 And again, now I would like to introduce our panel around respectful collaborations in this space. And our three panelists are Greg Castro. So I introduced this morning. Janet, I'd miss. Sorry. And Dr. Shannon Tushing him. And I would like to introduce each of them briefly, and then turn it over to them. So I, Greg, I'd like to introduce you again for anybody who missed it this morning. So I would like to introduce Greg Castro is Selene and Rumsian and Ramatush Aloni, in terms of indigenous heritage, and has worked to preserve his alone and Salinas heritage for three decades. Greg is the Society for California Archaeology's Native American Programs Committee chairperson is principal cultural consultant to the Association of Ramatush Aloni, advising within their San Francisco Peninsula homelands. He's a writer and activist within the California indigenous community, and he's worked with our ecosystem restoration camps gathering around cultural competence for the past year, which has been a real honor. And Greg brought forward his experience with collaborations that work for this panel. Next I'd like to introduce Janet I'd miss, who has 45 years. Hi, Janet. Good morning. Yeah, who has 45 years of professional experience in cultural resources management and the compliance, having been employed by several federal and state agencies in the private sector as a solo premier consultant. And since 2009 as the tribal historic preservation officer for Blue Lake Rancheria in Humboldt County. Her work experience has been focused in California, especially the Northwest, as well as Hawaii. She is a professional archaeologist and holds a BA in anthropology and archaeology, a masters in cultural resources management, and multiple specialized training certificates on historic preservation laws, policies and best practices. She has developed curricula and taught dozens of cultural resources management workshops for Indian tribes, state agencies and local governments on historic preservation compliance, Native American monitoring and consultation. For life's work has been to get Indian people to the table front and center when decisions about their cultural patrimony is at stake. Thank you. And next, I'd like to introduce Dr Shannon Trushing him from Washington State University. Dr Trushing him is an assistant professor of anthropology at Washington State University, where she is also the director of the Museum of Anthropology and Northwest Archaeological Research Laboratory. Before coming to Washington State University she served as tribal historic preservation officer for the Elk Valley Rancheria in California. Her approach is explicitly collaborative involving research with contemporary to Senate communities. Studies are developed to incorporate their issues of concern, which include broader impact research issues revolving around historical ecology, sustainability and management, ancestral diet and healthy traditional foods. Traditional versus commercial tobacco use and responses to threaten the access to critical marine foods and natural and human induced impacts on these resources. This includes an upcoming archaeological field school at Washington State University on indigenous collaboration landscapes and heritage management, which is delayed right now due to the pandemic, but still up and coming. So I would like to turn it over to the three of you and Greg for any of the questions and format. And again, we're so grateful to hear you in conversation, knowing each other and good work over the years. Hi, it's Panika and thank you, Joanne and the ERC committee for allowing me to yak at them for many sessions over the last year, and leading to this day and I just want to give a shout out to my friend, Kacha. I recommended their book, her book to the committee quite some time ago and they were so enthralled that they decided to invite her and I'm so glad she did the keynote. The only problem is having to follow Kacha in any topic she gives. Because it's, you know, it's like, okay, let's everybody calm down now. But if we need somebody to do indigenous strafing of truth bombs. I always call Kacha. She does such a great job, and everybody comes out relatively unscathed, but hopefully changed by what she has to say. And it was so apropos to what this community ERC is doing. My experience with ecological restoration actually is very long term, but siloed in the native community which was separated from the rest of the world in the work they were doing and now the last few years, they've started to come together. And they are, I became aware of them a couple of years ago in Echo Farm Conference which was in my backyard, Rumson territory at a Silamar for 40 years and I didn't even know about it. They asked me to do opening prayer and landing knowledge been a few years ago and that's when I became aware of this entire community and movement, and aware that native people were connected to it but in kind of a vague way haphazard way if that's the appropriate term. And so have been working with others to try to solidify that connection because we believe that the land needs us as the original caretakers and the world needs us to help them figure out what is going to happen in the future, depending on what we do. So, I also have to say that you know the information she gave after almost 30 years and of course I've been steeped in some of this information knowing who I was since I was a child and 30 years working in the community. You do have to get a little bit of a thick skin when you hear some of this stuff that the real history that Kucca revealed here. But at the same time, there's that joy she talked about, because we have a much longer history, 15,000 years and going. But our elders tell us our elder scientists say we've been here since the beginning of time. And so we have something to share we have something to offer, and we need the land, and the land needs us. So, how does that happen. Well in the community, ERC community, I've been encouraging them to forge relationships with native communities in their area and as Kucca rightly said and I think I said in my opening, wherever you are in California, there's going to be native people, whether you know it or not. You just have to find them, assuming they want to be found. And that's an issue. And as that history that Kucca talked about sometimes they don't want to be found, or they're just coming out of that framework being raised front by elders who remember much harsher times. And so becoming visible is actually a process for us. So after 15,000 years, the relatively short history, 250 years is like a week for us. And just last week, we were being killed outright, we were being enslaved, we were being oppressed, our land was being taken from us. So here we are this week, so to speak, being asked to share our knowledge about the land that was taken from us. That's sort of the crux of the. So how do we work that. I'm going to talk about today and I'm so honored and pleased for my two friends Janet and Shannon to be part of this and the reason I chose them specifically is as non native people coming into the community to talk about the process of how they experienced it what their experience with was and especially what their knowledge was before during and after and I'm going to start with Janet because I know her story well from from Florida to Colorado to San Diego if I remember correctly so Janet. Yeah, you can you can share that please with us. This is my middle name is Polk so that was the guy with the manifest destiny and he's supposed to be a relative so eventually I made it to California, and I had a, I had a bachelor's degree in archeology and no idea how I was going to get employed. I didn't know that there was a whole industry that had come about due to the passage of historic preservation laws and environmental laws in the late 60s and early 70s. So I showed up in San Diego got a job as a Kelly girls secretary and a waitress. And he said you know there's archaeology in the yellow pages in San Diego there was more work in 1977 in San Diego for archaeologists to do work in compliance with the California law California Environmental Quality Act than any other state in the union. I started working for some small firms because I could spell archaeology they hired me, I mean it was kind of that rugged. And I'm living on the coast of most of the projects in the development that was happening in the places I was surveying and realizing I'm looking at this land before it just gets totally ripped apart for housing development, you know, developments and subdivisions and shopping malls you know, highway interchanges close, you know highways are crazy in San Diego, and I looked around and I had no idea there was any California Indians because I never saw them, and nobody talked about them. It was only because I hadn't driven inland to the kind of hidden valleys of interior San Diego County where there are a number of tribal properties tribal lands and Paula is one now that I think of because I went there Paula reservation because the I work with that that typo tribal historic preservation officer. And so in the beginning in the beginning of my work as an archaeologist. You know I saw Indians kind of way off in the distance but the archaea they didn't the professors at the University of Colorado they did not even bring up the subject of working with Native Americans. It was like, they're gone. They're done. We're not even going to bring them up. And then when I got to San Diego. It wasn't it wasn't common practice then, except for one instance Caltrans held a meeting, because they were doing a highway interchange, and there were some Indians that are really upset about it. You know, and I had I wasn't working on this project but I'm wondering, you know what is going on that these guys are so, you know, inflamed. So that was my introduction to California and, and I moved I suddenly I found myself in 1980 up in Northwest California, where could you describe this land of such strong tribes with, you know, recovering and large populations recovered populations that are in their traditional homelands that are still that they identify with their, their creation places. They're not removed from them. And so I began work I met a couple of key people in the Europe committee Walt Lara and joy sunberg and they encouraged me. The light bulb went on when I was working for the Forest Service initially, and I was sitting at a table, and they were debating, you know what should be the protection measures for these archaeological sites in the, in the area of these timber sales. And this is an along the middle Trinity River drainage, beautiful country, America territory. And I was looking around going, you know, why are they asking me where's the end of the table. So I, you know, the light bulb came on it just was the right thing to do. I mean it was, and it was odd. It was an archaeologist reaching out to Indian people there was no, there was hardly anybody doing it, let's just say that way. I was not very popular with either of the archaeologist, who would call me kind of a blanket ass. It's kind of a derogatory term of somebody that might be hanging out with our friends and the Native American people that I met. It looked at me like I was a grave robber because that was the history of archaeology. And, again, a really good book to read is grave matters by our friend. Help me help me with the name. Tony Platt Tony Platt yeah guys thank you. So Tony Platt wrote about the social history of anthropology in Northwest California, which is, if I had known that I would have gone running screaming into the night. If I had been more astute and aware of that situation. So that was my introduction to California in the difficulty of, you know, kind of starting off as an archaeologist, realizing that really it's the Native American people it's the, it's the people that need to make the decisions on what happens to the cultural resources. And there are cultural sites everywhere, even in the middle of cities, even underneath schools as we recently found out here in Humboldt County on project. You know that there may be developments that are on top of these places, and they still have meaning, and they have their important to any people and they need to be the ones. We do the best, you know, and complying with the laws, but to make sure that tribal people are speaking for these places. And what's been really great about such a long span I just had to redo the math I think it's 4244 years doing this in California doing this work. It's under the the ages of a bunch of historic preservation laws, and I have been able to watch the growth and these laws catch up with what I started doing back in the late 70s and early 80s, which is to consult with the people and bring them out have them make decisions, talk about repatriation talk about, even if there's going to be any archaeology work. And, you know, that's, I've always tried to make it really clear that you know archaeology is an option I can share with you what what you might learn from archaeology but I don't push it. You know, it's because it's, that's not appropriate. You know, one of the key things that I learned to was, I know because I was considered you know archaeologists is grave robbers. It took me a while to really grasp. What is the difference in the Euro American, our Western view of treatment of the dead, how fascinating skeletons are, and the Native American view of respecting the dead and not disturbing your grave sites. You know, and finally what Lara I think was the one that finally really expressed it so well for me and won't repeat it quite the right but you know he said those grave items those things that the people were buried with. That's how they are recognized when they get to the next place. And they must have their regalia, they must have those items with them, or they won't be recognized they'll be lost. And that made sense to me. So, so let me, let me say that one of the reasons that I probably shouldn't clarify this first but I mean your, your examples are perfectly apropos because the reason I'm having you as archaeologists come in, and your experience with that is because this is the path that the ecological restoration camps are going on the whole ecological movement is going on. They're just entering into something that the archaeology community has been doing for decades and they had a history of that they had to overcome, going back generations. And now we have this new relatively new generation of archaeologists who didn't do that, don't want to do that, but they have to deal with that history and the systematic resistance to collaborating or even acknowledging Native people. And I'll have you do I'll just throw it to Shannon here because you were also a typo, and we've used that acronym tribal historic preservation officer so Jen it's a typo now and you were a typo before taking your present position. Maybe you could explain briefly how you came into that position and where you were before that in terms of your understanding of native culture, and then what's a typo. I've got a little cat friend here that just came up on the desk that's accompanying my talk. Thanks everyone for thanks Greg for the invitation and it's wonderful to be here. Yeah trouble historic preservation officer I'll talk about that and I do. I want to just say my path to becoming a travel historic preservation officer in I was. It was a circuitous path, but you know I'm from Canada I went to school on the East Coast and then came to California and I work right now and was educated in a system of land grant university so the University of California is where I got my PhD. And now I work for Washington State University. And it's important to acknowledge that these places are land grant university so I work and I'm educated in places that are part of a system where tribal lands were expropriated from tribal people and we continue to profit off of those lands. So those colonial histories are there with with us. And I also want to acknowledge that right now I'm in eastern Washington State here's a view of the beautiful eastern Washington State this is the homeland of the Nimipu or Nez Perce people and police people and I'm really honored to be here. So I'm part of a system that has profited off of these things and I'm also part of the scholarly tradition that, you know, Janet referred to anthropology or archaeology where on the one hand we study and native people and we're very interested in native people and honor them in that way, and are very interested in traditional ecological knowledge and all sorts of things. But also our, our, our scholarship, our, our discipline has really contributed to the erasure of indigenous people and we have to really work towards changing that and we are and it's and it's important and powerful to work with native people to really understand the context of all of those things so when I was, you know, I went through the sort of academic train my academic training. I worked in the real world for a while before going back to school and I felt like that was really good. As an archaeologist and really, you know, I met native people I was so interested in their history and archaeological sites and I thought it was really cool and then got more and more into it, and I went through this formal training. And we really, you know, didn't really learn how to interact with native people. So I thought in the university system how to work with elders we knew it was important, but that's continues to be a hole in the academic system is really how to, you know, we just send students out to these places and don't really tell them what to do. In my case, I started working in Northwestern California and I was exceptionally. I'm so I'm so grateful that I was kind of at first probably begrudgingly, you know, they, there's this weird student that's coming into our lands and is studying our ancestral sites but the, the tall of a community. You know, they, they, some of them took me under their wing and and when I was working with them over the years, I learned so much from them and gradually after I graduated I was hired by the Elk Valley Ranchery as their tiptoe. And I really think of that period of time I worked for them for almost seven years as a tribal historic preservation officer. And that means that so tribal historic preservation offices are that they're not all federally recognized tribes have these offices but some do many do growing number do. And it's a program where it's it's it's actually a wonderful expression of tribal sovereignty because tribes that that do these things they take over the formal responsibilities of the state historic preservation office and so they have a direct say in, you know, the, the sort of the management and oversight of their ancestral places. And so what one thing that we're trained and I know you guys are all interested in sort of historical ecology and and human land management and that sort of thing. In the formal training and anthropology and archaeology, many of us, and it's changing. We're really focused on sites and objects so it was all about really, you know, like studying the material remains of human cultures and that that's actually a pretty standard definition of archaeology. But in these, you know, the conversations that I'm having with when you when you work with people at their ancestral sites and you work with their descendants. It's a total utility takes on a whole new meaning, because it's connecting people to the present day people to these places and seeing that is just incredible. I mean it brings on this whole other gravity and understanding that is really important to acknowledge and I think what you know I learned as a tribal historic preservation officer to that. So the system that we work in, you know that there's a lot of federal and state laws that protect archaeological sites. But there are places to that are important that might not have archaeological artifacts on them or they might be not what we think of as a traditional archaeological site. There can be places that, you know, families have returned to you for for centuries or, you know, time and memorial. They could be places that, you know, where their origin story relates it can be places where they practice their religion and there might not be any, you know, material objects that we can stick in a museum but there's these places are no doubt are just as important. So this can, this can extend, you know, in terms of regional ecology to gathering places and protecting those places are really important. So when I was a typo, I would work with the community and say well, you know, that the agency wants us to tell them, which sites are important, you know, where should we, so we're supposed to point these places out, you know, and so people would say okay well, but, you know, there's this place over here we don't really want to tell anybody exactly what this is for but this is important to us. And I would say, you know, I realized, okay, this is more than this is about a much bigger thing that any, you know, I did not receive training and so I guess that's part of what we'll be talking about here in my education and just learning to work with people in the community that was something that was really important and see all the things that tribes have going on it's not just, you know, historic preservation is just amazing the journey that they've been through and what's happening today. So, I'll stop there. Yeah. Yeah, so I was going to say that one of the things that that brings up is a couple of things we you know we've been talking about archaeology because that's what I've been doing for almost 30 years, because of Janet, she's a wonderful answer fault. Drag me into the native program's committee that I'm now chair of. And, it is native people were approached by these various entities with their focus that in the case of archaeology is material culture, as you said, stone and bone science as others say, and people come to us about a place that has other values to them. We don't view those as separate. They're all inextricably connected to each other and they're also inextricably connected to us. And I think that film at the end about the return of Tula Watt really shows that. It's not just a physical place. It's not just dirt on the ground. These are living things to us that are part of our tribal community. They're a relative, just like a grandmother, an auntie. These places are living embodiments of our culture and we treat them that way and we can't separate that the archeology versus the ecology versus the agriculture aspects of it. They're all integrated. So when you approach a tribe from that aspect, when you approach a tribe, you wanna build a relationship for your ecological restoration camps focused on farming, you're gonna get a lot more because that's what it means to the native people. And just like we said earlier, there's gonna be native people virtually everywhere that there's gonna be a camp. That you have to be aware that on the land, there's a likelihood there's going to be a sign of a presence of native people physically on the land. So that is something that you all need to be aware of that cultural resources are all throughout the state, the country, the continent and you're going to encounter them. They're not all found and enumerated with trinomials and cataloged. A lot of them are to be discovered as they're being worked. In the past, some were discovered and hidden. Again, Tony Platt's book talks about that before the cultural resources laws came in in the 1970s and 80s and they can be rediscovered and that has to be dealt with. So that is something that there's a legal as well as a moral ethical spiritual component and a responsibility that goes with your land that you're gonna be working. So that is part of the process and the reason why I do encourage the communication and connection to tribal communities. And when you do that, and the both of these ladies can talk about this, when you do reach out to the tribes, the impact on the tribes themselves because most don't have huge amounts of resources and people to devote to these projects. So it's a huge impact. So maybe you can speak to that. We'll go back to Janet. You're currently working with Blue Lake East of Arcada up there in... Yeah, on the Mad River. Yeah. Mad River, one of those exploration parties, they got to the Mad River and they were not getting along too well. So they punched each other out, named it the Mad River. Anyway, what a great story. But so I've been a typo at Blue Lake Rancheria, which when you showed, when Kucha showed, and I saw Ted, my colleague who's a typo and the chairman at the Weot tribe, I work for one of what we call the three Weot area tribes. And this is something that folks in the land projects and farming are gonna also run into that there may be multiple tribes that are claiming an area. I mean, it's just kind of the way that the dice have shaken out over time. Blue Lake, like Elk Valley, actually, they were established and many other places, as Rancherias, that's a funny Spanish term for a little Indian reservation. And these places were established under a law and presidential proclamation in the early 1900s as lands for homeless Indians. So Blue Lake is actually, even though it's physically located within the Weot territory, and I forgot to do my greeting, pot-wot-low, pot-wot-low is Weot for hello. So, but Blue Lake is located physically within the Weot ancestral homeland, and its members are from multiple different Indian groups, you know, their descendancy. But what we do with the typo program, they decided is to help support the place where we are located, which is the Weot ancestral homeland. So I work very closely with Ted Hernandez and the Weot tribe in their typos and the Bear River Band of the Ronerville Rancheria and their typo, Erica Cooper. And what we do, and I went to work for Blue Lake because I saw that these three tribes who may have other different values and issues among them, they all got together and came up with unified recommendations for protection of cultural places. And they were 100% successful in getting those recommendations adopted by the various, whoever, the local Humboldt County Planning Department, the cities of Eureka and Arcada. So the jurisdictions that are administering these laws that are looking for the compliance. And so the typos are asked the questions for every development in their areas, whether or not there's gonna be an effect on a cultural resource of importance to the tribes. And so being able to work with two other tribes and really we look to the Weot tribe as the traditional tribe that has the traditional knowledge and we'll let them speak. We'll encourage and support them to go up and speak and then what they say, we back them. That's just huge. And it's important to recognize that again, there may be multiple tribes in the area that you're working. And my approach was, this is like when I first came, found Greg Castro was to throw the net as wide as possible. You start asking people, I'd like to talk to people saline and descent or Weot descent. And if they're not federally recognized, you may have one name, but if you talk to that person, then you may have five names and you talk to those people and it just spreads because and how it worked for what I meant. Greg, it was the saline and you guys were really kind of just coming out of the closet. It was timing. And I was working on a big contract at 400 Liget military installation in the back from coastal area of the Big Sur coast. So it's just over the first big ridge, the San Antonio and Nassio mental river valleys. And this is the saline and heartland. You know, what I had to start that project that lasted a few years, working for the U.S. Army on this big contract was one name from an archeological report from the 60s. And then with that, yeah, with that, I found a track down that person that got a few more names. And then I think within about a year and a half that we had about 130 signatures submitted to the U.S. Army that there was concerns. And you guys, we got you out on the landscape. Oh my God, that was, that may never happen again. It was just a miracle it did. But because these beautiful places in the homeland had been used as it's a live gunning range and they were shooting at the rockout props that had the rock art on them and the big shell middens at their bases and they were using them for target practice. And there was live duds everywhere. Anyway, so I mean, but that's how it works. You just, you start talking to people, ask them. And then I think my, the Society for California Archeology, that was a venue that in I think 19, I forget what year, 1990, they established the Native American Programs Committee. Right. And Greg, who I had met with the Selene and Project of 400 Liget, that was the first workshop that we gave. And we just thought it was so successful. We brought like local archeologists and the feds, people from the Forest Service and the Army and the County and practicing archeologists and tribal people and children. And put together this several days of a workshop to help train people who would serve it possibly as monitors during projects that require observation by a tribal person, side by side, maybe with an archeologist, you know, because there's different values and issues being represented in the field by those monitors. And the Native American Programs Committee, I mean that, which Greg took over now about 10 years ago, thank you, Greg. And he co-chaired with me for a number of years. So he's probably gonna die, but not die, he's gonna die. It might kill me though. It might kill you. But the really important thing was when, you know, I first went to the SCA meeting, you know, it was a bunch of old dinosaurs, old crotchety old men who were really kind of, I remember hearing them when NAGPRA, the Native American Braves Protection and Repatriation Act passed, there was this scene in a bar in San Francisco at that meeting where the old guys, the dinosaurs were arguing with the young Turks about whether or not, it's a good idea to give these people their artifacts and their bones back. I mean, really, it was beyond the pale for me. So I'm just lucky that I was born in 1953 in maybe oldest dirt at this point, but at least I came out of the dinosaur thinking and I, you know, little by little and with so many people that I love and that have been helpful and are so good at voicing things like Greg is a writer and Shannon too as a scholar who does the most wonderful work that all of us are interested in. They're gonna save us. That's what you guys are gonna try to do. You're gonna try to save us with this conservation stuff and get those Indian people on board and what we haven't covered in this is this concept of tribal ecological knowledge. The TEK acronym is kind of funny, but boy, it is at the core of it all. It is at the heart of all of what we need to do to move and get out of our predicament and have a future as human beings. Well, some of that is still embedded within archaeology and the profession, the old school thinking. I always encouraged when I got involved with the committee, I started encouraging native people because there was conferences where I was the only native person in the entire conference occasionally, certainly in the room. And I encouraged others and one person took me up on it. My good friend, El Frank Manriquez, went to a SEA conference, something she doesn't normally go to. And probably we'll never go again because we wound up in a lecture room where I won't name the person, but their paper was basically a rant that said, all of these artifacts in the college's archives are ours, we're keeping them, we're not giving them back. And she turned to me and looked, you wanted me to come here this. And she's never come back, bless her heart. Sorry about that, El. But that's sort of the thing that we still have to overcome. It's much less. And I have to say it's because of our women folk in the archeological profession, providing a lot of that pressure to grow up for the rest of the old fogies. And food. Yeah, and climate food. When you're always, when you're working with Indian people, don't forget to bring good food and great to share with people. And it's more than just practical. It's also has spiritual and social connotations. And that brings up the issue of trust. And I'll have you, Shannon, maybe address that. That's sort of the core issue here. What I always lecture to agencies that wanna work with native people is that it's not a business for us. It's not our job. The very heart of who we are. And it has multiple layers of meaning. Deep and unbreakable. You saw a part of it in the films that Kutcha showed. And it goes beyond that. And now people are coming to us, asking us to just hand over knowledge. And we're not necessarily gonna say no, but we're gonna ask why would we do that first? It's for us a matter of building trust. And it's an ancient cultural tradition when we meet up with nearby people or people we're building a relationship for with the first time. We learn to trust each other and know each other first before we get down to, quote unquote, business. So in terms of you're starting to work up there, and I know we have mutual friends up there in Tolowa land, chasing around archeologists and grave hunters occasionally. What was that process for you of that initial encounter and that whole issue of trust? Yeah, I think looking back, I just think, oh boy, I was so naive, I didn't know. I really didn't know what I was getting into or how to behave. I just knew that I wanted to treat everyone like, the people I was working with like friends, like you would a friend. And that kind of developed over the years. And I think looking back what I would tell and what I do tell students, and right now I'm sort of in this position where I'm educating students on these things. So I'm trying to articulate how best to, what practices to engage with. And it is, it's a long-term commitment. It's something that, having those conversations and honoring people's expertise, I think really going back to this place of ourselves as sort of quote unquote experts, but also looking, native people are experts as well. And we should honor that. It's really important. I do wanna get back to something that Greg said before. If you have the opportunity to work with elders, if you're honored to get that information, to speak with them, you should by all means treat them like you would, somebody with 10 degrees, these people are experts. You should honor them if at all possible, offering them an honorarium or something along those lines as you would any other expert. And that can, I don't know the best way to, I think it just depends on those personal relationships. And also, like Greg said, don't expect all of the information at once. If you are given some of this information, regard it as precious and something that you would do not necessarily have the right to just give away or publish. For instance, in our, my community, I'm under great pressure to publish a lot, but I have to be really, I have to think a lot about the down the line ramifications of that. And perhaps something that I write might inadvertently harm a community or, and I was not really cognizant of that. That's something that I've become more cognizant of now. And one of my first inklings was sort of walking around an archeological site with John Green is a good friend and he's, I can now call him an elder. He might get mad at me if I call him an elder, but he, John Green, and walking around with him and people would come to me and they would say, well, where did Indian people like get their basketry material? And I'm like, you're talking to the expert right here. Why are you asking me this? I don't know. I mean, there's this kind of interesting structural aspect of things that is important to acknowledge and decolonizing some of those practices is takes a lot of thought. So I would say, you know, communication with people, honoring that information that you're given, making sure checking in with people and making sure that you're doing the right thing that's appreciated. What else? And also really regarding people as equal members of your team, you know, their knowledge is that important. I would say too that indigenous people, sometimes they're thrown into sort of, they're stakeholders. They're one of many stakeholders. I think native people have, they're on a different level than just stakeholders. I don't know how better to say that, Janet. I mean, you've run across that. Yeah, tribes. You could tell the tribes. They're sovereign nations. And the sovereignty thing is, you know, it's getting stronger. I think tribes are able or we capture feeling that now. Yeah. You look at Ted when he signed that document and the island was back to the Wiyaw tribe, holy cow. And he did it on behalf of his community. And that's part of what tribal sovereignty is. It's not, you know, for Ted, I was tribal chair for two terms on my selenin side. And I realized it's a huge responsibility and an obligation and commitment that I took as not a right or a privilege. I was acting on behalf of my tribe and still do and always act accordingly. And when I do something, it either benefits or detracts from the tribal community. And so that's also part of what you have to understand. You may be talking to one person, even an elder, but you're also talking to a tribal community through that elder that reflects that. And there's a relationship behind that between the elder and the community that you're not aware of that you won't necessarily be a part of, but you need to understand that it's there. So for instance, you may ask a question and they may say the equivalent of, I'll get back to you. That's because they might have to go ask permission, even as an elder that to share that information outside their community, for whatever reasons that are unique and appropriate for them to decide. So there's that aspect to it. They're acting on behalf of their whole people, normally not just themselves, even as elders. I remember Tony Madugo years ago, he did a presentation at a California Indian Conference. He was doing work on the EPA document for the Agua Caliente tribe. And I remember one part of the part I remember because a lot of it was tech, but the part I remember was he talked about the process of information being exchanged and he described the tribal people as chief elder scientists. I still use that to the day. I stole that totally from Tony because I thought it was a great way to describe the level of knowledge that you're accessing when you talk to an elder, but it also is the tribal part, chief tribal scientist is acknowledging that they're acting on behalf of the people. So there's always that behind it. Let me ask this part, let me take it off in a little bit of direction. We talked about some of the pitfalls and we could spend a couple of days talking about that. And we might come back to a couple, but how about the personal part for you? What did it do for you personally when you sort of, if you ever got over the hump and maybe that never happens, but there was a point at which like, wow, I'm in the midst of something that I didn't anticipate. And I'm gonna throw it back to Janet. I remember the story early on that Walt and Joy, I think asked you to go to a ceremony at Patrick's Point, the village there, Sumak. Yeah, and that was the first time you'd been to one, I think, or at least went up there. And what you did, how'd that work out that evening that you first went to your first tribal ceremony up there? First tribal ceremony. Well, and I was lucky. I had, when Sumak was built as a replica Urok village, but in the Urok ancestral area of the Nair people and in the area of my friend, Joy Sunberg's relatives were from that general area, as well as Walt's were from Stone Lagoon. And I got to work with the advisory group, Urok advisory group to the state parks people on the actual design and then building of the village. And it was so creative. They figured out how they could hire all Urok men and they basically figured out how to split redwood planks and rebuild those houses. They had not done that for a long time. It had been a long time. The Hoopa had rebuilt a number of the old styles onto houses in the valley for the bicentennial in 1976. So, but the first, what Sumak has become a place where the brush dance is held every year beginning in 1991, I think. And it is a ceremony, it's a healing ceremony, usually for a child, but it can be also for an older person. Joy, I think at one point she was in the dance pit. And, you know, at last it starts Thursday night and the dance that you saw in the demonstration dance where the two guys were going past each other in the film about Tula Watt at the end of that film, that was a brush dance dance. And to sit on the benches and the dance is held inside of a traditional house with the roof pulled apart. So that people, I mean, this would have been in the old days. They were in a regular village and one of the houses was used for the brush dance. I was assumed it would have been the house, well, I don't know, the house of the person who the dance is for. They would remove the wall, they would remove the roof slabs and people would sit all around the house and then look into it. And the dancers would come into the pit, which is a square area with a central fireplace and there is a medicine woman. She has a medicine boy that's helping her a girl and then there's the child and the mother. And the dancers are all lined up around the perimeter and girls are in between the men. And the ceremony goes on on Thursday night till about midnight and then Friday's the rest night and then Saturday it starts up after dark and it lasts until after dawn. And it's that Sunday morning that the finest of the regalia comes out. And you're seeing it by a firelight and it's still, I mean, I still, it just makes my insights feel funny because it transported me back to a time I felt sitting up all night at the stands where it transports me back to a time when we were all one big tribe. We all came out of Africa and dispersed. So I felt such a strong connection to really old ancestors. And Greg, you'll have to appreciate this because I had to find it. This is my, this is my tribe. I know I went up into the attic last night to get it. But, and the other is, and this is really important because Kucha's mom and dad were, I think also so important. I've worked with her dad a lot and I know her mother has such great respect. And she was one of the important women when they had the flower dance was the first time it had been held in the Nurek, Urok country and was held for Kayla Sunberg. And a few years ago, and Lois Reesing was one of the women. It was as was, you know, the elder, the ladies from the Weot tribe. It was, it was a powerful thing. So dances are getting revived at Stone Lagoon and Gans Prairie, you know, the Urok have revived now the World Renewal Ceremony. The Weot finished the ceremony that was interrupted by the 1860 massacre. That was about three years ago. And when COVID gets settled down, they will then be continuing the dance, which is, you know, come back. These dances are coming back that had been suppressed for so long. And it's such a privilege that I have, I have the opportunity to work with the three Weot area tribes and, you know, do something to protect cultural resources and to educate people about them. And it makes my heart sing. That's what I call it. Thank you, Janet. So Shannon, you're up there and you become a Teppo, but beyond that, what did it do for you? I know you've had some deep friendships that have continued and we have some mutual friends up there. Some very interesting, wonderful friends up in that part of the world. So what did it do for you as a person? I think that's what interests you. It's a lot of hard work. I think you both say that. And, but on the other hand, what do you get out of it on a personal level beyond just fulfilling job requirements? Yeah, I think, well, I was, I had, you know, working as a Teppo, I mean, I was, I bring my daughter up with me and I used to, you know, I mean, my kids were brought up with, around the Taluwa people on the sites and I was allowed to bring my daughter in a sling and report to council with her in the sling. And when she started crying, people would take her and hang on to her. And so I feel really, I was really fortunate to be, to have those friendships. And I think it really brings out, you know, that connection on a personal level and commitment that goes beyond just, oh, this is cool. And I just, if I can briefly tell one story, that kind of brought this home for me. So when I was, before I became a Teppo, I was working up in the Smith River at some ancestral sites that were in a campground. And basically long story short, we were looking at some, we were excavating at some places at a campground. So there was this camp, very popular campground that the National Park Service was trying to figure out, well, you know, are the campers impacting an archeological site? And there were these depressions and they didn't know what they were. So we went in and we were testing those depressions to see if they were houses. And it turned out that many of them were indeed, they were all houses and they had to eventually shut down that section of the park service. So I don't think the park service really liked me after that. But anyhow, it was a good thing because it preserved this really important place. One of the houses on the outskirts was turned out to be a house. It was this sort of depression. You could, it was covered in poison oak. We all broke out in horrible rashes because of working, having to work through that. And it was a place that was in jeopardy of having a road go through. And so we excavated in that area just to see, is there a house floor here? What is this? And it turned out that it was indeed a house and we continued to look at it. And every day we had tribal, our tribal partners and consultants were out there and we would talk and sort of say, oh, look what we found. And this is really fun and interesting. And it was this excitement. There's always this excitement around archeology because you're finding new things and oh, what does this clue mean? What is this? And so that's always like a real, that's a really interesting thing. But this house, we started to discover some historic artifacts, meaning that like not just stone points and artifacts that have been used and tools and technology that have been used for thousands of years, they had examples of those in the houses but there were also these early historic glass and square nails and pieces of people's clothing, buttons and that sort of thing that were mixed in with what we call traditional sort of artifacts. And it became very clear as we were exploring this house that it was a house that had been occupied around 1850 to 18, so the mid 1800s. Contact. Contact. Now, so the consultants, again, that my partner is my friends, this took on a whole new meaning. I couldn't understand at first, the tribal people were sort of became, it was a little different. There was a gravity that was going on here. And so this first, when we understood this, one of the tribal elders, William Richards, Bill Richards, he's a good friend. And he said, I would like to take you and a couple of your students out to Yon Tauket. And Bill is a logger. He's somebody that is, he's a native person and he was a tribal chair, just a wonderful person, but not someone that would, I would say, would be very emotional or something like that. Or we're not quick to share, but he brought us out there to Yon Tauket. Well, Yon Tauket is the center of the Tolowa world, it's their place of genesis. It's where the first white redwood tree emerged. And it's also the place of a horrible massacre. So it's often referred to as the burnt rat massacre. It's sort of the place that is equivalent to, you know, what was talked about it for the weot. And he showed us this place. And he said, this is what happened in the 1850s in 1851. We had a world renewal ceremony, hundreds, you know, we all were all gathered here and men, women and children were in the houses. The settlers came here and set the houses on fire. And as they emerged, they were shot. And there were only a few survivors. And the only way they survived was by jumping in the water, a slew nearby the village and just swimming until everybody left. And so it was a horrible massacre. And he was choking up and explaining, this is what the context of this house was. This was his way of explaining and sharing with that with us. And my heart is pounding right now, just thinking about that because it became an entirely different thing to me and understanding and him sharing that and not just reading about it, but having an ancestor bring us to this place and say, this is the responsibility that you have. And so when we were, you know, the traditional archeological sort of, you know, say, oh, well, look at these artifacts. People are acculturating because they're, you know, the interpretation would be about native people are using new tools and technology. Well, okay, that's completely different. Native people, they were in this, they were living in this house at this time and people were being shot. They were being forced into reservations. They were people that were scalped. It was terrible. And they were so committed to that landscape that they continued to live in that place. And that is the connection that is just insane. Incredible to me to think about that historically and then how those stories are so important to modern people. And seeing the Talawa community continue to go to that place. And now they don't live in villages, but they still connect to that place. And then it's still important to them. And they gather there and have family gathering. So for me, that was, I felt it was a watershed moment for me, I think. And also I feel still responsible for explaining that those archeological findings in those terms. And it has been difficult to actually, I will say to publish about that place when you mentioned the word genocide because that's what was happening. So I just wanna say, you know, that was sort of my moment. Yeah. Yeah, and so it's important to realize that whatever relationship, and hopefully, and it can be a very good one, but behind all of that for native people is that history that we feel very connected to. It's not discreet. It's not in a little lump we can put into the side. It's not a book we can put up on the shelf. It's been handed down through families in various ways and means. It has huge emotional, mental, spiritual impact on us in the work we do. And the work we do actually brings it more to the surface. So there's this, like I said earlier, kind of that ER kind of mentality we have to do in this work of, you know, there's lots of things happening here that are distressful, but we have a responsibility to try, but that doesn't mean we're not impacted by it, that we don't get emotional about it. And I don't have any problem telling you that just watching the film that Kutcha Kutcha showed about the return, which I've seen before, and I actually was there in the city that day, but I was at another meeting with the education department for the Iraq. And we were told half the group wouldn't be there because they were at the city council that day, signing the island back. And so, and we all stopped and talked about that because it's not separate from education. It's part of the curriculum people want to bring back and teach not only their children as tribal people, but the public's children. So they know why that happened. So it's not, again, it's not separated. So we spent 15 minutes talking about and congratulating the one year, you know, we are a person that did come to the meeting to talk about that passage and even looking at the film. It's quite emotional to me. And I can remember we have one question that has to do with Las Padres and the fire there. And I feel the same way when I go and look at, you know, our homelands there right next to 400 Lagut, just a few miles away, our sacred mountain is there in Las Padres in that part of it. And the fire went all the way around at the Dolan fire and the devastation it caused. And then that was the earlier fire, the one that was just last year came back and did more damage. But so we, you know, how do we work with that? How do we deal with that? Well, first we mourn it. We have to, we're still in mourning for that, that history that we have, whether it's distant or not. And we have to, and it's really interesting. You said that Janet, they went and completed the ceremony. And that's what we felt we've had to do a lot that a lot of our people that passed over during that genocidal time, they didn't have the proper send-off, so to speak. And so one of the things we've done is brought back our burning ceremony, which is what happens when people cross over. And we've named people that we know, ancestors and others we know from the past. And we do that for them as well as people that have just passed away in the current year. We go back and take care of those ancestors as well. That's a really important part of our present day mind. We don't make that distinction in time either. So there was one question about, because we're at the question point, the Dolan fire in Las Padres. There's been three major fires since in my lifetime, I remember. And one of them impacted the place my dad grew up over in French camp, which is south of Big Sur along the coast which I think at the time was part of Las Padres. It was the biggest fire in the history of the country at the time 1975, 76. And it took out the cabin my dad was raised in when he was little by his grandparents. And going back in 2002 for the first time that I can remember, seeing the rubble from that cabin was still there. And one of the reasons is they said it was more than 50 years old. So it was considered historic. So they didn't want to just toss it. So they just put it in a pile next to the cabin. And all that was left was the brick chimney and the old potbelly stove that they used to cook on out on the porch. But they didn't want to disturb that either. They just left it just exactly as it was in 1977. And my grandfather who was the last one there, my great grandfather, I think he left in 63. So the cabin I don't think was used after that. And then in 77 it burnt. And since then there's fires that have gone through there twice. They want to know how to be involved. Well, that's federal land and we have trouble being involved. We certainly offer our suggestions not to give an excuse to any part of the federal government but the national forest I know at least in present day and certainly in our area has been cut to the bone and then some in terms of resources. So it's hard to even get them to talk about accepting help. And that's sort of one of the things I wanted to bring about with tribes too. And I think we talked about it earlier that tribes have so few resources. And when you guys were both hired as Tipo's you had a kind of a narrow job description but you found out you were gonna wind up doing a lot more and still didn't have time for all the things that you needed to do. And that's pretty much the way it is with all tribes. And maybe you can speak a little bit to that trying to deal with questions like that. How do you integrate with other agencies when they have resource problems but you can't take the time to integrate with them in a proper way. So go ahead and Shannon. Oh, yes. Sorry. All right. Letting the dog out. Yeah, Janet, the question was about how we integrate with other sort of departments at the tribe and maybe you could speak to that right now. You know, I think not well enough. Blue Lake has got, I think it's got more employees now than tribal members and their focus has been largely on economic development. And also contributing to the greater community. They run food programs, lunch programs for a number of elementary schools and summer programs, food programs, senior food programs. They have transportation, they have a casino, they have a hotel. So- And those programs are not just for the tribe, correct? Well, yeah, those are all just broader ones and the economic development is like the casino and hotel, but they don't have, they don't pay their tribal members per capita payments. This is an interesting thing that it took me years to understand or learn about is that some tribes that have casinos like the big ones done so in California that are making just buku bucks, they pay their tribal citizens per capita payment every month which could be $10,000, $20,000 a month. It's kind of like winning the lottery. So these people have basically, some maybe have come from and one generation from dirt poor to pretty wealthy. And I go and I see these people from a distance and I don't really haven't had any close friendships, but I'm thinking, I don't think this is gonna work out well. On the other hand, Blue Lake doesn't pay per capita and people live kind of modestly, the tribal members on the rancher in modular homes that are comfortable and safe and secure, but they're not handed a bunch of money every month and that money is instead plowed into energy development projects, say one of national award for their solar project and solar projection anyway. So, and they plowed back into the environmental programs, the fishery, Mad River stuff. And I'm always getting stuff on my desk from US Fish and Wildlife that are about critters, about animals. I usually can address the ones that deal with plants because that becomes gathering, but because animals move around, that's really hard for cultural resources to deal with unless they're skins of animals or others. You're dealing with a regalia. So, I just, I had made the decision and running this program to focus on trying to cover the most projects that have the potential for any kind of impact to a cultural site. And that can include a historic non-Indian site if it's significant enough because we're supposed to educate our local governments about the historic preservation laws. And the responsibility, and this is where the Yurok tribe, the early Tipo there, Tom Gates, really did us all a great favor because the Tipos I think were envisioned as somebody that would under a sovereign tribe just manage the cultural resources on the reservation, on the rancheria. Well, Blue Lake's got 75 acres and no cultural resources on it. So what do I do? I would have nothing to do, right? So, but Tom Gates and his great infinite wisdom, he just said, no, we're gonna manage for the Yurok, we're gonna manage the ancestral lands, which becomes enormous. For the Weot, it runs from the Bear River Ridge down by Rio del, south of Ferndale, all the way up to the Little River. And then inland to the ridge, it separates the Mad River from the Redwood Creek watershed. So it's enormous. And there's all kinds of things that are going on from timber harvest plans to pot marijuana cultivation. Of course, it's been a really big thing here in Humboldt County. But we got that regulated. And we got it regulated in such a good way that we had amazingly, we had this prayer place. And when you stood there, it had the cupules, the little ground of depressions on the boulder. And when you looked at that rock, at that prayer place, and you looked up, the whole of the Mad River watershed and landscape was in front of you. And there was no modern developments, no modern intrusion whatsoever and the landscape as far as you could see. And so when they proposed marijuana grows in the near foreground on the prairies below this prayer place, we said, no, no, no, no. Let's work to move them out of the view shed. And so we got three marijuana row permits and working with the County of Humboldt and really good guys on these, actually these growers were, they were good. Some that have come, there's been a bunch of new people that have come to town in Humboldt County since these laws passed. But these particular applicants, they were really very cooperative and very respectful of the tribe. And we were able to preserve that landscape of that prayer place that Ted says that when they're ready to do dances, that that will be a place where one of the persons who participates in the world renewal can go to prepare for the dance. It's just that is stunning. So, you know, there are good stories. There are good stories. There's a few bad ones, but by and large, these local governments are paying attention and it took them decades. But you know, one of the things is that source book that we put together, which was, you know, this manual that had all the key laws and stuff that was important, you could just pull it down. It's like a really good desk reference. And that was something I handed to the head of the Humboldt County Planning Department. And I think it made a difference. It woke them up. Yeah. Yeah. Can I bounce off of that? Actually. Yes, go ahead. Go ahead. And I just wanted to, and I don't know if this was covered earlier in the day, but just sort of, you know, the learning process and bouncing off of some of what Janet was saying too. For me was that it's just important to think about, you know, there's no pan Indian or pan California native way of doing things. The tribes today, the history of the tribal communities today is that these are artificial groupings of people where that were sort of, you know, during colonial times squished together in these different rancherias. Not all tribal communities are federally recognized. They all have different histories. They have different tribal structures. So you can't, you know, you could learn from, you know, Janet might say, well, Blue Lake works this way. You know, Greg could say, well, my tribe works this way, but each one has its own structure. And so you should learn about that. Oh, sorry. Go ahead. Yeah. Well, I was gonna say they're all equally valid. Yes, exactly. And so it's, you know, like doing that research and sometimes, you know, some tribes have, like there's a wide variety of resources. So some are casino tribes, other ones don't have those resources. Some have websites that actually can have quite a bit of information and educational material on there. That's a great place to start. And you can learn about the structure of a tribal community directly from them. So, and then not all tribes have Tipo, they're not Tipo offices. They might have their own cultural departments. And they might also have a certain designated people that you would be communicating with. So some, you know, sometimes it will be the Tipo. Other times it'll be somebody from another office or a certain elder that, you know, or from a family that is associated with the region where your, you know, your land might be or the place that you're interested in restoring. And also I would mention too, that tribes are, you know, like Janet was saying and Greg was saying that they have a lot going on. And so the Tipos are sort of, you know, my experience was, yeah, like working with these different offices, you have to give them a little bit of time to respond. Don't expect, you know, you know, like things to come back in a week because they need to consider, they have various periodicities of meetings. So the tribe I worked for, the culture committee met once a month. Other communities might have it every other month or twice a month or something like that. And so, and there might be other things on their docket or agendas. So that's just, yeah. Yeah, so we're almost, yeah, we're almost a lot of time. So I just wanted to wrap up with a couple of, kind of briefly address a couple of questions, you know, and just speaking of what you're talking about, that's why, you know, when I, you know, talk to agencies that want to figure out how to work with tribes, you don't start with a project and treat it as a business, which you have to do before a project even shows up when you first day in your office, find out who the tribal people are in your area of responsibility and go call them and start building a relationship so that when you do have a project, that part of it is sort of taken care of because otherwise the tribes part, if you just call them out of the blue, say I'm blah, blah, blah from this agency, they're gonna go, yeah, so what? Even if they have the time, they're not gonna just hand you over their culture to satisfy your business requirement or your project timeline, you have to build a relationship with them, not just for the social, spiritual, moral values that come with it, that the tribe is gonna entrust you with information. And it's also a practical thing. Why am I gonna spend my precious limited time talking to somebody who didn't bother calling me when they've been on the job for a year? And the project's been going on for six months, but now there's a deadline next week and they want me to respond. That's not gonna happen. So there's that mutual respect of an agency to an agency or a tribal community that needs to be honored and respected. That was one of the questions and it's always about building a relationship before you need to ask that favor, like I need something really quick, can you accommodate me? If you already have a relationship, you can get away with it a couple of times. Let's see. And that's kind of about it. Again, that part that the guidelines that we've been talking about here, the cultural competence circle has been addressing doesn't really talk about those two aspects. I gotta add that in to kind of fill that out. So I think that's it. We're a little bit past lunchtime. And so thank you so much, Janet and Shannon. Thank you. Thank you. Hopefully it wasn't too traumatic and you can go have coffee and chocolate as appropriate. Oh, chocolate. Yeah, it's chocolate. So thank you so much. And everybody out there that is looking at this, these projects to try to restore the earth, work with the people, the human beings or the human beings, save the humans. Yeah. Save the whales now. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for the invitation, Greg. Thank you. All righty, take care. Bye-bye. Thank you again to all of the...