Please note: Accuracy and availability of IPR transcripts may vary. 00;00;02;00 - 00;00;37;01 J.R. Jamison [theme music] Jamison: I'm J.R. Jamison. Today on The Facing Project, I’ll sit down with Canadian environmental journalist Trina Moyles to discuss her memoir, Black Bear: A Story of Siblinghood and Survival, and we’ll explore the fragility of our relationships with human and non-human species alike and the imperative to protect the wild. After years of working for human rights organizations, Trina returned to northern Alberta for a job as a fire tower lookout while her brother Brendan worked in the oilsands, a place vulnerable to a boom and bust economy and substance addiction. 00;00;37;03 - 00;00;59;09 J.R. Jamison When she was assigned to a tower and a wildlife corridor, bears were alarmingly visible and plentiful, wandering meters away on the other side of an electrified fence. Over four summers, Trina begins to move beyond fear and observe the extraordinary essence of the maligned black bear, a keystone species who is as subject to the environmental consequences of the oil economy as humans. 00;00;59;12 - 00;01;14;26 J.R. Jamison At the same time, she searches for common ground with her brother Brendan and his struggles with addiction on the land that bonded them. Stay with us. [Music] 00;01;14;28 - 00;01;40;29 J.R. Jamison Jamison: I'm J.R. Jamison, and you're listening to The Facing Project. My guest today is Canadian environmental journalist and author Trina Moyles, whose new memoir, Black Bear: A Story of Siblinghood and Survival, explores the fragility of our relationships with human and non-human species alike and the imperative to protect the wild along with the people we hold closest. Trina Moyles, author of Black Bear: A Story of Siblinghood and Survival. 00;01;41;00 - 00;01;43;17 J.R. Jamison Thank you so much for joining me on The Facing Project. 00;01;43;19 - 00;01;45;17 Trina Moyles Moyles: Oh, thank you so much for having me on the show. 00;01;45;22 - 00;02;09;25 J.R. Jamison Jamison: Black Bears, you write, is a story of growing up in bear country in northern Alberta during one of the province's greatest oil booms, and how you, an environmental journalist, and your brother who worked in oil and gas, would inevitably learn to draw boundaries and brace yourselves for different forms of loss and the way you lived your lives as you lost track of each other in the primal pool to love without question. 00;02;09;28 - 00;02;35;17 J.R. Jamison You go on to write this book as a story of reorientation, of fear and survival, of bears and oil, and of finding our way back to family and the wilderness that inspired us. I also found it to be a book about empathy and understanding, and also about navigating complex grief. You pull the reader into the interconnectedness that’s humanity and nature right from the jump. 00;02;35;20 - 00;02;53;29 J.R. Jamison Take me back to the early moments of drafting this book. In the decision to unfold the interconnectedness of these stories of nature and family, and to the broader story of finding a connection back to not only the land and your brother, but also how to navigate grief and the loss of both in the physical realm. 00;02;54;02 - 00;03;04;07 Trina Moyles Moyles: Yeah. Thank you. That's such a beautiful question. And you make it sound like it was very easy and it was not. Oh my goodness, this book was written over I think over seven years. 00;03;04;10 - 00;03;28;05 Trina Moyles So it took a very long time to weave some of those themes that you mentioned together, and to even understand what it was that I was working on, which now I'm learning like this is my third book and I'm starting to realize that's a very normal process for a writer as they set out on a thing. Sometimes we have a very clear idea of what we want to write about, and then you wind up, you know, the story takes like sort of a life of its own and becomes something else. 00;03;28;07 - 00;03;47;12 Trina Moyles But for me, the story started. It truly started with the bears. People say, why did you want to write about bears? And I was like, well, at the time in 2019, when I started working on it, I was working. It was my fourth season as a wildfire lookout in northern Alberta, and I was, stationed at a different tower. 00;03;47;14 - 00;04;24;08 Trina Moyles And it was a tower with a very particular reputation. There was, quite a few bears that lived in the area, and everybody kind of knew this in the forest, I would say in the forest, meaning like firefighters and other lookouts. This tower had a reputation for being a bear tower, we called it. So I was, like, a little bit nervous to take over this station, not really having had even though I'd been like the daughter of a wildlife biologist who studied bears, I didn't really have my own stories of, like, having to share space so closely with bears and have to sort of respond to those situations on my own. 00;04;24;10 - 00;04;52;02 Trina Moyles Being out in the bush alone. And so certainly that that summer there was this, like very confident, adult female bear with two yearling cubs who lived very close to the tower, was very comfortable with the proximity, even though I had, you know, my one dog at the time, and she would not budge from the tower site like she had made her home there previously with the previous lookout, and she did not want to go. 00;04;52;02 - 00;05;13;17 Trina Moyles So I found myself in that first summer. I just felt like I had to write about the bear. It was. So I'm not sure how many people have had close bear encounters, but they really you. If you feel it in your whole body, like you know your hair is stand on end, your heart rate increases. You know you're probably giving off a certain hormone to the bear even. 00;05;13;17 - 00;05;30;20 Trina Moyles And, you know, I'm quite confident bears can pick up on fear. They can probably smell what it is that our bodies emit. And after these close encounters with the bear, I just felt like I. I wanted to make a muse of it. I wanted to write about bears. And I knew I wanted to write a book about bears. 00;05;30;20 - 00;05;51;27 Trina Moyles I just didn't know what shape that would take. And so, over the process of working on the book, you know, the book, sometimes I say, actually became, began as like poems. I was, working on my master's at the University of British Columbia at the time and thinking about this thesis, I wanted to write, but really I was taking like short fiction classes. 00;05;51;27 - 00;06;11;18 Trina Moyles I was taking poetry, and I just started. Yeah, I started writing about the bear and these close encounters, and my frustrations with the bear of, like, everything I'd been taught about, like trying to scare bears away. And bear shouldn't be afraid of people. You know, we often hear like a bear that isn't afraid of of people is a bear that we should be quite afraid of. 00;06;11;18 - 00;06;48;08 Trina Moyles And I was. And so. Yeah. So the bear started to surface in poetry, in short stories. And I knew, yeah, I knew it wanted, I wanted it to the focus of bear to become a book. But I wasn't sure. Like, I knew I didn't want to write a natural history book. I didn't want it to be just about bears, because I think so much about the story of bear is also the story of people and the way that we the way that over millennia, people have related to this creature, you know, that could potentially kill us and sometimes does, though it's extremely rare that that happens. 00;06;48;10 - 00;07;14;16 Trina Moyles I think that that underlying fear is such a part of the way that we relate to the species and fear the species and create so many different stories from it. And over the course of the seven years that I worked on it, I did integrate my own personal stories into various drafts and in, sadly, in the spring of 2022, I lost my older brother. 00;07;14;18 - 00;07;37;27 Trina Moyles My brother and I had had quite a complicated relationship through - not through childhood, we were very close - and then through adolescence and into early adulthood, we became estranged. My, you know, we had both been exposed to substance abuse and addiction in our adolescence. Growing up in the north, in a small town, in an oil town, as you'd said. 00;07;37;29 - 00;08;02;09 Trina Moyles And that was sort of a byproduct of substance abuse. And addiction is often a byproduct of, resource extraction in small communities and looking back as an adult, as I was working on the book, I sort of explore some of those themes. But it became very apparent when I lost my brother when he passed that just like I had felt this really strong impulse to write about bears, I felt like I, I wanted to write about my brother. 00;08;02;09 - 00;08;26;17 Trina Moyles I wanted to try and understand that relationship and the way it was fraught. And some of the mistakes I had made or the way I had stereotyped him. And so those two storylines begin to weave together. I think at first not so effectively, but then over time, and with the help of some close, editor friends, I think I was able to bring those together more seamlessly. 00;08;26;17 - 00;08;33;19 Trina Moyles And and like you said, it occurred to me at a certain point, you know, the book is not really about bears. It's actually more about empathy building. 00;08;33;22 - 00;08;34;23 J.R. Jamison 00;08;34;25 - 00;09;04;06 Trina Moyles And trying to, you know, heal those the ways that we are divided from one another, whether that's like between, you know, our close human relationships or between, you know, relationships with another species. So it I don't think this is a book I had originally wanted to write something a lot faster, and then, and then, as this project unfolded it, I realized the time is what made I think the narrative work and yeah, yeah, that it was, something I learned through the process of working on it. 00;09;04;06 - 00;09;07;09 Trina Moyles It wasn't an intention I had from the get go. 00;09;07;12 - 00;09;47;18 J.R. Jamison Jamison: Sometimes stories come to us when they're ready to be told, right? And I and I think you did, as I mentioned, a beautiful job of weaving in empathy and understanding through the lens of watching the black bears and also understanding your brother and his trials and tribulations and what he had gone through. I find titling stories as a writer to be really hard because especially when you write a book, what do you name the thing like the permanent thing that when people see the title, they think, oh, I want to pick this book up and turn it over and learn more about it. 00;09;47;25 - 00;09;56;07 J.R. Jamison So I'm curious to know why Black Bear, what does that come to symbolize to you as the broader story? 00;09;56;10 - 00;10;16;22 Trina Moyles Moyles: Yeah, again, it wasn't the title that I had from earlier drafts, but it, The Black Bear., as I worked on this story, I realized the symbol of the Black Bear was something I wanted to unpack because in North America, we have three species of bears, right? We've got the black bear, the grizzly bear or the brown bear, and the polar bear. 00;10;16;24 - 00;10;42;23 Trina Moyles And then there are some subspecies within those, but I won't get into that. But it was interesting to me because the black bear is such a, you know, biologists will say, like the black bear is, is a successful species and that it is so abundant really across North America. And it's, you know, it's spreading into, it's found even in Mexico, like the black bears, this is one species of bear that has been able to figure out how to live closely with people and more or less make that work. 00;10;42;25 - 00;11;04;05 Trina Moyles They're also a species of bear that reproduce faster than brown bears (grizzly bears) and polar bears. Like every, year and a half, a black bear mother can reproduce, whereas it takes longer for a grizzly bear. So there's sort of, you know, this is sort of an ugly term, but they're seen a little bit like the rats of the bear species, you know, like, and often 00;11;04;07 - 00;11;26;01 Trina Moyles as I realized, like we also think of the black bear often as a pest because it does tend to live quite closely to communities. So the symbol of the black bear as the pest, as the abundant species of bear, that we can sort of afford to make mistakes with more mistakes with meaning more black bears get put down, versus brown bears, grizzly bears or polar bears. 00;11;26;04 - 00;11;53;26 Trina Moyles And then also like the symbol meant to me, like thinking of, of almost like the idea of the black sheep. I thought of a black bear, like, you know, with my brother, I felt like, you know, through especially through his adulthood, he'd, you know, he'd struggled and that had created quite a bit of family strain. And I think he always carried sort of this sense of shame for those decisions especially, you know, as he, you know, he got clean and, you know, was working through his addiction. 00;11;53;26 - 00;12;11;29 Trina Moyles I think he always carried a lot of shame for some of the choices he'd made, even though that's so, so many people struggle with that with these things. Right. But I sort of thought of my, as my brother, as the black bear, the black, the black sheep of the family, and, you know, and again, it's like this, these strained, fraught relationship. 00;12;11;29 - 00;12;31;01 Trina Moyles Sometimes we just want them at arm's length. We don't want to deal with them because they're too complicated, you know, or they're too much of an inconvenience. That's another thing, this idea of the black bear as an inconvenience to society or an inconvenience to the individual. And I think I did frame my brother in that way at a certain point as like, you're just too complicated. 00;12;31;01 - 00;12;51;23 Trina Moyles I can't deal with this, pushing him away. So I love I love that question because I do think, I think the symbol of the black bear is very it's very loaded. And and I love, you know, someone who's written about bears. I do love bear literature. And, you know, there are quite a few books that are titled just very simply, “Bear.” 00;12;51;25 - 00;13;09;08 Trina Moyles And I think I think that's because it's like when you, when you, when you have these encounters with bear, you can you think of literally nothing else because you're just watching the bear and you're like, what is the bear going to do? How is the bear going to react? And I sort of like it's both. That's nerve wracking, but there's something really beautiful about that too. 00;13;09;08 - 00;13;13;06 Trina Moyles Or like everything else falls away and it's just you and you and the animal. 00;13;13;07 - 00;13;56;02 J.R. Jamison Jamison: You and the animal. I love that. And I learned so much about bears, but particularly black bears through your book and understanding your brother through your words. It's also the titles like Black Bear and your brother. It's also like misunderstood, right? In so many ways. But you do take the the reader on a deep dive into learning about black bears, which I appreciated because I didn't realize, all the pieces you write on about them, about how they are kind of the rats of the of the bear world and how they're dispensable in so many ways. 00;13;56;04 - 00;14;26;26 J.R. Jamison And you also demystify their existence through your writing. And you teach us not to be afraid. You write: All too often, we want wildlife on our own fixed human terms, safely observable through zoo enclosures or from a jeep on a safari or a comedic reel on social media. We desire the raw, exhilarating feeling that proximity to wild creatures offers, but in reality, we don't always want them as neighbors. 00;14;26;29 - 00;14;50;08 J.R. Jamison We don't want to be inconvenienced or threatened by them. I found myself longing for protection of those glass enclosures that keep people and bears separate. We're living in extremely challenging and divisive times in both Canada and the US, and maybe I'm reading a bit too much into this, but is there a metaphor here on life in general? 00;14;50;11 - 00;15;11;09 Trina Moyles Moyles: I think so, and I, I can't say I set out with that intention to write about those big themes and those things, those divisive issues that we're dealing with right now. But it's interesting you asked that I had a very good close writer friend, ask me after one of the events I did over the last month, and he said, you know, the book is really about dominance. 00;15;11;09 - 00;15;52;06 Trina Moyles He's like, this is a book about about dominant culture. And the way that, yeah, the way that we exert ourselves over another group of people or another species out of fear, out of this feeling of entitlement or righteousness, you know, and sometimes we're not even aware that we're treating one another in this way. I think the book really, although it is, is so focused on these individual relationships with both my brother and then the particular community of bears around the tower, I think it does apply as a, yeah, as a symbol for the times that we're living in right now, sort of our gut reaction to thing, which sometimes can be, you know, quite 00;15;52;06 - 00;16;12;07 Trina Moyles ugly or quite we feel these sort of dominant or colonial things rising up in ourselves. You know, we so like it's such a human. One of the lines in the book is like, what is it... What is it about being human and the need to be in the right, you know, or like that sense of legitimacy? It legitimizes ourselves, you know, to treat one another this way. 00;16;12;07 - 00;16;22;12 Trina Moyles And I yeah, I think it's a symbol for these times that we're living in and how challenging and how messy that is. Yeah I think that's a yeah. 00;16;22;15 - 00;16;55;04 J.R. Jamison Jamison: It's also, right, the stories we tell ourselves based on our own lived experiences and maybe what we've learned about the other, whether that's a person or wildlife. But our own set of experiences set us up for what we think about, as you write in the book, the other is a term that you use. And I want to get back to some of these current challenges, and this does connect a bit to that, but I want to focus on the misunderstanding of the black bear itself. 00;16;55;06 - 00;17;13;13 J.R. Jamison We're taught in Western culture, kind of two things about bears in general. I was reflecting on this as I was reading your book. What are the things I've learned about bears? And it's, one, that they're soft and cuddly stuffed animals or caricatures in children's books, right? And two, that, out in the wild, they're to be feared or conquered. 00;17;13;16 - 00;17;35;27 J.R. Jamison And I think about lodges, especially out west and, you know, stuffed bears that grizzlies, right, that have been killed and also black bears. But the idea of a bad bear is solely a human construct. And as you write, bears are mostly afraid of people. And when pushed out by wildfires, bears follow their nose to food sources often created by humans. 00;17;35;29 - 00;17;49;08 J.R. Jamison And in this new territory, they face their greatest risk: humans. The number one cause of death among black bears is indeed humans. Talk more about these stories we tell ourselves and the reality of what is. 00;17;49;11 - 00;18;10;08 Trina Moyles Moyles: Yeah, that's. Thank you. That's such a like I'm glad you pulled that that that section from or that sort of thought from the, from the book. It's it's. Yeah. Like thinking about myself going into that fire tower experience, like how little I actually knew about bears, even though we are a culture so obsessed with bears, I think we really don't know their true nature. 00;18;10;08 - 00;18;35;09 Trina Moyles There's very few people that do, and those that do are probably the people that do have these closer relationships with them on a day to day basis, because I would say bears, you know, we love we love bear attack stories, for example, like those continue to be the stories that sort of dominate in the media headlines when we do talk about bears, even though those events happen so rarely, so, so rarely. 00;18;35;11 - 00;19;07;04 Trina Moyles And yet that's what we know when we go into encounters with them. So no kidding, our hackles are up when we immediately meet them. But I think what we don't talk about with bears is bears are incredibly... bears practice great restraint all of the time, because they have to. And this is a survival thing, right? If they're going to li- as humans are encroaching into their habit, habitat inevitably, bears have to practice enormous restraint in what they even if they're scenting us or scenting all the things that we put on the landscape, they have to make those decisions, whether or not they're going to wander close. 00;19;07;04 - 00;19;40;24 Trina Moyles And I would say for the most part, most bears figure out how to avoid us, how to use the landscape when we're not around. Or they are. They do grow quite tolerant of our presence, and they're able to be on the landscape with us. But those attack stories happen so rarely, so it's such an unfair thing to put on to a bear and to an extent, one bear expert who I've gotten to know, Phil Timpany, who lives, up in the in, in northern British Columbia and he runs like a commercial bear viewing operation and he says, you know, it's interesting because there's so many different human sets of behaviors that a bear 00;19;40;24 - 00;19;59;01 Trina Moyles has to read, far more sets of human behaviors that a bear has to figure out. What does this person going to do versus how many sets of behaviors a bear actually has, maybe 5 to 6 that a bear will show you, and communicate with you, whereas there's far more that you know that are sort of thrown at bears by humans. 00;19;59;03 - 00;20;13;02 Trina Moyles But yeah, they, they're, they're, they're incredibly restrained for the most part because they have to be, and the bears that aren't are those, those are tend to be the bears that, you know, that get put down or, you know, that we call the problem bears even though we've literally... 00;20;13;02 - 00;20;13;29 J.R. Jamison Jamison: Created the problem, yeah. 00;20;13;29 - 00;20;34;23 Trina Moyles Moyles: Yeah, we've created the problem. Exactly. And we very rarely think of them as like good bears. So that's sort of what started to shift for me at the tower, where I recognized, actually these bears that have grown quite comfortable being around me, you know, meaning that they weren't getting into any... My garbage was securely contained. My scents were quite, quite low. 00;20;34;23 - 00;20;56;14 Trina Moyles My impact on the land was as minimal as I could make it, really knowing I didn't want any negative interactions with them. Well, then we could, you know, those bears and I learned how to share space. And I realized because bears are quite... they know where they want to be on the landscape, just like us. They have their favorite, you know, spots to go graze on, dandelions, just like we have our favorite restaurants or grocery stores. 00;20;56;16 - 00;21;15;06 Trina Moyles They know where they are and where. And they also have, you know, they have particular relationships with other bears. And so by tolerating those bears quite close, in a way, they were good bears because they we had learned to read one another's behaviors. And I think that's the problem with like, we have this instinct when we see a bear just to chase that bear away. 00;21;15;08 - 00;21;39;12 Trina Moyles Well, I mean, when you do that, like you never have the opportunity to see what that bear looks like when they're relaxed, you know? And just my other friend who's a bear guide, she often says she's like, you know, bears are allowed to be curious, just like people are curious. And, you know, the presence of a bear doesn't signify aggression, a bear, you know, showing curious behavior that's allowed like, but but our impulse as people is to, you know, chase bears away. 00;21;39;12 - 00;22;03;02 Trina Moyles And that's really the dominant message that we've we've been taught. I have learned I would much rather be around a relaxed bear than a bear that is very wary or are afraid of people, because there you might get more unpredictable behavior. And I think that's true for our relationships with people too, right? Like we can't navigate space with one another when we're when emotion is so charged or reactivity is so charged. 00;22;03;09 - 00;22;04;11 Trina Moyles Yeah. 00;22;04;13 - 00;22;36;23 J.R. Jamison Jamison: There's a beautiful moment in the book where you're reflecting on mutual respect and not mutual avoidance, which is what is often taught. Right, between humans and black bears and finding ways to coexist without causing problems for the other. One way is moving bears from Western culture “it” status to personifying them. Robin Wall Kimmerer wrote in Braiding Sweetgrass that, if a bear is an “it,” we pull the trigger, we can bulldoze down habitat. 00;22;36;25 - 00;22;42;19 J.R. Jamison But if the bear’s a “her,” we may think twice. Talk more about this. 00;22;42;21 - 00;23;07;11 Trina Moyles Moyles: I love this moment in the book, and I read often from it because it and I remember it to those two summers that, like my thinking of the bears, was starting to shift. The way I was seeing the bear was starting to shift, and it really it moved from this sort of. I like this way that we tend to objectify the other or nature or wildlife, you know, and it shows up in our language. 00;23;07;11 - 00;23;32;14 Trina Moyles Exactly like that beautiful quote from Robin Wall Kimmerer. You know, the way that we like she says, like English robs a language in a way. And, you know, we talk about things like “it” as if, you know, humans have more sort of are superior to wildlife, which would just be an “it.” And I remembered, like even being on the phone with friends and I'd see a bear outside and I'd say, oh, I've got to go. 00;23;32;14 - 00;23;51;03 Trina Moyles Someone is outside. And like my friends know, I'm alone at the fire tower, right? Just with my dogs. And they're like, “someone?” Don't you mean “something?” And then it occurred to me, I was like, wow. Like even the way I am talking about the bears is shifting, and I think, I think there was great power to name that, both in real time. 00;23;51;03 - 00;24;12;01 Trina Moyles And then also on the page when I was writing the book, there was that section of the book really does mark the shift in moving from a way of objectifying something to to really starting to build a relationship, you know, with the bears. And, I really drew a lot from Robin Wall Kimmerer’s writing and thoughts around that. 00;24;12;04 - 00;24;34;08 Trina Moyles It's I'm not sure that I had, I had really, you know, like that had occurred to me before. But then when I was out there in that experience of relationship building with the bears, like it really did. Yeah. The i-, the idea of lan- language can be such a colonial thing, and we can use language to weaponize a thing and create distance from, you know, between ourselves and whatever it is that we're describing. 00;24;34;11 - 00;24;42;02 Trina Moyles But that really started to that marks the point in the story where it starts to shift in that space, that distance starts to to lessen. Yeah. 00;24;42;04 - 00;25;03;22 J.R. Jamison Jamison: And even as a reader, I started to wonder when you would mention you had spotted a bear. I started to think, is it Osa? Right? Based on the way you described the bears, right, like half moon shapes on I think it was Osa that had the half moon shapes on her, on her body. And there was another bear that had a circle. 00;25;03;22 - 00;25;25;21 J.R. Jamison Right. And so I started a personify them as well. Right. Because anytime you mentioned a certain bear, I'd be like, oh, I hope it's Osa. I hope Osa has come back. Right. So it does shifts this perspective in a really empathetic kind of way. And talking about language, you even mentioned, and I don't have this right in front of me, so I may get this wrong a bit. 00;25;25;21 - 00;25;43;04 J.R. Jamison So correct me on this. But the word carnivore right is connected to bear in the English sense, but really bear in other languages, primarily indigenous languages. Is is grass right, or. Yeah, talk more about that. 00;25;43;06 - 00;26;21;01 Trina Moyles Moyles: Yeah, that was beautiful. And that was, that was from the Indigenous Climate Action, had this beautiful, seminar on like on bear: bear and different indigenous groups sort of knowledge and perspective around bear and the, the word for black bear in the Cree language is “maskwa” and it means “from the grass.” And, you know, the knowledge keeper who shared that with me, Jeff, offered this story of like, black bears being born from grass and I thought, you know, the First Nations cultures, their knowledge is so important of like, human wildlife relationships because they really are built on observation. 00;26;21;04 - 00;26;46;10 Trina Moyles And the more time I spent watching bears, I realized, like, they certainly do are hunters as well. But for the most part, their, their diet is vegetation, you know? And like, my dad would sometimes joke like they're a fierce predator of dandelions. Yeah. And and that's primarily what I watch them eat in the close proximity or on my tower, or they'd climb the trees and feast on, like, the early sticky poplar buds. 00;26;46;13 - 00;27;05;18 Trina Moyles That was like one of the first things that they ate when they came out of the den, which was really cool. So yeah, I love to that. I can click once we when we can turn to other cultures to understand the way that they understand not just bears, but other species. And it's often built into language, these really deep observational things about, I think, an animal's true nature. 00;27;05;18 - 00;27;25;05 Trina Moyles And and I loved I loved that idea of the black bear being born from the grass. That's how I always saw them. Sometimes they'd be entirely immersed in the grass, and you'd only see like the grass, like, you know, like waving. And you're. I'm like, oh, I think there's a bear in there. And then you'd see a little like some black ears pop up or, you know, the little hump of the shoulder. 00;27;25;07 - 00;27;45;23 Trina Moyles But yeah, there's, there's so much we can draw, I think, from First Nations culture and not just bears, but human wildlife coexistence in general. Not to romanticize it, but I mean real things built in that the way certain communities have lived with animals, and not from this sort of like Western colonial stance of like keeping people and wildlife separate. 00;27;45;26 - 00;28;05;18 Trina Moyles You know, I think Jeff talks about like this idea of the respect of distance. And I loved that because I was like, oh, yes, if you watch bears interacting with one another, there's always this little buffer, you know, there's unless when they meet, which, you know, is so rare in a bears like realm, for the most part, they keep this like very particular buffer of space between them. 00;28;05;20 - 00;28;22;29 Trina Moyles And I think that's very true for people too. Like we need to keep these distances with bears. It's it's respect for the bear. You know, there's this huge, very human desire, I think, to want to be very close to bears sometimes, especially the more time you spend with bears. But bears themselves don't operate that way with one another, like they need that respect. 00;28;22;29 - 00;28;27;10 Trina Moyles And so, yeah, there's so much we can learn from First Nations cultures. 00;28;27;12 - 00;28;38;19 J.R. Jamison Jamison: Do you see parallels between understanding the instinctual life of black bears and the cycles of balancing empathy and understanding with addiction or grief? 00;28;38;21 - 00;28;46;19 Trina Moyles Moyles: That's a good question. That's a big question. A big bodied, emotional question. 00;28;46;21 - 00;28;50;13 Trina Moyles I think. 00;28;50;15 - 00;29;06;07 Trina Moyles I feel like I, I drew so much from watching the bears like, and I, through time, started to, like, something I just respected so much about bears was that is that, like, this idea that, like, a bear knows where they need to be on the landscape. 00;29;06;09 - 00;29;41;24 Trina Moyles Sometimes I, I'm so like, I don't want to say I'm jealous of that as a human, but I, I sometimes wish I had the confidence and certainty that a bear has in where they are and what what it is that they're supposed to be doing. You know, whether that's like grazing or like this immediacy of, like, preparing to burrow under the earth for, you know, depending on where they are for like, you know, five, six, seven, eight months of the year, like a bear has to make really instinctual and sort of hard choices, but they seem to do it with such like, honestly, with such ease and grace. 00;29;41;24 - 00;30;04;27 Trina Moyles They do have to make difficult decisions as well. And, and I think like, you know, and Osa, as you mentioned before, it's such a big part of the book because she was the bear that I had. You know, I watched the closest and I, I really, you know, felt that space between us shrinking. And it was in my last season at the fire tower that I, you know, I had watched her become a mother. 00;30;04;27 - 00;30;21;18 Trina Moyles And that was like such an amazing feeling for me. And then I had watched her raise the cub, and it was so cool to see, like, insights into her parenting style and like, she really wanted the cub, like quite close to her. Whereas I watched other mother bears like, you know, being more comfortable with like a greater space from their cub. 00;30;21;18 - 00;30;52;12 Trina Moyles So she and her cub were quite close. It's pretty, like, typical for, a young, young black bear for her first litter, just to have one cub. Maybe she had had two and lost one. But anyway, she raised him over the 18 months, so I watched I watched them over the two years together, and I knew in, in the spring of 2022 when we'd lost my I'd lost my own brother, and I'd been out at the fire tower, processing, you know, being faced with the enormity of that grief. 00;30;52;15 - 00;31;01;24 Trina Moyles And I watched Osa with her cub, and I knew every time I watched them, I just felt like I was like, oh, it's going to be the last time I see them together, because she's going to have to wean the cub. 00;31;01;26 - 00;31;21;20 Trina Moyles And I was sort of dreading it, you know, because I was so sad and I was so attached to the bears, and I was so attached with this idea of mother and cub. I really didn't want to see them split up. And even though I knew it was inevitable, it was coming, and I saw her kind of like toughening him up, you know, and like, playing quite roughly with him, like wrestling. 00;31;21;27 - 00;31;44;08 Trina Moyles And then I also saw him exhibiting some dominance back to her, too. And and that was, that was sort of interesting. I was like, oh wow. Like, look, he is, he's he's learning. He's like, maybe he's he's ready to be on his own. But he wasn't, of course. And then I, I did witnessed like the act of her chasing the cub up the tree over and over and over again, and you could visibly see the cubs distress. 00;31;44;08 - 00;31;47;07 Trina Moyles You know, that was really distressing. 00;31;47;09 - 00;32;07;05 Trina Moyles I thought I would be, you know, at the at the same time I was processing my own brothers, I was processing the grief of losing my brother. And I found watching the bears was incredibly meditative. And there was something about this, like, I thought I'd be... it would be so horrible to watch that process of the weaning. 00;32;07;05 - 00;32;23;00 Trina Moyles And I was quite shocked that I even got to see that. I didn't think I'd actually just see it. I thought one day I'd see Osa and she wouldn't have the cub. But that wasn't the case. But there was this like power in what she was doing to in this confidence. And so like, she was doing that out of love and necessity. 00;32;23;00 - 00;32;44;12 Trina Moyles And as I was working through like so many emotions with my brother as well, and accepting, just trying to accept that he was gone, the loss of him. I think I did take something from watching the bears so closely and, you know, the ways that we move forward. I could have, you know, I could have I could have chosen other coping mechanisms in, in, in dealing with the loss of my brother. 00;32;44;12 - 00;33;02;23 Trina Moyles You know, I had struggled with addiction myself, too. I could have fallen back on that. I could have I could have not gotten out of bed, you know, and and I and I didn't that summer, I, I continued to get out of bed. I climbed the ladder. I sat with my grief. I, I felt the discomfort of it. 00;33;02;26 - 00;33;23;18 Trina Moyles Yeah. And and watching the bears, I don't know, I drew I drew a lot of confidence from them and a lot of. Yeah in, in processing, processing this loss of attachment watching Osa do it and do it with this grace. And it's like to me I was like, it's a necessary act of love. And that's how I felt with my brother too. 00;33;23;18 - 00;33;38;27 Trina Moyles It was it was like letting all the the memories and the emotions of him run through me, but then also letting go too and recognizing I would have to move forward. So yeah, I don't know, I, I learned a lot from those bears for sure. 00;33;38;29 - 00;34;07;08 J.R. Jamison [music] Jamison: I want to keep on the topic of your brother. You approach his struggles with addiction first with shock and then building barriers between the two of you, and then with great tenderness. In doing so, you share how you also struggled at first with squaring how he could have been so brave during childhood when he had an encounter with an elk, or when he rode a six meter wave in Hawaii. 00;34;07;10 - 00;34;40;06 J.R. Jamison And how he'd also been a star hockey player and popular at school, and also your ally and protector, but also an addict. You write: “I didn't know you could grieve someone who hadn't died. All those years, I'd mourn the loss of my older brother, my protector. I'd fail to understand how he needed protection, too.” As the story unfolds, you begin to empathize with your brother and the loss of the young man he'd been, the loss of his hockey identity and lifelong dream, and having to find a new way forward in life. 00;34;40;09 - 00;34;45;29 J.R. Jamison How did you balance this honesty with protection, both of him and of yourself? 00;34;46;01 - 00;35;05;06 Trina Moyles Moyles: That's a beautiful question and observation. I... yeah, so much of... This is that I think the gift of being a writer is that you get to work through, you get to work through these these ideas that you had, you know, both like in the present as you're writing and then thinking back on, on how you, you previously had viewed a thing on the page. 00;35;05;06 - 00;35;24;13 Trina Moyles And I feel like people ask me, they're like, was your book... Was it... Did you find that healing? And I think, I think I did, I mean, I and without you know, at the risk of that sounding like I don't think writing is inevitably therapy; therapy is therapy. But I was also able to look at the story of my brother and realized how I'd gotten that wrong. 00;35;24;14 - 00;35;47;08 Trina Moyles And but then it also come from a place of such innocence, you know, like it had just been the two of us. My brother was three years older than me. He was my protector growing up. And, you know, and I think sometimes we have this idea, you know, in, in that I had had this idea of my brother, as always, being the brave one, always being a few steps ahead, always being there for me, which he was. 00;35;47;10 - 00;36;08;15 Trina Moyles And then through early adulthood. And I understand so little about the science of addiction and what my brother, what was going on through his brain, the need to use, and then also the pressures. Like, I don't think anyone really thinks about when you're young, you're not thinking about the way violence is normalized. You're not thinking about those things. 00;36;08;15 - 00;36;26;08 Trina Moyles I didn't know what it meant to grow up in an oil boomtown. And now, looking back as an adult, I was like, oh, well, if of course we were. I mean, these are this is what, you know, social scientists are finding about, resource extractive communities as well, or communities that are on the frontlines of those experiences. 00;36;26;08 - 00;36;54;11 Trina Moyles There's higher incidence of substance abuse and addiction. There's higher issues or higher rates of, domestic violence and, and misogyny. And there really was this I think when I think about what it would have been to be a boy in the in a community where we grew up, really this idea of like, I don't want to use the word toxic masculinity because I think it's I don't know if that's a positive thing, you know, a positive label to use. 00;36;54;11 - 00;37;13;19 Trina Moyles But really, this pressure to be very maybe I'll use the expression alpha like to be very tough and to be very brute and to be, you know, excel at, athletics, which my brother did, even in the way that, you know, you would talk like, again, that theme of dominance having dominance over this, like, quest for superiority. 00;37;13;22 - 00;37;30;10 Trina Moyles I think my brother struggled with all those things. And then he was very physically small. He was always one of the smallest boys in his class growing up. He was very, you know, he was very talented hockey player. He was very, very small. And that prevented him from moving forward in a professional way, which had always been his dream. 00;37;30;14 - 00;37;50;16 Trina Moyles So I think my brother experienced, you know, a lot of pressure, even though I always saw him as sort of, you know, the sibling who had a kind of had it all figured out and who was, you know, ahead of me and would always know what to do in any situation. He was obviously also struggling for answers and for support and for protection as well. 00;37;50;19 - 00;38;21;12 Trina Moyles And, and, you know, seeing him as a young man, you know, moving from our small community, which so this is such a common rural experience to go from a small community into a larger center and to feel totally disoriented and lost. And he found, you know, he found a community working as a bartender. And, and there was a you know, a very high rate of, of, substance abuse, and that and a loss of, of many things that, you know, the supports he'd had in our own community. 00;38;21;12 - 00;38;40;16 Trina Moyles So I can see how he fell into addiction and his 20s struggled with it and really struggled with the shame of it. As you know, he and I became estranged. And, you know, his relationship with my parents was so fraught, and he saw himself falling behind, you know, what other young men in our community were doing. 00;38;40;19 - 00;39;04;04 Trina Moyles And then he began working in, in, you know, the oil and gas industry, which also comes with, you know, a set of, of, of pressures on men and women working in isolated conditions and camps. And, and put that putting, you know, an immense amount of strain on, on relationships with significant others and with families, higher rates again, of addiction. 00;39;04;04 - 00;39;29;21 Trina Moyles So, you know, there were these there were great pressures on my brother and in working and and on the story in the book, I realized, yeah, how he really, truly had needed protection as a little boy and then also as a man. Yeah, it's, it I really felt enormous empathy for him, and I wish I had had I wish I had practiced more of that, you know, in real time. 00;39;29;23 - 00;39;50;28 Trina Moyles And, and that is, you know, there is a sadness there that all that I carry in that. But I, I wanted to write about it because I feel like so many people can relate to that. And, you know, it's these, you know, it's it's often our relationships people that we familial relationships that are the most fraught and the most loaded. 00;39;50;28 - 00;40;02;06 Trina Moyles And there's such a tendency just to want to push it away and be like, this is too problematic. Like I can't deal with you, you know? Yeah. And I yeah, I carry regret there for sure. 00;40;02;08 - 00;40;37;05 J.R. Jamison Jamison: The two of you are starting to rebuild your relationship and you're starting to see the complexities of his life and navigation of life. There's also this underlying culture of oil and gas and the COVID-19 pandemic that happens at the same time. There's a scene where your brother is wearing a sweatshirt with the “I Love Canadian Oil and Gas” slogan, which was one that had come to represent a rise in populism and the people versus the elites during the pandemic. 00;40;37;07 - 00;41;05;01 J.R. Jamison There's sort of a juxtaposition, right, to jobs that are harmful to the environment but also create livelihoods, and also the belief that liberals are threatening to take it away with their policies and values, like this “us versus them” mentality. And this is similar in the US, right? The rise of populism here. And it does feel like at least here in the US, there are divisions that are too vast to bridge. 00;41;05;04 - 00;41;28;20 J.R. Jamison But something shifted in you that I think is kind of a main crux of the story. You started to lean into your differences, and you write: “When I saw beyond the one dimensional lens of my brother as an oil worker, as someone with political beliefs I didn't agree with, I realized it's possible to love someone without agreeing with them or even fully understanding them. 00;41;28;22 - 00;41;46;23 J.R. Jamison My brother and I might never really know one another, but we practice love and empathy for the other. We can learn to lean into the paradox of that which polarized us.” Talk more about this. And what do contraction points teach us if we embrace them rather than run from them? 00;41;46;25 - 00;42;19;16 Trina Moyles Moyles: Yeah. That's, that's such a beautiful question. I- or observation, I feel I felt like, yeah, I felt like I had so misunderstood my brother. And because we seemed, especially on paper, so, so divided and pretty much every respect really like sometimes I'd be like, how did we come from the same parents? I don't understand that. And I think that's very, a very relatable thing that, you know, adult siblings are navigating or the question that they're asking themselves. 00;42;19;18 - 00;42;39;13 Trina Moyles But I started to I really started to lean into like the ways my brother was showing up for me, even though our politics were so different. For example, he came to so many of my writing events, and it surprised me. Sometimes I'd look up and I'd see him in the audience and I was like, wow, he came and I'd be talking about hard things. 00;42;39;13 - 00;43;16;15 Trina Moyles Like my first book really explored, like resource extraction, in Central America, and that the impacts on communities. And I remember this whole conversation was being facilitated in one of the Q&As on, you know, what are the parallels between, you know, mining, extraction in, say, Guatemala to northern Alberta with oil and gas. And here's my brother, an oil and gas worker sitting in the audience and, you know, listening, taking in this dialog like that was so meaningful to me that he'd showed up for me, and he knew my politics were different, but he was there because of love, you know, he wasn't there because of my politics. 00;43;16;15 - 00;43;45;23 Trina Moyles He was there because I was his sister. And I think I realized like that, you know, that's and it was very similar with the bear story too, when we have when we have all the when we're on the defense, we're never going to build a relationship. And so, you know, and then another example to that I talk about in the book was, during Covid, our family had had a small gathering, sort of somewhat nervously, like many families did throughout the pandemic. 00;43;45;25 - 00;44;01;00 Trina Moyles And, a good friend of mine would join me for dinner, and I sort of warned him. I said, you know, like, it could get tense because I'm such different politics from my brother. And he was sort of like, that just sounds totally normal. And like any, you know, any family would, would deal with that. And I was like, oh, you're right. 00;44;01;00 - 00;44;06;26 Trina Moyles And then the, the conversation was absolutely not political. It was just like a wonderful evening together. 00;44;06;28 - 00;44;26;19 Trina Moyles And I realized I had been bringing so, so much of this defensive energy into my relationship with my brother. And it was really preventing me from, from, from building trust, you know, and then once my brother and I, you know, there were moments where we or for example, looking at the climate crisis, you know, here's my brother working in oil and gas. 00;44;26;22 - 00;44;42;05 Trina Moyles There had been a fire that had threatened one of the sites he was working on, and he called me up and I was out at the fire tower and he was like, wow, like, this is a crazy fire season, you know, acknowledgment that the climate crisis is having real impacts on people and communities and was impacting him personally. 00;44;42;07 - 00;44;57;29 Trina Moyles And he called me to thank me. He was like, oh, I'm so glad for what you and your colleagues do. Because one of the other lookouts had spotted that fire, as it was threatening the area where he was working. So there were ways that we were starting to reconcile our differences and to and I think to see one another. 00;44;57;29 - 00;45;14;09 Trina Moyles And even as I was working on this book, I worked out, I reached out to my brother's colleagues who still work in oil and gas, to ask more questions. What is it like? And that in itself, I started to learn more about how the social impacts on people who work in these industries, and the hard choices that they have to make. 00;45;14;09 - 00;45;41;11 Trina Moyles And they're not the enemy. You know, like, and these industries are never going to improve, you know, in the best way possible for environment and for people who work within them if there's all this defensive energy coming towards them. So it's yeah, I mean, I think I, I had to check my own pride and ego and not to say, you know, there were some things there are some fundamental things my brother and I would likely have never have agreed on. 00;45;41;11 - 00;46;06;23 Trina Moyles And I sometimes do wonder if he was alive today, what our relationship would look like, because things have become even more divisive. So I'm not trying to romanticize it, but I did recognize some fundamental things that in coming at my brother, was such defensive, energy and and some righteousness on my part. I was really preventing, you know, preventing that relationship from growing, from trust, from deepening and really getting anywhere productive. 00;46;06;23 - 00;46;17;09 Trina Moyles And, and, you know, in working together and trying to find common ground. So I know it's just such an individual story, but I do I think it reflects on a larger societal level right now. 00;46;17;16 - 00;46;39;18 J.R. Jamison Jamison: Yeah, I absolutely agree. And I think of, you know, my own experiences and relationships I have with people in my own family. And I think that's true across the US and Canada, right, where we don't all think the same. And so we we all have someone in our family who might have different ideological beliefs, or political beliefs. 00;46;39;18 - 00;47;08;18 J.R. Jamison And part of navigating in our relationships in life is trying to understand the other. And I do want to talk a bit about grief some more and also some of these closing statements you had at the end of the book that's connected to what we were just talking about when your brother did take his own life. Your mom said that by trying to make sense of it, that his brain was broken. 00;47;08;20 - 00;47;35;16 J.R. Jamison But what you recognize was broken was a colonial system that bred boys to deny their feelings and prove themselves and their societal worth through money and systems that isolated workers. You're write, and I'm paraphrasing a bit here: “Oil workers were just as dispensable as the wildlife, the black bears. They cleared out the forest, and men and trades are exceptionally more likely to die by suicide. 00;47;35;18 - 00;47;58;11 J.R. Jamison I do not know how to turn a blind eye to these craven environmental injustices, nor do I know how to stay silent about the mental health crisis faced by the oil and gas industry's labor force, who are at higher risk of substance abuse and addiction. I don't know how to ignore the connections between the industry and substance abuse, and my brother's decision to take his own life. 00;47;58;13 - 00;48;22;13 J.R. Jamison One does not inherently lead to the other, but there's no question that the stress of my brother's work and his ongoing struggles with addiction made him vulnerable.” It's been four years since your brother died, and I'm assuming about a year since the book was finished, before it moved into production on the publishing side, where are you now on your answers to these thoughts? 00;48;22;16 - 00;48;45;20 Trina Moyles Moyles: Yeah, I I it's interesting. I, I just I'm just starting to dig back into, you know, it's like that is one part of the book that I have read from because I think it does frame sort of this understanding that I came with to my brother and realizing all of these risk patterns that he fit into. And I think losing someone to suicide is such a complicated grief. 00;48;45;20 - 00;49;14;08 Trina Moyles You have so many questions, so many unanswered questions, you know, that will never be answered. We'll never know all of the things that motivated him. But now and and having done more research, I could see that he was he was vulnerable. He was vulnerable. And his story, unfortunately, is not an anomaly. It fits within this much larger story that is happening in and not just in oil and gas, but in many resource extractive communities, especially where they're remote and rural. 00;49;14;14 - 00;49;39;25 Trina Moyles And there's a great deal of isolation. I'm realizing he is a part of this much larger story that is so little talked about. And I'm right now I'm kind of digging into it, and working on a feature article and reaching out to, you know, the very few there's not there's not a lot of research about, the, the, the, impacts of, you know, working in these trades and the mental health effects. 00;49;39;25 - 00;50;10;05 Trina Moyles But one social scientist I spoke to just a few weeks ago said to me, you know, it's it's it's it's an open secret. That's what she said. Suicide amongst workers is an open secret. And that very many, workers today have lost, know someone personally or know of someone they've lost. Companies... It's not regulated. Some companies refer to it as sudden death on paper versus suicide. 00;50;10;07 - 00;50;28;05 Trina Moyles It's, yeah, it's it's really a big issue. And it's, you know, I asked the social scientist, I said, why, why is this not more talked about? Why is the research not more funded? Why are we not looking at more answers? And she actually one thought that she had was, you know, it really is a cultural thing. 00;50;28;05 - 00;50;37;16 Trina Moyles And, you know, I’ll speak to Alberta, this idea of I mean, you mentioned populism, this idea of some people would call it “petro citizenship.” 00;50;37;19 - 00;51;02;29 Trina Moyles And people are very afraid of because we are in this very reactionary, divisive time instead of looking at, okay, what are ways that we can improve, structurally improve, you know, shift for workers the length of time that they're away from their loved ones, sort of the taboo nature of even accessing some of the the counseling supports that are available to workers, like, instead of structurally changing things. 00;51;02;29 - 00;51;23;16 Trina Moyles There's really this fear of like, well, there's nothing wrong with the industry. The industry has to go on and productivity is the bottom line. Right. And she mentioned to she's like, there's a lot of parallels with that with environmental concerns as well. So there's this defensiveness to make improvements because of this reactionary time that we're in. I'm not sure if that's making sense, but yeah, this is something. 00;51;23;16 - 00;51;45;02 Trina Moyles Yeah. This is something I've been thinking a lot about lately. But as, you know, four years since we've lost my brother, I finally feel at the point, I think I sensed when he passed, you know, I at some point I would probably start doing deeper research and and becoming more of a mental health advocate. And I think my brother would want me to do that. 00;51;45;02 - 00;52;01;23 Trina Moyles You know, he was someone who wore his heart on his sleeve. He spoke openly about his struggles with addiction. He reached out to friends who he knew were struggling. And in this way, you know, people I have had people ask me like, what do you think your brother would think of a book? And and he wouldn't have agreed with everything. 00;52;01;23 - 00;52;21;09 Trina Moyles Of course he wouldn't have agreed with all of my take on the industry and his experience would have been far more nuanced, right? Of the ways that care showed up in the industry that he worked in and the ways that people informally support one another. But I also, in this way, feel like in telling the story, it's it's not necessarily to like shut down oil and gas. 00;52;21;09 - 00;52;48;26 Trina Moyles It's it's if we're going to have these resource based economies, how do we care for environment? How do we care for people who work within them? And how do we care for those communities who are on the frontlines of them? And so yeah, it's, it's, it's still a journey that's unfolding for me, but I'm realizing there is a very, yeah, there's something very real there that has been swept under the rug as another mental health crisis worker told me, it's a very real thing that's impacting these workers. 00;52;49;03 - 00;53;13;08 Trina Moyles And it's an interesting time in Canada anyways, with this like quest for mega development projects and this urgency, the sense of urgency to go fast with it, with, for the sake of the economy. And I'm really, you know, I think what my even just my family's personal story is, it's that we need to protect these workers, like we need to protect these communities on the frontlines of it all. 00;53;13;15 - 00;53;19;17 Trina Moyles And there are social costs to all of it, you know. And there are environmental costs too. 00;53;19;19 - 00;53;33;08 J.R. Jamison Jamison: If someone is listening to our conversation and they're struggling with reconnection to a family member due to a political or ideological differences, or perhaps even addiction, what advice would you give to them. 00;53;33;11 - 00;54;00;11 Trina Moyles Moyles: I feel like sometimes just being in the same room as my brother helped, visiting him in his home helped me build empathy because I could see him. I could see him in other roles outside of the roles I kind of always pigeonholed him in, and that was like watching him be a father. That was something I felt very grateful for, that I had the opportunity to to see him become a dad in the way that he was with his children, which was very tender and loving and gentle. 00;54;00;13 - 00;54;17;23 Trina Moyles And it made me drop some of the fear, because I saw how he was capable of those things, and he wanted me to be a part of that. So I think, like, and I think sometimes too, we’re so on the defense with one another, we're not always cognizant of the ways that people are communicating with us and trying for connection. 00;54;17;25 - 00;54;32;28 Trina Moyles So for some simple things like my brother used to, he never texted, you know, and everyone is so obsessed with text messaging. And he was someone who always would call, you know, he'd always call. And sometimes I'd be hesitant to pick up because I was like, oh, do I have the head space and the energy for this right now? 00;54;32;28 - 00;54;49;21 Trina Moyles And I wish I would have picked up more often because that was my brother's way of reaching out, you know? And and at times I met him halfway in the middle there and sometimes I didn't. And that was okay, too, because it is important to protect our own energies. But I think, again, sometimes we're so defensive. And this was true for the bears as well. 00;54;49;21 - 00;55;10;17 Trina Moyles Like we're just not reading one another's behavior. You know, in the way that that you know that while whether non-human species or that human is trying to interact with us because we have our own sort of stories built up about one another. So I wish I had dropped my guard more often with my brother, and let him in when he was trying. 00;55;10;20 - 00;55;36;09 Trina Moyles [I’ve] been able to recognize that and. Yeah. And sharing physical space with him was really, really important. So yeah. So you know in ways where, you know, technology has brought us closer together and then also isolated us too. So more, more face time with him would have been great. And, yeah, I mean, I, I have a lot of regrets about about my relationship with my brother and where I could have put in more energy. 00;55;36;09 - 00;56;02;00 Trina Moyles And I guess, you know, it is cliche to say, like, life is so precious and but it is, it is and, and, you know, we don't get to do things twice, so it's, it's so hard. And then also just accepting, like the imperfection and then the messiness of it all, you know, like not every interaction with him was fantastic, but, you know, little things like the little things, the way that we share information with one another, it does stick. 00;56;02;01 - 00;56;06;18 Trina Moyles And, yeah, I don't know. I'm not sure if that's helpful. 00;56;06;20 - 00;56;15;02 J.R. Jamison Jamison: I think it will be helpful to a lot of our listeners. Yeah. What do you hope readers take away from Black Bear? 00;56;15;05 - 00;56;41;06 Trina Moyles Moyles: I hope they, I guess, sort of on that vein that we were that I was just chatting about, like, I hope they they feel a sense of just the necessity of looking for common ground in these very, very divided times to try not to “otherise” one another. I know that's so difficult right now to always think about the ways like that, 00;56;41;08 - 00;57;02;23 Trina Moyles you know, we're all individuals. We all have our quirks, no matter our politics or what. Like, you know, like there's this quote like, I'm like, you know, that we can contain multitudes. And I think that's what I tried to take to both the narrative with the bears and the narrative with my brothers, with my brother, the way he was such an individual. 00;57;02;23 - 00;57;27;24 Trina Moyles And I could lean into all those things that made him so unique, that had nothing to do with his politics. And that made me, you know, find empathy with him and, and love him and, and try to understand him on a deeper level. And the same with the bears, too. You know, when I dropped the fear story in the fear narrative, I was able to, you know, watch them just being bears on the landscape and all the beautiful things, you know, in, in allowing them to be close. 00;57;27;24 - 00;57;44;21 Trina Moyles Like I realized, like, oh, when cubs are nursing, they kind of purr. They have this, like, motor-like purr. And that was so beautiful to hear all of those things I would have not been capable learning about had I just continued to chase them into the bush and, you know, drive them off. And the same with my brother. 00;57;44;21 - 00;58;03;24 Trina Moyles Had I not gone to his home and spent time with him, watch observing him be a parent and how tender he was, how beautiful he was with his children like I am grateful. So grateful I got the opportunity to do that with him and sort of, you know, work towards that, that reconciliation. So I hope people can relate. 00;58;03;26 - 00;58;13;01 Trina Moyles And I, I hope it brings a gentleness to people's relationship, whether that's with the wild wildlife or whether that's with, you know, the people in their lives. 00;58;13;03 - 00;58;24;06 J.R. Jamison Jamison: Those are really relatable and beautiful take aways. Trina Moyles, author of Black Bear: A Story of Siblinghood and Survival. Thank you so much for joining me on The Facing Project. 00;58;24;12 - 00;58;28;22 Trina Moyles Moyles: Thank you so much for having me on the show. This has been such a beautiful conversation. 00;58;28;24 - 00;58;51;15 J.R. Jamison Jamison: Black Bear: A Story of Siblinghood and Survival is out now everywhere books are borrowed and sold. Learn more about Trina Moyles and her work at TrinaMoyles.com. I want to leave you today with closing words from Trina's book that I feel encapsulates not only the moment in time we're living in that often feels like an “us versus them,” but also is at the heart of the work 00;58;51;15 - 00;59;18;21 J.R. Jamison we hope stories from The Facing Project do to move hearts and minds. As we like to say, “Stories connect us.” And through that connection, we break down walls. Trina writes: “If we can learn to shed our colonial views of conquering nature, of dominating one another and practice care for a species is common and dispensable and devalued as the black bear, we might begin to heal and repair our broken relationships with the earth. 00;59;18;23 - 00;59;38;24 J.R. Jamison If we could learn to see one another not as what we think we generally know about the other, but rather who we are as unique, complex individuals, we might discover space beyond our ideological differences for understanding, empathy, and healing.” [theme music] 00;59;38;27 - 01;00;00;26 J.R. Jamison Thank you again to Trina Moyles for joining me on today's show and to her publisher, Pegasus Books, for providing a complimentary copy of Black Bear: A Story of Siblinghood and Survival. To listen to past episodes of this program as the Indiana Public radio.org/the facing project, or find us on your favorite podcasting app, or on YouTube, or on the NPR network. 01;00;00;28 - 01;00;24;12 J.R. Jamison Or just ask your smart speaker to play The Facing project on NPR. To continue the conversation about this episode, find us on Facebook and Instagram at Facing Project. The Facing Project is recorded at Indiana Public Radio at Ball State University in beautiful and wonderful and evergreen Muncie, Indiana, and is produced by the amazing producer and audio engineer extraordinaire, Sean Ashcraft. 01;00;24;14 - 01;00;35;20 J.R. Jamison The show is distributed nationally through PRX. I'm your host, J.R. Jamison. And until next time, I wish you the courage to share your own story and the empathy to listen to others. [theme music]