Recorded live at a SAND Community Gathering (April 2026)
Hard times are here, we hunger for voices that can see beyond the fear, beyond the noise, beyond the technologies consuming our attention. We need poets and visionaries. People who remember freedom.
Dr. Jaiya John (Mshkiki Odeh Inini, Medicine Heart Man), medicine poet, freedom worker, is one of those voices. He has spent his life gathering words that heal. In this conversation, we enter the beauty, the grief, and the medicine together. We sit with the devastation tearing our world, the sorrows cracking us open, the ancestors still holding us—and the radical insistence that collective freedom is not something we chase. It is something already alive in and between us, waiting to be birthed.
Dr. Jaiya John (Mshkiki Odeh Inini, Medicine Heart Man) was orphan-born on ancient Indigenous Anasazi and Pueblo lands in the high desert of New Mexico. He is an ancestral Baba, freedom worker, medicine poet, and the founder of Soul Water Rising—a global mission to eradicate oppression through re-humanization, book donations, and grants to displaced youth. He is the author of numerous books including Freedom: Medicine Words for your Brave Revolution and Fragrance After Rain, and the creator of the podcast I Will Read for You. A former professor of social psychology at Howard University, he holds a doctorate from UC Santa Cruz and has spoken to over a million people worldwide. His Indigenous soul dreams of frybread, sweetgrass, bamboo in the breeze, and turtle lakes whose poetry is peace.
Watch the full video version of this conversation.
Topics
Dr. Jaiya John — Guest
Dr. Jennifer Mullan — Referenced
The Gaza Monologues — Referenced
Nikki Giovanni — Referenced
Ancestors Referenced
Hopi Nation / Turtle Island
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