 I'm the founder and artistic director of Double Edge Theatre, and I have the privilege of welcoming you to the living presence of our history. In late 2016 and early 2017, Double Edge began research of the past of the town of Ashefield and the Hilltowns for our Ashefield town spectacle. We found much to be proud of in a history of settlement which began with two African American freed slaves and continued to include the first elected women officials in the United States. What we could not understand was in our research with the Ashefield Historical Commission, we were told that there was no native presence other than few migratory tribes in this area. We determined in further research that not only was there a millennia of history, but that that history remains unrecognized. It seems that in the mid 1850s, much of the black and indigenous populations were largely forced into cities from this region. To begin our counter education, we reached out to Ronda Anderson, and she reached out to Larry Spotted for a man and began an essential journey that leads us to today. We determined to create a space at Double Edge, which would be autonomously run by indigenous people to address the absence of space on their traditional homelands for the Nipmuc people and for indigenous people who live in the western and central Mass region. Okitao to plant to grow is that space opened in December and continuing to develop at this time. We at Double Edge are honored to offer this event today to our community in collaboration with the Okitao Cultural Council as part of the necessary responsibility of re-educating of our community. There will be an opening discussion in the first part of the event on the living presence and history of this land. In the second part of the event, Larry will discuss the idea and practice of Okitao. So I'm going to introduce our panelists on Zoom. Lisa Brooks. We're really honored to have Lisa with us. We've been reading her books nonstop since we found them in 2017. Lisa is an Abenaki writer and historian who lives and works in the Quintetek Connecticut River Valley. She is professor of English and American Studies at Amherst College and author of The Common Pot, The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast, and our beloved Kin, a new history of King Philip's War. And please make yourselves get a copy of those books. Next we have our moderator, Rhonda Anderson is a new Piaf, Adabaskin from Alaska. Her native enrollment village is Kok Tovik. Her life work most importantly is as a mother, a classically trained herbalist, silversmith, and activist. She works as an educator activist on the removal of mascots, water protector, indigenous identity, and protecting her traditional homelands in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from Extractive Industry. Rhonda curated, and still curates, vital, vibrant, visible, indigenous identity through portraiture, an ongoing collection and exhibit of portraits of native peoples of New England to bring awareness to contemporary indigenous identity. Rhonda is commissioner to Indian affairs in Western Massachusetts, and a founding member and co-director of the Okiteo Cultural Council, and the Native Youth Empowerment Foundation, as well as a representative of Native movement. Larry Spotted Pro-Man is a citizen of the Knitmuk tribe of Massachusetts. He is a nationally acclaimed award-winning writer, poet, and cultural educator. Traditional storyteller, tribal drummer, dancer, and motivational speaker involving youth sobriety, cultural, and environmental awareness. Larry's books, including Morning Becomes Thanksgiving and the Whispering Basket, are also available online and through Double Edges' website. He has been a board member of the Knitmuk Cultural Preservation is on the review committee at the Native American Poets Project and travels throughout the United States, Canada, and parts of Europe to schools, colleges, powwows, and other organizations, sharing the music, culture, and history of Knitmuk people and lectures on Native American sovereignty and identity. Larry is co-director of the Okiteo Council and the Native Youth Empowerment Foundation. Larry will now do a traditional opening. Good afternoon everybody. Good afternoon everybody. It's a real honor to be here. We have so much to get to. So the first and most important thing I want to do is acknowledge my ancestors, this land, the land of the Knitmuk people who come to my ancestors. It's a real privilege to stand here and share their voice and be their voice today. In part of being their voice, it's appropriate that I would speak in our original language. The language that was first spoken here, the language that the trees, the birds, the water, the rivers, the lands still understand. And so we say in our language, I greet you in those words in our Algonquin language. I greet you in those words in our Algonquin language. And those are words of peace, reciprocity, and oneness. And in those words that are reflective of this land and that are really synonymous with what we see in front of us, not something abstract, because they really are the contents of what we see around us as those words developed over eons. And those words express the foundation of love, reciprocity, and one coming together and really recognizing, seeing, really seeing with your heart the things that we see. And that reminds me of, before I sing this honor song in the Knitmuk healing song, we talk about the drum being the heartbeat of Mother Earth. One of the most important things I share is what my grandpa taught me about this drum. And when I go to schools and talk about, I would usually ask people, what does it sound like? And the kids would say, it sounds like a heartbeat. I say, yes, that's right. And I would say, I would ask everybody to look to the person to their left. Your other left, sir. You look to the person to your right. And then what you may see is somebody that may not be the same gender. They may not be the same color, have the same hairstyle. Some may not have any hair, but on the inside, we're all doing this. Everybody has a heartbeat. And so when we talk about that heartbeat, this is where we're connecting. We're not looking at the external, we're looking at the heart. So when you see somebody in front of you, look at that heart. And I assure you, everything will change, your perceptions. And with that, given all that's going on, everybody's been struggling with this crisis and so many different calamities going on. And certainly has affected my community. I thought it appropriate to open up not only with this song, but a nipple healing song. And so I would, as I sing this song, I send out prayers to all of you and all the different communities and that whatever you're going through right now, that these words in this song will help you on that journey and may you find healing as you hear the song. Oh, Jesse, get in our life ways. So I just thought I would share a Nipmunks panel song. Gemma, Gemma, Gemma, not gay. Actually, you know, native people didn't clap. They just kind of unbleed and enjoyed what they heard. But you can clap because we're, we do that now. But the words in that song are essentially, if I could translate it, we live for the water, the water lived for us. And the way it's said in English now is water is life. And so those are the words and also the second part is saying paddle strong people's paddle strong. So those are the words in that song. And I thank you for sharing this song with me because music is medicine. Here we are in double H theater and I'm sure all the performers can tell you that art that create TV to spiritual medicine. So as it is for our ancestors, and this is why it's such an important part of our soul and our spirit. So I hope these songs have helped you a little bit. And at this time I'll turn it back over to moderate around that. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I'm going to see. We'll talk. I'm going to talk to you. Colony me. I'm going to be actually a lot. I'm going to be around Anderson. So back to western Massachusetts commissioner on Indian affairs. Me. I could go peg. I could go California me a go up. I could go Chris. I could go a fairbanks me a go up. I could go. I could go. I could go. I could go. I could go. I could go to the Barlett DC leadership. I could go and say go there was somewhere. I could go back that Там. I could she MULÈTZ. I could get there but I could go to school. You're Welcome. I could go there. I could go to school. I could go to school. I could go to school. I could go back to Brighton. I could go. I could go to school. I could go back to Brighton. I could go to school. But of all interests. I went to school here down the street in the beloved old Sanderson Academy, which is no longer here. And I choose to live here in Western Massachusetts and I call Coleraine my home. The land that I'm privileged to steward and live on is the Bacomegon River watershed, which is known as the Green River today. I live in Sokoke-Abenaki and become to traditional homelands. And in that spirit, I want to recognize really in a more formal way, this land that we're standing on, this land that we are all benefiting from at this moment in time was and still is Wabanaki territory, land lovingly inhabited by Sokoke-Abenaki, Bacomegon, Nanatuck, Norwatic, Mohican and Nipmuk people. Wabanaki means the place where the sun is born every day, making the people of this place people of the Dawn land. Sokoke means people who go their own way. And they are still here in Southern Vermont. Mohican Natuk translates to waters that are never still referencing the Hudson River. So Mohican translates to people of the waters that are never still. The Mohican were pushed with the Stockbridge and Muncie bands in the 1700s and through the 1800s to Wisconsin. They landed on the Menominee tribal land where they have their own reservation today. They also maintain tribal land on the Hudson River near Troy, New York and come regularly to Massachusetts to maintain cultural ties to the historic homelands. Nanatuck means middle of the river in reference to the Oxbow area of the Kwanatuck River. Nipmuk, as Larry had said, means people of the freshwater. And as well, they are still here in Massachusetts, with a small reservation of land that has never been seeded. Pekumtuk is a Mohican Pekumtuk word that would translate roughly to people of a narrow swift river or people of a swift clear stream. There's some debate on that. It might be a swift clear fishing stream and were absorbed into the Mohican, Abenaki and Nipmuk peoples. We are in the watershed of the Pekumtuk River or the Deerfield River, the Swift Clear River or fishing stream. But we are also in the larger watershed of the Kwanatuck River or Connecticut River. While this river has known many names by many different groups of people along its flowing pathways, Kwanatuck River has stuck. It's important to remember that this area has been an integral place for indigenous people to reside, gather, farm, hunt and fish for millennia. Nadakana is the word for this larger space, New England. And it translates loosely to our land, the place to which we belong. Please get to know the indigenous people of your area and ask what you can do to lift and raise their voices, honor and respect their sovereignty. And in that spirit, I have three action items. First, recognize and make changes to the dominant narrative that glorifies colonization and genocide of indigenous peoples of this area. Problematic terms like Pioneer Valley are a reminder of the legacy of dispossession, removal and subsequent erasure. Connecticut River Valley is a more acceptable and appropriate and accurate term. Second, the Nipmuk Cultural Preservation Society is actively seeking assistance with the funding and restoration of repatriated land in Peter Sam and their only tribal building on four and a half acres of reservation land in Grafton. There is a donate button on their Facebook page, the Nipmuk Cultural Preservation. And third, lastly, there are three bills that the tribes of Massachusetts support in the state house right now that address imagery, mascots, a state flag and seal and abolishing Columbus Day in favor of indigenous peoples day. The tribes that support this legislation are the Chapequitic tribe of the Wampanoag Nation, Herring Pond Wampanoag tribe, Mashpee Wampanoag tribe, the Massachusetts tribe of Pankapok and the Nipmuk nations. We need your voice, support and solidarity for them to pass. Please contact your local legislator through massindigenousagenda.org and encourage them to support these bills. Hwayana Nalaknickavin, thank you for listening. I am so honored to be here today and I hope I do justice for this panel. Hwayana Pukta, Stacy Klein and Carlos Zuriona of Double Edge for giving us the space to have native voices centered. I don't usually have a hard time coming up with event names but I had a hard time coming up with this one. And eventually Stacy came up with living presence of our history which could not have been more perfect. I found a quote in Lisa's book, the common pot that I highlighted three times, three times. The recovery of indigenous voices and indigenous knowledge is instrumental not only to the adaptation and survival of native nations but to a deeper and more complex engagement with the past, present and future landscape of America. However, we might define it. So I would like to begin this panel with an old story. One that will set the tone of the larger space of Northwestern Massachusetts, the importance of this place and lessons of this place if we are willing to see, listen and learn. I think most of us in this room know this place and the story and some of us even drive by it daily without even realizing it. This is a story of Katia Misqua, the Great Beaver and the place of Beaver Tail Hill, Wequamps. So if Larry could take that away. Thank you. Gladly. Thank you all. So I will share this short version of the story and I will kind of reflect on why we are all here and what it means to us. And so when we begin the story it always starts with a prayer and we ask the ancestors to come in and share that story with us because we are, as I said earlier, we are the continuation of that voice. So we say long ago was this way. There was this very large beaver. And then we think about beavers, we think about these animals this size. Well, long, long ago things were much larger, maybe about three times the size of this space that we're in now, this big beaver. And he was looking for a new place to live, right? And he was coming from the North and you know those Northern guys are always big anyway. So this beaver started coming down. He followed his way down the river and eventually made around not too far from here. And he looked around, he saw these giant oaks and white pines and he says, I think I'll make a home here. So right away this beaver with his big flat tail he started smashing down the giant trees and creating his lodge and his wigwamp. And he did it right in the middle of the river. And of course, as you know, when beavers do that they stop the water and little did he know the beaver was not paying attention, this giant beaver. He didn't think about the two-legged. There was many women out there attending to the three sisters gardens and they were planting and doing lots of things that we do along the river because we know it's a very good place to share and grow near the water. And so this beaver as he built his home next to you know what caused a great flood and he was destroying all the land and all the crops and the ladies cried out to the beaver, hey beaver what are you doing? Beaver just kind of you know he went around kids in the north, hey beaver we're talking to you and he's just you know he's a big beaver he's big ears but he wasn't paying attention. And finally he looked over and says, yeah what do you want I'm working here can't you see I'm building my lodge and I'm relaxing now I worked hard I'm tired leave me alone. And they say, well what you did you stopped the water now our land is flooded and we can't live we need to eat to live. Please can you remove your move your home? I'm not gonna do that I don't think so. Please please and they pleaded and they went back and forth and finally of course you know he's no match for a the woman with no match for this giant beaver and his tail and all that. So they didn't wanna end up like those trees so they went and left and they counseled at their village for some time and what can we do when we're losing our food we're gonna starve we gotta think of something. So eventually they sought the counsel of Hobamok. Now Hobamok to our people he is known as the trickster and the English made a mistake and called him the devil because they and we have no devil we have no hell we have no angels and those sort of things that are just evil and because we understand that everything has a balance and everything has different parts to it just as an aside and I do this sometimes just as an aside one of the English said why are you counseling with Hobamok? And he says if I'm hitting with a stick who are you gonna pray to God or Hobamok? And so back to the story. So Hobamok, the ladies talk to Hobamok and eventually says, well, I think I can help you because whenever you counsel with Hobamok you never know what you're gonna get and that's why he's called the trickster. So eventually Hobamok came back and saw this beaver here who had built this dam and he looked around and he says, hmm, well this is my place and I live here so I kind of like what this beaver did. And so Hobamok tried to talk to the beaver as well. And the beaver says I'm not listening to you either Hobamok. So eventually a great battle ensued. Hobamok took a great branch from one of the trees and tried to fight this beaver and the battle went back and forth for some time and it was a real mess. It was things got really crazy and all the two legates got away and after a while Hobamok won the battle. He slaved the beaver and he went down the place where near Sugarloaf mountain that you call now. And so this story is really about sharing about greed, about understanding one another's place in that we need all need to share. And so this is the short version of the story and so I'll just pass it on with that. Thank you. Thank you. And on the screen there's a picture of Sugarloaf mountain and you can see the body of the beaver and the place where Hobamok struck the beaver in the head where it comes down and then the head is what is all the way to the right. And so that is where the little lookout tower is on top of the beaver's head. So when you go up there, you're climbing on a beaver. I also want to give some contemporariness to the old story. This is in The Common Pot by Lisa Brooks and it is a poem by Abenaki writer, Cheryl Savageau that captured the story in a poem at Sugarloaf 1996 for Marge Bruschak. Part one, Kitzea Miskwa. In The Big Pond, Kitzea Miskwa, the beaver is swimming. He has built a dam. The water in his pond grows deeper. He patrols the edges chasing everyone away. This is mine, he says. The people and animals grow thirsty. Cut it out, the creator says and turns Kitzea Miskwa to stone. The pond is drained. There is water and food for everyone. See those hills? Kitzea Miskwa's head, body and tail. He's lying there still. This valley, his empty pond. Part two, Kitzea Miskwa dreams. For leaving out of balance, Kitzea Miskwa lies still. While for centuries, his descendants are trapped in every stream, caught in every river, killed by the millions for furloughs from across the sea. They're pelts by blankets, cloth, weapons, knives. In this world out of balance, Kitzea Miskwa dreams a hard dream. A world without beavers. Then far away like the promise of a winter dawn, he dreams the river's back. Young mothers building, secure in their skins and a pond full of slapping tails of their children. So let's start off the discussion by learning who are the people that lived in the fertile bowls and intervails along Punitaka River. And I know, Lisa, you wrote about the interconnectedness of this space, the watersheds and Kitzea Miskwa's bowl, the deeply situated social and ecological environments. Could you please expand on that? Sure. Can everybody see me? Okay. First, I just wanna say, Kitzea Leone, thank you so much. I can't tell you how much joy this gives me to hear Larry, your songs in this space, but also I loved your telling of the Great Beaver Story. And I'm so grateful for it. And it's just so great to hear these words in this digital space, but also in this place in the middle of this barn on the Deerfield River. And thank you so much, Rhonda, for reading Cheryl's amazing poem. It's hard to speak after this because I feel like I'm done. I did my listening for today and I feel like I wanna go home and take it all in. So thank you so much. I hope you have many chances to do this. So I think it is so wonderful that we started out this discussion by being grounded in this place of the Connecticut River Valley. I'm here in one of the hill towns on the other side of the river, but maybe that's fitting because we're on opposite sides of the river, but we know that the river itself is the center, right? For some people, this river was the very center of the universe, right? And people tend to think of it today as this boundary between New Hampshire and Vermont, but from everything I know about the river, the river was like this super highway that connected people. And it goes all the way up into the headwaters of Wabanaki territory. The headwaters of the Connecticut River are one of the most special places to my heart. Even now you can go there and feel like you are in the middle of your ancestor's territory because there's more moose and beaver than people that live there. And it goes all the way down and flows out into Sambakwa, the ocean. You know, that is like one traveling river, right? And I found out that the river, when we say Kuna Takwa, that river means long, that name means long river, but also like if you add on just the slightest ending and the way that we usually often pronounce it, Kuna Takwa, and you pronounce that W and have an A at the end, that it means it is river and long, right? So that means it's really active and dynamic and it's rivering all the time, right? And that's to me a real metaphor too for the indigenous histories of this place is that it's always dynamic. And there are so many different people who have ties to this place, to this river. So sometimes I think it's almost a mistake when people try to define the boundaries on the river and make it as if everything was contained by these boxes, you know? English people brought a lot of boxes with them. But everything that I know about the river tells us that it's a space of relationships. And I just want to read a really quick quote about the way that John Pinchin, who many of you may know, he was one of the most prominent fur traders in the river valley and considered one of the quote unquote founders of the town of Springfield. But he actually was incredibly anxious about the way that native people continued to intermarry with each other. He complained about the Scatococci people, which we'll talk about in a little while, people who were refugees from the Connecticut River Valley, from Nipmuc territory and who sought shelter in Mohican territory in what is now New York. And he said of those people, sometimes they live at Scatococci, sometimes to the eastward intermingling with the eastern Intines, sometimes in Canada. He told the Albany governor that they had nourished vipers by giving these people a refuge. And so all of the many intermarriages that sustained our communities for millennia, those were also the intermarriages that helped people to survive when colonization hit, when disease hit, when warfare hit, that people responded by creating stronger kinship bonds with each other. And many of the people on the Connecticut River Valley created those intermarriages with people beyond the Connecticut River Valley. And then when people moved from the Connecticut River Valley, they migrated to places where they have those kinship connections. And then they came back to the Connecticut River Valley and even made kinship connections with the English people who lived here in the River Valley. So they were constantly trying to adapt to colonization through making kinship ties with each other and continuing to make those kinship ties with all of the many plants and animals that inhabit this place. Thank you. I wanted to make sure that we touched on the 1735 Deerfield Conference Deeds which took place in the shadow of Kitsiya, Moscow. And who was present and what that meant to Ashefield and the surrounding hill towns? And who makes up this refugee village of Scottacoke? Pardon my pronunciation, it's not my language. So I'm learning. And what happened to the Scottacoke village? Lisa? Sure, let me share a map with everybody. So many of you know that one of the impacts of a war called the First Indian War, or King Philip's War, was that it brought very intense colonial violence here to Nanatoc and Kamtoc territory to the Connecticut River Valley. And many, many native people during that time took refuge up in Suquawki territory which is the southernmost place of Abenaki territory. And they found refuge there. And then after when the war started to come to a close, New York Colony offered in conjunction with the Mohicans to offer those people refuge here at Scottacoke which is at the confluence of the Housik River. And many families sought refuge there. And I'm gonna show you another map that shows you that journey. So there were people who came from Pekamtoc and Nanatoc which is right to the south of it. There were people who were related to those people on the Connecticut River Valley, Nipmuc people from Kwaabog who went to Scottacoke. There were people who came from Wachuset and Nashua and other Nipmuc places that went to Scottacoke. And there were people from Southern Abenaki territory from Suquawki, from Kitsimiskadok and Kwaaboset from other places in this territory. And they found a refuge here. And again, they had already had kinship relationships, some of them with Mohican people. So when they were going to Scottacoke, they were being held and sheltered there by their relations. But they were also under the protection of the New York Colony who had an alliance with the Ganyangahaga Mohawk. So they were also in that way, also under Mohawk protection which was really important. And I think the role of Albany is important here because New England at the time wanted Albany to turn over all of those people to them. And as many of you know, that would have meant them being killed, executed or sent into slavery or at the very least being held under indenture or under guardians in praying towns, what they call praying towns. And none of these people wanted that. And so they went to Scottacoke. But then, I'm gonna show you another map, those people from Scottacoke, they continue to return to the Connecticut River Valley and to the places where they called home. So they continue to come back here to these places in the Connecticut River Valley, on the Bukamtuk River in Nipmuk country, where they still have relations. But then they also moved northward into places that would be safer for them going all the way up to what is now northern Vermont, to places like Winooski and Mrs. Koi, where they found deep refuge, or even out to Norwichwalk and Namaskanti and Wabanaki Territory and what's now Maine. So people dispersed, but they continued to come back to the places from which they originally came. So you have people who come back to the Connecticut River Valley from as far away as Odinac, up on near the St. Lawrence River, right? You have them coming back in the late 1700s. You have them coming back in the 1800s, right? All the way up through the 20th century, people are continuing to come back. So the reason I emphasize that so much is because we've got a mythology out here of the idea that Indians disappeared. Even some people will say all the Indians disappeared after King Philip's War, which you really have to ignore the documents to say that, but people just have kept coming back. People know where they come from. They know where their ancestral homelands are. And so again and again, we find not just oral histories of families who remember these places and who continue to come back, but also documents. We have documents that show, for example, Amherst College students going over to Northampton and Hadley to hang out with the Indians who were visiting. It was like an annual event that they did, right? And we know who those families are who came back. And not surprisingly, those families, many of them came originally from this place here. So I think that that talks about Scatacoke. I don't know if that covers everything you wanted, but there's so much here. There is so much here. And I know one of the things that I kind of wanted to touch on was the 1735 Deerfield Conference Seeds because that directly impacts what we know as Ashfield today. Is there any insight that you could offer onto that? Sure. Some of those refugees from the connected River Valley, as I said, they went north. And one of them, a man named Juanolet or Greylock, he went up to Missuscoy, which is where my family's from. And one of the inspirations for me for writing is knowing these stories of people like Greylock who actually came back to these places and he led what they called lightning fast raids on Massachusetts settlements, right? And he had this great, what they called Greylock's castle in the middle of the swamps of at Missuscoy. And he and his warriors would come down and hit those Massachusetts settlements and be gone before any of the militia forces on the English side could come after him. So in the wake of what they call Greylock's war, the Massachusetts governor was very anxious to create peace, right? In Massachusetts, in New England, because they were devastated by these raids, right? So this was a time period when native people kind of reset the balance, right? The English had been really forcing their way up and native people reset the balance. So Governor Jonathan Belcher, who was the Massachusetts governor at the time, on the English side, he was the leader of the Deerfield Conference, but he was one of many, many leaders at that conference, right? So the conference took place at Deerfield, at the foot of the Great Beaver, right? Which is highly symbolic because you cannot bring, there's a longstanding indigenous tradition of peacemaking being represented by everybody eating at the bowl of beaver tail, right? And we're literally at Deerfield, like kind of at the foot of the beaver's tail, right? We're at the bottom of it. So we're at, and we're in the beaver's bowl, and you cannot take knives, right? You cannot use knives when you come to a peace conference. You have to come in peace, right? So there were representatives, there are hundreds of native people gathered in Deerfield who were from Scottacoke, who were from Mochican, who were from Abenaki communities to the north, and also Mohawk communities from the north, all of whom came down, gathered in Deerfield, and had counsel with each other about how to live in peace in the valley. This is one of the most important conferences that took place in the Connecticut Rebellion. It's one of the least heard about in common New England memory, right? People will talk about the wars, but they don't talk about these incredible moments of diplomacy, where native people were actually trying to teach English settlers how to live in peace. Jonathan Belcher, the governor, had to open with an indigenous ceremony, right? He had to participate in an indigenous ceremony in order to open this conference, right? So it's really important that all these different people came together here at this place. They came to agree to a trading post where there had been a military court up at what was called Fort Number One, or they call it Fort Dumber, right? In Brattleboro. But they also came to make agreements with each other about how to share space, and to help the English understand how to share space. And one of the things that came out of this was three deeds, and those are very, very extensive deeds. Again, I can show you a picture of the area that the deeds cover. And one of these deeds covers the area that you think of, that is where you all are gathered today. Let me pull this up, there we go. And you can see that this deed covers an area that's deep within Nipmuc territory here near Mount Wachosa, and then an area in Sokoke country, and then this area over here that's on the Pocompa-Takwa River, right? The Deerfield River. But all of the people that were involved in these deeds, they all identified with this place, Skatakoke, that the one I mentioned that's on the Husa River, but they all had ties to these places by their mothers, right? Their mothers are mentioned in the deeds, in some cases it is women who are signing the deeds, and so they were all part of one community who was related to each other. And any of the family members who signed the deed, everybody else in the group that was there at the Deerfield Conference had to witness the deed, had to consent to the deed. So these are large communities that are making these agreements. And if you just looked at the deed on paper, you might think that this area here was just sold or given to English settlers. But if you understand that these are done within the context of a council that's about sharing space, then you can understand that these were also agreements about how to allow English settlers into these spaces to live with the native people who were already living there. And in fact, the testimonies of English settlers who were born after towns were established in these areas tell us that there were native people who were living there and they were the same native people who signed those deeds. So they clearly were not giving them up or meaning to leave. And one of the most important parts to me about the Deerfield Conference is Jonathan Belcher acknowledging that native people were living in these places and that part of the reason they needed to create a trading post there was so that they would have easy access to be able to trade with the English and also with each other. And that means to me that one of the most important things for folks who live in these areas, for all of us who live in these areas to think about is what does it mean that we're parties to this original agreement about how to share space and how to live in peace with each other while acknowledging the native people whose homelands were in? Thank you. So while we explored the history of the deep history of the space and what this space means to Indigenous people for millennia and the important happenings of this space, I kind of wanna dive in to our little panel about what are the lessons we all should be seeing and feeling when we drive by wet quamps, the head of Kitzi and Misqua. Is it living in reciprocity? Is it living in relation? The taking of space and colonization? I'll go to you, Larry. Give Lisa a break for a minute and then Lisa if you could jump in after. Thank you Lisa for that. Yeah, I'm always honored to have Lisa somebody who's been, essentially we grew up together and doing this work as long as Rhonda as well. So I'm always honored for the work that she's done not only in Apanaki country, but in Nipmung country. One of the things that she mentioned that stood out to me amongst many things is that she talked about the erasure and rewriting history. So I'm gonna kind of go down that path for a little bit. And we got some very painful and difficult things that you're gonna hear. But I ask that you stay engaged. I ask that you really reflect on it because if we don't talk about these things, all of us need to heal, all of us need that space. Canada, Australia, South Africa, they have something called the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. This is something the US has never done. Never allowed the space for the native people to deal with that pain. And as Rhonda mentioned, what do we think about when we see these spaces? And so how this effect is in real time, I'll share a little bit about my own personal life, my own personal journey, growing up in Western Mass. Going through the school system in the 80s, it was probably, and I share this many times, it's probably one of the most worst times of my life, growing up as a kid, because when I went to the schools, as the teacher talked and gave various lessons, nobody who looked like me ever accomplished anything. Nobody who was from my community ever did anything good to contribute to society. Nobody who looked like me ever had any value or any worth. Much like Lisa was saying, they were essentially saying the natives were gone. And so what does that do to a kid? It does a lot of harm. And those early lessons of being kind of left out of society really had a detrimental effect on my life. And as many other indigenous people as it continues to do today. And it was a great pain to hear teachers say that your tribe is gone and I would say things, and I could go deeper into it, but it was really an abusive environment to be a native person. I mean, because we were essentially getting it from everyone, because nobody really knew as, this is why we do what we do today. Nobody really knew what a native person was, what an Indian person was. So there's a lot of mysticism, a lot of characterization around us, that me and my brothers, some of you older people, my age would know who an Indian Joe was. That was the nickname of my oldest brother. So you kind of can start drawing a picture of how we were saw in our community when we weren't around our relatives. The only peaceful time I had was when I was away, when I went in within our own enclaves of our people. And so growing up in that kind of environment, I would ask my relatives, like, why are we always left out? Why we treat it like we don't belong here? When this is our land, you know? And unfortunately, there was a lot of alcoholism in my community and I fell into that too as a young child. And I was near death from drinking because of all this, I was just really in a dark place at the age of 21. And I was always a very ostentatious kid. I loved science, I loved astronomy, I loved to learn. But of course, alcohol was impeding that ability. And so I was at this critical moment in my life at 21 years old. And I recall watching this PBS special on TV and it just happened to be Christopher Columbus. And they talked about how alcohol was brought to the new world by the Europeans and they were summarily destroying native communities, they were taking their land on unscrupulous terms and they were usurping and all these horrible things were done under the guise of alcohol. And I tell you, when I saw that, I can't describe it in words what happened to me, but it changed me. And I never drank again after that day. And I sat on a journey of trying to figure out what in the hell happened here? What's going on in this post apocalyptic world of our ancestors? And that journey had taken me here now almost 30 years of life's work that I've done, of learning and sharing. And as Lisa could attest and rounded, we've learned quite a bit, but there's still a lot we don't know. And that's the tragedy. There are things that we may never find out. The things that were robbed from us, our culture, our history, our intellectual leaders were taken from us. So as I began on this journey, it helped me realize many things that weren't taught to me. Like, I didn't know that at that time as a young boy that my ancestors served in the Revolutionary War and that my great-great-great-grandfather and his son, my great-great-great-grandfather, and all their brothers fought in the Union Army in the Civil War. In fact, we have tons of military veterans in our own family, including myself, my sons, and that also taking that a step further that Native Americans are the highest enlisted people in the U.S. military. In other words, for their race, for their amount of racial population, Native Americans give more to this country than anybody else. But I was also able to find out that during the Civil War, my great-grandfather, Samuel Vickers, while he was down in, I forget the campaign, he was somewhere in South Carolina, while he was down there fighting and he eventually died down there, his land was being usurped in the Wabakwassit area, which is northeastern Connecticut, where one of our villages were at the time, the village of Wabakwassit. And so while he was down there, his land was being taken and his kids were being put in boarding schools. And in fact, we had three generations of kids taken and put in these schools, in these homes. And I have two relatives, so I always like to say their names. Hannah, Hannah Vickers, who never came back and another Henry Vickers, another child. And Henry Vickers died at 12, drowned in the custody of the state, and Hannah just disappears. So I always like to just keep saying her name, just disappears. So could you imagine sending your kid to school and the teacher would tell you the principal, well, the kid's gone, we don't know. And that's essentially what it was for her. And there's no records of her. We've searched, my cousin Bernie, we've searched intensively to try to find her and she just vanished from the records in 1902. And so these are some of the things that we've gone through. And it reminds me as I went through this journey of learning, experiencing and sharing all the things that I've learned that there's really a myth of America and there's the shared lived experience. The myth of America says that there's discovered lands, God's chosen people, exceptionalism, freedom, promised lands, manifest destiny. But the reality for many of us is that the shared lived experience of stolen lands, genocide, enslavement, mascots, cultural appropriation, internment camps, boarding schools and so on. So these things are the moon and sun apart, right? So what do we do with this history that we have, right? We have this over here, we have this over here that the people are believing, much like Lisa was talking about, we go down a pioneer valley, oh, it's very pretty name. The land is covered in blood and the bones of people who have been lost to history and time, but not so lost in time because we are their descendants and we're still here and we still have a voice. My great grandmother, Lucy Vickers, who was for lack of a better terms medicine, when we don't say that, we just say herbalism. And I would ask my grandpa, I said, well, what kind of garden did she have? He would laugh and say, the woods, go out there and find everything you need. So I think about that and imagine how you can go out to the forest and know everything by name, much like you and my grandpa would say, imagine if like you were in a big city like Manhattan, all the street signs. Well, that's how we were when we were in the woods because we could identify everything. And that way we'd never get lost. A native person could never get lost in the woods. And so this is why, you know, kind of bring it into more contemporary terms of the effects of that erasure and a lot of the work that we've been doing. And I'll just, I just want to mention after that is that when we think about this, this erasure and the people that are here, during those, I just want to get the numbers here, right? Let's see, that slide up. During 1803 and 1912 in the U.S., there were 32 states added to the union, right? And so during that time, the native population, which has estimated that, and I really don't like to use numbers, but they say before contact, there were roughly 18 to 20 million, I think the number is much higher. But we know between 1803 and 1912, the native population goes down to about a quarter of a million. So this is in direct correlation with these states being formed. So as the union's growing, Indians are disappearing and being forced out of society, kind of circling back a little bit, much like my relatives during that civil war period, they weren't allowed to work, they weren't allowed to associate. So they went to making baskets and arrows and one of my uncles Oliver Doris, he would make these bows and stand on the side of the road and sell them to the passersby. That's the only way he could make income and the white people would love it. Oh, I want an Indian bow and they would grab them in and he would have some money for the day and that's kind of how they made their living. The tragic part of all this is that the indigenous people here on this land have paid dearly for this sort of erasure. And as Stacy mentioned, a lot of my work is around preventing alcohol and drug addiction in native youth because I remember where I was and I want to really help native youth to get out of there. And that's kind of going into Okitea of why we do what we do, to empower people to bring that identity back, to make them feel like they have a purpose. When I was a kid, I felt like I didn't have a purpose, I was lost and just headed for destruction. When you feel like you don't belong, this tends to lead you to not want to care about yourself. And when you don't care about yourself, all these horrible things happen. Between 2014, and these are real numbers, between 2014 and 2016 in the state of Massachusetts, we lost 24 native teens to suicide or overdose. So we're losing about one kid a month for two years because of this epidemic, the opioid epidemic and suicide. And it all has to do with a lot of things I just talked about. And so our goal here is to save what we have, save our lives, save our community, save our people. And so this is what this work is about. I feel very blessed. I recently before the pandemic, I was in Ecuador sharing with the elders in the Andean mountains and it was a powerful experience. And I traveled to many parts of the world, from Greenland to Iceland to all sorts of places. And it's been a powerful experience to share that, but many people will never have that opportunity, that blessing. So that's my goal to kind of share that. And the key is to bring that value back to our people, right? Because I remember what it was like to feel like it didn't matter. And that really changes and that really destroys us from within. And that was the idea. That was the idea of the boarding school. That was the idea of the assimilation. But the assimilation failed. It failed because no matter what they did, the boarding schools, the removals, we still wanted our drums. We still wanted our language. You couldn't take it from us. Because taking that from us kills us. The land is synonymous with our people. And so with that, I'll just stop here and just kind of let us reflect on that. And I'll turn it back over to Rhonda. I wanna make sure that Lisa, if you could share your thoughts on what we should all be seeing and feeling when we drive by web comps. Some of the most powerful things we can do is know that that story that you told, that that story is thousands of years old, right? It goes back to when there was glacial melt that filled this entire valley and to know that that story is directly connected to the stories that Larry's sharing, right? That Habamax attempt to try to restore balance, that that is exactly what we're trying to do now. That's what you're trying to do with this project, right? Is that when we had so many of our young people being drowned in opioids and in other substances, and when many of us know that, for multiple generations through our families, like Larry's talking about with alcoholism, and all of the things that we face with the way that the land and the waters are still being destroyed, the way that our rights are even being destroyed, like that's directly connected to that story. And Cheryl's poem about that rebalancing about the beavers coming back, that's us too, right? Like we're in the midst of regeneration, but being in the midst of regeneration doesn't mean that it's all over, that it's easy, you know? And so I just think knowing that that's connected, that when we see the great beaver that we're not just meant to think about that story and its relevance for long ago, but that how do we participate in that rebalancing now, right? And what are the things, what are the dams that keep us from doing it? Because that's what I see, because when you're in the midst of regeneration, but there's so much pain, and it can be a real conundrum about how you actually participate in the regeneration when it feels like you're always just trying to stick, you know, trying to stick that last stick in the day on the whole back, the flow, the whole back of waters. Cool, thank you. I wanna circle back to kind of Larry's points. And in doing so, I want to mention William Apis, a Pequot native, Methodist preacher, and a widely acclaimed author, born in Colerain in 1798. And think about this, what he wrote about almost 200 years ago, still holds relevance today for native people today. Apis wrote about tribal sovereignty and unconstitutional laws regarding specifically the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe. He also wrote about historical and intergenerational trauma among native people, including his own family. He writes about misrepresentation of native people and acknowledging the extent of which he becomes afraid of others of his kind and not realizing until he was an adult who the aggressors truly were. And that narrative created by the same aggressors, the white settlers. Other topics that he talked about were equality of races, hypocrisy and religion, food sovereignty, traditional environmental knowledge, colonization and societal ills that follow. Each one of these topics are still relevant today and are very much the forefront of our contemporary issues. So I'd like to read a passage from the book through an Indian's Looking Glass, a cultural biography of William Apis Pequot by Drew Lofenzina. Chapter two, page 64, he, being William Apis, he was also keen to the slight to receive as a native child among whites. He observes at one point that nothing grieved him so much as to be called by a nickname. If I was spoken to in the spirit of kindness, I would be instantly disarmed of my stubbornness and ready to perform anything required of me. But he recalls finding it disgraceful that he was frequently referred to as Indian, which he considered as a slur upon an oppressed and scattered nation. And he wonders from whence the term came given that it was so frequently thrown as an appropriate appetite at the sons of the forest. The older and wiser Apis displays his wit by noting he could never find this word Indian in the Bible. He wonders if it was a word devised for the special purpose of degrading us. So in that vein, I think I would like to ask other panel like the most asked question I think we ever get is how do we identify ourselves? And what does it mean to be native on this land during this time? Lisa. First of all, a great shout out to William Apis. I love William Apis. He's like one of my heroes for sure, right? And I love that, you know, he talked about back then how he preferred the word native to the word Indian. And that was not common back then. But for me, you know, I think we do get this question all the time, right? And I think the important thing is like there's different native people who have different preferences, right? Like we could host a knock down drag out fight of, you know, people saying, you know, call me Indian or no, call me native or call me indigenous or, you know. So I just want to put that out there, right? So like whatever I say, that's just me, right? If there's no authority to it whatsoever. But I mean, I think for me, I always go to the language and what I like is that our languages have so many different words for how we call ourselves. So like in the Abenaki language which is the one I'm most familiar with, right? So the first word we would go to is al nomba which used to just mean human being, right? And human being as opposed to, right? The fish beings and the animal beings and the many, many other kinds of families that are here. But then that word changed over time with colonization to mean a native person, right? And maybe even a native person from this region, right? So it changes with the situation. But that word also isn't something that's static because there's this word al nomba wongan which I love which I found in one of the oldest published Abenaki language texts by a man named Pierpaul Weizogilane who lived in the mid 19th century. And he used this word al nomba wongan and said it meant both human nature and birth. Now how can a word mean both human nature and birth, right? But what it breaks down to is the activity of being or becoming human. So there's this sense that we're always becoming, right? We're always being born into who we are. And I think that corresponds also to our other word for ourselves, Abenaki, right? Which is the people who are born of this land of these Eastern lands where the people who have to greet the sun every day. But if you have to greet the sun every day then you know every day comes anew too, right? And you know that every day you have responsibilities then like what does it mean to be a human being today, right? And so I think when you start to look at the words in our language for ourselves, you realize that you have a lot of responsibilities that being a human being isn't just filling a certain category, but that it comes with all these relationships and these senses of responsibility. And I think one of the most important responsibilities that we have is to our homelands and to our places, right? So the other words that we have for ourselves has to do with the places we come from. And sometimes that means our ancestral homelands, those places from which our families were born that we might hold the deepest natal connections too. And sometimes that means the places where we live now and what are the responsibilities. And you can see like in Abenaki treaty literature, you can see leaders who over time are representing different places because they have kinship relationships to multiple places. Like, and historians used to get really confused about that. They were like, why does this same guy say he's a petticoat leader and then he's a patochic leader and then he's a pacochic leader and then he's a saco river leader. Like, did Indians just change identities all the time? Did they suffer from a kind of identity crisis and confusion, you know? And I was like, no, he had actual responsibilities to those places, right? And for that particular council, they thought he would be the best speaker, right? And there's a wonderful leader who's a panic leader who married into a family at Wachuset, one of Larry's Nipnok communities. And you see him showing up speaking for Wachuset people and you see him imprisoned for Wachuset men's debts, right? And when he got out of prison two years later because his family surrendered land that English colonists want, he headed straight up for Wabanaki territory to the North because he had relations there, right? And that's where he raised his children up there and he didn't switch his identity to do that. He belonged to these places. He had relationships to all of these places and that's a big part of who we are too. See, this is a big question, Rhonda. It is a big question, but it's the most common one, am I right? Like we always get, how do you identify? Are you Native American? Are you indigenous? I just wanted to get into this space, but yes, it is, I get this all the time and I like to say and quote from another author, oh my gosh, and of course I am blanking, but he says when I was a small child, I was an Indian and when I went to elementary school and middle school, high school, I became Native American. When I went to college, I realized I was indigenous, but then when I went back to my home community, I realized I was and in this case, the author, Anashinaabe. So I think most of us on this panel would identify most strongly through our community groups and the places that we come from. Larry, do you have anything? Yeah, so thank you, Lisa. She brought up a lot of good points. So again, that's really preference. I get that question a lot. My grandfather kind of laughs at that. My late grandfather and dad, he would say, well, they called me American Indian, they got it wrong once. I'm just gonna leave it at that. I'm not gonna let them keep changing it. So that's kind of was his take on it. And so I kind of just, I go with that or, and usually when somebody's addressing me, I assume they're not trying to be offensive. So if they say Native American, I'll accept it, but I think I like indigenous. I think I like that phrase the best now. And as I said, Lisa brought up a good point of how, as my late cousin, Tallpine would say, our language teacher, the language is the ecology of the land. And so to give a little background on that, so Nipmuc homeland, Nipmuc, as I said, means people of the fresh water. And that essentially is covering about 2,000 square miles of area and four states that we know of today, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire. And so within that area, there were villages or tribes, if you will, from Wabakwassit, Wachussit, Hassanamissit, Kweibawg, Wabakwassit, Nadek, Chabana Gangamag, and so on. So within all those villages, we were also identifying with those areas at that time. But what we called ourselves initially was Ninoak. We didn't call ourselves Nipmuc, we called ourselves Ninoak, which simply means the human being. And as Lisa pointed out, talking about the ecology of the land, a native person would usually change their name three times in their lives and drove the English people crazy. They couldn't keep up. They didn't understand that when you're a child, you identified in a certain way, you had different, certain experiences. And then when you're a young man, you have different, another kind of experiences. All of us can attest to that, right? How you change all those crazy things you did as teens, right? You wouldn't do them now. And so you were a different person in a sense. So your name would reflect that. And you would, a native person would usually have three names throughout their lives. And of course, as I said, they drove the English insane because they couldn't keep up. And so they were just giving people names and so on. And so in the term is, I'll just say it's pretty much a preference who you talk to. So it's really not any simple answer to that. Thank you. One of the things I just, I've been speaking on a lot of mascot panels this past week. I think I've been on three or four panels in the past five days all across the state. And Thursday night, I was on a panel with Anna-Wan Whedon. He's a Mashby Wampanoag Pequot Narragansett man. And he was speaking at the Medfield School Committee meeting. And he reminded the committee that he is speaking to them in a foreign language on land stolen from his ancestors to people culturally appropriating stereotype symbols of who he is. So the next question, I kind of want to not necessarily go into our stereotype to representation but more or less how we see ourselves versus how mainstream society sees us and our representations fair and accurate. Can you, any of you audience members, remember the last time you watched a movie with a protagonist being a Native American? And not only a Native American, but a Native American doing ordinary things. Just a father with a family. When was the last time you turned on a TV show and saw the same or turned on the radio and heard a pop tune that was Native American? We're not usually represented as doctors and lawyers. I don't even say the last one. The Indian chiefs, there are plenty of them here. But not necessarily as educators. People usually relegate us to the past. And how Native people are portrayed in current issues such as mascots and logos and the state flag and seal. But how do we identify in ourselves against mainstream society? That's a tough question. Lisa. I guess there's so many ways that we could answer that question. It's such a good one. And I'm sure there was lots of people who have ideas right now that they were just dying to share. I think as an educator and as a mother, the first thing that I think about is what Larry was talking about earlier with what it means to be a kid in schools where you so rarely see images of Native people in those kinds of roles of people who survive. And people who survive and who are doing things that are remarkable. And so often you get the stereotype and that's it. So the idea that mascots are actually damaging psychologically to Native students, that's what the scholars tell us about it. And that it's damaging to non-Native students too. And it's damaging to the relationship between Native and non-Native students. And yeah, that what we need is images of Native people that are diverse and show our real experiences. Yeah, much like I was sharing my own experience from kindergarten to college, the chances of a Native student seeing somebody in leadership, a principal, a counselor or an educator, somebody to emulate is no, it doesn't happen. Maybe now in this 2020, it may be starting to occur, but this is something that never happened. They will never see somebody who looks like them in a position of power, in an education facet that they could be guided on. And as Lisa said, the scholars are telling us and science is telling us and the psychological observations are telling us that mascots are damaging. And they are, they're visual terrorism. They're a form of white agency. I got the power over your image and this is what I'm gonna do. And the way people cling to that, it really boggles my mind. I really tried to understand that because it's very easy to talk to people who are listening and understand it, but I really wanna try to understand what makes people think it's okay to have somebody else's image. So, and real quick, if we think about what a mascot is, let's talk about how that started. The research of mascots, they go back to some ancient Celtic ways and different things in Europe where they had these talismans and good luck charms basically. And so mascots are a good luck charm. So you're making a person your good luck charm. And somehow I figured that's not okay. And to see that native imagery has outlasted other people of colors, discriminatory practices through the ages is really another thing that kind of I don't understand. When we look at TV in the 20s, the menstrual shows and just the heinous things that they did to different people of color in the cartoons and the commercials. But for some reason, native culture, it's still allowed. And so that's very problematic how, again, I've said many times, native culture is the last vestions of safe racism. It seems to be, but we're hoping to change that. Hey, I have two more questions and I will post them separately. One I wanna share a really hard story of my family. So my daughter, when she was in third grade, and this was 2012, 2013, so not ancient history here. She came home with the vocabulary words, Indian, moccasin, savage, squaw, heathen, among others. And when I asked the teacher where she got these words from, she said that she was teaching the non-fictional story, the courage of Sarah Noble. And in third grade, the subjectivity of fiction versus non-fiction just is not there. And I took that book out and read it. And I was shocked to discover that natives were referred to as little brown mice and they were just a soon-eat human meat off the bone. And that teaching went right to my daughter. When she had her test, she wrote Indians are savages as her definition. And when I asked her about that, because she was asked to capitalize Indians and then it was marked very well done, she said I had asked my teacher for an example sentence of what savage means. And she told me Indians are savages. You can imagine how I responded to that. So if we are striving to do anti-racist work, we must undo the systemic and institutional racism that begins early with our children in public schools. Beginning at the early age in kindergarten when they're learning about the myth of Thanksgiving and Columbus Day. I want to again refer to the Common Pot and read a passage, chapter five, page 218, again about William Apis. Yet Apis' subtly argued vision was not a request for inclusion in American space. Rather, he asked Americans to step into native space. To bravely join him in the forest, he considered himself a native as people of the forest. To extinguish the fires set by their Puritan forebears and to allow the forest to recover itself. He asked them to acknowledge the shared history of destruction and to join with the natives and all people of color as a body to end its continuing legacy. So Larry, I know that you had written the wonderful book, The Morning Road to Thanksgiving, which is exploring the complexities of this holiday and then doing so normalizing native narratives and a sense of contemporariness to mainstream society. Can you talk about why this is so important? Thank you, yes. So yeah, I wrote the book, The Morning Road to Thanksgiving, which I'm really proud of that book, your award-winning novel. And I encourage everybody to read that, not just to give me money, but it's important for our time. The Morning Road to Thanksgiving is a contemporary story, but it really sets the stage from the past. Really, the book opens up with a historical background to help you understand how we got to this place this contemporary day. And it's a story about a native person who's been suffering from his childhood traumas, but he's also bitter about what's going on in his world and this story deals with everything from race to identity, to mascots. And I don't want to give too much of the story away because it's a, but it's really a story about how, when I was talking earlier about this divide, we have the myth of America and the shared lived experience. I believe this story can get us to that place where we can understand each other better. What Rhonda was talking about her daughter's, some of the things I went through, I had teach, I had very long hair as a kid, teachers would pull my hair and tell me not to run around like a wild Indian and all kinds of bad things. I don't want to get into, it's just gonna make me really sad thinking about it. But that's how it is even for today. We had people on our coast, indigenous people, practicing their hunting and fishing rights and they're being harassed. But what are you doing out there? You don't have the right to do that. And we'll tell them, this is part of our treaty. You know reply, well, that was a long time ago. I said, you still follow the constitution, right? I said, well, that was a long time ago too. I said, so these treaties are written in that same spirit. And so what this book tries to do is really bring not just for native reason but for everybody into this space of understanding that we are contemporary people with that traditional history which makes us have this unique identity with the land, right? Because we are the first people here. We have this unique relationship that everybody can learn from and benefit from not at the expense of taking from us but sharing with us. And this is what we've always been trying to do. Lisa talked about that balance and that's all very important, you know? And I always like to give an example of this balance because as I'm standing here, I'm balanced but I'm not doing it by myself. This floor is holding me up. And as this floor is holding me, this wood that's underneath me, it's giving in just the right amount of pressure to hold me here and my legs are putting down just enough to hold me here in place. So everybody's giving something. Balance is not just giving what you want. We're both giving something right now to make that balance. That's how balance is. And so America has to give something to kind of open up and it's going to be a painful process. We're not saying it's going to be easy. I remember her just saying it's 50 miles in the woods. It's going to be 50 miles back out. There's no easy way. There's been a lot of damage done, you know? The generational trauma, the pain of even today this is just right now. That's why I spent the last 30 years. I have grown kids, I have little kids and I go to all their schools and I talk to the teachers and they know why that boy has a long grade and they're not going to be calling him a little girl because he has grades and they get this education but not everybody's going to have that. That's why we need to spread this out. And that's why a lot of the work I do is with educators and teaching them because they just don't know. The books are antiquated. The books are colonial books. They're not commensurate to our environment. And real quick, I've been a teacher at the Grafton Job Corps for many years and I have a very diverse population of students, students from around the world. So there's all sorts of students from color and I tell them students and they take it and they don't really understand when I tell them that in my mom's time, in my mom's generation, interracial marriage was illegal. So to see all you here, white, black, brown, Latino, Asian students just kind of enjoying and sharing and talking like it's always been like that. This is something new. And I look at that and I'm like, wow, this is amazing. Even when I go out to college campuses. And so we always have to understand that our students are ahead of the curve, our young people are ahead of the curve. The racism and the stuff that's sticking around is holding out to some of these big norms that people are clinging to and I add mascots into that category. So thank you. Lisa, you do the same. You're shedding a native lens and a native narrative by normalizing native relations to place and each other. Can you please share with us how this process was for you and how important it is that we change the way the history is taught and studied? Another big question. You have two minutes. Go. One of the things I say is just like that there's a kind of native common sense to the way that we're doing history. And I think the differences of what Larry's talking about is that a couple of generations ago it would have been nearly impossible for us to be seen as the experts on our own history. And so for me, it was the people that I learned from were the people who had been passed down multi-generational knowledge about history on the land, right? And so, and this is from Abenaki community, from the Abenaki community, as well as from my own dad. And so I think that there's a lot of things that seem really obvious to me as well as to other native kind of, you know, like we have a word in the language that Marge Grushak coined, nerd no basquoie, you know, like nerdy native people, you know, in that one it's nerdy native, but like people who are into the history, right? Or into, like there's a lot of things that when we look at the documents that seem really obvious to us, right? Based on our knowledge of land, based on our knowledge of culture that are not so obvious, right? To non-native historians. And so some of the work that I feel like all of us are doing, including Larry and the work that he's doing is bringing that those lenses drawn from the language, drawn from our land-based experience, drawn from our knowledge of kinship and history into being able to read the documents, into reading the land and all of those. And that feels like a major shift, but it really is just a form of indigenous common sense, right? And indigenous bringing indigenous knowledge out where it was repressed before. Thank you. I believe that Stacey has questions from our audience, and we're ready for that time. Yes, no? We're gonna start with questions from our audience. Okay, let's do that. Way back. Is that today? Stand up so we can hear you. Thank you. The differences between being white people, white people being in native spaces in a good way and cultural appropriation or white obnoxiousness? So you're asking if one of us could explain non-native people being in native spaces in a good way that's not culturally appropriating or being obnoxious, right? Okay, Lisa. I think Larry should answer this one. Okay. Okay, I'll take a dive in it. I mean, we have centuries of exploitation. Even today, we run into many situations where we're being exploited, being used. And so, and I was doing a talk some time back and there was a gentleman, a white gentleman who got up and asked, he went to a reservation. He was kind of shunned and pushed away. And I told him, don't give up. Keep going, keep coming, go back. Because the defenses are so high because of all the different, the generational trauma. And we're so used to being used in so many different ways that by the time somebody comes along that wants to share in a good way, the defenses are so high that the good voice can't get through. So I say to those people who want to do that, don't give up. And kind of what you mentioned about those different obnoxiousness, or I don't really try to discern any of those because I think what I'm seeing is because of some of this history, a lot of white people are very uncomfortable about it. And I don't blame you, you know? Because it's a very hard pill to swallow to understand what happened here. You know, we're in a post-apocalyptic society, you know, of black and brown people, you know, 500 years, you know? But we welcome everybody to do this work with us. You know, the original message of our ancestors when the Europeans first came was what's the share and that hasn't changed. Our Nipmuc people have a very open spirituality in terms of sharing what we have and knowledge. And again, many tribes are gonna be different. But as our ancestors taught us, this medicine is to be shared. And one of the things my grandfather said is that if the whites don't learn how to be on this land, then how can they be a benefit? How can they share in this knowledge? Because if they don't know what to do, they're gonna keep messing up. And so my goal has always been to share this knowledge and share that. But again, not to the point where we're being exploited or somebody comes on your land and next thing you know, they're a pipe carrier or they become a chief, you know, it's, I laugh at that now, but it's a very serious thing because usually there's money involved and it takes away from our community. And so, and I think when we think about those types of people, we'll usually find you out if you're not there in a good way and be dealt with in very expedient fashion. So I think that's the answer. Yeah, I knew that Larry should answer that question. And I just wanted to just add on one thing is that there is a historian, Christine Delusia who writes about this region really beautifully. And the thing that I always noticed about Christine, she's a non-native historian who does really good work with native communities is that she's always listening, right? And so that's what I would say is like, are you listening? Right? Yes, Christine and Andrew also have made headways into that. I just wanted to point out that 1978 was when native ceremonies were finally legal. So culturally appropriating our ceremonies is majorly offensive. Do not appropriate our ceremonies and if you're invited to be in them, make sure that you're listening and asking questions. And I learned when I went to Standing Rock and Elder had really amazing mind-blowing information for each one of us in our group. And he just spoke about it so plainly, but each one of us took away a lesson. And one of the things he spoke about was Standing Rock was a coming together of all these different people supporting native nations, right? If you know about Dakota Access Pipeline and what happened in 2016, 2017, is that there's a circle of reciprocity in which all beings of this planet formed a circle where everything was interconnected. And at some point, primarily white folks stepped away from that circle of reciprocity and interconnectedness and that sort of broke things. But just know that there is space for you in this circle, that there is a place for you to belong. You just have to find out what that space is without relying heavily on all the other parts. So, any other questions from this audience? This is Jody Hall. And I grew up on the Cisqua Bay in the area where Lisa is from. And in the 1950s, there were many native peoples everywhere around me. My parents were flatlanders. In Vermont, that's true for people who do not have come from Vermont. And my parents taught me a reference for the local people, for the natives. They were friendly with several families. And we always saw the native peoples along the river fishing throughout the year. That was their rate, we were told. And so, I'm really making a comment more to the times that we're living in and an appreciation for the many efforts of so many people to get a better understanding of this deep history and to acknowledge the experience of the native peoples. In the years worth of the Duramiga Project and Pre-Kield, I had the privilege of being for maybe six or seven years dialed into some of the conversations in this area. So, I just want to express my deep appreciation to Double Edge for having this event and for the panelists who are giving voice to some of the important matters. Thank you. Appreciation for what's happening here today. It's honestly something that I've been dreaming of for years. So, thank you for giving acknowledgement in that way. Anyone else? Shall we go to our online audience? Jen, where people start reading about those things about local, like what would be a book list recommendation? Oh my goodness. Lisa, take that away. Sure. I mean, we're lucky to be living in a time when there is so much good stuff we can recommend, right? So, some of the books that we've mentioned today, I'll just reiterate. So, Larry, of course, has written several books that I would highly recommend. I love his short stories that are really contemporary, and I think they're so important, like his story about a young man, a young native man growing up in Springfield, right? That kind of experience, being able to capture that so incredible and important. But also, we mentioned Christine DeLucha, her book, Memory Lands, deals not just with the history, but how we remember. And she brings us right up into the 21st century. Drew Lopez and Zena's book on William Apis that Rhonda mentioned, Barry O'Connell's edited, collected works of William Apis is absolutely wonderful. And there are also other native writers in the region whose work you can read in a wonderful anthology called Don Land Voices. So every native nation in New England is represented with that, and each section has multiple writers. So I always recommend that that has a place to start because you can so easily branch out from there. Other people might have other recommendations too. We could put a long list, maybe we can post it somewhere. I think that's a great idea to have a list for the after, after events. So people have a place to go for a reference. Good? And I can't underscore enough and thank you for that, Lisa. And this is even more important, I think, because what she mentioned is all these books represent the East. And for far too long, when people learn about Indians, they hear about Masa Soya and Pilgrims and next to you know, we're talking about Sitting Bowl. And so they totally skip over all hundreds of years of history and scholarship and culture that has been lost and forgotten about. And so this really kind of puts us back in place here and really helps people who are from here understand what the land that they're living on. So yeah. Thank you. Okay. All right, so I guess we're gonna move this portion of the panel. We're gonna move to Larry and he's gonna be talking about Ocoteo and that space. I know that Stacey had mentioned a little bit about the origins of Ocoteo. I had met Carlos at one of Larry's water protector talks years ago now, I think it was 2017. And I slowly sort of came into double edge and it was showing, we talked to Bonnie Hartley of the Mohican and I was bringing in Nipmuk people and other tribal members from this area because I grew up here, I grew up in Plainfield. And when I drive through this area, you know, it is a place that was well loved, well traveled. And I felt like it is so beautiful and amazing and rich here in, I don't know, the land is just gorgeous. And why aren't people coming out here more to enjoy something that is rightfully their own to enjoy? And so when asked, what do native people need in this area? Because we're having a hard time, you know, finding native folks. I said, well, it would be really great if we had a space that was not institutional, that was not related to a college, a space that was our own for all native people to be multicultural, multi-tribal where we could do our own thing and be autonomous. And Stacey said, yeah, let's do that. And so Ocoteo was born and I feel, I'm just gonna say this right now. I wrote this down when I was in the car because it just was this reoccurring thing that I think that we're trying to ask of you today is that we're asking our allies to step up and support us, that the BIPOC communities, we need the support of the ally. But we're also asking our allies to take on the role like stepping up, not just moving in as allies, but stepping up as accomplice. And I am just so grateful and so moved that Double Edge Theater has not only stepped in as a role of ally, but really stepped up as a role of accomplice and helping us achieve our dreams that we're trying to make here to make a better community for native people, native youth. And to, I'm gonna just let Larry take over from here. Go ahead. Rhonda could certainly talk about Ocoteo as much as I can. And again, the important thing is history and context and understand that none of this happens in a vacuum. So I wanna take you guys back a little bit, back to the earlier part of the 19th century and bring you to my community, Essin Amisset, which is now called Grafton. Anybody familiar with the Grafton mass area? Oh, Matthews. So, and as Rhonda talked about our homeland was once 2,000 square miles, but through usurping and all the other horrible things that happened to our people being pushed out, we ended up down to four acres of land. And that's what we currently still have now that's never been seeded to anyone. So anyways, one of our elders, Zara Cisco, back in the early part of 1900s, went to the state because nearby in the Grafton, there was a lot of vacant land, a lot of vacant land. And she went to the state and said, I envision a knitmoat community, a village where people can come together, our youth can have a place to live out their culture and have a better life and get out of this poverty. Because as I mentioned earlier, we were in deep poverty during that time. And so she went and approached them and asked and almost out of spite, the governor turns around and sells it to Tufts for a dollar. And that's where you have the Tufts veterinarian school now. That would have been, that's where she was proposing. And I'm thankful for the work that Tufts is doing, but this is something, but I bring up this story for the fact that not since colonialism and after the King Philip's War 1675 has a knitmoat person had a place to self-actualize, have a place to really focus on there, be creative and have a place to dwell that's not rented or borrowed. We have our yearly powwow that's been going on for a hundred years at that small reservation. But other than that, our other band, my other relatives, we have to rent spaces and we have to borrow and you got somebody watching the clock and it's time to go kind of thing. This is what we've been experiencing. So I shared that story with you to tell you that it's been hundreds of years that we've been trying to have a place to call our own, the place that we can just come and enjoy and have our youth and earlier I told you about the effects of how that's played out through time with the suicide, the deaths, the loss of culture and the different things that our people have experienced. So when I was approached to be a part of this, I wasn't sure what was gonna come of it. As I said earlier, how we were skeptical because we've been through so much. But then I realized this was for real and I got on board and I just was so happy and I started meeting the people at Double Edge and I went to one of the performance and I just fell in love with what I saw because just an amazing place to be out here on traditional Nipmuc land and Pekum-Tuk land and to have all these opportunities. And it's been non-stop since then and we're just beginning, right? So we're at the very beginning stages of this. So I'm really excited to think about what our youth are gonna be able to do in 10 years from now, five years from now what the place is gonna look like. Already we have a wealth of programs lined up and different opportunities. And of course because of the lockdown, things have kind of stalled but we're able to do events like this. But we have so many things with so many experienced native scholars and performers and cultural artists that are available in our area that just waiting to come and share that cultural intellectual knowledge. So we're really excited about that, what we're able to do. And of course, one of the main things we always need is support. This is where we ask for that support to make all these things possible. A double edge was gracious enough to give us this space but of course, money needs to come in to keep the lights on and keep all these funding things operational because as I mentioned, Nipmuk Homeland is very large and so our people are still kind of scattered out. We have folks in Boston, we have folks in Springfield, we have folks where I live in Central Mass, we have folks up in the border by Gardner. And so how do we get all these people here, right? Could be challenging without transportation and giving lunch provided and having them an opportunity because we don't wanna create a hardship because we've been there, done that. So we wanna be able to get people here without saying, well, you gotta make sure you get some bus fare or bring a bag of lunch. And so we wanna be able to do that. And so that's where our role as directors come in to make all that happen. And you wanna add anything else? Beautiful. Thank you. And so, and when I talked about that divide earlier about how we come together, this is a great place for allyship people to share. We had a wonderful opening with my friends from New York, Muriel and her husband and who recently passed, unfortunately from Safe Harbors, who did a presentation here. TP Tales, which was just so fun. Again, that presentation really highlighted how a Native American family in New York growing up, how they're still traditional, but they're kind of dealing with all the different trajectories around them. We had our winter solstice, which is a more ceremonial traditional ancient culture. So it's gonna be a very diverse place of hosting lots of different things. So I'm really excited about having that. I find it to be a great space to just come and reflect and do some writings and different things like that. Have my kids, my big kids, my little kids, my cousins and family. And we're still kind of in the introduction phase of it. Again, getting out to a larger Native community about what's going on, because again, we're just now starting to have our events there. And just as we started, this Corona crisis started. And so we're really trying to, hopefully everybody comes out of this okay, and we'll be able to start up more robust events. Yes, thank you. You're welcome. Yes, thank you. Yes, please. I just, I want to clarify something because it's maybe not clear, but Okiteo is an autonomous space. It's not belonging to double edge, but to the council that runs it. They have a website and the website is already really informational. It's one of the highlights of my 38 year career that we've been able to partner with Okiteo. And I'm really grateful. And also in the last four months, seeing Rhonda and Larry do all of their work, not just to Okiteo, but their fight against mascots, which are terrible, much worse than what you have portrayed. Their fight for justice, that's been also part of double edge's great blessing in the last four months of the pandemic and our society's pandemic as well. But as an autonomous space, also they have been sharing with us so much. And one of those things that they're sharing and willing to share is with our community, educating our community and their willingness to share their cultural life in many events that aren't limited to their people. And I think that's the utmost of generosity. And thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you Stacy. And as you mentioned, and it's again, it's so wonderful how double edge went about this. They took all the right stops. They took the keys and said, here you go. And that's kind of where it ended in terms of decision making because we make all the decisions about events, programming. We oversee all that, make sure things are appropriate, make sure things are what we want, what we envision for our community, what's best served in terms of cultural appropriateness, what's relevant, what's going to benefit our people the most. And so it's all up to us. So if anybody's thinking about having any events, any native people or people in the area, they would come to us and ask us, consult us about as far as what would go there. I wanted to give major thanks again to double edge. Thank you Lisa Brooks. I know that you stepped out for a minute, but I want to thank you so much. And you know, look at this book. I've totally just scribbled in your book constantly. I mean, every page was just one other nugget of something that was just so powerful. And thank you so much for the work you do and for being here today. I'm really truly honored. I hope I've done justice to your work. And thank you Larry for being here today and for talking about the work that we do together. I can't find, he's an amazing partner. I've known him for over 25 years. And I say partner as a work partner. He has his own family. We get confused sometimes like that. No, but thank you. I cannot find a better partner. He's like a big brother to me. And you know, we agree on most everything, which is so important in the work that we're doing. And we're just starting. So stay tuned. We would like to open up some of our events to the larger community. So please stay tuned and help support the work that we're striving to do for our community. Thank you so much for the team over here on the table for doing all the logistics and thank you for sweltering in this heat. I'm dying. I'm from Alaska. I can't handle this and in your masks. I had the luxury of being far enough away to have the mask off. And I'm so happy for making you stay here in your masks. And thank you very much for listening. Thank you for listening. So. Two more recognitions. In the spirit of thankfulness is that one is how around live stream this event. So I want to thank them. And then also this event is part of a series that's supported by the National Endowment for the Arts and Art Town Award that we received. Thank you. I think we're good. Thank you. Thank you all. Thank you. Put my mask back on.