 I'm always at the library. I love the library. It's my favorite place because I read a book a day. People don't believe that. So I just was thinking, while I was waiting for this to happen, I had to have new books because I just returned the five that I had borrowed last week. And so I got one called Radio Free Vermont. And I got to read a few chapters of it. And I was realizing, radio's revolutionary. It's amazing. And we're going towards the 100th anniversary of radio. And although the youngsters today in college, don't listen to the radio. They listen to podcasts or all kinds of other words. Weird stuff. If you go to any reservation in the country, because they're really not that connected to wireless internet, they depend on radio. And I was just sitting here and thinking about the family trees, thinking about the Pony Express. Because in my family tree, Alexander Majors was one of the three people that started the Pony Express. And my great-great-grandfather was one of the Pony Express writers because he was Alexander's brother. So he rode on the Pony Express, clear across from Missouri to California. And he carried a Bible. And he swore to be a T-totaler while he was writing for the Pony Express. Because those were the requirements for writing the Pony Express. And then I go, and I hear all this wonderful political stuff. And I said, Radio Free Vermont, we've got the revolution going right now. And then you talk about Cherokee Nation. OK, so Cherokees came up with things to do before they came up with the words for them. So the Cherokee Phoenix was actually a public relations maneuver. The Cherokee Phoenix was the first newspaper created, produced, and written in the Cherokee language and in English. And it was published in order to make sure that the people in the Congress knew what we were thinking and feeling. And also, it was tried to tell people, you know, we're just like you are. We're human beings. We have desires and wants and needs. So it was public relations. Because the definition of public relations is to overcome corporate malfeasance. Nowadays, we have a sort of a weird backward sort of public relations where the corporations are trying to fool us into thinking that we aren't really doing anything that's malfeasable. I don't know how to say. What's the word for that? We're not committing malfeasance, whatever. But it was really important to me to be part of the 100th anniversary of radio. Because it was Cherokee people, at least two Cherokees, were some of the first programmers on the radio stations of the 20s. So in 1921, 22, a young woman married John Reed and moved to, I think, Wisconsin or someplace. Now, her family was part of the publishing tradition. They did the Twin Territories magazine. They did a lot of newspapers. And they absolutely refused to have anything to do with the Dawes and Lattman Act roles. So they refused to be enrolled. They refused to have anything out about it. Because their political stand was, we don't want to give up our common good, our common lands, and our common way of life. So they were always putting out the fact that John Ross is giving in. There's always fights going on. In any native nation, anywhere, there's always going to be. Because we're family. Of course, we fight. Brothers and sisters always fight. Cousins always fight. You know, it's just part of the territory. So anyway, what happened was, as a young woman, she started a radio program. And everybody called her the Sunshine Lady. And I've been really looking at some of the things that she's talked about. This was during the Depression. This was during a period where everybody was not had nothing, really. And so she was able to take people and say, you know, we've got recipes for this happiness. We've got recipes for how to make the most out of every single thing that you have. So I sort of thought, you know, this is sort of what Oprah Winfrey did for television. So we had an early Oprah Winfrey in the Cherokee radio programming. Because a lot of the stuff that happened in radio then ultimately translated into television. But this was something. And then there was another cousin of Kim's, uncle, who sounds just like my uncle's when you listen to him on the old radio wire wax recordings or whatever they did. Record was Will Rogers. He was listened to by one quarter of the population of the United States of America. And I've heard three people tell me in the process of doing this book that if he had not crashed in the plane in Alaska because he was promoting flying and air travel and everything else, he probably would have gone on and become one of the first acting presidents of the United States. We have a tendency to elect our actors in this country. You know, it's sometimes good, sometimes not so good. So I've been really learning a lot about how radio influenced this country. But more than that, how the Cherokee Nation, the Lakota Nation, the Indian Chautakwas, the speakers, the oral historians, the people that passionately talked about their people, their languages, their lands, their cultures, and shared it in summer camps in YMCA's, in YWCA's, in creating Boy Scouts of America, in Camp Fire Girls, all kinds of ways. The life of native people influenced the children and the adults in ways that we will never be able to figure out and ways that we will never be able to understand how much influence native people had on all Americans. So I decided, since I haven't read that book anywhere, that I was going to have to write it. So I'm just saying that I have it all outlined. I'm going to get 16 chapters out of it. I got the early people. I got, since we are right in between Armed Forces Day and Memorial Day, I have a chapter on American Indian veterans doing radio. Now, I don't know how many of you have heard of the Code Talkers. But did you know there were 17 nations? Well, 17 languages and 33 reservation bands. So in other words, there was Lakota, Dakota, and Lakota from about 16 different reservations. But all these, they all spoke the same languages, so they were mutually understandable. So ultimately, the United States decided to give medals to all the Code Talkers. And they found there were 33 different bands, federally recognized tribes that did code talking in World War II. But they're not the only ones that worked with radio. I happen to know this because my dad went to Oklahoma A&M during just before the war. And he went through ROTC all four years. And he graduated in uniform as a, I forget, second lieutenant. Do you go second lieutenant and then first lieutenant? OK, good. So he graduated as a second lieutenant and went to ultimately Fort Manadnok, New Jersey to get long-line telephone radio officer training. So his job during World War II was to fix and make sure all the supplies and all the wires and all the radio supply equipment got to the places it was supposed to get to so that the Code Talkers could use them. So he went to England for the first couple of days of the invasion of Normandy to make sure all the supplies would get over to France in a timely and proper way so that it was all organized and it could be put back together and all the wires matched and all the radio tubes weren't all broken and all the supplies were together. So then he got into Normandy like a week after D-Day. Thank God, because I probably wouldn't have been here if he had to go through what those people did when they first got to Normandy. So he went from Normandy to Berlin with General Patton's Third Army fixing the radios and lining up the wires and making sure that the FM was going through the hills right and people could communicate. So it's awesome radio history that is part of my own family and that was interesting because my mother's Choctaw and in World War I, in 1918 and 1919, the Choctaws were the first Code Talkers in France. And there were also a couple of Cherokees because they have documented one Cherokee man, Georgia Dare, to be a Code Talker from World War I. Now my great-granduncle, Judge Arthur Evans Robertson, was in the American Expeditionary Forest Division 36 and he went from the Argonne Forest and all kinds of other places. He spoke Cherokee. So it's quite likely, since you need two people, to do Code Talking, one to give the message, one to receive the message, that he was also a Code Talker in World War I. Can't prove it, but hey, you know, I'm going to posit that. So it's fun writing these books because you really find out things. And then I found out my aunt did one wonderful thing. She did a radio show for the Chickasaw Library Project. Library, got it, you know? So she did a radio show in the 60s. So I come by my radio habit ultimately with a great deal of respect and a great deal of, and edits in the blood, okay? So I started doing radio in 1973. So this is 2018. I believe that's 45 years. So over half my life I've been doing radio and it's almost, you know, the 100th anniversary of radio. So I've almost been doing radio for half of that time. Hey, that's not bad. So I am a radio activist. I'm going to call the, when you look for it, it's going to be called Radioactive Indians. So look forward to that and keep beating me up if I don't do it, you know? And I'm really looking forward to you guys being there for my first whoop party. All right? All right.