 My name is Ian Thomas Tafoya, and I am a trustee of Historic Denver, and I'm very honored to be holding this space today. I am here to discuss the ancestral lands and the people who lived here in this community long before this amphitheater was built. The shine in Arapaho ranged in this community for thousands of years before the European colonizers came here. They used this place as a sacred place like us. I believe that you can understand why this place is protected historically. It is a gem and a mecca for people and artists, and we know that artists break down barriers and bring people together. Now today in Denver there are people are gathering now as we speak for an Indigenous People's Day march to transform Columbus Day. There are four people. There are four directions that are being celebrated today, and they are all represented by colors. Red will march for our ancestors and honoring our ancestors and elders. We are fortunate today to have Ada Deere, an elder in our community here in red. Those in yellow will be marching for harmony and balance with the earth. You can see across the globe the transformation that is occurring, and Indigenous people and their descendants make up 5% of the living beings on this planet, yet they protect 80% of the biodiversity and the medicines that will heal us all. Why is for Indigenous rights? I ask you to honor and respect Indigenous rights in tribal nations. We do not know borders. We know a land that belongs to us and raised us and held us tight, like a mother. Please respect that and join us in celebrating Indigenous rights. Now the last one of which I am wearing in black is to close the ICE detention facilities in the camps. Historians know whether Japanese internment camps or prisons that hold our black and brown brothers, these camps are no different than reservations. People should not be bound by these laws and children should not be taken from their parents. Now the last thing that I want to hold space for is for missing, murdered and Indigenous women. There are so many, and we are honored to have so many strong women here today, and Ada told me to speak to the men in this audience that we must stand strong, that the men must work to protect our people and to protect our women. So please go Google missing and Indigenous murdered women. The oil and gas industry is exploiting them to know to know abounds. People are suffering and we need to heal. Now lastly to close my space. I want all of you to think of water, your first memory of water. Water holds our memories and water heals us. Thank you and enjoy your day. And now please welcome Winter Marie Roybal of Colorado Preserve America Youth Summit. Hello, my name is Winter. I am currently a first-year grad student at CU Denver and yes, an alumni of the Preserve America Youth Summit. Growing up in Colorado, I never imagined that I'd be on stage at Red Rock, so this is pretty cool. But I would not be standing here today giving a speech about preservation at a preservation conference without many powerful and influential women who have guided me along a path of stewardship for historic places. The first of course is my mom who took me to my very first National Park, Mesa Verde, when I was six years old. The second is Miss Sloan, my high school history teacher, who encouraged me to attend the youth summit when I was a sophomore in high school. Then comes Ann Pritzloff and Michelle Pearson, who created the youth summit and have continued to be my mentors through high school, college, and life. These women have given me opportunities to lobby in our nation's capital for preservation and speak at my very first Pass Forward Conference in Savannah, Georgia when I was only 17. They have continued to give myself and other youth a voice in preservation and for that, I'm very grateful. Other women include Jane Jacobs, who I read about religiously in my undergrad, and Dana Crawford, who I saw stand up for historic buildings in my own small town. When I decided to get my master's in historic preservation, I applied for and was awarded the National Trust's Mildred Coladney Diversity Scholarship, which aims to make preservation a more diverse field. Throughout my life, and I'm sure yours as well, women have been motivators and change makers. We, as preservationists and advocates, should show our gratitude to the powerful women in our lives by preserving more diverse places, especially those involving women's history. As women, we are very powerful, but we need to preserve the histories and places of queer women, women of color, disabled women, young women, all women. I thank you for allowing me to share my voice with you, and I hope that you help me and other women by continuing to empower the future generations that will inherit these historic sites. Thank you. Please welcome Catherine Malone-France, Chief Preservation Officer for the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Good morning. First, thank you, Ian, and thank you, Winter, for starting our program off this morning in such a meaningful and inspirational way. And now it's my pleasure to set the stage for a panel of powerhouse women. You know, with the commemoration of the centennial of the 19th amendment, we, like many others, are taking a close look at the ways that women's stories are told and in the telling how they are preserved. Telling these stories is such an important part of telling our full history, and this celebrating and sharing of women's history extends well before and far beyond the 19th amendment. Today, we have three speakers who will examine how we tell women's stories, with the recognition that these histories are not all the same. There is no single African-American women's story just as there isn't a single Native American women's story. Like all stories, they vary from community to community, from individual to individual, and from place to place, in a layered and intersecting way. How we tell these stories can take so many forms, from oral history to music. And now it's my pleasure to introduce our panelists this morning. First, the legendary Ada Deer has spent her life advocating for American Indians across the United States. Ada was instrumental in restoring her tribe, the monomony, to federally recognized status. With a master's degree in social work from Columbia, she has worked as a tireless advocate. She has worked as a tireless advocate and activist for human rights, especially as the first female assistant secretary of Indian affairs in the Department of the Interior. Dr. Tya Miles, a professor of history at Harvard University, is the author of three prize winning works in the history of early American race relations, specifically on history and memory and women's history. She is a past MacArthur Foundation Fellow and Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellow, and she is a current National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholars Award recipient. But first, we will hear from Amethyst Kia, who is a professed Southern Gothic alt country blues singer, with a musical toolbox that is augmented by her scholarship of African American roots music. Today, we'll hear some of Amethyst's music, including her recent collaboration as part of the group, Our Native Daughters. Let's get started. Hello, everybody. How are y'all doing this morning? Well, it's an honor to be asked to be part of this event today. In general, it had always been a dream to play at Red Rocks. I'd heard about this theater for a really long time, and so when I got the email of this event, I already was already in because of what it meant to be part of this, and then when I was like, oh yeah, and it's going to be at Red Rocks, I'm like, what? So this is, I don't know, this is just a, it's a really beautiful day, and I'm glad to be here with you all to have these moments with you all today. So yeah, thanks for coming. So I had the opportunity back in January of 2018. I went down to Lafayette, Louisiana for about three weeks, and wrote and recorded an album with Rhiannon Giddens, who is formerly of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, and an amazing solo artist in her own right. And then Layla McCullough, who was also part of, or excuse me, that was also part of the Carolina Chocolate Drops as well, and has her own solo career now, and Allison Russell from a band called Birds of Chicago. And this was a project, it was, you know, four black women that play banjos, and our mission was to tell the stories and tell the narratives of enslaved people during the transatlantic slave trade. It's a, it's a part of history that to this day we have a hard time discussing. Usually it's discussed in an academic, very kind of stiff academic way, or people are so upset because they don't even want to talk about it. And I think that we have recognized the atrocities of many other things that have happened. We recognize the atrocities that have happened to the Native American peoples. We've looked at, we've recognized the atrocities that happened during the Holocaust and during the Japanese internment, and somehow this one subject, the transatlantic slave trade, is one that I think I'm not really sure if it hits a little too close to home for some people, or I'm not 100% sure why that's the case, but it's definitely, it's an ongoing issue. And the only way that we can move forward with race relations in this country is that we look at the trauma that happened to enslaved people and to the people that own slaves, because that is an abusive relationship. It's a traumatic relationship and it's affected policy, and that's why we had Jim Crow, it's why we had segregation. It's why, you know, it's why when, you know, when, when desegregation happened, black children having eggs and eggs thrown at them and having racial slurs yelled at them because they want to go to school. I mean, that didn't just happen out of a vacuum. It all stemmed from what happened during the transatlantic slave trade. So it was important to be able to talk about these narratives and these stories, and the best way to do it is through song, because music has a way of disarming all of us and a way of connecting us even for that moment, no matter what our differences are. Music is that one moment where we can all recognize each other's humanity, and that's what I believe music is about, and that's what this album is about healing, and it's about people understanding what those, what that time meant for all of us and that we're all standing on a lot of, a lot of shoulders of people that survived through that time for a lot of us to be standing here today. So, so anyway, the first song that I'll do is called Blood and Bones. It's a song that I co-wrote with Allison Russell for the record, Songs of Our Native Daughters, and it's essentially the story of, the story of a, it's two different sort of narratives within it, two different situations that involved enslaved people, and the chorus is one that I wrote a few years before and didn't know what to do with it, and it found life in this project and in this song. This child ain't mine, but my hands are tied. She's a life of bounty and her skin is white. Under my care she'll play and fly. Here's I'll be cast aside. I was once a noble daughter I was captured for the silver, sent across the sea to a land unrivalled. Sold me to some white man, skin as golden dust to the wind. I'm not enough steel to reconcile, crying out to the darkness. Once your way to feeling with no surprise, rest assured to welcome surplus of sister. One brother the strength, one brother the soul. Kinship denied is kinship still to reconcile, crying out to the darkness. Once your way to feeling life, deem it no surprise, rest assured to welcome surplus of systematic love. So as you can imagine, quite a bit of the songs, which unfortunately I don't have any of those CDs with me, the songs were Native Daughters, but you can order the physical copies at SmithsonianFolkways.com and you can also order it on Amazon, and then obviously it's also on streaming services as well if you want to take a listen, but anyway as you can imagine quite a few of the songs on this record deal with some very sort of very heartbreaking stories, but there's also some songs on there about triumph, and I think one thing to remember is that in history any people that have ever been put in a situation where they've been subjugated and where they've been treated as second-class citizens, that there's always been pillars of strength within that that have pushed through and overcome that and spoken out and have raised their voices to be able to break free from that subjugation, and so there are songs on this record that are also about overcoming that and coming on another side. So it is an album about tragedy and triumph, which in a lot of ways are just very intertwined. They can be one and the same at times. So this next song is one of the songs on the record that I wrote that is a song about triumph and overcoming, and it's a song called Black Myself, and it was inspired by a song called John Henry, which is an old folk ballad, and one of the lines in this particular version, which is a version by Sid Hemphill, one of the lines in it was, I don't want no red black woman, black myself, and it made me think of some of the intraracial discrimination that would happen within the black community because in order to be perceived as equal, the idea was that some people would want to be as light as they could. There's skin bleaching creams that exist for that reason, and then also marrying white or marrying lighter so that way you can be perceived more equally in society. So there were actually societies called Brown societies where if your skin was darker than a paper bag, you wouldn't be allowed in the society. So that line made me think of that, and so the phrase Black Myself just kept circling around, and then eventually it sort of came out in this way. And so the first verse is from the viewpoint of an enslaved person, and the second verse is if you point from a person that's no longer enslaved, but is still dealing with subjugation and stereotypes, and then the third verse kind of comes from my point of view, which is despite all of the things that have happened, I'm able to stand before you, I'm able to travel the world and do what I love to do, and it's because the people before me survived, and if it wasn't for them, I would not be here. So paying respects to that as well. So also want to say before I, because I know I need to sing this song, and then it's time to move on to the next thing, but this has been a really inspiring, it's been really inspiring to meet Taya Miles and Edadir, and to meet all the people that have put this together. It's just a very strong spirit here today, and I'm really feeling it, and it's amazing. So again, I'm honored to be here, and thank you for listening. Thank y'all so much. As a person, the environment is always important to us, but that's not my topic right now. But if you want to stand up and get a stretch, the topic is to talk about my mother, but I want to put this in a little context. This is in celebration the attention paid to women because we got the right to vote over 100 years ago, and that's an important privilege and right that should have been ours to begin with. They left us out of the Constitution. That's another lecture, but I wanted to put it in context. Okay, now in order to understand the importance of my topic, I really want to give tribute to my beautiful mother, Constance Wood Deer. She grew up in Philadelphia and a very, very well-to-do family of Quakers. At the time she was a young adult, you could have three choices. Wife, she immediately said, no, she didn't want to do that. She could also choose to be a teacher. She said, no, she chose nursing. She became a nurse, worked in Appalachia, worked, was transferred out to South Dakota and worked among the Rosebud Sioux, and since she was a very, very opinionated person, right is right, wrong is wrong, and people better shape up. Well, of course, she was a very talkative person and she put that gene into me too. And soon they shipped her out to Wisconsin where she went and looking for the horses because she learned to ride out there and went riding with the Indian people, went to the powwows, and was totally entranced by the culture of the native people. Well, she not only got the horses, she got the horsemen. And so here I am. We grew up on the banks of the Wolf River, the beautiful Wolf River of Wisconsin. We absorbed the love of the water. We absorbed the love of the trees. Our reservation, the Menominee Indian Reservation, is known throughout the world for the beautiful forest. You can actually see it from the satellite. It is so outstanding. And so growing up in that environment, I absorbed this early on in my life. When I was under 10, my mother told me, and I was a very beautiful child, she said, Ada, you're an Indian. You know, I had no idea what that meant, but I said, okay, mom. And she said, you are put on this earth for a purpose. Okay. And your purpose is to help your people. Now, that was pretty heavy stuff for her to be telling me at such a young age. But here I am at 84 years still repeating to you what my mother's assignment was to me. So I want every one of you to think about the influence of your family, the influence of your mother, and don't forget the dads, but today we're talking about women. I love school. I spent my first five years on the reservation. Then we moved to Milwaukee during the war, and I came back to the res. And I've had a wonderful public school education in Wisconsin. Went to college, went to graduate school, and never forgot what my mother told me. In the meantime, termination was the policy of the government. It was the nomination act was passed in 1954. And I'll tell you a little more about that later. And then I was in college at the time, and my mother immediately started writing letters to me. And she told me how to do some, she said, I had to do something about this. And I said, mom, I didn't even know anything yet. And so see, you always have to be self aware. So be self aware. All right. I went to graduate school, took a job in Minnesota, and that's where I first became acquainted with the government's policies. One was relocation. I worked in the neighborhood house, and the government was bringing Indians from the northern reservations and the other reservations to also, and put them in the cities. And this was to help. You would bring them out of their poverty-stricken reservations, put them in the cities, they'll melt into the cities, and you'll solve the problem. Well, they showed up at the neighborhood house because the word was out, American Indian social worker at the neighborhood house. And so I had all kinds of people coming to see me because back in 1961, many of you weren't even born then. And I was very unusual. I had a good education, and there I was. So in order to be effective in social justice, you have to have some background. You have to know something, and you have to know how to think. When the termination act was passed, she started writing me letters, and I hadn't forgotten that because I thought of the beautiful land and my tribe. So I absorbed the love of my land and the love of my tribal people, and that is still very, very strong within me. I have a book that's coming out in November, and the first sentence is, you know, I am monomony. So I have a very strong identification as a member of the Monomony Indian tribe, but I'm only half. So I claim the other half too. And one time I told my wood family friend, a relative, I said, you're a wasp. And he said, like, he looked at me. He didn't know what that was. I said, you're a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant. And he still was questioning me, but we went on to other topics then. Okay. So my mother was very influential. She wrote letters constantly. She wrote letters to the governor. She wrote letters to the commissioner of Indian affairs. She was enraged about the termination act. There are many books written about my tribe. We're one of the most famous tribes in America in terms of the policies that were supposed to be inflicted on us, and we were supposed to agree to. So I'm leaving my points about my mother now, just to let you know. And parents, you need to know that you have so much power. You have so much influence over your children. Too many parents get caught up in the tasks of earning a living and, you know, just the hardships sometimes, well, not all hardships, the routines of running a house and so on. And they don't pay enough attention, in my opinion, to their influence on their children. So I am my mother's creation. She comes to the reservation from South Dakota, where she, a whole new world, opened up to her. She actually went riding with the Indians, and they didn't like that. And that was the first time I heard the name Noah Broken Lake. I love the names of the people on the plains. They're crazy horse, sitting bull, names like that. Very picturesque and very appropriate. Well, then, of course, they got Christian names, and they were trying to abolish their Indian identity. All right. I wish I had more time. I'll give you Indians 101 first, but I don't have time to do that. I'm just mentioning that was my first exposure. And when I became aware of this, I said, well, this is wrong. They're not doing it right. First of all, they didn't have any trained people working on this for the most part. And I went to Washington as part of a social work conference. I decided I was going to go and see the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, and the first person there, she was the gatekeeper. She said, oh, you can't do that. You know, he's too busy. Besides, I'm coming back tomorrow. Here's my mother showing through. And I said, I only want is five minutes in between elevators. Well, my mother, I'm being known to me, had been riding hand ladders. And so he was supposed to do something about termination, which I will tell you about. And then he didn't. And so I was really surprised that he was so cordial to me. All right. So termination occurred in 1954. Why? Why? And I'm going to talk a little more about this now. Because the country still has problems dealing with Indians or with all people of color for the most part. And that's another long series, of course, right? At any rate, the Termination Act was passed. And here's here's the outline of it. We were supposed to be abolished as a tribe. We had a lumber industry that was reasonably sufficient. Men worked in the lumber industry cutting the trees and so on. And our tribal treasury put enough money to provide for services on the reservation. And one person said, you're almost white, as if the monomaniacs and other Indians want to be white. You know, all people want to be who they are, right? And anyway, I went to see the commissioner then, Filio Nash. And he looked like Santa Claus. He had a little peat. He had little stripes of white hair, beard and a little pot belly. I didn't realize that he was an anthropologist until later. And I told him, I said, I'm a social worker from a monomaniac. I work in Minnesota. And I think you need to revise your work with the relocation program, not that he was asking me. I'm giving him my observations about what was wrong with the relocation program. And he liked that. And so later on, he ordered one of the BIA persons to hire me. And he took me out to lunch. And he said, well, I'm offering you a job. I said, well, I really have a job. And besides, I figured out what social workers did then in the BIA, they took babies away and they put them in foster homes and things like that. So at any rate, termination, it abolished the tribal government. It made our beautiful reservation subject to taxation. It closed the tribal roles. We were no longer eligible for any kind of scholarships or other kinds of federal programs. And it was a cultural economic political disaster. It wasn't finalized until 1961. And people didn't understand what it meant. The governor didn't understand. People didn't understand. And this was supposed to solve the problem because we were supposed to be almost white. And if you're almost white, you're supposed to melt in with the society. Well, of course, that didn't happen. And yes, some Indians made the transition, but lots of people were very, very unhappy. And some of them went back to the reservation. Some of them did other things too. So when I found out that they were selling our land, what? I said, they abolished the tribal government. They installed a state private operation corporation. And people didn't understand what it was. But when they started selling the land, that just struck me in my heart. And I couldn't quite believe this. They started, the nominee people started restoration effort. They started demonstrating against the land sales. So I went for another time to the reservation. I went two or three times to see what they were actually doing. Were they accomplishing anything with these demonstrations? And I joined one demonstration. And the authorities then, and I can't describe all the, there was different levels of culture, of control that they had exerted. So the nominees didn't have any control at that point. And so they were very afraid of the demonstrators. We were all nominees. And we had a demonstration march from our community in Kishina up to Legend Lake. Whoops, I'm getting the sign, right? Okay. All right. Well, just let me finish this point. Well, I decided I was not going to put up with this. This was wrong. It was our land. And they were not going to proceed any longer with the sale of our land. I went and found lawyers and we started their effort for restoration. So I got the sign. I got through termination. I got through the start of restoration. And we'll talk about that a little later. But in essence, we brought about a historic victory for our people, for all Indians, and for all Americans. Because through our efforts, we were able to get the U.S. Congress to repeal termination, to pass restoration. And that's why it's important to know your government to work within the structures, but don't let them control you. My name is Taya Miles, and I have the privilege and the pleasure of knitting together some of the threads that we've been hearing so far today. I have to tell you that Ada Deer is an absolutely astonishing human being. And you know that, right? But I'm just telling you, adding to that. And one thing that I have taken from her example is to think about what would Ada do? Do what Ada does? So I'm doing what Ada did. She stood up at the podium because she is a force of nature, and I am simply following her example as I offer you just a few thoughts. I want to just point out and emphasize that in preparing for being here with you today, I asked some scholars in the Indigenous Studies what they would say to me in trying to characterize Ada Deer. And they said she was a force of nature, that she was an amazing role model, and that she is a champion of Indian country. These words are absolutely true. But the thing about Ada Deer, and the thing about many women in the history of the U.S. and across the world, is that we don't fully recognize their contributions. We don't tend to see women. We don't tend to see what's important to them. We don't tend to see what it is that they can make a possible. This woman made possible the end of the policy of termination, which she has just explained to you was disastrous for Native people. Another one of those federal policies which was misconceived, which was self-interested in the part of the U.S. government, and which went completely awry, which damaged Native people's lives, which took away their lands, and which ended their ability to define themselves as holistic, sovereign entities. Ada Deer was one of the significant people in that fight, and so I am thrilled that she now has a memoir that will be out, I think, any week now making a difference. Now here's the tie that I'd like to kind of knit together with what we've heard from Amethyst, who has the most moving voice that I think I have ever heard, whose words and music just speak to the heart. The tie is that we, as human beings, throughout our time on this earth, our long, long deep history, and sometimes it feels like, maybe especially now, we face insurmountable problems. We face intractable issues. We face mountains that seem like it would be impossible for us to scale them. I think the rocks are influencing my language here. And we often can feel demoralized. We feel like there's no way out. There's no hope. There's no promise. But the example of these women shows us there actually is possibility. There is promise. We can move mountains. How do we move mountains? Through creativity, through beauty, through music, through soul, through human connection. That's one sphere, right? There's another very important sphere that Ada Deere exemplifies, and that is through voice, through action, through hitting the neighborhood, hitting the streets, knocking on doors, going to senators, visiting congressmen, visiting congresswomen, it would be now. It wasn't always the case, right? And making an argument for why change must happen and not stopping until those mountains begin to crumble. That's the connection that I think we want to share with you. That we can make change. Women are often the change makers of our communities and our societies, and it's important for us to recognize that, to recognize what it is that women do, what it is that women contribute, and the wide range and diversity of how women experience their worlds and how they make a difference in people's lives. So what I'd like to do now is actually come and take a seat because I am going to do what Ada is doing, and I hope that Amethyst can join us and that we can have a broader conversation. To actually begin by picking up the theme of place that Ada started with. And I'd like to open the conversation up to include Amethyst and then circle back around to Ada. So Amethyst, we heard about how important the Menominee Reservation was to Ada in her life and her growing up, yourself formative. It was for her. Can you tell us about where you're from, where you grew up, and how it influenced your music? Yeah, so I grew up in a white suburban neighborhood in Chattanooga, Tennessee. I grew up there. I lived there for the first 19 years of my life. And I was introverted and shy, so I had an interesting combination there. But what ended up happening with that was I ended up sort of focusing a lot of my energy on music and writing. So the home that I grew up in, my parents loved listening to music, and my father had a very extensive vinyl collection and CD collection. So I would wake up every morning and he also had these three-way speakers and he had a mixer. He was a big audiophile, so he was very much into perfecting the sound. So all the music sounded amazing in the house, and it would fill the house. Some days it would be Carlos Santana, some days it would be Dolly Parton, or Miles Davis, or the Allman Brothers, or Earth, Wind, and Fire, so just anything really. And so I kind of picked up on that sort of eclectic music taste from him. And so when I was 13, up until that point I'd been playing sports and stuff like that, but when I was 13 my parents bought me a guitar and I kind of just went all in after that with music. And so the first 10 years of my life I played music kind of as a catharsis, because as I mentioned I was shy, so I had a lot of like social anxiety and things like that, because there were some certain elements within where I lived, where we were like the only black people in a white suburban neighborhood, and everybody was most conservative and Christian, and there was always the question of where do you go to church, because there's like within a three mile radius there were like 10 churches, and we didn't go to church. We had a general kind of idea of some sort of God-conscious or spiritual element, but I didn't go to church. And then there was later on I'd have to deal with my sexuality on top of the fact that I didn't go to church, so that was kind of put me as the odd one out, and also racially there was also issues there, because when you turn 13 the parents kind of made their kids kind of go in the other direction, because regardless of the fact that I was in the same socioeconomic bracket, I still was not considered to be one of them. It's cute when you're five or six years old, but when you get to a certain age, people kind of just started dropping off the map, and so that led to like a long many, many years of really poor self-image, and music for me was my catharsis. It was the one thing that I knew I could go in my room, and I can play my guitar, and I can listen to music, watch movies, books, and I really delved into subject matter where people were dealing with adversity, and that's in dealing with pain, and that's kind of the kind of music that I really got into subject-wise. It didn't matter what the genre was necessarily. So, and then eventually I went to creative arts high school the last two years of my life, which made a huge difference as far as the public school I went to. The art school, everybody was weird. Everybody was a nerd. Everybody, you know, there was the theater nerds, and the the art nerds, and the music nerds, and so everybody was weird, and so it was great. It was great to know to be in an environment where I felt like I belonged, you know. You felt normal. Right. I felt normal. Yeah, I felt normal amidst all of that. So anyway, my childhood wasn't like all terrible. It's just there was a lot of that in the background of like not being good enough, not being invisible, all of those things. So, but then what really kind of changed for me as far as my direction in life is when I started going to college at East Tennessee State University in Johnson City, Tennessee. My mom passed away when I was 17, so that added another layer of just more more things to emotionally deal with, which was hard. But again, music was always the backdrop, and my father throughout all of it has always been super supportive of my music. Even when I, you know, when I started studying American Roots music, traditional music at East East State University, that's when I started to play with other musicians. I started performing and traveling, and then eventually I would go on to play solo shows, and now I'm at the point now in my career where I'm touring regularly, so, but that all stemmed from that program at East Tennessee State University. And when I made this decision to switch from information technology to getting a degree in bluegrass, old-time country music studies, my father, you know, he, you know, back in the late 70s, he was a lead singer and percussionist in a popular local band in Johnson City, and he had to make the decision they wanted to go out to California. This was during the 70s, so there was no way to really, like, know or gauge if it would work out or not. And he had a really good job, and he's like, well, I'm going to stay here with my really good job, and I'm just going to, you know, continue to listen to music, and, you know, he would DJ on the side at different clubs and stuff like that alongside with his job, so he decided to do that. So, and he said the one thing that he said to me was that the one thing I didn't do that you're doing is you learn to play an instrument. You can play anywhere because you learn how to play your instrument, and you learn how to accompany yourself well. You've learned to diverse different styles to be able to accommodate your songs. He's like, I didn't do that. And so he's like, even though I'm a bit terrified about you leaving a, like a safety net to basically being an entrepreneur, which I didn't realize exactly what that was going to mean until it started happening. And I was like, oh, wow, this is, this is terrifying, because you're, you know, you have to create your own schedule or whatever. It gets not like you clock in and clock out. You have to like create your life, essentially, you know, from scratch. So, so he said, I will be with you every step of the way. I'll come to your shows. I'll do whatever, you know, and he's got a great ear to you. So he'll tell me if something sounds great or if something doesn't sound so great, you know, he's very, very good about that too. So, so yeah, I mean, so my journey's kind of been just this, this, especially in my late 20s, early 30s, there's been this kind of reawakening of a lot of the things I repressed from my childhood continue to creep up and interfere with my life and how I interacted with people. And so being able to work through that and to have, again, have my father be that support, you know, in my life, basically, I guess, you know, father and mother, I guess, in a way, you know, he was glad to play both roles. And, you know, it's, if honestly, if he wasn't in my corner, if he didn't support me all the way, I was terrified. I was nervous. I was anxious a lot. And, you know, if it wasn't for him, you know, being there for support, I have no idea if I would even be on this stage. So, so yeah, that's it. Thank you for sharing that. And for all of it, I think so often, we don't say out loud that it's a difficult road, you know, being a woman, being a woman of color, being in these different environments, and sort of finding ourselves and finding how it is that we can move out into a public sphere and share our talents. I want to ask Amethyst one more question before I turn to you, Anna. Amethyst, you talked about Roots music and your study of that in school. And I wonder if you would just reflect on the importance of tradition in your work, but also the importance of innovation. This is like one of my favorite things to talk about. So what I learned in my studies, because throughout my studying, what I realized is a lot of the different musical styles, like gospel music, fiddle tunes, banjo tunes, British ballads, all of those things. If you listen to any kind of American music, whether it be jazz, whether it be blues rock, whether it be pop country, whatever American genre, you can hear, I can immediately hear, oh, wow, this came from this influence, because American music is a hybrid. People voluntarily and involuntarily were brought to this country, and they brought their music traditions with them. And that's where I first, in my studies where I first learned that the banjo is the Senate of the West African Lude family, and I did not know that. And so I ended up delving into that history and really seeing the racialization of music, the creation of genres, of the splintering of music. It's interesting because on one hand, yes, marketing and your audience and all of those things, but when if a black person and a white person sat down, one with the banjo, one with the fiddle, or vice versa, they were playing music. Like before the commercial music industry, it was just music. It was just good music, and it was just something for everybody to enjoy. And so I feel like when I listen to different kinds of music now, and I see how people have intensity to identify with, well, I listen to Pop Country, or I listen to this, and if someone from a different race listens to that music, it's deemed as weird. And it's like, well, no, because the history shows that all of this music is a hybrid. It is directly linked together. It's not separate. And we can talk about the man and industry and being the facilitating the splintering, which that is essentially the case. But I think it's important for when I play my music and talk about this, obviously, I definitely have to talk about it because I'm a black person and I'm playing a banjo. And there's people that don't quite get that, or some people will see me be like, oh, you must play jazz or blues, right? And it's like, not exactly. So even now, I still get, when these people see the instruments, I get pegged for playing a certain kind of music, or that I should know certain artists, or that I should know certain people. So it's just about, for me, once I realize as I'm playing music, I have to do more than just show up and play the music and leave. I have to talk about this stuff and I have to frame it. And once you learn that history, it sticks with you. And so now I can walk anywhere with confidence and know that I have a birthright to this music. And we all do, all of us as Americans and people all over the world. I mean, there are Japanese bluegrass bands. There are Czech there are Czech Republic bluegrass bands. You know, there are people in the continent of Africa and various countries that play country music. There were cowboy hats and play like Johnny Cash songs. So like, this is music that touches all of us because a little bit of every country is kind of in the music. So for me, as far as tradition goes, tradition and innovation I think are also linked because, for example, if you listen to a field recording of somebody playing, say, like if you listen to BF Shelton play Darling Corey, for example, it's a banjo song. It's one that I play. Sometimes people listen to recordings and get really stuck on the recording and think that if it doesn't sound like that recording, then it's not the song. And so in a sense, you remove yourself from history. You take yourself out of the story and just say, this is how this song should be played. But if you asked BF Shelton before there was a way to record music, if you asked him who he learned it from and you went and saw that person play it, it wouldn't have been the same song because people were individual people and we do things differently. So I think sometimes tradition gets associated with being, can be somewhat stagnant because we look at the records and the documents and this shows this and the documents are a moment in time. They don't define what the whole thing is necessarily. And so I think tradition and innovation are they're linked because when BF Shelton heard the other guy or whoever play that song, he took it and made it his own. And so I think if anything tradition, the heart of tradition is innovation in a lot of ways because each person approaches the techniques in a way that's unique to them and then and so on and so forth. So I think, yeah, I think the passing out of tradition is the passing down of, you know, you know, yes, a set of parameters, but like, how does your experience fit in with that? And so that's, you know, that's, I think that's really important to consider for that. Thank you, Amethyst. What you said is really so rich and it allows me to pivot for one last question for Ada Deer. And with this, you talked about birthright and how American music is a birthright that belongs to, you know, all of us and maybe even the world. But only one people had a birthright to Menominee land and that is Menominee people. And yet the policy of termination was absolutely undoing that. It took individuals like Ada Deer, her sister Connie, her mother, her fellow members of the nominee nation to actually say, no, this land does not belong to developers and vacation home owners. It belongs to Menominee people. And Ada Deer was at the forefoot of not only ending that policy, but then restoring the nomination because after things are dismantled and taken apart by the government, they have to be put back together and restored by the people. So Ada, can you tell us about restoration as a way to conclude this conversation? Okay. Thank you. You've all been so attentive. I give you a lot of commendation. The wind is blowing. Okay. All right. First of all, I want to put just a few other things in context. You need to understand that we Native people are the smallest group in among the smallest groups in the census. Okay. And there are over 550 tribes in this country. They are governments. We have a government to government relationship. We're not little brown people just sitting on the land. We are governments. And that's hard for people to understand and to accept. And many Indian people don't really understand this like they should because most of the information about blacks, Indians, women is very poor in the schools, poorly taught or omitted. And so we constantly have millions of people in this country that are undereducated about huge numbers of people. Women, you know, the Navajos have the saying women are makeup half the tribe or half the population. Well, hello, people. I got news for you. Women are over half. And the women's movements, we're asking the men to just move over and let we always have to have lawsuits and all these things and starting the women's movement. And I'm going to get to your point here. It started that the Seneca Falls Seneca Indian, right? Now, if they had really looked at this, they would have adopted all of the portions to make this country equal because we're not in the Constitution, as I mentioned earlier. And that's another whole lecture. But anyway, so we have approximately a million people. You get different numbers quoted to you. And the number that I like the best at the time Columbus came is about five to seven million. But there were no computers or no counters at that point. There's been a lot of work trying to try to estimate how many people were there at that point. It goes up much higher, but the positive, no, the accepted one is more realistic to me between five and seven million. So we'll go between five and seven million down to like one million shows you the depths of the problems that American Indians have faced. But I used to teach a course on American Indians. It was a whole semester, but I'm only just mentioning these two things. And the treaties are the supreme law of the land. And many, many treaties were broken. And the land was stolen. And that's another long story. So people are wondering, well, how come they don't just shape up, get their feet on the ground and go? Well, Indians lost their land, they lost their resources. And so we're among the poorest in the nation in terms of groups. Okay. Now, let's see, start your question again. So the question is about restoration. Can you tell us what it was? Okay. Well, we didn't quite know what to call this. And being the social worker that I am, I convened, people were starting to meet anyway before me. And then I went to these meetings and I said, wow, then we have native of Milwaukee, Milwaukee, we have monomones, because after termination, people had to leave because there was no more opportunity for the mill. They fired 150 men who had met 150 families. And they were supposed to just melt away. Well, they went to Chicago, they went to Milwaukee. But guess what? They didn't abandon their tribal feelings. And they didn't abandon their tribal connections. And so we have the Marcus and Telegraph even today. So that's good, right? Marcus and Telegraph, I like that, you know. And anyway, so restoration. So we started out saying the monomony people, a book called Freedom with Reservation, the monomony struggle to save their land and people. People often ask, well, what is the Indian problem? Like there's only one problem and there's only one Indian. Well, it's always about land and people. At any rate, I had a discussion, early discussion with the Wisconsin lawyer. And I said, how can we change this? And what can we do? And so he said, well, it's the federal law. So I said, well, we have to get the law changed. And so actually, we did, we went around, we had help from Native American Rights Fund, two wonderful lawyers, Charles Wilkinson and Yvonne Knight, a Ponca Indian woman from Oklahoma. And at any rate, I said, okay, what do we want to do? I put them through this whole process. Usually everything with Indians comes from the top down. Washington, you know, the senators, the congressman or some aide gets a wacko idea and then that gets incorporated into a legislation and so on. Okay. Well, this one grew from the people. And I wanted to say my name gets mentioned a lot here, but it's not, it's not about me. It's about the people. It's about the tribe. It's about the American people considering what kind of government we've got going on in Washington at the moment. Okay. They always connect the dots. All right. So at any rate, we were talking about this and I was thinking, I always get myself into trouble thinking. So I want to commend you all thinking if people thought they wouldn't get into so many problems. At any rate, we wanted our land back. We wanted our status back. And so I thought to myself, well, restoration. And everybody likes that idea. So then we started saying, okay, what do we want to restore? Well, then we went through this whole process and our wonderful lawyers helped us put it in legalese. But it took time to bring about all the changes necessary. We had to put the land back into trust. That was a big separate action that had to be taken to put the land in the trust. One of the famous pictures is that we're sitting around with the then Secretary of Interior, Roger C. B. Morton, and a bunch of nominees. And then he and I are sitting at this table and we're signing, putting back the 200, well it had been reduced by because of the land sales, but maybe 230,000 acres back into trust. Because otherwise, if it's a termination, the land was subject to taxation. And there was no way that one poor little tribe with the one lumber mill was going to be able to pay state taxes on over 200,000 acres. And so that was a big step. But getting the Restoration Act passed and then implemented was a huge, huge task. This is the first time in the history of this country that a small Indian tribe with good legal help was able to bring about a historic change, like I mentioned earlier. So what? Okay, so now hang on a second. In 1954, there were 3,270 people on the roll. And now there are over 9,000. And we had to draft a whole new constitution. I ended up being the chair because we had an election for the interim tribal government. And since I got the most votes, I was automatically chosen to be the chair. You know, I wanted to go back to law school. For 10 years, I wanted to go to law school. I had to give it up. And then when I worked for the tribe, my tribe was more important than me going to law school. Okay, now I end up arguing with the lawyers anyway. And I just had to say a couple other things. When I left, one guy said, well, what are you going to do now? And I said, go back to the real world. And I said, maybe I'll go back to law school. And he said, Ada, you're already dangerous. If you get a large degree, you'd be lethal. So I'm both, anyway, I'm both dangerous and lethal without that. So our tribe achieved a historic victory, like I said. We still have problems. The wounds of the tribe are still there from termination. We have quite a lot of white people that are there. But many of them didn't want they liked the land. They didn't want to live among the Indians. So some of them left. Thank God. And I don't hate anybody. I don't hate white people. My mother was white. I'm half and half. I have many identities, Indian woman, social worker. Okay, I became the first woman chair of the tribe getting back to women and people were saying, well, our tribe has always been led by the men. So I said, well, that's part of the problem. Thank you so much, Ada. My last word is vote. Okay, vote. Everybody vote.