 Hello. Hey, thank you for having me here today. I'm very excited to have the opportunity to talk to you about history and historical preservation, but from maybe a little bit different perspective. What I do is I don't really deal with buildings or places or spaces or objects. I'm a filmmaker. I make documentary films. And it's a very peculiar profession. I Approach things in terms of story. So I think it's very different from what you do. I'm Mexican-American. I'm, for most of my life, I've been pretty much the only Chicano filmmaker that I ever met. It's been very lonely. And I grew up in Seattle, Washington. Okay, I come from a family of migrant farm workers. Okay, so the idea of becoming a filmmaker was something completely absurd. It was something that you really didn't think about. It just wasn't within the realm of human possibility. And so I grew up and I was the, my family had fled Eastern Washington because they were migrant farm workers and they wanted to escape the migrant farm working life, which is horrendous in case you don't know. Okay, and so they fled and they fled the Yakima Valley and they went to Seattle and that's where I grew up. And I grew up in a community that was all white and I was the only Mexican kid. And this is very difficult for me and it's kind of embarrassing to say and I really don't talk about this publicly. But I feel like it's kind of necessary. I had a nickname when I was a kid. My nickname was Spick. Now, I don't know if you're familiar with the term. A lot of people aren't. But it's, I don't know, it's a, you know, it's a racial epithet. It's like chink or kike or gook or nigger. It's one of those words. And that's, it wasn't, I mean, that's what people called me. And the really embarrassing part is, is that I had no idea what that word meant. Because my parents never used those words. And so I just thought that they were like using this funny nickname. And I thought, oh, well, that's funny. You know, that's cool, I guess. And I just had no idea. And so growing up throughout my entire educational process, through elementary school and middle school and high school, I never learned about any Mexican American in American history. Not one. And so I grew up thinking and so did my white counterparts. We grew up thinking that it was other people who had built America. It was other people who had forged democracy. It was other people who had moved westward and tamed the wilderness. It was other people who had marched for civil rights and died for that cause. It was other people who had built the great industries of America who had fought our wars. It was other people who were the inventors, who were the tinkerers, who really created the American story. But it wasn't Mexican Americans. We were the losers of history. While other people were fighting the good fight to bring freedom and democracy not only to North America but to the world, we were kind of hanging out on the sidelines with our hands in our pockets, watching history roll on by. And then, once a great nation was built, we were kind of jumping in to snatch the goods. We were taking the jobs. We were taking the benefits. We were kind of stealing. We weren't legitimate because we hadn't fought that fight. So if some of us were citizens like me, we were really citizens in name only. We really didn't earn our American-ness. We were outsiders, we were foreigners. In other words, I kind of, as I found out what that word meant, spik, on some level, all the evidence seemed to indicate that, yeah, that's true. I am a spik. That's what the history, the story of America told me. And so we were kind of in agreement in a way. So I finished high school and I went to college and I dropped out after about a year. I became a Latino dropout statistic. I pumped up the numbers that year. And a friend of mine had this crazy idea. We were hanging out and he said, you know what? I was into photography. That was like my thing. I love taking photographs. And my friend said, hey, you know what? He had heard about a school in India. I want you write to them and see if they, if you can teach there, you can teach them photography. It was like a stupid idea. It was like ridiculous. And so, but I thought, okay, whatever. So I wrote a letter, I got the address, I put it in the mail, you know, and I forgot about it. I went back to my job at the sandwich shop. And then a couple of months later, I got a letter back that said, yeah. And I was like, oh crap. Right? I had never been away from home. I didn't know any, India, what do I know about India? I saw the movie Gandhi, you know? So anyway, so I decided to go. And back then, what you could do is you could take a one-way trip. You could get a ticket and as long as you went one direction around the globe, you could make as many trips as you want going one way. And so I started to go and I went to Paris this time and I went to Greece and I spent a month in Israel. And I landed in India and so I got the students who could speak English because most of them spoke Hindi. And I taught them photography. We built a dark room. I showed them how to process film, how to print pictures. It was cool. And then one evening, they came to me and they said, hey, the villagers in Susara, the next village over, have never met an American. And they would like to meet you. And I thought, okay, well, let's go. So we walked through the jungle. It was evening, about two kilometers to get to Susara. And we got there and the villagers had built a huge bonfire. And around the bonfire, they had pulled their beds from out of their huts and they were around this bonfire and they motioned us to sit on their beds and I felt very uncomfortable. I didn't know what to do, but we sat on the beds and then they started telling these stories and they were speaking in Hindi so my students were translating for me. And they were stories about the gods and the goddesses. Hanuman and Ganesh and Shiva and Vishnu and Lakshmi and Krishna and Ram. And I thought, what the hell is going on? What are they talking about? You know? But I kept listening and as the evening wore on, I began to see that what they were doing is they were telling these stories and the stories were like little parables. Parables about what it is to lead a life well lived and what it is to lead a life squandered. And they consecrated what was worthy of remembrance and what was not and what should be forgotten and returned to dust and be gone with the wind. And so that evening, we went on until about three o'clock in the morning and that evening we were walking back through the jungle, maybe, yeah, like I said, three, four o'clock in the morning, I don't know. And we're walking back and I began to think about the United States. I began to think about America and I thought what happened to our ability to gather around the sacred fire, to tell the stories were so divided. And it seems like we always had been. And I thought, how do we capture that beautiful sense that I saw in India? And then it struck me. It seemed so clear. We do gather around the sacred fire. We gather around a burning box. And that burning box is television. And we gather around a burning wall. And that burning wall is cinema. And I guess now we gather, you know, around these. Right? And it is through these fires that we tell the sacred story of our people. It's through these fires that we try to figure out what it is to lead a life well lived and what it is to lead a life squandered. It's through these fires that we figure out what is worthy of remembrance and what shall be forgotten and turned to dust. And so I became a long story short. I ended up becoming a documentary filmmaker and I had this idea that it was, that what I should do is tell the story of my people. Now, I didn't know what the hell that meant. I mean, I, you know, and I'm still figuring that out. I don't know what that means exactly, but that's what occurred to me. And it kind of set me off on a life journey. And interestingly enough, as it turns out, and it's just purely by accident, I'd been shooting something, a work in progress here in Texas, part of it. And part of it was actually shot not far from where we sit today in a little town just south of here called Goliad. And I thought, you know what, since we're in Texas and you probably come from all parts of the country, maybe I could share with you just a little clip and show you what I'm working on because I think it actually has something to do with why we are gathered here today. So let's go ahead. Can you guys dim the lights and can we show the clip real quick? Well, anyway, this is what I wanted to show you because it is considered by many to be the most famous tree in all of Texas. Okay. This is the famous hanging tree of Goliad County. It was a site of extrajudicial executions. In other words, this is where they lynched Mexicans. How many Mexicans were there? Some say 80, 90, 100, but we really don't even know. And of course, on the other side of there is the famous whipping post where they would tie Mexicans and other people blacks and whip them for transgressions against the social order. Over there, we have a tree where it is said that they hung the blacks because I don't know, it's kind of crazy. Even in Texas, we had standards. You can't lynch a black person from the same tree that you lynch a brown person. It just ain't fitting. It ain't fitting. I mean, this is the kind of crazy racism that fueled all this and why. It was economics. And it was also the fact that they wanted our land. In fact, they came here to take our land and they were very successful. It's a tourist thing now here. Everything's named hanging tree around here. But I mean, when you really think about it, it should give you the creeps. This is, I mean, this is horrible. You know? Yeah, it is horrible. It is what it is. It is what it is. The events that took place here in Goliad weren't unique. Over the next 70 years, there were 871 documented lynchings of Mexican-Americans in 13 western states. And yet the violence found in the rest of the southwest didn't compare to the horror of South Texas. In a single decade from 1910 to 1920, historians estimate as many as 5,000 Mexican-Americans were murdered in a brutal wave of terror and mass executions. In proportion to their numbers, Mexicans were lynched in the west as often as blacks were lynched in the south. All right, is everybody totally depressed now? I mean, I didn't mean to bring you down, okay? This happened a long time ago. Okay, right, okay. But it's important. But it's important. This information that's in this film that I'm still making, it's a work in progress, right? It's something that most Americans don't know anything about. They've never heard this. How do you think Mexican-Americans feel? Now, the story gets a little worse. Okay, I just want to prepare you. After I leave here today, I'm actually going out to west Texas, not far from Marfa, which is out in the desert, way out there. And I'm actually going out there because I'm scouting what is, I guess you could call it, an unmarked mass grave. Okay? In 1918, really in the midst of all of this racial violence against Mexican-Americans that was taking place, there was one incident that was, sort of stands out for its egregiousness. There was a small little village near the, they're in Texas near the Mexico border called Porvenir. And there had been a robbery a month earlier, about 40 miles away, and some law enforcement folks got a tip maybe in that village there might be someone associated with that robbery. And during the robbery, the shop owner got shot and was killed. Terrible thing. And so the Texas Rangers and the US cavalry came into Porvenir in the middle of the night, and they ended up rounding up the entire male population of the town, which was all Mexican and Mexican-American. And they took them to the edge of the desert and they killed them all. Executed them. Arms blown off, heads, the whole thing, it was really bad. And then they left. And the next day, the women and the kids went out to find, you know, what had happened and they found the bodies and they loaded them onto a cart and they went just across the river, which was no more than, you know, a couple of blocks away, city blocks away, and they dug a mass grave and they put all the bodies in there, and then they fled to parts unknown. They were too scared to return to their homes. And good thing they didn't because the soldiers and the Texas Rangers came back and they burned the whole place down. Now, because of this period of violence in American history, Mexican-Americans across the country were traumatized, really scared. And they did something very interesting, actually. They began to organize and they founded an organization not far from where we are today, down in Corpus Christi called Lulac, the League of United Latin American Citizens, and they founded this place called Lulac. And what they ended up doing is they ended up creating a program called Little Schools 400, which we know today as Head Start. And they started to sue. They brought more than 81 civil voting rights lawsuits, and they won everyone. And then what they did is they sued in the courts over segregation. And they ended up doing, in 1947, a case Westminster versus, or Mendez versus Westminster, and they desegregated public schools in California. And they worked with a young attorney, an African-American dude who came out there to work with them on the case. And that guy took all of those legal precedents that Mexican-Americans had been doing across the country in the strategies and that architecture. And when he had a chance, he went before the Supreme Court and argued a case called Brown v. Board of Ed. His name was Thurogood Marshall. Mexican-Americans worked with that guy. We worked together. And it made this nation a better place. It transformed the lives of millions. When I was growing up in Seattle with those kids who called me SPIC, I wish we had known that story because I don't want to see other kids called that. I don't want to see black kids called that. I don't want to see Muslim kids called that or Native American kids or transgender kids. I've been there. I've been a SPIC. I know what that is. And I don't want white kids called that either. Most of the young people in the state of Texas today, under 18, are Latino. Most of the young people in California today are Latino. And by the time they reach middle age, by 2050, we will be a majority minority country. And soon to follow, we will be a Latino country. Now we can go kicking and screaming and we can become the United States of Anxiety, the United States of Acrimony, the United States of Suspicion. We can figure out how to find our common humanity, how to span divides of difference and find new connections for positive change and understanding in an America that welcomes all of us. And I guess that's why I'm here today. Because I think what you do is so vitally important. You can tip the balance. Because when we have an understanding of who we are, the horror and the beauty, we can understand our common story and how complex it is. In my opinion, historical preservation is not really about buildings or places or things. What it really is, it's about the stories that those buildings and places and things represent because they tell us what it is to lead a life well lived and what it is to lead a life squandered. They tell us what stories are worthy of remembrance and what stories shall be forgotten and turned to dust. And so I feel like you and I, we do the same thing. We're in the story biz, right? And so much depends upon us and that's why I love that tagline. Where is it? It's not a past forward. By understanding and reconciling the past we can find a beautiful road forward but we have to be honest and truthful about it. And that's why that other name is so important to me. The national trust. That's heavy. So can we do it? Well, as my friend Dolores Huerta once told me, si se puede, yes we can. Thank you. Please welcome to the stage our session moderator Max Page and our trust live responders, Afifa Said, Manuelito Wheeler and Teresa Leger de Fernandez. Beautiful. Well, thank you, John. Thank you everyone for being here. I almost wanted to say let's end and just think about what John just said. But we also have several remarkable activists in heritage here with us. So I think we, hopefully we can have a really good conversation about this. I really want to especially thank you, John, for reminding us what we all should know but don't always and to so bring reminder that this country and its history is bathed in blood and violence. And I think it's worth, it's required to remind us of this and I really appreciate that you did that today with your presentation. So this is called trust live voices. And so we can understand that word in a couple of ways. One is as bringing back the voices from the past, giving them their respect and do, but also making sure that the diverse voices of America are amplified today. So I guess I'm wondering when I look at that amazing clip you had, what do you hope the effect will be on your viewers? Well, look, the kids I grew up with who called me Spick, they were good kids. I mean, they were good people. They really were. And you know what it was? I think in retrospect is our parents and the adults had let us down because they didn't tell the full story. They didn't include everything that happened. They didn't give us the darkness of the past, nor did they give us the light and the beauty that evolved out of that malignancy that would forge a better nation. They never gave that to us. And so we just, you know, we didn't know any better. And so it's up to the adults to make sure that that doesn't happen. And it seems like places, even though you say this is about stories, at the very end you, I think, made that connection that it's stories that take place, that stories live in places. Right. Well, it's not the building. It's not the brick and the mortar. It's not the trees and the undulation of the land, right? What makes Gettysburg, Gettysburg is not that it's a plot of land. It's the story of what transpired there once upon a time. You know, what makes a building important is the humanity that passed through there and the stories that evolved, and what that tells us about the human spirit, what that tells us about human dignity, what that tells us about what we once were and the promise of what we might become. So what you raise is such a central issue that I think we're dealing with in the fields of heritage and historic preservation is the relationship between the objects, the places, the physical places, and the stories and the memories and we have these three amazing people. So I kind of want to pose that question to each of you all. We can have a discussion about it. Maybe I'll start with Manny. Each of you acts, interacts with places in a different way. We have lawyers, cultural anthropologists and specialists in recovering and preserving language. What roles, what role or roles do old places play in the work you do in kind of recovering and amplifying voices of diverse America? If you have a thought, Manny. I think, you know, I want to start out by saying that this entire country, even the land we're sitting on, was bulldozed over and built on stories of the original inhabitants of this country and that's the American Indian people. So, you know, there's a lot of discussion about the preservation of stories and what can happen when there is a blatant forgetting of the stories and that is what happened with this country. Like right now, on this land, it's like we don't know what the stories were. There were people here that had deep connection to the land and those stories are gone and they're gone forever or they're either a shell of the story and, you know, that turning away from the story, the truth is what was portrayed in the documentary we just saw and I think as a country of American people we are now becoming mature enough to start dealing with the story and that includes my people's story and it's a funny thing when you try to just like brush over, forget about the story but eventually you have to deal with it in order for our children to be able to have the future that we talked about, a future of hope, we're going to have to deal with my people's story, your people's story, your people's story, everybody that is now what makes up America. So I think a very wise person once said the truth will set you free. Thank you very much. So I think that in my work, I think I'm here kind of maybe with two different perspectives. I'm a Chicana who happens to work representing Native American tribes and as the vice chair of the advisory council and historic preservation. So there's all these different little hats we wear and part of that I think is the strength of what stories do is that when they are the most powerful there are different audiences for them. There's the audience of the people who created that story because that is who they are and that leads to their existence and to their self-affirmation and to their celebration and then there are those who are not part of that story but are fascinated by it and are willing to change perspectives because of it and it's that ability to have people change perspectives because they listen to a story and that I think is why it is important to when we have the hanging tree we don't just say, well here's a hanging tree because we're fascinated with death and violence but rather that you layer on top of that the story of what did that mean because then maybe you change perspective. I actually didn't think I wanted to talk about it but the North Devil, right? The Dakota Access Pipeline. What has happened there? One of the probably biggest things that ever happened for the National Historic Preservation Act because you actually have section 106 talked about on NPR and when does that happen? But I was like, oh my God I'm associated with that and we did the right thing, right? We did the right thing. We talked, we said, no you need to have a broader perspective. No, Army Corps you need to look at the entire impact of this so that was the right thing we did as a federal agency but the more powerful thing I think that's come out of it is this idea that it's captured the collective voices of people who are not Native American and they're streaming up there and they're saying we've heard this story and we think we need to change what we're doing and those sacred lands don't mean anything to the Anglos who are going up, the Native Americans I mean the other tribes, a lot of my clients are headed up there, Latinos, Chicanas are headed up, the environmentalists are headed up there because it captured the imagination and said we need to change what we're doing and it is that ability that a story can galvanize collective action because in the end it's only when we work together it's only when Dolores Huerta says, si se puede si se puede, she is talking about the union the farm workers union which nobody really cared about what happens with the farm workers but then all of a sudden boycotting grapes and that caught the collective action and people said no, I get it and what she said is they said we can't do that and her response was si se puede and Obama apparently did ask her if he could use it but it's that idea that we have to be able to work collectively and communally and so the place galvanizes, I agree with you but then it's how we all work together around that whether we are the same, whether it's our story or not whether we can understand each other this is such an important point that you bring up because the expanding who's included in the American story and what places we preserve could potentially be fracturing but the way you're talking about and the way you do John in your presentation and film is about how places but telling the stories that have been not told and been covered over actually is for all of the people in this country not just for that particular group it has to be for both someone, an expert, an identity do you talk about your experience in this? Yes I'm just, I'm listening to your story and it's the reflection of your story and my story and I think that's the important thing about storytelling too is that I see myself in that story in so many different ways and as somebody working on identity the idea that we are creating identity and that identity is not something static and for a long time and I don't know if I'll ever get invited back here again but I was an anti-preservationist because in my mind as a cultural anthropologist sometimes it meant and I was an applied anthropologist I'm always looking at problem solving in that sense so I was always concerned that we have this thing that we have to preserve something in a clean manner and it has to be something that's just right and it's just, you know that culture is something that you have to preserve because it's something that doesn't change so that frustrated me personally because my, and this is the reason I got into cultural anthropology was because I came to the US when I was five with my parents as immigrant my father decided we're not going to go back to and I was born in Kashmir north of India he was a prisoner of conscience there so we're going to go back to India so this is, you know, the connections that we have and we're going to be American so we spoke American we ate American we were American in every possible way except when I went to school then you're not an American you don't look like an American and that was frustrating as a sense of identity for myself but then many years later we went to Kashmir to visit for the first time and I'm thinking all this time I've been in America so long but nobody accepts me as an American I'm going to go to my homeland I will be accepted in my homeland because that's my people at that point I was thinking in my mind as a teenager especially I'm going to be anti-American but I'll be finding my people when I go back to my country and so on so I go to Kashmir and I'm dressed as a Kashmiri and I'm thinking I'm Kashmiri and so on and I'm American and the way I carried myself and so I was stuck in a situation where I was not feeling accepted I was told I was not an American but I go to my so-called homeland which everyone's telling everyone to go back home to wherever you're from going back there I'm not accepted there either because I don't fit there so I had to make the conscious decision about what does it mean to have an identity and to create an identity and to have an identification as something and so I think that's also a piece that we talk about which is formation of an American identity what does that mean and how are the pieces put into that with my work especially now I'm looking at that formation piece I'm looking at especially as an American Muslim what does that mean what does the different pieces mean and we're looking at lots of modes of education for example in schools and so on how do we not just tell the stories and the way that you start looking at yourself and others as well and I'll just one thing that we did that connects me to this idea of story and space was we had some Muslim scholars and Muslim leaders religious leaders who were a little bit on the I would say on the conservative side but also on the side of saying I'll just put it bluntly they were Holocaust deniers they didn't think it happened that much and so on and so forth took them and others on a trip to Auschwitz and being in that space being in that place and understanding it just not even saying anything and just having that connection to it coming back and understanding that I have something to connect with that space I have something to connect with that story as an individual and then coming back to a very different place and being able to use scripture which is another big piece of this how people are using religiosity and using their identity in religious space to understand our identities better and so those connections were very important recently a couple of years ago we took our students their American Muslim students talking about identity and everyone saying to them go back home Muslims aren't really part of America we took them to Mount Vernon but then I also took them to the slave graveyard where the slaves are buried and we had been talking about how many slaves came from Muslim countries how many of them practiced and tried to practice their religion and were suppressed and oppressed in their practice of religion and yet continued to feel that connection and so we made a prayer over the the unmarked graves of slaves and the students felt the connection between history between identity and between religion tells them you know Muslims don't belong in the US they can say no actually we've been here a long time and the connection is not just religiosity but it's part of what made America the same story that we're a part of this for many generations and it wouldn't be what it is and so on and so forth without those connections so I think that's what I'm interested in is how do we continue to make these connections on a personal level and also institutionally I'm so impressed by the way it's tangible and intangible heritage often it's treated as if there is a big divide and in some ways there is within these fields but you all just move back and forth easily around this idea of story and identity and I think that's really impressive now look I feel like we have to put on the table since you all come from such range of places ethnicities races we have to put on the table what happened this past year I look at this on the stage here and each of the groups represented here I know I'm the white guy but I'm also Jewish and so there was a lot of awful things that came out in this past year's campaign a lot of hate speech now there's hate crimes that are exploding a lot of attacks on the very people that the movements for an inclusive preservation movement the groups that an inclusive preservation movement is trying to involve the kind of really the unprecedented or at least in the last generation the unprecedented discrimination and racist statements and bigotry how does that change your work or how might it change your work as a filmmaker as a cultural anthropologist as a lawyer how are you going to react can I just throw something out because all of that is very unfortunate but at least in my mind which is global warming you know we're all in that box together and I don't know if how closely everybody follows the data but we're in trouble and that goes beyond some dumb kid being called a spick okay I mean this is like this is I mean we're teetering on a global catastrophe so that could be a unifying force I don't know what it's going to be but I'm just saying that at least as far as I can tell the stakes are really high because of that and that we're not as a society talking about that a lot more is very very very disconcerting to me more than everything else combined in my mind from my perspective so so that gets to there's actually a really good author named Naomi Klein and her book but it goes back to the idea of this collective of acting as community and collectively and she actually posits that one of the reasons it's difficult to adjust global warming we're just global warming is precisely because there is such an insistence that we don't act collectively we don't act communally and coordinating I am going to bring that back to historic preservation and what we do here because one of the things that strikes me is that what we're supposed to do the only really weapon and tool we have is this idea of communication and how to understand each other and that that is a very you know when you first looked at it when I took my first 106 case which was trying to preserve some sites along the Grand Canyon from an FAA that had no idea that you actually had to talk to tribes you know it was like yeah you do it's like all we really have is the power of talking to you all we really have is the power of consultation but when you can have that power you actually can start changing people's minds that FAA guy who didn't think he had to talk to tribes he became our hero in the agency and I think that that so I mean I think that that is important and that's what needs to happen as we move forward I mean the issues of trying to say we want to have a more inclusive I mean that's what the ACHP is we want to have a more inclusive it's not going to stop only because it's not coming from the ACHP it's not coming from the trust it's coming from those communities and they're rolling and they are talking among themselves and they are getting active and so I don't think that's going to stop but I think it needs to just it just has to have we just have to stay say it's going to keep moving there's going to be some new energy and the millenniums my children that have started that inertia has started it is not going to stop because of this it's going to be difficult because it's hard to come back from being my community is fractured my community is scared and in New Mexico what we always say is we didn't migrate the border switched on us you know it's like we were here and then the border went there and so it's really a perspective and they were scared but I think it's those of us who have the ability to have voice and have the ability to speak out and have the ability to organize that we just have to sort of recommit ourselves and have that perseverance you know it's the next generations that's going to have the energy and it's my generation that has to have a little bit of wisdom but also the idea of perseverance and it's still going it's interesting those who attended the plenary session a couple of nights ago were treated to a real demographic sort of overview of Houston and essentially Stephen Kleinberg said this is America no matter what policies this is the direction it's going to look more like this than it looks right now much wider so there's things changing that go far beyond any selection maybe I don't know if you have a thought from your perspective and your work in cultural preservation so I think the word that was just said was survivor and so you know we're all survivors one way or another American Indian people have been there's been attempted genocide on an entire race of people that was sanctioned by the United States government so I think that's something that is very important to pay attention to and but as a point of hope I mean that's what we have lived through and I'm here because of my ancestors strength and their ability to survive and that's what we all need to strive for to strive to be survivors and to mold this country's future for something that is just and fair whatever and however that's defined I guess that's the trick question is one person might define justice and fairness much differently than another person but you know my people have lived through much worse conditions many of the people here in this audience their ancestors have gone through those types of circumstances so you know let's not run to the hills let's kind of stick together and survive and oddly the history the long history of blood and violence and even genocide in this country is oddly comforting I guess in terms of looking at the long span of time and continued survival and resistance among many people who have been oppressed if I have to ask you as well we have groups that have been here that have long histories in the US of kind of violence and oppression and at the moment there's a new focus on Muslim Americans I wonder I know you work with a lot of different groups but tell me from your perspective what it looks like in terms of how we build a common identity out of a very fractured American identity right now yeah so I don't want to fall into the trap of representing all of America from your perspective a lot of times we get into those spaces and the fact that even within any community whether it's Muslim Americans or we have communities so whether it's a group of religious folk within that you're going to have so many different representations which is really critical for this conversational identity and so on so that goes back to my concern about preservation so let's make sure that the Muslim community gets this, this and this well what are we talking about within that and want to make sure that we have that representation amplified so that's partly but I think what I'm thinking through personally and I just came from the American Academy of Religion we had the meeting in San Antonio I came from that yesterday and talking about the role that everybody has to play and it's not in my mind it's very clear to me it's not just a reaction to an election it's not just a reaction to a political stance and so on and so forth it really is what we should be doing and the fact of the matter is what many of us have been doing which is also a critical part of the story which is building these alliances so the Jewish-Muslim alliance for example has had its moments of really clarity like you know what we are really we have an experience together and we were talking about how many Pakistanis and Muslims are working on some of the Native American advancement issues and so on and so forth so amplifying those that we actually do have alliances that we've been building we do have connections and it's not just because we have a negative experience of being an Americans that are oppressed but it's a positive experience of we are creating this identity and for us in terms of a way that we can come together and say yeah I am an American Muslim and this is what that means and it also means for you as a Jewish-American but also you as a Native-American and so on and so forth so I think part of the alliance building the other thing we talked about at this meeting yesterday was also there will be some folks whose job will be to be bridge builders and so that goes to alliances also but it's also more proactive because we're going to say I'm going to be in uncomfortable situations and I'm going to put myself in conversations I don't really want to be in but I have to be in further some of this identity and connectivity and then we also have sanctuaries people we need to create spaces and I think this is this speaks to the preservation folks where some of the work that you're doing in preservation can become those platforms where people can come and talk about identity where it can be a space to say identity as much as what is and that makes sense because that's a place or it's a place but it's also a space for storytelling and so on and so forth and that's a sanctuary where people can come and feel safe to talk about it and my concern is also to include voices that we are not used to talking to again because there are people I have people that I know in the Muslim community and again because we homogenize that supported the president-elect and they supported the president-elect as Muslims because they said he's going to protect us from ISIS and that's my main concern as an American as a Muslim and that's for some people that was difficult to hear because of all the other rhetoric that is anti-Muslim but there you go and there you are in terms of how complex this issue is but how much more we have to make what we have been but I don't want to think that we've never done anything and now suddenly we have to start doing all sorts of things but the last thing I wanted to say that I'm really interested in doing is creating spaces again inside communities so within the Muslim community for example we are starting to talk much more than we ever have about racism within the Muslim community and what does that look like and other kinds of isms that are in our country overall but then how do we address them from within these communities that are also necessary for us to move forward to heal and then to do the bridge building outside of communities Thank you So we only have a couple minutes left and in preparing for this conversation one amazing project that Manny's involved with came up and I don't want to project a false optimism although I have to say this conversation gives me the first like glimmers of optimism I've had in 10, 11 days so I really appreciate that but Manny maybe you could just very briefly introduce the film you are working on and then we're going to show a very very brief clip to end because I think it really does kind of it's an uplifting project Okay I worked on a project that involves a movie you may have heard of called Star Wars so there are many the Navajo Nation is the largest Indian tribe and we have over 300,000 members of that about half speak Navajo and of that half that speak Navajo I would say 80% of them are over 40 years old so we're trying to bring awareness about language preservation and so I reached out to Lucasfilm and asked them if we could make their movie and dub it in the Navajo language in an effort to help our young people and whoever wants to watch it become introduced and want to learn Navajo but something on the side really interesting really happened and it made all of you it forces you to rethink what you think Indian people are and it also for our own people it forced us to rethink like who and what we are so we can show it now I think it's great because for one thing it was really really hard to translate because there are some words in there that you can't really translate and to make it short like that like these guys did it's amazing Edo of Marvin Okay let's just use the word a lot of the terms that are used in the movie they've been invented some things didn't have concepts for them like the force which I think is a a great term it's it's kind of like awe inspiring fear causing and I was telling the translators my favorite one was which basically describes like planet fragments falling like rain and it's very visual so they used that and in some instances Navajo names can get really long and they've done a great way of making them shorter like and just seeing how different translators came together to translate this movie it was great to see the advancement of the language through a movie like this and seeing that if we continue to use it won't die and Navajo can be fluent enough to incorporate new concepts and to come up with new words It's a unique way to look at the evening look I feel very proud that it's happened and that it's done I think that we've opened the door to something bigger than we ever imagined Well thank you all let's just join me in thanking these incredible preservation activists