 Hello everyone. Welcome. Arising from this land is the Nipah greeting word aqua-nee, meaning peace onto you. I'm humbled to be speaking in the language of peace that grew for millennium from this land. I'm Travis Coe, co-artistic director of Double Edge Theatre, and I'm honored to introduce the Living Presence of our History Part 10. A panel of indigenous leaders and scholars will delve into the intricacies and complications regarding native appropriation. This series is led by Okiteo Cultural Center and curated by one of its co-directors, Rhonda Anderson, in partnership with Double Edge Theatre. The Okiteo Cultural Center was founded as an autonomous indigenous space, the first of its kind since colonization in western and central Massachusetts, to develop and create a much needed multicultural and multi-tribal space for traditional life in the environment and on the traditional lands of the Nipmuk and other tribal nations living and from this land. The Okiteo space was donated by Double Edge in recognition of the historical and present denial of native sovereignty on these lands and the present need to redress erasure. Okiteo, which means to plant to grow in the Nipmuk language, fulfilled the truth of its name and grew beyond all expectation. Dee also entered into a land share agreement of our 100 acres in this rural town for traditional practice and more native people have returned to this land after over 500 years. I say this all to share that action is possible. Okiteo's founders and directors Rhonda Anderson and Larry Spotted-Crowman have generously agreed to share beyond their own people this educational series, so that communities can learn about the long, unacknowledged history and presence of the Nipmuk and other tribal nations among us. This series is a place where the voices of Okiteo and indigenous people are permanent and have the final word on their own identity. The Living Presence series is a call for truth, it is a call for action, to look history in the face and see how it can heal the bleeding wounds, to ask for a commitment not only to listen and understand the stories of these many people, but also to share the responsibilities for that story to live fully in the present and to make sure that erasure and disappearance gives way to reparations, decolonization of our mind and in our actions, sharing land, cultural space, and most of all justice. I want to take this opportunity to thank HowlRound for broadcasting, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Jacobs Pillow, local cultural councils, and especially the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities Expanding Stories program, which has provided support since its early inception. And now, to introduce the co-founders and co-directors of Okiteo. Rhonda Anderson is an Inupiaq Athabaskin from Coktovic. Her life's work is most importantly as a mother, absolutely trained herbalist, Silver Smith, and activist. She works fervently as an educator and activist on the removal of mascots, water protection, indigenous identity, protecting her traditional homelands in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, from extractive industries into that light is also the curator of the Living Presence series. Rhonda tirelessly works on representation from the State House to local schools and businesses. She is on the advisory board of NIFA, was an advisor on decolonization efforts on the Massachusetts Council for the Arts, and has been appointed by the governor to sit on the Massachusetts Cultural Council's governing board. She is the commissioner of Indian fairs in Western Massachusetts and was named a Commonwealth heroine of Massachusetts. Larry Spada Croman is a citizen of the Nipmuc Nation. He's a nationally acclaimed award-winning writer, poet and cultural educator, traditional storyteller, tribal drummer and dancer, and motivational speaker involving youth sobriety, cultural and environmental awareness. Larry shares music and history and culture to Nipmuc people and lectures on Native American sovereignty and identity regionally and internationally. Larry's books include Morning Road to Thanksgiving, Drumming and Dreaming, The Whispering Basket, and The Adventures of Kiteyuu. Larry premiered his play, Freedom and Season, and recently premiered a new documentary titled, Anoki, More Than a Photo, More Than a Pow Wow. He's on the review committee at the Native American Poets Project and an artist-in-residence at Bunker Hill Community College. Larry is also the first Native American to sing the opening honor song in land acknowledgment at the 2021 Boston Marathon starting line. Larry will now welcome you to the living presence of our history. Kwe Kwe, thank you Travis. I want to thank all of you, all the panelists for being here, all of you out there listening. I really appreciate this time and Devil Edge Theater who are making all the necessary changes for getting us all here today. Thank you. I really appreciate that. Welcome all of you. I'm speaking to you here from our Nipmuc homelands and as we say, I'm in the nation at the moment to the bottom. We're to chicken as an all kumus the body which he surpassed who was looking to hear who or not know that's been woman and the old. He knew that you've been telling me and I may only know my quantum kitchen. God knows I'm a tentam. And I will share an honor song and recognition of our time here. Thank you all for being here, Kulipia, once again welcome. Now I turn it over to you, Rhonda, take it away. Thank you so much, Larry, for your words of welcoming and opening this event in a good way. I feel like this is probably the first time online viewers have heard him sing this song and that is thanks to Vincent Schilling, Native Guy, and Avestan Tai for giving us the technical information to make that happen. Really appreciate that. Thank you so much, Travis, and thank you to our partners at Double Edge, Koyanakpak. Rhonda Anderson. So I said welcome, good afternoon. Thank you for listening. I just greeted you in my traditional language, Anupyat, and I am zooming. I'm zooming to you today from my home in Khorrain. The land that I'm privileged to steward and live on is on the Pecomagon watershed, which is known as the Green River today, and is the contemporary territory of the Nipmuk tribal nation. I want to give deep appreciation and recognize this land as a living being and give gratitude for all that she has provided since time immemorial. And I always ask that you remember Indigenous communities have lived, gathered, farmed, hunted, fished, birds died, buried their dead here for thousands of years, and they are still here, not metaphorically, but physically still here. I always start off making sure that you have homework to do, right? And that is getting to know the Indigenous people of your area, see what you can do to lift and raise their voices and honor and respect their sovereignty. So, as always, I like to give three action items. I'm going to kind of breeze through it a little bit today. We have a very full panel of incredible speakers, and I want to make sure that we all have time to hear them. So, first, and I always keep asking for this because I'm not seeing reflexive action locally, right? Recognize and make changes to a narrative, dominant narrative that glorifies colonization and genocide of Indigenous peoples. So, being mindful of terms like Pioneer Valley, those are a reminder of a legacy of dispossession, removal, and subsequently erasure. Make those changes be reflexive. I want to see change. Second, look for ways to create intentional and meaningful reciprocal relationships with tribal citizens, tribal representatives. Travis spoke very eloquently about the work, the essential work that is being done with Double Edge Theatre. That is looking for intentional and meaningful reciprocity. And third, there are six tribes in Massachusetts that support five bills in the state right now. And yesterday, if you live locally, you might have seen in the paper that the mascot bill S245 has been voted favorably out of the Education Committee and looks likely to be passed this year. So, please visit maindigenousagenda.org to learn more information and ways that you can support and get involved. So, thank you for listening to that. So, pagala gypsy, welcome to the living presence of our History Part 10, 10 Native Appropriation. First, I want to apologize to everyone for any confusion or inconvenience about today. I'm sick. I've been very sick all week with a standard, a standard nasty cold, but we care about the health of our vulnerable Native community, our partners, and of course our allies and supporters. So, that is why we move to a fully remote venue. So, Kuyana, thank you for your grace and understanding. I really appreciate it a lot. I also want to thank the panelists tuning in from as far away as California. I think we have two tuning in from California today. And of course to Julie who took me up on my invitation to come out to beautiful Ashfield, Massachusetts to participate in this conversation. I am so sad that I'm not meeting you in person. I cried ugly tears yesterday, trust me. I am in awe of each panelist that is with us today because they're doing some of the most challenging work. And that is educating the general public on different forms of Native appropriation. This work can be demanding. It can even be dangerous, but it is rewarding when deep listening happens and there is change. So, I invite viewers today to come into that space of deep listening. You don't have to agree with everything. You don't even have to understand everything, but just deeply listen. And with that, I would like to introduce each panelist that is here today with a short bio and a quick question. If you've been listening to Living Presence before, you know I do like a rapid round of questioning so that you can get to know each panelist a little bit better, maybe something of their life or experience. And so, I'll get started with that. Lawrence. Lawrence Baca is a Pawnee citizen. And at his retirement, he was the Deputy Director of the Office of Tribal Justice at the United States Department of Justice. He was previously a senior trial attorney in the Civil Rights Division assigned to the Educational Opportunities Litigation Section, the Housing and Civil Enforcement Section, the General Litigation Section and the Office of Indian Rights. Baca became one of the first American Indians to graduate from Harvard Law School, the first hired through the Department of Justice's Honor Law Program, and the first promoted to senior trial attorney status at the department. In 2008, the Attorney General presented Lawrence with the Attorney General's Medallion, the highest award presented to a retiring employee. Also in 2008, the Federal Bar Association's Indian Law Section created the Lawrence R. Baca Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in Federal Indian Law, and he was the first recipient. In 2012, he received the American Bar Association's Thurgood Marshall Award. 2017, he received the Federal Bar Association Sarity Use Award for Civil Rights. And in 2021, he received the Carlos Montezuma Award for the Mitchell Museum of the American Indian. So my two minute or last question for you, Lawrence, is given that you, and I don't want to give away your age, but given that you grew up in a time when representation of Indigenous possibilities for a best future possible self did not readily include lawyer as achievable, what motivated you and your youth to study law and go on to become one of the most notable Indigenous civil rights lawyers in the country? Well, actually, my age is in fact important to the stories that I tell. I was born in 1950. I turned 74 years old two months ago. And so what you have to envision, of course, is this is a time well before any of the civil rights acts had come about. And so your life is impacted by the time in which you grow up. For me, probably the single most important moment in my life is when I was 10 years old and seeing scars on my father's upper body and chest, where he had walked into a bar when he was 21 years old. And it was a whites only bar. Six men jumped him, stabbed him 27 times with a knife and threw him out in the dirt parking lot. Now the good news is he lit. The bad news is he had been stabbed 27 times for being in a place that was reserved for whites only. That had an impact that I carried through the rest of my life. As a child here in San Diego County, where I live now and where I grew up, there were signs in the restaurants and bars that said no Indians allowed. And of course, my favorite sign was at a park in the edge of town right near the Indian reservations that said no dogs or Indians allowed. My friends used to laugh that the dogs all got a higher billing than the Indians did. But it's that kind of growing up that brings you to the Civil Rights Division at the United States Department of Justice. And of course, then to put a pin in it all, I went to a mascot high school. Elkone Valley High School was the Elkone Braves. And later on, I will show you some imagery from that time period. Thank you so much for sharing that, Lawrence. I know that that's probably not easy to continually bring up. But I think it brings important context to how you are here today and the work that you've achieved. Thank you for sharing. Next, I would like to introduce Julie Dai. She's an idol of mine. She's an enrolled citizen of the Pakeha Band of Potawatomi Indians. And as a native rights champion and environmental advocate, she works to improve the lives of Indigenous people through education and political and grassroots action. Julie is an honors graduate of Southwestern Michigan College and a former ARC US Center for Social Justice Leadership at Kalamazoo College Regional Fellow. She serves on the US Department of Interior's advisory committee on reconciliation and place names, and is the founder and secretary of Statewide and National Bank Caucus of the Michigan Democratic Party, vice chair of the Pakeha Band of Representations Outreach Board, director of the Southwestern Michigan College Foundation Board, and vice chair of the Social Justice Alliance of Cass County. Julie previously served on the Pakeha Band Tribal Council, Elders Council, and other community volunteer capacities. She's retired from a 40-year career in the electric utility industry and currently resides in Michigan. Julie, I am such a book nerd, right? So everyone has to know that by now, like I'm a total book nerd. My town library is in Colrain, and at this moment, the library board is struggling to make some simple changes, one of which is the retirement of the bust of Christopher Columbus. So I hear that you are trying to make changes in your town library. What are those changes and what have been the challenges? Two minutes or less? So the town that I reside in, and it is the home base for our tribe, actually has is saturated with memorabilia from a still company, the Round Oak Still Company, that had developed a logo and a whole branding around Pottawatomie people and in an inaccurate branding, fictitious branding. And our library had several pieces on display, representing mass-produced dolls from China that were supposedly native dolls. It had depictions of busts of this fictitional character that the town created to sell these stoves. They called it Doa Jack to help people pronounce the word Doa Jack, which is actually our city, our town, but it's actually not correct either. It's the Doa Genak, which means place of ice fishing. So they had several pieces in the library and a couple years ago, our culture department director and I approached the library about removing those items in the library board, and they actually did. But after they reconstructed the library and made an addition, they included this character picture on the wall again. And so we of course approached them and asked them if they would please remove that. Well, since the onslaught against libraries and the book ban issues, the libraries, I think nationwide and specifically Michigan, developed a process and a policy with legal help to stop censorship. And so they considered our request to remove this piece off the wall censorship. So they denied our request and we're going through the appeals process now preparing for that. So yeah, that's what it would library. Thank you for sharing that. It saddens me. This is a place of education, right? So it's very sad to hear that you have to go through this one more time. Thank you for doing that work. Adrienne Keane is a Cherokee nation citizen. She writes on the internet about representations of Native peoples and popular culture and has been writing her blog Native Appropriations since 2010. In her academic life, Adrienne has researched and written about Native students in the college process. In her free time, she makes Cherokee style baskets out of contemporary materials, does beadwork, and reads a lot of speculative fiction. Another book nerd. So of course, I have your book, Adrienne, Notable Native People. So my question, I love it when I can pull out books and talk about them. So my question, two minutes or less, is what inspired you to create this gorgeous book of amazing Indigenous folks? Oh my gosh, thank you so much for that question. And thank you for having me. That book was kind of the result of a long time of writing about misrepresentation. So with my blog, I was constantly tearing down misrepresentations, pointing out stereotypes, talking about all of these negative representations all of the time. And I realized at some point that a lot of us were doing this work of breaking down the stereotypes, tearing down the misrepresentations. But there wasn't a lot that we could give people to replace that with. And that there was kind of this vacuum of contemporary positive representations. And that has definitely shifted in a lot in the last like five, six years or so. But I decided that with this book, there are so many books like this that are like 50 profiles of amazing women throughout history, people of color, like just general sort of biography books, but we didn't have one specifically for the Native community. So I decided that it would be a great way to expose non-Native and Native audiences to a really diverse and broad range of Native folks from historic times through to the present, and to highlight not just like American Indian voices, but Alaska Native and Kanaka Mali or Native Hawaiian voices as well, and to offer the wide range of diversity within that. So I tried really hard with the book to make sure that there were profiles from Black, Native and Afro-Indigenous folks, LGBTQ, Two-Spirit, trans folks, all kinds of different backgrounds and life's work and ages to sort of give a very small window into the incredible diversity that makes up Indigenous communities in what's currently known as the US. So and then part of that is also making it beautiful. So I reached out and worked with Sierra Sana, who is an Indigenous artist, she's Chamorro from Guam, to do the beautiful illustrations and I think that goes a long way as well in sort of correcting all of those stereotypes and misinformation that folks are encountering all the time to have something the opposite that is really beautiful, I think can be powerful. And powerful it is. I love this. I know so many people in this book, I was reading it and it was like a who's who list of Native folks and I adore this book. I think it should be in everyone's library, honestly. Thank you for sharing that. Vincent Schilling is a citizen of the St. Regis tribe and is the editor and founder of the news site NativeViewPoint.com. In addition, he serves as the CEO and president of Schilling Media, a Native American and veteran owned media and media relations corporation. Vincent is an award-winning Native American author and producer and an award-winning photo journalist, editor and public speaker. He is a US Army veteran who trained as a 91A combat medic and a 92B medical lab specialist and served at the Letterman Army Medical Center. He is the former associate editor for Indian country today for 16 years, where he contributed thousands of articles. In addition, he has contributed video media content to the Smithsonian, history.com and A&E networks, Marvel, NBC, Dateline, now this new CBC, APTN and more. As a public speaker, Vincent Schilling has shared his experience and expertise with public, governmental and private entities about diversity in the workplace and in schools to overcome the stereotypes of Native American people today. So Vincent, again, Native guy in a vest and tie for the win today with your media assistance. I really appreciate it. I love watching your videos on YouTube and you have an incredible lineup of folks that you interview. So that's my question, two minutes or less. Who has been some of your favorites? And are you excited for the Oscars today? Am I excited? To say the least, I'm losing my mind, honestly. Just like Adrian was saying, all these notable people and the ship that we've had. And I understand what you're saying, Adrian. I wrote books for kids on Native role models that I remember going to Salish Katooni and one of the kids said, why are you writing about us? And I was all, in my mind, I was like, this is why kiddo, this is why, you know. But some of my favorite interviews have been with Sierra Teller Ornelis and Janish Meading and Ed Helms along with Michael Gray and Sunny Sky. My gosh, my mind is hearing what you said. I was like, I don't know that. You don't realize it because it just kind of accumulates. But the biggest thing I want to say, and I also did interview Lily Gladstone when she did previous movies and things. And I was just like, I said, you're such a great actor. I said, watch what's coming for you. And she's like, you called it Vincent. You know, I am belligerently excited. I literally think of myself growing up in California on Compton Boulevard, literally in a little two room house, you know, with me and my brother and sister and never imagining in a million years that there would be correctly represented Native Americans on television. Or I had like a patchy chief from the Wonder, Wonder Twins show. Or I mean, I'm sorry, you know, but now there's Lily, Robbie Robertson, bless the soul, rest in peace. And Doug and Scott for Oscars right now. What is going on? You know, wow. So it's just an incredible, incredible time for Native people. And I think all of us can say congratulations to ourselves because we've all helped propel all of this forward. And because we've all collectively been working, it's where it is today because of all that. Oh, thank you for sharing. It's like getting me excited too. Like this is amazing to be able to see ourselves represented authentically. Finally, really, for the first time ever, like this is so this is incredible. I'll be tuning in tonight as well. I have a feeling I have a really good feeling. So next is Samantha. She's a National Bay, a multidisciplinary storyteller, actor, musician, songwriter, playwright, beater. She makes incredible earrings and resides here at Okateo and Double Edge Theater in Massachusetts. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Lake Superior State University. Samantha is a Miranda family fellow through the National Theater Institute and an art and survival fellow through Double Edge Theater and Betty's Daughter Arts Collective. Sylvester is an ensemble member through Double Edge Theater and an emerging native artist through Okateo Cultural Center where she also does some pretty important community advocacy. Samantha is a 2023 Lyft grant awardee through Native Arts and Cultures Foundation. Samantha, I'm so glad that you're here today. And, you know, I want to talk about your work. You wrote and performed your incredible piece, Something Else at Double Edge. And in your work, no, of course it's two minutes or less, what is your strategy for addressing stereotypes and native appropriation? You have a strategy for addressing this in your place to educate others on Indigenous experience. What is that? Yes, Miigwetch for that. And I'm so honored to be on this panel, this star-studded panel. So my strategy, I would say, has a lot to do with being Native. I don't really know how else to say that, but there's, and I'm only recently able to articulate this, but at the time when I was creating Something Else, there was a question of, even though I didn't know it was a question, at the time of, like, we're so busy as Native people, a lot of us trying to educate people on who we are or what we're not, that we forget to, that we're not able to just be. And that was something that I was only recently able to articulate. So I would say part of my strategy, you know, is to use humor. That's a very Native thing. It's to connect with people and to make the audience involved in a way that they're not just sitting there. They have to participate in some way. Yeah, I think that's... Thank you for sharing that, because I think it's really important. It's for people to get outside of their comfort zone, laugh a little, and bring down that wall, right? Like, and you do that so beautifully. And I appreciate that. I also appreciate your honesty about how challenging it can be sometimes to be an Indigenous person in America. And I can take Canada on top of that. Next, last, but not least, by any stretch is Brittany Piawe-Wana Pugwally. She's a member of the Nipmuc tribe, and she is also an anti-tribal mascot representative. I work with her. A graduate student at the University of Massachusetts and a traditional weaver. Brittany previously served as a representative of the Hassanamisco Nipmuc on the work of the special commission on the official seal and motto of Massachusetts, where she was also a co-vice chair. Brittany focuses on native self-representation, Nipmuc archaeology, and woven art. Aside from weaving, she enjoys Eastern blanket dancing and has significant experience in the martial arts and loves cats. You might see my cat passing through today. I almost guarantee it. So, Brittany, I was honored to present you with the Berkshire County NAACP Freedom Fund Award this winter for your social and racial justice and your civil rights work. So, who? I know you can share a little bit about this. Who is your mentor in life that taught you to give back to your community in such impactful ways? So, Botnay, thank you for that question. Good afternoon. My name is Brittany. I'm the freshwater people. I'm coming to you from my homeland in more than one, Medway, Massachusetts, which the Quinoa bequean sea upper Charles River flows. So, Botnay, thank you for having me today. I mean, when it comes to the context of the awards, we know that I always try to tell my father's story. I really want to make sure the world hears about him. And my parents really have kickstarted whatever journey this is that I am on that brings me to be with all of you today. And of course, that evening earlier this year as well. My dad passed in 2021. So, it is a complete huge honor for me to be able to share his story really of resilience and creativity and ingenuity. And also to use the gifts given to me by my mom as well, who is a retired teacher. So, they really set me on the path. But there are many people starting within my community who also set an example for what I know I need to do. So, I can't say that it's one soul person because I learned from anyone that I spend time with. But I think that the underlying thing that I think of is integrity and how to be accountable and those kinds of values. So, if someone is exuding those, surely they have mentored me in some way. Thank you so much for sharing that. It brings to mind an exercise I had done where somebody had asked to write down mentors in your life on a piece of paper and the values that they imparted upon you. And when you did that, they said, look at that paper, that is you. And so, all of these things that we learn from other people become a part of you as well. So, thank you for sharing that and you exemplify that. So, we're starting off the conversation. Here we go. Adrienne Keane. We need to start this conversation off right. And as you are the one who pretty much mainstreamed the term native appropriation, what is native appropriation and the different forms? Thank you. Sure. I think maybe I'm the person who brought it to the internet. I feel like it was definitely something folks were talking about before me. And I came up with it by smushing together Native American and cultural appropriation into a title for my blog. But I think when we're talking about cultural appropriation or native appropriation specifically, we're talking about taking from a culture that is not one's own. And that can be I'm quoting from a definition from the 1990s by Lenore Keane Tobias. And she says, taking from a culture that is not one's own intellectual property, cultural expressions and artifacts, history and ways of knowledge. But I think the important thing to append to that definition is that we're talking about issues of power here. So, cultural appropriation can never occur in a vacuum. It always occurs in a situation of unbalanced power. So it's a group in power, taking from a group that is disempowered. And so when people sometimes throw back that it's not a big deal or cultural sharing is how we all came who we are, that diminishes this element of power. And for Native people, we're talking about obviously colonialism and settler colonialism. So cultural appropriation, native appropriation is taking it's a group that's in power in a colonial construct, taking from a colonized group. And that can be everything from lifeways and cultural markers to names, you know, you name it, we could talk about all of the examples throughout that. So I think the biggest thing to remember is that power piece in it, that this isn't just benign cultural sharing, this is something that has that colonial element to it. Thank you so much for sharing the definition of what cultural native appropriation is. And I think we're going to get into that a little bit more of that power dynamic and what appropriation really is rooted in as we move forward. But it's important to understand that nationally this country has a long history of cultural appropriation. And as folks entered the Zoom, you may have noticed that we were playing a video from the National Museum of the American Indian. And the text, which you may not have noticed because it scrolled by pretty quickly, was Indians are less than 1% of the population, yet images and names of Indians are everywhere. How is it that Indians can be so present and so absent in American life? And one can enter that website through that video and view a large selection of items that feature appropriated images, not of our making on everything from scalp tonic to radiator caps to camera boxes. So yeah, I'm not quite getting the connection there. Lawrence, you collected and donated thousands of ephemera items to the National Museum of American Indian. Can you please tell us about your collection and what it's about and why you donated it to the museum? Thank you. Certainly. Somewhere in my impetuous youth, I became fascinated with the Calumet Baking Powder Indian. Pardon me for coughing my head off here. I'll hold my notes up and you can read loud. Probably somewhere post law school, so 77-78, I started hitting antique stores and collecting items that were on the shelves in stores and had been since the late 1800s, where an American Indian face is used to sell a product to white people. And the key here is that these are products that have nothing to do with Native American culture. There are a bunch of advertisements and products about tobacco with an American Indian face, well, at least with tobacco that comes out of American Indian culture. And we taught non-Indians about tobacco in the beginning. Now, I'm going to see if I can hit screen share and show you some of the images that are in my collection. When you go to the Smithsonian and particularly go to its website, the website has about 271 images. You can click on each one of them. It gives you a little bit of a history about it. And this is pure bragging. One-third of the images used in the online images are from the Bakker collection. I had about 1,500 pieces in my collection to do the exhibit that's in the museum now in hard copy. The museum sent the curator to my home, and he looked at all 1,500 images and selected 300 to immediately take back to work on the exhibit that's there now. Now, let me see if I can make the technology work here on the screen share. Is that up? Or are you all able to see that? Yes. Thank you. Okay. Let me get back here to what I'm going to try and do is this is supposed to be on the arrow with the line. I'll bring you back to the beginning. Oops. There we go. Just getting my arrow up. I'm going to start here with just several images that you wonder where did they get this? You know, you got here. Get them dust cloth. As I say to audiences, I'm sure my grandmother dusted, but she never said, me get them dust. Obviously, a classic American Indian with the major headdress bow and arrow. This is one of those ads that speaks for itself. This is another one I found particularly offensive when I found big chief condoms. American Indian on the side in full headdress. Just as an aside, we were doing a display at the Department of Justice 20 years ago of an exhibit of all things that said big chief related with Indians. And we put up the big chief condoms to show this is incredibly offensive. The attorney general at the time had the big chief condoms removed from the exhibit because he said condoms are a form of abortion. And we said, but we put them up to show our offense. And you're telling us we have to take them out because your offense is greater than our offense. Sadly, Lawrence, I'm not seeing the condom commercial. I never thought I would say that. That's not up. No, just the get them dust, dust cloth. Somewhere. How's that? That's cute. That's in. That's in. Okay. Yeah, the problem here is I'm still trying to have having trouble getting it to go backwards and forwards for me. Okay, is that showing? Yeah, we're still on the big chief. Okay, where my slides are failing me. I apologize. Let me step out of, okay, how do I get back just myself back to the screen? Or is this coming up? Yep, we're seeing your images. Okay, this, you saw a handkerchief. And this is handkerchiefs. What you can't see in the box here is that the handkerchiefs are wrapped up like cigars. Here is a big chief peanut butter, big chief fruit jar rings, chief paints, obviously lots of chief images, surefoot heels, stereotype of Indians being very surefooted. The beauty of them is they had a different Indian head design for each size of shoe heel that you can use. Yakima chief evaporated with a very old Indian face that's on it. Again, Mudak pears. What most people don't realize is that copper tone and their advertisement about don't be a pale face showing a young girl with her bottom being pulled on by a bottom shorts being pulled on by a dog. The term originally came up, there'll be a pale face because they had an American Indian on the copper tone box. Land of Lakes, of course, is one of the most famous advertisements. They have changed and are now this. So let's go back, take over sharing. Okay, I'm going to end there because there are a few more that I want to show later, but I'm going to stop there and let you go on to the next person. But this kind of imagery started in the late 1800s and continues to being on the shelf in stores today. Thank you for sharing. That was, I don't understand, the connection between a lot of these products was completely non sequitur in me. So thank you for sharing that. I'm going to shift just a little bit because I want to recognize Philip Deloria for his books, Playing Indian and Indians in Unexpected Places. Of course, I'm flanked by books. Both of these books explore the larger complexity of identity and playing Indian as a much larger conversation in the formation of our country, perhaps imperialist nationalism, and even set and reinforces expectations of Indigenous peoples. So why is appropriation so ingrained in our Americans in society? Adrienne Lawrence, I would like to hear from both or one of you about why is appropriation so ingrained in American society? Like what place does it have? Adrienne, you take the lead. I was going to throw it to you. Thank you for that, Rhonda. And thank you, Lawrence. Truly like seeing those images, it just reinforces so much why the work that we're doing in present day continues to be so important that this is the foundation that was laid. And I think we can draw from Philip Deloria and talk about that these instances of playing Indian and appropriation go back to the earliest days before America was even the United States. Thinking about the Boston Tea Party is one of the first instances of the settlers putting on quote unquote Mohawk regalia, blackening their faces, wearing feathers to throw the tea into the harbor. And what Philip Deloria talks about is that that process, which continues today, is this making of an American identity because the colonists needed to create an identity that was separate from England that was their own new thing. And in order to do that, they drew from the people whose land they were on. And so it was tying their new developing identity as a nation state to the indigenous people from the land that they came from. And I think that process continues in various ways, whether it's conscious or unconscious of folks in what's currently known as the United States wanting to create an identity that is tied to the land that doesn't position them as outsiders as settlers and then ties in that identity to all the stereotypes that come with it. I'll stop there to let Lawrence jump in if he has anything to add. Oh, just looking at the world from a civil rights lawyer's perspective, what I said about all of these images and their continued use is that American Indian people are the open wound in the psyche of America. America cannot come to grips with what it did to us, but it has to come to grips with what it did to us because it did it. You go back 400, 500, 600 years, we were the dominant population. We are now 2%. We were slaughtered down to that 2%. One of the two speakers, the woman who spoke for the Republican Party the other night on the state of the nation, used the phrase about going west and settling the west. That scrapes on my soul when I hear it because settling the west means killing us off, dispossessing us from our land, putting us into reservations and attempting to eliminate us, forcing our kids into boarding schools and attempting to strip our culture away from us. That's all part of the settlement. Well, because of that, we had to be deified first so that you could do that to us. And now you have to glorify us to settle in your own mind that it was okay to have done it. And so this glorification is what you see with the advertising models and the Boy Scouts have adopted American Indian logos, cultures and the like. And all of this has been done without any consultation with Native American people and despite, in many of those cases, our protests. Thank you for sharing that, Lauren, St. Adrian. I really appreciate your voice on this. And that brings us right into my next topic. So another form of nationally widespread Native appropriation is the long history of Boy Scouts. So Vincent, you've done some investigative research and writing on Boy Scouts and other organizations that have been culturally appropriating Native cultures and encouraging playing Indian for over a century. Can you please talk to us a little about that? Sure, absolutely. Just really quickly, I just want to say I really appreciate what Adrian and Lawrence just said. And I said this in a video after the Adam Sandler debacle with the ridiculous six and I says, you know, and it hit me that I said everyone that has come to the United States has left behind the culture that they once had. And so when they get here, they're left with nothing. So what do they do? They latch on to whatever's closest to them. And I always felt like if you go back and you research your own history and your own culture, you'll be less desirable to take on Native. You know, I've always thought that. But as far as the Boy Scouts goes, you know, we're talking 122 years of cultural appropriation by an organization that started in 1902. And it's really creepy how it started. And I'll explain, you know, and I admit there's some assumption here, but it's creepy. You know, in 1902, there's a gentleman by the name of Ernest Thomas Seaton, who had these young boys had vandalized his property. And instead of getting them in trouble, he had them all come to his property and stay over the weekend, young boys and a man asking these boys to stay there. And he dressed them all up like Indians. And it's just to me, it just cringe, cringe. And so he started talking about Native American customs to bring them together. And he formed the Woodcraft Indians out of this. And then, you know, and then the Woodcraft Indians had, you know, a chief, a second chief, a keeper of the tally, a keeper of the wampum, sorry, Onondaga, the actual keepers of the wampum, you know, part of the Iroquois Confederacy, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. And so he wrote a series of articles for The Lady's Home Journal, which became the Birchbark Roll book. And then he took that book to England and met up with this guy named Lord Robert Baden Powell. And he was like, wow, let's capitalize on this. So they started creating these Woodcraft Indians with locations all over the place. And they created the Treasure Island Scout Reserve. One of them is called Treasure Island Scout Reserve. It's really interesting because that was in 1910. If you think about it, in 1940, a couple of decades later, Pinocchio had, you know, Pleasure Island. And as the boys were walking, young boys would go. And as they walked in, there's these six statues of Native Americans, Native Americans, throwing them cigars. You know, so it's just there's a weird connection. I don't, you know, I can't say it's definitely connected, but I wouldn't be shocked, let's just say. So after that, you know, this kept going and everyone's dressing up and it became wildly popular. Everyone liked to dress up like Indians, even Harold Roll Bartle, who was a Kansas City mayor. And you don't think we're still affected by Native appropriation today. Who just won the Super Bowl? The Chiefs. How did the Chiefs get started? By H. Roll Bartle, who started this and he started his own group, you know, based upon what Seaton was doing. And because his nickname was Chief, because he liked to wear headdresses and go to these events, his nickname was Chief. When the Kansas City needed a football team, he said, well, of course, their name should be the Chiefs. So the Chiefs got their name from Harold Bartle, a non-Native man who liked to play Indian. And everyone's today is like, we love Native culture, this and that, the Kansas City Chiefs. But that ain't the fact. So out of that spun off the order of the arrow, it spun off the Koshare dancers, which still dance today, non-Native kids who go all over the country. There's a Koshare museum. And the only reason I caught this is because Koshare even says, don't post your pictures anywhere on social media. Don't post them anywhere. People did it anyways. And I found them in my research. So this is still going on today. And I remember going to a power one time, this kid is all, hey, yeah, you know, I like to dress up like this. So I was like, okay. He was like a Boy Scout kid. And the thing is, I don't blame the kids. I blame the adults who don't guide their kids in the right way. Because if you look at the Koshare that order the arrow, all these, they're all these older guys, like probably in their 40s and 50s, all wearing head dresses because they like to dress up like an Indian. And again, I think it has to do with not having your own culture because people came here, leaving behind what they didn't like anymore and trying to find something else. And now because Native culture was so strong, they wanted to involve themselves in that. And so look up Mikasei folks, you know, it's, it's not, it's not, it's not pretty. And it's been going on for 122 years, you know, so and if I talk about this publicly, you know, what happens to me, I get, you know, attacked by some of the worst, most terrible things ever, ever, ever, you know, I've had death threats, I've had all kinds of people, people aren't happy, you know. So that's just the way it goes, you know, it is what it is. And I think education is the best bet to try and approach all this in the best way to try and help people make at least mental changes first. But you know, I think because it's so tied up in the camaraderie of friendship and the camaraderie of doing things together and the campfires we spent or my dad took me fishing when we were dressed up like this, I think people put that in place with the cultural appropriation. But I think that if you separate those facts and go, look, you love your father, you love your friends, you love spending time together, it's not the same as putting on feathers and painting your face, you know. So that's where I always try to talk about in my work every day, you know. So, but you can go to, you know, native viewpoint, I talk about it. I have, you know, how the Kansas City Chiefs got their name, you can check it out. So can I throw a question to Vincent? Absolutely. In the origin of this, these are kids who you say did damage his property, he invited them all to stay there and then dress them up as Indians. You say to them, you're savages, and so I'm going to make you dress like savages, and then I'm going to attempt to civilize you by creating the Boy Scouts. Have you ever made that kind of a connection? Wow, Lawrence, that is an incredible connection. No, I've never thought that, but wow, that just blew my mind. You know what, I bet you that's exactly what he was doing. You know, I'll train this band of hooligans. As a matter of fact, I'm going to dress you up like hooligans. Wow, Lawrence, thank you. No, I've never thought that. That just, you just opened my mind. Albert Einstein said, the mind once stretched by an idea, never retains its original proportions. Thank you, sir. A stew point. Oh my goodness. Thank you for bringing that up, Lawrence. And now, now I wonder, are we conditioned to think that way, that we are savages? Thank you for putting your life on the line, Vincent. I appreciate you. Thanks. I joke, but honestly, it's a real thing. So I also think it's a time now to really reflect on the fact that this time in history, when the Boy Scouts was being formed, these children were being dressed up, native children were being forcibly removed from their homes and their communities and sent to boarding residential and industrial schools, sanctioned by the voting American public and enacted in Congress to kill the Indian and save the man. Right? So this policy was an act of cultural genocide to further colonization, free lands for the taking, and to solve the Indian problem. In other words, it was not okay for Indigenous people to practice their language, their cultures, and yet white children were encouraged to do so. This was also about the same time when mainstream appropriation of our identity came to rise through the use of mascots. Right? So Julie, you have been working to remove mascots in your local town and supporting the movement to remove national mascotry for years. Can you tell us how mascots are a form of appropriation? Well, certainly. I was affected negatively and I'm scarred to this day when I was in high school by the surrounding mascot schools and it really was hurtful and at that time I really didn't have any support. I was the only native in the high school. So I've focused on mascots and I've actually taken part in the Cleveland Indians protests and supported there and the last two Super Bowl games with the Kansas City Chiefs and supporting my heroes. I'm in the Black Horse and Gaelian Crowzer and Ronda Lovaldo because it was so hurtful to me. So within my tribe, the tribal council kept getting requests. Every time it was a civil rights lawsuit or complaint in Michigan, these local schools would come to the tribal council and say, do we still have permission? Can we still do this? And they really didn't have an answer so they created a Native imagery committee and to deal with mascots. So what we did with this imagery committee is we educated the tribal directors of each department. We got their buy-in and then we requested from the tribal council a resolution, anti-mascot resolution, which included all forms of appropriation. So when we did that, we created the tribe created the representation outreach board, which I think is a model for tribes to follow. We actually dealt with mascot issues and collaborated with our Center for History and Culture and we got into scouting organizations, all kinds of different issues and then when it got into the media and reported, non-Native people and Native people would come to us with suggestions, oh, there's this history online that's incorrect and there's this mural that's derogatory and so we had so much work. It was wonderful that we've been changing the names of parks. We were approached by Canton, Michigan, a pioneer park and they wanted a Native name attached to it. So we did some research and worked with them and changed it to Zeeby West Park, which means Creek Park because Native people named places by what was there. And it's a beautiful thing because it actually helps our language, which is critically endangered and it brings those names to the forefront when you have Native people pronouncing and using and using the names. So it's just grown. It's a wonderful thing and it's going to continue and I hope other tribes adopt it. Thank you so much for sharing your experience. I think it's really important. I also am a big fan of making sure that Indigenous languages are heard. This is what our land remembers who we are and especially when our languages are being spoken. Adrian, you have done some pretty intense research and even surveys on Native appropriation. What is the harm of Native appropriation? I feel like all of us on this panel could answer this question in all of our kind of personal ways and I think with my research that I've done with my amazing colleagues, we did a survey of 600 Native people about their thoughts and reactions and opinions on Native appropriation. And I'll speak first personally that to me the harms of Native appropriation are that these images become in people's minds what real Indians are and I think it so erases our individual diverse experiences and is really harmful to young people who are trying to and I mean all ages who are trying to formulate their identity as a Native person when the only images that you ever see are these culturally appropriated disconnected stereotypical images and that that's what the vast majority of Americans think of when they think of real Native people is incredibly harmful to us as trying to formulate our identities. And I have my notes up from my article and I know Laurel Davis Delano who's an incredible, incredible ally researcher is listening and probably cringing that I don't have the results right at my hand. So maybe jump to someone else I'm going to pull up the reasons why folks in our study talked about that Native appropriation was harmful and how they responded to that measure so one second. Yeah I'm sure my phone is going to blow up any second now with Laurel sending me messages get it get it get it I sent it to you. So what I will do is I will jump to Lawrence and you know for your perspective because you wrote an excellent article Native images in schools and the racially hostile environment in which you wonderfully summed up how these many images create harm. Can you please share how you explained that cumulation of appropriation as small touches and the harm that results? Certainly what the paper that you read is about and what my legal theory was about is attempting to explain to the Department of Education that their regulations involving what creates a racially hostile environment applies to American Indian mascots and as everyone in the panel probably knows there are studies that show Native American children are negatively affected by having stereotypes about them in the form of mascots in their schools but the same papers show that non-Indians develop a feeling of superiority over racial and ethnic minorities from seeing mascots that are racially stereotyped about American Indians. So the Department of Education developed this racially hostile environment set of regulations that says a racially hostile environment exists if there is heresy conduct whether physical verbal graphic or written that is sufficiently severe pervasive or persistent so as to interfere with or limit a student's ability to participate in the benefit from the sciences activities privileges the school provides. So the key there is to look at it from the perspective of the Department of Education. They say if you hang a noose in the quad on the school that's just absolutely on its own a heresy event that creates a racially hostile environment and so I said to them okay well let's let's consider something like that a punch in the gut and when you look at an American Indian caricature that the student sees you don't see that as anything more than just a touch on the shoulder well think about the perspective of the Indian child who comes to school they get off the bus and they see a giant lawn jockey out in front of the school that's a statue of an Indian that looks like no one in their family they go past the principal's office they see a caricature of an American Indian that is not looking like anyone in their tribe they go to the basketball game and see a character in the middle of the four being sweated on and stepped on by individuals and throughout the day everywhere they look are these gross and disgusting caricatures of American Indians let's assume that that is minor I think it's not but for the purposes of explaining to my friends at the Department of Education let's say it's no more than a touch on the shoulder well let's say you go into the office and when you walk through the front door someone touches you on the shoulder and as you approach your desk someone touches you on the shoulder you get up to get a cup of coffee someone touches you on the shoulder you go into the restroom someone touches you on the shoulder at some point in the day you're going to grab the finger that's touching on the shoulder and you're going to snap it backwards we all remember the infamous water torture the reason the water drop torture is torture is because the drop of water on your forehead is insidious and that's the native american student experience at a mascot school the offense might be small but it is omnipresent the student cannot escape it when we look back to 1954 and brown versus board of education the supreme court said the mere separation of african-american children from white children and the stigma always falls on the black child the black child sees that they are being treated differently no matter how great a school they might be going to they are segregated there because of their race and it may affect the mind of the child in ways that we yet do not understand well the same thing is true for the american indian child seeing your race is the only one that's caricatured at school seeing your race done so with the imprimatur of the state seeing your race treated differently than non minority races with the approval of the school officials that all has to weigh on you and say to you where do i fit in as i said you earlier i went to a mascot school we were the alcohol and braves there was a 40 foot indian in the quad my younger brother had been held back in the third grade held back in the sixth grade so the time he got to high school he was a couple years old and everybody else he was desperate to try fit in with schools he grew his hair down over his shoulders because we're plenty and and and members of our tribe do that he was promptly kicked off the school's cross-country team because his hair didn't meet school regulations because it was further than the top of his ear he noticed that the school band had a guy walking out in front of it at all the school's events wearing long hair down to his waist and an indian get up with what black woodland indian from the east coast so my brother said well i can't run cross-country i will be the school mascot he was selling his soul because he really wanted to be a part of the school his young american indian kid at the school well we went into the band director and said i would like to try out to be the person who marches out in front of the band he was told no you can't participate in an after-school activity because of the length of your hair so instead a white kid puts on a wig with hair down to his waist paints his face brown and puts on face paint to march in front of the band so an indian kid can't be the school representative but a white kid wearing a wig down to his waist can be indian country will call that native irony irony indeed wow thank you for sharing that i don't i don't think i heard that that story that's pretty powerful like that's brutal i just had to say that's brutal yeah that we can't be our authentic selves but somebody else can pretend to be in the most undignified stereotypical way oh i just need to take a minute there and like let that one it's like i started to tense up just hearing about that um tamantha um you uh relayed a very similar experience um of how you felt driving through this area of massachusetts when you got here and noticing the local plaques and memorials and iconography that like is everywhere um and i know you had shared this before in a previous living presence panel but i think it's really profound and and it really needs to be shared again um please share what you saw and felt and what you did about it honestly yeah thanks for that um it's interesting because when i first got to mass it's so seeing you know native procreation obviously isn't anything new to me but when i got to massachusetts it was a little different in the sense that everything is very condensed like you just you go anywhere and there's something that's native appropriation so one of the first things that i saw was first of all coming into massachusetts and getting the little thing on my google maps saying welcome to massachusetts and it was a pilgrim i was like oh that's interesting and i was um you know getting to know the area driving around one day and i it was on route two also known as the mohawk trail which i was like that's interesting when i first got here and then i learned that was not supposed to be like that so um i drove past this giant indian statue that is over it was over like 20 feet or something like that just looking over the highway and i was like okay i know what that is um and all i can hear when i see stuff like that all i hear is somebody else saying a non-native saying this is who you were this is who you are and as long as i'm in charge this is who you're gonna be and i was like well that this statue is why is this here like what's the deal with this so then i had to go down and i'm just going to talk about this statue for a second so i first asked a lot of questions i was like before we get too crazy going down the road of trying to get this thing down or burned or destroyed or whatever um are the local tribes in agreeance with this because i'm not from this land you know are the nitmug people okay with the statue is this you know something that they want to see what is this are the shop owners native because it was a shop for those that don't know on the mohawk trail which the mohawk trail and i don't remember when it first started but was used as a tourist destination mostly by non-native white people to profit off of native stuff so um did a lot of research went into the shop did a little reconnaissance thing and found out that the natives were or that the owners weren't native um they were Tibetan and uh i think ron you actually tried getting this down years before so i just want to know that i wasn't the first one that tried to get this done but um anyways native appropriation central there's dream catchers with like bob marley on them things that just don't make sense there's you know a bunch of things in the shop and so i spoke to ronda who was you know mentoring me through this and partnering with me on this and long story short what i ended up doing was trying to get in touch with the um the shop owners to have a conversation of why this wasn't okay and you know i had this idea of building relationship in my mind as opposed to just straight attacking um so long story short tried to get in touch with the shop owner it didn't work out so and i remember this one moment specifically where i hand delivered a letter because i couldn't get in touch with the owners in any other way so i went in person and there was this white family standing outside of the shop they were standing in front of the statue and they were taking a picture of their child in front of the statue and they were doing the the howl motion and they were laughing and they were you know doing the whole whatever you know that kind of thing so i was like okay so after talking with some of the local tribal members and whatnot um decided it was time to just try to get this done long story short the letter i felt like was a dead end i there was i just wasn't getting any contact and that's when i started a petition an online petition to have the statue removed and although there was stuff on the inside we wanted to start with the outside to get that at least you know nipped in the bud before we went moved on to the inside into the interior so then long story short again i'm trying to keep this as concise as possible there's a lot of parts in here um the shop owner was willing to meet with us and it was ronda myself some allies from double edged theater and um laurel laurel davis delano yeah and also adrian when you said that about her notes i have her notes pulled up here and i was trying to send them to you it's fine she's sent them to me as well so i can go through them if we need to she's amazing thank you laurel yes thank you laurel shout out so anyways that conversation went actually very well and we were able to you know end up building this relationship with the shop owner and come to more of an understanding of what was happening and why this was so dangerous to keep up and so long story short again the statue was taken down it was brought to or it was bought by a family in oklahoma who is cherokee um that's just how that went there was a lot of things happening during this whole process that was really getting in the way of actually putting it in a context in which it makes sense to have this like a museum of you know stereotyping or whatever it is something that makes it more of an educational sense but um i think it's also important to for the audience to know that throughout this it was dangerous like people were you know coming after ronda and i specifically because we were the two people sort of heading this project and you know i know ronda you've said that you've received death threats before and everything but i do want to share some of the commentary that people have shared with me have direct messaged me through messenger and you know other social media outlets um you know after the media picked this up and it started to become more publicized that's when obviously people started coming out of the woodworks before i get to that one of the interesting things was that the the non-native folks were saying that we were taking their culture away from them by taking the statue down and i've never actually heard that before that moment i was like wow the irony so anyways um but i think it's important to share these comments with the audience just so you understand and this is just the tip of the iceberg this isn't a death threat so anyways my rights don't end where your feelings begin we should have finished the job and that's in that's regarding the genocide that happened do you people really have nothing better to do than to nitpick about any and every little thing you people are a disgrace to the human race so those are just a few of the comments that you know we've received during this whole statue and shop started turning around but but yeah i think that's that's probably a good spot to end thank you for sharing those comments Tamantha i'm i'm gonna go a couple of questions down the road and we'll i'm gonna address that and open that up to maybe i can maybe i can do that like right now like i feel like this is something that we're talking about right now so forget a couple of questions down the road let's just let's address that right now you know we i've been working in removing mascots for some time now and doing some of this work as most of us have been doing you know some type of work in changing appropriation and when this topic of change comes up we almost all hear the same arguments every single time right like it's almost like q one two three here we go it's honoring can you just get over it it's our tradition so panelists what do you say to these arguments real quick what's your best rebuttal to these arguments one of the things that immediately struck me when tomatha was talking is uh when you protest at a baseball game where it's the braves or a football game where it's the washington football club the fans will throw hot coffee on you will spit on you and then my favorite is when they shout if you don't like it here why don't you go back where you came from um what kind of idiot shouts to an american indian go back where you came from because my response is always i'm fine with that last to arrive first to leave you go now i'll go later um but what it comes out of is that there's this feeling of ownership is that we kicked your ass we shoved you off your land we put your own reservations we now own you and because we own you we own your images and that's how you say it's now mine and you're taking away my my property when you do that i i have to tell you i i spent 32 years as a civil rights lawyer with the united states department of justice filed cases in 26 states on a variety of issues from voting rights to housing rights to education rights i investigated a school in bunkham county uh south carolina that had uh the classic statue that you just described uh 40 foot tall i dubbed it the world's tallest long jockey um from the school right hand in the howl position left hand turned this way with a tomahawk in it now fascinatingly three blocks down the street was a Pontiac dealership with the same statue except in the left hand instead of a tomahawk it was holding a car tire so we know where the statue came from they bought it from the Pontiac dealership um they were the squaws and the warriors the native american mother called my office said i don't own my daughter being called a squaw for the next four years that's incredibly offensive and i don't allow that i developed a legal theory that i finally got the civil rights division to allow me to send a letter to the school to investigate them they were so offended that i questioned the having the mascot they released our investigative letter to the news media so in a career where i had filed the first case denying an american indian the right to run for office on behalf of the united states i had filed a case against the largest finance company in the world for refusing to give credit to people who live on indian reservations i'd sued banks for refusing to give homelands to american indians none of that made more than a half inch in the newspaper but when i investigated bunkham county schools for having an indian mascot first i got a full page in life magazine where john layover trashed me trashed janerino and called us the nazi word police second three national news stations sent crews down to the school to video for the evening news the world's tallest lawn jockey the washington post ran a half a page article on the front page of section two of the newspaper because that's how important possessing these mascots became it was just it was phenomenal the attention paid to something where previously nobody gave a rat's patoot and particularly where it was incredibly effective work that we were doing in indian country but this was what drew the attention of the news media instead of the other cases that we were bringing and i will tell you that i get told all the time as a civil rights lawyer why do you worry about that stuff why aren't you focusing on voting rights the economy housing rights education and my answer is i am focusing on all of these things because the problems that we have in housing and in banking and in school all stem from having a mascot that stereotype of us as a savage is what the banker looks at when he sees us and we're applying for a home loan the students will go to school with the teachers who see us if they're living in front of an indian mascot that's what i become when i am in their classroom is i'm that same stupid looking offensively drawn caricature that i face that there was a woman who eventually became the head of the nwcp in washington dc i saw her speak at a program where she said that the name of the washington football team a pejorative against american indians had to weigh on the minds of the supreme court when they were dealing with cases involving american indian policy and law i told her from the audience that she was my newest heroine for having the the stones to say that publicly i concede the floor thank you so much like that's you know a mic drop right there on so many levels um thank you for following up on that if i could uh i i just i i can't even tell you how much i appreciate what you're saying laurence i i was you know with indian country today uh for you know over a decade and a half you know and the majority of that time was spent doing coverage on the washington redskins you know um and boy i tell you some of the things the emails and things i got covering it or speaking on it publicly or or uh you know discussing things and people would always say the most horrifying things to me and i many times you know in continuing my my job as a journalist i feared for my safety many times like i was like whoa and in the midst of covering all of this washington um team stuff you know up came the the incident at the lincoln memorial between the young men in red hats and and and nathan philips and i was the journalist that broke that story worldwide you want to talk about the responses i got mixed up with all with all of that i had people sending me images of like people chopping up native people and the most ghastly things and i was getting to the point in my car of making three left turns because i was worried about people following me and i went to go beat my wife's mother one time she knocked on the window i almost jumped out of the car because i was like whoa and i was like oh i guess i'm a little high strong right now it's there's been some terrifying things and what people like like laurence said what people say to me most of all is like why aren't you focusing on so and so and so and so why aren't you focusing on so i said okay so so one of the i thought about it for one i says all right if you have three children can you only love one at a time you know as a native person i can focus on more than one issue at once you know what i'm saying it doesn't mean that just because i feel this doesn't just because i feel this way doesn't mean i neglect something else it simply means that i am i am capable of focusing on more than one issue at a time you know in school we take several subjects at one time right so you know this that that thing i don't know what people get so bent about well you should be focusing on something else is like i do focus on a lot of things i focus on um you know not just one thing i focus on several and as a native person believe me there are many to focus on a lot because we face constant attacks from people and people don't understand the things we go to go through on that so i just that that's my my 10 cents thank you vince and i appreciate you sharing yeah i always tell people i can walk talk and chew gum like i have that ability to do many things at once it's amazing i multitask um adrian i do not want to forget that you are holding on to your study of harms because these are these are some of the harms that we face as indigenous people go add something real quick oh yeah i was just going to say could we get julie and britney and real quick and then i'll come back because i got plenty to say too but i'd love to hear their voices thank you so much i just want to say that you know what we're talking about is the this dehumanization affects every aspect of our lives from education to health to the missing and murdered indigenous people problem and you know it is it an honor well if there's one native american that is embarrassed or humiliated or hurt in any way then no it's not an honor it's it's unwanted and it's forced honor and the get over it thing is we can only move forward if these things are remediated and removed because there can be no closure so thank you britney did you want to weigh in on how you might respond to its honoring get over it it's our tradition i truly think that a lot of the thoughts that have been expressed probably cover my response i haven't really heard anything that i disagree with i will say i have quite a bit to say about the seal just so i'm going to yield my time now to save for them okay adrian studies okay i'll i'll go very quickly um so and it kind of ties in actually to my response to the previous um question because one of the biggest things that's always thrown at me is that real natives don't care about representations or like i am native and i don't care or like folks on reservations don't care about mascots or whatever it is and so in that context my colleagues and i we developed this survey because there hasn't really been a comprehensive survey of actual native people of their thoughts and reactions and opinions on cultural appropriation on native appropriation so we did a lot of work to ensure that our sample was actual native people which is a thing that we could also talk about it was a lot of work to get to that point but in terms of the harms there's and laurence talked about this too that there's a lot of previous research by other scholars like stephanie fryberg and her team that talks about that um native mascots scott specifically are harmful because they decrease the self-esteem the achievement related goals and belief that tribes can make a difference um and increases negative emotions in native students young people um and in arm study we had a qualitative side where we were looking at what participants wrote themselves and then we had a quantitative side where we were coding their survey responses and in the qualitative side of things so these are things that participants wrote themselves um when we were asking them why they found uh the images to or why they found appropriation to be harmful the biggest reasons that they gave were um that it was uh disrespectful insensitive insulting or inappropriate um the largest one was that it was inaccurate or ignorant all of these sort of appropriation um instances and then uh labeling it as oppression which we thought was very powerful that people were seeing the um connection between oppression and appropriation so they uh our participants our participants wrote that it was racist that it was discrimination that it was dehumanizing and objectifying um and that it contributes to other oppression so what Lawrence was saying about that these images really contribute to these broader issues that we're um talking about um and then in terms of the quantitative study where we were looking at the actual um survey and what folks were agreeing with um we had reasons why one might oppose appropriation um in our study and the way that we broke it up was there were a small number of native people that supported or agreed with appropriation the majority of our participants um did not agree with appropriation and then there were a chunk that didn't oppose or um support uh so when we break it up into those who had an opinion so either they agreed or they disagreed um not the ones who didn't have an opinion um some of the reasons like we're all in the 70% of our participants um they strongly agreed with the fact that native appropriation was harmful uh because it ignores the feelings of native people it is disrespectful towards um spirit native spiritual beliefs and practices it ignores problems faced by native nations and people because native cultures are turned into sellable commodities for profit because it distorts the meanings of native cultures because it makes us all the same because it reflects and reinforces stereotypical beliefs and because the appropriators take the cultures and identities without permission from native tribes were the largest reasons why our participants agreed um that it was harmful and then the last thing I'll say to the point of like real natives don't care about this the biggest takeaway from our quantitative study for me was that when we ran all of our models the largest association with uh folks who uh were strongly opposed to native appropriation was connection to tribal community so the measure we called identity centrality like how strong you felt about being a native person how uh close either geographically or culturally you were to your tribal nation was associated with more strongly uh more strong opposition to cultural appropriation to native appropriation which goes against all of those public narratives of like real Indians don't care about this like actual native people we actually found through our survey that that is not the case that the more your identity is central to who you are the more connections you have with your nation the more likely you are to oppose native appropriation so I'll stop there but we have um one of the the studies is published it's available um online um and then uh the other is under review so hopefully these will be public soon and folks can um have that data for throwing back at people who uh say otherwise. Thank you so much for sharing and I appreciate it um I want to go back to because I don't want to to miss the work of Brittany and Julie so um Brittany we were talking about you know the landscape and so going to college right like UMass Amherst UMass Boston UMass Lowell going to a courthouse coming to Massachusetts you see the state right seal and logo and um as you were co-chair of the special commission relative to the state seal and motto motto how do you feel that that seal and motto is appropriation and what are the challenges that you face to make those changes um we do only have like about 20 minutes left so and I do have a big topic that we need to get to so I am sorry but like couple minutes of this I can try I have some written out notes and I do have a few visuals as well that I can share once I get there um so kind of diving into a point um I had I suppose would be a dual role when I was working on that commission uh because of course I was representing my community I was representing the Hasminesco Nipmuc but I was also serving as a co-vice chair of the commission so I did see that as having two functions one dealing with the content as a tribal representative and the other as a native co-vice chair and dealing with the structure of how things are organized so I'm going to speak to kind of both of those things so quickly um and for example I brought a Nipmuc perspective to the conversation which was very obvious but there were less visible details about bringing that perspective to the group um so there were things in my opinion that were important uh because of our broader context of the broader context of our process which of course was the state engaging in a topic with native tribes you know that's that's not something that happens all of the time and it is something that you can track throughout the written record so one of the things that I thought was important was ensuring that native titles were used and respected and we had nearly 20 people of various positions on the commission and I did notice that if someone had a title relative to the state it was very understood and when someone had a title relative to their tribe or nation it was not always understood so I really had to um I felt very adamant in making sure that people use the correct titles and of course on myself I was just a representative so Representative Wally was fine but people who are chair people especially not just a member of their council but the the head of their council that needs to be respected if we're going to have government conversation about a topic so that was something important and another thing when I think about the broader context of the tribes speaking with the state or what was to become the state is of course a long long paper trail of all kinds of documents and usually they're in English and if there is a native presence on it it's at least at the bottom um and it is usually their mark or their signature and to me that jumps out as their autonomy as someone who's looking at them and looking for traces of these folks through the written record which is of course not to be trusted so when possible and when appropriate I would try to add in a very clearly an undeniable NITMA perspective which of course was voting bilingually so um before we get into the visual I think we've talked about this a little bit but a piece of harm that is also less noticeable at first glance but worth combating is the mindset that all native people need to agree on things in order for non-native people to listen um I have actually come to a strange but you know very honest um opinion that I think it's a privilege to be able to disagree on things and that's not because I love chaos but it's simply because we are all still we're still here and our different communities have survived we've come this far and we're able to have conversations with each other with differing perspectives so even though it may be difficult it is still a privilege to be here together and disagree because to assume that there are no differences is a very flat very uniform very monolithic and false idea of what it is to be native today in this land so to skip over some I'm sorry if it seems a little choppy but I know we want to actually look at the visual so I do have a visual I'd like to just share my screen it's not too many and here I go so I'm just going to start my little slideshow don't look at anything but this all right so these are the visuals and this is the direct visual harm that I know we want to get at with my part of this panel so when we look at the seal let me see if I can use my little pointer here to help um this is what we see and this is of course on the state flag as well but they are interconnected in a in a complex way that you can watch all of the videos of the meetings that we had if you really want to learn about the intricacies so anyways um well first jumps out at me is this floating arm and this is a colonial arm being held over what is supposed to be representation of a native person the floating blade to me resonates with the visuals of a guillotine and many native people agree that uh this sword is a symbol of threat against our lives and that is not a metaphor truly is symbolism of a threat to native life native folks that have learned about 17th century contact history tend to agree that this is the sword of mild standish the professional military man of flimith colony um for a very truncated not it's just it's hard for me to even say this very quickly but um when i think of him i think of his ongoings in the west agusic colony um where some people consider his actions to be the first bloodshed in this area against native people so as you can imagine the sword is indeed a symbol that is harmful but to make that symbol exponentially worse is that folks cannot agree on what it is supposed to represent and i don't mean that everyone needs to agree 100 on what it is but again to me uh it is a threat and i think that we should all be able to agree on that there are other elements um in this seal that are not as obvious at first but just as bad and so we're actually going to look at at this imagery right here um because we you may not realize is that this is actually a frankenstein's monster so frankenstein's monsters of course made up of people who may or may not be alive all sewn together and i'm not speaking metaphorically at all um this the body is actually based off of something a little triggering so it heads up for my native folks um it's based on a skeleton and it does get worse because that skeleton was held in the harvard peabody museum of archaeology and ethnology and that may be triggering because this particular museum does have notorious reputation that they are working on um when it comes to not following or following the federal law that is the native american graves protection and repatriation after nagprop so again we're working with a skeleton that was being held hostage in the harvard peabody and that's the body of this frankenstein's monster um but it does get worse because the head is actually modeled after a photograph of an asian abbey leader uh thomas little shell and it gets worse and worse because the portrait that was used was selected because and i quote he was a fine specimen of an indian so when i hear that that's very dehumanizing so i'm sure you can imagine that that is additional harm that you can be found on the seal and of course aside from the floating arm and the arrow pointed downward which is clearly a it's a straight shot of you don't have any power in the situation um we also are looking at a coat of arms the seal is it includes a coat of arms which is particularly european and inside of various coats of arms throughout you know representing your family or whatever it is that coat is supposed to represent you can often find things like animals just like mascots this is another place that you see a native human being being used where you could easily put any any creature that lives on the earth which is problematic because it's dehumanizing um so i'm going to go to the next slide and this is going to be over here so there's a long history of the seal and one of the older images that we know of is from 1629 this is the seal of the mass bay colony which was incredibly harmful and very violent to native people and this as you can see says come over and help us from the native person here on this image and i don't think it's radical some people might think it i don't think anybody here i do find this to be propaganda because it is not truthful native people were not asking for help um because this was an advertisement and it was used again i quote to promote missionary and commercial intentions of the original colonists so native people were not asking for religious missions we were not asking for help for non-colonial business going on in this land so it's not truthful and it's propaganda because it's using taking from us being used for something that has nothing to do with us by people in the context of settler colonialism so it really hits all those marks of cultural appropriation and it's not truthful at all so to me it's propaganda and what's difficult about this is that this in part is where that seal originates from today's seal so i find it you know to be in the same lines as far as propaganda goes and to really hit it home i want to mention that we have a latin motto we have a latinification of the massachusetts word massachusetts which is interesting in itself but we also have this latin motto that translates to by the sword we seek peace but only under liberty and to that i ask who is the collective we because in that statement if the we is all people living within the bounds of what is now the commonwealth of massachusetts then the motto isn't true because we have not all known peace especially not peace through a sword and we have not all known liberty so it's it's not truthful if the we applies to all the people living within the bounds of what we consider to be massachusetts so perhaps once we have plenty of healthy truthful and difficult conversations the we can glomerate then we could discuss how we want to talk about peace in such a visible image but i don't believe that we're there yet and so i do think that keeping it is harmful and i also think and i hope that there are more actions taken that follow our commission's report which is available publicly and i can send the link forward to you ronda that if anyone has an interest to see all of the recommendations that i hope get followed up on if anyone wants to read through them i can give you that link so people can explore it for themselves thank you so much for sharing your work britney we are we're at about eight minutes and there was one topic i really wanted to dive into and so i apologize julie we um i i'm gonna kind of skip over the important work that you're doing with the department of interior um and i feel like that that conversation that does need to happen i feel as though you know making these changes on a national level um of place names is really important um and so i apologize for that we do have a hard stop in that seven minutes but i also do not want to ignore what's happening on a national level as well which is racial shifting identities pretendianism and self identifying individuals i don't want to get into names because that's just not fair like we don't have time and i don't want to get into that but it's a phenomenon of individuals who claim historical lore or a single native ancestor from hundreds of years ago um or you know i guess i'll say even recently some well-known folks um have been really called out to tell the truth of their identity which is that they're not native um i i had asked a scholar um i had actually asked if she could be on this panel kim tallbear and she has clearly stated that when a person claims i am part fill the blank um especially for purposes of academia grants or writing it is an act of colonizing violence and she asks why is it settler guilt familial lore the need for belonging and so i quote from her why are white people so intent on appropriating our identities in the same way that they have appropriated the land and destroyed governance systems we are not the problem end quote so i guess what i'm going to do is i'm just going to skip through some questions that i had about that and i want to hear from the panel what are the ways that one can claim indigeneity um we have less than six minutes so a quick answer if we could pop corn around the panel that would be amazing what are ways that one can legitimately claim indigeneity uh adrian i'm going to call you out can we actually start with julie okay julie thank you actually identifying with your tribal affiliation your clan your connection to the community uh that's all my particular tribe uh goes with uh lineal dissent and you have to trace back to the census roll the two different census rolls and have a um ancestor on that roll and provide all the documentations down that prove that yes you're related to them and we've actually instituted DNA testing um to provide paternity testing as well so yeah thank you uh vincent do you have any no laurence what there is actually a definition in the swiss sodium handbook of north american indians in their section on the legal rights of american indians and the definition starts with some of your ancestors were on the continent before the arrival of columbus that it points out that you are accepted by the community where you live or where you grew up as an american indian that you participate in tribal practices that you hold yourself out to be an american indian and that you don't start to hold yourself out to be an american indian for a benefit to it one of the problems that i noticed throughout my career was people claiming to be american indian to get plus points to get into law school ran a study between the year 1990 and 2000 where law schools reported out having 1497 graduates who were native american while the census reported a growth of 228 american indians so you had nine percent of the people who claimed to be indian were actually indians when they reported the census so they lied to their law school to get in but they were afraid that the federal government would come after them if they lied to the census bureau wow thank you for sharing that that's that's mind-blowing so are there legal ramifications in the works because we are the only protected racial group that's written within the united states code you know the native preference hire indian arts and crafts act is there any sort of legal repercussions for claiming indigeneity to author a book or to be a professor at a college unfortunately that's all left to the ethics of the individual the thing that i've argued to law schools about you need to ask the person what tribe are they are they enrolled who in the native community will say they're an indian because if the person will lie to get into law school that's the first ethical violation of their career as an attorney if they will lie to get into law school what will they do to win the case once you make them a lawyer i want to add into a small detail as well um i think that people need to think very deeply about the ideas of what a political group is what an ethnic group is what a racial group is because a lot of this talk um of of us as as a race is we were political groups that were racialized and so maybe people also need to think about where their politics lie before they decide to represent themselves as a as a member of a political group i think that's a that's some deep thinking people need to do thank you so much britney for sharing that i think that is an important thing to honor and recognize tribal sovereignty as well um so now that we're like counting down i want to try to ask panel to throw out one word uh each of you or two moving forward how do you feel you can make necessary changes to these harmful environments what steps outlets and strategies are panelists using to educate on appropriation um education education good speak when you can protest when you must exactly reflexive action allies what say that again julie allies allies yes in powerful places say keep writing writing is a big deal i've i've been having a book coming out talking about residential schools i recently signed with uh well a year ago with random house so it's going to be coming out and it's pretty intense work and i think the writers out there in indian country are doing amazing stuff we'll keep writing exactly genuine relationships and radical compassion excellent building relationships building relationships yes and centering native voices yes oh i love it i love you all like it was my it was my hope today to bring into sharper focus how native appropriation on our everyday lives is like ever present and harmful to native americans and non-natives as well so um you know in thinking about that like i think about philip deloria and and and i quote war chants and indian named automobiles make their way into our souls and they lay the groundwork for day-to-day social interactions they underpin though many ways non-indian americans blithely ignore our requests opinions and assertions of native people right that is basically the core of our conversation today so my hope today was to also bring awareness of returning agency over identity we are creating relationships educating building trust right that need for deep listening and being here and deeply listening is the start that's the start no matter where you stand in awareness so koya naknalak negivci thank you for listening and i want to give deep gratitude to our panelists for taking the time out of their day to talk about their work and i want to express deep appreciation to double-edge theater for partnering with okateo cultural center in a way that resounds reciprocity and builds relationships i also want to thank dr davis delano for your invaluable work and never ending support and probably your 20 emails that i'm going to get in five seconds when i log out here um but i would like to end with a quote from lily gladstone hopefully we'll be all cheering her on tonight quote be kind and please be gentle with each other there is much to process and much to heal end quote so thank you koya naknalak negivci