This week on Calling in the Healers, I sit down with Dr. David Tamez, philosopher at the University of Kansas and co-lead at KU’s Center for Cyber-Social Dynamics, to explore how artificial intelligence and human communities shape each other—right here in Lawrence, Kansas. From courts and classrooms to hiring and city services, David helps us ask better questions:

• What decisions belong to tools, and what decisions must remain human?

• How do we protect dignity, accountability, and care as AI enters everyday life?

We talk about:

• Decisions and norms: Why the hidden “rules of thumb” in a community matter more than abstract principles when AI meets real people.

• Keeping judgment human: The difference between information and wisdom, and how to design processes that include review, appeal, and repair.

• Street-level AI: Practical examples—eligibility scoring, grading, hiring, benefits—and how to build contestable systems with clear accountability.

• Elders & digital safety: Deepfakes, scams, and the grief of not knowing what’s real—and how to protect our most vulnerable neighbors.

• Metrics vs. meaning: Using data to inform decisions without letting metrics replace the values we actually want to live by.

• Role dignity: What we lose when we offload judgment to algorithms—and how professionals can reclaim craft, presence, and care.

• Community design: “Nothing about us without us”—co-creating AI policies with impacted people, not just experts.

• Place-based ethics: Why a local lens (Lawrence) helps us see global issues clearly—and act with humility, courage, and reciprocity.

If you work in schools, healthcare, government, nonprofits, or any team making decisions with data, this conversation offers grounded language and simple guardrails to keep people at the center as technology evolves.

🎧 Listen now

💚 Shoutout to Animal Kingdom Boxing, Coach Daniel has built a community focus on attending to each persons development and how you can grow into the best boxer you can be.

This week on Calling in the Healers, I sit down with Vanessa Johnson (Diné), Assistant Director at Lawrence Montessori School and proud Haskell alumna, to reflect on her journey from New Mexico to 20 years of community-rooted life in Lawrence, Kansas. Vanessa tells us about her journey as an , partner, mom and educator and her work supporting families and peers in early childhood, Vanessa brings wisdom about balance, healing, and the everyday magic of raising children in community.

We talk about:

• Growing up “making it work” and how it shaped Vanessa’s skills of resourcefulness, gratitude, and persistence.

• The role of Haskell Indian Nations University as a beacon for Native students seeking both education and family.

• The Diné teachings of Hózhó (walking in beauty) and what balance means in spiritual, emotional, physical, and community life.

• Montessori as a healing philosophy: independence, empathy, and natural consequences as pathways for children (and parents) to learn new ways of being.

• The crisis in early childhood education—cost, scarcity of care, educator burnout—and the deep healing that comes from trusted, community-rooted schools.

• Vanessa’s own healing journey after a running injury, and what it means to embody “She Who Runs” in a new season of life.

• The Diné tradition of the First Laugh Ceremony, and why laughter is medicine that connects us to ancestors, community, and joy.

🎧 Listen now

💚 Shoutout to Indigenous entrepreneur at Apache Selections, and the power of Native-led fashion and business.

This week on Calling in the Healers, I sit down with Travis Campbell (Cherokee, Choctaw, Delaware), Director of the Haskell Cultural Center & Museum, to reflect on the transformation of Haskell - from a federal boarding school built to erase Native identities, to a living space where students from 574 tribes gather to celebrate culture, language, and community.

We talk about:

• What sovereignty looks like at the institutional level — why it matters for Native nations to run their own museums and cultural centers.

• Sustaining cultural institutions: the challenges of funding, staffing, and long-term planning in Native-led spaces.

• The treasures and responsibilities held at the Haskell Cultural Center & Museum — from 700-year-old pottery to student yearbooks that help families trace ancestry.

• The “Haskell Rebellion” of 1919 and what it teaches us about resilience, resistance, and identity.

• Mixed identity, family heritage, and the privilege and challenge of navigating how others perceive you.

• Navigating bureaucracy as a survival skill for underfunded communities — asking for help, adapting, and finding creative solutions.

• The need for more spaces in Lawrence to practice solution-oriented dialogue and listen deeply across differences.

🎧 Listen now

💚 Shoutout to the Lawrence Public Library (Actively imagining what the future of libraries looks like)

🚩 Hot take: There is more than one university in town!

To follow Travis’ work, check out:

Haskell Cultural Center & Museum

Purchase replica prints from the Frank Rinehart Collection

Follow Travis and his team’s work on Instagram

In this episode of Calling in the Healers, we sit down with Rebekka Schlichting — filmmaker, professor, mama, culture keeper of the Ioway Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska, and co-founder of Dear Woman Productions. Together, we explore storytelling as both cultural preservation and a pathway to healing. From ceremonies on the Sac & Fox Nation reservation to youth workshops at KU, Rebekka’s work bridges traditional knowledge and modern media. She shares how returning to homelands, speaking ancestral languages, and reclaiming narrative sovereignty can bring deep intergenerational healing.

You’ll hear about:

• Building the Native Storytelling Workshop at KU and creating access for Native youth despite funding cuts (with support from Vision Maker Media and the Billy Mills Running Strong Foundation)

• The origins of Dear Woman Productions and its commitment to Native-led, women-centered film projects

• Honoring the legacy of Peyton Canku through projects like Rez Monster and the forthcoming documentary Walking the Footsteps of Our Ancestors (about the Otoe-Missouria people returning to their Nebraska homelands)

• Migration stories that weave German, French-Canadian, Wichita, and Ioway lineages with the lived realities of boarding schools, schizophrenia, resilience, and reclamation

• The healing power of laughter, language, and ceremony in the face of historical trauma

Whether you are a storyteller, a community leader, or someone navigating the complexity of mixed identity, this episode offers powerful reflections on how stories themselves can be medicine.

🎧 Listen now

💚 Shoutout to Bluebird Taylor-McKown at Baker Wetlands, who leads education programs that teach young people about reciprocity, connect community back to the land, and embody the practice of rematriation as a culture keeper caring for the beings and ecosystems — like the wetlands — that need our protection.

🎬 To follow Rebekka’s work, check out:
💻 Dear Woman Productions
📽️ Native Storytelling Workshop (KU School of Journalism, in partnership with Running Strong Foundation for American Indian Youth)
📚 Walking the Footsteps of Our Ancestors(film in progress)

JUNE 27, 2025
In this episode of Calling in the Healers, we sit down with Zach and Whitney Schneider, personal trainers and co-owners of a community gym in Lawrence, Kansas. Together, we talk about movement. Both how movement heals, as well as the work it takes to heal when we can't move the way we want to (e.g., recovering from a debilitating injury). Throughout the episode, we unpack the way commitment to our health in the long term sets us on a path to personal resilience, community connection, and lifelong strength.

You’ll hear about:

• Inclusive fitness practices for every type of body

• How to build a gym culture rooted in compassion, not comparison

• What this approach to fitness teaches us about adaptation and community healing

• Growing up in rural Kansas, recovering from injury, and staying rooted in place

Whether you’re a fitness professional, a community leader, or someone healing their relationship with their body, this episode offers powerful insights into how movement can become medicine.

🎧 Listen now

💪🏽 If you’re looking to join the community that Zach & Whitney have built, you can reach them at:
📧 zach@schneiderfit.com
📱 (620) 481-9631
💻 https://schneiderfit.com/
📍 3201 Clinton Pkwy Ct, Lawrence, KS 66047

JUNE 20, 2025
In this episode of Calling in the Healers, Nick Pineda sits down with Courtney Eddy King—Indigenous scientist, cultural steward, and greenhouse manager at Haskell Indian Nations University—for a conversation about the work of healing land, memory, and self.

Courtney shares her journey into ecological restoration and her relationship with the land—as someone reclaiming cultural knowledge that colonial systems continue to seek to erase. Together, they explore what it means to rebalance ecosystems and why public land care serves as a mirror for how much we truly value the land and sovereignty of the other-than-human species that live on it.

In this conversation, we explore:

• What it means to restore not just prairie ecosystems—but cultural memory

• How the land can become a teacher when ancestral knowledge is missing or broken

• The tension between progressive environmentalism and lived Indigenous realities in Lawrence

• The emotional and ancestral depth of working with plants as material and kin

This episode is for anyone hungry to feel rooted again—anyone looking to begin, or begin again, with the land beneath their feet.

🎧 Listen now

⚒️ If you’d like to volunteer with the
Haskell Greenhouse you can learn more about their work at their website and follow them on Instagram.

Volunteer days are held regularly.

And if you’d like to begin removing invasive honeysuckle in your community, check out this video from Cincinnati Parks.

JUNE 12, 2025
In this opening episode of Calling in the Healers, host Nick Pineda sits down with Cris—great-grandmother, sponsor, and longtime member of the Lawrence recovery community—for a conversation that is equal parts laughter and tears. It's about being honest and showing up for yourself so that others can do the same.

Together, they reflect on what it means to say yes to change, the role of truth-telling in recovery, and why healing is a lifelong, relational practice—not something we earn or perform. Cris shares how a pivotal boundary from her therapist led her to her first recovery meeting, how she grew into the role of sponsor for others, and how she brings an "attitude of gratitude" wherever she goes.

This episode is a reminder that we don’t need to be perfect to be powerful—and that some of the most transformative work in a community happens quietly, through honest friendship and steady presence.

In this conversation, we explore:

• What it means to begin a healing journey later at any stage of life

• How the recovery community models a different kind of leadership

• The difference between saving others and walking alongside them

• Why “taking the cape off” might be the most powerful thing we can do

🎧 Listen now and explore what recovery, honesty, and healing mean in your own life.

⚒️ If you or someone you know is struggling with recovery or addiction, help is always within reach.

AA.org

NA.org

Al-Anon.org