Sacred Remembering in Times of War: Dr. Jaiya John (Mshkiki Odeh Inini, Medicine Heart Man)

Recorded live at a SAND Community Gathering (April 2026)

Hard times are here, we hunger for voices that can see beyond the fear, beyond the noise, beyond the technologies consuming our attention. We need poets and visionaries. People who remember freedom.

Dr. Jaiya John (Mshkiki Odeh Inini, Medicine Heart Man), medicine poet, freedom worker, is one of those voices. He has spent his life gathering words that heal. In this conversation, we enter the beauty, the grief, and the medicine together. We sit with the devastation tearing our world, the sorrows cracking us open, the ancestors still holding us—and the radical insistence that collective freedom is not something we chase. It is something already alive in and between us, waiting to be birthed.

Dr. Jaiya John (Mshkiki Odeh Inini, Medicine Heart Man) was orphan-born on ancient Indigenous Anasazi and Pueblo lands in the high desert of New Mexico. He is an ancestral Baba, freedom worker, medicine poet, and the founder of Soul Water Rising—a global mission to eradicate oppression through re-humanization, book donations, and grants to displaced youth. He is the author of numerous books including Freedom: Medicine Words for your Brave Revolution and Fragrance After Rain, and the creator of the podcast I Will Read for You. A former professor of social psychology at Howard University, he holds a doctorate from UC Santa Cruz and has spoken to over a million people worldwide. His Indigenous soul dreams of frybread, sweetgrass, bamboo in the breeze, and turtle lakes whose poetry is peace.

 

Watch the full video version of this conversation.

 

Topics

 

• 00:00 Welcome and Land Acknowledgment
• 02:31 Guest Bio and Introduction
• 03:51 Opening Blessing and Heart Question
• 05:10 Reclaiming Anger as Medicine
• 08:08 Libation Prayer for the World
• 15:57 Anger Rage and Lifted Veils
• 20:19 Rethinking War and Remembering Water
• 25:18 Gather Your People Reading
• 33:04 Grief Poetry and Inner Wars
• 36:13 War Wants Us Small
• 40:30 Soul Conditions That Grow War
• 42:14 Oxygen of War
• 44:12 Harvesting Clear Vision
• 47:05 Ferocious Grief Revival
• 49:38 How Grief Behaves
• 51:59 Poetry Against Silence
• 55:08 From Muteness to Voice
• 58:33 Artistry as Resurrection
• 01:03:42 Womanhood as Creativity
• 01:07:23 History as Sacred Hoop
• 01:12:45 Composting Harm into Healing
• 01:16:33 Intentional Living Practice
• 01:19:22 All These Rivers Choose Love
• 01:23:01 Blessings and Farewell

 

Dr. Jaiya John — Guest

• Website: jaiyajohn.com
• Soul Water Rising — global mission
• Podcast: I Will Read for You: The Voice and Writings of Jaiya John
• Freedom Medicine: Words for Your Brave Revolution — book
• Wildflowers Praying at Midnight — book
• We Birth Freedom at Dawn — book
• All These Rivers and You Chose Love — book
• Fragrance After Rain — book
• Dr. Jaiya John's YouTube channel — where his poem for the Martyred Poets of Gaza and Palestine is available
• Substack: jaiyajohn.substack.com

Dr. Jennifer Mullan — Referenced

• Website: decolonizingtherapy.com — Dr. Mullan's "rage doctor" ministry and upcoming work
• Decolonizing Therapy: Oppression, Historical Trauma, and Politicizing Your Practice — book
• Therapy is Not Neutral:  Dr. Jennifer Mullan & Iya Affo (SAND Podcast episode)

The Gaza Monologues — Referenced

• The Gaza Monologues — ASHTAR Theatre — the global project of 33 young people from Gaza, which Dr. Jaiya John contributed a poem to
• Support ASHTAR Theatre / Gaza Monologues writers — GlobalGiving

Nikki Giovanni — Referenced

• Nikki Giovanni — Poetry Foundation — the poet whose performance broke Dr. Jaiya John open as a young man and birthed him as a poet
• nikki-giovanni.com

Ancestors Referenced

• El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (Malcolm X) — quoted: "Out of all our studies, history is most qualified to reward our research"
• Geronimo — Dr. Jaiya John's ancestral grandfather spirit, whose question "What is in your heart?" opens the gathering
• John Lewis — referenced for "good trouble" and getting in the way of harm

Hopi Nation / Turtle Island

• The concept of Sipapu (the Hopi place of emergence/womb place) is discussed at length as a framework for understanding history as circular, not linear

 

Connect with more talks and films from the SAND film Series The Eternal Song

 

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