 Can you hear yeah, there we go We're coming to our final session. It's been an amazing four days. I think I did not write a speech for the session at all I have something else to share You know, I think endings are a lot of contexts I think endings are harder than beginnings in my experience in plays. I think endings are usually harder than beginnings a little scattered, but I was hoping at this moment we had some time for us to have all of the incredible teams that have been part of supporting this effort to come to the stage. So can we bring them to the stage? Quickly. It may appear that there was no one, but there really were people More of them. Come out. Come out. Come out. Thank you. Matt, are you there? Michael, Lily, there's many missing. This is not the whole team. All right Thank you. You're receiving applause on behalf of your, here's Matt. There's so many others. Lily Hughes is out there, I think. Ali Pujwani had to go. He's been incredible. You've seen so many other people through this space, so I'm not going to name them all right now. It's a long list, but it's a I really want to thank them for the bottom of my heart. This is we've never done this before. We figured out how this strange building worked today, and I think the biggest thing that that was important to all of us, we said this at the beginning, was whatever went right and whatever went wrong and there's been plenty of both. It's just the way these things are, was that we're to be together through that in the spirit of why we had you here and that team made that possible. So again, thank you to them. The spirit was all there. I want to share a little bit of a window, and I was shy to do this, and I was encouraged to do it, and I'm doing it. A little bit of a window into some process stuff that we've that I've been part of. That is part of the lab for me feels in some ways very simple and will be familiar in terms of pieces of process that that you all do in your extraordinary work. For me, this process, in some ways that I'm not sure I'll be able to totally articulate, feels really deeply connected to the ethos of what we've done here together and why we've done it together. It's a process that that I've been calling performing one another. It's also connected to ideas about radical listening and theater as call and response. It's very connected to the hopeful encounters that you all had so beautifully at the beginning of this process of our time together, and for my money, we've just continued to have so many hopeful encounters. I feel like everywhere I look, whether under the tent or in a corner, I was like, oh, those people, you know, so but it gets back to the question of kind of like the art of connecting in a sort of way that includes deep noticing and deep listening. So I've had the privilege quite a lot in recent years to sort of take work that I was kind of doing intuitively as rehearsal exercises and classroom exercises and start to like in global context and in a range of contexts start to sort of do more of it and notice that it felt really revelatory and that it was in some of the same ways that spending time with so many of the people who've come to this gathering did, it was feeding me more and I felt having more meaning than the work I was the plays I was being asked to direct in some cases. I was getting more from this process than I had directed a lot of plays in my life, getting more from this process than some of the sort of four weeks in a regional theater towards an opening in the third slot of a season kind of work. Not that I bookmarked that work, but this was different work and it was work that wasn't always about people who self-identified as artists and the work is actually really simple and I'll describe my any student who's had me in recent years like we'll be like yeah I hit this thing again but I've had the privilege of doing this now in some contexts I look out like Ali Madi is here we were in Hainan China recently and I had the privilege of doing this work in a workshop with people from 15 or 20 countries in that space and I've done it in spaces where people are coming together from quite different worlds literally and figuratively and it involves as many of you are really expert at doing it first just involves coming together in a circle and standing and noticing what's present and I ask people to make eye contact with each other and that sometimes takes some time because it takes time to make eye contact okay and it's sometimes it's uncomfortable for some people and you start to notice oh am I going to eye contact and what's that about maybe I am maybe I'm not no judgment and then from there people just speak their full names as they were given to them that's the instruction so it's not the name that you think people want to hear or is more convenient for them to say it's the name that and I just ask people really simply to stand in their name and to say it make eye contact and to say it and for everybody to hear the name fully and to repeat the name back to them that's the whole thing that's the whole first exchange we go around the circle and we do that and it's a very powerful experience typically because it slows down something and people feel held by that in this particular workshop that a couple of you were at in Hainan China the first time around the circle three different people burst into tears when their names were said back to them and the stories were a little bit different but it was I haven't no one said my I don't say that name no one has said that name to me I don't stand in the world as that so to have people affirm that was was very important and very powerful um we go from there and there's variations depending on where we are but I often ask people to conjure in a place of significance to them just to say they don't tell a story about the space they just say the place they choose a place they curate a place and they name the place we might say the Davis Performing Arts Center can be any place a place of ancestry and people repeat back same exercise the place suddenly we have places in the room and some little wisp of story or something um then I invite people to say the I often have people say a person of significance to them of any kind of their choice who's not present in the room and they tag that person and then we repeat back the name so I might say something like my teacher Dwight Conkergood and the group people would say back Dwight Conkergood he'd be present somehow in the space we take we try to be patient with it and I try to just coach it to be a little more patient with it but it's very loving and then the the last part of this is is um that people uh have to make a statement of the only rule is they have a simple first person statement it just has to be true you know I had a bagel for breakfast Derek had a bagel for breakfast you know Alicia works at the Kennedy Center I work at the Kennedy Center Alicia works at the Kennedy Center there's no pressure to say anything what happened in this particular workshop uh that is three different people spoke about feeling alone one was I feel alone in my country I feel alone in his country okay we've just met I'm alone even in my family someone said Marisha's alone even her family so it's a very that's five minutes we've been together in that work and and again it's different in different contexts or at different times I share that part of the process it's just kind of call and response basically and of there are then variations and in classes that I teach and I've it's become kind of a it's like a muscle we check in and people can like you get some information about people and it becomes its own kind of narrative journey in a in a different day nobody in my experience and I've now done it hundreds of times with slight variations no one has ever been like oh no one opts out and in my experience people don't feel like you know there's no assessment there's no one's doing it better than anyone else um I you know I think Jan Cohen Cruz has a beautiful book called engaging performance theater as call and response and one of the things I think about we all understand call and response as a kind of important cultural practice in so many contexts but I think it I also feel like performance itself serves in a kind of you know we call and we respond right we don't have products and endings like and I think this is one of the things like we called you responded you came uh but this is also a call like we go forward there will be the response to this and I think remembering that every call is a response and sort of like that that is a generative process has been just the muscle of that has been very um important and I have found it becomes somehow because of the din I've been doing some work like this since before our cell phones were like everything to us it just seems to get more and more important to like stand and breathe together and like make some eye contact and I think that's part of the emotional people I think are starved for the kind of connection that I have felt us it's been relatively rare over the last four days as I go to a lot of things where you look around you're like wow every single person is on their phone right this second and we you know it for the most part I saw people really really connecting and having conversations so that's some context for that part of the work and then the second phase of the work is this work that's called performing one another and I won't go into as much detail with it but basically I have people have a conversation on their own it's not an interview it's a conversation and there's sometimes a prompt like talk about home and they have a conversation the only thing is they're both recording that conversation we all carry these incredibly powerful devices in our hands at all time they record the conversation but they don't have it for the recording they have it for each other then they go away and they listen back to the conversation and they choose a very very precise piece of the conversation again that they're curating to transcribe including all of the uhs and ums and different you know a little bit anti-divorce Smith style sort of the pieces of the work we do to communicate they transcribe that often in the form of kind of poetically and they come back and they share in the context of a group they they share what they've done of each other it's really very simple again it's just amazing to me what happens and subjectively like I find it the best theater going um it's really really beautiful to me what happens and especially with people who are scared of it and don't think of themselves as expressive communicative people and don't want to be on stage those are the people who actually get the most of it I've done it at like some fancy conservatories and it's it's a little tiny bit less rewarding sometimes um uh but it's really really rewarding so that's some background and I'm sorry to spend so much time on it but I I am because I feel in my heart intuitively like that practice that I've been interested in has made this gathering possible in some way they're connected in some deep way and has made what this incredible community that's come together possible so this past year we had through the incredible collaboration of my friend professor Dan Brumberg who runs the democracy and governance studies program here at Georgetown and the Baker Center um and through a really kind of lot of serendipity the opportunity to create a partnership and a collaboration with Patrick Henry College which is a conservative Christian school down the road in personal personal Virginia and over the course of the year a group of Georgetown students and a group of Patrick Henry students met regularly to have dialogues and to do variations on this work and uh it was a really extraordinary process uh it as one would hope it does would incredible friendships were formed a lot of sort of stereotypes and projections were defied we had a lot of that was due to uh an incredible partner at Patrick Henry professor Corey Gruel who's here um who really um you know this was this defied all of the things you would think it was what you would expect would be hard and what was really interesting was how little talk there was even over the course of the whole year about um politics in the sense of I you know support this candidate or I believe in that way and how much there was about um loneliness about faith about kind of existential questions about loss about longing um how much how much of that happened so um I'm gonna uh share we just did this kind of and I wish we had it's during finals week I wish I could share this incredible ensemble of 10 who performed across all of these combinations but we have this beautiful pair performance that I'm gonna share that's completely the words of each other um uh in a moment but before I do I'm just gonna our opening to this piece was a um the the ensembles kind of performed the mission statements of each other's school and I think that's an interesting backdrop for what hope and Kate are about to share so I'll just read you uh briefly from those mission statements um Patrick Henry College for Christ and her liberty Patrick Henry College exists to glorify God by challenging the unacceptable status quo in higher education lifting high both faith and reason within a rigorous academic environment thereby preserving for posterity the ideals behind the noble experiment in ordered liberty that is the foundation of America Patrick Henry College believes that God is the source of all truth be it spiritual moral philosophical or scientific for this reason we seek to educate students in God's truth throughout the entire curriculum Christian faith and genuine learning cannot be separated neither is our Christian faith the mere addendum to the liberal learning process instead our Christian faith proceeds and informs all that we at Patrick Henry College study teach and learn and then there's a statement of faith that all students are asked to abide by there is only one God eternally existent in three persons father son and holy spirit God is spirit and those who worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth Jesus Christ born of a virgin is God come in the flesh the Bible in all its entirety is the inspired word of God word of God man is by nature sinful and is inherently in need of salvation um and that ends with Jesus Christ literally rose bodily from the dead so that's the statement of faith now understanding of course that that is Patrick Henry College's context which of as at any institution the spectrum of relationships to that to that language is very broad among the people at Patrick Henry but that's the context of Patrick Henry College admission I will not go into Georgetown's Georgetown's is from my perspective subjectively more generic but it's a Catholic and Jesuit student-centered research university established in the spirit of the new republic on the principle that serious and sustained discourse among people of different faiths cultures and beliefs promotes intellectual ethical and spiritual understanding we embody this principle in the diversity of our students faculty and staff we educate men and women to be reflective lifelong learners um in the Jesuit graduate and professional education the Jesuit tradition for the glory of God and the well-being of humankind so that's just a little bit of context about what the two institutions under which we brought these students together were say they have as you know say they're about um so with that pray with that preamble I want to share one exchange as performed and presented by Kate Oakers from Georgetown and hopes Luca from Patrick Henry College so please welcome them my parents are part of the evangelical right I would say like what you would probably characterize as the evangelical right and they're very loving people the people that I know because I'm pretty well versed in the evangelical right um as like what you would think of it like the people who would constitute it most of them are very loving people very caring people who just happen to hold very sincerely held religious beliefs that directly contradict like current current political thought I guess like um specifically like what you see with Westboro Baptist Church like like against the gay community but my parents for example like my mom there are a couple of ladies at my church who absolutely they love the gay community and they say first and foremost we just want to love them and share love of God with them all that stuff my parents they would be they're not at all in favor of the Westboro Baptist Church you know being like God hates gays which isn't true God does not hate the gays um I wish that I were about to talk about something more intellectual or related to the greater good or something about community or family or relationships but something else has been eating up my mind recently it's actually a bit ironic because I'm about to talk about how I don't always want to talk about the fact that I'm gay surprise right well that's the thing I don't know recently I felt really boxed in by this aspect of my identity many well-meaning friends have pegged me as the gay friend I feel like that label has started to follow me around and precede all other aspects of my identity I mean I do think that I should take a second and step back and say that this experience goes to show how much privilege I inherently have this is the first time in my life I've truly felt othered and it stinks I don't want to be your gay friend I just I just want to be your friend gay actor one day I just want to be a good actor not the gay cousin but a cool cousin and on and on and on or even just being hateful to to like ethnic minorities and being hateful to any group of people which is which isn't biblical but with the idea of like sincerely held religious beliefs I think the whole point with the evangelical right is the fact that a lot of them distinguish let's just let's just take homosexuality for example a lot of them distinguish and this comes back to the idea of identity in boxes too they distinguish like being gay with like homosexuality and so it's like this idea of that's not who you are you're a person that has this lifestyle whereas the thing nowadays like what you've been talking about like you've been put in this box is like the gay friend or whatever and my parents would be like you're my friend and you identify as gay like they're not the same thing and so like I know that some of the choices I've made make me look more stereotypically gay fine I get it but it's not like I wake up every morning and think how can I be sure to look as gay as possible today not at all I've simply gotten to a point where I can own the fact that I like having short hair and when it times comes time to dress up I'd rather wear pants and a jacket than a dress it's actually kind of funny when I was home for winter break I was cleaning out my closet and there are a bunch of button downs that I had left over from high school that I just boxed up and put away I kept thinking that I'd be happier if I could just be a better girl and I really bought into the idea that looking more feminine would be the key to a fulfilling you know healthy future as I headed off to college but it really just left me feeling really disoriented so the button downs are back along with the loose jeans and crew necks I finally feel fully present again it's great and I guess I just want people to know that in no way am I trying to perform gayness I don't even feel that gay I have a couple of people in my life some friends back home who um are part of the LGBT community and they know that I'm like I don't think homosexuality is what you are it's not intrinsic to who you are as a person but they also know that I understand their struggle with identity and I have my own that I'm still working through even though it looks different they know that I love them anyway and I'd die for them it's just I fell in what I thought was love for the first time last year it was amazing and thrilling and wonderful and everything that love should be she just happened to be a woman and it's not that I'm ashamed I'm open about it but only as open as my straight friends are about their significant others so that's that on the grander scheme of things the mega issue that compels me now is identity in boxes and how we balance the labels we bear just say for a moment and I would I just would be great I would be interested I didn't tell you that I was gonna ask you this but um but if I think I'd be curious to hear just any brief reflections you guys have on the could be about the overall process but specifically about performing one another I mean obviously Kate I should have said this even more explicitly but hopefully by the prayer to do this clear that Kate was playing hope and hopefully playing Kate because we're each other's experience of I mean I have something that immediately comes to mind I know okay I know the whole in your shoes team has heard us talk about this but the first time that we read the pieces spliced like this back to back um in our little rehearsal room one Saturday I just started sobbing because I realized like even though I was reading her words and her story is obviously completely different from my own and we come from opposite sides of the country and totally different families they really resonated when she started talking about her mom or whatever I I felt really touched because you know even though we're so superficially different something within that felt so so similar and it felt so like being at home um and someone who is you know on the outside so different yeah it's it's been a really amazing experience um the in your shoes project in general which I'm sure if you talk to Derek at all like he can explain it in full detail um but it's it's just been a really amazing experience um especially just like getting to know Kate in general and just the idea of just really intentional listening and really making sure okay you know am I correctly portraying this person and like Kate's I would say Kate's like a really cool like really good friend of mine now because because we've like spent you know like 10 months doing this project and she's really amazing and so it even especially because we know each other really well it's been a lot like I respect you so much how do I make sure to tell your words in a way that you would be honored by so that's been a really big part of the process which I really enjoyed yeah thank you guys so so much beautiful uh thank you guys for um uh you know for allowing me to share that piece of things I'd actually be it would be an interesting it won't if not for now but I'm I'm uh I think I'm still working out the articulation of how that work I'm very interested in continuing that work and this work I believe we're doing something here at the gathering uh that should will must um grow um and uh and so anyway I wanted to connect those two things um so we're gonna move uh just to be completely transparent we're gonna we're gonna move towards um we don't end but we'll move towards our provisional completion of our gathering and this is a kind of we actually have not the you know as you hopefully got a sense of the welcomes we're quite coordinated and the endings are less less coordinated so we have we're returning to the voices and the presences of the group of people who welcomed us so we will first uh welcome back to the stage um the extraordinary Emily Johnson who will in turn be joined by Jason Tamiru and my friend Ali Madi Nori and uh and will close with the extraordinary Kathleen Shelfon so uh please come to the stage um Emily Johnson hi everybody I'm Emily and I'm a Yuppa woman who grew up on Dinayna and Canaitse land and live now in Manahatta um on Manahatta in Lenape Hill King and I want to say hello to the indigenous and First Nations people from around the world in this room and who have been here gathered and those watching later as well I see you and I hear you and I feel you and I ask for your support in these next few minutes I pay my deepest respect to Piscataway land Piscataway people Piscataway ancestors from the past here in the present and coming in the future I am honored to stand here on your land I am grateful for the time here this opportunity to speak and I look forward to building relationships with you in the coming future thank you to Derek and Cynthia and all of you lab fellows and the whole lab team you've been doing really awesome work and thank you to everyone who took time to gather here as Derek and I were uh saying on the phone earlier there's a lot of love here and also good lovers hold each other accountable so there's a little of that in these words too so first there's this story that I've been meaning to tell you all for a really long time but I I just can't remember the beginning which just makes me think about all of the things that happen in life that we don't exactly remember for example do you remember that story I told you about the tree don't worry I'll tell it again there used to be a tree right there where you're sitting where I was sitting yesterday before this building was built before this was Georgetown University before this was Georgetown before this area was called Washington DC you can see pictures of that tree and historical records and stuff it was a very mighty tree and I don't know if this tree was a gathering place or a place of learning but you know places are places they've always been so probably so yesterday I was sitting right there where you are now where that tree used to be and I got kind of tired about thinking about some of the things I was thinking about and so I looked up at the sky but it was actually the ceiling here but I was thinking about the sky and it reminded me of another time that I was outside looking up at the real sky and I noticed a hawk flying above I mean I think it was hawk so I was watching this hawk flying above me and I noticed then that way above the hawk there was this silver airplane flying and I knew that the airplane was like thousands of feet higher than this hawk but from where I was standing it looked like they might collide so I just had to stand there and wait until they passed and the moment that they did I had this sudden memory of the ground shifting beneath my feet and I was in two places at once I was right here now I was home I was that tree and I was me I was alive and I wasn't yet born in January this past a pretty extraordinary thing happened with Indigenous artists from the US Canada Australia New Zealand Derek mentioned it at the start of this gathering the First Nations Dialogues in New York it was 12 days of Indigenous-led performances and discussion and workshops and ceremony and the first meeting of the Global First Nations Performance Network a pilot initiative focused on cultural change through commissioning and touring and presenting of Indigenous works through building demand and capacity with audiences and with presenting sector. Our partners for this were the Lenape Center in New York, Amerinda, American Indian Community House, Aben's Art Center, American Realness, Dance Space, Gibney, Lamama, Performance Space New York, Safe Harbor's Indigenous Collective, Under the Radar, APAP and ISPA we held performances at all of these locations and at all of these theaters because we wanted to thwart the annoying habit of sequestering Indigenous artists separate from everything else. First Nations Dialogues was organized by a consortium which includes Marinda Donnelly of Black Dance, Angela Flynn of Cookinie Arts, an obituary theater all from Australia, Indigenous Performing Arts Alliance in Canada and myself and Belay O'Gantner from here in the U.S. and just briefly I'm going to show you some photos because it was beautiful and abundant and I'll just tell you what happened. We had an opening welcome and honor ceremony honoring Spider Woman Theater, the grandmothers of Indigenous theater here on Turtle Island. We also honored Diane Freer, an activist for Indigenous film artists and an Indigenous film artist herself. We had our first GFNPN meetings trying to build this Indigenous led structure. Joshua Pedder performed Jupiter Orbiting, a show that is a slow unraveling of ego that is profound and subtle in its method. Karen Wreckley offered a performance lecture called Care, Kinship and the Realness of Land's Overflow into the Celestial. We held kin conversations one, two and three led by Paola Bala, Genevieve Grieves and myself, the last one of which was titled Kailuk Tara, mispronunciation is mine, I'm learning. It's a upic word that means to act, change or deal with things in various ways, some of which are hard to explain. More on this in a second. There was a pulling thread story in fiber weaving workshop with Spider Woman Theater. There was another performance lecture by Jackson Paul's called Manifest X. S.J. Norman's Endurance work, Cicitrix One, that which is taken, that which remains, which is a work to transmute grief and boundary as they scarred their back 147 times to mark each death of an Aboriginal person whilst in custody of the colonial carceral state. There were dance classes with Katina Olson, Thomas E.S. Kelly, Vicki Van Hoot, there was the work called Footwork Technique by Maria Randall, an intimate sharing of Aboriginal footwork as a form of land acknowledgement and a way to pay tribute to traditional owners and land. There was reflections of native voices, two days of readings by established and emerging playwrights based in the U.S. curated by Muriel Borst Tarant. There was kinsulatory mappings in light and dark matter, a fire, a feast and performances including raps by Allison Atutuk Warden and flute by composer Brent Michael Davids and Dana Ashby Serpentine, a disturbing and reifying flow of movement and stillness that becomes and is power. And we have an overnight closed protocol ceremony at Bear Mountain, which is a diplomatic gathering place of the Lenape. So kailuk tarah, a word that means to act, to change, to deal with things in various ways, some of which are difficult to explain. Jason Tamaru, who you'll hear from in a second, Yorta Yorta Mann, who's here from Narm in Melbourne, Australia. He came here, I haven't seen him much, because he's been doing repatriation work at the Smithsonian. You all know what that is, right? So Jason is working to bring his ancestors home. And you know what I mean by that, right? So we don't say this word in relation to this, but I'll say it now for your benefit, bones. He's working with bones. He's working with bones that were stolen from their burial places. We don't say bones, we say ancestors. And we have a living relationship with our ancestors. So think about that. A lot of us have had to do this. Think about that action of getting your relatives out of horrifying places. All over this country, we have relatives in drawers and in cabinets. And Jason is trying to bring his relatives home. So imagine additionally that, you know, you go to a conference on the other side of the world to exchange with your artistic colleagues and potential collaborators, and you want to, but you don't, because you're also called for other deep, deep work that needs you to. So that deep, deep work, that deep, deep work that to act, to change, to deal with things in various ways. I'm wondering if you all also remember that other story I told you, the one about connecting to ground, the one about acknowledging and paying respect to Piscataway land, people, and ancestors. You remember that one? Good. Many of you spoke with me about it, and I'm glad you remember it. But I would like to know why I have not heard a single time an acknowledgement or respect paid to the Piscataway nation from this stage. I have not heard the word Piscataway outside of private conversations spoken during this whole many days. Does anyone have any reflections on why that is? Eman, last night in the performance, she said in relation to the occupation of Palestine, she said that she needs Jewish Americans to be the strongest voice against that occupation. And we recognize why. We can recognize that power. And I feel similar. I need you. I need all of you who are not indigenous to be the strongest voices against our oppression and our erasure in the clumsy ways, in the great ways. I need you to be powerful voices with us for justice and equity. As we indigenous people do all the deep work we need to do to fix things that settler colonialism has been fucking up here for the last hundreds of years. This includes, of course, our art and our stories and our dances. You know, and Heather Raffa was up here a few times and I watched her and I love her and I love her work so much and I admire her voice and her timing and her embodiment of a moment and a phrase and all of the actors and all of the scholars and all of the thought makers and change makers who I heard and I listened to I was at almost everything except for today because I was preparing. Everyone who shared time up here I admire everybody so much. But who has been missing? I've been here placed at the opening and at the end. Both actions I enjoy but I and other artists would also like to share with you our voice and our timing, our embodiment of moment and phrase. And so Mary Catherine Nagel, Larissa Fasthorse, Rosie Seamus, Ryan Eagle, Mariel Miguel, Gloria Miguel, Mikhail D'Angeli, Demian Deniazzi, the 1491's Vicki Ramirez, Anthony Hudson, Allison Warden, Christopher Morgan, I could go on and on and on. The First Nations artists of this country who are not here. We need, we all need to be here all together all the time in and amongst one another as we all try to fix the world. And I take the time to invoke these artist names because to my knowledge there weren't any other First Nations artists from the U.S. here. We can only do good work globally when we also do good work locally and I know we all know this in theory but let's also know this in practice. And I'm not picking on this gathering. It happens at every single gathering all the time. So let's just have this be the last one. We can do that. If we commit to it together. We can always do better. That's what we're here for and I hold you all in very high regard and I have very high expectations. And so please with the person right next to you right now, please hold them in very high regard. Please have very high expectations of them as you just very briefly one minute each share with one another what actions you have committed to. You've had a few days to think about it. What actions you have committed to in terms of equity for Indigenous peoples. And just one more minute. Good. And go ahead and pause this conversation. You can come back to it and please please do. And I appreciate your energy and jumping into this conversation and I appreciate Emma your land acknowledgement the other day downstairs and I appreciate everyone who steps into something unknown on the path to making things better. And so for now for the next two minutes can your pair get with another pair and just talk about your actions and how you might amplify those actions. And just another minute. Thank you. And if you could pause these conversations now and come back to them when you have a moment. But I'm hoping that maybe one or two of these quartets would mind sharing what what you your actions or what you came up with in terms of amplifying these actions. Any quartet want to share. Yes. Thank you. What. What. Oh. Okay. I'm very grateful to you Emily for doing this in a way that shows how many wonderful performers there are out there of Indigenous people who are trendsetters in ways that are so creative across a huge range of disciplines. And we do have at this beautiful university the makings of of something that could be very synergistic that could enable Indigenous studies to really take off and fly. So thank you for your leadership and thank you for saying this at a time when the Dean of the School of Foreign Service happens to be in the room and has been a supporter and can help continue to be. Thank you. And thank you Derek. You've always been a supporter. I met one of your great students. She was here at the opening Kelsey Lawson who's been doing a lot of work for Indigenous students and Indigenous rights and recognition here during her tenure here should graduate soon. So we're hopeful that she will be able to pass that work on to other students who will grow it with Marjorie. Is another quartet want to share. I will say that our quartet said a number of things about continuing to do land acknowledgement even when that land acknowledgement might be something that you don't know the protocol for. I think the more times we see individuals getting up and doing land acknowledgement we realize how personal it can be. I've I've seen the Deborah Rutter at the Kennedy Center do a land acknowledgement with those really beautiful. I thought yours was stunning and I think that the more times we see that there isn't always a protocol. There's also a mention of reaching out to the Piscataway and to other Indigenous tribes to actually get their permission much like you talked about at the beginning. It's important to actually have a dialogue instead of just do the land acknowledgement. Another thing that came up is there are some tribes that do real rent that allow you to actually make a donation to that tribe to support them because we do live in a capitalistic society and money does make a difference quite often and I'm in the process of transitioning to Seattle and in Seattle the Duwamish have a program called real rent and the more people that know that this exists and the more other tribes that know that this exists may really be able to not just amplify the voice of those tribes but give them I hate to say that money is power but give them access to more financial resources to make change and then also paying for what you use absolutely exactly the title of it right there and then something that you said was a short course oh yeah my day job is that I work at the American Political Science Association and it is a 115 year old organization that is predominantly white and this year our annual meeting is here in Piscataway territory and for the first time in 115 years of APSA we're organizing an indigenous politics short course which is a pre-conference event that's bringing together indigenous political scientists and scholar practitioners and tribal leaders to talk about the state of native politics in this country and I think the last thing was just about encouraging us in when we're talking about climate change to engage with indigenous communities because as the first stewards of this land there were a lot of great ways to be to honor the land more ethically than we currently are so that was the last thing of our quartet did you just read the UN just published a report saying that indigenous knowledge is what we'll save is what could save the world if we listen we're like we've been telling you this all right one more you wanted to share there I just I'm from Canada and them I think in conversations like this you might be helpful to just look at that corner because I mean not to not to risk the flag of Canada but I think that Canada is really doing something significant in that reason and specifically in my own field one of the things that we're doing for the past two years is really on language revitalization because you all know that some of the languages are going into extension now I'm a very black person I'm from Nigeria but one thing that I did when I got to Canada it's start thinking what is the connection of their history to my history and like I keep saying as long as we think we keep thinking in divide on the rule we're going to be ruled so I see the connection from a Britain Nigeria was colonized by the you know the by the British and I see the connection to their own history too so when the opportunity came in for me I started thinking how can I use my own art to build alliance so over since since 2016 we've been going to this particular community every summer working on language so I would get your story with the elders and we sit down for days and how can we pull that on stage and and the times I need to shut up because I have no idea what it is there are times that they're like oh we can do this so I think that we're looking into what are other initiatives also my university University of Victoria has a law program right now and it's like and it's one of the universities in the country that has a law program on indigenous law so and I think they just the government just gave them a huge grant to be an entire building looking focusing on indigenous law so I believe that and I think what part of the things that Canada did was to look to Australia where a lot of things have been done so I think there are a lot of initiatives going on that I think the US can really oh the university here can look as a way to help in building a lot of these initiatives thanks definitely those countries that you mentioned have are are further ahead in terms of acknowledgement and recognitions and reparations with indigenous peoples of their lands and we can learn a lot from from some of those systems and we can do better than some of those systems and collectively we can all always do better thank you I want to thank you all very much for this time with you together these whole few days and for all of these actions that I know you know the UPIC universe is a series of concentric circles and I can I apply that so often I think of it right now like I think of this as a as the center like if we center and then the next our actions and then the actions in our communities the actions with our local indigenous communities actions that can reverberate across the world that's a really deep change and we started everything with hope and to me that is what is hopeful thank you yeah thank you these last few days for me have been phenomenal I've had the opportunity to see the treasures of this country the First Nations native mob that took me into their collections area and what I've seen was phenomenal they have the key to life we were looking for answers the answers with your own people they underestimate your influence on the world if you can show lead the way on working with the people of this country that you will influence all of us I hope you hear these words because I love you America my journey would love to be with all of you a bit longer but as Emily said my path went along the way my business is to bring peace to my land I went to see the collections area of our treasures and what I've seen there blew my mind there were things that I've seen before there's things I've never seen before the collector the manager that was there he was cautious and I was cautious but through the magic of what we've seen we're able to speak and through speaking we're able to push a little bit further and my job is to take things home I'm taking home what I've seen I take home to the tribal people of my country through the tribal group we will begin the process I'll bring our people back home I'm so thankful we sing country my land you're the order go into my space I Good evening can you stand up I like you when you stand up it will be very short yes that's good do it like that I would like before we go from this place before we leave before we go back home Ferris I'd like to commit myself and I hope that you are going to share this commitment I spent these four days I have a big change inside me a lot of good things the good things that we met together we came together and this is the meaning of the gathering that we are here because we are thinking of the welfare of the human group within our performance are without that you can't do nothing I'm so happy that it was not a festival a conference a symposium it is multi multi artist we met and we talk we agree we disagree but at the end I take my commitment home as she the lady said just said now we work for the human being so are you commit yourself like me to come back again with other effort and to complete this message we have a message now a very strong message going out from your town this moment I'm sure the message will reach everywhere by your commitment so if you are commit yourself say yes are you commit yourself this is very small yeah are you commit yourself yeah sure can you jump like this can you do this yes yes can you do it like that see you next year um okay don't leave yet um I know we're a little over time I just want to say my last words first of all TS Eliot has never followed that before um no I I want to I want our final words to actually be what we're about to hear and then we'll have words with each other I want to very I just want to say that what I think is already self-evident which is this has been the most important significant and meaningful week in the life of the lab for sure but also in my professional life it's been the most beautiful few days of my professional life and the most important and that is thanks to each and every human being who came into the space and through the space I really we thank you all of us who've been part of this from you know from the bottom of our hearts so thank you to be continued and please uh for our final words welcome the extraordinary Kathy Shelfant it has been a great privilege to be here with all of you all this time and to be to share in the luminousness of Derek Goldman's spirit this is TS Eliot not in conversation with Krishna but in conversation with Julian of Norwich uh medieval nun and a great poet what we call the beginning is often the end and to make an end is to make a beginning the end is where we start from and every phrase and sentence that is right where every word is at home taking its place to support the others the word neither diffident nor ostentatious an easy commerce of the old and the new the common word exact without vulgarity the formal word precise but not pedantic the complete consort dancing together every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning every poem and epitaph and any action is a step to the block to the fire down the seas throat or to an illegible stone and that is where we start we die with the dying see they depart and we go with them we are born with the dead see they return and bring us with them the moment of the rows and the moment of the yew tree are of equal duration a people without history is not redeemed from time for history is a pattern of timeless moments with the drawing of this love and the voice of this calling we shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time through the unknown remembered gate when the last of earth left to discover is that which was the beginning at the source of the longest river the voice of the hidden waterfall and the children in the apple tree not known because not looked for but heard half heard in the stillness between two waves of the sea quick now here now always a condition of complete simplicity costing not less than everything and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well when the tongues of flame are enfolded into the crowned knot of fire and the fire and the rows are one