Uncharted: Teddy Roosevelt's Amazon Expedition | Lost Cities with Mike Heckenberger | 5
35:45 Share

From Wondery, I'm Cassie DePeckel, and this is Against the Odds. Over the last four episodes, we told the story of Theodore Roosevelt's expedition into the Amazon basin to explore the River of Doubt, later named the Rio Roosevelt.

For two months, Roosevelt and his companions faced disease, rapids, snakes, and insects, and were constantly aware that they were being watched by a local Indian tribe who had not yet had contact with outsiders. One man drowned, another was murdered, and the murderer was left behind. The former president himself nearly died of fever.

The Amazon and its rivers have long been the fascination of explorers, scientists, and anthropologists. And more than a century after Roosevelt's expedition, parts of the region remain largely unexplored by outsiders, even though indigenous people have called the Amazon their home for thousands of years.

Joining us today is Mike Heckenberger, a professor of anthropology at the University of Florida in Gainesville. Since the early 90s, Mike has been journeying to the Amazon to uncover ancient cities and work with indigenous peoples in the Shingu River Basin. Our conversation is coming up next. In our fast-paced, screen-filled world, it can be all too easy to lose that sense of imagination and wonder.

If you're looking for new ways to ignite your creativity and open your mind to fresh perspectives, then let Audible be your guide. Whether you listen to stories, motivation, or any genre you love, you can be inspired to imagine new worlds, new possibilities, and new ways of thinking.

There's more to imagine when you listen. Plus, as an Audible member, you'll get one title a month to keep from their entire catalog. If you're into mythology, then I recommend the title Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman. He's an amazing storyteller that narrates this unique version of the Norse myths.

Listen along. New members can try Audible free for 30 days. Visit audible.com slash the odds or text the odds to 500-500. That's audible.com slash the odds or text the odds to 500-500. Against the Odds is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Most of you aren't just listening right now. You're driving, cleaning, and even exercising. But what if you could be saving money by switching to Progressive?

Drivers who save by switching save nearly $750 on average, and auto customers qualify for an average of seven discounts. Multitask right now. Quote today at Progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. National average 12-month savings of $744 by new customers surveyed who saved with Progressive between June 2022 and May 2023. Potential savings will vary. Discounts not available in all states and situations.

Mike Heckenberger, thanks so much for joining us on Against the Odds. Well, thank you for having me. The jungles and rivers of the Amazon live large in popular imagination. I'm curious, how was your interest in the Amazon first sparked? I started doing archaeology up in New England. One of the things that always interested me about that archaeology is things we see in the archaeological record, like fire hars or pieces of ceramics.

How do they get there? My interest and my heart was drawn to the Amazon because it has such a rich diversity of living indigenous people.

And so first I was drawn to the Amazon and then started looking for places where there was really pretty clear indication that the people we see today are the living descendants of the populations who were there 500 years ago before Europeans came there. Oh, wow. You've been exploring the region for three decades, and a lot of times it's been spent in the Shingu Basin of the Amazon. Can you tell us where is it on the map?

The Xingu is in the southeastern corner of the Amazon basin, geographically right in the center of Brazil. And so I know that you've been talking about the Roosevelt Expedition, which is also in the southern peripheries of the Amazon forest, but slightly farther to the west, maybe a thousand kilometers to the west of the upper Xingu region. But

Both of those areas are right along the southern fringes of the tropical forest before you come up into the highland central Brazilian plateau where the vegetation and the topography and landscape is very different. I've been to the Amazon and the Ecuadorian area, so I was just looking that up on a map. Really interesting. What's been the main focus of your work there?

What I was interested in doing is looking at the archaeology of the past 500 years. At the time that I first started working there, about three decades ago in the early 1990s, the idea that with European colonization of the Americas, epidemics were brought into the Americas that decimated Native American populations and

And we knew that from Eastern North America where I'd worked before. We obviously knew that from Mexico and Guatemala and the Maya where I'd also worked, the Caribbean, the Andes, places where there was historical records. But there hadn't been enough work done in the Amazon to suggest –

that they too had gone through a similar catastrophe. The people we see today are very similar to their ancestors 500 years ago. And the question was, did the Amazon rainforest insulate those groups? Or is it just we're missing pieces of the puzzle, that we just don't know enough about the archaeology to make that determination? And so a lot of my work was with the Kikuru.

who live in the Shingu indigenous territory. And I was very interested in working with them and using their histories, the oral histories that they have of their past occupation areas and their understanding and knowledge of the forest to just kind of work their history back in time. And

and see how far back we could go. And sure enough, not only were we able to push that history through archaeology back to 500 years ago, but it goes even deeper than that. We have it now measured back to over 2,000 years ago.

I was very interested in just kind of connecting the dots between what people know from the present, their own history, and what we can find archaeologically. Can you take us back to that first trip you took to Shingu? What were your first impressions as you arrived? Well, I had worked with the Shingu indigenous leadership in Rio de Janeiro for a couple of years before I actually went to the Shingu and to the Kwekuru community.

And if I hadn't worked with them, essentially worked for them in Rio, I don't think they would have invited me to come and live in their community. But by the end of that period, the Kwikuru chief, his name is Afuka Ka, and I'll talk about him in a moment, did invite me into the community. And he and I and his young son...

traveled from Rio by plane and by bus and whatnot up to the nearest town to the Kikudu area.

We had hired a big flatbed to bring a motorboat up, which was the first motorboat to go in there. And Fukaka and I drove in the flatbed up to the edge of a river. It's the primary headwater of the Shingu River. And jumped in the boat, turned it on, and went downriver for about 12 hours.

in during part of the trip, the pouring rain. Many of our supplies got very wet and arrived at the port of the Kikuru village about 1 a.m. And

What I saw first was the small fires at the edge of the river, because at that time it was a very rare thing for outsiders to appear. And so it was kind of a community event. And then we divided the supplies and people got bags and boxes and whatnot up on top of their head, including me, and walked the six miles to the Kwekudu village.

But before we could get there, we had to walk through a river, sometimes knee high, sometimes neck high with the boxes on our head. You know, me thinking the whole time that some prehistoric like snapping turtle is going to grab hold of me and carry me down river. And then we come up the hill. And just then the clouds were really starting to break out and the moon came out.

And then all of a sudden, the Kikudu village with their thatch houses, their knot huts, their really substantial houses in a big circle around the plaza. And it was really a mystical experience. You know, it's hard not to feel like you're stepping back in time. Sounds really beautiful. And just how off the grid was it? Did you feel a bit like you were going into the unknown? Yeah.

Well, absolutely. The Xingu region, even though it's located right in the center of Brazil, was actually one of the last areas of the Amazon to be explored by outsiders. It was only first recorded in the late 1880s. And the people in Brazil created the Xingu Indigenous Park, as it was called at the time. And that kind of kept modern civilization out.

So they were still very remote from regular contact with the outside world, even in the 1990s. What about GPS? Does that work? I brought, I think, one of the first commercially available GPS into the area in 1992, and

And it didn't work very well. But when we went back in 2000, there was public access to the most precise GPS data available. Working with the Kwekuru indigenous community, geography, places, and

The orientation of things and spaces was something that they really responded to amazingly well. The GPS was a remarkable tool. They understood where things fit into place. They were able to draw their own maps of how they conceived of their community and how one community connected with another. And it provided a language almost that we could communicate in doing this collaborative work.

And just out of curiosity, does your phone work as well? Cell phone access is problematic, but we have been able to install high-speed internet. And so I can call people on WhatsApp, but not on their cell phone.

During the COVID epidemic, we had a project to bring doctors and oxygen tanks and whatnot that was driven by the community and their desires. But we would have Zoom meetings right into the Kwekudu village on a weekly basis. I bet Teddy would have loved to have GPS when he and his companions were exploring the River of Doubt over a century ago. And I'm wondering, do you think much has changed? Oh, boy, yeah.

I say sometimes to people that I think more had changed in the Kikudu village from the first time that I was working there to the second time 10 years later. And it seemed like more had changed in that decade than had probably changed in the previous 100 years, perhaps 500 years.

Because they were extremely traditional and because of the indigenous reserve that was created, they remained very remote from society. But then all of a sudden in the 1990s, members of the indigenous community were aware of the outside world. They wanted to interact. They wanted potentially some of them to go out and go to school, even go to university.

And so things started to change very quickly. When you can get running water from a spigot right next to your house, you're going to want to do that rather than walk two kilometers to the nearest water source and have somebody carry a big pan of water on the top of their head. Obviously, things like medical assistance, computer technology,

Some of my younger friends in the Kikudu village, I actually don't have a Facebook account myself, but they certainly do. They're tapped in. They want this knowledge. And they also don't want their traditional culture to kind of disintegrate. When Roosevelt was there in the 19-teens...

He hadn't really thought about indigenous people in the Amazon being much larger and more complicated, really being civilizations 500 years ago. He kind of thought that the people he encountered were pretty much the way they always were, you know, relatively small, primitive societies. Certainly they'd had intensive experience with epidemic diseases.

COVID was nothing new. They'd gone through pandemics that had wiped out large portions of their population for many centuries. But that really wasn't on Roosevelt's radar screen at the time. He was interested in going to a place that had never been explored and exploring it for the first time. And he really had some remarkable things to say about the indigenous communities. I'm always reminded there's a stretch in his book called

about a rubber ball game. And he described in detail that an anthropologist would love them playing this rubber ball game. The Kikuru who I live with also play this rubber ball game. You can't use your hands or your arms. You can use your head, you can use your body, and you can use your feet.

very familiar sounding. He was also aware and mentioned that some of these groups were living in, you know, rather difficult conditions. And I think he was aware that as modern society encroaches on them, that there was a threat of

to their existence as traditional communities. He worked with a Brazilian man, Colonel Pondon. He was the first director of the Service for the Protection of the Indians that later became the National Indian Foundation, but a real champion of indigenous people and the logical person to accompany someone like Theodore Roosevelt on his trip into the Brazilian equivalent of the outback.

When you're hiring, time is of the essence. That's why more than 3.5 million businesses worldwide use Indeed to find exceptional talent fast. Indeed's powerful matching engine works quickly, so quickly that, according to Indeed data worldwide, every minute 23 hires are made on Indeed.

But it doesn't stop there, because Indeed also helps you hire better. 93% of employers agree Indeed delivers the highest quality matches compared to other job sites, according to a recent Indeed survey. That's because their matching engine is always learning from your preference. So the more you use Indeed, the better it gets.

So let Indeed be your go-to for making great hires quickly and easily. And listeners of the show, get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at Indeed.com slash the odds. Just go to Indeed.com slash the odds right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast.

Indeed.com slash the odds. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? You need Indeed. These days, it feels like we're all just on the hunt for ways to optimize our health and feel our absolute best. The only problem is, with all these supplements out there, it can be really tough to know which ones are actually worth your time and money. That's where today's sponsor, Symbiotica, comes in.

Symbiotica is a premium supplement brand that's raising the bar when it comes to purity, potency, and efficacy. Their supplements are formulated with high-quality ingredients. That's why their formulas don't have any seed oils, preservatives, toxins, artificial additives, or natural flavors.

Plus, while most supplements can taste chalky or sulfuric, Symbiotica's supplements have amazing flavors like citrus lime, vanilla chai, or wild berry. I've been loving the magnesium supplement from Symbiotica. Being low in magnesium, I've made it a priority lately to take it consistently. I love how I can take it on the go and ensure I'm never missing a dose. Feel more energized, alert, and balanced with high-quality supplements that work.

Head over to Symbiotica.com and use code ODDS for 20% off and free shipping on your subscription order.

In your travels to the Amazon, you've uncovered numerous ancient cities in the jungle. They date back to before the time of Columbus. So what was the first city you found? And can you describe the first time you saw it? About two weeks after I arrived in the Kikuta village, I had been aware that there was linear earthworks, ditches and mounds everywhere.

In the area, previous anthropologists who'd worked in the area had recognized these features. The indigenous people themselves, the Kikudu, also have stories.

They see them as being created by a past mythical cultural hero, but they were aware of them as well. And so about two weeks after I arrived in the village, Afukaka, the chief of the community and who I came to be very close friends with and lived in his home for many years now, he said, listen, I know you're interested in those ditches. Can I go out and show you one?

And when he brought me to that ditch for the first time, I kind of threw my project script out the window and said, this village looks like to be about 20 times the size of the contemporary village. It turns out that where there was one Kwikudu village in 1993, there was about a dozen big villages in the past.

And at least four of them were about 150 acres. And so that's where I started to entertain the idea that these are kind of almost like small cities. So the communities were not separate towns. They were more like neighborhoods of the same town.

The only thing is, at the time, very few people were willing to accept that there was truly something like a lost city in the Amazon. They kind of said that was the thing of, you know, explorers' imaginations and the people who talked about lost cities in the Amazon, you know, were really thinking of them in terms of some European group who'd gotten lost in the Amazon and started building stone cities and whatnot, looking for, quite literally, Atlantis in the Amazon. And

And what they were not ready to understand is that the indigenous people themselves had developed very complicated and sophisticated systems that integrated large communities. And I found a book, it was written in 1902, called Garden Cities of Tomorrow. And it turns out that this fellow, he was an Englishman, Ebenezer Howard, had suggested that something like London, England,

was a bad idea. It was too many people in one place. And so he suggested a model of, in place of building one city of 300,000 people, why not 10 towns of 30,000 people and connect them up with roads and sophisticated communication systems and kind of work with nature as opposed to against nature? And as time has progressed, we realized that

that these earthworks, these complicated network systems, it's not just in the Shingu, they're all across the southern fringe of the Amazon. So they're in the area just to the south of the River of Doubt, of the Roosevelt River. And all of a sudden we start to recognize here is a form of low-density urbanism that's almost the alter ego of what we're expecting to find.

But all of the previous explorations and people who were hoping for, they were dreaming for finding something like what was found in the Guatemalan tropical forest, big stone pyramids, or in Southeast Asia with Angkor Wat, these discoveries of large urban settlements and

In the Amazon, that didn't occur. So if we went back in time to around 1200s, what would one of those cities look like? Well, that's about the time that they integrated into these tight clusters. It's really interesting because it's a climatic period called the medieval warm period.

There was significant climate-driven changes that were happening, and that may have actually stimulated them building these large earthworks and whatnot. We know today in what's called the current warm period, the global warming we're all well aware of today, that building things like straight roads and ditches are fascinating.

very effective fire controls. And as this area suffers from climate change and the climate gets warmer and drier, obviously there's drought, but there's also a very acute risk of wildfires. And so it seems like some of the things that they were doing in the past may have actually been a response to climate change in the past. And one of the things that I think is fascinating about this observation is

is today there are several thousand indigenous people in this indigenous reserve. They reached their lowest in about 1950 when they were reduced to about 500 people living in about a dozen villages. Well, we estimate that 500 years ago, there was 50,000 people in this area.

And all of a sudden, we're starting to realize that some of the ways that these fairly large populations 500 years ago were adapting to changes like climate change offer clues, pathways to think about what happens as contemporary communities grow.

And perhaps it makes more sense to follow indigenous technologies as our kind of guide to how to respond to these things. But what did a garden city look like? The contemporary Kikuru community is a big village around that central plaza and these really magnificent pole and thatch houses.

And I say houses rather than huts because, you know, these things get up to 10,000 square feet in size. They're larger than your average American home, many of them. But the contemporary community is kind of an autonomous unit.

And it seems like that prior to 1200, it was very similar to that. At 1200, they integrated so that it was a regional unit. And in the middle of those four large settlements of about 150 acres each, there was a ceremonial site

right in the middle of them and very, very precisely oriented. These settlements were always very regularly spaced. They were reproducing distances and angles in an extremely precise way.

So you have that central plaza site, and then five kilometers to the south is one of those major residential centers. There's another one eight kilometers to the east. There's another large one across the river, eight kilometers to the west. Yeah, you'll build up a sweat running from one to the other, but you could actually travel between one of these in less than an hour. And that's why I say they're more like neighborhoods.

considering that they're orbiting around the central plaza. But I say to students, for instance, that if you're looking for an analog of downtown Manhattan in the ancient past, look to the Xingu. When you map these roads out across the entire landscape, it's like a very precise latticework.

They all occur according to a grid. I like to say to people, you couldn't get lost in the pre-Columbian Shingu. Just take a left at the plaza, go three kilometers, take a right, and off you go to another. And what's it like to live in a Kwikuru village, if I pronounced that right? You've done it and go back and forth regularly. Yes, I'm there once or twice at least a year, pretty much every year.

Spent a total of about three years living with the Kwekudo over that 30-year period. And obviously, this is not the Four Seasons. Yes, there is now water from an artesian well that is pumped to each of the houses. And they do have a couple of bathrooms in the area. And they do have modern appliances, gas stoves and the like.

But it is, you know, kind of outback. I mean, it's like if you like backpacking, you'll like the Kwekudu Village. If you like the Four Seasons, you might want to just listen to this radio cast. But there you are eating fish and they make manioc flatbread. Manioc is a tuber crop, like a big potato or pretty much identical in shape and form to a yam. They cook them still on ceramic pottery.

that is essentially identical to the ceramics that we find 500 years ago. And so it is very much like stepping back to a time and a place where

in our own history when we didn't have so many creature comforts and so many different things. And so someone like myself, and I think I can say someone like Theodore Roosevelt very clearly as well, who really enjoys those kind of settings, it's a breath of fresh air for me to go to the Kwekudu village. It's like, oh, wow, all of a sudden things make sense again. Have you had any close encounters with animals or reptiles, a story that you'd like to share? Yeah.

Well, yes. Here's another aspect of the Amazon is the Amazon. It's the world's mega tropical forest. And sure enough, we were traveling by boat and canoe up a river and saw an anaconda basking in the sun on the edge of the riverbank. And

They, like me, kind of wanted to stir the pot and get some action out of the anaconda. So we had these kind of pre-cut pieces of manioc in the boat. So we started throwing them over at the anaconda just to make it move. Well, someone hit it right in the head.

And that snake launched at the boat. It attacked the boat, but it couldn't get high enough, long enough to get in the boat. So it came down right next to the boat. We could see it was the same length as the boat. It was about five or six meters long. So that's a very big anaconda. And sure enough, had it gotten into the boat, there would have been some real trouble. Another of my favorite stories is something called a botfly attack.

Which is something that burrows under your skin.

And it just kind of stays under your skin and grows until it emerges as a fly. And, you know, they're uncomfortable. I got a couple of them in my arm. So I turned to a Foucault once when we were in the city and I said, well, is there anything you know? You know, is there deep traditional knowledge that, you know, you can help me get rid of these things? He said, oh, sure, I can get rid of those. And he went off with his son, came back with a spray bottle of Raid,

and shot the raid right into the hole in my arm. He 10 minutes later came over and they were dead and that was done with. So yeah, the Amazon is a challenging environment.

But the mountaintops in Vermont can be challenging as well if you're not from there and you're not accustomed to there and you don't have the knowledge and the resources. I always had the benefit of having the Kwikudu with me. And so even though I was often childlike, stumbling through the forest or rivers, they were always there to guide me along. Speaking of the chief, you are good friends. He even gave you a name in a formal ceremony. What is your...

Kwikuru name and what was the ceremony like? I was given the name of his father's brother and names are given across generations. So for instance, his name is Afukaka and that name is passed to his grandson. Mine is Mikey Yanaa.

And he did, in a formal ceremony, do a name changing for me. There was someone who had that name who I had to do a ritual payment to adopt that name. But it was just a remarkable moment for me and how...

our relationship is. It's how I feel about the Kikuru. Mafukakai is one of my best friends. I talk with him, you know, at least several times a week now that we have WhatsApp. And you've got to remember that

Native American peoples across the Americas, the past 500 years have not been very kind to them. Not only has there been catastrophic epidemics that have dropped their population to a fraction of their original size, but we all know encroachment, appropriation of lands. It's been a difficult time. And so for the Kwikudu people,

to accept us and to welcome us into the community is really just a remarkable testimony to how willing they are to form partnerships, to help overcome mutual problems if we outsiders are respectful and willing to respect them and also willing to form partnerships and work together.

This season, Instacart has your back to school. As in, they've got your back to school lunch favorites, like snack packs and fresh fruit. And they've got your back to school supplies, like backpacks, binders, and pencils. And they've got your back when your kid casually tells you they have a huge school project due tomorrow.

Let's face it, we were all that kid. So first call your parents to say I'm sorry, and then download the Instacart app to get delivery in as fast as 30 minutes all school year long. Get a $0 delivery fee for your first three orders while supplies last. Minimum $10 per order. Additional terms apply. You've learned so much from your work in the Amazon. If you could go back in time and say something to explorers like Teddy Roosevelt and some of the British explorers, what would you say?

It's anachronistic to expect from them an understanding of the environment as if they knew what we know now. There really was no archaeological landscape or yardstick to measure what things might have been like in the past. We can look back at these people and say, yeah, there's...

Certainly a kind of a cultural bias against those groups as if they're backwards or primitives. You know, if we read that stuff today, we say, wow, that really is pretty biased, might even seem racist to us. But the notions back then were very different. Teddy Roosevelt encountered a variety of native Amazonian groups along his way, and he describes them. The River of Doubt was well known by them.

There was groups like the Sintalarga, for instance, who kind of shadowed his expedition. They were always alongside, even though he had a hard time making direct contact with them. It wasn't because they weren't there. It was because they knew that the Roosevelt expedition was there, and they were keeping themselves scarce, even though they were fully aware that there was knives and metal pots and all kinds of goodies that they might have wanted. They didn't seek it out.

He picked the right partner in Conjito Hondon to accompany him.

And with Hondon involved in the expedition, you know, I'm quite certain that there was a voice that was representing indigenous people as every bit as human and deserving of human rights as the explorers. But it's very hard to say, hey, boy, I wish they kind of had a notion that these indigenous people had been destroyed by the colonization of the Americas.

thinking back to what he might have done differently, he just didn't have knowledge, nor did someone like Percy Fawcett, who went looking for Atlantis in the Amazon. I like to say about Percy Fawcett because he actually was lost very close to the area I work, and many people said, oh, you found what Fawcett was looking for. And I say, well, no, Fawcett actually walked right over the top of these sites, and it just wasn't what he was looking for.

But the one thing that might have been done differently is they never really gave credit to the possibility that native groups, that indigenous people could have done sophisticated things themselves. The idea that there was indigenous civilizations that in many ways were

were as sophisticated as Western civilizations at the time that organized populations as large as many European cities of the day that managed resources and transformed the landscape in highly productive ways that worked with nature. That was ahead of their time. We cannot really judge what they said based on what we now know today a century later.

And finally, do you think the indigenous people of the Amazon are heard on the world stage today? Not enough. Absolutely not. Many people have this imagery that these are primitive societies, that they're almost childlike. And so they don't have the capacity to make the right decisions for themselves, to really control their destiny.

It's time that we put a seat at the adult table for indigenous people to describe in their own voice what they want to see happen, how they can contribute. And they very much are willing partners in this dialogue. So in the international stage, I think it's important to recognize while they are remarkably different.

than we are today, there's no reason to assume that they don't have the same capacities we do to do things in a way that can help, for instance, in this case, protect the Amazon forest. Many people believe, including scientists, but certainly in the popular imagination, that the Amazon is a pristine form of nature. It's a

tropical forest that really has not been influenced by humans. And we're starting to discover that a good portion of it actually is as much a human artifact as it is a natural artifact. Humans were actually preserving the forest. They were actually enriching the biodiversity of the forest. When people came in, specialists in wildfire management to deal with the out-of-control wildfires today, they

And they saw these maps of the pre-Columbian settlements. They said, wow, that's just what we would do. We'd build big straight roads as fire breaks and we'd build ditches and we'd separate things to a certain distance so you didn't have one fire that just wiped out the whole city. It just goes to show that 500 years ago,

In many ways, they were as sophisticated in terms of land and resource management as anything on the planet. It was really unthinkable to me when I started working in the Amazon that there might not be an Amazon forest in my lifetime. And now we're starting to see that. In fact, that may be the case.

And one of the best solutions is putting the tools and resources and knowledge and partnerships in the hands of indigenous and local communities that live there to try and find alternative strategies that do not destroy the forest.

but potentially enrich it and help manage those resources. We need to recognize them as full partners in the work and not just assume because they don't understand, you know, they haven't had the same science 101 classes or read the same science tech books or

or potentially don't have the same capacity with a little training, with a little working together, they can very rapidly learn our tools. But at the same time, what they very reasonably expect is that we hear them as well. And we have to recognize that the people living in the Amazon...

are the solution to the problem. We're not going to import from the outside solutions from Paris or Glasgow or Washington, D.C. The people who really are going to be responsible for whether there is an Amazon in 20 or 30 years are the indigenous and other local communities in terms of their lands and how to manage them. They're far more sophisticated than we are. Well, Mike Heckenberger, thanks so much for joining us today.

Well, thank you very much for having me.

This is the final episode of our series, Roosevelt and the Amazon. Thanks to our guest, Mike Heckenberger, for sharing his travels with us. I'm your host, Cassie DePeckel. This episode was produced by Polly Stryker. Our interview episode producer is Peter Arcuni. Our audio engineer is Sergio Enriquez. Our series producers are Matt Olmos, Alita Rozansky, and Emily Frost. Our senior managing producer is Tanja Thigpen. Matt Gant is our managing producer. Our series producer is

Our senior producer is Andy Herman. Our executive producers are Jenny Laura Beckman, Stephanie Jens, and Marsha Louis for Wondery. Wondery.

What's up, guys? It's your girl Kiki, and my podcast is back with a new season. And let me tell you, it's too good. And I'm diving into the brains of entertainment's best and brightest, okay? Every episode, I bring on a friend and have a real conversation. And I don't mean just friends. I mean the likes of Amy Poehler, Kel Mitchell, Vivica Fox. The list goes on. So follow, watch, and listen to Baby. This is Kiki Palmer on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts.