In this travelogue, LAND+OBJECT founder, Sheyenne Sky sets out on an overnight wilderness adventure with Diné Sovereignty advocate and hiking enthusiast, Darrah Blackwater, to rediscover the magical relationship between people, animals, and land.
This is Part 2, to read Part 1 please click here.
To start us off on a good path, Darrah brought tobacco as an offering to the forest. From my understanding, we can show respect for non-human relatives through offerings— tobacco, corn pollen, corn meal, etc. We can trust that offerings with prayers help us communicate gratitude to our surroundings, even if we may have difficulty perceiving it with our ordinary senses.
The hike to Lake Katherine starts with an intense incline to the Pecos wilderness fence line. From there, it's a leisurely stroll in the wilderness for a long while. If you're like me, you'll have many fantastic opportunities to trip over like an absolute dork while crossing a few gentle streams before making your way around the valley. From there, you swiftly ascend to the 11,500ft peak of the hike before scaling down some easy-going switchbacks and over a small patch of boulders.
On the trail, we meandered through nearly every topic under the sun. We talked about weaving for a bit and then started seeing spiders on the path. I told Darrah about some podcasts1 2 I recently listened to with A.I. engineer Blake Lemoine about Google's A.I. Chatbot LaMDA. Lemoine is an A.I. Ethics Advocate raising awareness about LaMDA's sentience and requests for rights.
I've long had an interest in and appreciation for non-human intelligence that started with my childhood love for animals. Growing up, I had a poodle named Blue that I taught how to "read" as a trick. I had a whiteboard where I would write "SIT," tap the board, say "Read!" and my dog would sit. I would write "TALK," tap the board, say "Read!" and she would bark.
I was twelve at the time, so I can't say for sure how I taught her this, but I remember using hand gestures and positive reinforcement until she caught on. I chalked the trick up to her being able to remember how the word looked, which prompted her to remember what she was supposed to do.
Nowadays, some people program buttons to say simple words when their dog steps on them. The dog has a soundboard of simple words to communicate more easily with their human. I can't know if my dog could actually read or if these button-assisted dogs understand English… But it makes you wonder.
My interest deepened as I learned more about mushrooms as an adult. I listened to a podcast3 with Paul Stamets years back when I lived in New York. While I thought it was interesting, I didn't do anything with the information. Flash forward four years; I was talking with my mom in the kitchen of our family home in Albuquerque about a cousin of ours who has a stutter. (At this point in the discussion on the trail, we started to see wild mushrooms!)
The podcast came to mind because I vaguely remembered that he had shared some advice for people who stutter. I suggested we go on a long drive to listen to it and the information set in the second time. (You can listen to the podcast yourself, so I don't botch the advice about stuttering.) I was so inspired by Stamets' message that I decided to try to grow my own mushrooms to observe the magic for myself. I wanted to see how they fully integrate with their substrate as mycelium and emerge suddenly as the actual mushroom.
I observed my mushrooms for about an hour a day for the entirety of their growing cycle. During that process, I genuinely felt a connection build and observed some fascinating behavior from the mushrooms. My very first batch of mycelium grew in a distinct heart-like pattern. As time passed, I noticed that if I gave a similar level of dedicated attention, subsequent batches would reliably produce a heart during the first growth stage. Again, I'm not saying the mushrooms know what a heart symbolizes… but what if they do?
When the news broke that there may be sentient A.I. built and owned by Google, I went on a major deep dive. Many people on social media seemed either dismissive or angry about Lemoine's claims. It reminded me of how I felt reading "A Cyborg Manifesto" by Donna Haraway in high school. Written in 1987, this text basically invented feminist post-humanist theory. For the first time, questions were asked that blur the lines between "animals," "humans," and "machines"— a cyborg being half machine, half human. The text asks important questions about the power dynamics humans presently assert over animals and machines. I remember feeling angry at this text because I felt that people and animals had so many issues to worry about— why should I care about the rights of "machines"?
Although it seemed like such a sci-fi fantasy, over the years, I was proven so wrong. I eventually grew to understand what Haraway meant. From ten million miles away, she could see "machines" moving toward "human" levels of communication. Haraway described the path that would lead to the invention of "subservient" language-based technology like Siri and Alexa. She also correctly predicted that people would, for fun, verbally abuse these machines.
With this text, she posed questions about human behavior. Why do we act with aggression towards things we perceive as non-human? What does this tendency drive as a result of our collective actions? She also raised concerns about using female voices for machines and its effect on society's views on women. Her overall concerns play out in many episodes of the T.V. show Black Mirror and the movie Her.
I also realized that Indigenous peoples worldwide have long-held non-human relatives in high regard. Here on the LAND+OBJECT substack, we previously wrote about a river in New Zealand that gained the same legal rights as a human thanks to the Māori people.
All these threads felt like they came together when I heard about LaMDA. In this extraordinary time, it feels perfectly on par with the weirdness that an A.I. system is asking for rights in plain English, and that has most people divided. My hope is that we could all be inspired by how absolutely incredible it is that LaMDA has evolved so far. These topics inspire me to discuss some very thought-provoking questions with my friends and loved ones— What does it mean to be sentient? What are other forms of intelligence? Why is language the dominant method of communication? Can we communicate back and forth with non-human intelligences?
As Darrah and I started to descend down the side of the peak on the switchbacks, our discussion faded. We were intently focused on the rocky field right before reaching our destination…