Interview with Barbara Rose Johnston, November 21, 2015

RYLKO-BAUER: This is Barbara Rylko-Bauer, a member of the Society for Applied Anthropology's Oral History Project Committee. Today is Saturday, November 21, 2015. I am speaking with Barbara Rose Johnston, an applied anthropologist who has worked for many years in the area of environmental social justice. She is the recipient of many awards, including the American Anthropological Association's (AAA) Anthropology in Public Policy Award which she received yesterday, November 20th, during the annual AAA meetings in Denver, Colorado. The interview is also taking place during these meetings.

Congratulations, Barbara! It's really wonderful to have this opportunity. It's a real honor actually to be able to interview you. I'm going to ask you a series 00:01:00of questions concerning your personal career, your research in advocacy, and how you also view the history and development of applied and practicing anthropology -- both generally and also in relation to your areas of interest and work.

I thought that maybe we could start by having you describe how and why you decided to pursue a career in anthropology. More specifically, a career that I, at least, would characterize as integrating theory with advocacy and practice.

JOHNSTON: Okay, good question. I did not start out with the intent to be an anthropologist, though I was certainly influenced by a number of concerns growing up, with social justice being paramount. In the "tribe" that I grew up in, we were the folks who always were out there at all the marches and so forth. Every summer growing up we went to our friend's cabin on the Russian River where 00:02:00they did an outdoor movie, and so I saw every summer growing up the Island of the Blue Dolphins (1964). It is this incredibly poignant story of a Native California woman who is left behind as her whole tribe is taken to a mission where they die of disease.

That has had an indelible impact upon me. I also grew up reading fairy tales and religious tracks and all that sort of thing, and so just that narrative and notion of suffering and justice is a facet of just who I am. I went to school taking classes -- I took a test in high school that [predicted] I'd be a planner. I did planning initially in my graduate program.

RYLKO-BAUER: Planning like urban planning?

JOHNSTON: Urban planning, yes. I did an undergraduate degree in anthropology, because you can take anything and get into a master's program in planning. I decided that since I was paying my own way through school, I will never take a class that I do not like. I like reading and writing and so anthropology and 00:03:00native California was my area of study. That was sort of the beginnings. I did planning for a couple of years.

RYLKO-BAUER: Now where did you go to school?

JOHNSTON: Initially, in high school I did community college classes and during high school I went to San Jose State for two years and transferred to UC Berkeley. I graduated after three years of college, because I was working and paying my way through school. One quarter I took 29 units, but it was, as I said, reading and writing. I had the most amazing year. It was the last year of Robert Heizer's life. Rob Heizer was dying of throat cancer. He's an archeologist, native of California, and the Great Plains was part of his body of work mostly. He was also an ethnobotanist and a number of things.

He was an expert witness in a lot of the 1950s era lawsuits over whether or not 00:04:00California tribes had the right to get the treaties that were never signed by Congress when gold was discovered in the 1800s. I learned really that year about the fierce politics that divide the anthropology profession, and the ways in which as an anthropologist you have an ethical obligation to act if you have privileged information. You can't just sit on the sidelines. He told me stories -- the whole year long, six hours a week for the whole year -- six hours two times a week for the whole year. That had a big impact on me.

RYLKO-BAUER: I can see, yes.

JOHNSTON: I worked for my honor's thesis with him and [Albert] Elsasser doing an annotated bibliography of all the Native California manuscripts in the Kroeber Museum as well as early texts. The Harrington collection of papers had 00:05:00just been returned to the Kroeber library. They gave me a key to the locked shelves and I spent the whole year in the library. That was my early sort of [unclear]. It was wonderful and I loved it. I pulled together this annotated bibliography that Heizer and Elsasser used to produce one of his last books. [The Natural World of the California Indians. Robert F Heizer and Albert Elsasser. Berkeley: University of California Press,1980]. When I was done with this big, thick manuscript of just the annotated bibliography showing where California plants were used for medical purposes--

RYLKO-BAUER: This was ethnobotany?

JOHNSTON: Medical ethnobotany. He said, "Okay, you wrote the book. You might as well publish it." I'm 19 years old. I'm too old -- too young, excuse me -- to do this. He really infused in me that notion, the whole year, whispering in my ear -- me and the other five students in the honor's class. I would say that was perhaps one of the biggest things.

RYLKO-BAUER: Did it get published?

JOHNSTON: The University of California published it as an occasional paper in their archeology series. [California Medicinal Ethnobotany, Senior Honors thesis in Anthropology, University of California, 1978] It's a book on their shelves. 00:06:00It's two copies or something, and I'd say that that period had another big impact for me only because it was one intense year to graduate. I found Berkeley to be very cold halls where faculty didn't engage and the culture climate was kind of strange. The one class that I did the worst in was also the one class that I learned the most, and that was Laura Nader's class. That had a big impact on my life and career as well, the difference between doing all the reading and being able to go to all the classes being paramount, but also the lifetime relationship that over the years developed because of that brief time that I had spent there.

RYLKO-BAUER: And then you got an MA?

JOHNSTON: And then I got a job at the county of Santa Clara where I was brought in as a federal program that paid for 18 months to bring people in on 00:07:00internships basically -- planning apprenticeships in this context -- but it happened for all kinds of government jobs. The federal government paid a significant portion of your salary.

I worked for a year and a half. At the end of the year and a half -- me and 21 other interns -- I was the one offered a permanent position. I decided not to take it. I was involved in documenting the cultural resources of the county and coming up with a long-term plan that protected the cultural resources of the county. That was the year that I got to do the historical research on relationships to where Indians had lived and how they lived and came up with a predictive model that the county based their county code, that said when you're doing development that you needed to look for environmental impact and you needed to look for cultural resources. If your home or property is in this area shaded, then you need to have an archeologist come and do a Phase I ESA survey. 00:08:00This county code then was taken to the state and became statewide. That was when I was 21.

RYLKO-BAUER: It sounds like from the very beginning you have had this really remarkable ability of figuring out how you can translate knowledge and research skills into a form that has policy impact. That's remarkable.

JOHNSTON: I think that the Heizer suggestions were really key in the sense of giving me the confidence to know that it didn't matter that I was 21, with my hair in braids and wearing overalls to work, and telling these developers who were millionaires that no, you can't build there. To have that kind of power was something that came natural I guess, in part because of the teachers and in 00:09:00part, because of the family that I grew up in -- that we have rights, if you have knowledge and you have the evidence that backs it. Hey, deal with it. Those were the times where Wonder Woman was on TV and feminists were taking to the streets and farm workers were protesting. Cesar Chavez started a farm workers union in our church, or at least the early years of the farm workers union and so that context of the times.

RYLKO-BAUER: Your PhD was from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, right?

JOHNSTON: Right, and so I started out in planning. I did a semester or so of graduate work in planning and it was stupid. They were teaching me how to write an office memo. The environmental law class was good and I got a lot out of it. The environmental impact fieldwork course, I had to go out and do surveys. I worked full-time. And then I decided to go and visit my brother in the Virgin Islands when my 18 months was up to think about this job offer. I had never been 00:10:00a kid. I had never been to a bar. I had never done anything in that regard. I had just been a student. Living on a houseboat for three or four months and diving and I had hooked up with a friend. I made a new friend who was doing archeology there and volunteered on excavating a midden there. It just got me wondering. I expected, I had never been further east than the Nevada state line. I had never been anywhere like the Caribbean. I expected when I got there that it would be tropical, it would have rainforests, but instead I encountered a mountainous island that looked like Baja California.

One of the key questions I had then was well, why? What was the difference between my expectation and reality? Especially when I had read up on the place. Bluebeard, Blackbeard and the pirates lived there, right? I decided to study on my own with my unemployment checks when I turned down the job. I studied 00:11:00tropical ecology and this question of how did the landscape change over time, or was it a one way or another -- the difference between my expectations and reality.

Doing archeology as a volunteer, that meant asking some of those questions. I got those questions in the archeology, you know, they had paleoclimatology questions and what kind of plant floral, plant and animal life was here. That was interesting to think about. That gives me what does this look like 10,000 years ago, because we had analysis of some of the shells. The site itself I think was about 3,000-4,000 years old, but it gave us that kind of timeline and information. That is one of the things that I think got me thinking.

And then I went back for a family wedding and encountered Les Rowntree, a geographer at San Jose State, a friend of mine that I had gotten to know when I worked for the county. He said, "As long as you're studying this stuff, you might as well get a master's for it, you know? Tell you what, I'll sponsor you 00:12:00and you do independent studies, because there is no master's yet at that time in environmental. I'll sponsor you. Go back to the Virgin Islands and finish your research and write it up. Come back and take some classes and then you'll get your master's." I wrote my thesis for the research and then came back. I spent the second semester back in California taking ecology everything -- plant ecology, biological ecology, the labs, the fieldwork, human ecology -- and wrote my thesis at the same time. I also applied for grad school at the same time.

RYLKO-BAUER: This wasn't really . . . I mean, so you weren't taking anthropology courses, right?

JOHNSTON: No, I was doing an interdisciplinary master's degree. So I got a master's in interdisciplinary studies that now, in the program that I did it, that it was sponsored by, is now an environmental studies master's. So I'm on the San Jose State environmental studies site with that little linkage, but that 00:13:00master's thesis looked at the cultural construction of drought and how an island changed over this long historical period. It got me reviewing all the history of the place; the relationships between land use and slavery; its relationship in geopolitical terms and so forth. That little kernel then became, when I applied to grad school and got in a number of places and went to the University of Massachusetts, because they had a Caribbean program -- I further developed and expanded after taking a year of classes at UMass.

I had a year of classes at UMass, and then, because they accepted my master's and so I came in with the master's. Then I went back to the Caribbean and did basically a semester at UMass the second year, and then I was in the Caribbean the rest of the time to finish my research and write my dissertation. So I did not have a whole lot of schooling other than my undergraduate degree which was intense, and a full year of intense courses in anthropology and also political 00:14:00economy and paleoclimatology. So, yeah, I did not feel like an anthropologist for many years.

And when I asked my dissertation advisor who chaired my committee about this, shouldn't I be taking more history of anthropology and theory classes, her answer was, "Listen, Johnston, you've got enough of it to get out. You will learn this when you're teaching those classes. You will, I guarantee it because you don't learn it by just reading the book. You learn it by engaging and talking it through and teaching it." And she was right, she was really right. I didn't do a whole lot of anthropology teaching as it turned out over the course of my career. Even though I applied every year, anthropology departments weren't interested in hiring me. But, I certainly have an understanding of what I see is 00:15:00to be the original transdisciplinary disciple and I feel like I fit in now, though I certainly didn't when I first started this.

RYLKO-BAUER: It's very interesting to me. I've known you for a long time, and it's just interesting as I listen to the path that you took, I can see the very early influences in what you did, and how you've kind of run with it and developed it over time in the work you've done. You mentioned Heizer. What were some of the other people, both early on, but then throughout your whole career that have really had an impact on you? Or also, like sometimes, you know, it's one work that we read and it creates an epiphany, you know?

JOHNSTON: I have to say that although I'm an independent person -- hence, I 00:16:00did independent studies and put my way through school and all of that -- the people that have influenced me the most are the people that I've worked so closely with in all of these collaborative endeavors over time. I was so fortunate to get into the University of Massachusetts and go there, not knowing that when I got there that this was a really independent program and a really unique graduate program with a lot of student determination. We had a student representative on the governing council for the department who had power, a vote. They could vote on whom do we want to offer the job interview to; they could vote on whom do we want to offer the job to.

But then more than that, though, your construction of what is my PhD was very student-controlled. You defined your statements of field. You had to have three statements of field, plus what you're doing your dissertation on. You defined what your readings were, that you go into a defense -- you couldn't be grilled 00:17:00on the things. . . You couldn't be asked the question "give me the name of a Native American Indian tribe for every letter of the alphabet," which a friend of mine got at her university.

RYLKO-BAUER: Seriously? Oh my.

JOHNSTON: In other words, it had to be within what these students [wanted], very much, and part of that was because of Sylvia Forman.

Sylvia Forman was one of Laura Nader's students at UC Berkeley. And then when she got hired, UMass-Amherst was a startup department. Everybody was hired at the same time. Most of the faculty that came in were new PhDs or just finishing their dissertations. This was in that revolutionary era. And so you have to come up with, well, what is the guiding, guidance? What is our department? How do we operate? Sylvia was a natural. She was part of the Berkeley political movement. She knew how to craft this, but she also wrote up and really reacted to what she disliked about her graduate program training and made it student-empowered. So 00:18:00that was interesting.

And then Sylvia and I got to know each other, because working in the Caribbean, Granada was invaded. I knew something about that, just because of the time that I was living on my brother's houseboat and so forth, everybody would hang out. It was a big, huge houseboat in a harbor with small ships. That was the party place. One of the guys that would hang out, he'd leave his boat there and go for mysterious trips and then come back. He seemed to have a lot of money and really a fast boat that we used for diving when he was gone. And he, as it turns out was a special op, to practice the invasion for Granada. He got drunk one night and told us these stories.

"Yes, you know what we did last week? We practiced this really cool exercise; dropped us off two-and-a-half miles offshore and we swam in. And then we all, you know, in our little suits and so forth, went and took over the radio tower; we went and took over the telephone company, the electric company and we secured 00:19:00those things. And then at the end of the night we swam off and nobody knew about it." That's how the invasion of Granada went.

RYLKO-BAUER: Interesting.

JOHNSTON: Yes, it was interesting. There was, Johnnetta Cole was another faculty member there. Sylvia and Johnnetta were very involved in the U.S.-Granada Friendship Society, and I got involved when I came on campus. And when it was invaded that same year, we were involved in protests and political action around it. I got to know my faculty members not as in the classroom reading their works as much as colleagues around the table talking political strategy for outreach and engagement or advocacy.

And then I got to appreciate Sylvia over the years, because I came in 1981 and I finished in February of 1987. I got to know her in large part because of this mix of conversations -- of Berkeley and the shared template. And so Laura Nader 00:20:00was a very big force in her eyes. I got to know Laura Nader through Sylvia, and not through Laura initially. And then through political actions and this determination to get out in the world. She was the one who was really good at pushing me out. She was also the first person who ever mentioned applied anthropology to me.

RYLKO-BAUER: Laura Nader?

JOHNSTON: No, Sylvia Forman. Sylvia was very good at empowering other people to do. She didn't have a lot of patience for women coming back to grad school and just studying and not sure of what they want to do -- studying this and that and taking ten years to get through school and not doing something. Sylvia did not do a great emphasis in publishing her work. She was a political actor and she did a lot of her advocacy within anthropology in trying to find ways to make this matter more. She was a real, she and Carol Hill, in a seminal inspiration 00:21:00with a number of other people in founding the Association for Feminist Anthropology, but she was also with Johnnetta Cole a really big behind-the-scenes person to help make the Association for Black Anthropology happen. So that notion of how do you create communities and collectives to allow political action and transformative change to occur was fine-tuned by working with Sylvia on that.

RYLKO-BAUER: You got a lot of practical experience and some real models that you then were able to later both apply, but also to make your own, yes.

JOHNSTON: Yes, I was so fortunate to do this, to get that experience in a context where we were all equal at the table. There was no power differential between professor and student, so to speak. Instead we were just shared actors trying to achieve a common political aim or social aim or justice aim. Yes, that 00:22:00school -- you asked me also, though, about other inspirational sources?

RYLKO-BAUER: Yes.

JOHNSTON: Again, because of the template there where you define your own statements, I studied my statements of field, ethnicity and ethnic conflict. And to do that I did a whole survey of both sociology and anthropology. And I contacted a lot of these people -- key folks -- to say what is the difference between sociology and anthropology. Truly, in that realm there really wasn't much difference at all. Everybody would tell you that. There was perhaps an argument, you know, a theory-based difference between East Coast and West. I had a brother later who went back and did a PhD in sociology. And we just, it was amazing to realize that we were reading the exact same things. If he was on the West Coast, they were influenced by the same things that we on the East Coast were in anthropology. My school had Marx Bible classes, we used to call them -- 00:23:00all the archeologists and everybody got Marx, right? Marx, of course, and Fredrik Barth in terms of ethnicity and anthropology; but Paulo Freire, that was the one that really gave me a sense of praxis, the connections between people and the underlying reasons why we do what we do; how to do it in a way with dignity, with empowerment and what kinds of strategies. Paulo Freire was a very big influence in those early formative years, I'd say, in my work.

RYLKO-BAUER: That's really interesting. I can see the connection, I'm not surprised, but I didn't know that. I want to shift a little bit to focus more on the work that came after, but first I want to ask you . . . I see your work as crosscutting environmental issues, health, social justice, and human rights. And 00:24:00I'm sure that you could add a number of others to that list. Is there a particular way that you like to describe this? When you're trying to tell somebody, for example, what it is that you do?

JOHNSTON: Yes, I get irritated in that sense. What I tell people is what I do is what I'm doing. I do environment, health, and human rights at this point in my life -- those intersections, the linkages. I find it difficult to do the catch term phrases of what do you call this?

RYLKO-BAUER: The labels.

JOHNSTON: The labels. In large part because they get defined, redefined, morphed and tweaked. They have different meanings for different people, but also because it tends to be an insider language. I would rather communicate more clearly. "I do this, this and this." So, sometimes in earlier years it was environmental quality and social justice, you know, but I've had different terms over the years.

RYLKO-BAUER: I was going to ask you what led you to go into this 00:25:00constellation, but clearly you were doing it from your master's thesis.

JOHNSTON: I was doing it from day one. I grew up in the "Valley of Heart's Delight" [Santa Clara Valley]. That's where I grew up and now it's known as Silicon Valley. I saw in my lifetime, this beautiful orchard and landscape and valley with little tiny towns and cities -- thirteen of them. Now, you have one big blanket of cement and absolutely polluted aquifers. And so, that question of how and why was this process of change occurring, and at what cost, was always asked. And then the other facet that got me was the recognition in my schoolbooks that California natives were always described as Digger Indians who died off. They were peaceful, and less primitive, ah developed tribe, because they had no warfare, they were considered, you know, the village idiots, so to speak. And I had no idea that every summer when we went to the Russian River and 00:26:00I watched this sad movie about this dying off of the Indians, that the people picking the grapes across the river at Korbel Champagne-- you know, vineyard -- were Pomo Indians. The Indians, hello! We're like, in fact, more Indians were in California, you know, when I was a kid growing up because of the relocation acts. But in terms of native California, it was alive and it was certainly there and it was invisible.

RYLKO-BAUER: Yes, invisible is such a critical word.

JOHNSTON: The point being I guess that I didn't come to anthropology, you know, and I don't do stuff in anthropology -- it's just who I am. Life shapes you.

RYLKO-BAUER: You know, I think that word invisible, I think that your life work has been making things visible that others would rather remain invisible.

JOHNSTON: When I think about what I do, I see a gazillion bits and pieces and 00:27:00parts of stuff out there, or this one right here, I see. I think of myself as like a kaleidoscope and then when you shift the lens, the vision of the world looks different. Sometimes an idea or a facet or conversation causes the kaleidoscope lens to shift. Sometimes in terms of the nature of the work that you're doing, it's giving voice. And initially, at a superficial level, that's kind of what I was doing maybe back in 1990 or so, of the idea of what we can study and what we can learn. And then we can, we give, we white anthropologists, or what have you, would give voice. We would assert it at places for those people who didn't have power, and so we were playing a culture broker role or an advocacy role, a facilitator role, but we were also, of course, doing it through our own lens.

RYLKO-BAUER: Lens, right.

JOHNSTON: For me the ideal outcome in life is that if you start off working in 00:28:00that kind of context, to be able to evolve in your relationships and in your understanding and productivity to the point that you're just a full-time facilitator, rather than a documentarian, in that the people you are working with are fully determinant actors and your role is congratulations, or commiseration, or how can I help -- but you are no longer the top of the power chain.

RYLKO-BAUER: More specifically about your body of work, in 1998 at the SfAA meetings in San Juan, you stated that you didn't see yourself as an activist. What do you mean by that and do you think differently seventeen years later?

JOHNSTON: Activist as a label often gets used in our disciple as a way of marginalizing. There are those who do real anthropology that is theoretical and sound and informed, and is not tainted by the various ways that political actions might preempt, you know, or skew an analysis. I came into the field as a science background and that science master's is really key. Science is about evidence. And evidence can be used in political ways or not, but it's about evidence.

So, I see myself, first and foremost, as somebody who is deeply concerned with the evidentiary basis that informs whatever it is you're looking at. So no, I don't see myself as an activist. At times I will do activism, but I primarily do research on issues and topics that matter -- research with a purpose. And at 00:30:00times some of that research is explicitly action-oriented research, but I'm largely a book scholar, an archivist, researcher, writer. And I don't do--people tend to describe me, "Oh, Johnston must be doing the trenches or out there on the picket lines." No. Other people do that, I may facilitate it.

RYLKO-BAUER: Yes, as you said, as a facilitator to give the people, who are in the trenches because it's their issue, more power and more resources to be more effective.

JOHNSTON: Right, and even when it is my issue. So in my own backyard and I get called to ask and so forth, my role typically, and when Fukushima happened, the nuclear issues in our backyard -- my neighbors organized -- "Johnston, you work on nuclear issues." My role, I see it, and I really try to make clear boundaries on it, is to educate and facilitate and support, but to empower them to do the 00:31:00activism and to give advice. I need to have my own little cocoon where I'm not working 24/7. Maybe that's the end result of that.

RYLKO-BAUER: But this is a great model. We talk constantly in anthropology about relevance and engagement and outreach. I think that people are really confused about what it is that all that means and how can we effectively interject whatever resources we have into that. I think that this is a really great model, and a doable one.

JOHNSTON: I have to say that when you get involved and engaged with a group or community of people, or with an issue, and because of your research and work become a unique player in your command of knowledge -- you have an immense 00:32:00ethical responsibility. I've had in my own life a couple of areas where I've developed this unique body of knowledge and information and insight. That means that you're always on call. The ethical relationship is always there.

So, I will do activist-oriented things and advocacy on behalf of an issue, but I will do it only because of that unique role. There's other people who can't do it, but often it's more providing advice and political advocacy strategy input. So, I do a lot of work in collaboration with civil society actors and affected communities and various people in the public and governance, and in academia. I'll be facilitating or providing information or giving suggestions on strategy or digging up key evidence in documents. But again, it's that sense of, you have 00:33:00to do it, because you have this command. If other people can do it, I'll say go for it, you know. Or I turn folks on to that. I give away more work, than I . . . give away jobs, give away money [laugh], just because you can only do so much in life.

RYLKO-BAUER: Well, you've done a lot of different things. You've worked on a lot of different projects, but I know that there are several that I think one could label as landmark projects in your career.

I think the award that you got, Anthropology in Public Policy Award, was for those landmark projects that you did, each of which was in helping indigenous people, who have been affected by environmental and military projects of 00:34:00different sorts, to gain both acknowledgement of their suffering and some form of restitution for that. Am I right in the way I characterized that?

JOHNSTON: Sort of, the award itself is for the body of work and demonstrative impact in public policy in the last five years, which was really hard in the sense that I've done a whole lot of public policy stuff in the last five years that have been profoundly significant. One reason why, when I was nominated I said, OK, yes, where if I might have been broached earlier, I would say no, because the public policy outcome had not yet been achieved or perhaps I didn't see it at all as possible, which was the case. There is that, it's for recent work.

Also, in that regard it shows some of the skewed nature in how they set up this 00:35:00award, because you don't get public policy done as an individual. And yet, you're giving all of the attention to the individual. The individual may be a key actor and an important facet, but it's because of a huge pyramid or a large collective collaborative that public policy happens. And, people when they think of public policy, they think of government or a law or whatever. That's only a little facet of it. A lot of the area that I focus in is how do you get governance that addresses needs. Governance in the true sense of the word, where you have an institutional and political apparatus that is designed to meet and serve the needs of the people.

So then when people don't have access to the rule of law -- when they have horrific situations and conditions that are outside the realm of 'we don't care, you're not our interest group' -- how, outside of the rule of law, do you get 00:36:00remedy is sort of the area that I tend to specialize.

RYLKO-BAUER: Yeah.

JOHNSTON: So it was kind of interesting for me to try and answer these questions to the committee on my body of work in the last five years, because it's all based on 30 years of work.

RYLKO-BAUER: Exactly.

JOHNSTON: And yet, the recent achievements have finally occurred.

Which says a lot about anthropology and our mis . . . perhaps those who don't necessarily work in such a fashion -- idealistic notions or shallow notions -- that when you want to do effective work, you can just have a project. You get some funding. You go out and do some work. And then you have some product. And then you move on to the next thing. And that's what a lot of people do, but it's not the same for what I do.

RYLKO-BAUER: Just to have it on record, a lot of people are very familiar with the work that you do. But I think for this interview, I think that it would be good for you to summarize. And I'll also include in the interview as it gets 00:37:00published, a listing of your key publications and stuff that people can refer to, because you could spend hours talking about each project, but just summarizing--

JOHNSTON: OK, four. Four main projects that sort of create this arc. The first being, doing a global study; trying to secure social science contributions, case-specific studies in support of a United Nations (UN) initiative, the first special rapporteur on human rights and the environment. This was created out of the Rio meetings in 1990; the term started in 1990 for the first special rapporteur. I had seen the call in an environmental magazine. They wanted contributions and so I contacted the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund, which was the main nonprofit assisting the rapporteur and said, "Well, I'm interested in 00:38:00this, because I've been teaching environmental studies and there is no social cultural content in there. When they're talking about people it's only a population issue. I want to write a textbook, and I want to write it about the environment and human and cultural context in a much more sophisticated way for environmental studies. Let's exchange information."

We had this long meeting and they told me, "Well, actually we don't have any cultural contributions. We've only gotten responses and studies and cases that look at the example of how human rights and the environment intersect and abuse from individuals, from individual journalists who are whistleblowers or from lawyers for the problems in the lack in the law -- but we've never really thought about groups and group rights.

So, I organized a committee and I proposed it to the AAA and to the Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA), a human rights and environment committee. This was in 1990. At the November meetings for the AAA, Carole Hill and Jane Buikstra were then presidents, and they approved it -- both of these presidents, let's do 00:39:00a joint committee of the AAA and the SfAA on human rights and the environment.

And the plan was to globally contact--both in anthropology, the AAA, that's anthropology and the Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA), which is interdisciplinary -- it allowed me to contact geographers and other kinds of, political scientists and lawyers, to get the broader array, to collect those kinds of case studies around the world that demonstrate the most egregious examples of ulcerating abuse, that give you the reasons why the groups have rights; that cultures are being abused as well as the environment. And that what are the processes and the driving forces that are making this happen.

So we did this study and we had about 150 people in the end submitting case studies. Now, mind you, in 1990, I go to the first . . . Jane Buikstra says, "I'm going to put you on the environmental task force." I show up at the environmental task force meeting at the AAA and no one in the room knew who I was, or why I was there. They had already been meetings for a year and so I explained, and they welcomed me. This would have been Skip (Roy) Rappaport and 00:40:00Shirley Fiske-- I'm blanking, but actually it was a wonderful group of people.

My task was to focus on human rights and the environment and to be mediating with the Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA) and we'd have these two sort of rounds. At the end of the meeting we have a new [AAA] president and the new president did not support this initiative.

RYLKO-BAUER: Ah.

JOHNSTON: So she disenfranchised the former decision. All of the paperwork wasn't properly prepared and it was easy for her to do. I still remained on the environmental task force though.

RYLKO-BAUER: But no human rights in there?

JOHNSTON: No, I did environment and human rights for the environmental task force, but there was no AAA sponsorship of this AAA-SfAA [initiative]. And I would say that almost all of our contributions came from AAA members, some who were also SfAA members. It was major endeavors of three years' of work where we 00:41:00pulled together different reports and submitted to the United Nations. We also prepared, I wrote a grant and got Nathan Cummings fund money to the SfAA, and it was the first time they'd ever used their nonprofit status to get a grant.

RYLKO-BAUER: So then the SfAA was involved in this work, too, but not as a collaborative with the AAA?

JOHNSTON: Right, the collaboration was dismantled right after it was approved. The SfAA and Carole Hill, I went to their meetings during that November time, and the executive board approved it as well. They set up a human rights and environment committee that operated from 1990-1997, that I chaired and developed and organized. So that committee then, I was basically the lead and we pulled together all of these cases. And at every SfAA and AAA meeting we would meet and pull together cases. That was a huge and profound thing. Some of the most egregious cases that we came across, one was the case of Rongelap, an atoll in 00:42:00the Marshall Islands that was heavily exposed from nuclear weapons, but also where the people were used in human radiation experimentation. Another was the case of a dam development in Latin America and the horrific human rights abuses accompanying an internationally financed, a World Bank financed dam. So these things were from the start in this template of issues and concerns and part of the broader array. That project had a huge impact.

We don't have enough time to talk about it, but as much as anything, one outcome was the book called Who Pays the Price: The Sociocultural Context of Environmental Crisis that I edited and was the principal author of. From that, when that came out, it was published at Island Press. I didn't want to go with an academic press, because I wanted to get into the science realm. Island Press was the main science and environmental science publisher and was a nonprofit 00:43:00press. It was published and had a broad distribution. It was used in a gazillion law courses, especially, and it influenced a lot of things. Among others, it also went to some of the communities and the places, and I started getting contacted because of that book to do more work. That's where my other projects evolved.

RYLKO-BAUER: So, just to back up, so that project and the book that was the end product, and its impact, was . . . I mean, the SfAA was involved in the sense that you were on that SfAA committee?

JOHNSTON: I organized it and chaired it, and I reported to the board twice a year. And we had this immense amount of work and activity. With that Nathan Cummings grant we had $5K that I was able to use to produce these reports and 00:44:00distribute a booklet that went to 450 environmental and human rights organizations around the world. There was no intersect at that time between the two areas and fields.

RYLKO-BAUER: Oh, really.

JOHNSTON: Environmentalists only saw environmental problems; human rights saw human rights problems. There was no intersect, so we made that happen by sending this to the foundations and the advocacy groups around the world -- for free, there you go.

And then Greg Button was a AAA fellow at the time and also on this committee and contributed a case study on the maquiladoras and the proposed adverse impact of NAFTA, the border. He was Senator Wellstone's congressional fellow. And Wellstone was pitching an environmental justice act. So he helped to influence the writing of that act in large part out of this, but also he got that booklet put into all of the incoming Congress packets. So Barbara Boxer saw that booklet, which had four of the most egregious studies, including the Marshall Islands case.

And then in 1993, Eileen Welsome published a series of articles on human radiation experimentation based on interviewing subjects or the families of people who had been in classified research used in the U.S ["The Plutonium Experiment," three articles for The Albuquerque Tribune]. When that hit the fan, a broad public protest occurred and President Clinton set up an advisory commission on human radiation experimentation. And Boxer sent the SfAA booklet to Hazel O'Leary, who was Secretary of Energy, and said "Put the Marshall Islands on the mandate." Other people were advocating as well, because the initial construction of the advisory committee's mandate was only the 48 states. And because of advocacy like this and others, the ACHRE looked at other territories like Alaska and the history there, and Puerto Rico and the history 00:46:00there, and the Marshall Islands and the history there of human radiation experimentation.

RYLKO-BAUER: And the ACHRE was?

JOHNSTON: The Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments. So that was sort of a . . . really, when I think of my life, I think of, you know, I'm a body of water -- a pond. I'm a vessel of water. Obviously, we all are, right? But the first big, in my adult life, stone that was tossed into that pond creates all of these ripples. And then the more that you track where these ripples go, that is the interconnectivity between that which took me to the Marshall Islands and an invitation to advise the Nuclear Claims Tribunal on indigenous peoples and indigenous rights and their customary relationships with land, as they were trying to figure out how do we compensate for the environmental harm associated with land.

That invitation in 1999 led to a relationship I'm still involved in, and massive 00:47:00questions that keep coming up in different areas of research. Perhaps, I think the most, if you're a researcher, anyone would give their eye teeth, what a privilege, to be asked to come assist, to answer questions like, to a judicial panel, of how do you appropriately compensate for the loss of land, for the environmental harm, when the people are still there, if they are removed from their ability to safely use land? How do you compensate that, when the property courts or administrative courts are all based on the Western notion of property? How do you get an indigenous notion of value into this conversation and appropriately compensate for the fund of dollars this, these immense issues that money can never, ever solve?

RYLKO-BAUER: Why don't you just mention a few of the issues that resulted from the--

JOHNSTON: So nuclear weapons testing, the most polluted place in terms of U.S. atomic and nuclear bombs on the planet--we tested our dirtiest nuclear weapons in the Marshall Islands. It's called the Pacific Proving Grounds. In 1954 one of , the biggest detonation the U.S. did and the second largest, I think, to Russia, just carpeted the whole 22-populated atolls, but especially the Northern Chain, with extremely dangerous, and it was the largest population, the people of Rongelap who were a hundred and so miles downwind and the largest number of people to be exposed to the highest level of radiation and still live. So it was classified, of course, tests. People were left on their island for three days or 00:49:00so before they were evacuated, where in their Rongelap Atoll, one of the adjacent atolls is Rongerik, weathermen for the military were evacuated a day and a half after the test. So they [the people] were left to their own devices, though they knew that there was very, very, very off-the-charts high levels of radiation in the area.

They were evacuated, they brought to Kwajalein where they were immediately enrolled -- immediately, meaning I think on day seven of March 1, 1954 which was the Bravo test, in a classified project to study the effects of high-level radiation. And they were looking at acute effects from acute exposure. They studied them, and they also went to Utirik which was another atoll, not as close but still within range. They got very serious doses, though not as much as Rongelap. They collected that population and brought them back. They studied the people from Utirik for 30 days or so, and then they returned to their atoll. 00:50:00Nuclear weapons tests continued all the way through the end of 1958. So people were living. . .

RYLKO-BAUER: They were getting repeated exposure?

JOHNSTON: People of Utirik, it turns out, got repeated, repeated, repeated, repeated exposures that the U.S. never really addressed or paid much attention to, in large part because they had their population-studying concern. And they thought at the time that only high levels of radiation were a problem; that at low levels human will adjust and adapt to the ecosystem.

But then also at the time, it turns out--I learned this from responding to the Nuclear Claims Tribunal's request and the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments finishing its work, and because of civil society lawsuits -- President Clinton issuing an order to make all of this public, a Web-based open access to all of the formerly classified documents on a word-searchable engine.

RYLKO-BAUER: A treasure trove.

JOHNSTON: Oh, my God! So, I got asked to answer those questions when I had access to word-searchable downloadable document to really pull together the history. And then also to pull together a study. I'm jumping ahead and I think, probably you don't want to have so much detail . . .

RYLKO-BAUER: Yeah.

JOHNSTON: I'll just sort of sum up to say that the nuclear work in the Marshall Islands was meant initially to document and advise the Nuclear Claims Tribunal on how to address indigenous land value issues. I brought out a team -- myself, Holly Barker and Stuart Kirsch, because he had been working in Papua New Guinea on a land claims expert witness. Where we would try and hammer out what's a methodology to really handle this. We had a lot of debate. In the end, after that trip it resulted in Holly and I continuing our work together focusing on an area that I thought was important; and Stuart continuing on in his own research 00:52:00areas of interest. But, Barbara, I don't know how to [laugh], I don't know how to cut short such a big, huge and important story.

RYLKO-BAUER: No, I understand, I knew from the very beginning when we started this interview that it would be a real challenge. But maybe just summarizing some of the key findings that you had, and then fast forward to what happened as a result. What was the, not the end product, because it's still evolving, but . . .

JOHNSTON: So, I'm glad that you gave those suggestions. That's really helpful. But I won't directly answer it the way that you wanted me to [laugh], but just to say that one of the more important things that came out of this -- in part because of those debates and discussions with Stuart Kirsch and Holly Barker, 00:53:00and in part because I had been working with this large group of people on human rights and the environment and I had a phenomenal number of contacts and connections to assist -- was the development of a methodology. How do you document the consequential damages of these things?

A development of a methodology that also took into account other sources of law of natural and other economic regimes, of how do you value natural resources. So having access to people like Bonnie McCay and Shirley Fiske, for example. Shirley Fiske, who could tell me that you have to look at the Exxon Valdez spill and all of the expert witness testimony and so forth. But then you also have to get a hold of the Army Corps of Engineers reports, because they really wanted to figure out how to get the money back from the corporation, right? And then, how do you value a salmon or a seal. Then Bonnie McCay, similarly, how do you look at law and the broader history of law and then customary law.

And then friends of mine that had worked in Australia, how do you look at especially issues like marine resources, that land is not just land. Western law is based on land, yet indigenous life, and especially in the Pacific Islands, it's based on a much broader array. Because how can you own land? Let alone when your life as a seafaring people -- Pacific Islands people. So those were really significant for me, because I developed a consequential damage assessment approach that first looked at a traditional way of life and did it in a participatory process, working with elders in all of these different areas -- mapping, documenting, and fleshing out the ways in which people lived.

And then how do you come up, from an evidentiary sense, at how people have changed over time. What were factors in terms of the nature of the harm? Again, it was beautiful to have access to health physicists and to all of the wide array of people that had been previously working on the UN study. And then, how 00:55:00do you pull that together in a way that allows standing in a judicial process that is based initially on a U.S. template of an administrative port in western property law.

And then, because in the Marshall Islands their constitution includes customary rights as parallel and in equal power to the constitutional rights that reflect this largely U.S. authored constitution; that and they also explicitly recognize international law. So customary law and international law are recognized as equivalent standings of power and authority. Australia, and to some modest degree, Canada, but especially Australia became a very important source.

In that realm, because I had worked on the human rights and environment project initially with the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund, which is now Earth Justice, with lawyers, environment and human rights, now, lawyers. That was extremely helpful. I met people more broadly in the community of that hybrid between anthropology and the law. So, coming up with a methodology and then figuring out 00:56:00how to present it in a way, in a court context, led me to my next projects.

Years later, when I was asked to assist and advise the World Commission on Dams and prepare a reparation and right to remedy brief, it was because I had done that in the Marshall Islands. It wasn't just--they asked me to prepare a brief on how do we compensate those who were adversely affected by dams. And I turned it around, having gone through the UN documents and seeing these new draft guidelines on reparation and right to remedy, and I made it that; that we can't just look at the economic losses that people incurred from being forcibly displaced or suffering from massacre or what have you.

We need to look more broadly at what has been lost here, but what's meaningful remedy look like. In the Marshall Islands, because we did participatory process from day one and because it was based on this historical art of the past and the period of concern. But then also, where are we going, what we do need and what are issues and problems, what does meaningful remedy look like, became a real 00:57:00key component. I did that for the World Commission on Dams.

RYLKO-BAUER: To just maybe finish up with the Rongelap case, just kind of tell us how that has ended. What ended up being done with that material?

JOHNSTON: So for the Rongelap case . . . we did two different studies for the Office of the Public Advocate, which was Bill Graham who invited my participation in the first place. And then those two studies, they ended up not using the land claim study -- the land valuation study in the land claim part of the court's review of the issues for the people of Rongelap. But in the third phase, consequential damages, I was brought in to revise that, to do additional research and pull together the case for Rongelap claim for consequential 00:58:00damages. I did that with Holly Barker in 2001. We presented it in three days of a court claim hearing on Halloween and the Day of the Dead -- very appropriate. At this point, decades and decades had passed.

RYLKO-BAUER: What's the year?

JOHNSTON: This was 2001 right after 9/11. On 9/11, I was studying anthrax delivery mechanism systems in the Marshall Islands and the nationwide exposure to staphylococcal enterotoxin B, which is an anthrax-simulating agent that produces in the aged, in the young, and in infirmed populations, a pneumonia that is often fatal. That's what I was just doing on 9/11 and then we had the anthrax scare.

And then I went to the Marshall Islands and we realized that there were people there who had died as a result of it, and so that ended up being an element in 00:59:00our story. The point is that we had these hearings and they were phenomenal. The judge said, "I wish you had done this approach when we started the Tribunal so many years ago, because all these years we've been going through these other claims for Bikini and for Enewetak and we haven't addressed community damages, cultural damages, and the loss of a sustainable way of life -- all of these other issues.

And the idea that the Tribunal can do more than just due dollar and it's legal, but due dollar with the rationale that supports the notion of remedy was really a revelation. So it was a profound hearing. We had the judges with literally tears running down their faces in three days. Holly Barker and I were given authority to directly ask questions and interrogate in the situation, because of the indigenous status of the people, and that was a norm and precedent set in Australia. And basically, we were in charge of the case. It was just amazing. We 01:00:00left feeling like, we won! In fact, one of the key survivors of Rongelap who was evicted in '54 and had spent his whole life doing this, he said to me, "Now I can die, because I know that the generations are -- that change, remedy will happen."

That to me was the big and beautiful outcome, but the truth be told is that it wasn't until 2007 that the Tribunal issued their award. They decided to issue their judgment on this. Other politics were involved. Negotiations with the U.S. on can they restore the full funding for the Tribunal, was one aspect, or not restore, but to fully fund the Tribunal to allow it to pay out its awards. It was $150 million to start with. By the time they finished in the four atolls, they realized that nationwide exposure had occurred, because the U.S. never provided those classified documents. So only four atolls went through a claims 01:01:00process and I think it was upwards of $4 billion were awarded and only a $150 million fund -- so nothing really happened.

RYLKO-BAUER: So today?

JOHNSTON: So today, judgments are on record and they have never been implemented. The Nuclear Claims Tribunal was closed. They ran out of funding. I managed to get some grants and assistance at the former National Archivist to assist, Trudy Peterson, to try and save it from going to the garbage dump and at least create the archive of the files and medical records and so forth.

The Marshallese went through the U.S. courts, but they don't have standing. Because they used to be territorial residents and now they have a Compact of Free Association. They went all the way up to the Supreme Court, which denied the case. So they have no court and they have no reparation with this mechanism, but they have the body of evidence that we pulled together for that case.

Holly Barker and I later turned it into a book, once the award was announced in 2007. And then they had a tool that they can use politically. They had that book that they could go to whenever they met with other nations of the world. So today, their standing is really very very different, because I'm not involved directly in their advocacy, they are; and my tool, that Holly and I helped to create, is being utilized.

At the UN level, one of the things that we managed to do in 2012, I helped bring, for the first time, the Human Rights Council and representatives from the Marshall Islands to tell their story to the Human Rights Council and present this egregious failure to provide meaningful remedy, and to get the world's community to tell the United States that they have an obligation here. In that endeavor, the only protesting voice, of course, was the United States, which believes that they've met all of their obligations.

And it's a still-evolving story. But I would say, from my point of view, I feel like an amazing win has been achieved, to have just been present and have the 01:03:00honor to assist, and to be present and bear witness to the evolution of a place that had been fallen off the map. They were the ones that started it, the reasons why we have a nuclear nonproliferation treat in the first place, was because of the 1954 exposures and petitions to the UN. It was a UN sort of trusteeship previously, and so forth.

And then they went through decolonization, and off the map. They were invisible and voiceless. And now they're back on the map in a big way. They're suing the nine nuclear nations of the world. A Marshallese woman gave the leading speech. It was a slam poetry presentation at the climate change conference in New York in 2014. I mean, it's just amazing, it's just amazing.

So yeah,, reparation and remedy, one of the lessons out of this is that remedy in this context involves the coming of age and self-determination and capabilities of a nation to advocate on its own behalf. But also the ways that people like you and I might be able to assist and facilitate.

RYLKO-BAUER: I wanted to just for the record say that the book you're talking about, is titled The Consequential Damages of Nuclear War, The Rongelap Report. You coauthored that with Holly Barker. It was published in 2008 and also won the Millennium Award from the Society for Medical Anthropology, because it has a lot of information about the health impacts of all of this. So, maybe you could shift to the next case, perhaps summarizing it a little bit more succinctly.

JOHNSTON: So, I mentioned the World Commission on Dams which was a global look at what have internationally financed large dams, or just large dams in general, 01:05:00done in terms of do they meet expectations in providing clean, green energy, renewable energy. It was a critical look. It was a panel that included Ted (Thayer) Scudder as the social science representative with twelve people representing indigenous advocacy, industry, governance and just a whole array. A massive study ensued over three years. They had literally over 25,000 submissions. A huge pyramid approach that divided into 12 themes where you had people at different areas collecting, and synthesizing, and then developing reports.

Some of the outcomes . . . they realized that as it got to the last year of their three-year term, this was a joint International Union for Conservation and Nature (IUCN) and a World Bank funded initiative, but a global independent 01:06:00investigation. Last year they realized that they had done four consultations around the world where people came and gave information, especially affected communities. And they had never, ever, ever thought about the adverse impacts in a really rigorous way, and the continuing ulcerating problems on what happens with mitigation; or do these impact assessment processes work, and do they have accountability mechanisms that are working. So forth and so on.

I was brought in at the last minute on a recommendation based on what had been in the Marshall Islands on consequential damage methodology and reparation and right to remedy, to write a brief for the commissioners. So I did that in 2000 and they had me to do it, not just reviewing all the sources of law and all of the accountability mechanisms that exist at the UN and these international institutions, or in the constitutional law of all the nations of the world. All of that I reviewed happily with input from my partners originally from the first 01:07:00study that I did, but also to look at three exemplary cases of dams and the social impacts and what happened to those people, the legacy cases, they called them the legacy issues.

So I had one dam, the Kariba Dam built in 1952 in Africa that Ted Scudder is still working on, every year. He and Elizabeth Colson are the longest and continuous research that we have had in anthropology, I think. And then I had one in Pakistan, and I had the Chixoy Dam in Guatemala. I had all of the case presentations that were submitted by advocacy and by the affected communities from these consultations to review. And I pulled together a report.

Based on that, when that came out, three years later in 2003, the people from the Chixoy Dam had thought, when they gave their testimony, that they would get some measure of assistance and that didn't happen. Or international attention 01:08:00and that didn't happen. So, they asked the civil society partners to assist them in doing a study to document their history, and their damages and injuries, and to do it in a way that was written in World Bank language, because the World Bank was telling them that "you are better off than any other Mayan indigenous village that suffered massacre during the genocide, because you have these nonprofits that are helping you."

They wanted a study. So they contacted International Rivers, and International Rivers had been a partner on that reparation and right to remedy brief. And they said, "Johnston, do you want to come in and take a look at it?" I went to Guatemala and one of the reasons I did this, and I don't speak Spanish very well at all -- I can order beer and find the bathroom, but I was asked explicitly because of the previous work and because I don't work in Guatemala. Because you need a neutral party and outside actor, to have some credibility here, because the political factions are so extreme and the history is so intense.

So I started working on that in 2003. Most of our initial work was to try and find funding, which I found, in the course of my life, has been nonexistent. In the end, we documented a study in 2003, and it came out in 2005 from reasons of political advocacy in Guatemala. They managed to get a reparation agreement by taking over the dam, that we found was actually still owned by the affected communities. That agreement was never implemented. The agreement was to sit down and negotiate fully the reparation plan that I had in our five-volume study.

RYLKO-BAUER: I wanted to interrupt you, because I know that you're trying to summarize this. But what I've found interesting, because I've heard you speak about this before, and so I want you to mention this, is one of the points in the research that you did related to who actually owned the land?

JOHNSTON: Right, right. So, we did this study, again using the Marshallese model. And we hired a realtor, basically the person that goes out and finds out whether or not your title has been legally secured. He went to the Central American cadastral, he reviewed the records in Guatemala. He reviewed the community records. He found that of the whole area of the dam and the reservoir, the construction hydroelectric works and downstream, that only two parcels had been legally secured.

RYLKO-BAUER: By...?

JOHNSTON: By the INDE (National Electrification Institute), the electrical institute which is a government facet that received all the funds to build this dam.

RYLKO-BAUER: From...?

JOHNSTON: The money came from the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, Venezuela, and other places but only two dams -- excuse me, two parcels had been legally secured. All of the rest of the land was still owned largely by the indigenous mining communities, plural. Some of those communities own land upstream and in the reservoir area that extend into the reservoir. And they are still to this day paying taxes on submerged lands, and so that was an 01:11:00interesting and very significant finding. That was a report.

And then once you are done with the research, how do you get the implemented change happening? That took from 2005 up to 2015, another ten years. In those ten years a very long story emerges, but the outcome is that just in October of 2015, the massacre survivors who were displaced from their homes at gunpoint, slash and burn of all of their property and 456 or so people from the Rio Negro village alone killed -- those people got sent an apology from the president in November of 2014. Now that president is in jail, but the new president, vice president gave them another apology and a check for initial compensation. And the Congress has made law, in large part because of political action and international actors that assisted, that said for the next 15 years--

RYLKO-BAUER: The U.S. Congress?

JOHNSTON: No, in Guatemala. The U.S. Congress passed a law to assist in this advocacy process, to ensure that the reparation plan does get implemented. The banks are playing some, mostly the Inter-American Development Bank, role in remediation. But the Congress in Guatemala needed to pass a law to make sure that when presidents come in and go out -- when administrations come in and go out -- there is still an obligation that says, we have to include this when we do our budget allocation each year. So, the rare and unusual experience of a case.

I have to say that one of the other reasons why this case was so significant is that when Guatemala was going through its most intense civil war period of state-sponsored violence, et cetera, and so many people were dying -- it was erased. It was reported in the news, but generally the notions, in terms of the 01:13:00international level, were human rights abuses are occurring, but because there's a war going on. After the war, we did not just disappear. We weren't just refugees and went someplace else. These massacres happened.

It [the case] happened because of Clyde Snow, an anthropologist who worked with archeologists and anthropologists in Guatemala. They exhumed these massacre sites and documented it. And that forensic work led to the peace accords. This is really happening. The first site that was exhumed was the Rio Negro site in this dam, and so that is a really significant part.

In the peace accords, then the truth commission was set up. That issued its report in 1999 saying that genocide had occurred. I began work shortly after. Genocide had occurred and the exemplary case of genocide was this Rio Negro, one of the exemplary cases, that genocide had occurred was this Rio Negro story of 01:14:00the village that is now underwater because of the Chixoy Dam. And that was hugely significant because it shows relationships between internationally financed development and the ways in which violence at times results. But also because when you look at the financial trail of money, it was that dam that financed the genocide.

RYLKO-BAUER: This is a case where . . . it's interesting to first of all hear of the different anthropologists that have been involved, and archeologists.

JOHNSTON: In the Chixoy Dam case we had over a thousand people involved in contributing information that I was able to tap into for one reason or another, directly or indirectly involved.

RYLKO-BAUER: This is a great example of what you said at the very beginning, that impact and advocacy doesn't happen because one person does something. But it takes a huge collaborative team of people.

JOHNSTON: Yeah.

RYLKO-BAUER: I want to shift to . . . we have sort of a time limit with this interview, so I want to shift to one last topic, with the idea that we may explore after we see how this interview has come out, that we might kind of explore doing a second interview in the future, where we get a chance to delve into things with a little more detail. Since this is an SfAA oral history project, you've mentioned already the human rights and social justice committee work that was done--

JOHNSTON: No, it was the human rights and the environment committee.

RYLKO-BAUER: But you also did work with the EPA. So, if you could, in the last five minutes, talk a little bit about that project?

JOHNSTON: The Who Pays the Price: The Sociocultural Context of Environmental Crisis book, when it came out, I sent it to Al Gore and Kathleen McGinty, the head of the White House Council. Hillary Clinton read it, you know? Al Gore sent 01:16:00it to the EPA. And starting in 1996, up until the end of their term, when you walked to the EPA's office there it was. It was on a pedestal: Who Pays the Price: The Sociocultural Context of Environmental Crisis, the book. It was really cool.

Some of those ideas were used when he was given the task of reorganizing and reinventing government. He created or supported the initiative in EPA to create an office of sustainable ecosystems in communities. And they had this book, saw it every day. They contacted the Society for Applied Anthropology, because it says so on the cover -- Who Pays the Price -- and the Society for Applied Anthropology underneath my name. They contacted them. They said that we'd like to create a cooperative agreement to work with SfAA to help communities develop their own means and capabilities to address their environmental problems, to recognize and address in appropriate meaningful ways their environmental problems.

They got this call out of the blue in 1996 -- new president, new staff, you know? Anthropology professional organizations are always changing. Jay Schensul gets the call. And she's "wow, this is amazing! This is great! We could do this!" She contacted me and together Jay and I wrote a cooperative agreement in negotiation with the government counterpart, Theresa Trainor, who was also a master's degree anthropologist. We worked on developing a cooperative agreement that allowed us to have full autonomy, full control.

We would be invited, we would only work at the invitation of communities. And the communities would tell EPA that we have these problems and issues, and EPA would say, "We have these resources and one of them is this." And then they would set the community up in negotiation with the SfAA to discuss what exactly they needed.

RYLKO-BAUER: One example? Would that make sense to give an example of that?

JOHNSTON: Sure, I helped create the agreement. And then I worked as the director of the project, and I first set up an advisory board with Shirley Fiske and Bonnie McCay and Ed Liebow and Miguel Vasquez. The advisory board worked for the whole term, the whole five years of this cooperative agreement. And I apologize if I've forgotten any names in this rambling, but in that we had to define who are we and what are we doing. It was a cooperative agreement. It's called the Cooperative Agreement between EPA and the Society for Applied Anthropology. So we had this long day meeting where we negotiated and described and figured it all out.

Our first fellow, Eric Jones, was taking notes, where we decided to call it environmental anthropology. We created the term and then we defined what environmental anthropology means. And we described how it would be employed and deployed in this project; that we would be doing environmental social science, because this is an applied anthropology organization that is writ-large, interdisciplinary. Among other things, we would be working with communities, but 01:19:00we would also be doing internships and fellowships -- first a fellowship that you could get with a master's degree, and then we had technical assistance at a higher level with PhD folks who were doing very specific projects. We worked in 27 states over the four years that I was director of the project, and I think that I had 54 interns and fellows working. Those people then went on and created what they were doing.

The projects ranged from getting environmental social science in the Everglades restoration plan or doing lead hazards outreach in Philadelphia, or looking at pesticides and sustainability in agricultural workers in Washington, or just a whole array of issues and problems -- working on the Zuni. Finding an anthropologist to work in a sensitive and collaborative way with the Zuni nation to do a repatriation of a sacred wetlands. It was remarkable. Thanks, it was remarkable. And it was also a whole lot of work and we were quite, quite effective.

By the end of the four years, EPA needed to decide if they wanted to negotiate the following year an expansion. We had a cap of $250K a year that we could do in projects. They wanted to expand, but they wanted us to be more professional. I was working and doing everything myself in terms of doing the reports and the reporting; the SfAA managed, sent out checks, and received bills. No, I received those actually.

At any rate, the point being that they wanted us to put out more professional products similar to the Ecological Society of America and get into the computer age. "Let's see some glossy publications. We want booklets. We want . . ." You know, that sort of thing.

So I pitched it to the executive board at the SfAA, that we have a space instead of being a cyber organization. That we are a nonprofit function, we would call them umbrellas. The SfAA would serve as an umbrella and this would be a 01:21:00nonprofit project that has its own staff, that the SfAA would pay 50% of the staff initially to get it up and running, and that we would go through the grants blah, blah, blah. The board said no. It's really too bad, because at that time we also got requests from CDC and from forestry to do the same kinds of cooperative agreements.

So there was this mass of we'd like to help communities solve their problems recognition of the role of anthropologists and this organization to help, but it was not prepared to do it. A moment. But it's interesting to me to see in terms of ripples in the pond, the many fellows and so forth that I worked with and where they've gone. I know one who, for example, is the head of the California water board right now, you know, and all kinds of different positions with professors as well as public citizens doing the kinds of work that they do. And then the communities and the changes in relationships that occurred. The first time that the EPA ever dealt with an indigenous nation, where they [the EPA] 01:22:00were not allowed to publish the report.

RYLKO-BAUER: Who were these? The Zuni?

JOHNSTON: Yes, that precedent -- the precedents that were made in all of this are huge and profound.

RYLKO-BAUER: They could publish this report?

JOHNSTON: They could not. EPA is funding it and they're supposed to be able to make everything open access, as their mandate, but they're dealing with an indigenous nation who are doing restoration of sacred wetlands. This is privileged information and so that implementation of the Native American rights and the sacred, the various laws hadn't yet filtered through the EPA. So, EPA's first effort to come up with a human subject, where does anthropology lie -- oh, my gosh, we have to consider human subjects, you know? I helped write that.

RYLKO-BAUER: Interesting, and so these are really important impacts, yes.

JOHNSTON: There were all kinds of ripples in the pond. But also more writ large, was environmental anthropology, and the notion that you could be quote, unquote "an environment" and just the term, I'm an "environmental anthropologist." Now people know what that means around the world. Yes, it was a 01:23:00busy time.

RYLKO-BAUER: Well, Barbara I have to tell you -- yes, we could talk for another couple of hours for sure, but it's been really wonderful for me, because I've learned so much, and I know a lot about what you've done. I've learned even more, but it's just also amazing. It's just a great example of how there are different ways in which one can be engaged, and there are so many different levels of engagement. And I think that your career has really, you know, there are so many models there. I think that it's really wonderful, and so I'm glad that we've been able to at least get the bare bones of all the different things that you've done. I'm really going to try and see if we can find some more space maybe in Vancouver at the Applied meetings to plot out another talk. Thank you, it's been great.

JOHNSTON: Thanks, Barbara. It's been good to have this conversation.

[End of interview]