This is episode two, recorded at Eco Nomic Futures in San Francisco. Not a conference exactly—more a meeting point. Where conversations crossed paths around food, land, economics, and what happens when systems lose their connection to life.

Tate Chamberlin is joined by Jacob Huhn and Warinkwi Flores. This episode is called BioCulture.

It's about systems—the ones we live inside now, and the ones that came before them. Indigenous economies were relational, not extractive. Land, food, and water weren't commodities. They were responsibilities. Those systems didn't fail. They were interrupted.

From there, the conversation moves into the present. Food as product. Life as data. Supply chains so long and familiar, they disappear. Corn becomes a way to see how meaning gets stripped as things move farther from their origins.

We talk about data, the rights of nature, and economies embedded within life—not separate from it. A reminder that the future isn't something we have to invent. It's something we already know how to return to.

Stay with us.

Today, we're somewhere that feels both familiar and overlooked at the same time—Arbor Day Farm in Nebraska City, Nebraska. The kind of place people call flyover country, a place many don't think twice about, even as the people who live here are quietly shaping a future the rest of us will eventually feel.

I'm Tate Chamberlin, talking with Jeff Yost, Chris Harris, and Huascar Medina—three voices who don't see the Heartland as an accident of birth, but a choice. A commitment. A belief that local decisions should be made… well, locally. By the people who actually walk these streets, and raise their kids here, and imagine what this place could become.

Because if you really want to understand a community, you don't just start with the data. You start with the people who see it up close—teachers, shop owners, artists, local organizers—the ones who understand the rhythms of a place in a way reports never quite catch. The people who can show you what a community is actually like, not just what it looks like on paper.

And right now, these towns—these counties—are in motion. Old systems giving way to new ones. A moment where risk tolerance suddenly matters. Where one wrong move can feel fatal. And the arts—the artists—help us inch forward anyway. They make us brave in ways spreadsheets never will.

There's also the quieter story: young people leaving for opportunities somewhere else, communities slowly thinning out, the talent and energy of a place drifting outward like smoke. And the equally powerful force coming behind it—the massive transfer of land and assets from one generation to the next, often to heirs who don't live here anymore. The early signs of a company-town future, unless something different takes hold.

And somewhere inside all of this—inside the questions about belonging and the future of work and what makes a place worth staying in—is the story we're following today. Not an invitation. A moment. A snapshot. A look at how the Heartland, by choice, is writing its next chapter in real time.

Turtle Island.
Before there were countries—before anyone called this land the United States, or Canada, or Mexico—this was Turtle Island. A continent of nations, overlapping territories, trade routes stretching farther than modern highways, and relationships thousands of years old.

Today, that history is being carried forward by contemporary Indigenous leaders at Fort Mason—San Francisco's skyline in the backdrop, summit banners hanging over a conversation that reaches far beyond the city around it.

This is the First Nations Economic Compact.

You're in a conference room that usually sounds like quarterly forecasts, and suddenly Chief Redman is talking about an economic conversation older than all of that—older than the 1763 Royal Proclamation, older than colonial regulatory systems, older than the borders that now cut through nations whose trade routes once ran uninterrupted across the continent.

Long before GDP, First Nations had their own economic indicators: ecological balance, kinship networks, sustainable yields, inter-nation reciprocity. Systems the Doctrine of Discovery tried to erase. Systems that survived genocide, forced relocations, and treaties—signed, coerced, or never signed at all.

And yet: the nations remain.
The economies remain.
The knowledge remains.

Here, leaders are talking about restoring ancient trade corridors, sharing resources through ancestral law, and building a bio-economy centered on stewardship and community resilience. While modern governments argue over tariffs and trade wars, First Nations are putting forward something older and more future-ready: a sovereign economic compact drawn from traditional trade logic and built for today's global market.

"If someone doesn't want to deal with Canada or the United States… they can deal directly with First Nations," Chief Redman says. It isn't a request. It's a reminder.

Suddenly, this summit doesn't sound like policy talk—it sounds like nations dusting themselves off and reintroducing themselves. Not as stakeholders. Not as interest groups. But as governments.

This is what reconnection sounds like.
What continuity sounds like.
What a continent remembering itself sounds like.

Tate Chamberlin is with Chief Redman. Stay with us.

Music by Supaman