 Hello and welcome everyone. Thanks for coming to tonight's book talk. I'm John Smalley, a librarian with the General Collections and Humanities Department here at the main library on the third floor, where you will find thousands, tens of thousands of poetry books and also essays in 41 languages. So feel free to visit us sometime. While I'm waiting for a couple more people to join us, I want to take a moment to acknowledge our community. So on behalf of the San Francisco Public Library, we wish to welcome you to the unceded ancestral homeland of the Ramatishaloni, who are the original inhabitants of the San Francisco Peninsula. As the indigenous stewards, and in accordance with their traditions, the Ramatishaloni have never ceded, lost nor forgotten their responsibilities as caretakers of this place. As guests, we who reside in their traditional territory recognize that we benefit from living and working on their homeland. We wish to pay our respects by acknowledging the ancestors, elders, and relatives of the Ramatishaloni community and by affirming their sovereign rights as First Peoples. Tonight's program celebrates a new book of essays by the San Francisco poet, Kim Shuck, Noodle Rant Tangent, before turning the microphone over to our guest of honor and with Kim's forbearance, I want to say a few words by way of introduction. Kim Shuck was San Francisco's seventh poet laureate. Her poetry draws on her multi-ethnic background, which includes Polish and Cherokee heritage, and her experiences as a lifelong resident of San Francisco. Her most recent book of poetry, What Unseen Thing Blows, Wishes Across My Surface, a collaboration with the visual artist Lisa Ruth Elliott was published in 2022. In her term as poet laureate, Kim hosted scores of free poetry and art workshops for all ages in neighborhood libraries and schools and works closely with the San Francisco Public Library and the San Francisco Arts Commission to launch major citywide initiatives to honor Native American indigenous people's heritage. Since 2018, Kim Shuck has hosted the main library's monthly poem jam, a monthly poetry reading that takes place on the second Thursday of each month in this very room. If you're interested, want more information or not, there's flyers on the table. So without further ado, please, let's all give a warm welcome to Kim Shuck. Thanks, folks, and thanks for being here. Whoa, sorry about that. Thanks for being here. I was having a conversation with somebody the other day about being not entirely comfortable around other humans. And one of the responses was, no, you're kidding because you're on stage all the time. Yeah, but the stage is my room and none of you are in it. I'm here all by myself. And I think what you find generally with people who perform is that a lot of us really do have, if not human anxiety, then, you know, crowd anxiety. So it's kind of a funny thing. And I realize that I'm actually more comfortable when I'm preparing to invite somebody else up to do something on this stage, to be perfectly honest. I'm delighted with this book. I'm going to tell a little bit of a story before I actually read any of it. Judy Bernard invited me over to dinner. It's a great start to a story, isn't it? And wanted to talk to me about something and asked me, basically, the upshot was, you're satisfyingly sarcastic on Facebook. You do longer pieces of sarcasm. And I said, sure, I have a couple. And I did have a couple and they're in this book. But then, very quickly, I needed to start writing them because I just didn't have enough. So I was sending her one a day and she brought me back. She said, why are you sending me one a day? And I said, because I'm writing them one a day. So a lot of these were written the way you see them, more or less. I'm not sure I have the intestinal fortitude to read this one. This essay is actually called Not One More Rapist Asshole Left Off on a Technicality. Yeah, when I was trying to do that earlier, it made a big popping noise, so it frightened me. So to repeat it, Not One More Rapist Asshole Let Off on a Technicality. I just wrote one sentence, drew a line through it, and then spent the next five minutes on my back in my studio with my feet up on the wall. That position is supposed to be good for you. Something about circulation, I think. Why did she wait so long to report it? My partner tells me I've been walking around the house saying no under my breath for the last few days. I have to think of something more than no. If no worked, none of this would be an issue. She waited to report it for all kinds of reasons. You'll be blamed for your own abuse. You'll be forced to repeatedly relieve that abuse under the opposite of therapeutic conditions. You'll be blamed for your own abuse. You'll be blamed for your own abuse. What was she wearing? What the hell were you wearing when the building collapsed on you? Are we really going to have to wait for this lazy reasoning to die out before we get past it? I listened to three cops talk about a rape victim one night, not my house, not my dinner party, not my friends. And I was 19, so I couldn't argue with them. The premise of their conversation was that all rape is just men taking things one step too far, that often women say yes and then set a limit that is then breached and claim rape and there isn't really rape as such. I said they're grinding my teeth and organizing my counter argument in my head. You know what I was wearing? Boobs. I was wearing a female body. And we're all taught as people who have those bodies that our bodies are a problem. Some of us really take that on board, too. Was she drinking? Now let's get this right. There exists social gathering spaces where alcohol is served. These places advertise as such. They're legal. They don't post signs on the way in that say, women, if you drink, you give up agency over your body. Then there's the woman who has the one glass of white wine. Are we arguing that she ordered the Rohit Nal back herself? When undercover, colors started researching a nail polish that would detect rape drugs. I applauded them. These are the minds I want solving the world's problems. That said, the sad premise is that they want to shift the fear to the people drugging drinks because they might get caught. And so what? Get caught and have to go through an inconvenient court trial and get released because she looked, she drank, she wore. How tedious to be forced to do community service. I don't want all of the onus to be on women. What? Weren't you wearing your anti-rape polish? Poor planning you. What did you expect? Well, having some option seems like a good thing. How many men has she had sex with? That one put me back on the floor for another five minutes. I now have a favorite spot on the floor for feet up, slow breathing, and not having a traumatic event posture. Rape is no more like dating than buying something as like being the victim of credit card fraud. What? Someone stole money from you electronically? Well, how many things have you bought with that card? You have a track record of buying? Why is this theft so different? You suffered home invasion. How many guests have you invited over? It isn't as though you're unused to guests. His life may be ruined. Now that's an excellent focus. His life may be ruined if he commits a serious crime. That might happen. I would love to see more of these guys suffer some discouraging consequence for their actions. In this week that I am writing this, one of these dose them and rape them characters has been released from prison on a technicality and he will resume most, if not all, of his pre-prison activities. He becomes yet another symbol of how little we value the lives and work of the women he abused, how little we value women's lives generally. And the problem here is that his life will be relatively unaffected going forward while every one of the survivors needs to carry his actions with them. We really need to do better than that. So that one wasn't really funny. It had its moments. This one's called Scorpion and Cinnamon Bun. I once had an official role in a coming-of-age ceremony for a tribal group of which I'm not a member. There may be people reading this who think that's pretty cool and the cool part is that they ask me, so yeah, it's pretty cool. The cold sweat of sweet creation, no part, will take a bit to explain it and I'm going to have to come at it at an angle because there's no way I'm going to tell you the material fact about the ceremony. In spite of the reputation of indigenous people in the Western Hemisphere, our day-to-day is mostly like anyone who lives here with some precise location and work-related adjustments. The big differences are philosophical, so in spite of the ointments, the smudge sticks, the material culture, things that you are sold, which are in varying degrees things that we own, make and do on any given day, there's going to be some cheese puff eating on watching a Star Trek. Shut up. I'm an indigenous, what can I tell you? There's every so often activist culture bearer who's out there making a boat by hand, teaching twined baskets or camping by a riverside where someone's building an ill-advised oil pipeline in order to save all of our lives and protect the water. And I know these people. They're heroes. There's also a lot of nursing, professing, retailing, filming, trucking and all of the other things that help lives take over. And those guys are also heroes. People have their hobbies. My friends' Facebook pages are studded with surfing photos and such. Mostly indigenous people do many of the things non-indigenous people do. However, many of our religious and cultural ceremonies were officially illegal until the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, which passed in 1978. Lots of people didn't do their traditional coming-of-age ceremonies for roughly 100 years, and if they did, they were done in secret ways. Many of us who are around now still feel uncomfortable talking about these things, and maybe more than uncomfortable. Maybe unwilling is a better word. There are a lot of reasons for the hostility. I'm in my 50s, and the reticence was impressed upon me early. When I see the uninformed accidentally killing people in clumsy versions of a sweat ceremony, also not of my culture, I think that maybe the non-indigenous people, the way non-indigenous people think about indigenous people, can lead them into all kinds of deep foolishness, and I hate to see ceremony fouled by that sort of thing, so it's best not to share. Anytime a government forbids a perfectly reasonable cultural thing, that thing tends to become a bit rigid. Tradition becomes regulation. None of what I say about indigenous things is ever universal. Any more than any other human population known to universal truths were a varied group, and unlike Europe, our unifying event wasn't religion, it was colonization. When I taught this stuff, the one big thing I wanted to change about my students was the U.S. habit of saying Native American culture. It's always plural. Unless you're referencing a specific group, it's always plural, and sometimes within that group it's also plural. If you get three indigenous people in a room and talk about any topic, there are generally at least five opinions. So our celebrations were banned. People amalgamate, misuse, and are just straight up make things up about us. We become protective of our rituals. For these and other perfectly understandable reasons, and the pressure to behave in certain ways is pretty severe. Unfortunately, the how to behave part can be a bit unclear. It's a serious honor to be asked, as I was, to participate in this kind of celebration. Unlike the other people who had official roles in this event, I was not part of the culture and couldn't risk a guess at anything so I was faced with either being a bit of a pest and asking too many questions, or mostly keeping mom and watching what people were doing while trying to be useful. I can generally manage one or the other. I'm not sure how well I did. At the end of the event, as with most celebrations from all parts of the world, there was a meal. It was amazing. Dishes ranged from roast elk to those mall cinnamon rolls. I got my plate of food and went to eat it by the fire. And I saw a thing that was funny and touching and disturbing in equal measure. It's become one of the ways I see myself, and I'm going to share it with you. It had been a fairly damp event. Rain, sleet, snow, sunshine, fog. It wasn't actually wet, but I was uncomfortable. So I was right next to the fire in the hope that I could convince my clothes not to stick to my body. There was a crumb from a cinnamon roll sitting just outside of the burning wood. It was a big crumb, maybe an inch by half an inch. And while I watched it, it was moving away from me. I realized that the smallest wood scorpion I'd ever seen was toting this thing off. The scorpion could have easily curled up on my thumbnail, way smaller than the bit of bun. And I don't know if wood scorpions can even eat mall cinnamon buns, or if it had another plan for the treasure. I was impressed by the scorpion's work ethic, surprised by its strength and a little bit baffled, because until that moment, scorpions and cinnamon buns had existed in wildly separated places in the world, as I understood it. As much as possible these days, I try to remember that feeling when someone seems truly confused about something indigenous. You know, in life you may see a scorpion stealing some cinnamon bun. You may not know why. It may never be explained to you. It's just possible that story is not there for you. Take it in and get on with the stories that are. You are actually allowed to make noise. Thank you. Does anybody have any questions at this juncture? No? You are a very quiet crowd. I mean, there are at least three of you who are allowed not to have questions, because, yeah. Is it biography or fiction? How would we classify a book of essays? It's a book of essays. Nonfiction. Yeah, I mean, this is all stuff I've experienced. Yeah, yeah. That was real. There was a moment during that weekend where we were standing leaning over a fire, trying to make it not go out in a freak sleet storm. I think that coat still smells like wood smoke. This is actually a question that's been asked to me a lot, so this one's called, Why Do You Notice the Birds? Every once in a while, and this isn't part of the thing, but every once in a while I get asked a question that just completely floors me, because it would not have occurred to me that there was any confusion about it. The birds are there, so I see them. Seeing the things around you as a way not to get too caught up in your own head-life perspective. Do you want to notice birds more? Next time you step out your door, take a moment and don't leave the front of your place until you see one bird. You'd be surprised how, if you didn't notice them before you'll start noticing them. I measure journeys in birds sometimes. Where are you so angry? I get asked. Well, I should be. I'm generally not, but I should be. A web search for Native American pulls up a story about the mass graves in Canadian residential schools. That's the first story I'm offered. The second one is, Are There Still Native Americans? The third story is about the secretary of the Interior, Deb Holland's call for an investigation into U.S. Native boarding schools. The fourth is about a sports team that doesn't want to give up its mascot. Since four is a nice even number I stopped looking there. I'm not angry. I'm tired. I'm often sad. I'm almost always overworked every reason to be, but not. The crows are yelling at the cats on the porch. They want the cat food. And I notice them. An exercise in noticing. Look up the treaty that covers the use of the land where you live. People seem to think that there was a war somewhere and that that war opened up all of North America to settlement. You hear about taming the West. Read the treaty. Is there one? Whose land are you on? I was on a Zoom poetry reading that was organized out of Nevada. So I looked up the treaty of Ruby Valley. I wanted a documentary that I'd seen before and I couldn't find it. In fact, I couldn't find any documentary about the treaty. But I did find videos about a cryptid called The Beast of Ruby Valley. There were more than one. I wonder how many people who are enraged by the loss of U.S. history have ever read any of those treaties. And I wonder if we started teaching about them, how long it would take for someone to make a law against having those in schools. This was written a while back. That has happened. Did you find out whose land you live on? What do they call themselves? Their own name is rarely the one on the treaty. What does it say these documents call people out of their name? Since Crows and Ravens started showing up in San Francisco, I've seen fewer and fewer other birds. I'm watching the morning doves out my kitchen window. What's the sacred food from where you live? My French teaching partner asks me questions about acorns. I don't know all of the answers. We're going off to teach in a place where acorns are the sacred food. They're scattered all over the parking lot, all over the road to the school. Tanoke acorns are everywhere. He looks at me confused. But how can they be sacred? There are so many of them. Anyone who wants them can collect them. Yeah. What has happened to the sacred food of the place where you live? In the photos of the buffalo corpses with their hide piled high. Other photos with buffalo hunters sitting on vast piles of bone. Why was William Codingick named Buffalo Bill? Carry in birds, pick at the flesh. And I noticed them too. Why do I notice the birds? Noticing is a habit worth having. I have to... I know these aren't academic essays. I'm going to come out of a closet now. I'm a recovering academic. I used to profess at San Francisco State University. And I've got to say I love teaching. And I hated the politics. And I'm really bad at it. And I tend to not do things regularly that I find myself to be bad at. It's... Here's a story I don't think is in this book at all. I was an outreach and retention officer at San Francisco State for a while when I was there. There were no tenured or tenured track people when I started professing there. And as a result, they built the department, rebuilt the department on the backs of the folks who were teaching there. And so we had all these responsibilities that technically we shouldn't have been handed, but we were. And for the most part, those of us who were there really wanted to help the students. So I had a few responsibilities and one of them was I oversaw a scholarship as well as being outreach and retention. So I'm talking to parents from small places around the country who wanted to be sure that their kids would be okay in San Francisco. And, you know, we'd talk and I'd say things about my experience of living here, but that it was really different and so you really do have to impress upon people to look both ways before they cross the street and that sort of thing. And I... just to be clear about the sorts of students we had, I had one student who got the scholarship and I called people in individually to let them know that they got it. I didn't think an email or a letter or anything was personal enough. So I'd have them into my office and I had a teapot and we'd have tea and I'd talk to them about the fact that they got the scholarship and some of the paperwork that was involved in that. And this one young woman came in and I explained that she'd gotten the scholarship and I told her how much she'd gotten and she started crying. And I asked her why she was crying and she said because she could pay for tuition by her books and get a coat that year. So that's who we had. And I loved that part. That same semester a friend of mine asked me to show her daughter around SF State and her daughter had just graduated from Cal with an undergraduate degree in ethnic studies. And it was pretty clear she wasn't going to come to San Francisco State for a master's degree because that's not really the ideal way that academia works. If you go to Cal for your undergraduate degree you're probably going to go somewhere either with parody to Cal or the one place in the States that's considered better or maybe somewhere in Britain. Who knows, right? But it's generally not going to be now you go to SF State. But her mother had asked me to show her around and her mother had told her I was going to show her around. So we were both sort of doing the kabuki of that, right? It's like, oh yeah, okay. So you've got family sort of who's working at the place and we'll talk about it and it'll be fine. And then we'll have a cup of coffee and you will go away and I will not see you enrolling in any of my classes. We happened to run into the head of the department the head of ethnic studies who screamed at me about how I was overstepping my responsibilities as a professor by showing this woman around because clearly she wasn't going to come to state and there was just no explaining to this man that I had social responsibilities involving doing this and that like I was on my own time nobody was paying me for doing that. And then the next semester somebody showed up with a gift blanket for me which obviously I couldn't accept because of all the reasons of academia but there has to be some kind of way to make our cultures okay in academia as well. I can also not refuse that blanket. You see the fork there? This is checkmate because somebody's family sent me a gift blanket and I can't tell them no and I can't take it. And so I was trying to explain to the department that there had to be a way for me to accept this and put it in some kind of departmental cash of things that spoke about that the letting the community take care of us as well so that I wasn't in any kind of violation and there just there was no way to get through that that the culture of academia is a specific one that favors hegemony and even if we're going to call the department ethnic studies you're not going to get there. So that was a long way around the tree to say something that's kind of important. I went to a very good school and I learned how to write real essays and these are something else and it's not the fault of my professors that I'm not writing in academic essay form. It's an absolute choice and I will also point out that there's sort of a Cherokee tradition of storytelling that favors the long way around which is in part why the title of this is noodle rant tangent. Mary Jean Robertson is in the audience and Mary Jean has sat at my family holiday table where my father attempted to tell her his life story in real time and my... eventually I don't think he'll ever catch up that's the problem of course right because you can never really get there. So I'm not actually the verbose one in my family. On the subject of family holiday dinner tables this is called Thanksgiving. Sometimes it's the fish. I want to scream. Really I want to throw my head back and just spend all of my energy on sound with the power to express my frustration, conflict, heartache, need, historical trauma, suppressed feelings, all of it. There's a sound stuck in me that no number of words spilled, glued, type scribbled in crayons for a painter stitched in thread that stained with my own blood that's managed to release. There's seven of the holy things now that I've tried. There's your holiday week going. Too much. Fair is fair. This was never going to be a favorite time of year. At best the holiday narrative is about Indigenous people modeling good behavior before being disenfranchised by the guests. At worst it's a celebration of mass murder and for the moment I'm allowing myself not to care that you personally might actually have some kind of thankful ritual. We all know that's not why this holiday is on the calendar. This is a dancing on the graves moment which is why I do not have a problem in telling people who wish me a happy gluttony day that it's not my holiday. I'll snarl it, I don't yell it, I just say it and let that statement float there. It doesn't help that November is Native History Month, a time when we Indigenous individuals are each and all viewed as a window into our respective cultures. By the last Thursday of the month I'm so exhausted by all the events, panel discussions, requests for reading lists, requests for comments and requests for the names of other Indigenous writers that there's so little left me through whatever event my current partner has arranged for us to attend. When I was younger and someone would ask me to say something at the dinner table to offer a Thanksgiving thought, I'd read a section from Chief Seattle's The White Man Will Never Be a Loan Speech. I don't do that anymore. It's a bit of a cold fish in the face but trying to meet some Euro-American ideal for polite behavior really hasn't gotten us very far so sometimes it's the fish. I love stuffing. It's probably my favorite thing. Stuffing isn't a sufficient recompense for attempted genocide nor for requiring me to deal with the holiday dedicated to the attempted genocide. My beautiful Cherokee dad has a birthday that falls in the last week of November. Sometimes it falls on Thanksgiving. This means we mostly get that day off and can hang out and eat stuffing together. And I would love to say that these dinners are a beacon of light in our year. I would love to tell you that my family, unlike most other families, has a simple and joyful celebration of this increasingly notable day. I would like to say that our interactions are sensible, loving, full of mutual acceptance. Drawing a veil for a moment over all of the interpersonal silt that's piled up over the years, we have the same tension-filled holiday dinners that many families do. It was pointed out to me that I literally run from the table at the first opportunity. What would we do with our family tension? Hey, I have to work off the dinner calories somehow, right? It'd be great to blame all of the stress on the underlying settler-colonial outrage that is Thanksgiving, but probably the tension comes from being flawed human beings. I live near one of the most notable native run-on Thanksgiving events, the Sunrise Ceremony on Alcatraz Island. I used to attend that event. In fact, I used to help organize getting people to the dock to attend that event. The year my oldest was born, I attended and took him with me, and it was so cold that while I was trying to soothe him by bouncing him while on the ferry to the island, he slipped out of my hands and slid down my legs. Now, he thought that was great and had a good old laugh. My thought was that I had dropped my baby. That same year, I was told a traditional Miwok story about the island. It's not mine to share, but between baby dropping and that story, the lure of that event has faded for me. I don't attend it anymore, and I'm sorry to say it's one of those community touchstones in the year that some use as a measure of our indigeneity. There's only nothing in that last Thursday in November that I enjoy. My aspiration is to spend it grumpy in bed with a box of sea soft centers and a thermos full of good tea. Unfortunately, I'm generally required to put on party clothes, makeup, and shoes in a welcoming smile. I'm writing this on the evening of Wednesday before Thanksgiving 2021, and in a moment, I'm going to be off to hunt for a nice cold fish. Does anybody have any questions yet? Go ahead, John. Yes, is there an essay that I thought about writing or that I wrote that isn't in here, that I rethought having it in here? Yes, there are a couple. One of them was pretty sure I didn't include the one about Brittany Spears. I almost didn't include the one about somebody overhearing something I said in a poetry reading that caused him to call me. I think what it was, he wrote this afterwards. I'm not going to say who it was, but he wrote a thing afterwards in which he described the situation and he said a white woman behind me said the stupidest thing I've ever heard. And I did include that one, but I thought about it a few times because I think the essay starts with a question. Did your grandma ever tell you not to eavesdrop? Because mine did. And the reason for that is that you'll never hear anything you like if you listen in on conversations. So here's the situation. I was walking into a poetry reading. I'm not going to read it, I'll just tell you the story. I was walking into a poetry reading for my apprentice and I was really happy for her that she had a book out. I was so happy for her. And because I'm who I am and people knew who I was, when I attend poetry readings people come up and say things to me about poetry and that's fine and appreciated at all. But this guy came up to me and said I love your poems but I'm not sure that a native woman in this day and age should be writing about what you're writing about. Something to that effect. And I thought that is a really weird thing to say. And thank you for thinking you get to tell me what I get to write about. And I was feeling a little grumpy about it. And then I locked eyes with a person who was right behind me who's a friend and we both kind of went I don't know what that was. So when I was about to sit down she goes I really love this woman's work and I said yeah me too. But I'm not sure flowers are a thing that a black woman should be writing about in this day and age and it was a joke that the two of us shared and it was absolutely out of context for everyone else and I'm sure it sounded really ridiculous. And I said it for a couple of reasons I thought maybe if I said the thing out loud I would understand why that guy had said it to me but there was no illumination there whatsoever. Just a moment of idiot things to say about poetry I guess I don't know. But the funny part is this guy who wrote about hearing me say that is a Pulitzer Prize winner he ended up on a national website and I thought this is how we're interacting with one another these days right is these half-heard things and then we're judging each other completely out of context and I think context matters you know. So I'm not really critiquing him out of context that's a really weird thing to overhear what's also true is allowing yourself to react to and overheard things something not directed towards you is probably a fool's errand because then you end up totally misunderstanding what's going on and sort of the funny part about it is I actually did end up running into him in another context and he did recognize me and I was introduced as a Cherokee poet and you could just see the gears like I mean I know what I look like I'm 10 years old and I own a mirror and my dad is really brown so that was a source of lots of comment when I was a child but like if you don't understand if you don't know what's going on it's probably not a good idea to have a deeply formed opinion about something based on four words you heard somebody say you know I think we need to be more generous you know there is a general rule right now and I think part of it's the fault of social media but I'm not anti social media actually love it because social media lets me have breakfast it let me have my first cup of coffee for years with a couple of other native women who taught in universities and there's usually only one of us in any university because we need a lot of supervision I'm not arguing with that I think it's true but they generally don't group us together it's probably dangerous to do that and again I don't disagree with that but it meant that I could have my first cup of tea while my niece was having her first cup of coffee in Illinois or if I got up a little bit earlier I could have my first cup of coffee with Debra Miranda in Washington University like before she went off to go teach and so that's the good thing that social media has done is that um a community that's frequently quite dispersed can have moments together that we wouldn't otherwise have but it also allows other people way to feel like they know you in context where they don't so and I have opinions about a lot of things and some of them change tomorrow and some of them I hold for a long time so I don't know is there something I've touched on in one of these that you want to hear more of because there's a bit of overlap in some of these I'll tell you the one I was asked a question I was reading at Haskell Indian Nations University which I do every time I go through Kansas as a request from Kerry Cornelius who is the librarian at Haskell I may love her if you get a chance to meet Kerry Cornelius do that she's an amazing person and a great librarian and a really good support system for some of the students at the University well anyway I always get a pretty good audience because um Haskell students like my work they are my key demographic and I am writing in many ways for them so it makes sense to me what I thought my responsibilities were towards students and how to help them keep them from being too disillusioned by um the academic process when I clearly have a lot to say about how I have a problem with a lot of things about it and I read them this and this is an older piece that dates from when I was professing it and it's called analgesics for treating the results of ongoing cultural misrepresentation or bad Indian movie night and the rubber tomahawk award as a contemporary person of native descent as a sometimes academic as an engaged community member it's often difficult not to take frequent and shall we say questionable material presented about native folk personally there was a time when I'd look and find your totem extra at the end of the brother bear dvd and think okay how many hours of teaching will it take to set that one straight wampum engine corn chips were another personal favorite I love the big chief wampum cut out mask I was a kid in San Francisco during the hippie sixties in early seventies the granny dress seventies the party at rain and lemon sages house people expected things of a woman of native descent and they still do in the spare moments when I'm not crying at the roadside trash or singing depressed songs about my mixed race heritage I like to spend a little time contextualizing these sorts of images for my students and for my own kids I like a good joke as well as the next person it's just that some kinds of jokes don't seem to apply to all equally why is it that wheat thins or saltines don't have a big joke cracker as their mascot the marketing opportunities are legion they could package them in the little box painted like a double wide there could be roadkill recipes on the side panel maybe I should trademark that do these people mean to be offensive? I doubt it they want to buy into the mystique of a native stereotype and they don't think about the subtle effect on actual 3d indigenous people after all we're dead right for a few years I was in charge of outreach and retention of native students at SF State University it was interesting and a challenge the number one problem my students had with their education outrage and heartbreak ran about even we came up with some emotionally meditative solutions one that never got off the ground was the rubber tomahawk award the tommies were to be awarded to the most glaringly hideous case of insensitive material involving native people each semester I'd even designed a really cool award statuette but some of the best ideas are before their time I guess it would have been difficult to give one of the anthropology professors her tommy for asking one of our students if she could take a cast of her teeth for the school collection what's the student supposed to say being asked that in class as if she were subject rather than a student now how does an advisor help someone process that I found out quite early on that the phone calls didn't help neither did complaints to her supervisor letters to the school newspaper or leaflets the idea of a tommy award however let my students laugh at the things that could otherwise cause huge tension and mistrust for the university when I was a student at SF State I took Lakota language classes and this was roughly the time that dances with wolves came out now I know some people enjoyed the movie for other reasons but my professor loved it for the sometimes horrifying misuse of Lakota for about a month's worth of classes he'd play small sections of that movie and we'd all laugh if I'm not mistaken he played bits of it during a test and we had to directly translate and the results were hilarious it was medicine so when I became the advisor for the student organization I tried to guide my students less in the direction of protest and more in the direction of creative and sarcastic social commentary so we had bad Indian movie night the night would go something like this a group of students and friends would gather we'd pop some popcorn and we'd play the movies there were three fantastic aspects to bad Indian movie night there is an endless supply of bad Indian movies so we could do whenever we wanted without threat of running out of material popcorn is a fun and low fat snack that does little damage when thrown the group catharsis was deep now before I continue I know and like many native actors who've been in some of the bad Indian movies we ran in fact a movie lost points towards the Tommy if they had talked actual native people into participating in their film some of my students couldn't believe that people we knew were in these things I'm older more cynical and I know I've been in books I regret blessings on the actors I'm sure you needed the work having said I'd love to have been in the mind of Adam Beach when he agreed to star in Squanto a warrior's tale for those unfamiliar with his classic bit of cinema Beach plays Squanto who at one point in the action is thrown into a bear baiting pit and manages to calm the bear down with we're not really sure perhaps his inherent and mystical native powers this scene still plays to enthusiastic laughter at my house and no movie night was complete without the what makes the red man red song from Peter Pan polywally gumdrop indeed squaw get him firewood if you missed it or don't remember it go see my very favorite bad Indian movie even in a field of serious contenders still has to be white command with William Shatner Shatner plays half Comanche twins the darker of whom leads a renegade band against white settlers the lighter twin helps to subdue his evil brother and hooks up with the blonde woman has brother raped in an earlier scene fantastic stuff half naked young Shatner stilted dialogue at least one clearing continuity era lock this bit of cinema into probably a permanent location Tommy charts considering what movies don't get made I marvel that this one did children's movies occupied more than their fair share of bad Indian movie night which is probably because of the recurring errors in which a kid's adventure book just isn't a kid's adventure book without pirates magic and you guessed it wild Indians wild here having the meaning of painted half naked with long hair humans are pattern recognition animals it's one of the things that we do well children in particular are taught to pick up on those sorts of patterns this is how we get Peter Pan with Indians Brady Bunch visiting Indians the Partridge family visiting Indians the Hardy Brothers Nancy probably even the Bobzie twins everyone takes a turn although in this moment I can't think of the name of the book with the Bobzie twins visiting them but we are mysterious and natural and whatever whenever there needs to be always a lost wonder in a story they frequently reach for us so ok the English have their teacup and pith helmet the French their baguette and beret and we have our loincloths and feathers no one's immune to the stereotypes of what am I going on about last month my youngest child's high school had spirit days in order to show school spirit the students are expected to dress in whatever way is specified for the day so there was nerd day and pirate day and what have you and there was also Wild West day you guessed it cowboys and their counterpart my youngest has worked terribly hard at school he maintains top grades in a low profile he's in the process of getting tall which makes him a bit of a throwback and he's not really comfy in his skin yet unlike his older brother he doesn't know how beautiful he is nor would he be interested if he did my son made it into the most challenging and competitive public school in San Francisco and for the entirety of spirit week he dressed in his words as if he were forced into close at knife point in the dark by a ninja all in black he attended all of the spirit week dressed entirely in black he did it on his own as a protest it probably made him stand out even more tall and good looking as he is but he felt that his sarcasm went unnoticed and every day he had to walk past a poster of the Tasmanian devil dressed in feathers whooping it up he characterized the experience as disappointing it'd be one thing if there were the native stereotypes and then the students had to read some high and native lit as they do with the British and French examples but no for us it's just the stereotypes and I agree with my boy that really is disappointing I can't fix the world for him I've been an activist for years and I'm getting tired but I can offer a school of Robert Tomahawk award for their achievement it may be time for another bad Indian movie night too just for the giggle of it yes it's an interesting question I couldn't tell you what percentage what I can tell you is that the people who self-identify had something like a 2% graduation rate when I got there which has to be adjusted for the fact that we have sort of an overall at the time the year that I was outreach coordinator we had like a 2% graduation from high school rate as well so it's not a whole lot of people so I think one year we had four people graduate and then the next year we had 12 yeah but I was sort of talking to because I have my own reputation and my family has our own reputation and it's not universal or Indian country but you know my dad is sort of impressive my family, my grandmother's family is sort of impressive and so people trusted me with their children and so it went up for a while but what also happened was the person who decided to the person who was sent to decide how well I did who didn't look at any of the numbers and how any of them had changed but just came in and talked to me personally looked at my face and came in and talked to me personally wrote this long thing about how I was unqualified to do my job which is really interesting to me because four times the number of students graduated the year after I started doing it but I don't know I imagine we could think guess what it was that she saw that she thought disqualified me for doing a good job supporting Native students and I think we'd be right so there's a lot of this to go around the struggles aren't just out to end but from in laterally as well I think I did a pretty good job my students almost rioted when I quit so I think it worked I think it worked better after we started having tissues as well as tea in my office you know you need a community to get yourself through things and as I pointed out I think academia favors hegemony we're not in charge of things pretty much nothing so there are some of us though who grew up in the red power movement and believed them when they said go get a degree and we come back and people would be like you think you're too good for us I was like yeah I do actually I'm like what do good for you mixed message about boy you know and then we're working through it you know as a community but what would really help is if people would just stop offing Native women quite so frequently that would be a good improvement you know people are struggling against a lot but gotta tell you I do not blame young Native women for not wanting to come to San Francisco because we're on the top 20 list of towns where Native women get killed for being Native women never makes the papers they're absolutely delighted the papers to publish things about lateral violence within Native communities attacks made against people who have been in charge of organizations in the city who have done really good work by people who are doing really nothing at all or attacks against people like Sashin Littlefeather by people who have no such reputation helping people working for cancer research and doing all of the things Sashin did but you know the newspapers are delighted to post those things but you almost never hear about in San Francisco and our newspapers about how we're towards the top of the list of places where Native women get killed I did a 50 50 day series of poems about murdered and missing Indigenous women and while I was writing it a woman that I considered a second daughter to me was shot and another girl was kidnapped while I was writing it people I know this is not a scientific measure by any stretch of the imagination but it does sort of help illustrate it is ubiquitous when I went and read that book at Haskell Indian Nations University I had to stay an extra hour and a half to talk individually to each person in the audience because everybody wanted to tell me their story and there was no way I was going to walk out on them one girl looked at me and said I lost your daughter which I did and she said I lost my mother and they still haven't investigated it she said so if you ever feel like you need to call somebody up to tell you they're horrified by the color of lipstick you're wearing I'm your girl we're um there are some real challenges turns out the top of the list is Seattle and Tacoma for those who don't know which is across the bay from Seattle is number six dealt with separately yeah it's pretty epic huh my goal for this year by the way while we're winding down my current goal is to be banned from Florida school libraries I think what I have to do is send copies, donate copies of my books to Florida school libraries and then they'll they'll then ban them I said that and this one guy goes you're just trying to raise your sales I'm like baby if I were looking for sales I wouldn't be a poet this is not the way one makes money it's really not which is why I have to say if we could have a round of applause for my the publisher of this book who's sitting in the front row here Judy Bernard who likes my writing it's an interesting thing um to listen for where the laughs happen because they happen in different places depending on the audience and uh and sometimes there's an absolute silence because even though I play them like jokes it's not funny but I have found that there are audiences that have to hear it that way or it doesn't enter like they need it to come sneakily into their brain or they can't take it in but uh I already have a death threat on my head so and I'm getting I'm slowing down as I'm getting older so not as quick as I used to be it's probably a good thing to um to try to do it without the actual dust up I mean we'll have the dust up if we have to but it's better not to I'm still looking for the way to keep our children safe and safe in their heart as well as in their bodies if that makes sense and part of that it hurts to witness I mean it really hurts to witness for people and it hurts to be witnessed for I've said this at a couple of things recently this is real stuff it's painful but the community is we have to be there for each other anyway there are some copies of this book um one fun game to play is if you get a copy of the book and then you go listen to things on the internet where I'm actually reading it find the places where I wasn't actually reading word for word that's a good one to find all of the things you disagree with about my punctuation the people who've read it on paper are the ones who are laughing anyway thank you so much for being here thank you uh John Smalley for hosting this thank you to the AV department for their tireless efforts on my behalf and thank you very much the San Francisco public library without whom I probably would have to find something else to do of a Thursday afternoon take care