Inheritance of Peace

Reunification as Inheritance of Peace Amy Shimshon-Santo (AS²): This is Inheritance of Peace. I’m Amy Shimshon-Santo. We’re back with a fresh series that aims to create a culture of peace as a personal and global endeavor. In this episode, just in time for Earth Day, we connect with Deike Peters, a German-American educator, urban planner, and environmentalist. Her parents were children of World War II, and the Berlin Wall fell when she was a teenager. A witness to the reunification of East and West Germany, her inheritance of peace is that “peaceful regime change is possible.” Let’s listen in. . .[Deike Peters and students Aayusha Prasain, Taiho Higaki, Aakash Baral, Colby Baker, Jenny (Thao-Linh) Vo, Yakubu Mohammed Abass, Khostsetseg (Chloé) Tumurbat, Miyuki Sase, Nala Thomas, Dimpi Lama, Anh Khue Nguyen, Sarah Truong, study the global significance of the Berlin Wall, 2026]Deike Peters (DP): “Who are you?” always depends on the context where the question is asked. I might say, “Oh, my name is Deike.” Or if I come into a classroom I might say, “Oh, my name is Professor Peters.” I recently introduced myself as a “German-American environmental urbanist.” Which is so funny, because I start with a hyphen, so it’s already a dual identity. And then I’m not even content with describing myself within a single discipline (as an urbanist), but I throw in the environment as well. I guess it’s an indication that we are all multitudes. I’m Deike – and it’s a very unusual name. At least in this country, I often have to just restate my name multiple times for people to get me right. I was named by my mother. It’s a version of a diminutive, a Frisian name. A name that comes from a borderland between the Netherlands and Germany. In a way, it’s an appropriation that my mom just thought was beautiful.My home region in Germany is an old industrial coal mining region (The Ruhr Valley). I grew up in Post-war Germany. It was a region in decline. Dortmund is my hometown and a place where we’re sort of at the tail end of the extraction that happened through the majority of the 20th century: the coal mining, the steel production. Part of my family were people who came to be part of that era of mining and extracting from the late 1800s on, helping and producing the steel that ‘re-steeled’ the country. Industrialization is at the very core of that part of the family history.At the forefront of a lot of environmental conflicts these days is, of course, resource extraction. The fact is that a lot of these struggles are global and united. You trace back some of your own biographies, but hopefully at some point there’s a way to connect dots at a more global level. I am thinking about my own history and connectedness of land extraction. Hopefully you have a path in your life where you move from learning and recognition to at some level being part of a solution. It might have been coal extraction. These days lithium mines are at the forefront of what we might have to resist against. Hopefully you get to do something with your life that is still connected to where you come from. Be a lifelong student. Keep learning. Tap into other people’s wisdom. At some point, you’re on the spot for having to help the next generation of young people point the way a little bit.“At the forefront of environmental conflicts these days is resource extraction. The fact is a lot of these struggles are global. Hopefully at some point there’s a way to connect dots.”When I graduated from high school in Germany they asked: “Who do you think you’re gonna be? What’s your plan?” I wrote in the yearbook: “I want to do something with languages.” Which is hilarious, right? Being a planner was not on the horizon. But I think it makes sense because we need multiple languages. I grew up [around] too much silence. A lot of what we need to be able to do as young people is to translate, broaden our ability to express ourselves. So multiple languages were really important to me. Once I felt oh, now I have a second or a third language as part of my arsenal of expression, what do I do with it? This is where my idea to become an urban planner came from. Become somebody who has “real” skills. Looking at a settlement or actual map-making, planning. I didn’t know it was going to be more counter-mapping, ultimately. Languages first, as a means of translating and communicating ideas, and then the planning and plan-making as a more interventionist solution-making, skill-building arsenal. Planning is about who’s making decisions in this world. Who’s empowered? Who’s put in a position of laying out futures for us? I know now it was very naive, but I think this idea of plan making was a way to help inscribe rules into the world. Some of us might have to do this, with hopefully different ideas.AS²: I feel so much empathy with what you’re saying, so I’m leaning towards the microphone. When you do go through an advanced education in urban planning, seeing the way decision-making is coming down right now is such a shock. Especially if you learn the scientific method. It’s a slower pace of improvisation based on a feedback system, where you make a little move, and then you assess the impact through data, and then you lean towards the things that are working and getting you where you want to go. So, there’s of course innovation and improvisation in it, but there’s also deep reflection and a circulation of ideas and reflection and ideas and reflection that I think are more likely to guide us towards the kind of outcomes we want.“I grew up in a Germany that was at the very center of the Cold War with cruise missiles pointing to East Germany. Threat of nuclear obliteration was a part of your childhood. The Green Party, at the time, was intertwining social progressive ideals with the idea that we need to think differently about our relationship with the environment. Environmental thinking was going to be our pathway.”DP: As far as urban planning as a profession in Germany at the time, the discipline was explicitly connected to the ecological awakening that was happening. Growing up in West Germany in the 70s and 80s was a post-war environment very different from the U.S. First of all, this crazy idea that my parents’ generation was the “Stunde Null” the “zero-hour” generation. The idea that a country, as a whole, can start over. So you have May 8th, 1945, as the end of the war. But then, all of a sudden, you had a new Germany where supposedly “we’re not Nazis anymore, because the Nazi regime is over.” My parents were 5 and 8 at that point. I grew up in a Germany that was at the center of the Cold War with cruise missiles pointing to East Germany. So the threat of nuclear obliteration is part of your childhood. The Green Party, which was the most progressive political force at the time, is intertwining social progressive ideals with the idea that “we need to think differently about our relationship with the environment.” Environmental thinking as something that was going to be our pathway. Talk about peace, right? It’s a cold war, we’re not hot. The missiles are not exploding. But if there’s a pathway towards a better future, a better world, a better re-entangled way of being on this planet: ecological thinking and systems thinking were what these planning faculties wanted to think about. My planning education didn’t come out of the modernist, dominating tradition of let’s all build neighborhoods looking from above. The kinds of teachers, and the pathway for an education in urban planning faculties at the time, was very inherently progressive. People who had good community organizing roots, and naive hopes for an alternative future.AS²: I really appreciate the hopefulness. My mother, who is in her 90s, said “You have to have a romantic idea.” It’s very hard to get anything done, to mobilize things, without a romantic idea. It gives me a sense that we have a very small flash of time on Earth, and we don’t get to see the bigger picture, and things can change. I guess that’s my romantic idea. We’re not stuck, we’re not powerless, even though it might feel that way right now. One of the classic stories that a lot of Jewish people have said is anything is possible if German people and Jewish people can hang out. You’ve been impacted by growing up with parents who were children of war. That reality may have also demanded the romantic, hopeful environmentalist response. We really know how bad it can be so let’s really try for something very good. In terms of an environmental focus as something that can bring people together across regions and nationalities and cultures.[Remnants of the Berlin Wall at the Topography of Terror. Photo: Deike Peters]DP: When we talk about any kind of reconciliation, it has to be peaceful so there can’t be war. But it also has to relate to the way that we relate to the more-than-human world. My parents, of course, did not have the luxury of reflecting on the past, or where they come from. My parents’ generation is the generation that had to endure the silence that came after the rebuilding. So my mom would always share with us these very, very strong childhood memories. She was born in 1940, so her first 5 years of her life were bomb shelters and enduring hunger. She grew up with a mother who struggled for them to survive, and with a father who, when he came back from fighting in the war, she didn’t recognize. Her earliest childhood memories were of a war that she didn’t understand at the time. I think more dramatically: a war that was also never explained to her afterwards. Her father never was able to speak about his experiences. The German educational system did not really “talk.” There was not a good way in the 50s and 60s to grapple with the enormity of the Holocaust. My mom was sort of a seeker. She didn’t have a college education. She was always interested in history, but I think she felt — I would say on her behalf — a little bit betrayed. She was not the perpetrator generation. She was the recipient. “Growing up, I had the incredible benefit of teachers that had to be very aware of the ‘never again’ part of history, of the grappling with ‘how could this happen?’”Whereas for me, growing up, I had the incredible benefit of teachers that had to be very aware of the “never again” part of history, of the grappling of how could this happen? The 1980s in Germany are that moment where we, as a nation, were talking about, “is there such a thing as collective guilt?” Intergenerational. For me, it’s really hard to fathom how that’s something that you might lose with the next generation. It’s almost like the shaking off of that weight and the historical responsibility of we as a people must uphold certain values. I realized being a young German in the 80s, you can never be proud of where you come from. You can’t ever wave a flag. You semi-understand. So you create new identities. I mean, growing up European. Being multilingual. Speaking a different language to the point where people can’t pinpoint directly where you’re coming from. So, its very interesting to realize at some point, that that’s not a universal thing that every German generation goes through. But, again, that is something that you have to somehow uphold. Then raising my own children, mostly outside of the country, changes things because it changes them. I eventually created a more hyphenated multiple identity for myself, but they were born into it. Yeah, it’s interesting.AS²: First of all, now we see that your love of languages is also your precursor of being a multinational, transnational person. The precursor for understanding another way of being is to be able to listen and hear much less speak and converse. The idea of silence is so fascinating to me because there’s been a lot of silence here. Obviously, the United States was built on all of the genocidal activities that were underscoring the foundation of this country. And when I was studying or living in Latin America, people said, “we understand the United States has a certain relationship to imperialism, and yet we see you as you and not as the government.” And now, with family in the Middle East, I see the negative impact on everyone. I want everyone in the region to have a good life. It is heart-crushing to see so much suffering. Even suffering in the name of the Holocaust, which is absurd to me. My ancestors would never have wanted that to be the outcome of what we went through in Europe. This calls for constant reflection, storytelling, and also staying open. Rather than just saying, all Germans are the same, or all Americans are the same, or all Israelis are the same, or all Lebanese are the same. That’s just foolishness. Don’t we have any authority over what we think, what we do, what we wish for? It’s just very rational and obvious to me not to equate people with their governments. Because we’re seeing how difficult it is to get a democratic process going here in the U.S.Is there anything else you want to share about the idea of silence? It sounds like you were witnessing the silent generation, and also receiving a different kind of education.DP: Yeah. How is genocide a repeated occurrence throughout humanity? It is essential to have had human encounters with Others. People who are unlike yourself and who you learn to love, appreciate, and encounter. At its core, and it sounds super corny, the importance of intergenerational, intercultural, and multi-lingual human encounter. Seeing the other. You would hope that empathy is possible across multitudes and otherness. We’re grappling with the idea that there are certain structural conditions that make genocide possible. Genocide is mass murder usually within the context of an oppressive state. There are belief systems that powerful people and structures are able to institute that make mass murder possible. And then there’s an instrumentalization. There’s something that happens. It’s weapons. It’s violence. But what can break through? What is the other side? What brings a German family to either hide or denounce a Jewish person in the 1930s? What brings you to reaching out or pointing a finger? It’s something in the humanity. In order to be able to understand, you need to be able to listen. So I think at its core it’s communication. That’s what it is. Non-understanding. How do you give someone the means to hear you and to understand? It’s a two-way process, so you have to do the work of making yourself understood. That’s definitely one of these through lines in my life. You need to find some way of clearly articulating ideas. It could be that you need images or tools. Sometimes you just also need to learn who the other person is and not reject that. I’ve also put myself into positions where I needed to challenge, or overcome, that.AS: I’m seeing that there are so many silences. Recently, Ghana argued in the United Nations for recognition of the holocaust of African people during the transatlantic slave trade. The United States and Israel both didn’t want to recognize that. So, there’s a silencing of what are the facts of history. It’s hard to look at. Part of the value of education is to try and cut through.The opposite of silence isn’t just speaking out. Maybe it’s also what you were talking about — communication. Because communication isn’t just, I’m going to tell you what I think, and what I think is more important than what you think. It’s actually making myself vulnerable and receptive to learn from a different period of time, a different perspective, and somehow gain a larger analysis and understanding of truth and what good ethical behavior might be at this moment in time.“Listening is silence. Silencing is something else. Silencing is a violent act. Silencing is suppression of ideas. And it is absolutely frightening to see how quickly that could happen, and the patterns.”DP: There is a place for silence too. Listening is silence. It’s when you shut up and you hear the other. Right? Because silencing, of course, is something else. Silencing is a violent act. Silencing is suppression of ideas. And it is absolutely frightening to see how quickly that could happen, and the patterns.One of the most memorable and important ways was how my high school history teacher encouraged us to understand German history, and of course Nazism and the Holocaust. He started in the 1920s and talked about the structures and the culture of a post-war environment (because there was “The Great War” in 1914). So, a people that wanted to have strong leadership. People very often think the Weimar Republic was this beautiful cultural moment where we celebrate Berlin as the center of the world. What happened in Germany in the 1920s is exactly what happened in this country. The rise of authoritarianism. You want to believe in leadership, but people are being convinced by authoritarian propaganda to fall back on simplistic ideals. The parallels are stunning.“What happened in Germany in the 1920s is exactly what happened in this country. The rise of authoritarianism. You want to believe in leadership, but people are being convinced by authoritarian propaganda to fall back on simplistic ideals. The parallels are stunning.”Are we on this pathway of an increased willingness to become violent? Violent suppression — the way that we have just seen in the past year unfolding? Strategic violence. The raids. It is frightening. But silencing is at the core of these things. Silencing whom? It’s the other. It’s diversity. It’s the claiming of dominance. That’s something that doesn’t ever end well.AS²: What is your inheritance of peace?DP: I just did this intensive project with students where I took them to Berlin to study the fall of the Berlin Wall. I was 19 years old when the Berlin Wall fell. The idea is that peaceful regime change is possible. The formal marker of the end of the Cold War is the fall. The fall of the so-called Iron Curtain, the fall of the Berlin Wall, a reunification of a country that had been at the very center of the division, of not just the country but the world. Here is the supposedly democratic, capitalistic west, and the communist east. The two systems we have divided the world between. Here is a concrete physical marker that we — the people— are tearing down within a very short period of time. Then we are left with the task of stitching something back together that probably should have never been pulled apart.The irony is that I wasn’t even living in Germany at the time. I was doing another study abroad, living in France, crafting a more European identity for me. I’ve since reflected a lot on the fact. This influenced how I think about the possibility of a peaceful transition. It’s a given that it is possible to reunite. And you think, that is just right and obvious. I have assembled that, like most Germans of my generation, into an identity as something that’s almost a given. It’s a given that it is possible to reunite. Once again, we are now at a moment where we realize: no, we’re in danger of losing unity on all fronts. I think this is an inheritance of my adolescence. I came of age, and was choosing my future path of where I wanted to be in the world, at a moment where my own country was in one of its better moments.The fall of the Berlin Wall “influenced how I think about the possibility of a peaceful transition. It’s a given that it is possible to reunite. That is just right and obvious. Once again, we are now at a moment where we realize we’re in danger of losing unity on all fronts.”It was interesting to take a group of 12 international students, some of them from communist countries to Berlin. Vietnamese students, Nepalese students, students from Ghana, from Japan, encountering the place for the first time. How do people of an entirely different generation, from entirely different corners of the world, encounter that memory as a teaching moment? When, for me, it was a reality that sort of happened to me. I didn’t make it happen. Yeah. So, inheritance is also an intergenerational project. An inheritance of something that’s given. My inheritance is reunification.AS²: We’ve had so much harm on top of harm on top of harm, and normalization of that. You see people saying we just need to win by being stronger, by being the bigger bully, by showing more force. I love that your counterpoint to that, from actually having been born into a place that was so deeply impacted by war, is not domination. It is unification. It is the fall of a wall. It is, what are our common points? Which does sound very romantic.“One of the things we need to hear is that regime change is always possible. Because we think of things as entrenched. One way of flipping it, and reframing things is always to say: ‘No, we can point to the moments where change was possible.’”DP: The reality of course is complicated. It wasn’t really unification. In so many ways it was a taking over. Yeah, I don’t want to be misunderstood. I’m not romanticizing what actually happened in the process, or what happened in the years since, and how the country has turned out to be, and how fragmented it is now, and all the problems that came with it. But we recognize the symbolic power of the moment. One of the things we need to hear is that regime change is always possible. Because we think of things as entrenched. So one way of flipping it and reframing things is always to say: no, we can point to the moments where change was possible.AS²: Just for clarification in our current context, we’re not talking about taking over another country as regime change. We’re talking about taking responsibility for our own spaces, with certain values, and certain actions as regime change. We’re all a part of this since we are wrapped up in a global economy. We are wrapped up in a global war economy. “Regime change” is not, you must change so that I have more comfort, but we must change so that we get peace and sustainability. DP: To clarify, the Berlin Wall was erected by the East German socialist regime as a so-called “anti-fascist border protection wall”, so it’s the walling in of East Germans. How was that change possible? It wasn’t because Ronald Reagan just screamed “Let’s tear down this wall.” We needed the Gorbachevian Glasnost and Perestroika. We needed someone to not escalate. We needed someone to not militarily, violently oppress. A quest for freedom and openness. That’s what I mean.AS²: “A quest for freedom and openness.” I love this. I appreciate you so much. You are such a wonderful presence in my life. I am grateful to you for coming on and sharing your time with listeners, but also for your friendship and neighborliness. Thank you for deciding to be a transnational human being, to speak different languages, connect with different places, and to invest in the next generation. Thanks for sharing about your own legacy, your own origins, and how these lessons have affected who you have become.“How was that change possible? It wasn’t because Ronald Reagan just screamed ‘Let’s tear down this wall.’ We needed the Gorbachevian Glasnost and Perestroika. We needed someone to not escalate. We needed someone to not militarily, violently oppress. A quest for freedom and openness.”DP: I love this project so much. It is kind of amazing where you end up in life ultimately, and how there’s more of a pathway, a red thread, that you realize looking back. I ended up becoming a teacher and a professor at a liberal arts college that is ostensibly built upon Buddhist traditions of peace and reconciliation and disarmament. And I’m neither Buddhist nor Christian anymore. It’s this idea of interfaith communication also. When you really start talking human to human, your faith is not the first thing that matters. You see the greater values shine through in many ways. And then you build community out from that. I have taught so many students. For some of them their faith is a big part of their identity, or it might not be. It’s not the first thing that we have to flag. But in these big violent conflicts that we’ve alluded to, that is something that people foreground.AS²: In a way, we get to experience something that our ancestors may have thought was never possible, and it’s completely possible. I find myself involved with interfaith work. I love working with the Muslim-Jewish Alliance. It’s so healing for me. It brings me closer to any future of accountability and common care and something beyond Jewish supremacy, or Muslim supremacy, or Christian supremacy. It is just a world of difference. I’m rereading the work of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel now. He was very involved with the Civil Rights Movement, and he had many thoughts about the importance of interfaith communication. That’s why it struck me when you said communication. I am leaving our conversation with how important communication is. It’s receptivity. It’s mutuality and valuing of a different opinion and a different experience without fear that one will be demeaned or overpowered in some way. I feel like there is a protective quality to friendship, probably because it’s the door to communication.“True faith doesn’t fear the difference of ideas. I think that’s such a hard thing to understand because dogmatism is the opposite of that. It doesn’t allow for the difference, or the variety, or for the openness of ideas. So much of war and violence is based on fear of the other.”DP: The really important word that you just used was fear. Fear and faith. True faith doesn’t fear the difference of ideas. I think that’s such a hard thing to understand, because dogmatism is the opposite of that. It doesn’t allow for the difference, or the variety, or for the openness of ideas. So much of war and violence is based on fear of the other. Are you fearing it because it’s challenging your own identity? It’s challenging the way that you live? It’s challenging what you want to believe about the world? I think communication is about overcoming that fear.AS²: My grandparents on my father’s side divorced, and my grandfather married another Jewish person who said, “I cannot stand the sound of German.” She was so traumatized by the Third Reich that she couldn’t imagine a new relationship to German people post-Third Reich. One of the things that’s so beautiful about a conversation like this is to understand — as these Artemis II astronauts keep on trying to say as they come back to Earth — that our well-being is wrapped up in each other as earthlings.DP: The blue planet! That’s the other watershed moment, right? I was born in 1970, so the picture was already there. We already had the incredible benefit of looking at the blue planet from space. That’s about framing and perspective. The zooming in and the zooming out. And a part of what we’ve talked about is, when you get to see something up close you encounter it. But stepping back, or zooming out and gaining perspective, is just as important. Hopefully the astronauts bring back the message that from far away these things look a lot more together.“Look at the blue planet from space. That’s about framing and perspective. The zooming in and the zooming out. When you get to see something up close you encounter it. But stepping back, or zooming out and gaining perspective, is just as important.”AS²: For sure. But also, we don’t even have to be astronauts. I feel that just with you. I’m sure you do this in your life, in your research, in your classroom, and in your friendships, so thank you so much.DP: Yeah. Embodying things rather than just spelling it out. Maybe that’s the last thing about silence. Quieting the mind, or silencing. Silencing is an act. But silence can be meditative and convey a lot of understanding without the words.Additional Resources:The Berlin Wall: Encountering a Memorial Site of Global SignificanceDeike Peter’s Academic Website“Urban Nature in Need of Ecological Restor(y)ation”“Igniting Passion for Urban Nature” Get full access to Warm Blooded Mammal With Hair at amyshimshonsanto.substack.com/subscribe

PROTECTING PEACE AT HOMECreating a culture of peace can begin with the first people we know — our family. Today’s episode with Paul and Michaela Paulette Shirley focuses on familial love and support as an Inheritance of Peace. Michaela’s significant work in Indigenous Planning is shaping what is possible in community development, educational policy, and ethical research. She’s the daughter of two phenomenal people: Paul and Dolly Mae Shirley. Paul comes from a long line of Diné sheepherders and Michaela is an urban planner and doctoral candidate in American Studies. In this interview, Paul and Michaela, reflect on life lessons from Isabelle Shirley — Paul’s mother who lived for 99 years. They speak about lessons learned from family, our relations to the land and livestock; and the value of discipline, work, and protecting peace at home.[Paul Shirley standing with his mother Isabelle Shirley. Photo courtesy Michaela Shirley.]Michaela Shirley (MS): I am Michaela Paulette Shirley. My clans are Water Edge, born for Bitter Water. My grandparents are of the Salt and Coyote Pass clans. I am originally from Kin Dah Lichii, which means Red House in northeastern Arizona, located on the Navajo reservation. I am so happy to be here. Thank you! I’m joined by a very special guest who is very important. I’ll let him introduce himself.Amy Shimshon-Santo (AS²): Yay! Great.Paul Shirley (PS): I was born and raised as a sheep herder. I’ll be turning 73 next month. This little bordertown we have is along the I-40 New Mexico borderline. That’s where we’ve mostly been going to get our stuff, which is 45 miles back towards Arizona, towards Window Rock, where we come into. We’ve been at a bordertown all our lives. With my five daughters, and so many grandkids, we had to travel to Phoenix, Tulsa, Seattle and places like that once or twice a year. That’s how we come to be. Still having my grandma’s herd of sheep, which my mom took over. So, recently now, I have it, with 30 heads (of livestock).AS²: I’m so glad to be here together. Mr. Shirley and Michaela are some of my favorite people in the world. Thank you so much for making time to be together. The next question is about what you get to do. That might be a bit different for both of you. For Paul, you mentioned sheep camp and sheep herding, and Michaela is into research and studies. What do you get to do with your life force?MS: Okay, well, I’ll let my dad go first.[Paul Shirley seated beside his wife Dolly, their children standing in a row behind them, on the occasion of his 65th birthday. Photo courtesy of Michaela Shirley.]PS: All our grandkids are pretty well taken care of. So we hardly have any time with them just once in a while. Like, summertime, there’s maybe a few days. So that’s one good thing. We raised our girls to know how to take care of their own kids instead of the grandma or the grandpas doing the job for them. We’re less stressed that way. That’s what the kids like to come back to. The grandkids.AS²: Do you want to say a bit about your grandma’s herd of sheep for people who haven’t felt what it’s like to herd sheep?PS: Well, my mom was the only one that didn’t get her education. Her siblings, younger brothers and sisters, all went to boarding schools or wherever but she never went to school. That’s why my grandmother gave the Sheep Livestock Permit to her to take care of alongside us — being me, my two brothers, and two sisters. Five of us. We maintained my mom’s business of sheep herding. That’s primarily what our girls did, was participate with my mom during the summer at the sheep camp farther into the mountains. My mother, all she did was walk, walk, walk after the sheep all her life. That’s what put her to the age of 99. So she finally passed last year. All she stood for was disciplining. She never gave up on discipline. That’s why now, that’s what I stand with. Being able to discipline people that don’t have the right track of mind.AS²: Mhm. And know the difference.PS: We were totally able to get rid of people, like, what you help us get rid of that time you visited. I admire how you traveled by yourself to Albuquerque that time. All by yourself. Yeah. All our girls were like that. They know how and manage to travel by themselves. Especially our first one, the head of the girls, now had to go back to Seattle by herself. She’s a hustler like you on the highway, on the open road.[Michaela and Atlas Shirley.]AS²: When you gotta get someplace, you just gotta get there.PS: Yeah. They all like doing that because they don’t want to be pampered by anybody else. They like to do it themselves.AS²: That’s a lot of strength and will.PS: Yeah, that’s what I’m proud of. Me and the mom (Ms. Dolly Mae Shirley) we’re proud of our kids and grandkids, and three great grandsons.AS²: I know they’re proud of you too.PS: Yeah.MS: Dad, did you want to tell how you start your day, everyday?PS: I start my day with hot coffee in the morning.MS: He makes the best hot coffee.PS: Talking about sheep, we butchered yesterday and we had roast mutton on the grill. There were 20 people. Mostly the relatives. That’s what we experienced. And Michaela enjoyed her mutton.AS²: I bet.[Paul Shirley seated beside a photo of his grandson Atlas. Photo courtesy of Michaela Shirley.]MS: Yeah. I’m the family member that has always taken the higher education route. So my daily life is very different, but every step along my journey, my family has always been very supportive of me. Whether they were offering their prayers for me, for success, or even monetarily. And now these days helping to take care of my 3-year-old when I need to do some stuff for school. But all along the way, my family has been very, very encouraging and supportive. My mom and dad have always been the ones to pay for my application fees: my undergraduate, my graduate, and now my second graduate degree for my Ph.D. program. They have always made their mark in that very special way for me. My parents and my family have always been very supportive and loving in that way. And even now, they’re always asking me questions about what the whole process is like. And that was the beauty of the morning that my dad and I got up early, after they brought home my son from him being two weeks away from me because I had to finish my comprehensive exams. My dad was the one that made coffee and was curious about what the process entailed. I showed him what I was working on at the end of this exam. I have this framework I’m trying to build, and it’s tied back to schools and how we are trying to build better communities in our reservation. Because our reservation is homelands that are very, very important to us. Thankfully, we’re an Indigenous tribe that still retains its original territories. That’s not the case for some other Indigenous peoples who’ve been removed.PS: Relocated.MS: Yeah. But, for us, thankfully, we are where we are from originally. So, all of my work goes back to trying to figure out strategies and ideas for how to go about our future planning. And it all does start with the teachings from my late Nali, Isabel Shirley, who is my dad’s mother that he spoke very admirably about. She comes up a lot in our stories, even in our daily lives. She was always so strong mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and there was nothing that could keep her down. So the essence of who she is as a person, I really want to keep honoring and respecting that in my work. At the same time honoring and respecting my parents, and the lands that we definitely still have. My dad plays a really big part of staying connected to the land by having a grazing permit which is how Navajos have to go about their sheep herding these days. Having to inherit a sheep permit.AS²: Do you want to say any other words about the land that you belong to or are connected to?MS: Well, for us, and a lot of other Diné families that practice this tradition of burying your umbilical cords and your placenta in the land. That’s something my mom and dad still do to this day for all of their grandkids and great-grandkids. No matter where you go in the world, you will always remain connected. That’s home. And that is important, because for a lot of Diné families, we end up having to out migrate to places far beyond our reservation territory boundaries. Like my dad saying “Seattle, Tulsa, Phoenix.” Those are distant places that we’ve had to go to in order to secure the best opportunities for ourselves.That’s also why the planning work I’m trying to do is ensure that we don’t have to leave our reservation in order to pursue those great opportunities. I don’t think I would have that sort of connection, or passion to our homeland, had it not been for my parents dropping us off during the summer for sheep camp.“We were taught not to be claiming lands. Primarily, on my mom’s side through her culture. Never to say “this is my land.” All she would say is: ‘What’s 6 feet under and so many square measurements, that’s where your land is.’ - Paul ShirleyPS: For my part, pertaining to land, we were taught not to be claiming lands. Primarily, on my mom’s side, through her culture, how she really disciplined us was never to say “this is my land.” That’s not proper for her. Not a human being. But livestock that graze on the land. That is primarily what I stand with.AS²: You don’t own the land.PS: Yes. All she would say is: “What’s 6 feet under and so many square measurements, that’s where your land is.”[Dolly and Paul Shirley, Michaela Shirley’s parents.]One thing my mom stood with was: Be a man. Be a woman. Be respectful. She did not like domestic violence among families. She pretty well maintained discipline when her in-laws came about (In-laws will come in peace or us [kids would] never be there). Try to deal with positivity, and not be too negative about anything. Just be happy and have a good time with your family. That’s about it, and that’s how our grandkids are raised. They’re taught respect. “One thing my mom stood with was: Be a man. Be a woman. Be respectful. She did not like domestic violence among families.” -Paul ShirleyAS²: Our last question is do you feel you have an inheritance of peace?PS: I would have to have an interpreter with education like Michaela to understand in my culture what that question is. A prime example of understanding the words . . . Most people, the majority of people, do not know the meaning of words that they talk and deal with every day. Especially the work, W-O-R-K.AS²: You had mentioned that your Mom was walking for most of her life. I thought, is it work or walk? She was walking with the sheep for most of her life, right?PS: Yeah. And able to understand, talk with the sheep and the dogs here. I was left alone at 10 years old with the sheep in the mountains because my mom had to participate in ceremony. And she never [had to] worry about me. I was able to talk to the sheep and the dogs and the cats. Day and night, especially at night. And I know how to deal with being scared.AS²: How do you deal with being scared?PS: Just tough it out. I know crying ain’t gonna solve that problem. You just have to talk to your dogs and the sheep. Get to know even the birds, or whatever animal is living out there. Ants or squirrels. Chipmunks. You just live with them, that’s it.AS²: Live with them.PS: One thing I forgot to tell you was that in the early morning hours at dawn, people would get thrown out. Get their sheepskin taken out from under them and get chased out. And the reason why was because of the corralling of Navajos, to participate in the long 300-mile walk to Fort Sumner, New Mexico. They used to call them “police.” The teaching was to outrun the police. “Run hard.” That was stamped deep into us, our generation. I think that’s where it ended. But before, my mom and my grandma were deeply more into that — outrunning the cavalry. And that’s why people learned how to just be quiet and to outrun any danger that comes forth. That’s primarily what the teaching was, to just to run hard in the morning and run hard every day — which was exercise, I guess.AS²: Absolutely.PS: All that leisure that people have to this day. Looking at television. That’s what my main teaching from my mom was: Don’t listen to any gossip. Don’t be greedy. Don’t be jealous. The Ten Commandments of the Bible, those were her teachings the majority of the time. Not to giggle or laugh in any public places. Act like a woman, not some wild girls. That’s how she disciplined the girls. And us men, the main thing she taught was not to run away from your kids. That was her primary teaching. Don’t ever gossip. Don’t ever do stupid things. You’ve got your five senses. Your ears, tongue, eyes. Mainly the ears. You have to listen to what you’re being taught. That was one goal that she lived with. Stay in shape. Get up early. Don’t gossip too much.AS²: Love it.PS: That’s about it. Hopefully I’ve covered everything.[Dolly and Paul Shirley with their grandson Atlas, Michaela Shirley’s son.]MS: I would say to help bring our conversation to a close. I really didn’t know what to think about in terms of your question “what has been my inheritance of peace?” For me, it’s very important that we amplify peace that comes in the form of love and support in your family, and with your family, and you have to protect that as much as you possibly can.So, in terms of, the intergenerational peace. Peacekeeping, or peacemaking that my dad was talking about, started with my Nali [Isabelle Shirley] because she was in a domestic violence situation with her children. So it’s also the reason why she didn’t want to remarry, like my dad says, with another man after her husband passed away. And then there’s the second peacemaking with my dad and his upbringing and the importance of just trying to maintain that for his family.I always take a lot of great pride in knowing that I had a childhood where I never saw my dad hit my mom, or them yell, or get angry at each other. Our home was always peaceful, and it was always clean. There was always food at home. There was always a lot of great childhood memories in terms of that peace that was there. So, now I’m the third generation of that peace, and my son is the fourth. I too want to provide him the most peace I possibly can in our home because it’s what he’s going to remember when he’s older. It’s what he’s going to carry on with him and his children later on. There is so much violence, hate, and negativity, that my dad is saying, is out there in the world. “It’s very important that we amplify peace that comes in the form of love and support in your family, and you have to protect that as much as you possibly can.” -Michaela ShirleyIf you can have a life that’s peaceful, it’s your home. That can come within four walls. It can come within the territories that make up our territory. But yeah, peace. Where I find it is at home. And, like my mom says, “It doesn’t matter where your home is. What matters is where your family is.” We have family in a lot of places, so should I ever feel like I need to get out of any kind of danger, I know I have a strong family network that I can rely on to do that. And I think that’s pretty much how I would want to round out our conversation, as well as focusing on the peace of the home.[Amy and Michaela in Albuquerque shortly before Atlas’s birth.] ResourcesDine’é Bikéyah, N. D., Charley (Navajo Nation), E. V., Lopez-Huertas (Maya K’iche’), M. J., & Shirley (Navajo Nation), M. P. (2025). Restoring our tomorrow: planning for who we are. AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples, 21(3), 540-549.M. P. Shirley and K. Jackson, “Shí Yázhí ‘there is money underneath your fingers,’” Et Al: New Voices in Arts Management, 2022.BiographiesPaul Shirley is a loving father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and a husband. He was born in Ganado, Arizona and resides in Kin Dah Lichii, Arizona on the Navajo Nation. Paul is Bitter Water clan born for the Coyote Pass clan. His maternal grandfather is of the Long House Hopi clan and his paternal grandfather is the Big Water clan. He is an intergenerational sheepherder and a retired heavy equipment operator. He enjoys ranching, herding sheep, movies at home and in the theater with his beloved wife, Dolly Mae Shirley.Michaela Paulette Shirley is a doctoral candidate in American Studies at the University of New Mexico. She identifies with the Water Edge and Bitter Water clans, with her maternal grandfather from the Salt clan and her paternal grandfather from the Coyote Pass clan. She was raised in Kin Dah Lichii in northeastern Arizona on the Navajo reservation. With over ten years of experience in Indigenous planning, community development, community engagement, qualitative research, conference planning, and technical assistance training and workshops. She is currently serving as the KSU Tribal TAB Program Manager.This interview has been edited and condensed. Subscribe to Inheritance of Peace with Amy Shimshon-Santo on Apple Podcasts or on Substack at Warm Blooded Mammal With Hair. Theme music for this program is by Avila Santo. Get full access to Warm Blooded Mammal With Hair at amyshimshonsanto.substack.com/subscribe

WALKING IN PEACE DURING WAR How can ancient Persian history reveal enduring legacies of peace — even during a time of war? In this episode, we listen to Dr. Mahnaz Motayar, an Iranian-American writer and neuropsychologist with nearly 50 years of experience innovating creative therapeutic processes and guiding mental health education. Memories of her homeland provide a sense-memory of peace through the beauty of ancient architecture, mouth watering sweets, and the enduring poetry of legendary Persian poet Saʿdī (1210–1291) who inspired humanist ideals underlying the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) centuries later. Listen to Motayar and learn from her fresh perspectives on the importance of valuing peoples, cultures, and land. [Tomb of poet Sa’adi Shirazi (سعدیه) located in the city of Shiraz, in the province of Fars, Iran.]Mahnaz Motayar (MM): My full name is Mahnaz Motayar. However, my nickname that I have grown up with is Naz Motayar. I’m a human being. I’m an immigrant. I have been in the United States for almost 50 years. And, my passion, and my vocation and my avocation has always been working with people to make life a little bit easier for them in whatever way possible with the circumstances that they are in. And I’ve been fortunate to be doing that, also, for 45 years.Amy Shimshon-Santo (AS²): What do you get to actually do with your life force?MM: My life force is truly about people, and community. My life force is about bringing peace, comfort, and ease wherever I am and with whomever I am. My career started as a public health educator, and then I taught at various universities for a number of years and then I started my practice as a clinical neuropsychologist. I loved all those pieces of my life, and I see that I’m a person who works better without borders. And, institutions right now, both academic and medical establishments, there’s a lot of borders. Not honoring the diversity of human beings, not just ethnic diversity, but every person has different desires, different strengths, different weaknesses. Unfortunately, in these establishments these days, you cannot acknowledge those. The focus of my life right now, is, promoting health and wellness through music and community.“My life force is about bringing peace, comfort, and ease wherever I am and with whomever I am.”AS²: May I ask you if you were in charge of how public health education was unfolding, if you were the author of that space, what it would look like?MM: It would be very creative. It would create space for people to realize their own potential rather than just learning some information and applying it to the entire population. It would be very respectful, creating a space for people to transform themselves rather than just be lectured at, and saying you gotta take this protocol and apply it to everyone who has this illness. Or, if you’re teaching this course, you have to teach this and this. More of an experiential, interactive, engaging process, rather than just information and lectures.AS²: How did you figure that out?MM: Creativity was always a part of me. I always believed that creativity will allow us to reach each other in a more intimate way. If I could use an analogy, Amy, it would be like if you take a frozen food and just defrost it, then everybody can do that. But to cook?AS²: Ha! Right. “But to cook.” I’m so glad to be here with the real chef.MM: It’s an honor to be interviewed by a real chef.AS: Do you have a favorite food ?MM: I like sweets. There’s some Persian sweets that are really…AS²: Which one?MM: I love cream puffs.AS²: Yes.MM: I like Napoleon’s.AS²: Yes.MM: I can do without food…AS²: …but not your sweets.MM: In response to your question, I was just thinking, you and I can pick up the same recipe and it can come out totally different because of our own unique energies, because of the resources available to us. Because of so many other elements. We are to cook. We are to make food that is not tasty at all, and then play with it, and make it better and better, until we reach that place where we say, “Oh, this is it.”AS²: I see. So health —mental health, physical health, education, public health education — should have that kind of openness and creativity.MM: Absolutely.[Image depicting Saʿdī (seated left) and Abu Bakr ibn Sa’d (seated right). Made in Mughal India, dated 1602.]AS²: The next question is about your connections to place. What lands do you feel a sense of connection to?MM: I was born in Tehran, Iran. And, to this day, my connection is to that land. I live in San Jose, California. I’m also connected to this land. But the place where I feel whole, and where I feel healed, and, strangely enough, where I feel at peace is still my homeland.AS²: Absolutely.MM: It’s very strange to feel at peace with a place that is totally out of peace.AS²: I can understand that though because the un-peace isn’t natural. What I mean to say is, to say: “I feel at peace with my place where I was named, I was made” makes sense to me— even if it’s a place that right now, is not at peace. Because that’s not its authentic state. What is the peace of Tehran? What is that to you?“The peace of Tehran is the hospitality of the people. The peace of Tehran is people are willing to help and reach out to each other. The peace in Tehran is amazing beauty in buildings that are thousands of years old. The peace in Tehran is generosity of its people. The diversity and a strong culture that is based in community.”MM: The piece of Tehran is the hospitality of the people. The peace of Tehran is people are willing to help and reach out to each other. The peace in Tehran is amazing beauty in buildings that are thousands of years old. The peace in Tehran is generosity of its people. The diversity and a strong culture that is based in community.AS²: I’m so glad to hear that that’s your definition of beginning. That you were born into a place of welcoming and community care and ancient architecture. And that that place is Tehran. MM: One of my favorite quotes that actually brings me peace is “when we replace an I with a we, even illness becomes wellness.”AS²: Yeah.MM: And whenever we are held, and cared for, and we were made to feel safe, there is much more potential to feel at peace. If god forbid, I consider you my enemy. How can I feel safe or at peace if I have an enemy?AS²: Right. We’ve been in a writing group together, and it’s been so wonderful for me just to hear your work, and you’ve heard my stuff, too. And I thrive so much on just knowing that you have a foot in a region where my mother’s family is. That a lot of people wouldn’t even be able to imagine. And that we share this understanding of, like, how do you create a space of wellness? How do you create a space of peace? And I believe that people have always been doing that somewhere, and we don’t hear enough about it.MM: People are doing it here. And we don’t hear about it. They’re definitely doing it in the Middle East right now.“Whenever we are held, and cared for, and we were made to feel safe, there is much more potential to feel at peace.”AS²: Yes.MM: And we don’t hear about it, because there is a segment of society that does not want people to be together. They make profit by separations, by divisions, by disentanglements. And I think it has always been that way. The intensity of it has changed. And, my prayer is that this intensity will wake us up.AS²: What would you like to have awoken?MM: That we are all human before we are anything else.AS²: Absolutely.MM: I mean, if I don’t know where you’re from, Amy, and you don’t know where I’m from. How would we treat each other?AS²: Well, we might treat each other from the face value of how we behave, what we say, how we show up, what we feel. And, you know, we know, specifically. You were born in Tehran, my mother was born in Jerusalem as a Jewish person. And I delight in you. And I always love when it’s your turn to read. I love to listen. And I can’t see why people couldn’t come to that kind of a place with people from different nationalities, if they knew each other, if they actually got to know each other at their best.MM: I was working at the VA hospital and this young man came to my office and looked at me straight in the eye, and said, “I cannot work with you.” Right. It was our first session together. And I said, “I respect that. It would just help me greatly if you tell me why. Because you don’t know me, and I don’t know you.” And he said — it was during the Iraq Desert Storm War — he said, “You remind me of the people I had to kill.” I said, “I would be happy to go and arrange for another therapist to see you. And I would appreciate a chance if you just sit and have a dialogue together. But if that’s really hard we don’t have to. And he agreed. And we sat down. And we had the most amazing conversation. I’m sure it must have been very difficult for him. But he gave it a chance. And the only reason, probably, that he did give it a chance is because I gave him freedom to choose. We are to give each other freedom. In everything. In conversations, in interactions. Freedom. Respect. Empathy.AS²: The benefit of the doubt? A clean slate, just a fresh beginning. Right? I’m going to meet you in this moment. And not with this legacy that my family, or myself, may be carrying. We sometimes turn to ancient stories as an excuse for bad behavior now. Instead of taking responsibility for good or bad behavior now. And we are ancient people. But we’re also people who I would hope that one thing we have in common is that we want futures for our children and our grandchildren, and for the land.MM: The land is never gonna forget.AS²: The land is never gonna forget.MM: History may forget. People may forget, but the land is never gonna forget.AS²: Forget what we’re doing to it now, what people are doing to it now.MM: Or what happened to its people.AS²: Tell me more. My first reaction was, Oh, it’s the oily rain, it’s the bombing of the oil fields, it’s dropping toxic ships to the bottom of the sea. What are all the aquatic life saying? It’s all the other living things in the region. But maybe you have something else in your mind.“The land is never going to forget. I consider land a living thing, a living being. Land, like our body, does not forget.”MM: I consider land a living thing. A living being. And land, like our body, does not forget. Our body remembers what we forgot. I see the land as that kind of a space.AS²: I agree.MM: In these busy, chaotic, complex, rushed lives that many of us are living right now. We don’t even pay attention to what we are stepping on. And now, with what’s going on and different ideologies, and different experiences, we’re stepping on each other with our words. By the way, I think we have an acronym. And I’m gonna use it. We were just, we were just talking about it, and we said, respect and freedom.AS²: Respect, empathy, and freedom are the true referees of a fair game. Oh, I’m so with you on that. I’m so with you on that. I understand that when I ask, “what is your inheritance of peace?” it almost might seem innocent, perhaps. But, I personally have chosen to not reach for hatred, not reach for war. I must have become this way somehow, and I assume I’m not the only one. So, I’ve been asking people. You’ve already said it’s Tehran, which is really beautiful to hear right now, that your memory of that place for you still feels so rich and so full.MM: In order to accept that inheritance of peace. I am to be at peace. If I’m not at peace, that inheritance has gone wasted. You know, it’s kind of like we all inherit a lot of things in our lives, but we don’t use it all. We don’t want it all.AS²: Right.MM: For me, my inheritance of peace. Have come from my family, my community in Iran, even to this day. You can’t imagine when we can connect. Which is very difficult right now. A friend of mine, who is our age, and her parents are in Iran. Right now, they are in their 80s. And she was in tears two days ago. Both parents are involved in social work and NGOs and he said, “My 86-year-old father was putting me at peace.” This is someone who has been imprisoned five times. This is someone who is being bombed right now. And he calls his daughter and puts her at peace. Don’t worry about us.AS²: Having family in the middle of a war zone though, they do do that. My family does that for me, too. I know they’re not sleeping. I know they’re hiding out, they’re underground, they’re in bomb shelters, and they always want to make sure no one else is worrying about them.MM: Because taking care of each other is at the foundation of both our cultures. That part of me is the culture of sanctuary.AS²: I relate with that word a lot, too. And I have said, I want to be a sanctuary.MM: I’ve traveled back home many times since the regime was changed. And this is my personal experience, I’m not saying it’s that way for everybody.AS²: Sure.MM: This is just my own personal story. At times when I went back home, I literally was a foreigner. I didn’t know how to do things. And everywhere I went I was treated with such integrity.AS²: I have to ask how your people are there right now because we haven’t really talked about it. You talked about your friend. You don’t have to if you don’t want to.MM: I don’t know how most of my people are right now. Because there is no connection.“Taking care of each other is at the foundation of both our cultures. That part of me is the culture of sanctuary.”AS²: Right.MM: There’s no internet connections, and phones are… If you can purchase cards, which are expensive, then you can call out from your home. But not everybody can afford that. I have relatives who are not affluent. And even meeting their basic needs right now, I can’t imagine how they are doing that. I am a student of many teachers back home where I have no idea where they are because we were meeting online. Everybody there is our people. Everybody in Israel is my people. Everybody in Lebanon is my people. Everybody in the U.S. is my people.AS²: Absolutely.MM: When we say, “my people” the meaning of it is not an ownership.AS²: It’s not a wall. It’s not like my people that are not yours, or your people that are not mine. In the language of recognition of international human rights, it speaks directly to the human family. And it’s sad to me that the human family had to put themselves through such torturous conditions to get to that awareness which is who we really are, in my opinion. But I’m sad for so much suffering. I wish we could have that understanding without the suffering.MM: I feel like there will always be suffering because without it, we human beings won’t learn anything. It’s sad to say that. My wish is: let this suffering bring us together. Are you familiar with that poem, from Persian poet Saadi? That’s on top of the United Nations building.[“Bani Adam” written by Saʿdī (1210–1291) woven into a Persian carpet that hangs in the United Nations-New York]MM: I know it in Farsi.AS²: Let’s hear it in Farsi.MM: “We are part of each other.” [Naz reads poem “Bani Adam” by poet Saʿdī]بنی آدم اعضای یک پیکر اندکه در آفرينش ز یک گوهرندچو عضوى به‌درد آورَد روزگاردگر عضوها را نمانَد قرارتو کز محنت دیگران بی‌غمینشاید که نامت نهند آدمیbanī-ādam aʿzāy-e yek peikarandkeh dar āfarīnesh ‘ze yek goharandcho ʿozvī be-dard āvarad rūzgārdegar ʿozvhā rā namānad qarārto k’az meḥnat-e dīgarān bī-ghamīnashāyad keh nāmat nahand ādamīHuman beings are members of a whole,In creation of one essence and soul.If one member is afflicted with pain,Other members uneasy will remain.If you have no sympathy for human pain,The name of human you cannot retain.MM: Isn’t it fascinating that a poem from Iran, is on top of The United Nations Building?AS²: Well, the poetry from the region. is ancient. And the whole world turns to that. The whole world will quote Rumi, or will quote Hafez. But then, do we really study each other? Do we really study each other’s poetry, each other’s culture, each other’s roots? No.MM: And we don’t necessarily have to “study,” but listen and ask for the stories like you do. You know, I may not have time to go study your culture.AS²: There’s so many aspects of every culture. Both you and I are educated women, and we’ll probably go to our grave not knowing all the things we wish we could learn. At least I feel that way. Maybe it isn’t just knowing, it’s listening and enjoying and valuing.MM: It’s valuing! How come you and I? I didn’t know you, you didn’t know me, and now you’re on my list of gratitude.AS²: And you’re on mine.MM: When this war started…AS²: Yeah.MM: I am blessed to have many wonderful Jewish friends. And as soon as the war started, all these messages: “We’re still friends, right? We’re still friends, right?” And I’m going like why wouldn’t we be?AS²: Oh, Naz. When I was in Ramat Hasharon in October 2023 one of the first people who texted the cousin I was with was her friend from Iran. They had met when they were both on vacation where they had started talking and learned that he really loved this one particular Israeli artist, but he didn’t have access to listen to them because of blocks. It just so happens that my cousin knew the artist he liked and called the artist on the phone so they could talk. They became fast friends. On October 7th, this Iranian friend texted my cousin right away. She said, of all the people who could reach out to me now, this one matters most. Is there anything else you would like to share? Anything that you pull from for strength? You once said to me something to the effect of “you can’t live with the war inside you.”MM: It’s not my war. And the war…wars. They enter those of us who have deep compassion and empathy for others. And, but these wars are to stay outside of our bodies because when they’re in our bodies, we’re not well. The wars around the world. Yes, I may sit here, I may smile with you, We can chuckle, we can do all of that. But inside of me, I know that my wonderful cousin may not have food to eat tonight. That’s how war enters me. I don’t know who’s alive right now? My mother-in-law passed away, and we didn’t know because there was no connection. We found out, four days later that she had passed away. I have friends here who have mothers back home that are alone and they’re elderly. They’re all my people.AS: Of course. I’m not sure if everyone understands who doesn’t have family somewhere else, or a family somewhere else in a place that’s effected by war. You can’t just find them, you can’t just go. You can’t just bring them here. You can’t just go in. You can’t just go out. There should be, I believe, more respect for immigrant families that have to negotiate this kind of thing because the distancing is dehumanizing. The boundaries and borders are dehumanizing, and it’s a lot to carry. How do you process an experience that is inherently toxic or negative and harming and somehow not come out the worse, come out the better? You’re a healer. You’ve studied mental health. You’ve taught mental health. You’ve treated people who have had to live and experience war. Do you have anything you would like to share about choosing to bring your peace with you instead of other choices that we have?MM: It goes back to that life force that you were talking about a little while ago. If that life force is diminished, we first are to heal that life force. Connect with it. Allow people to feel it again. Just the fact that we are alive. For those who still have the will to live in light of what is going on. That life force is still there. The light is on, even though dimmed. And to get to that life force. I cannot tell you how many patients over the years I have seen where my ethnicity becomes the entire focus of the session.AS: What?MM: Yeah. But I’m not interested in war.AS: This is a really troubling thing. There’s too much storytelling about war that keeps it in place. That are fictions to bring people into nodding of the head that it’s okay. I think if we dehumanize whoever this is happening to, or we also say the land has no value. What you just said is really sad to me. It’s not okay to not know a place and to believe the worst of it.MM: We both have been in education. Education often is about right and wrong, correct and incorrect. You answer correctly, you get a good grade. You answer incorrectly. You’re left behind. When people tell me the things that they do, that you’re talking about that’s “not okay?” Oh. I don’t tell them it’s not okay.AS: Because you’re a better… You’re a therapist!MM: Outside of a therapeutic session, even if you and I had a disagreement. I can say it’s not okay for me. But I cannot say it’s not okay for you. Because as soon as I say that, we have entered a different field.AS: When you spoke about the person who said, “You cannot be my therapist because you look like the people I had to kill when I was a soldier.” My first reaction was different than yours.MM: And that’s the thing, my friend. We are all different. We all have had different experiences. We all are living different stories. It’s like the universe is a big library and we are each a book in that library. Some of us fit into a section. And some of us are having a hard time finding a section. What I am leaving with from our conversation — which I’m very grateful for — goes back to that REF (Respect, Empathy, Freedom). I pray for enough empathy to understand the person who hates me, who disagrees with me, who wants to kill me. That has happened, too. Because something, somewhere they picked up that made them who they are.AS: I think you must have been and continue to be a great healer and therapist, because you have so much more compassion than I know how yet to generate. I don’t want to live with hate and I don’t want to normalize hate. And you are saying, “but I want to learn from it.” Because it has been your job, in a way, to understand the human mind. That’s an elevated state.MM: I have relatives who have been educated in the United States. And they are physicians and engineers and lawyers, and all I’ve heard from them for years is, “Oh, these Jews, these Jews.” And one night, I was sitting with them. And I go, “I’m really curious, what have “these Jews” have done to you. You are such a smart, talented, caring person. What is this? I wanna know.” He said, “When we were growing up, when I was a kid. I was told, ‘watch out for the Jewish people. They will suck out the blood out of you.’”AS: Right. Yeah, that’s an old anti-Semitic trope.MM: And I looked at him and I said, “and you’ve carried that?”AS: I know, if I could only show him the jars of blood I have hiding in my closet! MM: And also I said, “You know I can’t change you. But I can choose not to listen to you.”AS: Well, I’m with you on this. With my privilege of being not under missile fire, what kind of ethical communication do I want to have? When we were together last time, I wrote about an experience with this wonderful Jewish-Muslim Alliance, and how it felt to hear the call to prayer in Arabic inside of L.A.’s oldest synagogue. At first I was cynical that this was never gonna work. Then a young woman, who is Saudi, came over and sat next to me, and we had Iftar together. She had never been inside a synagogue before and was thrilled. I felt a kind of relief. Peace is the most important thing I could possibly imagine. Peace as a prelude to actual coming to know the human family, and having a deep love and respect for who we are in all of our broad array. I don’t see how the path society is on now will take us anywhere better.MM: Maybe we are all to have the conversation: “How do I walk in peace in a war zone?”Biography:Dr. Naz Motayar is a healing advocate, and a medical psychologist supporting individuals with challenging medical conditions to return to the healing path. Born with a physical difference she knows and promotes the healing path as a process of integration and illumination, personally and professionally. She has developed and taught numerous courses on healing through community and creative interventions. She has served as medical staff at several hospitals. Her work emphasizes the necessity of honoring relationships with all beings to promote individual, communal and planetary healing. She is best known for bringing joy, vitality, inspiration and enthusiasm to the healing process through creative approaches. Healing is her passion and life’s purpose.Resources:Follow Naz on Substack at Naz’s SubstackNaz and Amy met in a writing circle taught by Deena Metzger. Follow Deena’s substack Desperate Love Letters to a Wounded Earth.Read more about the 13th century Persian poet SaʿdīRead the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Get full access to Warm Blooded Mammal With Hair at amyshimshonsanto.substack.com/subscribe

PEACE AS ENDURANCEHow does one go about creating a culture of peace when we grow up inside social systems we did not author that are often violent or unfair? In this episode, we hear from Beah Batakou — a poet and attorney based in Accra, Ghana. Peace making requires qualities that she learned from her mother and grandmother like “steadiness” and “strategic calm.” For Batakou, creating an inheritance of peace means transforming survival into structures for flourishing, and having the disciplined endurance to bring them into life. Let’s jump right to learn more.Beah Batakou (BB): I consider myself to be a woman of many faces — something of a jack-of-all-trades.Amy Shimshon-Santo (AS²): And a master of many.BB: I consider myself a dual cultivator, particularly in relation to my professional life. I am a lawyer by profession and I am also a poet. I cultivate both practices simultaneously, always trying to understand how poetry weaves into the law, and how the law in turn, intersects with poetry.Beyond my professions, I am also both Beninese and Ghanaian. I rarely identify myself as simply Ghanaian, even though that is the orthodox expectation where I come from. In my community, lineage is patrilineal, so people often say that you belong to your father’s family. But I was not raised by my father’s people. I was raised by my mother and her family. And the world I grew up in carries many influences that are not strictly Ghanaian. Because of that, I cannot confidently say I am only Ghanaian. I am also Beninese, and that heritage has shaped me in important ways. Before colonial borders were drawn we were part of a continuous cultural space anyway. Despite differences in ethnicity and tribe, people lived within overlapping worlds and shared practices, so the distinction has never felt absolute to me.Much of my work, both as a lawyer and as a poet, is concerned with inheritance. I often write about spiritual inheritance, cultural inheritance, political inheritance, and bodily inheritance.I come from countries that have been shaped by trade, by missionary presence, and by colonial administration. At the same time, they have also been shaped by resilience and by the quiet labor of ordinary domestic life. My writing, and even my practice of the law, sits at that convergence.“I come from countries that have been shaped by trade, by missionary presence, and by colonial administration. At the same time, they have also been shaped by resilience and by the quiet labor of ordinary domestic life. I try to understand what it means to grow up within these pillars of society, and to develop a language capable of interrogating them without flattening their complexity.”I have always been interested in what it means to grow up within systems that existed long before you arrived. Many of my poems engage with Catholicism, gender, and economic constraint. I often speak about gendered expectations, religious systems, and poverty—about the structures that shape everyday life. I try to understand what it means to grow up within these pillars of society, and to develop a language capable of interrogating them without flattening their complexity.I also have a deep affection for what I call chaos, though I do not mean it negatively. I think of chaos the way one might look at a child’s scribbles. There is a kind of beauty in that disorder. It is a convolution of things that do not neatly fit together, and I find that compelling. For me, that kind of chaos represents tension. I often feel a surge of joy when I can inhabit that tension and create something from it.Growing up, I was very much a church girl. My childhood was shaped by catechism, rosaries, and prayer camps. At the same time, I grew up aware that these structures often carry violence alongside the comfort and solace they provide.Despite that, I was raised by very strong women—my mother and my maternal grandmother. Their endurance was not always described as strength, and the things they survived are not experiences we would ordinarily romanticize. But I see their lives as a form of profound endurance, and that is the strength I recognize in them.My life has also been shaped by place—by the sea, by heat, by dust, by classrooms and offices. All of those textures find their way into my poems. In some ways, they also find their way into my legal writing.Since last year, I have become increasingly attentive to the idea of the body as an archive. The manuscript I worked on at the Watermill Center in New York explored this. I was trying to understand what it means to think of the body as something that stores history, how trauma and devotion leave inscriptions on flesh, and how memory and experience travel across generations through the body itself.In many ways, I see myself as someone trying to reconcile reverence and rebellion within the same breath.AS²: There’s so much happening in what you’re describing. I was also raised at a kind of crossroads — between legal ideas of justice, the frameworks societies create to keep people safe, to establish precedents, and to organize collective life — and the artistic space which is deeply concerned with culture-making. Even though I come from a different part of the world, your language of reverence and rebellion feels very legible to me. So does your affection for chaos. Sometimes things do need to be shaken up. Not in a destructive way, but in a way that reveals where power sits and how it operates. Your work seems to do that—pointing toward power from different angles. And you’re clearly not owned by anyone but yourself.My second question is this: how do you spend your life force? What kinds of things occupy your time and energy?BB: Yes, definitely. When you mentioned “life force,” the first word that came to mind was ambition. But I don’t really think of life force as ambition. This year especially, I’ve found myself in spaces where people say, “You come across as a very ambitious person. How do you do that?” And the truth is, I’ve never really thought of myself that way. I tend to think more in terms of energy, or force.When I reflect on what I get to do with my life, I think about the accumulated charge of my experiences. Those experiences didn’t break me, but they marked me. That charge includes grief, anger, discipline, faith, and a great deal of doubt. It includes desire, fatigue, and hope. When I write, those charges become legible. A lot of what flows out of me is rooted in those emotional and spiritual registers, and sometimes it might appear heavy. But I don’t consider myself a pessimistic person. If anything, my professional training—especially as a lawyer—has taught me to see what could exist but does not yet exist. That orientation naturally brings grief, anger, doubt, desire, and fatigue into my work. I tend to gather all of those forces under a larger structure that I call survival.“I convert silence into speech. I convert confusion into image. I convert memory into form. And through that process, I also refuse simplification.”The ability to transform expressions of survival into structure is really what my purpose is about. Many of us—especially women, and particularly women of color—inherit systems that we did not design. We inherit patriarchal authority, religious hierarchies, and economic precarity. These systems exert pressure. They shape us and, in many ways, attempt to contain us. What my work allows me to do is metabolize that pressure rather than simply carry it. I don’t want to carry that pressure unchanged. I want to transform it. What I do feels like a kind of conversion. I convert silence into speech. I convert confusion into image. I convert memory into form. And through that process, I also refuse simplification.There’s always a temptation, especially when writing about faith or violence, to reduce things to a single narrative. To choose between condemnation and devotion. Between one side or the other. Between black and white. But the force that drives my work—the transformation of survival into structure—allows me to hold nuance. It allows me to hold reverence and critique at the same time. So I can love the ritual that raised me while still interrogating the harm embedded within it. I can love being Catholic and still say, “This is wrong. This is painful. This is what is happening.” In doing that, I’m able to honor my ancestors without romanticizing their suffering.In many ways, this practice keeps me balanced. It’s a discipline that helps me live my life with a certain steadiness. Staying on that path requires constant revision—of my work, but also of myself. Every day I learn something new. And what I write, at any given moment, is simply the best expression of my life force that I can produce at that time.AS²: Well, that was definitely a poetic response. There are lines throughout it that reflect a poetic mindset. At the same time, your work clearly extends beyond the page. You also run an educational organization focused on menstruation education for women and girls (@HappyMonthlies). And you stepped forward to write and contribute to a national report for the United Nations on the state of women and children. So alongside your creative writing, you are also active in the public sphere—working on women’s rights and menstrual health advocacy. In other words, your writing takes many forms. Some of it is poetry. Some of it appears as formal reports. Some of it is written as policy briefs or legal documents.“Much of my life and work begin from a simple set of questions: What systems have we inherited? What are those systems doing to our bodies? And where do we go from here? That orientation is why my work often circles back to human rights.”BB: Yes. I did contribute to what we call a mid-term sub-periodic review, which has since been published. The report is available on the website of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights under the NGO mid-term submissions to the Universal Periodic Review. You can access it here: UPR NGOs Mid-term reports | OHCHR. If you navigate to the Ghana section on that page, you will see the reports there in full. It was a collaborative effort, and I remain grateful to everyone who contributed to the work. Beyond that, I write poetry. Much of my life and work begin from a simple set of questions: What systems have we inherited? What are those systems doing to our bodies? And where do we go from here? That orientation is why my work often circles back to human rights. Ultimately, these questions return to the human being and to dignity — human dignity, but also the dignity of the environment, and our place within the wider universe. They raise questions about our responsibilities to ourselves, to one another, and to the world around us. That is the space I write from.AS²: Yeah.BB: I think of myself as a woman with many outlets. There are many ways to carry a message, and the outlet itself doesn’t define the message. If you’re familiar with the Bible, the Apostle Paul once said, “To the Gentiles, I became as a Gentile; to the Jews, I became as a Jew.” I often think about my work in a similar way. To a European, I can be European. To a Ghanaian, I can be Ghanaian. What matters to me is that the message travels — that people are able to understand it, live with it, feel it, and nurture it in their own contexts.AS²: Beautiful. When you describe yourself as a church girl, it reminds me of the time I had the opportunity to visit the Elmina Castle with you and walk through the dungeons. The architecture of that place stays with you. Beneath the castle are the dungeons where people were held during the transatlantic slave trade. Nearby are burial grounds connected to that same history. Then, within the structure itself, there is the church. And above that, the residence of the official who oversaw the entire economic system of trading human beings. What struck me most was the vertical layering of it all. The roof of the dungeon is the floor of the church. The roof of the church is the floor of the governor’s quarters — the space where the person responsible for this system lived. Standing there, you can’t ignore how those layers physically embody a certain history: faith, power, commerce, and violence literally built on top of one another. And yet, when you speak about being formed within the church, you also carry a critical awareness of those contradictions.[Beah Batakou, Amy Shimshon-Santo, Phillippa Yaa de Villiers, Pelu Awofeso.]BB: There are aspects of my faith that have been genuinely helpful — parts of it that I continue to carry with me and integrate into my life. At the same time, embracing those parts does not mean that I suspend my critical eye. I can hold gratitude for what has nourished me while still questioning and examining the structures that produced itAS²: That sensibility feels particularly important at a moment when the world often seems intent on turning people into enemies of one another — reducing everything to a simple “me versus you.” There is a constant pressure to oversimplify human beings, to flatten our identities into opposing sides. What you’re saying pushes against that. You’re insisting on complexity. You’re saying: I am many things. I contain multiple histories, influences, and ways of speaking. I can move across spaces and communicate with different people without abandoning myself. That becomes a powerful stance against oversimplification and stereotyping. It asserts that human identity is not fixed or singular, but expansive and capable of holding many truths at once.BB: Yeah, I remember that day at the castle. I had been there several times before, but that visit affected me differently. It struck me in a way it hadn’t before. I suddenly felt the contradiction very sharply — that the same people who came preaching salvation were also participating in the very violence their message condemned.That memory helped clarify something about my own practice. My work is about transforming survival into structure. Those are two very different states. There is a difference between simply enduring something and actively shaping it. Many of us grow up inside frameworks we did not author. Patriarchal authority may define what a girl’s body means before she has the chance to understand it herself. Religious hierarchies may prescribe obedience before inquiry. Economic precarity can compress choice long before aspiration or ambition has the space to form. That is the kind of pressure I am referring to. It is social, moral, financial, and emotional all at once. If it remains unexamined, that pressure accumulates. It settles into the body as tension, silence, and repetition. That is what I mean by carrying pressure. When we carry it, we internalize it without altering it. It becomes posture. It becomes self-censorship. It becomes inherited scripts we perform unconsciously.What we must do instead is metabolize that pressure. Metabolism implies transformation. The body takes something heavy or raw and converts it into usable energy. I remember you saying something like that when we left the castle—that we had to do something with what we were feeling. We asked ourselves what could be done with those emotions.In many ways, that question shaped our conversations afterward. We began talking about how to transform those feelings into something usable, and poetry became one of the tools that allowed us to do that. Through language, lived constraints and difficult experiences could be placed into form. That is what I mean by metabolizing pressure. Once language enters the picture, the experience is no longer simply endured. It can be examined, ordered, and reframed.“When I talk about chaos or tension, I am really describing survival. Survival rarely arrives in a neat narrative. It appears in fragments: a rule you were taught, a silence you kept, a fear you never quite named. Structure, however, is deliberate.”When I talk about chaos or tension, I am really describing survival. Survival rarely arrives in a neat narrative. It appears in fragments: a rule you were taught, a silence you kept, a fear you never quite named. Structure, however, is deliberate. In a poem, I choose the line breaks. I decide what repeats and what is withheld. In a legal opinion, a report, or even a witness statement, I decide what belongs and what does not. I decide whether the voice is kneeling or standing—whether it speaks with authority or from a place of vulnerability. Those are formal decisions. They represent a reclaiming of agency. The experience no longer dictates the terms entirely. I do. That is what it means to convert silence into speech. Many systems—particularly hierarchical ones, including religious structures—depend on quiet compliance. Transforming silence into language disrupts that expectation.AS²: Yes, political ones rely on that as well.BB: Yes, exactly. In many ways, all of these systems depend on quiet compliance. What my practice — both in law and in poetry — tries to do is interrupt that quiet. But it doesn’t interrupt it by shouting indiscriminately.I often think back to a period when I was an active protester with the Economic Fighters League. The movement has some parallels with the Economic Freedom Fighters associated with Julius Malema. In Ghana, the group organizes demonstrations and forms of resistance against what we perceive as undemocratic government decisions. At times, the strategy involved using shock value—creating disruption in order to force attention. But I also noticed that those actions were consistently labeled as illegal or indiscriminate. That labeling began to stay with me, and eventually it became one of the reasons I stepped away from that form of activism. I started to feel that language, in that context, was no longer doing the work it was meant to do. The conversation would collapse into simple accusations: this is illegal, this is reckless, this is indiscriminate. And once those labels are applied, the substance of what is being said often disappears.“When you are able to name something precisely, you begin to move the balance of power. The terms of the conversation are no longer entirely dictated by someone else.”That experience pushed me toward a different kind of practice—one that does not shout but articulates. One that names. Because naming shifts power. When you are able to name something precisely, you begin to move the balance of power. The terms of the conversation are no longer entirely dictated by someone else. So part of my work involves transforming confusion into image. Many of the pressures we experience are diffuse and difficult to describe. When you give them an image, you give them contour. You stabilize an experience long enough to examine it. That is what I mean by transforming survival into structure. I am not writing, or practicing law, simply to vent emotion. I am trying to organize experience into something shareable, something intelligible, something deliberate.When people encounter my work, whether it appears as poetry, a report, or legal writing, they will often see inherited systems being held up, tested, and reconfigured. The goal is not to erase what happened, or to deny the pressures that shaped us. It is to change our relationship to those pressures. Instead of remaining subjects of those systems, we begin to interpret them. And interpretation, in itself, is a form of power.AS²: To speak in this way reflects a kind of deep knowing. What you’re expressing comes from time, attention, and presence. It requires a sustained relationship with language, with history, with memory, and with the present moment. It also grows out of engagement with activism and lived experience.I recognize some of that path in my own background. At one point, I believed the most direct way to improve life was through physical structures—through architecture and urbanism, through designing spaces that would simply make life more livable. But over time it became clear that power does not step aside simply because a good idea appears. There was too much abuse of power embedded in the systems themselves. Partly out of frustration, and partly from a personal need to metabolize pain, I had to confront what it actually takes to build a good life. I realized I cannot even imagine a good life, let alone live one, unless I feel some measure of power within myself.In many ways, that is what this project is trying to address. We are acknowledging that we have been shaped by structures that are violent, oppressive, and unfair. These systems often make life harder rather than easier, especially for women, for children, for families, and for people who are outside the financial elite. As a woman, as a mother, as a thinker, and as a creative person, I am constantly asking: How can our actions begin to generate a different reality? What can we build now that might move us toward the future we actually want? This is why it feels like the right moment to turn toward the idea of the Inheritance of Peace. The question is whether we can have the audacity to ask for a form of peace that is not passive or lethargic. Not powerless. Not complacent. But a peace that carries strength, intention, and the capacity to reshape the conditions we have inherited.BB: Amen.AS²: I’m really trying to co-create some kind of form that is life-giving rather than life-denying. In the United States, we’ve seen a series of high-profile killings carried out by the government. What I struggle to see is the process of what replaces a bad system once it is removed. Many people agree with the idea of getting rid of what is harmful. But there seems to be much less attention on the question of how we create the good.I am very curious about that question of the good. I believe we wouldn’t even be here if there weren’t some inheritance of goodness, of peace, that we could build upon and give form to. And I’m wondering if you might share your sensibility about what an inheritance of peace looks like. You engage with the domestic sphere, but also with public policy, international policy, and even energy policy. So at whatever scale you wish to approach it, I’m very interested to hear how you think about this idea of an inheritance of peace.“I come from women who carried immense responsibility without drama or theatrics. They endured scarcity. They endured silence, social pressure, and spiritual contradiction. Yet what I inherited from them was steadiness.” BB: I often speak about an inheritance of survival. If I were to articulate an inheritance of peace, it would not be very different from the inheritances I usually write about. For me, peace is not simply the absence of conflict. My inheritance of peace is the discipline of endurance. I come from women who carried immense responsibility without drama or spectacle. They endured scarcity. They endured silence, social pressure, and spiritual contradiction. Yet what I inherited from them was steadiness.At the same time, I also inherited unrest. By unrest, I mean the awareness that certain structures are unjust. So peace, in that sense, is active. It is not passivity. It is a kind of strategic calm that allows critique to be precise rather than explosive. It is the choice to create rather than merely inherit.I also connect this idea to the environment. When I speak about the world — about trees, landscapes, and even non-living things — I am thinking about how peace is rooted in our relationship to place. In the language of citizenship, I might say I am connected to Benin and Ghana. But beneath that layer, I am connected to coastal landscapes and mountainous terrains shaped by trade, migration, and resource extraction. The sea is central to my thinking because it holds memory. It holds both departure and return. My maternal grandfather was a seaman, so whenever I think about the sea, I think about him. I think about how my mother’s family migrated to Ghana. The sea carries the residue of histories that were not always consensual. The coastline is not abstract for me. It is formative. That awareness also reminds me that land is never isolated. Even when I am physically in West Africa, I am not outside global currents. Conflicts far away reshape realities here. When I look at events such as the war between Israel and Gaza, or the geopolitical entanglements involving the United States, I see how those forces move through supply chains and energy markets.In Ghana, those currents are very tangible. They affect oil prices, supply chains, and the broader energy sector. They determine whether electricity is stable, whether supply disruptions push us toward shortages, whether people worry about spending nights in darkness because something has shifted somewhere far away.These global entanglements also shape diplomacy and politics. A statement by a president, a shift in alliances, a diplomatic posture — any of these can alter relationships between countries and create uncertainty. They ripple outward into economic conditions and into the emotional climate of daily life.In Ghana, fuel prices shape everyday survival. They affect transport, food prices, and what ends up on people’s tables. They influence whether a family can afford a full meal or whether they rely on something as simple as gari and water.“Global entanglements shape diplomacy and politics. They ripple outward into economic conditions and into the emotional climate of daily life. In Ghana, fuel prices shape everyday survival. They affect transport, food prices, and what ends up on people’s tables. They influence whether a family can afford a full meal or whether they rely on something as simple as gari and water.”Beyond those material realities, global rhetoric also shapes the emotional atmosphere of the world. It determines the news we hear, the conversations we have in churches and offices, and the ways power is discussed, justified, or mourned. Coming from a region marked deeply by colonial borders and external interventions, I cannot watch conflicts elsewhere without recognizing certain patterns. The language of defense and retaliation, the narratives of security and entitlement. These frameworks are familiar even from a distance. Conflict changes the psychic atmosphere. It sharpens questions about belonging, dispossession, nationalism, faith, and survival. Questions that might once have felt distant suddenly become personal. A simple question like, “Where are you from?” can take on a new weight. It reminds me how easily land can become sacred and weaponized at the same time.AS²: You know, sometimes I wonder whether it is really about the land itself, or about what can be extracted from it. Because if our concern were truly for the land, it would be difficult to justify an entire industry built on missiles, explosions, and destruction. The toxicity left behind — in the water, in the soil, in the air — suggests something else is driving it. Those forms of damage seem inseparable from the war economy. The exploitation of land and the machinery of conflict often move together.BB: They do, they do. And of course, when I speak about land in this context, I’m using the term broadly. I mean everything connected to it — its extraction, its use, the economies built around it. It’s a wide frame. As both a poet and a lawyer, I can’t ignore that reality. I can’t ignore the violence carried out in the name of land, the violence done to the land itself, and the violence justified as necessary for it.AS²: Yes. You know.BB: That tension concerns me deeply. When we have these conversations, you could feel how emotional it is for me, you know?AS²: Deeply, deeply. Last time I was there with you in your land, there was also the toxic waters movement happening.BB: Yeah—illegal mining, what we call galamsey, exactly. The term comes from “gather them and sell.” That’s why I say land is really a continuum. Even though I’m in West Africa, whatever is happening elsewhere still affects us here, because in many ways the same dynamics are unfolding, just on a different scale or plane. The crisis of Galamsey shows that clearly. People fight over land and water bodies in the name of extracting gold. Rivers are poisoned, forests are cleared, and communities are destabilized. When I look at that, I can’t help but think about conflicts elsewhere where land is fought over through missiles and war. The forms look different, but the underlying logic is not so different. At the end of the day, the conflict keeps circling back to the environment — who controls it, who extracts from it, and who bears the cost.AS²: Just to bring us toward a sense of conclusion today, and I know our relationship and these conversations will continue. First, I want to thank you for who you are, for joining this conversation, and for the work you are doing across so many fronts: as a culture maker, as an attorney, and as an advocate for land, sustainability, and for the rights and well-being of women and children in your region. In moments when things feel overwhelming, it’s important to remember that refusing to obey can also mean refusing to follow a broken analysis — refusing to repeat actions that we already know will produce harmful and non-generative outcomes.Before we close, I’d like to ask if you have a final thought—perhaps a nourishing idea—that you would like to leave with us. Earlier, you spoke about the inheritance of peace as something that holds conflict, analysis, and survival all at once. If there is a single seed of an idea you’d like to leave us with, perhaps we can end there so that people have space to really hear it.“I am naming ordinary actions as forms of resistance. Resistance to despair. Resistance to war. Because waking up is an act of consent to another day, even when the structures around you are flawed. Working is participation in survival. Writing is articulation rather than suppression. Loving deeply is a refusal to let hardness and pressure define who you are. And questioning is a form of intellectual integrity within systems that often discourage inquiry.”BB: Yeah, definitely. I’ll end on this note: my inheritance of peace is the capacity to continue. Peace is often imagined as the absence of conflict. No argument. No visible disruption. But the lineage I come from understands peace differently. In our lives, peace has rarely meant ease. We did not inherit stable systems. We inherited colonial afterlives and gendered expectations. There was always something pressing in on my ancestors, and on me. And yet, despite all those pressures, they continued. They woke up. They went to work. They prayed. They cooked. They raised children. They carried grief quietly, without any theatrics. They adapted without surrendering themselves completely. That continuity — day after day, without spectacle — is what I think of as peace. And I don’t see it as passive. It is a form of strength that persists, even when the conditions around it are uncertain.AS²: There you go.BB: It is discipline. It is endurance. That is what peace looks like where I come from. So when I say that my inheritance of peace is to wake — to wake up, to go to work, to write, to love, to question — I am naming ordinary actions as forms of resistance. Resistance to despair. Resistance to war. Because waking up is an act of consent to another day, even when the structures around you are flawed. Working is participation in survival. Writing is articulation rather than suppression. Loving deeply is a refusal to let hardness and pressure define who you are. And questioning is a form of intellectual integrity within systems that often discourage inquiry. That is what I would call peace.“Peace is not a gift handed down as comfort or luxury. It is something developed over time — like a muscle. It is the capacity to remain present to your life without surrendering to bitterness, without yielding to the violence of war, and without collapsing under the pressure of the times. It is forward movement without denying history.”In my lineage, peace is not a gift handed down as comfort or luxury. It is something developed over time — like a muscle. It is the capacity to remain present to your life without surrendering to bitterness, without yielding to the violence of war, and without collapsing under the pressure of the times. It is forward movement without denying history. So my inheritance of peace is not calm waters. As my maternal grandmother used to say, it is the skill of navigating rough waters without capsizing. That, for me, is what my peace is.AS²: Wow. Beautiful. Thank you so much for your presence in my life, and for taking the time to come on the podcast so that people who haven’t met you yet can hear you. I think these small alliances that cross obvious borders — of generation, of geography — are part of restructuring cultural life to something more planetary. Something grounded in understanding and care for one another.BB: Yes, that’s true. I should thank you too, Amy. There’s a saying where I come from. It’s a playful variation on “birds of a feather flock together.” We say, birds of a feather confuse their owners. But really, what it means is that we recognize each other — we are of the same mind, working toward similar ideals and values. Resources:Human Rights Council Mid Term Report“A Proclamation” , poem in Libretto Magazine. Support Happy Monthlies Menstrual Education Organization“Galamsey in Ghana: Mitigating its Negative Effects” by Felicia Dede Addy and Shikshya AdhikariThis interview has been edited and condensed. Listen to and follow Inheritance of Peace with Amy Shimshon-Santo on Apple Podcasts or substack at Warm Blooded Mammal With Hair. The music for this program is by Avila Santo. Warm Blooded Mammal With Hair is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts, and support my work, become a paid or free subscriber. Thank you! Get full access to Warm Blooded Mammal With Hair at amyshimshonsanto.substack.com/subscribe

[PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ENGLISH TRANSCRIPT]LA ÉTICA BIOCÉNTRICA DE MARGARITA LEÓN “La ternura es la forma más modesta de amor. No tiene emblemas o símbolos especiales. Aparece cuando miramos de cerca y con cuidado a otro ser, a algo que no es nuestro ‘yo’ pero donde nos descubrimos a nosotros mismos.” - Olga TokarczukAmy Shimshon-Santo (A): Hola. Estoy aquí hoy con la fabulosa Margarita León, poeta fenomenal. Vamos a aprender con ella y escucharla y conversar sobre la herencia de la paz.Margarita León (M): Soy una mujer relativamente joven que he dedicado mis esfuerzos, mi tiempo, los años que tengo de conciencia, a enaltecer con un nombre artístico la herencia de mi madre. Mi mamá me heredó una raíz, que es la raíz otomí. El idioma que me enseñó, me crió desde el rincón más humilde que es un rincón semidesértico de México, es el estado de Hidalgo, históricamente marginado por las estructuras de poder que gobiernan nuestro país.He trabajado mucho personalmente tratando de criar a mis hermanas pequeñas que se quedaron a mi cargo porque mi hermana mayor migró a los Estados Unidos. Después migró mi hermano, después otro hermano, y mi hermana pequeña. Me atraviesa una historia de migración muy grande, que ha sido muy triste, pero que al mismo tiempo ha sido un motor para interesarme en estos temas. Por eso estoy aquí. Por eso soy amiga de Amy. Compartimos además las inquietudes de la poesía.Más que una poeta en lengua hñahñu, que es el idioma otomí, un idioma mexicano indigena. Uno de los más importantes de México. Soy una mujer comprometida con enaltecer esa raíz que he añorado desde mi infancia, esa herencia que me dejó mi madre. Ella era una mujer muy sabia que extendía tres pesos para alimentar a diez bocas en su casa. Una mujer que supo cómo sobrevivir a las violencias que una mujer indígena y pobre puede sufrir en México.A: Pues es un honor y un gran placer estar juntas y tener chance de convivir y escucharte, y crecer nuestra relación que ya vamos un tiempo cultivando. Cuéntanos, ¿qué te toca hacer hoy con tu fuerza de vida? Sé que enseñas. Sé que escribes, que has hecho en investigaciones regionales. Pero en tus propias palabras, ¿qué te toca hacer?“Una de las responsabilidades más grandes que tengo es la de criar. Más allá que crear mi obra poética, paralelamente debo estar criando a mi hijo. Tengo como una obligación, casi heredada, que él sea un buen ser humano.”M: Pienso que una de las responsabilidades más grandes que tengo es la de criar — la crianza de mi hijo. Por eso este tema de las herencias de paz me provoca mucho. Me provoca tantos sentimientos eso de andar peleando unos con otros. Porque me provoca justamente estar pendiente de lo que ocurre en mi entorno. Recientemente falleció un amigo muy querido, un maestro para mí. Alguien a quien he leído, que he estudiado, y he querido mucho. Se llama Eduardo Hurtado Montalvo. Él decía que ser poeta es tener las antenas bien puestas para recibir toda la información que hay a nuestro alrededor. Pienso que debo estar mirando todo lo que acontece a mi alrededor porque estoy criando más allá de crear mi obra poética, debo estar criando a mi hijo, que tiene siete años. Siento una obligación casi heredada de que él sea un buen ser humano.A: Sí.M: Y eso es algo que pesa mucho, pero que a la vez se disfruta. Y es un sentimiento. Creo que tú me comprendes.A: Sí como madre, claro.M: Exacto. Como un sentimiento de responsabilidad y pero que al mismo tiempo te genera felicidad. Pero al mismo tiempo, esa felicidad suele pesar por el amor que sientes a esos humanitos que estás criando y que quieres que tengan una piel sensible a lo que acontece en el mundo.A: Sí. Si Si. Entonces, ya has mencionado un poco la conexión de las tierras. Ya hemos conversado bastante sobre el ser planetario. Ser humano significa pertenecer a la Tierra. Entonces, ¿con qué tierras sientes una conexión?“He sido muy curiosa de conocer el mundo porque cuanto más lejos estoy más ganas tengo de regresar. Mi conexión más profunda está acá en el Valle del Mezquital.”M: Bueno, he tenido la oportunidad de estar en Sudamérica, en el sur. He tenido la suerte de conocer con mayor profundidad Argentina, por ejemplo, que estuve ahí ya un tiempo haciendo unos estudios, en Perú, en Lima, con amistades que conocí en Cuba. He sido muy curiosa de conocer el mundo porque justamente cuanto más lejos estoy más ganas tengo de regresar aquí. Lo quiero, más como que más siento esa conexión que me jala, que me atrae.A: Mhm.M: Porque aquí es donde más feliz he sido y donde más he sufrido. Es una dicotomía rara y perversa. Quieres estar donde más sufres, donde más te duele, pero también donde más he sido feliz, porque es donde crecí, donde tuve a mi madre por nueve años. Donde enterraron a mi padre y donde están mi abuela, mi abuelo, que mis hermanos mayores no tuvieron la suerte de venir a enterrarlos porque no pueden venir después de haberse ido, porque no podrían volver y tienen a sus hijos allá.Entonces mi conexión más grande, más profunda es acá donde se le llama el Valle del Mezquital, que es un valle semidesértico donde amanecemos a menos 5 grados, pero durante el mediodía estamos a 20 - 25 grados de temperatura. Es un clima extremo que te duele en las mejillas el viento cuando te pega porque es muy frío, pero también el clima cálido del verano es hermoso, hermoso. Y es acá donde yo quiero que descansen mis cenizas también junto a la gente que más amo.A: Qué bonito. El círculo de la vida. Las generaciones. Todo el mundo sabe que hay herencias de violencia, de colonización, de desposesión, de esclavitud, del fascismo, de tantas cosas que nos han hecho a nuestras familias sufrir. Pero pienso que no estaríamos aquí vivos si alguien en nuestras familias no tuviera un concepto de cómo encontrar una estabilidad interna y también social. Como no nada más sobrevivir sino criar personas fenomenales como tú. Ahora sí, entramos en la pregunta central: ¿cuál es tu herencia de paz?“El pueblo Otomí, mi pueblo, es un pueblo que se rige por una ética biocéntrica — una ética centrada en el amor a la naturaleza, y la conexión con el todo cósmico.”M: Creo que hay una herencia que me dejó mi madre. Y también mi padre, pese a sus grandes defectos, que es la herencia del amor a la naturaleza. En las clases que doy en la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, yo les digo a mis alumnas y a mis alumnos que el pueblo Otomí, o sea mi pueblo, es un pueblo que se que se rige por una ética biocéntrica, una ética centrada en el amor a la naturaleza, a la conexión con el todo cósmico.Porque acá hay una de las prácticas muy antiguas y milenarias de mis abuelos. Mis padres todavía me enseñaron. Mi padre me enseñó a hacerlo, y yo le voy a enseñar a mi hijo. Pero cuando sea un poco más grande, porque es una cosa de espiritualidad y de creencia filosófica, pero también es un tema delicado que estamos tratando con los guardianes de la naturaleza. Acá los conocemos como Sanjua, que son guardianes que son pequeños, son piedras que caminan y que castigan al humano que no cuida las plantas, que no cuida los animales, que destruye. Y entonces, por milenios, ese pensamiento espiritual es el que permitió el respeto y la supervivencia de la naturaleza, de los animales.De ahorita con los megaproyectos que se han implementado, como acá hay una cementera de un hombre muy rico de México. Se ha destruido parte de esa fauna y de flora que había aquí cerca, se han desplazado. Se han ido los pájaros. Se han ido muchos animales porque el cambio del entorno del aire es otro. Ahora está contaminado por otros. Factores, ya que vienen de esta cementera que está operando acá en medio de la serranía.Entonces esa herencia para mí es fundamental. Yo no soy católica. No soy cristiana. No soy evangélica. No tengo otra creencia más que esa, que es la del amor a la naturaleza, la conexión que tenemos con las plantas, los animales, todos los bichitos. Le digo a mi hijo. Todos, incluso los pequeños insectos, son seres sintientes. No los puedes aplastar porque tú no eres superior a ellos. Y ese pensamiento para mí es el que yo quiero heredarle a mi hijo.Pero que al mismo tiempo me da miedo porque este mundo no está listo para una persona que piense así, porque aquí la supervivencia del más fuerte es la que impera el que tiene más poder, más armamento nuclear más. Y a lo largo de la historia. Lo hemos visto.Y me da miedo esa herencia que esa misma herencia mía me da miedo que mi hijo la tenga, pero a su vez, es lo único que yo tengo para darle. Entonces, no sé, Amy, tú ves que yo estoy en un en una como en una paradoja. ¿qué voy a hacer? Porque es lo que tengo para él y al mismo tiempo, se que eso lo puede volver frágil e indefenso ante los otros. No?A: Ah! Es una complejidad que he pensado bastante también en eso, pero lo veo como fuerza. Lo veo como poder. Lo veo como orientación de vida y no como fragilidad. Porque en mi propia perspectiva, en la violencia no hay futuro. No hay futuro en la violencia. Nos enseñaron que en las historias dominantes hay siempre armamentos. Hay siempre lo más poderoso y las víctimas. Yo sé que eso es una herencia humana que puede existir en el rumbo de la casa con violencia doméstica o en el barrio. Y no es nada más las personas que ocupan posiciones de poder más altas que podrían ser violentos uno con el otro.Pero desde mi perspectiva, esa herencia que recibiste de tus padres y abuelos, y que quisieras dar a tu hijo, es la única forma de la familia humana de sobrevivir. No hay futuro sin esa filosofía y perspectiva y forma de vivir que te han dado a ti, y que estás pasando a la próxima generación.​​No debe ser siempre lo más violento, más dominante. Bueno, esa es nuestra pregunta. Si. Hay fuerza y poder en otra filosofía de vivir. Yo no veo otra solución. Uno no puede ganar a través del abuso de poder o la violencia. Y de repente es porque yo vengo de una cultura en la que las guerras han impactado bastante no lo veo como solución.M: Sí, exacto. Es como la perdición, yo creo, del alma humana, el hecho de justamente pensar en que como si es fuerte, si es poderoso, se puede aplastar al otro. Y esa es la historia. Por desgracia, la historia no le hacemos caso, pero nos ha mostrado que eso es un grave error.A: Gran error, gran error. Me acuerdo cuando era chiquita en la escuela cuando estudiamos historia, era estudiar guerras. Y (de niña) me pregunté, ¿la guerra es la historia? Quiero informarme más con esta experiencia del podcast. En este proyecto pregunta, ¿Cuál es nuestra herencia de no guerra, de no violencia, y cómo eso puede ser poderoso?M: Nos atrapan y nos llevan a mirar lo que ellos quieren. Hay que mirar otros ángulos. Desde otra perspectiva mirar lo que está aconteciendo y sobre todo con otra sensibilidad. Decía otra autora que me ayuda mucho. Y ella dice, lo que nos va a salvar como humanidad es la ternura.A: Sí! Cien por ciento. ¿Cómo se llama ella?M: Ella se llama Rita Segato. Es una Argentina que trabaja muy duro por todo estos temas. Ella estuvo en Brasil haciendo estudios. Me parece impresionante. Justo ¿cuándo hemos mirado al otro con ternura? Que la empatía nos provoque las ganas de ayudar lejos que querer aplastar como alguien inferior a mi. Justo que de repente esa situación de ahora toca a mi ser lo más fuerte. Ahora me toca a mi ser el poderoso. Lleva esto. Tengo al poder entonces aplasto a los otros. Y no hay la posibilidad que ese otro reciba nada de mi, al contrario. Te quiero despojar de todo, incluso de tu humanidad.Nos enreda la violencia. Nos atrapa. Y todo lo miramos normal. Mirar a un niño que está muriendo de hambre. Mirar a una persona que está mendigando. Muriéndose de frío. Lo miramos normal.Me llama la atención. Hace poco fuimos a comprar comida a la tienda. Había una señora pidiendo comida, pidiendo dinero. Mi marido y yo, ya estamos acostumbrados, y él no. (Mi hijo) estaba comiendo unas papas y dice, “Toma. Come.” Algo muy natural. De humano. Ya es normal para nosotros, para él que es pequeño, le daba sus papas. Ya normalizamos todo lo que supone nos hace humanos. Pero mi hijo una vez le dio comida a una mujer que pedía en la calle, con total naturalidad. Nosotros como adultos, ya estamos anestesiados. Eso es lo que no debería pasar: perder nuestra humanidad.A: En primer lugar, tu hijo ya está siguiendo tus lecciones de empatía. No son enseñados como un curso. Lo está percibiendo. Si alguien tiene hambre, lo voy a compartir. Es lógico. Me acuerdo que el segundo marido de mi abuela paterna me dijo que “nunca le das nada a nadie pidiendo porque debe estar manifestando en frente del edificio federal.” Él estaba muy a favor de la protesta y acción política. Pensaba que la caridad nunca sería suficiente.M: Fíjate que yo últimamente he pensado eso es la cosa. Él nunca me había visto hacerlo, Amy. Él. Su humanidad. De pequeño. Pues, ¿por qué no le voy a dar las papas si estoy comiendo y tiene hambre? Su misma esencia humana dijo, “Tiene hambre? Le doy las papas.” Ella debe buscarse, no estar mendigando porque esto no va a acabar nunca. Y era una mujer joven. Para mi, yo dije, bueno. Ella puede hacer otras cosas para ganarse el alimento. Dentro de mí. Pero no dije nada. Cuando mi hijo le dio las papas nada más le felicité. Dije, “muy lindo lo que hiciste.”A: Sí. Muy lindo. Y en la ciudad donde vivimos, donde vivo yo, hay mucha gente sin vivienda. Y están viviendo en la calle. Hay suficiente para todos. Entonces en la estructura de cómo vivimos se está fallando mucho. Me alegra mucho la conciencia de tu hijo y la generosidad. Que se siente naturalmente dentro de él. ¡Claro que vamos a compartir las papas! Si hay el amor por la naturaleza y una ética biocéntrica. El moverse de un lado para otro no es salir del mundo, cruzar una frontera, por ejemplo, de estado o de país es moverse en la Tierra. Un proceso de repente natural. Yo sé que para mí, mis padres eran inmigrantes. Mi madre emigrante, mi padre e hijo de emigrantes me casé y tuve hijos con alguien migrante de otro continente. Después nos divorciamos pero seguimos como familia. Para mí, la inmigración es algo muy natural. Hay que respetar porque uno no sabe de qué condiciones viene otro. Me molesta mucho como representan al inmigrante como alguien cuestionable. Hay muchas razones de por qué moverse de un lugar a otro. Tu perspectiva social de paz tiene que ver con la naturaleza, el todo cósmico. ¿Cómo ha afectado tus estudios y experiencia y poesía el tema de la migración?M: Estoy de acuerdo contigo que la migración es, y debe ser vista como algo natural. En efecto, no hay razón para cerrar fronteras para limitar el hecho que las personas queramos buscar, otros mundos, otras oportunidades, y moverse. Simplemente, desplazarse para su propio desarrollo. Hay muchas razones que llevan a la imigración.Yo miro este tema de la imigración. La perspectiva que tienen muchos Mexicanos tienen que tienen origen indígena, es de apego con su territorio. Cuando este tema comenzó, de llevarse a los braceros para que les ayudaron a ustedes allá (a Estados Unidos — ya hace muchos años. Cuando comenzó esta situación. La gente iba y regresaba, naturalmente. Ganaban su dinero. Regresaban a México. Porque hay una arraigo muy fuerte por la tierra. El humano es así. Somos así. Como que tu territorio te llama. Tu paisaje. Tu tierra. Donde naciste. Creciste. Dónde nació tu abuela. Dónde nacieron tus abuelos. Te llama. Naturalmente si no se cerrarán las fronteras irían y vendrían. No se quedarán allí encerrados. Alla atrapados.Entonces es realmente un absurdo. Una vez que llegan a su país, no se pueden salir porque están cerradas las fronteras, cuando naturalmente las personas podrían ir y venir cuando quieran.“Hay una arraigo muy fuerte por la tierra. El humano es así. Somos así. Tu territorio te llama. Dónde nacieron tus abuelos. Te llama. Allí es donde están sus ombligos.”A. Si. 100%M: Entonces en el caso del pueblo Otomí, tienen una arraigo muy grande por su tierra porque el pensamiento espiritual, su pensamiento, su religiosidad, su filosofía de vida, está totalmente vinculado con el territorio. Porque allí es donde están los guardianes. Allí es donde están sus ombligos. Hay una costumbre del pueblo indigena de enterrar el ombligo en un árbol, en una ceremonia que hacen los padres. Entonces, “el ombligo te jala”, dicen. Te jala para que vuelvas. Por eso mucha gente cruza la frontera de la manera más horrible. Pasando por el río, la experiencia más horrible. Regresan a su pueblo. Y después vuelven a ir. ¿Por qué? Porque hay un arraigo importante por el territorio. Entonces, respeto al territorio y al libre tránsito de las personas.A: Si. Si. Adoro eso. Entonces, para cerrar nuestra plática de hoy - y la plática va a continuar porque eso es la amistad. Le doy tantas gracias de ser tu amiga. De estar conectadas. De colaborar y hacer cosas juntas da mucha motivación en mi vida. Porque son tiempos difíciles y hay que tener con quien soñar.Escuché a Angela Davis decir que es muy importante cultivar la imaginación. No podemos dejar de caer en la falta de imaginación. Porque sin imaginación no hay posibilidad.Ella no dijo esto, pero sin posibilidad es difícil criar a nuestros hijos, es difícil escribir, es difícil confrontar los poderes que están congelados en una perspectiva de dominación, de abuso del poder, de estragar las tierras, y de tratar a la gente sin dignidad.Es difícil ahora soñar, pero te voy a pedir tus sueños. Idealmente, ¿qué te gustaría para divulgar tu propia herencia de paz? ¿Cómo te gustaría ampliar la herencia de paz de tus antepasados?M: Primero, eres una mujer muy inquieta, que te gusta provocar reflexiones que son muy urgentes y necesarias. Te acuerdas que fuimos a la playa. Caminamos y caminamos. Hablamos y hablamos. Muchas cosas que nos surgieron. Compartimos. Acababan de pasar los incendios allá donde vives. Te agradezco mucho la confianza que me consideras para que tengas estas conversaciones. Como dices, permitir que la imaginación nos despierte. Que no nos quedamos ahí anestesiados diciendo así es la vida, así es el mundo. Y no nos quedamos nada más así mirando las injusticias. Y eso yo te admiro mucho, porque luchas. Porque estás ahí alzando la voz ahí por las personas que tienen derecho a transitar en este planeta, en esta tierra.No jaulas, no muros no nos van a detener. La naturaleza humana es libre. Libre de estar donde quiera. De habitar donde se nos da la gana. Porque es nuestro planeta tierra, como hemos hablado muchas veces tú y yo.Es un tema que me genera muchos sentimientos por mi familia, pero me conmueven todas las historias que tiene que ver con este tema y las violencias que tiene a ver con esto. Realmente yo quisiera ver cuidar juntos este planeta, que es nuestra madre. La madre tierra es nuestra madre. Todo lo que nos provea es para compartir. Es para todos.A: Exacto.M: Entonces yo pienso que el tema de este pensamiento está en el caso del pueblo Otomí, de mis hermanos, de mucha gente de acá de la zona, y de varias partes del país que se han ido. Tienen un arraigo muy grande por su tierra porque el pensamiento espiritual, lo que es como su religiosidad, o su filosofía de vida está totalmente vinculada con el territorio. Porque ahí es donde están los guardianes. Ahí es donde están sus ombligos. Hay una costumbre muy fuerte del pueblo indígena.Entonces “el ombligo te jala,” dicen. Te jala para que vuelvas. Por eso mucha gente, aunque cruce la frontera de la manera más horrible. Y haber pasado por el río, la experiencia más horrible. Regresan a su pueblo y después vuelven a ir. Es algo. ¿por qué? Porque hay un arraigo grande al territorio. Entonces el respeto al territorio y al libre tránsito de las personas.A: Sí, Sí, adoro eso entonces. Ya para encerrar nuestra plática de hoy, y yo sé que la plática va a continuar, porque eso es la amistad. Le doy tantas gracias a ser amiga de estar conectada de colaborar y hacer cosas juntas. Me da mucha motivación en mi vida. Porque son tiempos difíciles y hay que tener con quién soñar. Escuché a Angela Davis decir que es muy importante cultivar la imaginación y que no nos podemos dejar caer en la falta de imaginación porque sin imaginación no hay posibilidad. Y sin posibilidad, ella no dijo eso, pero digo yo que es difícil criar a nuestros hijos. Es difícil escribir. Es difícil confrontar los poderes que son congelados en una perspectiva de dominación, de abuso de poder, de entregar las tierras y tratar a la gente sin dignidad.Entonces diría que es difícil ahora soñar, pero te voy a pedir tus sueños. Idealmente, ¿qué te gustaría ver para divulgar tu propia herencia de paz? ¿Qué te gustaría trabajar para ampliar la herencia de paz de tus antepasados?M: Sí. Primero. Bueno, igual yo me siento muy feliz porque eres una mujer muy inquieta que le gusta y justo provocar estas reflexiones, que son muy urgentes, muy necesarias. Y desde que te conocí me acuerdo que fuimos a caminar, ¿te acuerdas de la playa?A: Mhm.M: Hablamos y hablamos y caminamos. Y muchas cosas nos surgieron donde tú vives. Te agradezco mucho también la confianza. Que me consideres para permitir que la imaginación nos despierte. Que no miremos las injusticias y nos quedemos nada más así mirando. Yo te admiro mucho porque luchas por estar ahí alzando la voz. Y, en este caso, por las personas que tienen derecho a transitar en este planeta, esta Tierra. Yo no sé qué jaulas, que muros, se va a poder detener. La naturaleza humana es libre. Libre de estar donde quiera de de habitar donde se nos dé la gana. Es nuestro planeta Tierra, como hemos hablado muchas veces, tú y yo. Es un tema que me atraviesa totalmente. Me conmueve. Me genera muchos sentimientos por mi familia, pero me conmueven los que tienen que ver con las violencias que se generan a partir de esto. Y realmente lo justo es que podamos ser libres de cuidar juntos a todos, entre toda la raza humana. Cuidar este planeta, que es nuestro, es nuestra madre, la madre Tierra es nuestra madre. Todo lo que nos provee es para compartir. Es para todos. Hay un poema muy hermoso de Federico García Lorca, que tuve el honor de traducir al Otomí. Y dice que esta tierra da frutos para todos.A: Sí.M: Y es para todos. No es para unos cuantos. No es para los más poderosos. No es para el que grite más, para el que más armas tenga. Es para todos. La tierra debe a todos, y nosotros debemos cuidarla y no explotarla y querer las tierras raras y querer el petróleo. Y todo eso que tanta lucha y guerra ocasionan.A: 100%. Así.M: Quisieras compartir un poema para nosotras. Publiqué un poema en una revista de la Universidad de Guadalajara en una revista que se llama Luvina. Es un poema que escribí. Creo que alguna vez yo te había compartido un poco de este poema. A lo mejor te platiqué o leímos. Es un poema que se llama “Norte”. Norte, los caminantes nocturnos. Y es un poema de migración que estuve como ideando y escribiendo un poco cuando estuve en Texas con mi hermano mayor, el semestre pasado. Entonces lo leo en Otomí y en español.M. León presenta su poema plurilingüe “Norte” en el audio podcast. M: Ay, sí. Ternura. Hay que darnos ternura.A: Y es un gran placer y honor estar junto contigo. En esos tiempos te deseo todo lo bonito para ti y para la familia, tus comunidades, tierras y futuros.M: No gracias a Ti Amy, siempre por compartir y por provocarme hermosas reflexiones, y siempre vas a contar conmigo.A: Igual. Estoy aquí para ti también.M: Gracias. A ver cuándo nos vamos a caminar otra vez a la playa.THE BIOCENTRIC ETHICS OF MARGARITA LEÓN“Tenderness is the most modest form of love. It has no emblems or special symbols. It appears when we look closely and carefully at another being, at something that is not our ‘self’ but where we discover ourselves.” — Olga TokarczukAmy Shimshon-Santo (A): Hello. I’m here today with the fabulous Margarita León, a phenomenal poet. We’re going to learn from her and listen to her perspective on the inheritance of peace.Margarita León (M): I am a relatively young woman who has dedicated my time and conscious effort to praising my mother’s heritage through my artistic voice. My mother’s inheritance was our Otomí roots. The language that she taught me. She raised me from the most humble corner, the economically poorest, in the semi-desert region of Mexico in the state of Hidalgo historically marginalized by the power structures that govern our country.Personally, I have worked a lot trying to raise my younger sisters who were left in my care because my eldest sister immigrated to the United States. After that my brother migrated, then another brother, and my youngest sister. A very large migration story runs through me, one that has been very sad, but at the same time has been the engine of my interest in these themes. That’s why I’m here. That’s why I’m Amy’s friend. We also share restless feeling about poetry.More than a poet of the hñahñu language, that is the Otomí language, an Indigenous Mexican language. One of the most important indigenous languages in Mexico. I’m a woman committed to praising this heritage that I have longed for since childhood, this inheritance that my mother left me. She was a very wise woman who could stretch three pesos to feed ten mouths in her home. A woman who knew how to survive the violences that Indigenous and economically poor women can suffer in Mexico.A: It’s an honor and a great pleasure to be together and listen to you, and to grow our friendship that we’ve been cultivating for some time now. Tell us about what you do with your life force. I know you teach. I know you write, and have done regional research. But in your own words, what is it that you are called to do?“One of the greatest responsibilities I have is to create. Beyond the creation of my poetic work, I must also be raising my son who is seven years old. I feel an obligation, almost inherited, to make sure he becomes a good human being.”M: One of the greatest responsibilities I have is to create — the childhood of my son. That’s why the theme of inheritance of peace provokes me so deeply. It provokes many feelings inside me, and some of these feelings clash against each other. This makes me become aware of what is happening within me. Recently a very dear friend of mine died. For me, he was a teacher. Someone who I have read, studied, and cared about. His name is Eduardo Hurtado Montalvo. He used to say that being a poet was like having antennas well positioned to receive all the information around us. I must be watching everything that is happening around me because beyond the creation of my poetic work, I must also be raising my son who is seven years old. I feel an obligation, almost inherited, to make sure he becomes a good human being.A: Yes.M: And that is something that weighs heavily on me, but, at the same time, I enjoy. Its a feeling. I believe that you understand.A: Yes, as a mother, of course.M: Exactly. It is a feeling of responsibility, but, at the same time, it generates happiness in you. This happiness is weighed down by love for those little humans you are raising and that you want to have a sensitive skin to what happens in the world.A: Yes. Yes, yes. You have mentioned a connection to the land. We talked a lot about what it means to be an earthling. Being human signifies belonging to the Earth. So, what lands do you feel a connection to?M: I’ve had the opportunity to be in South America. I’ve been fortunate to get to know Argentina very well, for example. I was there for some time doing research in Peru, in Lima, with friends I met in Cuba. I’ve been very curious to know the world because the farther away I am the greater my desire to return here. I love it here. I feel a connection to place that pulls me, that attracts me.A: Mhm.M: I’ve been the happiest here, and it is also where I’ve suffered the most. It’s a strange and perverse dichotomy. You want to be where you suffer the most, where it hurts you the most, but also where I’ve been the happiest. Because it’s where I grew up, where I had my mother for nine years. Where they buried my father, and where my grandmother and grandfather are. My older siblings didn’t have the chance to come and bury them after they departed because they could not return and leave their children.So, my most profound connection is here in a place called the Valle del Mezquital, that is a semi-desert valley where we awake to minus five degrees but by midday we’re at a temperature of 20–25 degrees celsius. It’s an extreme climate that makes your cheeks hurt when the wind hits because it’s so cold. But the warm summer climate is beautiful. Here is where I want my ashes to rest alongside the people I love the most.“I’ve been curious to know the world because the farther away I go, the greater my desire to return. My deepest, most profound, connection is being here in the Mezquital Valley.”A: How beautiful. The circle of life. The generations. Everyone knows that there are legacies of violence, colonization, dispossession, slavery, fascism … so many things that have made our families suffer. But I believe that we wouldn’t be here alive if someone in our families didn’t have a concept of how to find internal and social stability. Not to just survive, but to raise phenomenal people like you. So now let’s get to the central question: What is your inheritance of peace?M: I believe that my mother left me an inheritance. And also my father despite his great flaws. It is the inheritance of love for nature. In the classes I teach at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, I tell my students that the Otomí people (my people) are a people governed by a biocentric ethics, an ethics centered in the love of nature and a connection with the cosmic whole.Here are the ancient practices of my grandparents that have lasted millenia. My parents taught me. My father showed me how, and I will teach my son. But when he is a bit older because it’s a matter of spirituality and philosophical belief, but it’s also a delicate topic since we are speaking of the guardians of nature. Here, we know them as Sanjua, that are guardians that are small, small stoned that walk and will punish a human who does not care for the plants, who does not care for the animals, who destroys. So, for millennia, this spiritual thought is what permitted our respect and survival of nature, and the animals.Currently, with the mega projects they have implemented here … because there is a cement factory owned by a very rich man from Mexico. This has destroyed part of the fauna and flora nearby. They have been displaced. The birds have gone. Many of the animals have gone because of changes to the environment. Even the air is different. It’s contaminated by others. These factors come from the cement plant that is operating here in the middle of the mountain range. So this inheritance is fundamental to me. I am not Catholic. I am not Christian. I am not evangelical. I have no other beliefs than this one, which is the love for nature, the connections we have with plants, animals, and insects. I tell this to my son, Everything, even the smallest insects, are sentient beings. You must not crush them because you are not superior to them. This way of thinking is what I want to pass on to my son as his inheritance.But at the same time, I’m scared that this world isn’t ready for a person who thinks in this way. Because survival of the strongest demands one have more power, more nuclear armaments. Throughout history, we have seen this.And, it frightens me that the same inheritance I want my son to have, at the same time, its all I have to give him. So, I don’t know, Amy. You see the paradox that I am in. What will I do? Because this is what I have for him and at the same time, I know that this could make him appear fragile or defenseless against others. No?“The Otomí people, my people, are a people governed by a biocentric ethics, an ethics centered on the love of nature and a connection with the cosmic whole.”A: Ah! It’s complex. I’ve thought about this a great deal too, but I see it as a strength. I see it as power. I see it as an orientation towards life and not as fragility. Because from my own perspective, in violence holds no future. There is no future in violence. We were taught dominant historical narratives where there are always weapons. There is always a most powerful and their victims. I know that this is a human heritage that can exist at home due to domestic violence or in the public sphere. And it’s not only people who occupy the highest positions of power who can be violent to one another.In my perspective, this inheritance that you received from your parents and grandparents, and that you want to give to your son, is the only way for the human family to survive. There is no future without this philosophy, perspective, and way of life that you have been given, and that you are passing on to the next generation. Things should not always fall to the most violent, the most dominant. Well, this is our question. Yes. Is there strength and power in another philosophy of living? I don’t see another solution. A person can never really win through abuse of power or violence. And maybe it is because I come from a culture that has been deeply impacted by wars, that I do not see them as a solution. M: Yes, exactly. It’s like the perdition of the human soul. The fact of thinking that because one is strong, if one is powerful, that one can crush the other. And that is history. Unfortunately, we don’t pay attention to history, but it has shown us that this is a grave error.A: An enormous mistake, enormous mistake. I remember when I was a child that when we studied history, we studied wars. And, as a girl, I asked myself, “Is war our only history?” I want to learn more through this audio project. The question driving this project is: What is our heritage of no-war, of non-violence, and how can this become powerful?M: We are trapped, and they bring us to the mirror they want us to see. We must view things from other angles. From another perspective to see what is happening, and more than anything from another sensibility. Another author who helped me a lot said, what will save humanity is tenderness.“We need to look from other angles. Look at what is happening from another perspective, and, above all, another sensibility.”A: Yes! One hundred percent. What’s the author’s name?M: Her name is Rita Segato. She is an Argentine who works very intensely on these themes. She has been in Brazil doing research. Her idea is impressive. When was the last time we looked at the other with tenderness? When can empathy provoke us to have the desire to help rather than to crush someone as an inferior? When it’s my turn to be the strongest. Now it’s my turn to be powerful. If I have power I crush the others. And there is no possibility that this “other” receives my own response. On the contrary, I want to dispossess you of everything, even your humanity. Violence entangles us. It traps us. And we see this as normal. See a child starving. See a person begging. Freezing to death. We see it as normal. Something caught my attention when we went to buy food at the store. There was a woman begging for food. Asking for money. My husband and I, we’re already accustomed to this but our son wasn’t. (My son) was eating chips and he says to her, “Here. Eat.” Something very natural. Humane. For us adults, it’s already been normalized. But for my young son, he just gave her his chips. We normalize everything that is supposed to make us human. But my son once gave food to a woman who was begging on the street, as a natural gesture. We as adults, are already anesthetized. This should not happen or we lose our humanity.A: First of all, your son is already following your lessons of empathy. They aren’t taught in a course. He’s perceiving them. If someone is hungry, I’m going to share. It’s logical. I remember my grandfather G saying, not to give anything to anyone who is begging because “they should be demonstrating in front of the federal building.” He was in favor of protest and political action. He thought charity would never be enough.M: Lately I’ve been thinking about this too. My son had never seen me do this, Amy. Him. His humanity. As a small child. Well, why wouldn’t I give her the chips if I’m eating and she’s hungry? His own human essence said, “She’s hungry? I’ll give her the chips.” While I thought, she should find work, not be begging because this will never end. And she was a young woman. I thought to myself, She could do other things to earn food access. I said this to myself, But I didn’t say anything aloud. When my son gave her the chips, I just congratulated him. I said, “That was very kind of you.”A: Yes. Beautiful. In the city where I live there are many unhoused people living on the street. There is enough for everyone, but the structures of how we live are failing. Your son’s awareness and generosity make me happy. It comes naturally from within him. Of course, compartimos las papas! If there is love for nature and a biocentric ethics, then moving from one place to another is not leaving the world. Crossing a border, for example to a state or country, is moving along the Earth. A natural process. My parents were from immigrant families. My mother was am immigrant. My father was the son of immigrants. I married and had children with an immigrant. Later on we divorced, but we continue as family. For me, immigration is something very natural. We must respect immigration because we don’t know the conditions people come from. It bothers me greatly how the immigrants is being represented as questionable. There are many reasons why people move from one place to another. How does your social perspective on peace have to do with nature and the cosmic whole? How has this effected your studies, experience, and poetry about migration?M: I agree with you that migration is, and should be seen as, something natural. In effect, there is no reason to close borders to limit what people wish to seek, other worlds, other opportunities, and move themselves. Simply to relocate for their own development. There are many reasons that lead to migration. I study this theme of migration. The perspective that many Mexicans of Indigenous origins have, is a deep attachment to one’s territory. The issue of taking Braceros to help you over there has gone on for many years. When this situation started people went and returned naturally. They earned their money. They returned to Mexico. Because there is a very strong sense of rootedness to the land. Humans are like this. We are like this. It’s as if your territory calls to you. Your landscape. Your land. Your birthplace. Where you grew up. Where your grandmother was born. Where your grandparents were born. Calls to you. Naturally, if borders were not closed, people would go and return. They wouldn’t stay there trapped. So, it’s truly absurd. Once they arrive in your country, they can’t leave because borders are closed while naturally people could come and go as they wished. A: Yes. M: In the case of the Otomí people, they have a very strong attachment to their land because their spiritual thinking, their thoughts, religiosity, and philosophy of life is completely tied to territory. Because that is where the guardians are. That is where their ombligos are. There is a custom among Indigenous peoples of burying the umbilical cord at the base of a tree in a ceremony performed by the parents. And so they say, “el ombligo te jala.” Your bellybutton pulls you. It pulls you so you return. That’s why many people cross the border in the most horrible ways, crossing the river, and they return to their towns. Then they go again. Why? Because there is a profound rootedness to territory. So, respect for territory and for the free movement of people. “What I want is for us to be free to care for this planet together. All of us. The entire human race. Care for this planet that is ours. Mother Earth is our mother. Everything she provides is for everyone.”A: Yes. Yes. I love that. So, to close our conversation today — and our conversations will continue because that’s friendship. I give thanks for your friendship. For being connected. Collaborating together provides a lot of motivation in my life. These are difficult times and we have to have people to dream with. I heard Angela Davis say that it is very important to cultivate the imagination. We cannot allow ourselves to fall into the lack of imagination because without imagination there is no possibility. And, she didn’t say this but without possibility it’s difficult to raise our children. It is difficult to write. It is difficult to confront the powers that are frozen in domination, abuse of power, and the realities of climate change.It is a difficult time to dream, but I am going to ask you for your dreams. Ideally, what would you like in order to spread your own heritage of peace? How would you like to expand the heritage of peace of your ancestors?M: I feel happy because you are a very restless woman who likes to provoke urgent and necessary reflections. Ever since I met you. I remember that we went walking. Do you remember the beach?A: Mhm.M: We talked and talked as we walked. And many things emerged where you live. I thank you deeply for your trust and consideration. The imagination can awaken us so that we don’t simply look at injustices and remain passive. I admire you greatly because you fight by raising your voice so people can have the right to move across this planet, this Earth. I don’t know what cages or walls could stop that. Human nature is free. Free to be wherever it wants, to inhabit wherever we please. This is our planet Earth. You and I have talked about many times before. Its a subject that moves straight through me. It moves me deeply. It generates many feelings because of my family, but it also moves me because of the violence that arises from it. Truly, what I want is for us to be free to care for this planet together. All of us. The entire human race. Care for this planet that is ours. It is our mother. Mother Earth is our mother. Everything she provides is to be shared. It is for everyone.There is a very beautiful poem by Federico García Lorca that I had the honor of translating into Otomí. It says that this land, that gives fruit, is for everyone. Not for a few. Not for the most powerful. Not for the one who shouts the loudest, or the one with the most weapons. It is for everyone. The Earth belongs to everyone, and we must care for it, not exploit it—not chase rare earths or oil and all those things that cause so much struggle and war.“The Earth is for everyone. Not for a few. Not for the most powerful. Not for the one who shouts the loudest or the one with the most weapons. The Earth belongs to everyone and we must care for it, not exploit it.”A: Viva, viva viva. Aṣẹ Aṣẹ Aṣẹ. Did you bring us a poem today? M: I published a poem in a journal from the Universidad de Guadalajara called Luvina. It’s a poem I wrote called “Norte.” Norte, los caminantes nocturnos. It’s a migration poem. I began ideating it and writing when I was in Texas with family last semester. I will read it for you in Otomí and in Spanish.A: Thank you.M. León reads aloud from her plurilingual poem “Norte” on the podcast.A: Thank you for this treasure of a poem. Thank you for your time, your friendship, your struggle, your affection, your tenderness.M: Oh yes. Tenderness! We must share tenderness.A: It is a great pleasure and honor to be alongside you. In these times, I wish you everything beautiful—for you and your family, your communities, lands, and futures.M: No, thank you, Amy, always—for sharing and for provoking beautiful reflections. You can always count on me.A: Equally. I am here for you too.M: Thank you. Let’s see when we will walk together again on the beach.Recursos / Resources* El Valle del Mezquital* Poemas, Margarita Leon, Luvina.* “Resuena el Grito de García Lorca en lenguas indígenas por Daniel Francisco, 9/12/2024.* “Fallece el poeta y editor Eduardo Hurtado Montalvo a los 75 años”* Rita Segato, Antropologia Argentina.Inheritance of Peace is a plurilingual series. Episodes are recorded in the preferred language of the person being interviewed. This episode was recorded in Spanish and includes transcripts in English & Spanish. Herencia de Paz es una serie plurilingüe. Los episodios se graban en el idioma de preferencia del entrevistado. Este episodio está grabado en español con transcripciónes en inglés y español. Get full access to Warm Blooded Mammal With Hair at amyshimshonsanto.substack.com/subscribe

INHERITANCE OF PEACE with Amy Shimshon-Santo.I want to be a sanctuary, even in times of chaos or corruption. I learned this from my father and grandmother. They gave me an inheritance of peace. This series highlights the inheritance of peace of survivors — everyday people from different generations and various walks of life. Poets. Researchers. Shepherds. Healers. Tune in to Inheritance of Peace on Apple Podcasts and Warm Blooded Mammal with Hair on Substack. Get full access to Warm Blooded Mammal With Hair at amyshimshonsanto.substack.com/subscribe