Learning Session 7: Knowing Place - a Key to Survival
Online learning sessions using dialogue to explore the workings, developments, (im)possibilities, and emerging insights of diverse approaches and praxes for Co-creation with the More-than-Human world
This 7th learning session of the Co-creation with the More-than-Human sandbox in October 2025 explored Knowing Place: A Key to Survival with Michael Kotutwa Johnson, a member of the Hopi Tribe in Northern Arizona, dryland farmer, and faculty member at the University of Arizona.
Michael’s work sits at the intersection of Indigenous Traditional Ecological Knowledge, conservation, and food systems. Grounded in Hopi Ways of Knowing, his practice draws on millennia of continuous relationship with the same land—where crops such as corn, beans, and squash are grown with only 15–25 cm of annual rainfall and without irrigation.
In Hopi understanding, corn is not a crop but “the mother”—a living relative that has sustained the people for generations. This relationship is not symbolic; it structures how land is tended, how decisions are made, and how knowledge is transmitted.
The session explored what it means to know a place over generations, how this shapes practice and decision-making, and what becomes possible—or remains inaccessible—when such depth of relationship is absent.
What follows is a synthesis of key questions, insights, and cross-cutting threads from the dialogue.
🌿 Learning Session 7 (October 2025) — Synthesis
Knowing Place: A Key to Survival, with Michael Kotutwa Johnson (Hopi Tribe / University of Arizona)
What becomes possible when knowledge is rooted in long-term relationship with a specific place—and what is lost in a world characterised by mobility, abstraction, and short-term decision-making?
1. What does it mean to truly “know a place”?
Knowledge emerges through continuity, not observation alone
Knowing a place is not the result of studying it over a short period, but of sustained relationship across generations, where patterns, variations, and signals become visible over time.
Time reveals what is otherwise invisible
Subtle shifts in weather, soil, plant behaviour, and ecological dynamics can only be understood through long-term attention, where knowledge accumulates and is refined across generations. What emerges is not simply more detailed knowledge, but a fundamentally different way of knowing—one that cannot be accessed through short-term study, data collection, or external expertise.
Place is not interchangeable
Knowledge developed in one place does not automatically transfer to another, as it is inseparable from the specific conditions, histories, and relationships of that land.
🌱 Seed:
Place-based knowledge is not something you can extract—it is something you grow into over time.
2. What does it mean to relate to corn as “the mother”?
Learning from corn as kin
Within Hopi Ways of Knowing, corn is not approached as a crop to be optimized, but as a relative—specifically, as “the mother.” This framing fundamentally alters the relationship: rather than extracting yield, the focus becomes maintaining reciprocity, continuity, and care across generations.
Corn as ecological and relational teacher
Corn becomes a teacher because its growth reflects the condition of the entire system—soil, rainfall, timing, and human attention. Observing how corn responds across seasons provides feedback that is ecological, relational, and spiritual at once, guiding decisions in ways that cannot be reduced to metrics alone.
Contrast with industrial agriculture
This stands in sharp contrast to industrial agriculture, where crops are treated as outputs within controlled systems, rather than participants in an ongoing relationship.
🌱 Seed
When a crop is understood as kin, success is no longer measured by yield alone, but by the continuity of relationship—the conditions that allow both the plant and the people to keep living well together over time.
3. How do values translate into actual farming practice?
Values shaping practice
Hopi dryland farming is often described as values-based first, technique second. This means that decisions about when, where, and how to plant are not driven primarily by efficiency or maximization, but by principles such as respect, restraint, and responsibility to future generations.
Farming as a form of listening
Practices are informed by observing and responding to the land, rather than imposing predefined techniques. Values are therefore not abstract—they are operationalized through everyday decisions that accumulate over time into a distinct form of land stewardship.
Working with constraints rather than overcoming them
Farming with minimal rainfall is not approached as a limitation to be engineered away, but as a condition to work with through accumulated knowledge. For example, planting decisions are shaped by careful observation of environmental conditions, but also by an ethic of not overreaching—taking only what the land can sustain. This can mean choosing not to plant in certain conditions, even when short-term gain might be possible.
🌱 Seed
Technique answers the question “how,” but values determine whether something should be done at all—and in place-based systems, that distinction becomes the difference between continuity and collapse.
4. What does co-creation with the more-than-human look like here?
Collaboration with environmental forces
Farming with minimal rainfall and no irrigation is only possible through deep attunement to multiple forces—soil conditions, wind patterns, moisture retention, plant behavior, and more. These are not variables to be controlled, but collaborators to be worked with. Wind, soil, moisture, and other ecological factors are thus not external variables, but become active participants that shape outcomes.
No separation between human and ecological processes
Farming is not something done to the land, but something that happens within a broader system of relationships. This requires a form of listening that is both empirical and intuitive: reading subtle environmental cues while also drawing on accumulated generational knowledge about how these systems behave over time.
Outcomes are co-produced
Success is not determined solely by human effort, but by how well these relationships are understood and engaged. Rather than imposing a plan onto the land, the approach is to respond to what the land is already doing—adjusting practices in alignment with conditions rather than against them.
🌱 Seed
Co-creation begins when the land is no longer treated as a passive surface to act upon, but as an active partner whose responses shape every meaningful decision. This makes co-creation not a concept, but a condition for survival.
5. What happens when this knowledge meets modern systems?
Loss in translation
When Indigenous knowledge is translated into Western scientific or policy frameworks, key elements that give the knowledge its meaning—such as relationality, values, and context—are often reduced or omitted. Practices that are inseparable from values, responsibilities, and cosmology are frequently reduced to techniques or data points, making them easier to adopt superficially but harder to apply in ways that remain true to their origin.
Mismatch of validation systems
Knowledge grounded in lived practice and ancestral continuity is not always recognised as legitimate within institutional frameworks that prioritise different forms of evidence.
Risk of extraction without understanding
There is a tendency to take techniques or insights without engaging with the underlying worldview and relationships that make them work. This creates a paradox where Indigenous approaches are increasingly referenced, yet rarely integrated in their full depth, because doing so would require changes to the underlying assumptions of the systems receiving them.
6. What can people who are not rooted in one place learn from this?
Start with attention and relationship
Even without generational continuity, people can begin by paying closer attention to the places they inhabit and developing relationships over time. Rather than attempting to replicate Indigenous knowledge systems, they can start with consistent, attentive engagement: observing seasonal changes, understanding local species, and recognizing patterns over time.
Accept limits to what can be known
There are aspects of place-based knowledge that cannot be replicated without long-term continuity, and recognising this is part of engaging respectfully.
Shift from control to participation
Rather than seeking to manage or optimise, the focus shifts toward participating in and responding to existing systems. A shift from a mindset of seeking knowledge to use to one of relationship, where learning is tied to responsibility and care for the place itself.
📌 Practitioner takeaway:
Knowing place begins not with tools or frameworks, but with sustained attention and relationship. Over time, attention itself becomes a form of relationship.
7. What does resilience look like from this perspective?
Rooted in continuity rather than adaptation alone
Resilience is not only about responding to change, but about maintaining relationships and practices that have sustained life over long periods.
Capacity to navigate variability
Long-term knowledge provides a basis for responding to changing conditions without losing the underlying relationship with place.
Not everything can or should scale
Practices rooted in specific places challenge assumptions that solutions can be generalised or scaled across contexts.
🌱 Seed:
Resilience is not just the ability to adapt—it is the ability to remain in right relationship over time.
Cross-cutting insight threads
Across the session, several deeper shifts become visible.
Knowledge → Relationship over time
Knowledge is not accumulated information, but the result of sustained, intergenerational relationship with place.
Resource → Relative
What is typically treated as a resource becomes a living relation, reshaping how decisions are made and what is considered acceptable.
Control → Participation
Rather than controlling environmental conditions, practice is oriented toward participating within them.
Scalability → Situated knowledge (unresolved)
Place-based knowledge challenges dominant assumptions about scalability, raising questions about how such approaches can—or should—be engaged beyond their original context.
Closing
These sessions are not designed to arrive at fixed answers, but to surface how different approaches work in practice. Each conversation reveals not only how and where they hold, but also the tensions and questions that remain unresolved—and that continue to invite further inquiry.
Over time, these syntheses form a growing body of insights into what co-creation with the more-than-human world might require, across contexts and practices.
The Co-creation with the More-than-Human sandbox is a collaboration between The Repatterning Collective and Kincentric Leadership.
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