Acorns, Hazelnuts & Fire: A Conversation with Elspeth Hay, Ron Reed, Joanna Brooks & Gale Pettifer

In this episode, we are uplifting some of the ideas in Elspeth Hay’s remarkable book,   Feed Us with Trees: Nuts and the Future of Food.  After starting with Sara Jolena offering a summary of some of the big ideas in the book, we move into a conversation with author Elspeth Hay and a few of the many people whom Elspeth has mentioned in the book: Ron Reed, Karuk tribal member and cultural biologist; Joanna Brooks, settler scholar and author of Why We Left; and Gale Pettifer, commoner and scholar of the New Forest in England. Together they trace a set of histories that turn out to be deeply entangled: Indigenous land dispossession in California, the enclosure of the English commons, the suppression of cultural burning, the erasure of ancestral foodways — and the folk songs, forest laws, and buried memories that survived all of it. Timestamps0:00  —  Welcome & introduction: Sara Jolena introduces the episode, inspired by Elspeth Hay’s book Feed Us with Trees, and the “no farm, no food” myth it challenges.2:51  —  Guest introductions: Elspeth introduces Ron Reed (Karuk Nation, cultural biologist), Joanna Brooks (Why We Left), and Gale Pettifer (New Forest commoner and commons scholar).5:44  —  Ron Reed’s opening story: childhood memories of harvesting acorns, mushrooms, and salmon; the Klamath Dam removal; and the ongoing fight to restore Indigenous fire practices with public trust objectives.9:20  —  Gale Pettifer on the New Forest: a thousand years of contested common rights, Norman forest law, and what it means to still practice ancient commoning in the 21st century.12:58  —  Joanna Brooks on settler scholarship and song: tracing her European ancestry through folk ballads, a grandmother’s lullaby, and a plate of hazelnuts at the British Museum that the curators couldn’t explain.18:29  —  Fire across continents: Elspeth connects her experience of gorse burning debates in the New Forest to Ron’s work on cultural burning — the same argument, on opposite sides of the Atlantic.30:58  —  Dragons, sacred fire, and colonial memory: a discussion of how fire moved from sacred to feared in Anglo-Saxon and English tradition, illustrated by the New Forest dragon legend and the introduction of Christianity.34:31  —  Songs of grief and displacement: Joanna traces the emotional record of enclosure through English murder ballads — songs about hazel trees, beaver hats, and families starving off the land — and what they reveal about why colonial settlers “lost their minds.”43:12  —  Magna Carta, common law, and the 1877 New Forest Act: Gale traces how brutal Norman forest law paradoxically became the foundation of commoners’ rights, and how public outcry saved the New Forest from privatization.47:33  —  The allotment parallel: Elspeth draws a striking connection between English allotment gardens and the U.S. federal allotment system used to break up Indigenous tribal lands — the same word, the same colonial logic, on both sides of the ocean.1:10:42  —  Cycles of colonization and reverse transmission: Sara Jolena traces how colonial practices — from plantation timekeeping to fire suppression — were exported back to Europe, and the importance of distinguishing imperial forces from common people’s forces within every culture.1:16:11  —  Closing round: guests share what is shifting now — prescribed fire training in Wellfleet, MA; intergenerational transfer of fire ecology knowledge; the joy of reconnecting with the New Forest through free-roaming ponies — and an invitation to listeners to bring these ideas into their communities.Elspeth HayBook: Feed us with treesWebsiteBioInstaRon ReedArticle about Ron Reed - How Karuk ceremonial leader Ron Reed used Western science to take down the Klamath damsInterview featuring Ron - Fire is Food: A Virtual Brown Bag Discussion with Ron Reed and Kari NorgaardJoanna BrooksBook: Why We Left WebsiteBioLinkedinGale Pettifer LinkedinBioSend us a messageSupport the showLearn more about Sara Jolena Wolcott and Sequoia SamanvayaMusic Title: Both of UsMusic by: madiRFAN Don't forget to "like" and share this episode!