News from rural America.

We’re starting out in central Texas with a conversation between Daily Yonder health reporter Madeline de Figueredo and Bastrop County Cares executive director Norma Mercado. We are also checking in with our pop culture crew this week to learn about three new pieces of rural media for the season. Then, we learn about an impressive 40 year commitment from the McKnight Foundation to rural Minnesota. In western North Carolina, we visited potters who are using wild clay for a Living Traditions segment, a project documenting Appalachian folk traditions. Finally, we head to the Southwest for a beautiful short film, ‘The Way We Carry Water’ which documents the history and emotional significance of ah Say kee ah culture in northern New Mexico. Our featured musician is Grammy nominated singer songwriter, Amythyst Kiah.

TRANSCRIPT

Hi, I'm Jared Ewe, the host of Yonder Radio.

Every week, we bring rural conversations with national reach to listeners around the country.

We're starting out in Central Texas with a conversation between the dedicated Daily Yonder health reporter Madeline DeFigurito and Bastrop County CARES Executive Director Norma Mercado.

Also checking in on our pop culture crew, they are absolutely bursting with new pieces of rural media for the season.

And we learn about an impressive 40-year commitment from the McKnight Foundation to rural Minnesota.

In Western North Carolina, they are are digging up their own clay.

This is called Wild Clay for a Living Traditions segment, a project documenting Appalachian folk traditions.

And finally, we head to the southwest for a beautiful short film, The Way We Carry Water, which documents the history and emotional significance of Ase-Kia culture in northern New Mexico.

And when our featured musician, she was Grammy-nominated, still is, I guess always is once you are, Amethyst Kia joins us.

That and more on Yonder Radio.

We'll see you next time.

Yonder Radio, Rural Conversations with National Reach.

Hello, Jared Iwi here.

Welcome to the program.

Putting together a show today that features Grammy-nominated singer Amethyst Kia, an incredible conversation with her and how it came to be that she was known in her community as a singer and artist in the first place.

I'm soon going to be talking to Norma Mercado out of a nonprofit in Central Texas, and she has hope, folks.

She'll talk about that.

And now news with Jan Patalski, news editor for the Daily Yonder.

What is going on, Jan?

Hey, Jared.

This week we start with NPR and a little story about a new poll from KFF and AP showing that rural voters, despite supporting Make America Healthy Again movement, or MAHA, don't think that it actually makes a difference and has an impact on their lives.

Was this a big number of people they talked to?

How big was the poll involved?

So the poll involved 2,000 registered voters, all of them rural.

About half of those rural voters identified as supporters of the movement, and about 68% of them said that President Trump's policies have not really helped improve the health or improve the well-being of their communities.

Well, I wouldn't be a real deal media guy if I didn't ask how this might play out in November.

I mean, this is where we're all leaning.

Yeah, so the story quotes a sociology professor at Louisiana State University.

He's reluctant to make any predictions as far as any switch in allegiance among those voters.

However, he thinks that they just might simply choose to sit this one out.

More to learn on that and with food.

More food.

Civil Eats here has a conversation as Super El Nino approaches.

And what does this mean for Pacific Fisheries?

Yes.

So Civil Eats published a really in-depth article about how the upcoming Super El Nino could wreak havoc among Pacific fisheries all the way from Alaska down to California.

El Nino is a natural phenomenon.

Basically, it's when the temperature rises in the Pacific, it causes a lot of weather events that can be pretty harsh.

And according to the article, if the last Super El Nino was to be an indication, the losses could go into hundreds of millions of dollars.

What help is there for fishermen?

Unfortunately for fisheries, unlike for farmers, there are no crop insurance type programs.

There is some help coming from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA.

However, it's notorious for being slow.

It can take as long as three to six years to reach fishermen's pockets.

What's the scale of this issue?

The number of disaster relief requests, according to the article, has ballooned from an average of two per year between 1985 and 2015. to an average of 10 per year since then.

And just to give you an example of how slow the turnaround can be, the Trump administration allocated $124 million in disaster funds for fisheries this year for crises that occurred in 2022 and 2023.

However, we still have claims pending from all the way back to 2019.

Well, if you like to eat, this is an issue that you may want to pay attention to.

We have the latest here with Jan Patalski.

Thanks for stopping by.

Thanks a lot, Jared.

That was Jan Patalski, news editor for The Daily Yonder.

Also from The Daily Yonder, we have a conversation between health reporter Madeline DeFiguredo and Norma Mercado, executive director of Bastrop County Cares, a nonprofit in Central Texas, working to unite other organizations around issues like health, housing, and child care, and people Norma still has hope.

Let's listen to her talk about it with Madeline de Figueredo on Yonder Radio.

I'd love to hear a little bit more about your path to Bastrop County Cares and reading a little bit about your education and previous work background.

It seems like you've worn truly an infinite number of hats for the community.

Can you tell me a bit about what that path was like and how you came to be a part of Bastrop County Cares?

Yeah, so before coming to Bastrop County Cares, I worked in Bastrop ISD.

I oversaw the social work department, the highly mobile student population, which included homelessness, foster care, military-connected, and teen pregnancy-related services, and Title I parent engagement.

And in that role, I also participated in community meetings, which often were led by Bastrop County Cares.

So it was part of their collaborative meetings and initiatives.

And Bastrop County Cares works on a community engagement model that centers community-led voices, input, and decision-making.

And I'm curious about how that work is done and how you go about implementing that model.

So what I did is really using collective impact framework to strengthen our collaborative work and divided the collaboratives more focused on addressing the non-medical drivers of health So that way, wherever people felt they wanted to engage or support, they could join one of the collaborative that really spoke to what they saw they wanted to support.

And so that's the model that we have right now is that we have five collaborative meetings that meet regularly and that address the non-medical drivers of health.

Okay, so there's five collaborative meetings.

Are those thematic?

Yes.

So, for example, one is on education.

So, we have a lot of school districts representatives that attend that particular collaborative.

Same thing with local library representation, parents, Head Starts.

And their focus right now is in improving the literacy rates in our students.

So through increasing access to library cards, access to books.

Then we have economic stability, which is focusing on the workforce, improving their job skills or resume writing, things like that.

This is also where our broadband task force is part of and our food and security task force.

And then we have the health collaborative and they're right now focused on pregnancy related services, care for elderly support.

And then our last one is our Thriving Communities Task Force, which is also part of our interagency meetings.

This is more of a network opportunity for local nonprofits who they just want to meet to support each other.

And then they share about what's coming up for them or what could they work on together.

That's like quite a large scope of projects.

So is there an advocacy component to this as well?

Like, are y'all speaking with city council members or county commissioners or folks that can help implement policies that would benefit kind of this child care issue as well?

Yeah.

So for example, on our health and housing collaborative, we are, it includes a housing policy change component that we are already started speaking at with the city of Smithville.

And then we're asking the cities to have like a dedicated team or that affordable housing is part of their planning as they're coming up with new codes and things.

So that is one that I know we're working on right now.

And then how do you get all these people in the same room?

Kind of collective impact is really assessing who's in the room and who's still missing and whose voice still needs to be there, especially people with lived experience.

So oftentimes when we ask those questions, the same participants identify who else needs to be invited.

And so they're always inviting more people to join to ensure that when they come up with a solution or initiative, that includes the people with the lived experience as a decision making.

Do you have any examples of like innovation or solutions that have come out of these collaborative meetings or these task forces?

For example, our care rights initiative, where we identified that a lot of our seniors don't have a way to get to medical appointments and we don't have enough, we don't have in rural communities.

We don't have the transportation infrastructure.

And so we had a group of volunteers who said, I am available to transport a senior.

And so now we have a pilot program where we pay the volunteer for their hour and their mileage, and they're taking elderly people to their appointment.

I mean, they're doing it, even if we, whether we have funding or not, they're doing it because they care about their neighbors and want to make sure that their senior citizens are taken care of.

Yeah, that's incredible.

I guess my last question is, what brings you hope these days?

What gives me hope is that people are just passionate about helping their community thrive.

You might not have, you know, all the money, but we have the community who comes together to really come up with solutions.

One of the reasons I'm so passionate about this is because I see myself in there.

And there's someone who navigated homelessness, teen pregnancy, poverty.

I know what a difference it is when you have access to resources and how my life could have been easier.

My mom would have had those resources.

And so that is why I am passionate about the work that I do, because I feel like education is power.

And we can really change the impact and outcomes for our children and our youth.

Thank you so much for your time.

Thank you so much for including our story.

I really appreciate that.

That was Madeline DeFigureto, health reporter for The Daily Yonder, in conversation with Norma Mercado, Executive Director for Bastrop County Cares.

To learn more, visit bastropcares.org.

That's B-A-S-T-R-O-P cares.org.

And every week, we have a musician.

This time, we're bringing in the Grammy material with Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter Amethyst Kia.

Amethyst lives in Tennessee and brings her deep feelings and soulful voice to every song she writes.

Well, Amethyst, I watched you, I think it was a PBS documentary, and they had footage from Red Rocks.

Is it as awesome as I think it might be to perform at Red Rocks?

Yeah, it is.

It's whatever you're thinking.

It's that plus some.

I just generally speaking, anytime I've ever played a show out in Colorado, it makes me, because I really love any place that has mountains.

And I live in Southern Appalachia.

So our mountains are several, I think, million years older.

They're smaller and a little more, you know, rounded off at the top.

But they look incredible for their age.

No, yeah, I think so.

That's what I like to tell people.

Yeah, I opened for Dispatch.

They were super cool guys and they sold it out.

So it was like 10,000 people.

Wow.

It was like all my favorite things rolled into one, being outside, being in the mountains and playing music.

So it was really, really incredible.

And the audience was super great too.

There's this moment though, where you're walking up to stage and you start that intro riff to Black Myself. and there's this space from when you begin playing your guitar to before you sing and it feels like that's the moment for a musician to ensure the crowd is going on the journey and I'm wondering what's going on in your head is it is it your entire life in 20 seconds thinking about everything that's got you to that place before you start singing or are you just going through housekeeping being like, okay, shoelaces are tied.

I've got my pick.

Honestly, the moments leading up to stepping on stage, like when I'm standing at the side of the stage and, you know, five minutes beforehand and waiting to be called on that five minute interval feels like forever because I am just standing there waiting.

And the anticipation is always just like, ah, and, and in those moments, especially with something huge like that I really try not to think of the big picture because it'll you know I feel like it would end up I end up psyching myself out after the show then I can sort of be like oh my god can't believe it you know um but yeah just trying to stay like focused and honed in so I can deliver the performance I want to jump the fence and watch my face in the creek, but I'm black myself.

I want to sweep that gal right off a beat, but I'm black myself.

I'm tired of walking around with no shoes on, because I'm black myself.

Is it true, I mean, it's kind of Amethyst Key, a legend, that people didn't know your musician skills until you sang at your mother's funeral.

Is that how it went, or did people already know?

Yeah, I would say that's fairly accurate.

I mean, initially I had was in a like a public high school and I once I started playing music and like trying to write poetry and songs, then I just really started to gravitate more toward that.

So my parents kind of saw that, you know, maybe we need to foster this artistic development.

I auditioned for a creative arts magnet school.

I initially tried with guitar and I also brought like poetry I had written.

And the kind of music that they did at the school was like orchestral music.

And I was, you know, playing like, you know, alternative rock stuff.

So they said, well, we don't have a program for the music that you're playing, but your writing is really good.

So I basically majored in like creative writing in high school.

And then I continued to play music, of course.

And I played in like a couple of talent shows too.

I played Zombie by the Cranberries with two other kids.

Somebody was on drums.

The other person was on bass and singing lead.

And I was just playing guitar.

So that was technically like the first time that I ever performed in front of anybody.

But I didn't sing.

I was just playing guitar.

And then, you know, when the funeral happened towards the, I guess it was like in November of 2004, I ended up writing a song about how I felt about my mother and her, you know, deciding to, on her own record, to leave this, to leave this, leave this planet, or I guess return to the earth, I guess, if you want to get scientific about it.

So a lot of people that didn't already go to the school, that was definitely their first real introduction to, you know, my songwriting and singing and playing guitar.

There's a lot of ways to say it, leave the planet, return to, you know, but there also is a third way I'm thinking of is manifest herself through you in this moment.

Well, yeah, I mean, genetically speaking, like my mother is a part of me.

My voice, you know, everyone on my mom's side of the family has a very similar voice.

In fact, we all would get mistaken for men on the phone simply because our voices are deeper.

Because they're awesome.

That's all.

Yeah, well, I appreciate that.

I mean, it's, you know, I grew up in like a white conservative suburban area.

And, and then also at the time, you know, and this is obviously before social media, but like, you know, magazines and TV shows and movies were all showing this idea of what femininity is and what beauty is.

And so my voice and me being a tomboy as I got older seemed to be things that were like stacked against me.

And so it took me several years to like to be happy of how my voice sounds and how I look and all of those things.

Over the years, it's been great to know that when I did accept how I sounded, how I looked, that a lot of people, whoever in the past saw me for what they didn't like about who I am, I found that many more people like exactly what I'm doing.

And that's been that's been pretty cool.

That was a conversation with Amethyst Kia, who brings her soulful folk music to us from Tennessee.

You can listen to more of Amethyst's music wherever you get your music or find her upcoming shows at amethystkia.com A-M-Y-T-H-Y-S-T and Kia, K-I-A-H.

And if you happen to know a rural musician who you think should be highlighted on Yonder Radio, send us an email at info at yonderradio.com and let us know who our next featured artist should be.

And it's time for this week's trivia here.

Here's your first clue.

The first one here is what Holiday was first conceived of in 1977 at a United Nations conference in Geneva.

Coming up, the pop culture crew bringing you albums, bringing you movies, bringing you the latest that you might want to pop down on a cool fall day and enjoy.

That's coming up on Yonder Radio. guitar solo guitar solo Yonder Radio Rural Conversations with National Reach.

Jared Iwi here.

We are getting the pop culture crew in place.

There's a movie.

There's music.

There's another movie.

Susanna Brown, Madeline Basil, and Anya Patron-Slepian here now for what's going on in rural media.

So we're back with another pop culture roundup.

I'm Anya Patron-Slepian.

I'm Susanna Brown.

And I'm Madeline Basil.

So Susanna, you recently had a pretty cool experience, which is that you got to attend the Toronto International Film Festival.

I know there were a ton of rural movies that you saw, but was there one that stood out to you?

I do think I have an absolute standout from the festival, which was Fjord, which had its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, where it took home the biggest prize there, the Palme d'Or.

And so I was very excited to see what all the fuss was about.

It's directed by Christiane Manjou.

It stars Sebastian Stan, who has shown time and time again he can totally transform into a character.

He plays a Romanian man.

He's bald in this movie, too.

It's kind of fun.

And he is married to a woman who's Norwegian, who's played by Renate Renze, who was in Sentimental Value last year.

The plot of this movie is that this couple and their five children move to a very small town in rural Norway after living in Romania.

They are a very conservative Christian family.

And the crux of this movie is that they are suspected of abusing their children and an intense legal battle follows.

And it really shows the extreme differences between this progressive rural Norwegian town they've moved to and the family's personal beliefs.

This movie is very interesting and it reminded me a bit of Anatomy of a Fall from a couple of years ago in how it's like a legal drama, but I actually think this one is way more of a sharper social commentary.

It sets up this very nuanced moral quandary.

If you watch the trailer, you might be surprised by how this movie makes you feel and what sides you end up taking as you watch it.

It's also just stunning.

The rural Norway landscape is very beautiful.

I'm so intrigued by specifically what you're saying about the trailer because maybe I'll eat my words later, but Sebastian Stan seems villainous.

Yes.

So I'm interested to see how that preconception is challenged when I finally get to see the movie.

I'm really excited.

I'm really excited to see the broader public response to this.

It comes out October 9th, so I'm sure the discourse will start flowing.

Moving from rural Norway to the American West, Madeline, you have an album you want to tell us about?

Yeah, I feel like it's fitting in our movie-dominated roundup to talk about Shibuzi's new concept album because it's basically the closest you can get to like a cinematic western but in musical form.

It's called The Outlaw, Sherry Lee, and Other Western Tales.

It came out at the end of July.

It's like a revenge fable told through song and there are also a few skits that feature Jamie Foxx, Tiana Taylor, and Sam Elliott, who are kind of the perfect lineup for creating this dramatic theatrical atmosphere.

Will Sherri Lee ultimately succumb to her lesser nature or die trying to bring justice to those responsible for the death of her father?

Just know there's a hefty price to pay for revenge.

The album's got melodramatic ballads, It's got rap country hybrids, and it's even got a cover from Orville Peck of a classic cowboy tune called Streets of Laredo.

Shibuzi definitely did his homework on this one.

My fave song is Burn It Down, which is featuring Leon Bridges.

And it'd also be wrong for me not to shout out Cowgirl, which is a complete bop.

Like I can't even think about it too hard right now or it will be stuck in my head for the rest of the day.

It's very much on par with a bar song, Tipsy, which I feel like is the song that Shibuzi is most known for.

At least me personally, I sort of had written off Shaboozie as maybe a pandering pop star kind of vibe with a bar song Tipsy, which I do like that song, but it just was very overplayed.

This album is really cool and shows like a clear creative vision.

Yeah, I agree with that.

I think A Bar Song Tipsy was so well-loved that it maybe created a little bit of shaboozy fatigue, but I'm really happy that this new album is really creative in a new direction, but with a song like Cowgirl shows that he's still got makings of a great pop star.

Keeping with this theme of revenge, Anya, I'm excited to hear about a new movie that you watched recently that it sounds like you liked a lot.

I did really enjoy it.

The Rivals of Amzaya King, which stars Matthew McConaughey and Angelina Lookingglass.

And it's this magical thing where it was a totally original movie and also reminded me of two of my favorite movies, those two being Fantastic Mr. Fox.

I think it's sort of about the agrarian heist vibes and Little Miss Sunshine because it's so frickin charming.

It's more or less about this eccentric, fast-talking beekeeper named Amzaya King.

That's Matthew McConaughey, who is also really invested in his bluegrass band made up of his friends and neighbors and tenants.

And he reconnects with a former foster daughter who is Angelina Lookingglass and shows her the ropes of the honey trade.

It was shot in Alabama, but set in rural Oklahoma, and they're just really gorgeous shots of the landscape.

But really, the dialogue is so fast and sharp.

The plot has all of these funny little side scenes that somehow work their way into this larger narrative.

And it's a pretty unusual movie that is somehow really fun and poignant and also can take on darker themes like a lot of revenge and a little bit of murder.

It was directed by Andrew Patterson.

This is his second movie.

He's from Oklahoma and his first movie was 2019 Vast of Night.

There was some reporting that there had been some major disputes between Patterson and the studio and that they tested both visions with audiences and that Patterson, the director's vision, won out, which I feel like so rarely happens when there are disputes between the creator and the director.

And the studio that puts all the money behind it.

And I feel like this movie is really good evidence that that should happen more often.

So now you have two new movies and a new album to enjoy this fall.

Let us know what you think of them by emailing us at info at yonderradio.com.

Thanks, Anya.

And thanks, Madeline.

Thanks.

Thanks so much.

Thank you, pop culture crew, for that one.

I want to check out Fjord now that it's out.

And you can find more rural pop culture coverage in The Good, The Bad, and The Elegy, a bi-weekly newsletter from The Daily Yonder.

Sign up at dailyyonder.com.

And this brings us to another song from this week's featured musician, Amethyst Kia.

Here's Empire of Love, a song Amethyst called her personal theme song on Yonder Radio.

Concrete pillars, golden domes, there are kingdoms come and gone.

That we'll never know My religion Is none at all I build my own cathedrals And let them fall Cause I don't want a theocracy Some idol ideology We're all made from stars From above I pledge allegiance to my soul I follow where she needs to go I'm a pilgrim for the empire of love Johnson City Tennessee my home in Appalachia is still calling me give me a mountain something divine a river that can come its way through stone and time That was Empire of Love from Amethyst Key's 2024 album, Still and Bright.

The McKnight Foundation recently granted $6 million to Minnesota Initiative Foundations to fund investments across rural Minnesota.

Dee Davis, the president of the Center for Rural Strategy, sat down with Tanya Allen, the president of the McKnight Foundation, and Benya Kraus, president and CEO of the Southern Minnesota Initiative Foundation to talk about this investment and McKnight's 40 year commitment in rural Minnesota.

If you're a development director and you hear philanthropy and commitment in the same sentence, you need a paper sack and a place to lie down.

Well, we have that conversation here with Dee Davis. - I really am interested in this Minnesota initiative.

I've been looking and working around rural philanthropy for a long time, and this is an outlier.

I read about 3.5% of U.S. philanthropy goes to rural areas.

Oftentimes, when I hear the word place-based philanthropy, it really means, well, we'll go to other places, but not your place, right?

We're not going to go to a rural place.

Can you explain a little bit about this commitment to rural development?

I'll say nearly 40 years ago, Minnesota as a state was experiencing pretty extreme disruption.

We had a farming crisis going on.

We also had a decline in the mining as well as the manufacturing industries.

And one of the things that the leaders at the time decided to do was instead of trying to design a solution from Minneapolis or from the Twin Cities was to go into these communities and to listen to the people.

What we ended up doing was help those communities establish six independent foundations that have been pretty extraordinary community development tools that had worked in small towns, have worked across regions, across multiple counties.

Benya obviously is running and leading one of those initiative foundations, so I'll let her speak to why she believes they're so important to her community.

I have the great gift and blessing of getting to lead the Southern Minnesota Initiative Foundation.

As Tanya mentioned, I am one of six Initiative Foundation presidents serving across the state.

I get to support the rural vitality and community vitality of a 20-county region.

That is 175 different communities.

And in our 175 communities, only 12 of those communities have populations over 20,000 people.

And over the past 40 years, we have been doing, I like to say, like impact investing before that was a term or a thing.

And what I mean by that is we were making loans to businesses at a time in which banks at the heart of the farm crisis could not say yes to.

And instead of just letting the free market decide who gets to stay and which communities and families and businesses have to close, We were able to step up and say, we believe in the long-term future, and we will give a loan on a term and timeline that the bank can't, and we're going to be in it with you for the long term.

You know, a loan that we gave at the height of the farm crisis, one of our very first ones, was to a family-owned business that is now today delivering tabletops to companies and higher ed and public schools all across the world from the small town of Fountain, Minnesota.

I see a lot of foundations that talk about innovation, but it's often three years and out.

This is a 40-year commitment.

It's like $400-plus million in grant making, $300 million more in investment.

Can you talk about this, Tanya, and just talk about what it means to make a generational commitment to a set of rural communities?

For the McKnight Foundation, the reason we stick with this work is because we know that the initiative foundations are equipped to help people bring their dreams and bring the future to fruition.

And when you have people that feel like they have agency and self-determination in the future of where they live, then we know that they're going to more likely be deeply engaged in voting and their school board.

They're going to be more engaged in the revitalization of their downtown districts.

And so the commitment from us is really about understanding who our neighbors are across our state and making sure that we support their capabilities and their love of place.

On that theme of local ownership, still today, local ownership continues to be under a threat.

You know, my family still farms and we're on six, almost now seven generation.

The next generation's being born to take over the family farm.

And the pressures are just as hard, if not even harder.

But it's not just agriculture under crisis in terms of, you know, being able to steward local ownership.

Our Main Street businesses, our child care centers, or the projects that really require community members coming together to say, how can we take back what is ours?

How can we keep it here?

How do we see that our communities are worthy of investing in?

And how do we invest in those good ideas alongside them?

We have a small-time grant-making program, for example, that has invested in the past nine years, 160 projects.

And it includes revitalizing a train depot.

It includes restoring an old opera house in downtown Fairmont.

It's about letting the community lead and say, what is important for you to own and build yourselves?

And what kind of capital, but also what kind of championing and cheerleading and optimism is also needed to get you there?

I think the big takeaway, in my opinion, is that every community deserves the trust, the resources and the power to determine what works for itself.

And what we see all across our country is that communities feel detached from the decisions that are being made about their livelihoods.

This is important work.

How do you hear others talk about rural investment and what it means?

I went to business school to try to figure out how to restore this downtown building in Waseca.

I kept being told, oh, you know, the deal pipeline for rural is just not there.

You know, it's so hard to invest in rural because there's not enough projects.

People aren't doing enough.

Every transaction size, quote unquote, is going to be too big to do that efficiently.

And I think that hyper-focus on efficiency leaves out that there are really innovative, creative entrepreneurs in all parts of our country, and especially in rural.

What you need to make rural investment work is to have that investment into the infrastructure that helps find these deals, helps prepare them, helps build up community leaders.

And what the McKnight Foundation has helped us to do is build that infrastructure of being able to receive and prepare and also then bring in outside investment to say, hey, rural is not just worthy of investing into.

It is good business.

It is good for our country.

It is good for our democracy when we invest in the ingenuity and innovation that is coming from rural places.

I'm a big believer in the local saves the national.

And right now, when we think about all of the challenges that our country is facing, it is so easy for us to think that we can look to Washington to help solve this.

And I actually think it's the opposite.

Democracy is built at the local level.

It's serving on boards.

It's volunteering.

It's mentoring.

And if I think about what we need to do as we look forward to the next 250 years of our country, we have to be building this democratic culture, re-invigorating, so people don't simply watch their community's future unfold.

They have the power, resources, and agency to shape them.

Thanks to Dee Davis, president of the Center for Rural Strategies, for bringing us this conversation with Tanya Allen, the president of the McKnight Foundation, and Benya Krause, president and CEO of the Southern Minnesota Initiative Foundation.

Now it's time for our second trivia clue.

The first state to adopt this holiday formally was South Dakota in 1990.

Now at least 17 states and 130 cities recognize the holiday.

Which one is it?

Coming up, we're going to go play In the Clay on the way on Yonder Radio. *music* Yonder Radio, Rural Conversations with National Reach.

Hello, Jared Ewe here.

We're going to go talk to a filmmaker in New Mexico who put together a beautiful short film and now another Living Traditions segment where we dive into stories about folk and traditional arts in Central Appalachia.

Today, we are digging in the dirt in North Carolina.

For most studio potters, making a new piece starts with opening a fresh bag of commercially produced clay.

Oh, not for Naomi Daglish. and Michael Hunt of Bandana Pottery.

They have a different process.

They produce their own clay bodies out of local clay dirt.

Reporter Anya Patron-Slepian visited Naomi and Michael at their studio in the mountains of western North Carolina.

Outside, surrounded by mountains, Naomi Doglish and Michael Hunt are processing wild clay.

Michael has a four-foot-long hand drill and a giant metal drum.

He's mixing water with clay dirt to make a slip.

The yellowish clay dirt they're using came from a nearby farmer's field.

The first step in making the clay usable in their pottery production is mixing this slip, a watery clay slurry.

Once the slip is the desired consistency, Naomi says it's time to strain out debris using a screen.

We actually have a couple of different sizes of screens because at this point we're deciding how much of the coarse material, like little bits of sand and small pebbles we want to leave in the clay.

She pours the slip through a mesh screen that's fitted into a wooden frame.

We really enjoy having a clay that has some texture to it.

So this is, in a lot of ways, one of the first aesthetic decisions that we're making.

Naomi and Michael are the team behind Bandana Pottery.

They primarily make functional ceramics, like cups, bowls, trays, and vases, as well as some decorative items like large jars and sculptures.

Michael says local traditions inspired them to start processing their own clay.

It kind of started from sort of seeing historical pots and seeing how a kind of complexity and depth to the materials that we were really after.

North Carolina has this amazing tradition of people using local clay that was kind of continuous.

Back outside, the slip is finished straining and is now in a large metal tub.

Naomi opens a bag of feldspar and pours the white powder into the clay slurry, as Michael continues to mix with the drill.

The mineral lowers the firing temperature of the clay.

Next, Naomi and Michael pump the mixture into wooden racks lined with fabric.

For this, they use a large brown hose pipe.

The mixture is left in the racks to dry.

Naomi says it takes between one and four weeks for the clay to get to a working consistency.

It really depends on the weather, how long that process is going to take.

For most of human history, potters have been restricted to the types of clays available in the ground where they live.

Each geography produces clay with different characteristics, and this has informed how each culture's pottery traditions have developed.

North Carolina is known for its plentiful natural clay deposits.

For 3,000 years, Cherokee potters have used local clays to create intricate and functional pots that are hand-coiled, paddled, and stamped.

Later, European settlers and their descendants began making wheel-thrown pieces and created the iconic North Carolina ash glaze style.

Digging and processing clay is a lot more labor-intensive than a trip to a clay supplier.

But Naomi and Michael say it's well worth the effort for a lot of reasons.

Part of it has to do with aesthetics.

It's kind of really about the expressive possibilities of particle size.

We're playing with having the materials be fine enough to make functional pottery, but way coarser than like commercial materials.

Naomi and Michael say digging their own clay is also more environmentally sustainable than using commercial clays.

It cuts down on transportation and they're using a material that's otherwise a nuisance for local farmers.

It's like the sticky stuff that gets stuck on the bottom of their tractor wheels.

Or in the field, it's where the water isn't draining as well.

So people are like, oh yeah, we know where that is.

And are actually usually not too upset to let some of it go.

Processing clay is also cheaper than buying premixed clays.

But most importantly, they say that using local clays has been a constant source of creative inspiration.

The clay is like a collaborator.

It has its limitations, but also possibilities.

And we're constantly thinking like, oh, what do we want to do with the clay?

But like, what does this clay want to do?

Inside the studio, Naomi is slapping a mound of clay to get it roughly centered on a pottery wheel.

This is a method that we use for making lots of bowls and cups.

It's called throwing off the hump.

The wheel is surrounded by a wooden bench.

Unlike electric wheels, this one is human powered.

She spins it by using her right foot to kick a second wheel near the ground.

Naomi has around 12 pounds of clay piled high in a cone, which she begins to shape as she spins the wheel.

It's always sort of this dance between how much do you want to take a clay that has its natural limitations and change it into something that could do more things, and how much do you want to just sort of explore what is this clay really good at doing.

Digging and processing wild clay also builds and depends on community connections.

When Michael and Naomi first began experimenting with wild clays, they were supported by teachers at the nearby Penland School of Craft and other local potters.

Since then, they've mentored many apprentices of their own.

I almost kind of forget that they were our apprentices.

Now they're just like our pottery pals.

We kind of are just sharing information.

The community connection goes beyond just the potters themselves.

Naomi recalls one time when a former neighbor was preparing his field for spring planting.

He came upon some clay and decided to bring a tractor load of it down to the pottery studio.

We were so, like, touched that he thought to do that, but we were also kind of like, so, you know, what part of the field did you get in?

Like, we just wanted to make sure it was the right stuff.

And he looked at us in sort of mock indignation and was like, I'm a farmer.

You think I don't know my own dirt?

So we all just really have like the same mutual relationship and respect for the same material.

It was just sort of through different avenues.

And he's someone to this day that we really value our relationship with.

Back at the pottery wheel, Naomi finishes throwing her set of bowls.

Once they dry, she and Michael will turn them upside down to trim a foot, revealing the rough texture of the clay that inspires them so much as artists.

The bowls are the ultimate collaboration, the result of Naomi and Michael's partnership, the generosity of a local farmer, and of course, the character and contributions of the clay itself.

For the Center for Rural Strategies and Living Traditions, I'm Anya Patron-Slepian in Bakersville, North Carolina.

Thank you, Anya Patron-Slepian, for digging into that.

Just a pot of puns we could go with, but we'll just appreciate your story out of Western North Carolina for our Living Traditions segment.

Now, Makayo was a star high school quarterback.

He wasn't going to follow in his parents' footsteps.

And then he started working as a production assistant on Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer.

And now he has his own short film out, The Way We Carry Water.

It tells a beautiful story about the New Mexican environment, partially based on his experiences growing up.

The film showcases a young man grappling with grief while working to preserve his family's asakia, a community irrigation system.

Is this your story?

Is this from your life?

Yeah, it is.

It's definitely deeply rooted in my experience growing up where I did.

Technically, it's on cold New Mexico, population like 40.

Growing up, you know, in that area, my grandparents lived right across the street from us.

Any opportunity I had to be over there on the other side of the road, Like I was there.

So I spent as much time with, you know, my grandparents and more specifically my grandpa as anybody else.

Spending so much time with him, like, you know, I was his shadow.

A lot of sort of who I am today was built by him specifically.

And that connects to the film, obviously, because that's kind of the backbone of that dynamic and that character and that story, those relationships between grandfather and grandson.

So Mikayo Frazier is with us today because through his company, Chili Line Media, he made this short film, The Way We Carry Water.

And Mikhail, it's gorgeous.

I don't know how much you shot to get the shots you have, but the shots you have are gorgeous.

Yeah, no, thank you.

Thank you for that, for recognizing that.

Giannis Schielens was our director of photography on this project.

He's someone that I, early on in my career, built a relationship with.

But in terms of sort of my direction in it, growing up in the bosque there, like in the Southwest and in New Mexico, that's like our oasis, right?

It's, we know where we have water.

So what's really cool about that is, you know, it's a really unique sort of environment.

I've never really seen it captured on camera.

And so I wanted that location to be a character in and of itself, right?

Especially with the work that's within a psychia culture.

It's a seasonal thing.

And so, yeah, I wanted to maximize that.

And so that was early on a goal was to shoot all four seasons and sort of really capture that space.

You just mentioned a main character in this film that's not a human, it's a psychia.

And the importance of water, which carries a lot of weight here, folks.

Talk about the acequia.

Yeah, it's essentially a shared governance system.

It's really old.

Like our acequia, where I grew up 25 feet from behind my parents' house, is about 300 years old.

That's considered young.

For instance, the film, the acequia madre, the mother ditch, is about a thousand years old.

And so it's a mixture of traditional indigenous northern Pueblo philosophies, right, and systems of shared governance of water.

And then, of course, about 500 years ago, the Spanish influence as well through the Moors.

Now, today, in the modern sense, it's a combination of those sort of two cultural values and systems.

It's incredibly essential to where we are at in the world, right?

For agriculture, for community involvement.

They're independent systems, right?

So they're not necessarily government regulated.

They're governed by the communities.

When you live on a sequia system, you really have to be friends with your neighbors.

You know what I mean?

So like it's really essential, you know, part of who we are as northern New Mexicans and even across New Mexico and other parts of the southwest in general.

Your main character is having a conversation with the grandpa and he talks about a wounded heart.

So what is that line?

And can you talk about this?

What is the line?

Yeah, the line is when sorrow cuts deeper into your heart, it leaves you more room for joy.

And I wish I was the original creator of that line.

I kind of stole it from Khalil Gibran, who was the author of The Prophet.

He was, for my Grandpa Russ, one of his favorite authors.

And on his obituary, which I have pasted up above my desk, there's that quote, which is, Deep is your longing for the land of your memories and the dwelling place of your greater desires.

And our love would not bind you nor any told you.

The deeper that sorrow carves into your heart and your being, the more joy you can contain.

And so that's the direct sentiment because that's one of the things that stuck with me most, you know, in hindsight since my grandfather passed.

And I was like, I have to put that in the film somewhere.

So I adapted a little bit, but that's kind of where that feeling comes from.

What is next?

What are you working on for your next project?

We've developed our company into being not only film and narrative works, right, and documentary works, but also branded storytelling for companies, organizations, institutions.

I'm also working on a feature that I'm currently writing, and I'm really excited about that one.

It's another sort of coming-of-age story.

I think there's a lot of lost young men right now in society who don't really know where they fit in and where they can get in.

And I want to touch on that sentiment that's kind of growing within, especially my generation.

Mikhail, where can people see the way we carry water now?

You can currently find it on our YouTube channel at Chillaline Media.

You can also learn more about who we are as a company at chillalinemedia.com.

And then our Instagram, which is our most active platform, Chillaline Media.

Check it out there.

Mikhail Frazier, thank you for stopping by Yonder Radio.

Absolutely.

Thanks for having me on.

Really appreciate it, Jared.

Well, it's time for our final trivia clue.

This holiday challenges historical narratives that celebrate European colonization and is often celebrated instead of Columbus Day.

The answer to this week's trivia is Indigenous Peoples Day.

Celebrated the second Monday in October, although the holiday was conceived decades ago, it has gained widespread popularity in the past few decades.

In 2021, Joe Biden was the first president to commemorate Indigenous Peoples Day.

The holiday celebrates centuries of indigenous resilience and continuing cultural, economic, and political contributions of America's tribal nations.

And now our little holiday is coming to an end, but we'll bring it back next week.

Remember, let us know if you have a rural band that can use their story on Yonder Radio.

Info at yonderradio.com.

And thank you for listening.

Thank you for listening to Yonder Radio, a production of the Center for Rural Strategies, publisher of the Daily Yonder.

I'm your host, Jared Iwi.

Thanks to Don Castle and the Tennessee Sheiks, Steph Gunno and the Lone Tones, Quincy Ponfair, Leo Pozel, and Tim Merrimah for the great music.

Our editor and producer is Susanna Brown.

This episode was also produced by Ilana Newman with additional support from Anya Patron Slepian and Julia Tilton.

Our executive producer is Joel Cohen.

The executive in charge of production is Adam Georgie.

Beyonder Radio, rural conversations with National Reach. guitar solo