Megan Vickery 48:10
You’re serious business now!

Teracita Keyanna 48:12
I know, I know. Now I think I’m published in two different things now, because I remember that we were published in another magazine, and we had to do a presentation for that in Hawaii, and so I got to go to Hawaii, and it was kind of weird. It was, it was kind of unnerving, because a lot of people, they might not feel it, and they’re like, “Well, you know, Hawaii is stuck to the ground.” I was like, “No, it’s not!” Because everybody’s like, “Yeah, it’s there.” And I’m like, “No, it’s not there. It’s unstable.” And people don’t understand why I was saying that. And I was like, I can feel it. I can feel it when I’m walking there, I can feel it. When I’m laying in bed, I can feel like a subtle movement. And everybody’s like, really? I was like, yeah, when I’m in the States, when I’m in the middle of the United States, in New Mexico, I don’t feel that. I was like, when I was on this island, I could feel it, and I could feel it in Japan too. So I was like, and my husband’s all, well, Japan’s just another volcano. So, yeah, yeah, I can, I can see where you could just feel that very subtle movement. And he’s like, “How in tune are you with the ground that you feel that?” And I was like, “I felt it every single time.” It was very, very weird. And I could feel it, it made me feel uneasy. And I was like, I was like, “You guys can have your paradise back, I’m good.”

Megan Vickery 49:59
“I’ll go back to my landlocked desert.”

Teracita Keyanna 50:02
Yeah, yeah.

Megan Vickery 50:04
Well, I don’t want to take too much of your time here. Is there anything else you would like to share?

Teracita Keyanna 50:11
I don’t know. There’s so much. I mean, there’s so much to share, and it’s like such a large story, and it’s bigger than me, and so it’s — I think maybe that would be the takeaway is that, you know, this is not just a situation that’s here in the Southwest. It’s not just here in the Four Corners. But this is a massive situation that’s international and that there’s small communities like ourselves that are being impacted, and not all of them are as lucky as Moab to get, you know, an act of Congress to get things moving. And you know, you see that disenfranchisement, you see the environmental racism, but we need to acknowledge it. We need to understand that it’s painful, but we also need to understand that the only way we can get out of it is if we actually learn more about it, advocate for it, and push to get these areas cleaned up, not only for the people, but for our environment. Because it’s not about us, it’s about our future generations, which we’re just borrowing the land from. We’re not, we’re not owners. We can’t say that “This is my land.” I mean, and I’m speaking from somebody who, you know, has a piece of property that I have a name on it that says my name, says my husband’s name, and I do own property, but I don’t feel like I own it. I feel like I’m just borrowing it from my kids, and one day they’re going to take care of it. You know, hopefully, you know, they’re going to become the stewards of the land that you know we’ve always wanted to be. We want it to go back into our culture of farming and tending to the land in that way, and going back into animal husbandry and making, you know, those connections back, like how we had it back in the way our ancestors grew up. And so I think that’s the biggest takeaway, is learning and understanding that we were meant to be here as stewards of the land. And so if we can go back into it, then we bring everything back into balance. So balance and hozho — harmony. That’s, that’s kind of that type of way that we should all be getting from any kind of event like this. Is, you know, where we sit should be in balance.

Megan Vickery 53:03
Yeah, well, thank you for speaking here for your community and sharing your story with me today.

Teracita Keyanna 53:09
Of course.