We Can Return Again is a powerful episode that explores the critical work of Survival International, an organization dedicated to protecting indigenous and uncontacted peoples worldwide. Hal Russell, Asia and Pacific Research and Advocacy Officer with Survival, joins host Jef Szi to guide us through the many threats indigenous and uncontacted communities face.

Along the way, we come to understand the extreme vulnerability and survival pressures these communities have. Whether it is illegal logging, deforestation, nickel mining, drug traffickers, governmental indifference, or self-centered influencers, each of these forces is putting our contemporaries, who have chosen a self-sufficient lifestyle to avoid the historical and ongoing traumas of colonialism, into real danger.

With great facility and immense dedication, Hal walks us through the serious challenges while also offering a powerful ethos and meaningful obligation, inviting us to recognize these communities' fundamental rights to continue to exist and what we can do individually and collectively to support them.

This conversation helps us wake up to an unpublicized tragedy, the irreplaceable loss of people, their cultures rich with long-held knowledge. At the heart of the show, we come to find the best guardians for the land and the people who depend on healthy ecosystems for their well-being. The episode concludes by looking at the work of Paul Rosolie, an increasingly popular advocate for the people of the Amazon.

About Survival International: Founded in 1969, Survival International is a global movement campaigning for the rights of indigenous and uncontacted peoples. They advocate for the fundamental right of these communities to be "different and free," prioritizing land rights as the most critical factor for their survival. The organization challenges destructive practices that displace indigenous peoples from their lands. Survival stands in solidarity with indigenous peoples, ensuring their voices are heard and their ancestral territories are protected for generations to come.

Resources and Links:

Survival International Website (Join and Donate!)

Read the PDF: Uncontacted Indigenous Peoples: At the Edge of Survival

Video Report documenting nickel mining on Hongana Manyawa lands.

More on Uncontacted Peoples

Chris Burris is a Senior Lead IFS Trainer and a clinical consultant with decades of experience in mental health and group work. Chris is based in North Carolina and leads training for the IFS Institute and his Creating Healing Circles work worldwide.

Last month, Chris joined Jef Szi for an in-depth conversation that illuminates the power, purpose, and benefits of healing with others. Along the way, we get to know the variety of influences and the backstory to Chris's group work, including a need to help his clients have real spaces to work on their social challenges, and Chris's interest in finding new models of authenticity that don't require being hijacked by reactive emotions.

With tremendous kindness and boatloads of reference points, Chris helps us understand why healing circles are an essential tool for healing from traumas and for offsetting the hyper-individualism found in most personal-growth work.

Chris teaches us that most traumas arise in relationships and are also healed through supportive, non-threatening contexts where participants can experience others as advocates and allies. He also shows us that well-run Healing Circles can allow participants to test new ways of being that are more cohesive and less isolating.

Throughout Healing with Others, Chris offers his grounded perspectives; whether it's on the Internal Family Systems model, the pros and cons of Men's work in the 1980's and 1990's, or how nature is another kind of healing force, we are well instructed by Chris and his extensive knowledge on group work and the healing process.

Perhaps the heart of Chris's teaching is the Internal Family Systems (IFS) model. In this conversation, he breaks down the model, showing how IFS is a constraint-and-release model whose core notion of an innate Self is characterized by calmness, curiosity, and compassion, and how the various "parts" play a role in protecting the Self. We also learn from Chris and kind way of thinking about our parts, and how these protective and often reactive voices within us frequently eclipse our core energy, leading us to relate to ourselves and others in harsh or critical ways.

With Chris, we take another step forward in imagining what it takes to be more cohesive as a society. In this case, the path forward is to challenge our assumptions about the do-it-alone approach. Instead, we are encouraged towards the chance to be with others, dropping in deeply, where trauma and social connections can be transformed as a community. Few are better positioned to show what this path looks like than the heart-centered and wise Chris Burris.

Thank you for being on the show, Chris!

About Chris Burris: Chris is a Clinical Consultant and Senior Lead Trainer for the Center for Self Leadership. Chris has been a psychotherapist since 1989, working with diverse populations in community agencies, intensive residential centers, institutions of higher learning, and in private practice.

He began training in the Internal Family Systems model in 1999 and is currently a Senior Lead Trainer for the Internal Family Systems Institute, where he teaches Level 1, Level II, and Level III trainings and serves as a trainer and mentor for new IFS training staff.

Resources:

Episode Summary:

Recent events in America from Minneapolis to Washington D.C., show us that unapologetic postures and political strategies are attractive to some who are interested in power.

In this special bonus episode, Jef Szi shares his recent essay about this unapologetic trend on full display not just in the terrible shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, but in the Trump administrations response to those events.

Jef show us how empathy and social care are essential tools as we aim to stay human in inhumane times. An important reminder that our feelings are not just difficult, but part of the solution.

Finally, Jef shares his most recent poem. It imagines Adam apologizing to Eve in The Garden of Eden.