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

00:00 Welcome and Land Acknowledgment
02:31 Guest Bio and Introduction
03:51 Opening Blessing and Heart Question
05:10 Reclaiming Anger as Medicine
08:08 Libation Prayer for the World
15:57 Anger Rage and Lifted Veils
20:19 Rethinking War and Remembering Water
25:18 Gather Your People Reading
33:04 Grief Poetry and Inner Wars
36:13 War Wants Us Small
40:30 Soul Conditions That Grow War
42:14 Oxygen of War
44:12 Harvesting Clear Vision
47:05 Ferocious Grief Revival
49:38 How Grief Behaves
51:59 Poetry Against Silence
55:08 From Muteness to Voice
58:33 Artistry as Resurrection
01:03:42 Womanhood as Creativity
01:07:23 History as Sacred Hoop
01:12:45 Composting Harm into Healing
01:16:33 Intentional Living Practice
01:19:22 All These Rivers Choose Love
01:23:01 Blessings and Farewell

Dr. Jaiya John — Guest

Website: jaiyajohn.com
Soul Water Rising — global mission
Podcast: I Will Read for You: The Voice and Writings of Jaiya John
Freedom Medicine: Words for Your Brave Revolution — book
Wildflowers Praying at Midnight — book
We Birth Freedom at Dawn — book
All These Rivers and You Chose Love — book
Fragrance After Rain — book
Dr. Jaiya John's YouTube channel — where his poem for the Martyred Poets of Gaza and Palestine is available
Substack: jaiyajohn.substack.com

Dr. Jennifer Mullan — Referenced

Website: decolonizingtherapy.com — Dr. Mullan's "rage doctor" ministry and upcoming work
Decolonizing Therapy: Oppression, Historical Trauma, and Politicizing Your Practice — book
Therapy is Not Neutral: Dr. Jennifer Mullan & Iya Affo (SAND Podcast episode)

The Gaza Monologues — Referenced

The Gaza Monologues — ASHTAR Theatre — the global project of 33 young people from Gaza, which Dr. Jaiya John contributed a poem to
Support ASHTAR Theatre / Gaza Monologues writers — GlobalGiving

Nikki Giovanni — Referenced

Nikki Giovanni — Poetry Foundation — the poet whose performance broke Dr. Jaiya John open as a young man and birthed him as a poet
nikki-giovanni.com

Ancestors Referenced

El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (Malcolm X) — quoted: "Out of all our studies, history is most qualified to reward our research"
Geronimo — Dr. Jaiya John's ancestral grandfather spirit, whose question "What is in your heart?" opens the gathering
John Lewis — referenced for "good trouble" and getting in the way of harm

Hopi Nation / Turtle Island

The concept of Sipapu (the Hopi place of emergence/womb place) is discussed at length as a framework for understanding history as circular, not linear

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