Dr. Lyla June Johnston (aka Lyla June) is an Indigenous musician, scholar, and community organizer of Diné (Navajo), Tsétsêhéstâhese (Cheyenne) and European lineages.
Her messages focus on Indigenous rights, supporting youth, traditional land stewardship practices and healing inter-generational and inter-cultural trauma.
She blends her study of Human Ecology at Stanford, graduate work in Indigenous Pedagogy, and the traditional worldview she grew up with to inform her music, perspectives and solutions. Her doctoral research focused on the ways in which pre-colonial Indigenous Nations shaped large regions of Turtle Island (aka the Americas) to produce abundant food systems for humans and non-humans.
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Host: Nizhoni Redmond is a 2020 graduate of Dartmouth College and currently pursuing her MA in Cultural Administration at the Institute of American Indian Arts (2025-2027), her thesis explores the intersection of artificial intelligence and Native communities asking how Indigenous knowledge, sovereignty, and values can shape the technologies reshaping our world. This conversation with Lyla June is part of that research.
Lyla June