 Hello, everyone. My name is Lucia Elias. I am an architectural historian, and I'm the director of the Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture at Columbia University. Welcome to the first in our series of conversations on architecture and land in the Americas with Joseph Conkel and Teresa Montoya. There'll be two more such events this spring and check the chat for those dates. I'm going to share my screen real quick. I'm joining you today from a campus in Morningside Heights on an island that lies within the ancestral homelands of the Lenape people. Until about 1650, the Lenape managed the forests, marshes, animals, winds, floods and paths in this place by stopping by as they navigated what is now the Hudson River, seasonally staying in small encampments, growing food, perhaps also harvesting crops, hunting and fishing some animal species while leaving others alone, periodically setting fires to control growth, and generally maintaining the resource ecology that stretched all along the Atlantic coast from what is now Western Connecticut to Delaware, including most of New Jersey and southern New York. By the end of the 17th century, the Lenape had been largely driven out of their homelands. And in the following centuries, their numbers have been decimated, their humanity denied, and their descendants dispersed. The European settler state that was responsible for this erasure and this diaspora relied overwhelmingly on the institutionalization of land. Columbia University, a land-based institution, is a legacy of this urge to settle. And in fact, the building in which I sit today embodies architecture's imbrication with this institutional urge, in a particularly vivid way. The Buell Center, which you see here in red, is a relatively young institution, 40 years old, but it gives its name to a red brick building that is the oldest on this campus. The building preceded the campus. It was already there in 1896 when Columbia University purchased this land and received special status as a not-for-profit organization. The building had been built in 1885 for an earlier institution, a special ward to host the wealthier male mental patients at the Bloomingdale Insane Asylum that had existed on the sites since the 1830s. So central was architecture to the construction of institutional legitimacy that not only did Columbia decide to keep this building when it took over the land, but as the campus expanded, the building was preserved and moved 42 feet vertically and 97 feet north rather than being destroyed as part of the new expansion plan. In other words, since at least the 19th century maintaining this large of a piece of land in a city in the United States requires a special arrangement, an institution. And while some institutional legacies demand an honorific architecture, the kind of architecture that is sustained and carefully preserved red bricks, other institutional legacies are less tangible architecturally. For example, as this building was being constructed, the 1897 General Allotment Act was passed to break up the large reservations of land into which indigenous communities had been gathered since the 1830s after fleeing persecution. The Lenape people, for example, were found in Oklahoma and in Texas. This act also had profound architectural consequences, shrinking the land base of surviving indigenous people and compelling them to adopt Western institutions such as that of private property or family farming. I'm recounting this history today, not only to acknowledge the role that our hosting institutions have played in the erasure of indigenous peoples' relationships to their homelands, but also because the relationship between architecture and land in the Americas is our topic and takes a form of a question, an open question. How do we tell a non-objectivizing history of land? How do we account for the insight on the part of indigenous scholars and activists and practitioners that land isn't an object, but a relationship? Our two guests today are experts about and participants in these institutional architectures as they're lived and experienced by indigenous communities. So the title of our event is Untrust Land and I'll just explain this choice briefly. It's meant to be specific to the predicament of indigenous communities, but also instructive and comparative for many different kinds of trusts that exist. As an institution specific to indigenous nations in the United States, trust land was invented in 1934 when the federal government decided this time that indigenous people should be able to buy back land, but again with very specific spatial and social architecture, as long as they registered in a national database, performed gestures of privatization such as in closing land and accepted a generally paternalistic form of governance where land was placed in what was called the trust to avoid claims of outright ownership or of sovereignty. The use of the phrase trust land to designate this institution may seem especially confounding to an architectural audience as these two words land and trust are also used today to name relatively commonplace legal tools that are increasingly used alongside design to produce the built environment. Community land trusts, for example, used to develop housing, conservation land trusts used to keep the built environment from sprawling into nature preserves. And there are also state trusts instituted at the end of the 18th century to manage public plans. However different all of these cases are, they have one thing in common that a trust is understood as an object, a thing, a financial construct like this box in our diagram. In the case of indigenous rights, many of the transactions are actually the same but the word trust continues to designate something that is both a thing and a political relationship. In fact, in 1983, the relationship between the US government and indigenous nations was explicitly named as such. And so today we host two speakers who are rethinking how trust lands are inhabited and struggled for. Their knowledge and their practices help insert trust land into patterns of the past and future developments. And I would just point into two ways. First, the history of indigenous dispossession is a history of transactions. And as we will hear from Joseph Kankl, indigenous communities in some sense have no choice but to engage in this transactionality for even the most basic architectural programs such as that of building housing. And second, dispossession is not a past event but an ongoing one. And as we will hear from Theresa Montoya, it's most prominent medium is infrastructure. Resource extraction like allotment acts and reorganization acts are infrastructural acts that can provoke the mobility of certain people while giving others the privilege of permanence. After all, and this will be my last acknowledgement, we're meeting today remotely. This remoteness is made possible by hardware and software that consume an immense amount of energy. This energy is being supplied to each of us somehow, extract it from land somewhere on the earth, somewhere that we are not. And the two cultural producers we welcome today can help us think about this kind of relationship, new ways that land is experienced as relationship, not only in indigenous communities, but all over the earth. So our event today takes a form of two presentations. I'll stop sharing the screen. Followed by discussion, hopefully among our speakers and then followed by Q&A. So Joseph has kindly turned on his camera and I'll introduce him first. Joseph Conco is a citizen of the Northern Cheyenne Nation and a principal at Mass Design Group where he directs the Sustainable Native Communities Design Lab in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He's a community designer and educator focused on sustainable development practices throughout Indian country. His work include exemplary American Indian housing projects and processes nationwide. And this research work has developed into emerging BEX practices leading to the publication of a guide, an online guide called Healthy Homes Roadmap for Tribal Housing Development, which is funded by the HUD. In 2019, Joseph was awarded in the Obama Foundation Fellowship for his work with indigenous community. Joseph is a fellow of the inaugural class of the Civil Society Fellowship a partnership of ADL and the Aspen Institute. He's a member of the Aspen Global Leadership Network and most recently, congratulations on this. Joseph was named a 2022 Rubinger Community Fellow by the Local Initiative Support Corporation. So please help me welcome Joseph and Joseph, go ahead and share your screen. Thank you, I'll start sharing my screen. I have this, we're ready. So, there we are. So thank you, thank you all for being here this morning. Kind of wanted to start the discussion with this conversation around community culture in place, how this is kind of all kind of coming together and its relationship to land and posing this question. Gonna kind of go through this quickly but this idea around questions that help frame our conversations today. Questions that really kind of lift up where we are in kind of space and time as it relates to the communities that we serve out of the Santa Fe office and at Mass at Large. But really kind of talking about this dichotomy between this tension between the rural and urban, right? There's kind of poor images here, Manhattan Island, what is now the capital of what is now the United States and these two kind of rural spaces. And lifting up that this is Indian country, right? We kind of heard, Lucia, you kind of shared that this was the homelands of the Illinois-Linope. It's, these rural places are as kind of weak in Indian country. It's where we celebrate our culture. It's where it's our connection to place. It's the connection to our families, our ancestors, our kind of cultural activities. This is the Tong River, my homelands and what is now South Eastern Montana. These are literally my family's allotted lands on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation. This is also Indian country, right? This is on the Navajo Nation. It's housing that doesn't necessarily represent a community's sense of culture, sense of place, sense of identity. And so the architecture isn't kind of doing the land in a justice. It's this kind of disconnection from place. Manhattan Island, right? This is like the financial capital of the world yet. This kind of notion around kind of indigenous culture or indigenous kind of connection to place isn't necessarily kind of being spoken in or is out there kind of much more broadly yet. And when we think about the Mohawk iron workers that built these structures, many of these structures, there's a disconnect there, right? The home of the Piscataway, the nation's capital. Yet they are not necessarily a federally recognized tribe. And so what is this connection between state recognized, self identifying and federally recognized tribal communities? And this is Indian country where I'm joining you all from today, right? And I want to kind of acknowledge with gratitude the Ogate-Pogate original Tewa name for Santa Fe, which means white shell water place on whose unceded traditional territories. This office is based. We honor these people past, present and future along with the many other indigenous peoples who would have it continue to have it hold sacred and steward these lands. These are kind of native lands. And to kind of lift that up is to kind of lift up a history. It's these indigenous lands. It's this connection to place. Like I said, history. Prior to Western contact, it's estimated there were 20 million indigenous peoples that called these lands home. And today we're approximately 5.4, 6.4. And according to an NPR stories, those that self identify in the most current census that number is rising dramatically. There are 574 federally recognized tribes in this country. And not all have tribal trust lands to be clears just over 350 tribal reservations in the country. So what does it mean to have a physical connection to place? What does it mean to have a physical connection to the culture, to the kind of built environment? And trying to kind of lift up what does that mean when it comes to healing, when it comes to identity, when it comes to community, family and how we work. That's all kind of all these kind of semblance and these connections to how we think about the power of place and the power of architecture. Like I said, these are my home lands. It's kind of my first notions of what I thought the built environment was doing or not doing for my community, for our people. So why are we here? I kind of pose that question, why are you all here? And why am I here? And kind of lifting up this notion that architecture is never neutral, either heals or hurts and to kind of broaden our mission. Our mission is to research, build and advocate for an architecture for a design that promotes justice and human dignity. And historically, when we think about the built environment, when we think about that connection to place, the architecture hasn't done that. And so how do we reframe that? 33% of Indian country lives in poverty versus the national average of 12 and a half percent on any given day, 90,000 are homeless. There's an immediate need of 200,000 units of housing on these kinds of lands. Yet when we think about the ways in which we access funding and we access financing on tribal lands, it's not necessarily equitable, right? If we were to just solely rely on the federal resources and the kind of current financial mechanisms that we have to build on tribal lands, it'd take about 120 years to build 200,000 units of housing. And so we need to kind of rethink those structures when we think about philanthropy, 0.03% point of philanthropy goes to native led organizations when Indian country makes up just over 1% of the US population. Cause if we don't kind of innovate, if we don't rethink these systems, this is the kind of architecture that will inevitably get an architecture that doesn't reflect the community, the culture and the places of our indigenous populations. And so posing the question, the question is not, and as many of you, I'll start with the question first and then I'll acknowledge the individual. The question is not what is the cost of architecture, but what is the cost of not having architecture? And one of our early collaborators, Paul Farmer who recently passed this earlier this week, kind of pose that question. How do we think about our built environments and what is that connection to place? What is that connection to the lands in which we're building? And so our team is really looking at these kind of three areas, researching, building and advocating for ways in which we're thinking about the built environment. Because if we don't, the communities that we're serving will kind of result in this notion of placelessness and we really wanna be honoring the lands, honoring the built environments in which we're looking at. And so I wanted to kind of dive in quickly to a case study, to a project that I worked on early on in my career with the Santa Domingo Pueblo or also known as the QO Pueblo, which is located about 30 minutes south of where I'm located today, in between Santa Fe, New Mexico and Albuquerque, New Mexico. It's a rural community along the Rio Grande, right? And my focus was trying to kind of understand what is the power of design? How can we think about the built environment and how can we leverage the built environment to lift up this notion around culture, community and place? And early on in the process, how can we leverage design and really think about it as an opportunity for change? And we knew that we had early on in the planning process an opportunity to flex that design muscle because as a project gets further and further into the development process, our ability as designers to advocate for what design can do is slowly diminishing as a project becomes further and further into fruition. And our process started working right there on the ground, on the lands of the QO Pueblo, working with tribal youth, leveraging the skill sets that I had as a designer, as a planner, someone who was practicing architecture in this community and wanted to lift up that I was an outsider, right? I might be a citizen of the Northern Cheyenne nation, but I'm not a citizen of this community. And so how were we kind of bringing together the kind of cultural nuances that these young individuals understood and knew while merging that with kind of the design knowledge and skill sets that I brought and how do we kind of bring that together? And so we walked the community, we learned about the community and tried to understand in what ways could we leverage a design process to lift up their voices and lift up ways in which they could be communicating these complex ideas more locally, right? And teaching kind of hard and soft skills, right? They were getting to kind of understand the different softwares and design tools that allow them to understand their communities differently and merging these kind of Western ideologies with these indigenous knowledges. And so we walked the community, we surveyed the historic village. We were in some ways becoming more proactive rather than reactive. When there was an issue in the community village, in the historic village, community members would go to the housing authority and ask for support, right? My roof is leaking, my window's broken, my refrigerator doesn't work, my heating is off. And so that was a very reactive response. Whereas if we were able to kind of survey and understand the conditions of every one of the units within the community, then the housing authority could proactively move forward. And so this is a way of merging kind of the traditional architectural practice with a way of serving the community and lifting up their ways of being. This image here, which really kind of speaks to this inability for Western society to kind of identify the cultural nuances of a community, right? That blue boundary box is a national historic boundary of Sydney. It's a kind of basically the National Park Services says everything in that blue box is historic, right? And you see this all over the Pueblos in New Mexico that this random box is placed, right? And in that bottom right, that blue line goes through a house, right? And so what does that mean? One side of the house is historic and the other is not. Well, during the surveying process, kind of walking through the community, kind of understanding these particular lands, we were able to kind of establish what the community deemed as historic rather than the federal government. And so this kind of tension between a government to government relationship was important to be lifting up. And we did that through historic imagery. We tried to kind of understand the development of the Pueblo over time. So again, taking kind of Western ways of practicing and merging them with the community's ways of being. And then just very quickly going into understanding what are the conditions of these units? How could we start to leverage the Indian Housing Block Grant, the Indian Community Development Block Grant, the federal funds allocated through the Native American Self-Determination Assistance and Housing Act or NAHASDA for short, which was passed in 1995, trying to kind of find ways of leveraging those funds and ensuring that the communities were in control or in this case, Senator Mingo was in control of allocating those funds, how they deemed it important. And so when we were reflecting back, we were very much creating these networks of partnerships, right? We were trying to connect practice with the government, with kind of the academy and with philanthropy. And I'll get to that in a moment, but really trying to understand how are we sharing these kind of sets of knowledges, scaling the outcomes and creating some semblance of community impact. And so this idea of being there, being present, being on the ground, knowing the populations, knowing the audience was incredibly important for us to do the work. And then aligning that with the funding potentials, right? Where are we garnering funding? We can come up with all the good ideas that we want, but if we can't actually execute them, then we're kind of caught in this kind of idea of advocating, but not necessarily building. And so through this work, developing a set of principles and goals of community as architect of their own vision, right? This kind of vision has a long-term commitment to change, engaging with the community to gain a clarity and understanding of perspective of place and then participation from everyone, right? So how are we asking these questions to tribal youth all the way through tribal elders and understanding what is their understanding of the built environment? And so this notion of designing with and not for community helps to kind of lift up this idea around creative, equitable, equity and positive social change. And this allows us to define what's possible, right? It defines a process that really lifts up kind of a Santa Domingo perspective around the built environment, a Kiwa perspective of the built environment and not if I were to kind of cone it. It's not my perspective, right? It's not an outside perspective. It's really building that from within. It's leveraging the past, right? This is the village, this is the historic village which kind of resembles a density of an urban place, an urban space and thinking about how that relates to the future, right? How can we take that and reflect not copy paste but really build on this notion of how do we learn from the past and leverage that for a future architecture that is kind of identifying of this place of these lands and it is about that kind of listening to the community, right? We started to learn that 75% of the community members relied on the arts as a main source of income, right? This is Robert Tenario, he's a potter. And so if we're thinking about housing, if we're thinking about ways of building on these lands, we need to also be thinking about how they're going to be using these spaces, right? We came up with a model of typology that had an art studio or a maker space attached or adjacent to every one of the structures. Initially, we were thinking about 60 units after doing all the financial work. We started to realize that it turned out to be 41 units. And as you can kind of see in this kind of site plan, there's a railroad tracks to the north. That railroad line connects Santa Domingo to Santa Fe, to Albuquerque. It's the rail runner, which allows them to access the art markets, to access healthcare, education, get to UNM University of New Mexico. And so trying to find ways of using that public infrastructure to connect the community. That about bottom right unit is about a five minute walk to the rail runner station, right? That notion of how are we building infrastructure, building on infrastructure that may be in urban spaces we take for granted. And so trying to kind of understand the complexities that we can be kind of lifting up within rural context. And these are just some really quick images of how we were thinking about an architecture that would be reflecting this sense of community, this sense of place and understanding ways of which we were lifting up the Santa Domingo priorities or Santa Domingo's priorities rather than just building housing, right? There's a very specific connection there. A community center that kind of dubbed as a multi-purpose space, a community kitchen, a child daycare, training center, a place to build up and maybe even host gatherings, host ways of thinking. And of course, those little shed areas are making spaces. Here we have one of the community members making hishi while his son kind of looks in, but this notion of you're building up and building that capacity locally. And so the kind of question that I'll leave you all with is this like thinking about what is that connection to place and why are you here and what ways in which we're thinking about what we're doing and why am I here? I'm just kind of thinking about that next generation, right? Inevitably, if we're thinking about the architecture, if we're thinking about the lands in which we're building on, we're thinking generations ahead in terms of how they're going to sustain our tribal youth and future generations are gonna sustain these lands and kind of sustain the places in which we're living, right? They're the future. They are our future leaders of the communities and which we're serving. So if we're not doing anything sustainable in the kind of contemporary sense, then we're not really building a future for them. So I'll just leave it there and pass it back. So thank you. Thank you, Joseph. And I'll go straight to introducing our second speaker, Teresa Montoya. Teresa Montoya is a social scientist, a media maker and educator. Montoya's research and media production focuses on legacies of environmental contamination in relation to contemporary issues of tribal jurisdiction, regulatory politics, water security, and public health on the Navajo Nation. Her research has been published in cultural anthropology and water international, in the American Journal of Public Health and the Journal of the Anthropology of North America. Her photographic and film work has been shown internationally most recently in an exhibition entitled Still in Vancouver, BC. In addition to her art practice, she has curatorial and education experience at various institutions, including the Peabody Essex Museum, the National Museum of the American Indian, and currently the Field Museum. She is a provost, post-doctoral fellow, and incoming assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. She is Dine and an enrolled member of the Navajo Nation. Please join me in welcoming Teresa Montoya. Take it away. Thank you so very much for that wonderful introduction and thank you to Joseph for laying some of the groundwork for our discussion today. So I'm going to share presentation and also go very quickly over some preliminary concepts that I think will help guide our larger conversation. So one is invited to be part of this conversation, you know, is thinking on this notion of trust land and this larger question of what does it mean to own land? So starting from this orientation, I further asked, you know, how do we de-center these naturalized notions of property ownership, notions that presume settler occupation and seizure of indigenous land that was somehow inevitable, rational, or morally legitimate? So briefly, I will outline a few concepts of land and property that will help orient this discussion. So in addition to the earlier introduction, I'm going to show a couple of these animations that illustrate the rapid theft of indigenous land and territory. There's also this land map. So at once this illustrates a process of what could be termed land acquisition or land loss. The notion of acquisition from the US settler state was an imperative of settler colonialism of westward expansion. This was fulfilled through multiple acts of violence and salts and tactics, but also in legislation and this notion of private property ownership through settlement itself. And of course, the other orientation, which is of land loss and dispossession of territory, which those animations violently illustrate is an indigenous perspective that hasn't been centered in US policy. So contemporary notions of Western property law are legitimized through ideas of righteous ownership. So how can we unpack what ownership means and for whom it serves? So really briefly, I want to, for those of you who aren't familiar, point to an English philosopher named John Locke. I teach this a lot in my classes, which seems to be going back several centuries. People wonder, like, what is the connection between an English philosopher who wrote the second treatise of government and land ownership today? He's called the soap, called the so-called father of liberalism. And what he proposed is that land ownership or the right of ownership is determined through labor upon land. So if you work the land, you have some inherent right to this thing. And that notion I think is really central to a settler colonial view of land possession in the US today. It undergirds basically all of land tenure system. And several indigenous scholars have also criticized these sorts of views and how it's informed indigenous land theft as moral, rational, and legitimate. Here's a quick quote from Vine Deloria Jr., who states, one day the white man discovered that the Indian tribes owned some 135 million acres of land. To his horror, we learned much of it was very valuable. Therefore, it took no time at all to discover that Indians were really people and should have the right to sell their lands. Land was the means of recognizing Indian as a human being. It was a method whereby land could be stolen legally and not blatantly. Discovery negated the rights of Indian tribes to sovereignty and equality among the nations of the world. It took away the title to their land and gave them the right only to sell. So in this quote, I want to point to a couple of things. First, that the recognition of the humanity of indigenous people, something that was putreford not recognized. This was required in order to establish a relationship whereby land could be taken. If you could recognize that, oh, yes, this indigenous person is a land owner. Therefore, they could enter into a property transaction. So that recognition was only in the moment of property theft. In this very last line, it took away their title to their land and gave them the right only to sell. So this is in summary, the notion of allotment, the Dawes Allotment Act of 1887, whereby indigenous land was broken up into parcels, the imperative of dividing conquer under this idea of uplift, of bringing native people into these ideas of civilization. And it was through this notion of property ownership. So with allotment policies of 1887, it designated each head of family to 160 acres of land. They had to be registered through the Bureau of Indian Affairs. So this brought in this process of a federal recognition and the disastrous policies of blood quantum, which still continue to affect many of our communities today. So it legitimized the system of the federal government determining who was Indian and who was not. And it also was premised on this idea that eventually indigenous land would cease to exist. So that the further breaking up of parcels of land is akin to the notion that indigenous peoples themselves would cease to exist, that eventually our ancestors would continue to intermix with the rest of the population. So there was this diminishment of our communities and our nationhood, both in our bloodlines, but also through our land. And this was a conscious decision and policy enacted by the federal government. So in light of all of this, what does trust mean? Where Walter Echo Hawk states, by 1881 Indian land holdings in the US had plummeted 156 million acres. By 1934, only about 50 million acres remained. As a result of the General Allotment Act of 1887, during World War II, the government took 500,000 more acres for military use. For over a hundred tribes, bands and rancherias relinquished their lands under various acts of Congress during the termination era of the 1950s. So this is a primer now. We're jumping to this era in the 20th century. Allotment was determined to be a failure. And so the US government then shifted to what is called the termination era, relocation era. So many indigenous tribal members moved and drove to the cities. This was another policy of trying to bring indigenous people into the fold of mainstream America and to disconnect us from our land and territories. So today, when you think about trust and trust lands, federal lands, this map here is illustrating all the different types of lands that is held in trust by the US federal government. The red is indicating tribal lands. So built on these earlier notions of warship, of indigenous people being so-called warrants of the state, not being able to own or to own their land outright, only being given the rights to sell their lands how do we make sense of what Josephus is like healing in light of this? So in my research as an anthropologist, I tried to connect these colonial land policies of earlier centuries with environmental contamination today. How can tribes work within this complicated system of land tenure that has continually over the centuries sought to dispossess us of our land, of our sovereignty, our jurisdiction and what are the ways that tribes can actually enact policies for their own benefit? So the broader Colorado plateau region across the four corner states, you can see here this outline and this map is the Navajo Nation and there are over 500 abandoned uranium mines. And this is a consequence of rampant resource extraction across the region from the 1940s through the 1970s and to 80s as part of larger Cold War efforts. It's an area that's very rich in uranium and vanadium resources. And even though the Navajo Nation has passed legislation since 2005 to ban uranium mining on a Navajo Nation the legacy of these assault still remains in the form of groundwater contamination. This area was also the site of multiple nuclear testing both in Nevada and the state of New Mexico. So this whole region has been designated a quote unquote downwind region. So people over time inhaling radioactive contaminants into their lungs. And so you see the successive layering of environmental contamination. And so in this map, I also wanna point out so the Church Rock spill of 1979 was the largest nuclear release in US history. Most people don't know about it. It was the same year as the Three Mile Island incident which is much more widely publicized. But the Church Rock spill because it wasn't a nuclear meltdown it was a uranium mill tailing spill. It sent contaminants downstream into all of these other DNA communities including the community where my maternal grandparents are from which is in this region both on and off the reservation near wide ruins and this community of sanders. So my research centers on these community impacts. How do people strategically navigate between these multiple jurisdictions and try to understand how can we actually get clean water? This is just another image here of a Department of Energy site of former Kermige uranium mill tailing site in Shiprock, New Mexico. So this also shows illustrates how pervasive uranium and hard rock mining was across the region and continues to pose threats to human health as the sign illustrates in both English and Dineb Azad Navajo language. And this is similar to another map that Lucia had put up earlier but following a policy of forestry location in the 1860s where our Dine ancestors were forcibly marched to a military reservation in central New Mexico. And this was also at the same time as the Civil War. So the U.S. was otherwise occupied with many other things. So at the end of 1868, many of our ancestors, the ones who had survived were allowed to return to our homelands. And that's when this reservation of 1868 was established. You see this in this purple rectangle here. This is a diminishment of our original territories which extended into Colorado, to the Rio Grande in New Mexico and all across what is now considered Northern Arizona and into Southern Utah. And as a consequence of this forced removal, the U.S. also simultaneously was enacting Transcontinental Railroad policies. So this was part of this broader push of Western expansion. Here's a railroad map here to establish the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad that went directly across Pueblo and Dine territory. And this image here, taken from the Library of Congress, I think shows actually the extent to which this theft continues to impact land tenure today. Trying to make it, it wasn't able to animate. There we go. The checkerboard allotment system, similar to the DAW's allotment system, essentially gave away by the federal government discontinuous allotments of land for the encouragement of settlement. So rather than the U.S. government federally funding the Transcontinental Railroad, they said, okay, all of these private railroad companies will receive these land tracks which they will in turn will sell to sellers. So they gave away, effectively gave away this land while Navajo people were interned at Fort Sumner. And this corridor, when Navajo people returned, led to these violent confrontations between settlers and Dine and Hopi who had been living in this region for time and memorial. And as the Navajo nation was able to successfully recover some of their land, it did, these land parcels of settler ownership still remained. And so these are the vestiges of settler colonialism from the 19th century in the 20th century that continue to pose serious threats and challenges to the exercise of Navajo sovereignty. And for my family that lives in this borderland region on a parcel, a territory that is three square acres or three square miles, but is completely occupied by Dine people. But because of this railroad allotment system, it is not considered to be the contemporary jurisdiction of the Navajo nation. So things like trying to remediate uranium cleanup from the 1979 church rocks bill are hindered because of this island jurisdiction. And this is a problem all across Indian countries, this notion of checkerboarding fractionalized land interests that have enabled other sorts of business ventures that would otherwise be illegal on our tribal territory. So I think this puts into stark relief like the contemporary impacts of the settler colonial land policy for the exercise of Dine sovereignty today. These images here point to the physical vestiges of railroad and settler infrastructure that continue to contaminate our homelands. These images are from the San Juan Mountains in Colorado, which was the site of the 2015 Gold King mines bill. So some of my photographic and art practice centers on this tracing the path of this bill. So in 2017, I completed a photo essay titled To Kletso, which Dine language means yellow water. And that at once references the legacy of uranium, yellow cake, but also these other forms of contamination. And even though these hard rock mines were built in Colorado, away from our homelands, we continued to fill those impacts through the flow of contaminants south onto our homelands. And this is an image by David Burney called contamination, which is also was made in commemoration of the Gold King mines bill. And so just briefly, I just, I want to now point to, what are indigenous relationships to land? How can we heal and work together to confront this legacy of contamination and unland theft? So a lot of my work is working side alongside indigenous communities that are trying to understand this legacy of contamination. So this is just an example of different sorts of arts that grassroots groups have made to warn people about the presence of uranium contaminants. The Navajo Nation, you know, on a note of infrastructure, 40% of families still don't have running water. And this is in a region which I said is very rich in so-called resources, you know, not only uranium, but also coal. So coal has been extracted over the past century in order to fuel energy production in the broader Southwest. So to provide energy to cities like Phoenix and Los Angeles. So it's required, you know, the extraction of coal from our territory, but also water. And at the same time, many of our own communities don't even have running water. So many people rely on these livestock wells, will haul water, sometimes driving, you know, one or two hours just to provide running water for their families. So this is part of, you know, the longstanding legacy of, you know, this fractionalization, the divide and conquer tactics of the US settler state. And despite all that, you know, indigenous people have continued to survive and thrive. This was after the Gold King mine spill, where, you know, a community came together. This is like steamed corn in the ground in a community of shiprock. So I think the challenge is, and a lot of my work is to like hold these two things together. And I think that's a challenge for a lot of us in doing this work. Is recognizing, you know, the impact of these violence policies of erasure, but at the same time pointing to the ways that indigenous communities are working through these and refusing in certain ways, the policies that imagine that we would no longer exist. So I think I'll just end it here for now. And I'm happy to answer more questions about the nitty gritty bureaucratic and regulatory politics. But yes, thank you. Thank you. That was extremely, the question of how one holds two things together, I'm extremely sort of in awe of the multiple registers that both you, you, Joseph and you, Teresa, are having to inhabit both critically the multiple registers at which sort of history of violence is deployed tactically, strategically, philosophically by the settler state. And at the same time, the multiple registers that both of you also have to occupy, you know, Joseph, both your practice, both leading you to ask the most fundamental question, which I probably think most architects I know never ask themselves, why am I here? At the same time as you're clearly leveraging these altogether completely imperfect tools that are made available for governance because people need to live, people need to have housing. And Teresa, I love that you brought us John Locke, not because I love John Locke, but that its relevance can be seen in a continuum with these practices where it's not only toiling the land but it's somehow drawing upon a water cistern that is what makes possible, you know, the continued life of these reservations on the land. So I want to put you both into conversation. I have questions, of course, that I could ask each of you, but I also don't want to be sort of necessarily directing. So I don't know if either one of you want to go ahead. As I said, I have tons of questions up my sleeve and sort of I'm especially interested to have at some point, I mean, more technicality for sure, but to have Joseph explain to us a little bit how what dealing with HUD looks like from, you know, how you work and Teresa, how image-making and visibility-making, you know, works within these kinds of practices too. But I'll let you maybe start a conversation if that's okay. All right, thank you so much. For sure. Go first. Go, feel free, feel free. I'm happy to jump into. Well, yeah, thank you so much for that presentation, Joseph. And nice to meet you. I know it's always awkward over Zoom when I can't be in person because a lot of my research centers on environmental regulation and its relationship to travel sovereignty. And then of course these connections to settler colonial land allotment policy of the past century. I'm actually curious to know more about maybe if there's any examples in your own work that you've confronted around these complications of jurisdiction and how maybe that's challenged your work. I noticed you did show some images. You had like the rectangular square where you're designating, oh, this is like historic property. So yeah, I guess I could just leave that really open-ended in terms of like how notions of jurisdiction figure into the work that you're doing with Indigenous communities. Yeah, a lot of the times, I mean, that image specifically, right, is something when we talk about sovereignty, self-determination, what does it mean to be sovereign? What does it mean to be self-determined? And a lot of the time, when I arrived at Senate Domingo, I was brought into council and they were like, well, you can navigate these systems, go to DC and ask for more money for our housing project. And I kind of put my foot down a little bit there to tribal council, and I was wondering if I was gonna get into trouble. But this idea of like, if a tribe kind of wants to be lifting up this notion around sovereignty and self-determination, I said, if I'm going to DC to ask for more funds for housing, then this kind of notion of this permanent crutch of continuously relying on the federal government to supply dollars for housing, which is in my mind to be blunt, is like a waste of time. And so how can we be understanding the systems in which we're working in? And so that's a prime example of working with the National Park Service who designated these boxes randomly on tribal lands was all, if we wanna really be advocating for what does it mean to kind of define what is historical and what is not, then you as a community should be defining not that, not necessary, not an outside entity. And so let's do our work. Let's like get out into the community and walk around and use the tools that we do like the kind of, and this is where kind of Western knowledge and Western ways of practicing come into tension with like indigenous ways of being, which I find to be, that's where I find it to be interesting. And I kind of very much lift up this, I acknowledge that my whole education is based in a kind of Euro central Western space, right? My whole architectural and design education, but knowing that I've kind of grown up in kind of in different like indigenous ways I've learned from my ancestors, like how do I start to bring that and try and bring these two together in a way that's not quote unquote, like this harmony, it's always intention, but like when do you lift it up? When do you not? And in this instance, when we were defining what is like, what is historic and what is not, that's when I thought we could really do some, do that work justice, if that makes any sense. And actually I mean really quick, I wonder as someone who has studied the history of those Western modes of deciding what's historic and not, what methods did you decide? Was it image? Was it some kind of numeric age? Was it sort of depth of memory? Was it practical? It was more practical to include this house or not? I mean, are there criteria that, because one would imagine that the category of historic is itself a kind of Western categorization, no? How did you decide? I mean, the National Park Service, right? It's like a point in time in history that some white guy gets to decide, like this is historic and this is not, like this wood frame structure is historic and that's not, well, when one of our kind of board members who led the Office of Native American Programs within the Department of Housing and Urban Development, basically he's Diney and he, every time, like my first meeting with him when I first was introduced to Roger Boyd, he kind of points to his ring finger and he points to this ring and he said, before this was a Navajo ring, this was a Spanish ring, but what makes it Navajo is the innovation and that kind of made it become a Navajo ring, which I found pretty powerful, that it's always constantly changing and so the relationship to the land was, what was important and what was crucial? There's a kind of a Spanish church and then there is an Asakia or a ditch and so that became the boundary, that kind of water source became the boundary of what was historic and what was not and then we kind of moved closer to the Rio Grande, the kind of define what was historic and what was not and so I mean, yeah, it became more, the more and more we sat and talked with one another and sat in community with one another, we started to realize that this was as complex as it needed to be. I appreciate what you mentioned and also Lucia's provocation around like historic, right? Because I think the double bind is the necessity of tribes having to pander to a certain extent to the system, right? In terms of both like trust designation or these categories of historic preservation and I think that definitely there's critiques within our communities of, oh, we don't wanna rely on federal money. What does it really mean to be self-determined to self-empower but at the same time, to what extent do we still need to incorporate these notions? I mean, like for instance, the Navajo Nation government, it's a three branch system. We've incorporated a lot of like forms of Western governance into our own tribal communities and unfortunately forms of patriarchy and things that we would determine to be very colonial. And so a lot of like what I'm seeing is even moving beyond tribal governance itself. And that's also like, I think something that's hard for folks on the outside to see is that there's all these internal conversations about like self-determination, which is really community-based and community-centered. So yeah, I'm kind of curious like from your work, yeah, what sorts of like housing projects or things that are trying to redefine indigenous space that is I guess more community-centered and not necessarily under what you would call these federal categories of like historic preservation or HUD or anything. Because I think, I imagine you're doing both of those, right? And you have to strategically navigate between federal sort of tribal programs and then like community-based programs. Yeah, I think it's, well, building off of some of your work, it's like, where do we go from here? With all that knowledge that you're kind of building, it's like, how do we kind of situate ourselves but you can't unknow what you know, which is like incredibly complex in that space. And I would say like navigating HUD policy or trying to figure out how to leverage in the housing block grant funds. What I find to be exciting is that tribes, federally recognized tribes all have a guaranteed pool of income or grant dollars, depending on how you wanna look at it, that is outlined by Congress every year in the federal budget to build housing, right? That's like a stepping stone, but that's not gonna solve the issue. And this is where, how do we, I mean, this notion of how do we define wealth? How do we think about wealth? And it's not necessarily in the monetary sense. And this is where like every community gets to define it on their own terms. But inevitably it's like, how do we build housing? And how do we build communities that really reflect our values and that's something that we try and work with communities to define? Like that's, and so in many ways it's like navigating the systems, like how do we get a family to qualify for a mortgage product or like a lending project or you just simply put access debt capital, which is your traditional home like mortgage. And how does that get applied on tribal trust land? Well, right now we have access to a HUD 184 loan but not many financial institutions actually provide that mortgage, that program. And so how do we kind of open it up? And so this is where I find it to be intention too. It's like, well, do you wanna open up trust land to the kind of general financing system? Do we want to do that in a way that allows communities to build wealth in a kind of traditional Western way? Yes, no, some communities have different stances on that and that's not for us to decide. It's really for the communities and for tribal leaders to decide how that is allocated. And those are like incredibly complex generational conversations. Yeah, it's no direct answer but I think it's different in every one of the communities that we're working in. I wanna ask Teresa about architecture. I know it's gonna be not what you, sort of where your attention is focused but I'm thinking of the kind of possible critique that you just mentioned and possibly that many others, these discussions that are happening of the critique of the very form of governance and to what extent architecture can conceive pretty traditionally like a house would take part in that. So that if you're advocating for water, running water basically an architecturally educated person thinks that means house, that means house with foundation, that means like really specific. And I noticed in Joseph, your projects of the one that you showed, has a very specific water feature which waters are very, I mean, there's an entire feature of that design that has to do with how water is brought in. But I mean, is there a conversation where one one advocates radically for water rights that actually doesn't include a house that includes something else? I mean, I'm just wondering is the architectural scale is something that impedes that it curse to you in any way especially when dealing with water rights? Well, thank you for that question. I mean, water rights is a huge issue in the Southwest obviously and it's complicated by, well one, so there's this act, the Winter's Doctrine for 1908, which in theory provides tribes with the right to water but it's premised on this idea of from its establishment as a reservation. So already that's limiting, right? Because that is forcing us to conform to a Western temporality. So for a Navajo Nation, that would mean 1868 because that's when our treaty was designed. Of course, we have lived in the Southwest since time immemorial like other tribes. So I guess I'm always trying to point to how the existing system of legislation is already confining either temporally, geographically, epistemologically, but yet this is what we are forced to confront. Also with water rights, at least in the Southwestern states, we don't have a seat at the table, so to speak in the same way that states do. So for like Western basin states who all draw from the Colorado River, like the Colorado Compact of 1922, basically imagines a pie, right? A water allotment pie. And then each of the lower basin states and upper basin states would be able to each take a slice and this is based on population, a based on imagined use. Well, tribes didn't, weren't imagined to initially have a slice of this pie. They would have to go through states. So for right now, the Navajo Nation, we've negotiated a settlement through the state of Utah, with the state of New Mexico, Arizona is still on the table. In any case, this is just like one example of the ways that trying to secure water is a really broad political process. And that's at the scale of like nationhood, right? And then in terms of like communities and household, that's limited by infrastructure, right? And these ideas of, you could call like the metropole and the periphery, right? And the metropole being like Phoenix and Los Angeles that built all of this infrastructure to deliver water to those cities of higher population density, which left out tribes. And, you know, there's these smaller scale, you know, amazing projects that I think Denae communities are doing to deliver water. But even like think the notion of like infrastructure as development is problematic, right? To thinking about a large scale delivery that would draw down our aquifers and deplete it. And that's kind of like a notion I think the Navajo Nation as a tribe really wants to invest in because that is the way that you can get water for an entire nation. But I know, you know, from like a more community or grassroots perspective it's about like, well, how do we recharge our aquifers and protect our watersheds? Is it really sensible in an era of climate change and drought, we are now like officially declared we are in this longest drought that we've been in for several hundred years to be imagining these large scale water projects. But that is kind of the system with which we have to like subscribe to, to assert our rights to water. So yeah, I think across the board it's just all of these double blinds of like asserting nationhood which is asserting like a large scale sort of project and then asserting, I don't know more of a better balance with our communities and like non-human relatives and like not taking water from them. And it's always these competing sorts of logics. And yeah, I think water is essential to all of those tensions. Yeah, I mean, I have a reaction to that which is that Joseph, when we spoke before, you know this call when we first met you mentioned that essentially the federal tools that you're often having to resort to, to bring funding require have over the years over this history required tribal structures to be mirrors of the federal government. And this is basically what scholars call the politics of recognition. In order to be recognized, you have to look like the interlocutor with whom you're, who's recognizing you. And so that's one image that one has that there's a kind of mirror, a false mirror relationship between the states and federal governments and what is recognized as a structural, a formal tribe. Teresa, in your work, you write about permeability which is, you know, conjures up the idea of water and what's evocative about it. And I encourage everybody to sort of read your writing on it is that on the one hand it describes basically Western permeation and eating away at native lands. And on the other hand, it also describes the politics of resistance. Like you could permeate back or permeation is kind of what you have. So I'm just wondering if both of you and then after this I'll maybe read some of the questions we have in the chat. Both of you can kind of talk about that. And I recognize my questions coming from the outside because I'm not asking about models. I'm just thinking how useful are these concepts because in some ways they're kind of, you know, describing these binds structurally like the bind of the mirror and the bind of the permeability. I can go first or you can go first. Go for it. Okay, well, I'll just speak briefly on this notion of permeability. So the notion of permeability I think can be illustrated by that checkerboard map that I showed really briefly which is that allotment system. You know, and for my family and ancestors in a purple valley region, you know, this has continued to have consequences for the exercise of Navajo jurisdiction today is like the vestiges of this allotment system that still exists. So through working with these community coalitions when they realized that the Navajo nation doesn't have sovereignty over these communities as they're trying to remediate, you know, uranium contamination in their water, they were strategically able to navigate in other ways that might have not been available to them if they were only relying on like Navajo nation, EPA or those sorts of tribal regulatory authorities. So it required them working, you know, with EPA region nine in San Francisco, which is the EPA region that oversees the tribes in the Southwest, you know, working with Arizona Department of Environmental Quality or I should say pushing back against the state entities and then also, you know, the Navajo nation itself. And so I'm trying to imagine, you know, not reifying tribal sovereignty so much in just this very like static federal tribal relationship because that's very limiting. It's the way that enables us to assert our sovereignty in our land base, but it's also limiting in terms of if it's premised upon, you know, a shortening of like our time scales of occupation in the region if it's premised on, oh, since the date of our establishment of reservation, you know, and as history shows, as our oral histories tell us, like we have occupied these lands before the date of our formal like reservation establishment. So I'm trying to also gesture to that as other like indigenous scholars do as well. But yes, we are part of these tribal nations that are federally recognized or state recognized or whatever, but there's also something else. There's all their sites of sovereignty that pre-exist and continue to exist. And that's what I'm trying to hold intention and to articulate and to uphold. And those things are not always visible from the outside, like the way that tribes continue to, you know, assert the sort of self-determination that isn't always conforming to geopolitical boundaries of what, you know, tribal nationhood. And so yeah, in that way, I think Joseph's work is really interesting because I imagine, you know, you're working through all these different sorts of entities and, you know, from an indigenous perspective, it's, yeah, our occupation in these lands doesn't start at when our reservations were established. It's much longer. It's time immemorial. Totally. Yeah, like some point, again, some random, not some random guy, but an individual basically said that at this point in time, this band needs to identify as Cheyenne, right? Meanwhile, like when you go to, when you hear our stories, it's like, oh yeah, well, your great-great-grandfather was actually part of this Sioux band or that, like, so there's these connections that we're not necessarily recognizing and from a Western sense. The kind of this idea of like tribal nations is an interesting one, right? We, as a, my tribe, the Northern Cheyenne, we ousted our tribal president two weeks ago, right? And those, and it's not that, and so it doesn't necessarily work very well, I'd say, in a kind of Cheyenne perspective, right? Our traditional, our, we have a traditional government and we have a Western government and they don't necessarily work very well together and that could be looked at from an outside perspective, from a Western, oh, those, they don't know how to run their government. Well, it's just like false dichotomy that you're trying to impose a structure that just doesn't work with how our community runs, whereas, or our community operates, right? We operate in different types of bands and our kind of government structures rely on different types of societies and that's how it's historically worked in the past 140 years. It hasn't worked like that because of this imposing, but some tribes do work very well under these systems, right? Lifting up like Shakopee or Ho-Chunk or Cherokee Nation, like, and their abilities to kind of serve not only their populations, but other both tribal populations and non-native populations. So you look at Cherokee Nation where they're one of the largest health systems provider in the state of Oklahoma, right? They're serving natives and non-natives and they're able to kind of operate within the system incredibly well. So it's, there's not, you can't qualify indigenous people as like one people, right? And that's where I think we go awry and that's where from an outsider perspective, it's hard to kind of understand the nuances in every one of these communities. Yeah, I mean, that's the, those are thoughts in trying to kind of arrange this blind date of an event where it's really important to think of cultural production and knowledge production as being one way that people from very different, you know, daily practices can still have a conversation. So I'm very grateful that you've sort of agreed to sort of talk. I'm going to read a couple of questions from the Q and A. An anonymous attendee asks, would either of you be willing to share your views on the role of the Navajo Housing Authority, part of the Navajo Nation government that manages public housing for the tribe in addressing the housing situation of the Navajo Nation? And I'll just, I mean, I'll just, you know, because it seems relevant to what you were just discussing that the fact that there is even such a thing as a housing authority, that word is like, that's not an American construction. I don't know, American in the traditional sense. So yeah, the fact that there is a housing authority and how does that, do you have views on that that you're willing to share? I actually, I'm just gonna say, I mean, I can go first or either one. You might have more working experience with NHK versus me. I have maybe anecdotal like experience with it. Yeah, I mean, and it would be great to hear your thoughts. I mean, I just think you're setting up an institution for failure. And from my perspective, you have incredible amounts, multi-millions of dollars going to one entity, and then you're asking this entity to service many different communities in different ways. And that system is not set up. And when you don't have that internal capacity to get the money out to the communities, when you don't physically have both the people and or the systems, financial systems, accounting systems in order, it's really hard to get that money out into the community. When you don't have the ability to kind of have project managers, like it's your setup for failure. And then in the kind of reverse side, you have the community trying to kind of say, why are you not serving our communities? Why are you not serving our communities? And it's like hand tying. And we see this in terms of allocating of federal funds all over the country. Like the capacity is just not there within these entities. I'd love to hear your thoughts, Teri. Teri said, do you wanna add? I'll just, yeah, I'll just briefly say, I mean, there's just, like in my experience, like there's just such a vast shortage of housing. And even with the houses that are available, like with upkeep and are these houses even built well to begin with is a whole nother thing. I mean, I think tangentially related to this is now with this infusion of cash for infrastructure now with the CARES Act. So the Navajo Nation now is also scrambling to like, how do we spend it on all these dollars? How can we build up infrastructure? Which is also about housing improvements, right? So for many folks who don't have running water or bathrooms, so I know like families that we're able to like apply for and then get funding like through their local chapters. So then each chapter is like allocated a certain amount of money. And yeah, but the challenge is, yeah, not having like the capacity to like deliver. It's like, yes, we need to build and to provide water or, you know, any sort of like housing infrastructure. But you're talking about a reservation that's 27,000 square miles. It's the state, the size of West Virginia. It exists across three different states. So putting that into practice of, you know, a building is a challenge. That's so, what's interesting is that the role that infrastructure plays is so primary, not only to governance, but to decision-making it seems. So this feeds into another question we have, which is from someone called RISC gets, who says, I'm curious to hear more about both of your thoughts on the first slides by Joseph. How does the urban-rural divide that privileges urban areas and life and disadvantages rural communities add another perhaps often hidden dimension of disinvestment and the ratio in many indigenous communities. So the kind of rural versus urban divide. Yeah, and I'd say in many ways, it's a kind of false dichotomy. If we think about Indian country and we think about native population per not this most recent census, the one before half of Native Americans live in and or around urban areas, right? And then the other half are on typically reservation. And so it's like this, I don't think we should be thinking about it as this kind of rural and urban population, but how are we kind of living in between these spaces? And I think what is important to lift up is that I'm, well, I'm trained as an urban designer. I'm trained as a planner, right? And this notion when I think about like our T.P. encampments, our villages, like those are urban forms. And so how do we kind of leverage them in ways in which we can be lifting up communities? Or I don't want to kind of create this tension between the urban and the rural, or we're only working in the rural, but we're only working in the urban. I think we're working in all these areas and indeed in between. And so how do we kind of lift that up in a way that is lifting up both sides? I don't know if that's helpful or trying to get to your question. Teresa, did you want to add? I mean, I was just going to say something similar to the effect of, yeah, a lot of our, a lot of indigenous folks actually live in urban areas. So the presumption that you're only dealing with reservation areas is already like not an informed view. But yeah, but then how do you provide any sorts of services for folks on a reservation while also thinking about the many indigenous people that live in cities, especially like Chicago, Denver, San Francisco, Los Angeles, these were relocation cities, right? So that's pointing back to those relocation policies by the US government is now you have these urban centers that have significant urban indigenous populations. Yeah, I mean, there's the, in architectural discourse, the one presence of indigenous, let's say know-how that makes it to conventional histories of modern architecture or steelworkers who's history in architectural history is typically told, really through the most basic kind of heroics that they are heroes because they participated in the building of tall skyscrapers. But of course, indigenous scholars, including our colleague, Adra Simpson has shown that what is really the site of struggle is the going back and forth across what the West understands as being a national borders and what they themselves understand is not being a national border. And so, I mean, I remember reading that book and having my understanding of steel being completely transformed, that the hardness of steel was nothing compared to the hardness of that weekly or bi-weekly travel on a bus at night in order to be able to go across the border. So in a way, what you're discussing, Joseph, about the ability to redefine what the urban is, like the projects you described them as urban projects. And that's what HUD stands for. HUD is housing and urban development. I think that kind of redefinition could use to happen a lot more. So, all right, we have very little time left. I'll just read the last question we have since it's a question about a very technical thing, feel free to transition into a broader comment. How does the NHPA section 106 process help? Has this EO help, which is the level of engagement and assistance all tied to political administration? And I guess this person is referring to the White House Council on Native American Affairs, a document from- National Historic Preservation Act. Is it the National Historic Preservation Act? Is that what it is? Yeah, section 106 process. Yeah, government-to-government relationship between the two. Yeah, so do you have any comments of that? Is that, I mean, the question is whether it's helpful. Maybe you can just comment on its appearance and its- Just kind of, I mean, from my perspective, again, it depends on the capacity of a tribe to actually participate in the section 106 process, right? Do they have a Tribal Historic Preservation Office? Do they have the internal capacity to actually be at the table? I mean, this is very similar to litigation when it comes to Tribal law, right? Do you have the ability to practice a certain type of law internally? And if you don't, then you have to rely on the federal government to provide that support. And so it is just, it's very dependent. A lot of the larger tribes are the tribes that have the ability to kind of have these complex systems to kind of that mirrored system. They have the ability to kind of show up and show up strong. Other tribes that don't, it's sometimes hard. I mean, I reckon back to what when you think about Standing Rock and DAPL, right? The ability to kind of show up during the 106 process, the ability to kind of be there and be present and what is your obligation as a tribe to be there to kind of confront the federal government or participate or be in conversation with the federal government is not necessarily very easy. I mean, as you're running a community, you're leading a community. And so this is like a larger capacity conversation and what are the obligations of a tribe internally and externally and what are the obligations of the federal government to ensure that those systems are there so you can actually participate. I don't know. I'm not gonna speak specifically to this process. I'm not as familiar with it. But I will say maybe in this larger context, I mean, if we're pushing back against this notion of property, right? And of like indigenous peoples and tribes, having to toe the line between conforming to like whatever existing legislation is available to them to protect certain things. So it's like a property is like a thing, a structure, right? And for indigenous people who've like lived and occupied and moved around areas, like this larger conversation of sacred lands, I think is instructive here. So I'll just point to what happened at Bears Ears and the Intertribal Coalition that was formed to protect a region of sacred lands, right? So maybe akin to this notion of like historic preservation, right? But it's for an entire landscape and having to use and leverage existing US frameworks to protect that. So short of like all these conversations around land back, right? Like they can't get back this land into like their own trust management, but the tribes work together using the Antiquities Act of 1906 to petition the former Obama administration to establish a national monument to protect Bears Ears. So that's just like, I think a tangential, but maybe like an illustration of how like tribes are using and strategizing to like, how can we protect our landscapes or our properties or things of cultural patrimony and working together? I mean, I think that was historic, right? Tribes that maybe historically hadn't always gotten along but were like, hey, we share the sacred landscape and we want to protect it from resource extraction. So yeah, I would just kind of point people to also that that legislation. Yeah, it's a wonderful, I mean, on that note of sort of hopeful solidarity, one thing to note is that in the history of preservation movements, the United States and especially disability and the Bears Ears episode in particular has been noted worldwide by other disenfranchised communities who have noticed that you can use nature preservation to act at a very broad scale and use, and I'm talking about sort of Southern Europe but also in Southeast Asia. An apparently very weak kind of claim, which is a cultural claim for a territory can actually be very strong, especially against blatantly predatory sort of infrastructural and resource extractive regime. So well, if we can maybe end on that slightly, that sort of bell of solidarity maybe, I wanna truly thank Joseph and Theresa for having joined us and thank you to the audience also. It's really too bad that we couldn't be together in person and for the rest of the spring, we will have two more events. One is on counting land and the other is called making the land pay. So I invite you all to join us again and thank you again, Joseph and Theresa, and we will encourage everybody to keep following your work. Yeah, thank you, thank you.