 keynote speaker for today, Julian Brave Noiskat, a member of the Canem Lake ban Tisgeskin and a descendant of the Lilawat Nation of Mount Curry. Julian is a writer and filmmaker currently based in the Pacific Northwest. He's a brilliant thinker who works at the intersection of climate journalism and advocacy for indigenous rights. Noiskat's work has been recognized with numerous awards, including the 2022 American Mosaic Journalism Prize, which honors excellence in long-form narrative or deep reporting of stories about underrepresented or misrepresented groups in the present American landscape. In 2021, he was named the Time 100 Next list of emerging young leaders for his work at the center of the climate crisis. Julian is my great honor to welcome you here to the University of Michigan and to the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. I know what you're thinking. What the heck did that native guy with that crazy-ass, native-ass name just say? I've been thinking about names and naming. To have a name. To give a name. What's in a name? What is a name? And what is it to name? It's probably hard not to think about these things when your parents and ancestors gave you a name like Julian Brave Noiskat. Whenever someone checks my driver's license or reads my byline or has to listen to me think out loud into a microphone like you all are so graciously going to do today, they often stop, squint their eyes and ask, is that really your name? TSA guy hit me with one of those on the way here. I think for some it might be the first time they've encountered a real-life Indian. I'm sure they've heard native names before. You know like Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, maybe John Redcorn from King of the Hill. But when a real-life Indian is staring them down, I often feel like there's some curiosity on the other side of the gaze. Some desire to understand, maybe to inspect my difference. Like maybe on some gut level, people get that there must be some significance to a name. And indeed there is. Sometimes my family and I will sit around and tell stories about the Indians we know with big names. Growing up in Oakland there was a family who were often unhoused with a last name that could be rendered alternatively as shot with two arrows, shot twice, or just shots. It was as though their very name like their family was restless. It moved here, it moved there, did not want to stay put. It did not want to be singular. And it did not want to be made legible to the state. My dad remembers two Oakleys, brothers, best friends, who used to run around the res together in the 60s and 70s named Klabi and Kanki. Except in our Shushwap English Pigeon, their names were rendered with Salish Phenology, a glottal stop placed after the K. Klabi and Kanki. Klabi and Kanki are gone now. When you say their names, your palate decolonizes, at least for a syllable or two. And of course there are some Indians whose names received rather unfortunate English translations. One of the crow scouts who rode with General George Armstrong Custer was named Maritathi Dakkarush. History remembers him as white man runs him. It's hard not to think about names when you're an Indian. We are peoples with big and often powerful names who understood the power of naming, the power of the name one carries, and also the power of the names we give to others, to humans, to places, and to the other than human world around us. The University of Michigan invited me to stand up and offer words upon your graduation. I am humbled, humbled by their request. It was not so long ago that I was one of you sitting down there looking up and listening on my big day, not talking, definitely not speechifying, just waiting for my name to be called. So when I, a writer, a filmmaker, an activist, and an indigenous man thought about what I should say, I thought about words and how much they matter, and about names which in all the galaxy of words are a particularly strong constellation. Today I want to talk to you about choosing words well and with care, and about the significance of names. I want to talk to you about names in part because for hundreds of years the United States and Canada and many other nations across the world tried to wipe indigenous names off the face of this earth. When my ancestors were baptized and sent to schools built to eradicate their Indianness, church and government officials changed their names. I'm not talking about bestowing a nickname, or adding an honorific, or making something easier to pronounce in English. I'm talking about the wholesale eradication of names, the dismantling of the structures of nomenclature, the deletion of identities from the historical record and eventually from all human memory. When they baptized my ancestors the missionaries would give us Indians just one name, a first name. So not too far back in my family's family tree I have an ancestor who the missionaries must have called some Indian named Archie. In our community there was an Indian Frank and an Indian Bob, an Indian Pete and an Indian Dick. Many of my relatives still walk around with those first names for last names. And as the missionaries erased our names and eradicated our identities they submitted our children to systematic cultural deprogramming. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Canada has deemed this a cultural genocide, a cultural genocide. At one of the schools my family was sent to, St. Joseph's Mission in Williams Lake, British Columbia, a ground penetrating radar study recently identified over 90 potential unmarked burials. At another school my family was sent to, the Kamloops Indian Residential School, a similar search identified over 200. Canada operated some 150 schools like St. Joseph's and Kamloops. This country, the United States, operated more than 350, 350. General Richard Henry Pratt who founded the first American Indian boarding school in the United States described the goal of these schools as to, quote, kill the Indian and save the man. All of the Indian there is in the race should be dead, said Pratt. In that continent wide campaign to kill the Indian in the child we are now learning that thousands of actual Indian children perished. That not long after the church and government took their names many of those native babies, native toddlers, native children, native adolescents, native teenagers were themselves dead and in the ground. Let me tell you some of what they killed. In the traditions of my Sikwetmuch and Statlian peoples names could either be inherited or earned and names are remembered. My family remembers them. We retell them through story and song. Descendants honor our ancestors by keeping their names alive. Some names like the last name I carry, Noiskat or Naweeskit, Naweeskit as it was originally pronounced, mark descent and relationship to ancestors. And I venture to guess that like me, many if not most of you carry last names that mark your descent and your relationship to your ancestors too and in that way perhaps our people are not so different. Other Sikwetmuch names though like the one carried by my ancestor Tien Meshen recognized a person's deeds on this earth. Tien Meshen is a combination of two words, Tienem meaning to go around and Schenck meaning rock. As it was told to me, my ancestor Tien Meshen was a war chief who confronted settlers and gold miners coming into the Sikwetmuch peoples country. As those settlers intruders went around and threw a rocky past, Tien Meshen would impress upon these squatters and fortune seekers the importance of abiding by our indigenous laws. There aren't that many stories like that that still survive so I feel lucky to know that story because for my people to name someone or something is to be able to tell a story, to endeavor to understand and tell their truth. And in many instances if you could name someone or something you might also know how to sing its song. The morning before the Williams Lake First Nation announced that over 90 potential unmarked graves had been identified at St. Joseph's Mission I had a sweat ceremony with the Williams Lake Chief and a few other men. And in that sweat lodge a statly young man, a man from my people, sang the song of my grandfather's grandfather, Nkashusha, the hereditary chief from Shamakwam, whose tax name was Harry Peters. Children from Shamakwam, like children from Canem Lake, were sent to St. Joseph's and other schools. And in all likelihood some of those children did not return. I acknowledge Nkashusha today because I hope to stand in the strength of his leadership, his legacy, and his song. A song that was sung for me on a very important morning. You see Nkashusha was a celebrated leader. He was one of the chiefs who signed the 1911 Lee Watt Declaration which reads in part, we claim that we are the rightful owners of our tribal territory. We have always lived in our country. At no time have we ever deserted it or left it to others. We are aware, we are aware, the government claims our country like all other Indian territories. But we deny, we deny their right to it. We never gave it nor sold it to them. We speak the truth and we speak for our whole tribe. I invoke Nkashusha's words today because like him I am asked to speak. And when ground penetrating radar is finding the bodies of my ancestors' children, children who did not have the opportunity to beget their own descendants and become ancestors in their own right, voice becomes an existential responsibility. I remember and honor Nkashusha's name so that like him I might carry my responsibilities in this world to myself, to my ancestors, my descendants and to you all here today well because names come with responsibilities. That's the way it is in many of the indigenous communities I've visited. Names come with responsibilities. One of the men who has helped me to return to our sequelae clans and life ways is a hereditary chief from the Asquiat First Nation named Francis Johnson Jr. Francis spends a lot of time up in the high country hunting and down at the river fishing. And everywhere he goes he recalls the stories and names that connect us to our places. His name, his hereditary name, klechwoman-esked means to go up high. And that's appropriate because klechwoman-esked is often going up into the mountains where the memories of our ancestors still live. And he knows that to carry forward our ancestors' memories we have to pass that knowledge on to responsibility all of us have to pass on our knowledge. And that's why when he goes klechwoman-esked invites his brethren like me to come out with him and to learn on the land. And it just so happens that before we even knew each other klechwoman-esked and I both attended the same potlatch, the same ceremonial gathering where many songs, dances, meals, and gifts were shared in the remote valley of Bela Kula, British Columbia. Bela Kula is a river valley cut into the coast mountains by retreating glaciers and rising seas. And it's one of the most beautiful places, the most absolutely stunning places I've ever seen. And there in that valley at the mouth of the Bela Kula River in 2018, the Moody family of the New Hulk Nation passed the title of Nazmada, Nazmada meaning heaven, from Larry Moody Sr. to Larry Moody Jr. The name Nazmada comes with the responsibility to care for their family's ancestral village site at a place in the valley the New Hulk call Snoot Lee. And it also comes with the responsibility to give. You see a New Hulk culture like many indigenous cultures, the person who is considered the wealthiest is the one who gives the most. And that, that is the function of the potlatch. In 2015, the elder Moody, Larry Moody Sr., hit the $1 million jackpot in the provincial lottery. He used the winnings to buy cars for his brothers and a Harley for his junior. And much of the rest he put into the gifts for that potlatch that I attended. Into traditional foods like salmon and venison. Into piles upon piles, I mean mounds of winter blankets. Into originally carved and painted traditional art. And into money that he put into other people's pockets. Because for native people to have a name, to have a name like Nazmada, to have a name like Klehwoman-esked, there is a responsibility that comes with that to give. A few weeks ago, I found myself at another potlatch. This one in Sitka, Alaska was put on by Louise Brady, a herring lady from the Kicksuddy clan of the Raven Moody of the Slinkett Nation. The Slinkett of what is now Southeast Alaska have been harvesting herring, which they have given the name YAH in their language, for at least 10,000 years. That means that the Slinkett's ancestors started pulling herring and herring eggs out of the ocean about the same time that Mesopotamians started settling down to grow fields and raise livestock. And according to the Slinkett tradition, the first herring were harvested in the hair of a Kicksuddy woman named YAH Shah, the first herring lady who rested her head on a rock perched above the herring spawning grounds. And when she rose from that rest, her inky locks were caked in the golden translucent row of the fish. The Kicksuddy and the herring ladies were such good stewards of the herring that in living memory, the Slinkett used to be able to harvest herring eggs by skimming a special herring rake across the water. There were that many herring in Sitka. But nowadays, it's not so easy to get herring eggs anymore. In the latter half of the last century, the herring were incorporated into a commercial fishery that provided raw materials for fertilizer, for animal feed, and for fish food, and that also supplies the lucrative market for Kazunoko, a delicacy consumed by the Japanese on New Year. And in just a generation, as commercial fishermen have fished and fished and fished too much, herring stocks have collapsed. There were once seven commercial herring fisheries in Southeast Alaska. Today, there are just two, a decline that reinforces a multi-decade and global trend. At present, herring stocks have been nearly completely depleted in Japan, in Norway, in Nova Scotia, in East England, and in Washington State's Puget Sound, where I live. You might have never thought about herring, but this is no trivial matter. Herring, it should be said, feed everything. They feed humpback whales, they feed harbor seals, they feed sea lions, they feed eagles, they feed seagulls, they feed halibut, they feed salmon, they feed humans, they feed everything. And when those forage fished windell, other parts of the ecosystems they sustain can also falter. And so at the potlatch for the yaw, the slinket named for herring, Louise Brady, a kick-study herring lady, a yaw-shaw, challenged all in attendance to imagine what it might look like to celebrate, to protect, and to give to the herring, to give to those little silver fish the same way that they have given, have always given to the slinket and to many others. Louise asked us to consider the responsibilities she holds as a herring lady, and in turn what responsibilities we hold as people who have heard and considered the gift of that story and the name of the herring lady. Because I believe and Louise believes that names bestow responsibilities on their listeners and on their witnesses too. They bestow responsibilities on you. Now, you might be wondering, why is this guy going on and on about names? Well, as I said, for centuries, I'm not talking for like ten years, for hundreds of years, innumerable policies, innumerable practices, and innumerable processes were devised and enacted to rid society of names and responsibilities like the ones I have just named and recalled. What I am humbly suggesting is that we remember and consider the power of names. That naming matters. That as good students, citizens, and policy makers, you are going to be confronted with all sorts of realities, problems, and challenges out there in the broken world we have inherited. And as you go about that world, just as Tlech Homen asked, goes about his, from high up on the mountain to way down by the river, I would suggest that you seek to understand, to have empathy, and in due time to name what you see and encounter appropriately with words carefully considered to represent the truth, the truth about our shared planet with accuracy and with respect. And that this is an essential, perhaps even sacred responsibility. In her award winning book, Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation writes, quote, names are the way we humans build relationships, not only with each other, but with the living world, their fundamental building blocks. Now this might sound like simple folk wisdom or even common sense, but I think our society keeps getting it wrong. Among the many crises we face, of health, of climate, of democracy, we face, I believe, a crisis of words and a crisis of naming. Right now, Vladimir Putin, one of the most powerful men in the whole entire world is calling the Russian invasion of the Ukraine a country led by a Jewish head of state, a campaign for, quote, denazification. President Donald Trump, the former and still aspiring leader of the free world, has described our rapidly changing climate as a, quote, hoax invented by the Chinese. The wind got mad at that one. I guess the wind's voting for Trump. In school boards across the nation, parent activists are decrying a more accurate account of history as, quote, unquote, critical race theory. Insurrectionists dare to call themselves patriots. For some, the common courtesy of using the gender pronouns a fellow human identifies with and prefers is considered a step too far. And on the cable network with the largest audience on television, by far, much of what I have just said would likely be called fake news. If democracy is the collective expression of our views and values through votes, I wonder how much of today's dysphoria can be traced to something off kilter within ourselves, to people unmoored from place, from community, from social role, from communal responsibility and from social reciprocity, to the turmoil of workers chasing jobs and livelihoods far away from familiar hamlets, to the young people floating through social media platforms and the pensioners flipping through television stations, to the sick who are denied their fundamental right and the dignity of healthcare, to the good traditions that are dying, to the special places that are homogenizing, to the names and responsibilities no longer given and too often forgotten. And sometimes I wonder, I wonder what our world might be like if the policy makers who took this land had let some of those traditions, responsibilities, and names live. If more of us sought to remember, understand and name the parts of our humanity, indigenous and otherwise, that were nearly completely annihilated. I'm currently writing my first book and co-directing my first documentary. And in each of those projects, I've been thinking a lot about the power and significance of naming and of names, including and especially the power of my own. You see, I once thought about names as static, as something you received at birth and maybe came into a flash as an adult or early career professional. But along my journey, advocating for climate and environmental justice in Washington, D.C., reporting from indigenous communities across North America and beyond, and holding tight to survivors and relatives as we searched the grounds of St. Joseph's mission for ancestors and for answers, I've come to realize that names are not discovered. They revealed and worked towards across a lifetime and sometimes across many lifetimes as names carry stories and accrue stories and songs over generations. And so let me tell you, let me tell you what I'm learning about my name, Julian Brave Noisecat and also about myself. Noisecat, my last name, is derived, as I said, from the ancestral name Nwiskit. No one remembers what Nwiskit means anymore. No one. No one in the whole world. I've asked my grandmother, who's a fluent speaker of our Sikwepmukh language, but she can't come up with a translation. In an old ethnographic text, I've been looking all over for this, I found reference to a warrior with a similar name, Nwisasken, who helped bring an abusive man to justice near the Fraser River. And look, I mean, everybody wants some sort of like justice-seeking hero type to be their ancestor, so I thought that was pretty dope. And I don't know if Nwisasken is my ancestor, but part of me would really like to think so. But what I do know, what I do know, is that in the 1800s, the name Nwiskit definitely belonged to a man named Copper John from Tschuechum, which is in the Kerabu region of British Columbia near the Fraser River. And then it belonged to my great-grandmother, Alice, who raised my father when his own parents, who were all messed up from the residential schools, could not. And what I also know is that one night, in 1966, when my dad was seven years old, Alice went out in a blizzard to look for her husband, Jacob, who had been out drinking. And she froze to death. After Alice was gone, there were no noise cats anywhere in the whole world until my father married my mother, reclaimed Alice's name, and passed it on to me and to my sister. We may never know. I may never know what Nwiskit means or to which ancestor it originally belonged. But what I do know is that to be a noise cat is to be among the last of your name, to be a survivor dangling on the limb of a family tree they couldn't quite chop down. Julian, my given name, connects me to my mother's late best friend, Julia, to my great-grandmother, Julia Kraus-Peters, the daughter of Nkashusha, to my cousin, Julianne, who is learning our language so that she can help me teach the next generation of speakers, our kids, our nieces, our nephews, our cousins. And to King Julian, king of the kingdom of Madagascar, and if I recall from the Madagascar franchise, also the self-proclaimed king of the Central Park Zoo. He was a hereditary chief in his own way. And lastly, brave, my middle name connects me to, and you're going to be surprised by this, of all people, my late and very, very pale white grandmother, Suzanne, an Irish-Jewish orphan who may not have been native but who understood the power of a name who gave me a quality to aspire to in my own and who I think had a sense of humor, maybe a bit politically incorrect, but a sense of humor, nonetheless, insisting that our only half-native grandchild go around being called a brave. Today, the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan is going to call out the names of 171 graduates. When they call out your name and put it on a degree in your hands, I want you to think about the ancestors who gave you that name, maybe your parents who are here, maybe their parents, their parents before that, back, back. I want you to think about their deeds, their good deeds, their bad deeds, and all the ones otherwise. And I want you to think about your own, to imagine what it might look like to live your life in such a way that you might become an ancestor worthy of having their name and their story remembered, passed on, maybe even sung about. To honor those who have made you who you are, so that you might go out into the world with responsibility, with generosity and with intention, so that someday you might name things well, too. Chuk, Kuk's Jechem. Thank you. Jillian, thank you so much for those powerful and moving remarks and advice for our class. We are going to have a little bit of an interlude now with a wonderful...