 I'm Betsy Peck-Learned, Dean of University Libraries here at Roger Williams, and I'd like to welcome you to our first Talking in the Library event for this fall. In person, yay, there's something to be said for Zoom, but in person is much better. All of our Talking in the Library events are generously supported by an endowment to the university, to the library specifically, by an alumna of the university, Mary Teft-White, whose donation also made this program space this room possible. This evening, we're delighted to welcome Washington Post columnists and around-the-horned panelists, Kevin Blackestown. He will speak on the topic of imagining the Indian, the fight against Native American mascotting, in conversation with Roger Williams, Professor of Writing, Brian Hendrickson. Professor Adam Braver, our Library Program Director and Professor of Creative Writing, will be introducing them both in just a moment. I'd like to briefly mention our next Talking in the Library event this fall. On Tuesday, October 4th, which is next week, a little close, we welcome the novelist Steve Yarbrough. And we are co-sponsoring this event with our neighbors at the Rogers Free Library in Bristol as part of their Jane Bodell Endowment. The event will take place at Rogers Free at 7 p.m. Their address is 525 Hope Street, and I hope you all join us there. And now, Professor Braver will introduce our speakers. Thank you. I will be brief and spare you my usual long introduction. Only to say, to give you a little background in really how this came to be is that I was watching the PBS News Hour one night, and the issue of Brian Flores, the football coach who had been fired and turned out to be the only black football coach in the NFL, was hot in the news, and Kevin was the guest to speak about it. And I watched it, and then Betsy, it turned out Betsy was watching, and she texted me and said, you see, I said, yeah, and I said, he's someone I'd like to know. And Betsy said, me too. Once we have this, let's invite him here to speak. He's not going to speak on that. That's what we originally had thought he would speak on. And as you can imagine, there have been numerous potential topics over the last year that we could have had Kevin come to address over and over. But as it turned out, this documentary film, which he's been working on since 2014, imagining the Indian had just come out, and it seemed like a good topic. It seemed like an appropriate topic for here, especially based on where we're situated, but also just what is in the air and something very present and important to Kevin. And as Betsy mentioned, Kevin is among many things, also a professor of journalism at the University of Maryland, but is a columnist for The Washington Post on sports, and very much so on cultural issues around sports. And so this certainly ties in well. And again, our interlocutor would be Brian Hendrickson, who is again a professor here in writing studies, and also quite an accomplished poet for those of you interested in the world of poetry as well. So they'll speak for a while, and then there'll be some Q&A. I'll have a microphone to pass through the crowd if you have questions. And then we'll come when we get to that point. So I'll leave it to you. Yeah, I was going to say, I'm going to try to speak less than our guest here. I thought maybe we just start off with a clip from the documentary so that we're all a little familiar with it. And then the way we'll do this is I have some questions prepared. We'll hopefully keep this a lively dialogue, but I encourage anybody else here in the audience who would like to ask a question of our guest to please feel free to raise a hand and let us know. And we'll leave some time at the end regardless for you all to participate in Q&A, all right? Sounds good, and one thing I've become very conscious of in doing this work the last eight years is a land acknowledgement. And I'm sure there's a land acknowledgement for this campus on this land. I don't know if anyone would like to offer it. I'd be happy to. So we recognize the unique and enduring relationship that exists between indigenous people and their traditional territories. We acknowledge that Roger Williams University's Bristol campus is located within the homelands of the Poconochit. Let this acknowledgement serve as a reminder of our ongoing efforts to reconcile and partner with the Poconochit and all indigenous peoples whose lands and waters we benefit from today. So thanks for sharing that with us, Kristen Foremost. I thought maybe for our audience here who might not be familiar with your work, but certainly might not know much about this project or where it came from. I'm wondering if you could maybe say a little bit about how this project began and how it arose out of your own career as a sports journalist. Sure, thank you very much. Thank you for the invite. That was a five-minute clip from a 95-minute full-length documentary, which I'm proud to say last week at the Human Rights Film Festival in Atlanta, won Best Full-length Documentary Award, which was the first time that we had outside of Washington, D.C. It had played in a city with a professional sports team that uses a Native American iconography and names to sell itself. I'll start. I won't give you a whole bio of me, but I'm from Washington, D.C. I grew up in a family that had season tickets to the Washington football team. My parents took me to see those games before I could walk. I grew up inculcated as a Washington football fan. I live, breathe with this team every day of the year. And never once, even though I came up in a very progressive household, never once thought about the name of the team. Not until the mid-1990s when I was a sports columnist at the Dallas Morning News, and I was writing a column about an NAACP fight in Midland, Texas, which is in the Panhandle of Texas. And if you know anything about George W. Bush's rise to fame, that's where he started in an oil company after he moved from up this way. And the NAACP fight was against Midland Lee High School, Lee coming from General Lee, the Confederacy. And the school draped itself in all forms of Confederate imagery. And the NAACP was upset that their sons were scoring touchdowns and points on the basketball team. While the song Dixie might play in the background of the Confederate flag, might flap in the wind in the stands. And they were upset about that, and rightfully so. And it was easy for me to identify with that. And that was about the time when I first experienced or heard that native folk might be upset with the name of the team that I grew up rooting for. And it was the first time that I started to make a connection between how I would support the NAACP in their fight against Midland Lee and why I should also support and understand native folks disagreement with the name of the football team I grew up rooting for. So that was really the that was really the seed and into the late 1990s. I started to talk to more people about it. I started to come to an understanding. I started to try not to say the name myself. I kind of cleanse my wardrobe of of any merchandise with that name on it. I tried to remove it from my writing when I was covering a Dallas, Washington game. And I'd have to remind copy editors to leave it out that I purposefully was not using it. And when I moved back to Washington, D.C. in the late early 2000s, I actually got to know Suzanne Shown Harjo, who has been at the forefront of this movement. She lives in Washington, D.C. has been there since since the early 1970s. She grew up in in Indian country in Oklahoma and began to talk to her about it. And in 2014, there was a case before the Patent and Trademark Office, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, which canceled the trademark for the Washington football team. And I thought at that point that the name was going to fall into the ocean and be washed away. And I talked to a friend of mine, who's a filmmaker by the name of Sam Bartley. If any of you ever saw the ESPN 30 for 30 documentary on Lynn Bias called Without Bias, he did that. And we had been kicking around some ideas. And I said, we need to document this fight that this woman and native folk have won against the multi-billion dollar industry of the NFL. This is really interesting. And it happened right in our backyard and we should do it. So that's how I got involved in trying to make a film. So it seems like this was both something that you had maybe a deeper history and connection to, but also that there was some amount of a learning process that might have come through the engaging in the process of making the documentary. And I'd just be curious to know about that. What are the things that you learned through doing this that you didn't know before you went into the process? That would be an entire class. That's about filmmaking, which I knew nothing of other than being a fan of film and in particularly documentary film. There was so much to learn. First of all, had to figure out what it was we were going to try and do. We're going to make a documentary film. Okay, what's it about? What's our purpose? What do we want to get out of it? And why do we want to do it? To two brothers from Washington, D.C., we're not native. I wasn't drawn to this in the beginning because of the native community. I was drawn to it because I felt I should have a sensitivity to it given that I'm a black man in America. And I'm a black fan of this team in a predominantly black city, Washington, D.C., and that other black people should be sensitive to this issue. So once we figured that out, then we had to figure out, well, how do we tell this story? And we had both gotten to know Suzanne Shonharjo and so we thought that given her stature in the Indian community, as well as her stature in the civil rights community within this country, she had been awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Obama for her work with her work in the indigenous community that we would tell the story of this fight using her as a vessel, a narrative. But then we realized there was even more to tell. We had to figure out the context for this. And the context was historical, what has been the history of native people on this land since Europeans first arrived. And it is a genocidal history, one that's not told in full enough. So we had to figure out how to do that. And then we had to figure out where we are today and where we're trying to go. This is gonna be a protest film, where we are protesting for these names to come down. And these are the reasons why. The difficulty was, and you mentioned it, and Adam mentioned it, started working on this in 2014. Well, we wound up chasing news, which we didn't really anticipate. Things were changing all the time on this particular issue. There was a Supreme Court case that came out involving a rock band, an Asian rock band, up in the Pacific Northwest called the Slants, which sued for the right to use their name, even though it was considered, is considered a disparaging remark about Asian folks. And when they won their case, that had a direct impact on the Washington football team and a decision it championed to hold on to their name. If the Slants could do it, then we could do it. Even though that was an uncomplicated way to talk about it. And then we realized that we needed to have, as we expanded this, that we needed to have some native representation. And so fortunately, we were introduced to Ben West, who also is from Washington, D.C., who is Cheyenne, who graduated from USC, studying film and being a script writer and all of that. And he was very much interested in doing this film. And we were introduced to him through Aviva Kempner, who's the other co-director on this. And Aviva Kempner is an award-winning documentarian in Washington, D.C., who for 40 years has made documentary films about Jewish heroes and heroines. Most recently, I think her most recent movie was, I think it was Mo Berg, who was a baseball player, a catcher in the 40s and the 50s, who became a spy for the U.S. government on Japan in the run-up to World War II. She also did a great piece on Hank Greenberg, the great Jewish slugger in the 30s and the 40s. And she quickly glammed on to this idea, so it then became a great team effort. Yeah, so that makes me think of tooth-connected things. And you've kind of pointed out that there's the learning curve involving and taking on a whole new medium, which I find really impressive. And then there's the learning curve in taking on this particular subject matter. And I'm wondering if you could just say a little bit more possibly about how did your understanding of the subject matter itself perhaps evolved through the process of making the film? Did you come out thinking about it differently or more deeply by engaging in this process than when you began? Sure, no question more deeply. Our approach in the beginning, I think, in my thought process in the beginning was very much on the surface. It was what I had seen, what I had heard, but it wasn't what I had delved into. And we started really to take a deep dive into native history, native culture, and the native struggle. And so what I knew about native American history, I'm not a student of it, but what I knew was they were here first, Europeans arrived, shoved them off their land, murdered them, stuck them in reservations, tried to separate them from their culture. And there weren't many around, but I didn't know the impact that all of that had on not only their community, but the rest of us. And I think when we were speaking earlier, I talked about the interview with Amanda Blackhorse, who was the woman talking about in the clip who talked about growing up and thinking of her skin color as being making her less than. And what you don't see in that interview, or maybe you can pick up a little bit of it from the glossiness of her eyes, is that in the course of that interview, she broke down. She was telling me about losing her job by taking up this fight. And she talked about losing her hair by taking up this fight. And when she mentioned her hair, she was just, she was overcome and we had to stop filming. And it's the first time that I really understood the depth of this situation, like how deeply hurt native people were and are by being reduced to mascots. And one thing you have to know about native culture is hair is a very important symbol of their being. And I was reminded of this, I don't know if anybody's watched any of Ken Burns' latest documentary, The U.S. and the Holocaust, but there's a bit in there where they're talking to a woman who, a survivor who was in Poland, and I can't remember what city it was, but she talked about how she saw the Nazis drag the rabbi of the community synagogue out and then sheared off his beard. And like how devastating that was image-wise for that Jewish community. And so it made me think about Amanda talking about losing her hair. So as, you know, we talk about this in a very disconnected way, right? We watch it, we see it. We hear people complain about it, but then to get that emotional reaction, that visceral reaction, that wasn't something I was prepared for. You know, you had said something I thought was pretty striking a minute ago and you mentioned the effect that that history has on all of us. And I wonder, you know, one of the things I found really compelling about this clip was not that you have to always have empirical research to show that something has a negative impact on a person or on a people, but just the laying out the sort of research-based argument for the negative impacts that mascots have on native peoples. And I wonder, are there negative impacts you think mascots, the sort of mascotting of indigenous peoples has on all of us? Absolutely. I mean, one of the things I thought about in doing this and one of the things I've always thought about anyway, being a person of color in this country, is like, how did this whole racism thing start, right? Like, why are we still battling this? And, you know, one of the reasons is exactly what happened to native people when Europeans first came ashore. And how they were treated, which was horrifically, that their culture was almost was almost removed from our national palette, that they were denigrated. And that if that could happen to them, then certainly you could do that to other people of color in this country. Because after that happened to them, then, that's 1492, then fast forward to 1619, and it begins to happen to Africans who were dragged here across the Atlantic Ocean and enslaved. And so I think there is a connection and some of the research has shown that it has made it easier or more acceptable for the rest of us to denigrate others or to otherize others. And it begins with that relationship. And I hadn't really thought about that. I wasn't aware of that research until we delved deeper into this film. One of my personal connections to this, and I mentioned this to you before, is I grew up in Florida and I did my undergraduate degree at Florida State. And I would say that I was pretty uncritical growing up in terms of race and racism. I was probably your typical Southern white, middle class kid. And if you had asked me as long as 10 years ago, well, how do I feel about the Florida State football team using the name of Seminoles? And I would tell you the party line on that, right? That, well, Florida State has a good relationship with the Seminole Tribal Council. I have to admit, I'm still a little perplexed by this whole thing. And I think it sort of speaks a little bit to maybe some of the complexities of allyship and the kinds of decisions we make when we are not indigenous ourselves. How do we make sort of decisions about who gets to decide what or whether or not we should have an opinion at all? And I think unfortunately, sometimes the complexity of the situation maybe prevents us from doing anything sometimes, even when maybe the choice is clearer than others. So this leads me to two questions. One of them, of course, I wanna know how do you feel about the Florida State sort of situation? And then two, I'm just wondering, just through all this process, has it shaped your sort of understanding of allyship or how to navigate the complexities of this or sort of what does that mean for us to have to step into complicated issues that sometimes demand we make decisions even when it's difficult to do that sometimes? Sure, well, what you didn't see was a part of the film where we discuss Florida State. And I'll just point this out. We have a clip of the mascot for Florida State being prepared to be the mascot to ride out as Chief Asiola that they call him. And so this student is sitting in this chair as someone puts paint on his face and a wig on his head and then uses some sort of material that I guess would mimic something that someone saw in Native American culture and Seminole culture around his head. And when I first saw that, I thought to myself, man, that's blackface, it's just red and yellow. I wouldn't stand for that. And then I thought back to some of the fans that I would see at Washington football games who would paint their faces red. In fact, a self-appointed mascot of the Washington football team when I was growing up was a black gentleman who painted his face and wore a headdress, which by the way is sacred, and these fall Indian clothes and made these fall Indian sounds or what he thought were Indian sounds and paraded around the stadium. His name was, he went by the name of Chief Z. So what I'm seeing at Florida State when I look at that film and I watch someone ride out on a horse and throw a burning stake into the ground at the 50 yard line is minstrelsy. So that's my orientation towards that and those who participate in it. The Florida State situation is complex or I shouldn't say that. The Florida State situation has been made to be complex and it's been made to be complex because Florida State has cut a monetary deal with part of the Seminole Nation that they've been able to negotiate with within that part of Florida. And so they have a contract in which a few things are meted out but it needs to be pointed out that the Seminole Nation is very large. It stretches beyond the state of Florida and there are for every Seminole who you might find in the state of Florida who's comfortable with that relationship with the university which is theater. There are plenty who are not upset, I mean who are upset and would prefer that that performance not be a part of Florida State. So like anything and we're seeing this now we saw it with the Washington football team where the new owner has tried to buy by the goodwill of native folks, by parading them around the stadium from time to time and giving them awards or jackets or something like that to give this impression that all of Native America is comfortable with the name, it's just not true. But that's why I say it's not, it's been complicated by money, it's been complicated by a strategy of pro football teams or in this case Florida State University just so they can hold on to the name and hold on to that image and those histrionics before and after enduring games. So what would you say to somebody who just feels like all of this politics and all this talk about race, all that's just like a big distraction from the game and loving the game and can't we just get back to loving the game for the game and keep the politics and the conversations about taking knees and other things like this and racial represent, can't we just love the game for the game and not have to think about this kind of stuff? Isn't that a conversation for somewhere else as my grandfather liked to say, you don't talk politics and religion at the dinner table. Maybe he was partly right sometimes but what would you say to somebody like that? Well, first of all, I invite them to audit my class which is called sports protest in the media which is a part, a historical look at the relationship between sports and politics or serious issues. Which go back to the beginning of sport. You know, the first team sports or the first huge sporting events that were held were held to honor gods. You know, the marathon which is probably the most iconic event of the Olympics was a political event, you know? It was a messenger running back to Athens to deliver information about a victory by the Athenian army. You know, the whole reason that Colin Kaepernick can use the national anthem as a mixtape to his protest is because Woodrow Wilson decreed that a military band in public play this thing called the Star Spangled Banner and it just happened to be a military band at the 1917 World Series and they played the Star Spangled Banner, right? So sports and politics have always been together and people who argue that that's not the case or they don't belong together know neither the history of sport nor the history of politics. They've always gone together, they're perfect bedfellows for any number of reasons and you can enjoy the game but you are hard pressed to ignore all the things that go around it unless you absolutely refuse to acknowledge them. Like how many people here have seen military aircraft in the air? How many people have only seen that at a game during a flyover, right? Or are familiar with a flyover? You know, that's been, other than going to one air show, which I didn't enjoy because it included tragedy. You know, that's where I've seen it. You know, how many people in their regular work life start their day by singing the Star Spangled Banner? How many people have been to a movie and had to sing the Star Spangled Banner? How many people have served in office and started your day singing the Star Spangled Banner? But go to a sporting event, you start that sporting event by singing the Star Spangled Banner. Why? Why has that continued? I'm not sure. But I do know that if you go to some schools, I think Quaker schools do not play the Star Spangled Banner before games. I think that's right. Quakers are rebels, huh? There you go, so what are your thoughts? I do want to open things up to our audience in case they have any questions, but I want to maybe close with one that I'm sure our audience also wants to ask you if in case you started Googling around trying to find which streaming platform you can watch the full link documentary on right now, you might come up short. So, I mean, any word on when and how we might be able to see this thing? Yeah, right now we're on the, right now since the movie debuted in April, we're on the Film Festival Tour. And one of the reasons you get on the Film Festival Tour is you're fortunate to be selected by the ones you apply to. But the other reason is to attract distributors. And that's where we're at right now. We're trying to get distributors for a theatrical release and a distributor for an educational package because we want to get this out to school. So, at this particular moment, the full length is only available to places where we've been selected to screen. One of which a few weeks ago was actually the Rhode Island International Film Festival. It was selected there and it streamed there. I think that in November, and I can tell you all later, when we play at the, we're being screened at a program at the American Indian Museum in Washington D.C. was part of the Smithsonian Institute. And I think that they're going to allow for several days, or we're going to allow them for several days to stream us on their projects platform. But I'm not exactly sure with dates that that's gonna take place. So right now, yeah, we're just, we're only being shown at film festivals and some limited screenings. But we got a lot of them. We're in Calgary this weekend. If you want to get up to Calgary, you can catch us. Let's see what else we got coming up. And we're in Dallas, the second weekend of October. We're in Santa Fe. I forget what that date is. We're back out in California for a date. So we got dates. Oh, and we're in Toronto at Imaginative, which is the largest indigenous film festival on the planet. And that's in the third week of October. So if you want to get up to Toronto. Well, New Mexico is really lovely this time of year. So you might run like this. You might choose Santa Fe instead. Well, thank you so much for sharing the clip with us for being willing to share the story behind the documentary. And of course, your own sort of scottily insights into sporting and politics. I really appreciate you talking with me. And with that, I might turn things over to the audience in case anybody has any thoughts or questions they'd like to share. Just don't ask me anything about fantasy football because my team's 0-3 right now. And I'm not happy about our drafts. This is pretty mundane. I think in the opening of the clip you showed, Oprah Winfrey, a shot at her in the show, and she used two phrases and kind of wondering which of the two is accurate. And the Indian woman or one of the nations responded that neither is correct. What would be and what is the correct reference into a terminology? It's a good question because the museum is called the American Indian Museum. And being out in Indian country now and working with Ben West, I've found that that's acceptable to some, but not to all. We are about to come up on what you know as Columbus Day. And as you know, there's been a movement in this country that is slowly getting more and more successful to either reclaim that or rename that or add to that name Indigenous Peoples Day. So for me, I've tried to use the word indigenous because to me it's a more global term. There are indigenous people here. There are indigenous people in the other Americas. There are indigenous people almost everywhere we go. And so for me, I'm more comfortable with that. I've also heard Native Peoples, which I also think is global and more inclusive. Calling people Americans is really problematic because they were here before Americas. And so that's really kind of inaccurate and kind of speaks to their being colonized. We were at a, this blew me away. We were at Sue St. Marie, Michigan. Anybody ever been there? Anybody here from Michigan? You know, they do the hand thing. We're up here. So it's the Upper Peninsula, right? The point of the top of the Upper Peninsula. And we're up there for their film festival. And I just heard today we won Audience Award for there. But the nearest big university, I think, is Eastern Michigan. And I think they go by the name of Chippewa. Everybody's heard Chippewa. And they still haven't changed that. Well, while I was there, and half of, basically half of Sue St. Marie is reservation. And we were staying on the reservation side. And we were being, our host was a guy named Aaron Payment, who is a longtime Native American official at various levels, at the national level. And he explained to us while we were there that Chippewa is not a real thing. That actually Native folk in that part of the country, the nation is obituary. But Europeans mispronounced it as Chippewa, somehow someway. And so that name just stuck. And so we've been calling obituary, I think that's how it's pronounced, which is not to be confused, I don't think with the nation out of, right, right. Which is in Minnesota, T.J. Ochi of the Washington Capitals is of that nation. So it just stuck. So we have been misnaming Native folk, Indigenous people forever. And being so disrespectful that we haven't asked them, as you did, maybe how we should refer to you. And one of the reasons that Suzanne Schoenhardt just said all are inaccurate is because Native people don't really refer to themselves that way. They refer to themselves by what nation they're a part of, right? Cheyenne, they refer to themselves as Cheyenne and Muscogee. They don't refer to themselves as Seminole, but we have turned them into a monolith by just making them Native Americans, Indigenous people, American Indians, or whatever. Thank you. I'll see you there. So any discovery more about the fight against Indigenous imagery? How did you kind of process or grapple with your childhood memories or childhood identities associated with being a big fan of it? It wasn't easy. I mean, if you're a sports fan, you're a sports fan. It makes you irrational, right? Like I said, I lived and died with this team. In 1992, which is the last time this team was in the Super Bowl, I went just as a fan with some friends. And as we were walking into the stadium, and I tell this story in the film, I saw a commotion off to the side. And so I went over to investigate the commotion. And the commotion was a protest against the name of the team. And I'm standing there with the name, you know, probably on my cap, on a sweatshirt. I mean, I'm decked out. And that was really the first time I had witnessed any blowback to the name of the team. And I really didn't pay much attention to it until that trip to Midland, Texas. So, you know, this is a part of my identity, right? You go away to college, and people want to know where you're from. Where are you from? You're from New Hampshire. So people may ask you if you were a fan of who you grew up as a fan of, maybe the Boston Red Sox, right? So maybe you kind of identify with that. So you go away from home, and that's part of your identity. That's who you are. So I go away to college. I'm from DC. I'm a fan of this team. My team is better than your team. I can't wait until we play each other, right? I mean, I breathed that oxygen, and I exhaled that oxygen. So, and as a progressive person, that really troubled me. And I slowly but surely, as the owner of the team became more and more entrenched and more and more obstinate over this issue, I really had to check myself. I pride myself on being consistent. And my argument and my feelings were no longer consistent with what I was supporting. And so it was hard. We have, we display that in the film. There's a former Washington DC city councilman who grew up a big fan, and he and his brother would go to games. That's what you did. And then he talks about how he became more conscious about the impact that this was having, how it was wrong. And he finally told his brother, his brother, I can't go to, we can't go into games anymore together. I can't do this. So that was a fracture in a family. We have somebody like, we have Jamie Raskin who grew up in Washington DC. Jamie Raskin is, he's really rising in the political frontier right now, right? And really a smart guy and very sensitive and very conscious. And it's not until really now that he has reached a point where he can't, the team that he grew up rooting for, he just can't, he can't embrace them anymore. It's hard. It's hard. Sports are so, it's so much a part of our bloodstream. It's really, really hard to go through the transfusion of getting that out of you. It's interesting that this has really touched on emotion on both sides, identity in terms of affiliation with a team. And then there's also the heritage aspect. I live in a neighboring town that originally had a high school team named after the R word. And that was luckily dropped because of regionalization within other schools. So they had to come up with a new name. But the men who were the athletes at the high school and some women too, are now very entrenched in keeping that logo and image alive of a war on it to become an American. There's even a cigar store version that was created as the mascot. And there's a museum showing items from the past. So there's been some reinterpretation. There's other little hidden things of the recreation department still uses that logo, which it really, I mean, and I'm sure it's because of their loyalty to the past and that people identify with it. So we haven't really had a tough conversation that needs to be held. But it's simmering in the background. And it's another way that this has trickled down into our culture. And it's become very local, not just a national or regional situation, because we do now have more activity and more attention to a local tribe. Yeah, and I think that's really important. And to your point, when we started doing this film, I may have mentioned this earlier, I can't remember, but there are over 2,000 secondary schools across the country that use the R word or some variation thereof. And now they're less than 2,000. So we've been tracking this, and we know that this fight is going on in communities all across the country. Most are being successful in finding a new moniker. But we do know that there are some where it's been a knockdown, drag out, and changes haven't been made for any number of reasons. And that's one of the reasons why we want to do educational outreach with this film, put together a study guide, and get it out to schools so that people can understand the history that they're involved in. We have one last question there. Well, I'll just speak up. So since you're from DC, I wonder if you see parallels between the lack of representation and federal government for DC citizens and indigenous as well It seems to me that there's sort of this erasure of representation. And I wonder if you have talked about that. Man, taxation without representation. I grew up with that in Washington, DC. I live now living, since I've moved back, I now live in Maryland. I had not made that connection, but you're absolutely right. It is similar if not the same. You know, there's a fight on right now. This is one of the amazing things I did learn about Native history that I probably should have known. We know about the treaties. We've all heard about the treaties. But the amazing thing about the treaties is how many of them have just been completely disregarded. Everybody signed on the dotted line, certain agreements, and almost none of them have been upheld. And so there's a story out right now about a treaty that the Cherokee signed. Did anybody hear about this? With back in 18, I can't remember what year it was, but it was to have a representative in Congress for the Cherokee people. And right now, and it's been signed and ratified and everything whenever it was. And so right now, someone has resurrected it to try and get Cherokee people represented as a nation on Capitol Hill. So much of this has to do with lack of representation, either codified or just respectfully. And so that is not a connection that we've made, but thank you for pointing that out. I had not thought about that. Unfortunately, the Washington football team has played anywhere but Washington for ever since about 19, I forget what year, they moved to the state of Maryland out of D.C., but sometime in the early 1990s. And they're looking for a new location now, and chances are, I think, even though some things have happened to suggest otherwise, I think they'll wind up in Virginia, which is where their headquarters are anyway. But that's a great through line. Lack of representation for Native folks and lack of representation for what until the next census comes out will still be an unrepresented majority black city in this country. Well, I think we have to close out, but thank you so much. Thank you. You've given us so much to think about, and I can't wait to see your film. I hope I get an opportunity to. I hope you do too, very soon. And Brian, your questions were right on. They were really great. Thank you so much. Thank you all for coming.