martha Odom, was an amazing woman. She passed away more than a decade ago, but she personified Robeson County to me. So her home was literally our home in Robeson County. It was a welcome place, and she worked really hard and set an example of that. She was an elementary school teacher for many years, and also as a retiree she continued to cook for her family, but also for other people, to put away food, and also to just serve in all kinds of ways.
She drove a little Dodge Omni hatchback, and she would just burn up the roads of Robeson County, going to visit people who were shut in or in the hospital or needed a meal or things like that. She also encouraged education. She gave me $1 if I got all A's on my report card. And I remember that, and those kinds of things make a difference, but it's just to be able to focus my experience in my community around one person, I couldn't think of a of a better person to dedicate this book to, because she meant so much and embodied so many of the stories that I talk about in the book. So thank you for that.
Mallika Nocco
So one of your book chapters is focused on climate change, and particularly flooding in North Carolina after hurricanes Michael and Florence. Just given the very recent impacts of Hurricane Helene, can you talk a little bit about the changes that you've been seeing and how they are affecting the Lumbee.
Ryan Emanuel
For people in the southern Appalachians who have experienced Helene, and for those of us in the East who experienced Matthew and Florence and other catastrophic floods, I think for all of us, it highlights the duality of water. I mean, one of the things that we love about North Carolina are these amazing waterscapes. And we want to be close to them, but at the same time, they can be very dangerous. And so it is this tension that we live with here and in many other places too, right? We love water, but it's also something that can create major challenges for us.
One of the specific challenges of dealing with climate change in this part of the country is that we have increasing extremes of hydrologic systems, and they're also happening around the same time. And so what do I mean by that? So here, fall is typically the driest time of the year. It's when our rivers are lowest, when water supplies, which tend to be things like reservoirs fed by rivers and streams, they're going to be low. They're typically low in the fall, and so this is typically a dry time of year for us, but at the same time, it's the peak of the North Atlantic hurricane season. And so, while we're trying to manage for water shortages and drought conditions, we also have to be prepared for major floods, and when we do get flooding during this season, it tends to be much more intense than flooding that may come in the winter or the spring.
So our highest flows of the year will come when we have these major hurricanes blow through. And so as these hurricanes get slower and wetter due to warmer water in the North Atlantic, Gulf of Mexico, we only expect to see more of these kinds of storms, unfortunately. And so in my view that's our biggest challenge, and that's where climate change is hitting hardest, in places that are not right up along the Atlantic coast, because they're also dealing with those storms, but they're also dealing with sea level rise and salt water intrusion, which creates another suite of problems.
Mallika Nocco
When you think about all of these things together, it's just a lot to consider. When you talk about just the combination of the dryness and then thinking about hurricanes at the same time, that feels a little overwhelming.
I want to talk about field work. In your book, you talk a lot about your experiences doing field work. And before we got on the podcast we were talking about this because Sam and myself also do field work. We've had experiences of racism and being afraid and being threatened in the field, but what you talk about in your book adds this whole other level to like the experience of being approached and made to feel afraid by a white person who is actually, in your case, it's your ancestral land that you're being confronted on that adds this whole other, when we were talking kind of mind blowing element. Can you tell us a little bit about that incident and the conclusions that it has led you to?
Ryan Emanuel
Yeah, so the incident that I write about in the book happened right after Hurricane Florence. I happened to be out in the field with the two elders from the Coharie Tribe that I write about in another chapter, and one of my graduate students, who is also Indigenous. We were collecting water samples for analysis back in the lab at North Carolina State. One of the amazing things about that day was it was the first time in my life I'd ever done fieldwork with an entirely Indigenous field crew. And so I was really upbeat about that, even though it was a really difficult day because of all the devastation that we had to encounter and the people that we met, and we knew that their lives have been upended by this flooding.
So it was a day of mixed emotions already, and then I encountered this gentleman who started the conversation by saying, the only reason I didn't shoot you is because of that NC State shirt that you're wearing. I was intentionally wearing a polo shirt with the university colors on it, because we tend to have a good reputation all over North Carolina, because of the extension and one of the land grant universities in the state. He was clearly upset that we were collecting water samples on the public right of way near his house, and he spent maybe 15 minutes telling me why, and I began to see that in his view, water sampling and water quality work more generally had become politicized, and it posed a threat to his livelihood.
So from what I could gather, he was involved in both poultry and swine operations in various ways, and I'm certain that he did that in order to make a living so that his family could stay on property that may have been in their hands for generations, and so I certainly sympathized with him for that reason. But as I walked away from that conversation, I also thought, well, my Emanuel ancestors are actually Coharie, not Lumbee. We married into the Lumbee Tribe about a century ago, and that entire conversation took place on my ancestral territory, on the Coharie side. Obviously, I didn't tell him that out of respect for him and for my safety,
I will say I never saw the gun, but he certainly threatened me. And so that was a really emotional conversation for me, trying to be respectful, knowing that I represented a university, knowing that I also represented my people. It was complicated. I had to walk about 100 yards back to the van where the two elders and my grad student were waiting. I sat down in the van, and I was pretty down at that point, and they were quiet because I'm sure they saw the expression on my face as I was walking back, but then a few seconds later, somebody just busted out laughing, and we all sat there on the side of the road and had a good laugh. And we weren't laughing at the man, because that was not funny, right? We were just laughing at the whole situation.
In the book, I tell that story, and then I quote from Vine Deloria, where I think in Custer Died for Your Sins, he talks about how the ability of a people to laugh is a testament to their resilience. So the lesson I learned from that is that we can live close to one another and still have very different visions of home, or visions of what it means to be connected to place. And obviously this gentleman and I had different visions of what those connections look like. Or maybe we didn't, maybe we had more alike than not, but that was something I never had a chance to find out the cause of the whole situation of the day. But it did give me pause, and it made me realize that, yeah, there are many people involved in these industries and operations that I and others critique who also passionately love the place that they come from.
Sam Sandoval
Thank you, Ryan, for sharing those memories, sometimes not sure if you've been re-traumatized or better, being experienced back again into that time and place. Earlier in the conversation, you talked about factory farms, and now you're mentioning it again. You provided a great example, and you shared with us about how the swamp looks like and what is interesting, not only environmentally, but also culturally. Would you mind talking about factory farms and what? What are those? How do they impact rivers?
Ryan Emanuel
Certainly. So these are industrial livestock feeding operations, and in North Carolina, the animals that are grown in these operations are either pigs or poultry. So there are two different kinds. They don't do it together on the same property. So you're either invested in swine operations or in poultry operations. And so you have 1000s of swine on one facility or 10s of 1000s of chickens on one facility, and the environmental issues are associated with the waste from these animals, and they're handled differently for each type of animal, so swine waste is flushed from beneath the floors of these sheds into what is commonly called a lagoon, but it's really a cesspool. And when, when this lagoon fills up with waste, it is sprayed on adjacent crop fields using the type of irrigation equipment that you might see out in the Midwestern US.
So instead of spraying groundwater, they're spraying effluent that has been sitting in these lagoons, and thankfully, there has been some microbial decomposition of some of those waste products, but we still see very high concentrations of nutrients and pathogens in the water in the groundwater beneath those fields where spraying takes place and in adjacent surface waters. And so because the coastal plain is underlain by unconsolidated sediments and very sandy soils, that means there's very clear connections, very easy, quick connections, between shallow groundwater and the stream, so it doesn't take very long or very far for those pollutants to show up in waters.
For poultry operations, they handle the waste differently. When they take the chickens out of the sheds and send them to market, they shovel or bulldoze out all of the waste into a pile, and those piles are loaded onto trucks and distributed to neighboring crop fields as fertilizer. And so, it's a cheap alternative to inorganic fertilizer, and it's attractive to people for a lot of reasons, but there's so much of it. There's just a super abundance of this nutrient rich waste. Once you spread that waste on the landscape, it begins to pose the same problems. As soon as it rains, those nutrients and pathogens infiltrate and reach shallow groundwater, and then they show up later in our rivers and streams, and so we see eutrophication of downstream waters, and we see high levels of harmful bacteria in our waters as well.
Sam Sandoval
Thank you, Ryan and thank you for also sharing with us your glasses, your vision on that one, because for some of us, we have a distant experience, but it is good to have those, those close experiences through your eyes. So can you talk with us about the recommendations that you put at the end of your book about Indigenous communities exerting sovereignty over their own lands?
Ryan Emanuel
Yeah, thank you for that question. So if we really believe that Indigenous peoples are inherently sovereign, then that means our communities and their leaders should find ways to exercise that sovereignty, instead of looking at all of the negative limitations that state and federal governments place on the exercise of sovereignty. And so there have been many creative ways sovereignty is exercised in eastern North Carolina, including my friends and elders from the Coharie Tribe who managed to do this amazing river restoration project without the resources and benefits that come through the federal trust relationship, they managed to do it without the support of state agencies, and they enacted the vision on their own by jumping into the river with chainsaws and shovels and winches and clearing out all of this hurricane debris so that they could return to their ancestral practices of using the river as a transportation artery.
Today, they've modernized that with canoes and kayaks that you would see out on any other waterway, and also bringing people from outside of their community onto their river to experience it intimately and in a way that makes them love that place and want to protect it just as much as they do. I think for Indigenous peoples, we have to be creative about finding ways to exercise our sovereignty. Instead of only looking at the downsides, I try also to provide recommendations for not just Indigenous governments, but other parties as well, like individual members of Tribal communities and nations can do things like be more thoughtful and critical of who we vote for, right? Because as much as we try to exercise our inherent sovereignty we know that there are absolutely limitations that are placed on it by external parties and how our federal and state and local governments function can impact the extent to which we can exercise sovereignty.
I also offer recommendations for non Indigenous parties too, just a couple of those state agencies don't always have robust Tribal engagement policies. And in North Carolina's case, we don't even have a formalized Tribal engagement policy, even though North Carolina has the, I believe, seventh largest Indigenous population in the United States. So it's shocking to me that we haven't figured out at the state level how to formalize State-Tribal relationships yet.
And another recommendation that I offer for corporations who I've interacted with a lot through the years in this work is to not think about environmental justice as public relations, which is where environmental justice lives in many corporations, or maybe it lives in a diversity, equity and inclusion, office and environmental justice is really neither of those things. I guess it's more accurate to say it's larger than either of those things, and it's a serious area of policy and practice that deserves to be staffed by people who are trained to understand the principles of environmental justice and the principles of community engagement.
We don't have that by and large right now in corporations or even in consulting firms. And so one of the things that I try really hard to do at Duke is to provide that training to the future corporate and government leaders in our country and around the world. I teach a large environmental justice class each year to our professional master students, and that is my motivation, because I know that they are going to be tomorrow's environmental leaders.
Sam Sandoval
Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for providing such clear recommendations on all these different levels. We always like to end our episodes by asking our guests, first is, if there is anything else that you want to share with our audience and how can all of us support the work that you're doing?,
Ryan Emanuel
Thank you. I think I will answer that by combining those two questions. I think that one of the best ways that people can support the communities that I come from and work with is to learn more about us from us. Lumbee people in particular have a number of scholars who write about their experiences, who write about our ancestors. So we have historians, we have political scientists, we have legal scholars. And these people write and publish, and they tell our story in a way that breaks up stereotypes of who Native Americans are, where we do and don't live, and how we relate to the world around us.
I think it's incredibly important for people to understand that even within the United States, Indigenous peoples are not a monolith. We have different historical experiences, different cultural experiences, and unfortunately, our experiences are often overlooked or underrepresented in conversations around Indigenous peoples and our priorities and needs and values. And so I would encourage people to go out and look at work by Melinda Maynard Lowry, David Wilkins, we have a number of amazing Lumbee scholars who are writing accessible and informative work about our experiences in the world and about our neighbors. We have a lot of scholars coming from other Tribal communities in the region, and they're doing amazing work.
Faith Kearns
Thank you for coming on Water Talk, Ryan, this has been a great conversation. I'm sure it can continue much longer, but we appreciate your time today. Thank you so much.
Ryan Emanuel
Thank you so much.