 I'd like us to care that activations and cultural rights and freedoms is popular. We bring communities that I can trust to understand the lives of these young men. But generously, we will share the one and best home to both of us as we go through so that our communities can learn the truth of our faith-based interests. Since here in New York City, we've been able to do both fair and easy for the people of the community and that is why we're very proud of that. Since here in 127, we've covered a lot of these topics, including the first few discussions today and very actively with the public. That's not the only reason that we're doing this. Creation is not going to be easy for the people today rather than the pollen on the skin. Indigenous art and social change and indigenous playwrights and storytellers including artists from this region and from around the continent have presented their work and discussed and shared how they use their art for justice and voice, particularly in regard to missing and murdered Indigenous women. One panelist called this a revolution of the heart. The Living Presence series is a call for truth. It is also a call for action to look history in the face and see how we can heal the bleeding wounds. To ask for a commitment, not only to listen and understand the story of these many peoples but also share responsibility for that story to live fully into the present and to make sure that erasure and disappearance gives way to reparation, decolonization of our minds and interactions, sharing land, cultural space, and most of all justice. I want to take the opportunity to thank CalRound for broadcasting the best cultural council, Jacob Tillo and local cultural councils and particularly sponsor the Living Presence series, the Mass Foundation for the Humanities Expanding Stories Program. The Okitewa team includes youth resident, Nazario Tallhair Red Deer Garate, Anoki Maan, Hamanta Dancing Star Woman Sylvester, Tracy Loving Medicine I. Ramos, Andres Brown-Bairhart Gaines, and now to introduce the co-founders and co-directors of Okitewa. Rhonda Anderson is Anupiat Adobaskin from Kutkovic. Her life work is most importantly as a mother, a classically trained herbalist, silversmith, and activist. She works permanently as an educator, activist under removal of math cuts, water protector, indigenous identity, and protracting for traditional homelands in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from Extractive Industry. And in that light, she is also the curator of the Living Presence series. Rundant tirelessly works on representation from the State House to local schools and businesses all the way to Charlemagne. Don't forget to let's say a little bit. She is on the advisory board of DECAW, was an advisor on de-colonization efforts on the Maths Council for Arts, and most recently on the philanthropy Maths 50 Second Meeting, as well as many, many, many times. She is a commissioner of Indian Affairs and Western Maths and was named the Commonwealth Heroine of Maths. Larry's body's pro-man He is a nationally-acclaimed award-winning writer, poet, and cultural educator, traditional storyteller, tribal drummer, dancer, and motivational speaker involving youth sobriety, cultural, and environmental awareness. Larry shares music history and culture to many people and lecturers on Native American sovereignty and identity regionally and internationally. Larry's books include Morning Roads of Thanksgiving, Grubbing and Drinking, and the Whispering Basket. And Larry premiered his play Freedom and Season in the spring of this year and is currently making a film, A Noki, A Journey Beyond the Picture. He is on the review committee of the Native American Poets Project and Artist in Residence at Bunker Hill Community College and writing a children's book series for Indigenous youth. Larry was the first Native to have shared a traditional NITMUG song and land acknowledgement at the opening of Boston Marathon since the Boston Marathon started happening. Larry will now welcome you to the Living Presence. Thank you all for being here. Thank you panelists. Thank you everybody for sharing this time with us. I want to open my traditional words and say I greet you in the words of peace in the NITMUG language and I welcome you all here in this time of sharing and this time of coming together and I will offer a welcome song in our language. Thank you so much Larry for that beautiful opening. I'm so glad that you made it out. Good to see everybody in person. Thank you so much Larry. Thank you so much Larry. Thank you so much Larry. Good to see everybody in person. And after that storm some of you are probably surprised to see so much snow up here right now. Right? So I said welcome and good day in my traditional language. I'm Rhonda Anderson and back at the Baskin from Alaska. Before we get to into things I really want to take a few minutes to recognize this land and give deep appreciation and gratitude for Mother Earth as a living being and acknowledgement that our collective Mother Earth provides everything that we need to survive. Tribes historically local to this area as Stacey, thank you Stacey said before Asakoki Abenaki, Bacumtuk, NITMUG, Nanatuck and Mohican tribes are currently situated are NITMUG, Abenaki and Mohican I always like to begin by saying that folks please get to know Indigenous peoples of your area ask what you can do to lift and raise their voices and honor their sovereignty so in that spirit I like to have three action items the first one and I'm going to keep saying this one until I see that we're having more changes locally recognize and make changes to the dominant narrative that glorifies colonization and genocide of Indigenous peoples of this area be mindful that problematic terms like pioneer valley are a reminder of a legacy of dispossession removal and subsequent erasure second please consider supporting the various Indigenous artists that are here today please look for our resources list that will be forthcoming after this event to inspire you to learn ways to reinforce, lift and center Indigenous voices narratives, literature and public art and lastly of course there are five bills in the state house still and I'm going to show you one of the six tribes of Massachusetts support so please visit MAindigenousagenda.org to learn more information and learn ways that you can support these efforts that means thank you for listening that's the most important step officially welcome to the eighth installment of the living presence of our history today we'll be having a conversation with Indigenous authors regarding representation and literature I'm really honored to be with such an incredible panel today many of whom I know personally and I adore and some I'm entirely unabashedly a fan girl of looking at you I'm a book nerd if you've listened to any living presence I say it every single time I'm a book nerd if I find out that a panelist has written something it becomes part of my collection and the books that you see around the room most of them are mine it's like 0.002% of my collection I've also intentionally curated this panel to represent regional authors and center youth and young adult education okay and we have now come to that very fun moment where I introduce our panelists and I like to ask a rapid round quick question of each panelist so that you may get to know each panelist as an individual a little bit better so I'm going to start with you Chris okay Chris is a longtime singer named drum group mystic river singers based out of Connecticut and you've traveled the U.S. and Canada to many different events and you are also a senior advisor for the Emmy award winning documentary Don Land Chris was also a participant and co-director of a short absolutely gorgeous documentary Wakuwapak Thank you very much the approaching Don which was released in 2022 and it chronicled a historic collaboration in 2021 with Wabanaki musicians and storytellers and the 19-time Grammy winning cellist Yo-Yo Ma Chris has published is a published author of the Scholastic book If You Live During the Plymouth Thanksgiving and this non-fiction historical children's picture book earned star reviews from the school library journal and Kirkus reviews so I'm going to go back a little bit into your bio, your introduction what was it like to sing with Yo-Yo Ma as backup Well that's the question I came to that particular project I in a way backed into it Yo-Yo Ma was coming to Academia National Park you know does pop up performances as I'm sure if anybody follows his career you know when people were getting vaccinated he would show up and play for the people getting vaccinated and he was coming to Academia National Park as part of a journey through his own life of trying to reconnect with nature because in his own life he does not have that connection with these and this was kind of the first of that and as he was planning this his office reached out to me when I was working at the Abbey Museum as the Executive Director with a question what could Yo-Yo Ma do that would be meaningful to Wabanaki people because in this journey to connect with nature and music and humanity he did not want to leave indigenous voices out and so my suggestion to his crew is what it would feel like to play his cello play his music for the sun on the coast as it rose as we as Wabanaki people do as part of our cosmology as people of the dawn and the answer came back that instead he wanted to collaborate and it kind of went from there and Yo-Yo Ma being who he was actually handed over the power of the creation of this performance to us as performers so what was it like let me just say that Yo-Yo Ma is a very down to earth person if you meet him he is just as genuine as he is portrayed in the media as real of a human being as you can get so when it came to him working with indigenous folks with Wabanaki people he fit right in because he joked around with us and all kinds of stuff like that he became a friend of my father's during the experience during the rehearsal and other things and so that relationship went on and so it was really almost like meeting a relative from far away almost like somebody from a different tribe in a way because he acted as we would do as I do in this area I'm Wabanaki I'm not from this area I'm a guest in this area you know to the tribes of this area and in that same way Yo-Yo Ma acted as a guest within Wabanaki and so it was magical in a lot of ways and it's hard to describe in words thank you that is a beautiful documentary I wholeheartedly recommend that it could seem Wechkuwabuk it's on YouTube by the way Wechkuwabuk Larry you've been introduced so I won't go through that I'm sorry tales from a whispering basket was your first book what led you these are loaded questions about 2-3 minutes per question what led you to write this book of poetry and short stories thank you Rhonda thank you all I'm really excited to be here so I've been an artist my entire adult life singing storytelling in various forms of that throughout US and Canada with my family and one of the things that inspired me about doing that traveling and sharing the culture and history and living presence of knit monk people was kind of undoing in my own way the trauma within myself the trauma within my community and I knew one of the best ways to do that is share the stories of our people to let the world know that we're still here and then it kind of dawned on me another way to reach folks was to begin writing because I've always loved to write poetry as a youth and so I was suggested I should write a book I said okay sure I'll do that and so that began my journey and it was a very long process those who are writers know what I'm talking about with editing and all the different things and publications and so I had no idea what I was getting into and I said about that piece of it I just wanted to tell my story and then all the mechanics and the publishing ugly world that is so you know and then you kind of grunt your teeth and okay this comes with the deal and so that began my journey and and the most important thing I wanted to share was kind of shift the understanding about who we are as indigenous people and there are really some horrifying statistics when it comes to really education indigenous folks and that kind of led me to write my children's book series I'm working on now but a lot of folks don't realize is that the most common experience of a Native American child in the U.S. is from kindergarten to college he would never see a teacher of his own racial group he will never experience that kind of mirroring and kind of like ownership of a self-accuration in a very you know significant way in terms of education and academics but what they will see is mascots caricatures made out of their images and so on and so I wanted to kind of address that and we also know from statistics that there are only about 1% of books that are geared towards early education for indigenous children whereas there's over half for white children and about 25% of trucks and dinosaurs so I really wanted to to kind of work within my means and through my stories of kind of shifting that and you know we have a lot of work to do so I'm really just excited to be able to share that and through my own stories and I usually use my kids you know my kids on my second book and now I'm using my other kids for this other book so they're there so I might as well okay I'll put you in the story so yeah that's been the main focus of sharing and shifting this narrative thank you thank you for sharing Eric Gansworth Shao Enesay is a writer and visual artist enrolled in the Onondaga Nation Eel Clan born and raised at Tuscarora Nation the author of 13 books has been widely published and has numerous solo and group exhibitions Eric is a Lowry and Residence at Kinesias College and an NEH distinguished visiting professor at Colgate University his work received a Prince Honor Award which is the first Native author to receive this award in 2021 Eric was also long listed for the National Book Award and has received an American Indian Library Association Youth Literature Award a Penn Oakland Award and an American Book Award Eric M. was chosen for Time Magazine 10 best young adult and children's books for 2020 his newest book is my Good Man which is a coming of age novel so I have a sentence one sentence well there's lots of things I take books and I absolutely destroy them when I read them I'm sorry that you have to see that but there was But there was one sentence in the book, Apple Skin to the Core, that really spoke to me. And it was from the chapter Masks Unmasked, page 121. And the sentence is, a pen, a brush, can be a dangerous weapons or shields for survival. I use them with care. Eric, as an artist and an author, can you expand in two minutes or less on that statement? Well, I think that through your process in any art form, the final product is as much what you've taken away as what you've left on the page. And so through the process of working on a first draft, I kind of do it for me and what I think I want to say. And then when I'm getting further down the line, I imagine how it's going to affect others. And in this case, it was particularly tricky because this was a memoir. It was really the first time I sort of warned my family ahead of time. I said, this is your one and only shot. I'm writing a memoir. If you don't want to be in it, let me know. For the most part, I knew how people were going to respond. But I felt a tremendous responsibility. And I think that's kind of what masks do, is they allow us to see something and they allow us to keep something private as well. And I think that's what an artist does. That's, I guess, how a brush or a pen can do both of those things simultaneously. And largely how I choose to keep them as a foundation of my work as an artist. Thank you so much for sharing. Morgan Tulty, a citizen of the Panopska Indian Nation. Morgan is the author of the Nationally Bestselling and Critically Acclaimed Story Collection, I should say. Night of the Living Rez from Tin House Books, which has won the New England Book Award. And was a finalist for the Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers. Was the 2023 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, the Story Prize, and the Penn W. Robert Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection. Tulty is an assistant professor of English in creative writing and Native American and Contemporary Literature at the University of Maine in Orano. And he is on the faculty at the Stone Coase MFA, the Institute of American Indian Arts, and a prose editor for the Massachusetts Review. So wow, with a bio like that, Morgan, I was really shocked to read somewhere that you never considered yourself a writer and that you didn't really read books in your younger years. Is this true? It is. Yeah, I did not like books. I don't know if I didn't like them. I feel like I just grew up in an environment that made it difficult to kind of like, I don't know, experience education in that sort of Western way. But I always loved storytelling. That was the thing I always loved. And I didn't start really reading and writing until I was about 18 when I was like, oh, wow, I can tell stories in this way. But yeah, I was not a fan of books at all, except for Harry Potter. I will say I read the Harry Potter series only after I'd seen the movie and I knew what people looked like. So thank you so much for sharing. Yvonne Tiger, I love you Yvonne. Yvonne Tiger is a citizen of the Cherokee nation of Oklahoma and the end of Seminole and Muscogee descent. She is a PhD candidate in the cultural, social, and political thought program at the University of Lethbridge. Yvonne holds a bachelor of arts degree from Smith College and two master of arts from the University of Oklahoma. She is an indigenous art historian and teaches indigenous studies courses at the University of Lethbridge and master of fine art studio arts at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. She was a scholar in residence at Smith College in 2021 and a 21-22 and 22-23 Kobel scholar. Yvonne, I met you when you were a student at Smith. My gosh, how many 20, 21, 22 years ago? Are we dating ourselves? No, let's not do that. And you really encouraged me at the time to go to the five colleges and spend time with native students. And you really imparted that they must be feeling lonely or homesick for other native folks. And I also remember that really ties into the story of how you found the work of a native student who was at Smith almost 100 years earlier. That was Angel Decora. And how that made you feel. Can you talk briefly? Again, this is like the rapid fire question time. Can you talk briefly about that time and how it shaped your future? Yeah, absolutely. And Chris, I was running around with Chris Pegrum too. So, with Mr. Grif. So, I would probably met. So, yeah, it was, I grew up, I was born and raised in Germany. So I was very diasporic in my own existence. And so I had already been at Smith a year before I found out that Angel had been there. And I was really angry that I hadn't known because I had been the president of the Native American Women of Smith at that point for a year. This is my second term. And it changed everything. It changed the focus of what I was working on going forward. It changed my perspective on the complexity of the lives of indigenous women, especially in the sort of situation that she was in as a Winnebago woman or girl who was taken from her home, taken to Hampton, had all kinds of other things happen, end up at Smith and then go back to Carlisle, the complexity in trying to understand that kind of a lived life and also make sense of my own life. It really did, it really altered everything and my perspective and the questions that I asked and that I continue to ask of my work. And right now as I teach indigenous women at the university that I'm at now, I always encourage my students to look at the complexity and also to be very careful of this president's stance of, you know, because it can be really hard to understand the decisions that people made back then when we think about the lives that we live now. But yeah, I hope that answered that. No, beautiful, thank you, Yvonne. And I love you too. Dr. Debbie Reese is tribally enrolled at Nambé Oinge, a sovereign native nation located in the Southwest. Dr. Reese's book chapters, articles and blog, American Indians in Children's Literature are used by educators across the United States and Canada. Debbie, your story about how and why you started doing the work at AICL is really sort of essential for framing the topics of today's conversation. Can you please share with us, tell us the story of how you began sharing this critical analysis of indigenous peoples in children's literature. All right, good morning. Thank you all for having me and thank you for being part of this conversation. I left the reservation in 1994 to go study family literacy at the University of Illinois, got there and there was a mascot. And I'm so committed to storytelling and what we learned from storytelling. And as I spent time there, I began to be invited to come to various civic groups and dance. And I'd say, I don't dance for civic groups. For us, dance is prayer. It happens at a certain time. At a certain place and no, I can't do that. Well, can you come and tell us a story? They would reply. And I would say, no, I'm not a storyteller, but I am a teacher. I'd be glad to come and spend time with you and share what I know about this or that topic. And they didn't want that. They wanted a performer. They wanted a dancer. They wanted a storyteller. So there at the University of Illinois, which is a research one university, I saw a tremendous amount of ignorance and started thinking, okay, still staying in that area of literacy. What are children's books telling them about who we are? And it was easy to see once I started looking very critically at them, like Clifford the Big Red Dog, wanting to be an Indian at Halloween and Grizzly Bob leading a campfire story with his hands up in the air. And it went on and on as I started looking at that and seeing just how prevalent in children's books, mascotry kinds of images are there. That's when I started to think, okay, what can I do with my interest in children's books that will help people understand who we really are? And that was a two, that's at least two focuses that I, or foci, I don't know the right word and I don't care. I don't know that right English word for that. My goals are twofold. One is to bring forward native writers because they bring insight, knowledge, and life experience to their storytelling that a white writer can only imagine and generally they imagine it very badly. And the second is to call attention to the problems in those white authored books. Island of the Blue Dolphins, no way. Little House on the Prairie, absolutely not. And these are books that people who are teaching kids hold so dear because somebody read it to them, somebody assigned it to them and they have this nostalgic feeling for it. What it does, unfortunately, is it creates a condition such that any of the writers here today when they come forward with their books, kids don't know that those are actually books by native people or that the people in them are actually native people because they're looking for the stereotype. So the twofold work is really important. Thank you so much for sharing. Larry, I know that you started to talk about this and your similar experience of not being seen in literature as a child and having that missed opportunity to have a mirror held up and you touched so briefly on your next project which is a children's book about Cataio. Can you please talk about that and why that is an important part of the work that you're doing right now? Yeah, I'd love to. I just wanna go back to something Morgan said too that really resonated when he talked about not reading as a youngster. I was the same way and that's something that folks need to take a lot of consideration to in terms of indigenous people were all the survivors of the awareness post-apocalyptic fog of survival from the boarding schools and residential schools and so on. So like I'm first generation college and in many of, if you look at my entire network of my mom's family and uncle's in many cases were first generation high school right from my mother's generation they're all farmers and lived in the woods and they were not encouraged to go to school. They were encouraged to stay on the farm and do their thing and they were kind of kept away from white people. So that was kind of the life. And so when Morgan talked about environments where education wasn't kind of like pushed in that sense and it was kind of the norm, right? Coming from those generations. And so having that I went through the similar process of not really getting into books. I had a very short attention span and I'm really glad this came up because this is something I wanted to talk about to kind of hit out there to other young native writers who are coming up who maybe have experienced this. So I did love to learn always but so I had to get through that book, right? And so having a short attention span I'd have to read a page three, four, five, six times and it's really about just taking that dedication to push yourself and do that. And so then it's like a learned practice, right? Reading like anything else. And so that kind of excelled that process. And so another thing I wanted to touch on when I was talking early about numbers is that which inspired me to continue on this writing path of teaching about who we are as a people was that 50% of the cultural and linguistic diversity in the United States is of indigenous people but we don't realize that. In Ronda's communities alone, how many languages are there? There's hundreds. So I mean, and there's tribes I don't even are aware of across the country. So, and then we think about some of the books Debbie pointed out. I mean, they're ridiculous and absurd because they're not even getting to the real people. And so the books I have presently are for young adult and adult. And so this really pushed me to go further. And I have some work with the Massachusetts Department of Public Health where we created a life skills series called Circle Tides of Mother Earth where we really wanted to address the crisis of opioid addiction and suicide in our communities where Massachusetts alone between 2014 and 2016 we lost 24 youth to overdose and suicide. So we were losing a child a month for two years. And that led to the culmination of the book there Coming Home and Circle Tides of Mother Earth where it's beyond a curriculum, it's storytelling, it's traditional knowledge shared back to our youth to help them navigate through this life in terms of not just saying no to drugs but also helping to make healthy choices around diet, around wellbeing, around the spirituality and so on. And then I got tapped by the University of Iowa and Native Health Network to create this literature because if anybody knows the Native Health Network they do a lot of work around the wellbeing of indigenous people across the country. And so they wanted to create this series of children's books and they wanted me to lead that. So I gathered up some folks from the area, some Wabanaki and some Wampanoag folks to, so I created this team of people and I'm not an artist. So I got a Wampanoag relative who's an artist and so he drew these just beautiful, brilliant images. And so I said, okay, we need a person. So I thought of my little son, Kateo. And so then I started thinking about the process of the book. It would be the Adventures of Kateo and it's early education. We're talking from ages three to five. And so what we really wanted to do here is show indigenous people, buy indigenous people and create these life stories, right? So for early education, you give them a problem. There's a problem in the story and he has to overcome it. And then there's little situations of how he does these figuring out. And it's also codified through a native lens. So he's going through life and in this contemporary way of, he may come across this problem. How does Kateo solve this problem? And how does he deal with certain situations in life? And it's a really teaching about sharing and all the different principles that we hold as indigenous people, right? So sharing, dealing with a negotiation, kind of like around sharing and justice and sustainability and understanding each other, communication skills, all the different things that are not readily shared in some of the curriculum that we need. So it's been a work in process. And the title of the book is the Adventures of Kateo. And because it's not out yet, I'm not gonna tell too much. I'm gonna be an author for a minute. But I'm really excited about the work. He has these cute little sayings in the book. And so that's kind of where I'm going with that. So thank you. Thank you for sharing. And what a gift for your child, who's absolutely adorable by the way, to be able to see himself mirrored. You know, that was a struggle growing up and my mom is in the front row. She tried very hard to make sure that I was mirrored in society, which you worked very hard at that. And again, you know, I wanna put it out there that most books about native people, especially historical fiction are written by non-native authors to the tune of 78% or more. Yeah. So understanding that there's very little representation in historical Native American literature that native authors actually write. Chris, you wrote, of course we talked about this, the educational book for Scholastic, if you live during climate Thanksgiving. And I absolutely love the way you have written the book. There is explicit language on settler colonialism and the myths surrounding the holiday. Can you please discuss the importance of using that critical indigenous lens in your educational book and why you wrote it? Yeah, so when it came for me, where does that lens comes from? You know, like a lot of the authors that have spoken, there wasn't a lot of example, you know, in presence in media for me growing up, but I was blessed to grow up the son of Wayne Newell, you know, who spent 50 years plus working to preserve our language or music and wrote over 40 children's books all in the past Macquarie language. You know, so when it comes to, you know, my experience with indigenous literature, that was my first experience with indigenous literature is learning these books in school in my community in my doctorate book. But then, you know, you go out into the world, I get out to Dartmouth College and I see how ignorant, you know, the American public is about native people. And in fact, back in the 90s, if I were to tell somebody I was past Macquarie, a student, their reference was the old Pete Stragon movie from the 70s, you know, where the town is named past Macquarie and that's all they had, you know. So for me, it was very frustrating to have to constantly educate everybody about, you know, who I was. But, you know, and this is something that, you know, I had a chip on my shoulder actually for quite a lot of my life before becoming a professional educator. And when I went into that world, I entered in back into it at the Pequot Museum. If any of you have never been there before, the Pequot Museum is the largest tribal museum in the world. And it tells a history of Connecticut unapologetically from the perspective of the Pequots, which includes the good, the bad, and the ugly of colonization. And what I saw in my time there, I became the education supervisor around public programs is that children from Connecticut would enter the space with simple, with actually innocent questions. Are Pequots still alive? Right, that's what they've been fed the implicit biases of the children's literature that they're running into. Now all natives are dead and gone. By the time they leave, right, they have learned once again, all the good, the bad, and the ugly of the story of how the living community got to be where it is today. But they are leaving with the knowledge that Pequots are part of the fabric of what became the state of Connecticut. And they are actually more excited when they leave that space as a result. So when this particular project came along, I'm an educator by trade. I am not a writer by trade. But I had been at the Pequot Museum because there's sometimes a conflation between the Mayflower landing and the day of Thanksgiving declared after the Pequot massacre. And as a result, I created an educational program called the Mystifying Thanksgiving. And to teach about the history of the Thanksgiving holiday and actually how we got to the creation of it in the 19th century. And that's where the material really came from was just my want to answer these simple questions for these children and their parents, by the way, in a way that they would go home with something even more full. Even though it does not always read as pleasant when it comes to the story of colonization, that does not mean that we should lie to our children because the effect of that is those children grow up, they mean a native person, they're going to meet my children, right? When they go to college and they get to diverse environments and they're going to have a really awkward experience as a result. And that doesn't help those students either. So it's not just representation, you know, and my children seeing ourselves in books, but also, you know, tackling that ignorance which does not benefit anybody in this country. Thank you so much. Like that was, you dropped a truth bomb right there. Yeah, like I said, I really appreciate the truth that's being told in your story. And I think that that benefits non-native students greatly. And I see this quite often as I work with mascots, you know, is that if we had that educational piece in place, then the answer about mascotry would become obvious. Um, Eric, you have also seen the importance or the need of educating young adult readers about your contemporary culture. As you have published the Scholastic Book, if I ever get out of here, Eric, in the book, you immediately get into the tough subjects that are glaringly absent from the curriculum in the United States. And the first chapters really tackle, I mean, the first, literally the first chapter and a little into the second, tackle the tough topics of boarding schools, racism, stereotypes, poverty, alcoholism, and intergenerational traumas. You are genuinely educating young adults on the complexities of being indigenous. Can you please maybe expand on the significance of that type of education in your book? I think one of the, that was really my first book for young readers. And so I was kind of doing a learning curve there as well and kind of thinking about what sorts of materials are going into there. But mostly I was just really working on a novel that reflected my avoidance of middle school. As a fiction writer, it's one of the things you do is you consider where your character's going to have conflict and because that's really what drives fiction. And I realized that I hadn't writing for a fair amount of time at that point. I think I've had nine books on and I realized that none of my characters ever went through middle school. They went through an elementary school and they just kind of vanished for a while and reemerged in high school. And I thought, well, what was that all about? What am I avoiding as a person there? And I thought, okay, probably this is the place to begin. This is the place to find conflict for a young reader and with a young protagonist. And I realized that that was a huge turning point in my young life because I am from a very, very small res in Western New York, you know, it's home to, depending on who you ask, about 1,000 people. Some people say it's around 800. Some people say it's around 1,200. So I'll say 1,000 to be safe. And that's really, that's the only demographic I ever spent any time with was just people from home. I mean, we obviously left the res to go to stores and things and my mom was a house cleaner for a living. So she quite intimately had been in white people's homes. And occasionally I had been in there with her because she would just bring me to work if she had no other option. My solid other life. And I thought, you know, I didn't quite grasp like that parallel world was existing beyond ours until I hit middle school and I discovered that it was just tremendous awakening. And back then we were academically tracked. And I guess probably I tended to task well. So I was tracked kind of in the achiever section but I was like the only one from the res who did. And so I noticed immediately everybody else in the class knew other people and I was the only one kind of going solo. And very quickly realized that all my frame of references were not shared by anyone. And so I had to start figuring out why that was happening. And ultimately I quickly came to the conclusion that I was living an alternate history. And the novel kind of unfolds from there and it turned out to be even more true. I guess that was the weird and most shocking thing was when this book came out I discovered that it was labeled as historical fiction. So I felt definitely like a geezer at that point because it's set more or less than I can. I had become historical fiction. And so I thought, well, it was important that if I was going to write intimately about character of protagonist who was indigenous then that person should have the same frame of references I had. And as a result, I think it kind of becomes educational but maybe more incidentally because of the life lived. Thank you. That is so true, I appreciate that. I also wanted to point out that there's a beautiful connection with our panelists and that book as Debbie Reese encouraged Eric Gransworth to submit a piece that eventually became if I ever got out of here to Scholastic. Is that true? Yes. We met being kind of co-keynoting at a couple of different conferences and very rapid succession. And I did tend to write about young life a fair amount but mostly from an adult's point of view reflecting. And so Debbie kept saying, so when are you gonna start writing for kids? And I was like a never. And she said, I bet I'm gonna find a situation where that's not gonna be true anymore. And I said, okay, well, good luck there. And then she did, so it was probably the offer I couldn't refuse. And so yeah, that interaction became, I guess the beginning of my writing for young people and that's largely what I've done since. Thank you, Debbie. Don't mess with her. So now I wanna like take a turn here and I really wanna dive deeper into representation and stereotype busting with literature. So Morgan, you write about the intergenerational and historical trauma in your communities and you speak to the contemporariness of the trauma unfolding in your book of short stories, The Night of the Living Res. And through those short stories, you show, maybe this is my interpretation though, why and how self-destruction happens. And I was kind of really shocked to find your book's connecting point. And I had this aha moment of understanding the trauma, the main character moves through and what made him the way he is. So what are your, I guess, I don't know, what are your inspirations for the book and the importance of that contemporary representation? Yeah, thank you. I think, I've always liked this quote by Luiso and who was a fiction writer and a scholar. He said, non-native readers come to indigenous fiction and basically hoping to get a comfortable, colorful, easy tour of Indian country. And I think we've been, all of us have been sort of talking about that in a way and that there's so many books out there that engage with that idea, which I think has a lot to do with capitalism and what sells and that sort of thing. But with Night of the Living Res, I was really, really deeply interested in telling stories about people and their emotions. For me, fiction is about feeling, it's about, I think it was the poet Ocean Viyong in a New Yorker interview who recently, I don't know if it was recent, but he's like, I feel more alive when I read fiction. And I feel like fiction, I feel like storytelling helps us sort of, gives us a little shock, a little jolt in what it means to be human. And so that's where I've always come from as a writer is like, I'm gonna build a story around this sense of feeling or these types of feelings and putting those as the foundation and then building upon it, culture and history and all of those things. And because I feel like if we do it the other way around, we might fall into the trap of positioning the work as performative in a way. And so with my stories, I'm always like, you know, and it's not an easy thing to do because we read, or let me say it this way, is I feel like I'm trying to articulate this in the best way possible, but it's like fiction and nonfiction and all of these modes of storytelling that we see in Western culture, are not, they're not a form of storytelling that we traditionally used, you know what I mean? And so it's like readers from a Western perspective for thousands and thousands of years have read works and have looked at works in this specific way. And so it's like, we can think of telling traditional stories and trying to put them in fiction and it's like we get readers who are like, oh, well, that wasn't really a story, you know what I mean? Because it's not fitting with the mold of what they expect a book to be. And so I feel like with my book, it was like, I wanted to write a book that was fighting against that. And, you know, I can't take, you know, if my book did that, it did that, but it's like, I feel like there were so many other contemporary writers at the time who kind of just sort of like blasted open the doors, you know, like Tommy Orange with there, there, and, you know, Teresa Mayut and, you know, Brandon Hobson also who came, who had been writing, but, you know, like after the door had opened, all these writers came out and, yeah. So for me, you know, it was always about, you know, not avoiding stereotypes, but starting with emotion and building upon it and then being like, this is who these people are, right? Like this is a sliver of a sliver of who these people are. Thank you. The short stories were, in my opinion, very complex. And I honestly didn't realize that they were connected to each other at first, because the stories were so different. Little snippets of a lifetime. And anyway, so I'm gonna leave it with that, I don't wanna spoil the book for anybody. Eric, in Apple Skin to the Core, and I think just in general, your writing, you combine this rare gift of art, prose, and storytelling to name what community life and indigenous cultures are and how they move alongside colonization. And this method is sort of, I don't know, I would consider it kind of all-encompassing and uses pop culture to add to a new level, maybe, of contemporariness or to reclaim and indigenize mainstream society, indigenizing mainstream society. So I would like to read another fragment of a piece from Apple Skin to the Core. It's a part of a poem that is called Migration. And it's the very first part of the poem, page 172. Eventually you will become what's called an Indian writer. But weirdly, when you make this assertion, an unlikely percentage of people here you say, Native American storyteller. Instead, they expect you to reveal life lessons for children disguised as stories about anthropomorphic animals. So here is a story about siblings and reservations and the culture of returns. But just in case you can't hear me, let me tell you a little something about Robbins and their young. That really popped out for me. As a literary author, Eric, do you feel you're constantly up against these stereotypes and have a need to break down these misinformed expectations? And maybe how do you do that by using pop culture? Yeah, it used to happen all the time. And for, as I said, the first, at least 15 years of my career, I wrote for adults. And I mean like adult adults, not pornos obviously, but also kind of on the greeting side. And various colleges and universities would invite me to speak and no matter what they put on the posters and then fairly often it just said, you know, poet, fiction writer, all kinds of people brought like these little kids because all they saw was Native Americans. So they were like waiting for me, I guess as Debbie experienced this earlier, waiting for me to dance or waiting for me to tell some kind of story. And I did, but never really quite the story is that they were thinking of. And so I thought, well, you know, one way to check people's expectations without them getting super defensive is with humor. And I am also just kind of naturally a smart ass. I don't really know how to not be a smart ass. And I just accept that that's the way I deliver. And at this point, mostly I don't care, you know, if you didn't do your research well and you show up with a nine year old and I'm reading something for a 15 year old, that's on you, that's not on me. But the reality is also if you've given this kid a phone at this point, you know, there's like way more than they're being exposed to in the culture beyond me being smart ass. So I figure it's all kind of, you know, open for discussion at that point. And it's not my job to tailor my presentation to your lack of awareness. And so for me, I decided to write about the res as I do it and as I live it and as my family lives it. And our world was fairly saturated with popular culture. And, you know, and I think even there, we're often kind of judged by others for our poor choices because, you know, like my mom, she gave us really unusual choices, you know, like we didn't have a lot of money, we didn't have running water, so that should tell you how little bit of honey we had. And so she would have saved a little bit at the end of summer. And she'd say, so you can have a new pair of jeans or you can have a couple of albums. And I always went for the album because I could go to Goodwill or Salvation Army and get some jeans. And so I had a really good music collection and people would be like, how is it that you have, you know, a record player and you don't have plumbing. And I'm like, I don't know, you've done the cost analysis of plumbing and you've done the cost analysis of a record player, they're not quite the same thing. And but it was also this weird judgy sentiment that we should be denied all pleasures we might want just because we were poor. And you know, I just kind of rather than flipping the bird because that's kind of counterproductive, I thought transforming American pop culture and allowing it to be seen through an indigenous lens was maybe a more productive way of opening their eyes and their ears. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. And I know in Apple to Apple you used Beatles as part of your music, your music selection to, I don't know, indigenize pop culture. And then in your latest book, you used, where is the latest book? Oh, my good man. Am I correct when I'm reading this that you used Rush? Yeah, Rush is the big bribe. Right, we got clapping out here. Yeah. Oh. So I think that's absolutely brilliant. And really sort of taking back, you're like indigenizing, it's like reverse colonization. And so I think that's absolutely brilliant. And you know, I think we probably grew up in about the same timeframe. So for me, the books are really relevant. So very exciting. And so just to recap, right? So we've talked about historical representation through an indigenous lens. And we've talked about contemporary expression. And what really piques my interest is visualizing possible future selves. Where is that? Right? So Yvonne, you wrote a very compelling article on indigenizing the final frontier, the art of indigenous storytelling through graphic novels. I'm going to read a little excerpt of your article. And you were, it was your interpretation of a story in one of the Moonshot graphic novel volumes. I have all three volumes here because I'm such a nerd. And let's see, where is it? Quote, fortunately, indigenous artists have sought inclusion in the science fiction graphic novel genre to retell their traditional stories and reinvigorate them with futures intended by their ancestors in settings undoubtedly beyond their wildest imaginings. Since the final frontier is part of Western settler ideology, indigenous peoples do not see the galaxy or celestial bodies as a frontier at all. No, indigenous peoples, including their ancestors, see that space as part of their enduring cultural territory and a place to share with all of their relatives. End quote. Wow, I think like for me that just blew my mind and it's so important to imagine ourselves in the future. Can you please expand to our audience what your article is about and the importance of the Moonshot series for young readers? Yeah, absolutely. What is my article about? There was a moment when a colleague of mine said, there is so much science fiction, because I'm an indigenous art historian. And so there was a lot of science fiction, sci-fi, speculative fiction influence coming into indigenous art in this moment. And so let's get some people together and write about this, because we see it, but we don't really articulate what this means in terms of our cosmologies and just other ways of knowing and worldviews. And so it felt important. And one of the pieces of pop culture that I think resonates with a certain generation and then it's continued to go on is Star Wars. And so there had to be a place where I started and it was in that final frontier, right? That they talk about. And I don't believe that speaking very broadly about indigenous people that our people saw the final frontier as final or finite. And so we attribute so much to our place-based knowledge and ways of knowing and being. Part of that includes the cosmos. And I know that from my mountain-building ancestors. And so these times, these celestial happenings, the solstice, the equinox, all of these things mattered. And so to be able to talk about them in reference to some of the art production that was happening felt important. But for me, it was really through those graphic novels and moonshot because then that was really one of the only things that was out there. There were a few books floating around but those first moonshots brought together indigenous words and not all indigenous art, but some. As the moonshot series went further along into the third series, you'll see all the stories are written about the whole production, the art, the graphic work is done by indigenous artists. And so these things, this whole, the continuity and the drive to be very, to indigenous moonshot as well as to continue to indigenous sci-fi and speculative fiction, it's really been important for me, one of the most important things about it was that some of those stories tell the traditional or customary tales, oral tradition from some other nations, right? And so that to me enabled those stories to reach different generations. And for me, it was important, as I said, having grown up a diasporic Jalagi woman, that it reached, it's able to reach people who are not able to be home to have the traditional storytellers reach them, but in a way that reaches them as young people now. And so that drive to reach a contemporary young indigenous person felt really important to me. It felt important that it reaches kids on reses as well as urban indigenous kids and people who cannot be within their own territories to learn. And I think that was the beauty of it, but also along with the fact that it continues to build upon the idea that our past is really so imbued in our future, because what they're doing and we're taking these ancient stories and moving them forward into galaxies, like thousands and thousands of years in the future, and we're still using our traditional knowledge for us to survive. I mean, that really speaks to the level of technical knowledge that our ancestors had that is still relevant today. And so, yeah, I fell in love with those stories. They're very deeply embedded in my memory in terms of the things that they do and did and can contribute to young people's knowledge and hopefully inspire people to continue to write. Absolutely, and it makes it easier for children to read graphic novels. It's very intriguing and it's very, again, a very important mirror to visualize a possible future self in the very distant future. And how you framed that, right? There's another quote in your article. The retelling of this story helped demonstrate to me as a Native American woman that we as indigenous peoples have culturally relevant future to imagine, to work towards. After all, our oral histories and traditional stories teach us lessons that often save us from ourselves, thus proving to me that our ancestors were truly concerned about our future. And that really, I'm such a book nerd. There's a collection of short, 10 science fiction stories to rewire your perceptions called Tasting Light. And it's a wide variety of authors, but one of them is a woman I know from Anaktuvik Pass, Rhaeny Hobson. And her piece is called The Weight of a Name. And it really is an incredible story about how the Anupyat thousands of years from now are sort of this hinge moment where we could recolonize a planet that is too cold. And that our ancestral knowledge and animals and knowledge of the animals is going to be what saves humanity, right? That really, like it gives me chills to think about it. And as well, growing up with my daughter, my daughter growing up, she really took to graphic novels and not so much I would read to her since she was two days old. I read to her every night. But graphic novels is what she took to. And a girl called Echo was another great series. The Dear Woman Anthology is a fabulous series as well. Let's see, there's one that I couldn't find. She was sleeping in her room this morning and I couldn't go in and raid her room. But Super Indian by Aragon Star, who's Kikapu, she was the first Native American woman to do a comic that was written and illustrated by a Native woman. So I just wanted to bring those up to, I'm going to now, I'm gonna share about my daughter's experience. In elementary school. And I've talked about this before. I've talked about this a couple of times before. And it's about how education really begins early in the disappearance and erasure of indigenous peoples. And it begins early in elementary schools. And in my daughter's school in 2012, so this isn't far back history, but 2012, she came home with some vocabulary words. And it was he then, squaw, savage, moccasin, yeah. And it turns out when I questioned the teacher why my daughter was learning a racial slur, that they were introducing to the class nonfiction books, which third grade nonfiction is very subjective, especially when you're learning about it for the first time. And the book where most of these slurs came from was The Courage of Sarah Noble. The children in her classroom read that Indians eat human meat off the bone. They would just as soon skin you alive. And the author likened the Indians, which were likely Narragansett folks, as little brown mice. Of course, the vocabulary test came home with the sentence Indians are savages. Yeah, and when I asked my daughter about it, she said, I was confused on how to use savage in a sentence. And so I asked my teacher and she said, just write Indians are savages. She didn't capitalize Indians because we are a proper noun. And so she had to erase it and capitalize Indians and it was marked very well done. The unintended consequences of that were really noticeable when my daughter's friends came to dinner. And the year before they learned how to say, good morning in their classroom in our language. And now they said she's not native because she's not a savage and she doesn't eat human meat. So I had to show pictures of our family members and really kind of walk back that teaching that came home to my house and my family. And that was devastating. And the long-term effects in her friend connections were absolutely devastating. And the long-lasting effects of losing trust of your teachers, I think was absolutely heartbreaking. And I don't think she ever got over that. The alternate books for the students at that time in the classroom were equally problematic. It was Farmer Boy by Laura Ingalls Wilder and The Education of Little Tree, which was penned by Asa Carter under the pseudonym of Forrest Carter. And he was a known segregationist and hate speechwriter. So I talked to the principal and the teachers and I offered solutions, you know, really making sure that you're talking to me about anything indigenous before it gets taught in the classroom. Because when it comes home, that's a problem. And fortunately, I was able to recommend other books and have some native folks come in and do some re-teaching, rewiring as it was. But the American Indians in Children's Literature Site was absolutely a gift. And so Debbie Reese, if I could turn to you and take all the time you need to talk about how to identify a book and use your incredible website, please. Okay, well, I'm probably going to repeat some of what I said earlier. What I recommend is that people look for children's books by native writers. So that's the first thing that I look for. And again, it is because I think that native writers can bring knowledge and life experience to the subject that they're writing about that a white writer cannot. I also think that native writers should try to stick to their own nations because when they're talking about spiritual aspects of a children's book or spiritual aspects of a nation that's not their own, they don't know what's okay to share and what's not okay to share because we all have ways that we protect our own nation's stories. That metaphor that you have been talking about, a mirror. Books are mirrors that came from a literacy professor at the Ohio State University named Rudine Sims Bishop. And her idea was that books can be mirrors if they reflect who you are. They can be windows if they give you a look into someone else's culture. I added curtains to that metaphor because as native writers, we draw the curtain on certain things. As native people, we close the door, we close the window because of the long history of exploitation and misrepresentation of what we do in our homes. So anyway, so that idea of books as mirrors has many dimensions to it and people, it's taken off in the last few years and I'm glad people are using it but they really should be aware of where it came from. This is the intellectual work of a woman of color and too often the ideas that native and people of color bring forth get appropriated and taken by mainstream white scholars and they go on the circuit and make a lot of money and people who originated those concepts don't get those opportunities. So being mindful of your own citations, what you're talking about, being careful to credit where things came from I think is really important. I had some notes here. You referenced some data, one of you referenced some data about how many books came out in a year and the thing that you were talking about was a graphic representation of the publication of children's books in the year 2018 the data is put out by the Cooperative Center for Children's Books at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. So it's a place where people have been counting books for over 20 years and representation of peoples of color and native peoples in those books for all that time. What's important though, that people don't really take time to understand I think is that they can look at the graphic and they can see that the native child has a small mirror because we have smaller mirrors there's just not that many books but at the children's feet there are shards of glass. That 2018 graphic says that 23 books out of over 3000 that came out that year that have enough native content to be called a native book. However, half of them are by white writers that are misrepresentations and stereotypes. So at the feet of the children in that graphic you'll see broken glass because our children's representation opportunities are even less than the data shows that at the Center for Children's Books in Wisconsin. So that's important too is that being good consumers of information that's given to you means you really need to look carefully at all the information that's being presented. Because CCBC is providing us with a lot of data but people are thinking it's better than it actually is it really is not that good. My blog I think is important because I was a school teacher before I went to graduate school. I couldn't afford to be a member of the associations where you get articles. I couldn't afford to buy books where those chapters are written that could help teachers. So my blog was designed to give people information without a paywall, you know anybody that has the internet can access anything I have there. A lot of what's there is there because a teacher or a parent wrote to me and said Debbie, can you please look at this book? So for example, you're talking about The Courage of Sarah Noble. I have not written about that book, but I will now because parents and teachers write to me asking me can you write up this book so that I can talk to my kid's teacher about it? So that resource is very much designed for people who are actually working with books in particular with people who want to give kids good literature about native people. I guess I could say many more things. We do have more than we used to but it's still worrisome to me because right now you all probably know that books are being banned right and left across the country. And those books that are being banned are primarily books by people of color and books by LGBTQ writers. And we seem to be largely missing from the challenged and banned book lists which at first blush people will say good. And I'm like, I think we're missing because nobody's reading our books and they don't know what's in them. They still don't know that we exist. And if they did, if for example they picked up Cherise's big voice that's a picture book by Cherise Davids in there she has the word lesbian twice that would send those moms for liberty off the edge. In there she shows a soldier holding a gun pointed at some Ho-Chunk people when they were moving the Ho-Chunk people off of their homelands, that too. Moms for liberty would be saying, you're trying to make my kid feel bad about being an American. Those are the criteria, one of the criteria that they're using to ban books. So our books I think we have more of them but they're not that visible. And so people who are here today for this session really should be holding up those books and promoting those books because they need to be visible. They need to be part of everybody's knowledge about children's books in particular. I think I'll stop. Wow, thank you. And I know when I approached Debbie to be on this panel the first thing she said was, it sounds really great but here's a list of authors that I really think that should be on the panel. I said, no, I need your voice because Dr. Reese was so instrumental in how I was able to deal with the school crisis. And thank you so much for bringing up the banned book because I wanted to, if we had time and we do have time is to really, is to ask any of our panelists today what do they think about this sort of national rush to ban books? And I think most of our authors here talk about these very challenging and difficult topics that most certainly would be right on cue with, what did you call them? I don't even know what they're called. Moms for Liberty, it's a very well-funded political conservative Republican GOP group that their chapters are growing. You can look at their website and they're proliferating across the country and they go to school boards and they read aloud from books that they think are problematic. And I want them to be reading aloud from our books. I do. I want people to know. And you also co-authored the Indigenous People's History of the United States for Young People, right? And that would most likely be on one of the targeted. I almost feel kind of sketchy even bringing it up. I don't want it to be a thing, you know? But at the same time, you're right. Like I feel so gemini about it, Debbie. Like we need to talk about this, but I don't want it to be on anybody's radar either. Like we're kind of educating under the radar here. Do you think that your book, that you helped co-author would be on the list? That is one exception, that book. And I think it's an exception because it's an adaptation of an adult book that people were frowning about. So our book, The Adaptation, is in fact on the banned list. And we do have data showing that it was boxed up and taken away from school libraries in Texas. So our book actually did get banned, but when you look at the justification for it being banned, it's like they're cutting and pasting a few sentences and the Moms for Liberty, sticking them on any book. So they didn't read the book. If they did, they would have said, hey, she called George Washington a monster, but that's not what their criticism is. It's just nonsense kind of criticism. Anyway, our book did get banned. Any other panelists want to talk about this topic? My style as a writer, and it kind of goes back to some of the stuff we were talking about earlier. Like I just want to go over some obstacles for Indigenous writers that are for many years, especially when I started out back in the late 90s and early 2000s that it was still considered a niche genre. Many native writers lack the platform, lack the resources to gain leverage to access mainstream publications, competing with non-native writers writing about the same topics. And you could be writing something as an Indigenous person and see a non-native person getting a review in the New York Times about your own tribe. And so those are some of the obstacles. And I think experiencing that, and going through all the different things I went through as a youth knowing the pushback against who we are as Indigenous people and folks not wanting to come to terms with it. And that's what a lot of this banning is. It's like, they don't want to talk about slavery. They don't want to talk about genocide. It's a trigger for them, right? We always say when there's a conversation about race, who in the room doesn't want to talk about it? It's white people. And so it's a trigger for them to have to deal with that because dealing with that means accountability and accountability means you have to do something about it. And so when I wrote my first book, for example, it was a lot of pushback in itself from some of the things I mentioned. So I wanted to prove, I can write about things that have nothing to do with native people. So if you look at my first book, Tales from the Whispering Basket, there were stories in there that have nothing to do with Indigenous people. I wanted to show my creative breath of writing and I wanted to show them, this is what I can do that. I don't have to talk about native people. And so I did that, but I rather talk about native people. So I went back to that in my next book. And my book, The Morning Road to Thanksgiving has a lot of powerful and indicting statements on the genocide, on enslavement. And but being a creative writer, I knew that white consumption may have been too much for. So I spread it out in a way that they kind of like, and I had this thing, I call accidental learning. And so I wrap these in stories and little narratives and little scenes where they're getting, oh, now I know this. So I get it in their head, the stuff that's in my head. And so that's kind of one of the ways I kind of combat that in my creative style of writing is sharing that history through creative storytelling and getting that message out there. And incidentally, my first book was some of the many challenges I was going through as a traditional storyteller, the editors didn't like my style of writing. You can't go past, present, and future. You can't do that. I just said can't. No, you can't. And so it was a lot of conflicting ideology in terms of how we tell story, right? And so we have to kind of be the authors of that in every sense of the word of how we want to do our traditional style of storytelling and also a couple of the stories that are traditional that were in that book. I went to my elders and said, can I write about this? Because that's part of our culture too that some of these stories weren't meant to be written down. So I had to get permission from some of the elders to share some of those stories in there. And so, and I think as Debbie pointed out, we're still partially not on the radar in terms of some of the things that we're sharing about because you know, the natives are cute and we're gonna get this, the noble savage or the heartfelt story where they're gonna drop some wisdom on us. And I experienced that many times where non-native writers will send me their manuscript without me asking for that. I'll get these manuscripts and they want me to tell them some things and it's more of a colonial grab and to make their books more palatable for consumption and marketable. And so I just usually ignore it. But that's kind of the way I dealt with that myself. And I just mentioned lastly that, you know, thinking in terms of the future, and that's kind of why I dole back down as one of the other panelists talked about was during the Trotun's writing and the amazing work I must give a shout out to Bunker Hill Community College because we're really trying to ship that narrative of getting that literature out to not only the youth but in a college level where Bunker Hill Community College has engaged in creating discipline areas to impact over 20 different disciplines in their school on indigeneity, indigenous knowledge. And you know, the quantitative metrics already are that we're hitting 1500 students per semester and the qualitative data is the testimonies of reflections, the new curriculum development and the enhancements of study and that they're getting an opportunity to learn about the people of their land. As Chris mentioned earlier that, you know, they don't have to think that we're gone because they're learning about it in school. It's not an elective anymore. It's required reading. And you know, you want to graduate from college, you learn about the tribe that the land that you're benefiting from. And so that's a lot of the ship that we need to see happening. Yeah, absolutely. And that is also part of the Mass Indigenous Agenda is making sure that there is accurate and relevant curriculum regarding Massachusetts state tribes so that that is taught in our elementary schools, well, our public schools. There's not just elementary schools, high schools, middle schools as well. So that's very important. And I know, Chris, you have, you're working on another book coming up for Scholastic. Yeah. So the book, if you live during the Plymouth Thanksgiving is actually the beginning of a rewrite of a series of books that Scholastic began in the 70s, written all by one author. If you lived, you know, during the original was if you lived during the first Thanksgiving, which Scholastic was so embarrassed about, they wouldn't even show me a copy of to have a guide. They wanted something new, you know, by doing this. And yeah, you know, in writing it, you know, working with a company like Scholastic even when they want to do diversity work sometimes, you still run into things that they balk against because of fear of public reaction. You know, so I sourced some of the material from Frank James' suppressed speech from the 1970s. If you don't know that story, in the 1970s, the town of Plymouth invited a Wampanoag speaker, Frank James, Frank Wansada James, to speak at the 350th anniversary of the Mayflower and he had a very truth-telling speech that he was gonna tell. They looked at it and they wouldn't allow him to speak. It ended up getting republished later on, who's now part of the collection at the Smithsonian. You know, so that was, you know, my homage, you know, to these truths. And oftentimes the reaction, if people do have a negative reaction, you know, it's oftentimes to a piece of truth. I include facts in there like the U.S. legal basis for ownership of land, of native land, is the doctrine of discovery that was created by the Catholic Church in 1493. And, you know, so if you look at my one-star reviews, it's, you know, how can that be? The U.S., no, that can't be true, but it is true. You know, the Marshall Decision Supreme Court, Ruth Bader Ginsburg even cited it herself. You know, so these are things that people balk against, but my approach to it was I was contracted for 8,500 words. What I ended up turning in was 15,000 words because there was just too much that I felt had to be included and I wanted to make sure to cut off any of those arguments ahead of time, you know, with actual facts, you know. And so that way that when people come away, they have a better experience. And, you know, to Debbie's point, you know, the story of Wampanoag history is not my story, you know. So my intention all along with this particular project was not to please Scholastic. It was not to please a non-native audience. It was to please Wampanoag people who experienced that same thing at Plymouth Potuxent Museum where people come up and say, I'm surprised you're still here, you know. So I wanted something that the communities would be proud to say, no, this is a good starting point, you know, because I'm tired of telling this story to you over and over and over. So here, use this instead. And, you know, to, you know, my delight, thankfully, the Wampanoag communities, you know, and I worked with Linda Coombs as my subject matter expert who is a very hard grader, by the way, which is exactly what I wanted to make sure that, you know, the communities would want to use it. And that's essentially what's happened is that you can see it sold at the Mashpee Museum as well as the Equinocultural Center, you know. So the starred reviews that were mentioned before, actually, I was so raw to this process when the school library journal gave me a starred review. I didn't even know what the star was about. My friend that worked at Scholastic Television, oh, you got a star, I was like, oh, what does that mean? You know, it wasn't about the stars for me. I really could care less about that. It was about making sure that Wampanoag people felt that their stories were being told respectively. And that means truth. Yeah, thank you. I think what I would like to do now is ask each of our panelists really to take a moment to give words of wisdom and encouragement to any Indigenous listeners out there who think that they can't write or that they won't get published or, you know, anything. Any books that you feel are up and coming or should be, you know, part of our collective radar. So I'll start with you, Eric, putting you in the hot seat. Yeah, wow, thanks. Well, you know, I think the kind of time you can test that advice for writers, you know, and just keep hearing it over and over and over again. And it was even advice that I thought I was rejecting is to write what you know. So if, in fact, you are tied, you know, to your community and you're really, if your cultural heritage isn't matched in your life in some meaningful way as a writer, you know, it's going to come out. And at the same time, though, you want to learn your craft. And, you know, I was not a hobbyist reader either. I think I started reading for pleasure in high school, but not because I like the books, but because I like horror movies. And the only ways to re-experience them was to read like this really kind of terrible novelizations. It was like the pre-VCR era, some kind of big geezer in that way. And so like the only way to re-experience a horror movie was to read the novelization. That's where I began reading. And then I discovered Stephen King in the process because I thought Salem's Lot was a novelization for a movie I had just seen. Didn't know it was a novel. And then I discovered, you know, how awesome it was, but also that it seemed very much like the resumes. Salem's Lot takes place in a really, really small, somewhat gossipy, closed community. And I thought, oh, that seems very familiar to me. And the first novel I wrote in college, and I finished it when I was about 20, 21, and my creative writing professor recently, he said, you know, we remain friends to the rest of his life who recently passed. He graciously read it and he said, wow, you know, that was a really fascinating novel about the res. But what were those monsters doing in there? And I had no idea that I had, in fact, written about the res, but because my entire life was enmeshed in that culture, that was, in fact, what I had written about. And that I think, you know, that kind of set me on my course. And he also, because he was way better read than me, said, there's a brand new novel that's just come out and, you know, you should really check it out. I think, because I didn't want to tell you while you were working on this, he said, I thought you should, you know, be charting your own passage of going, but now that you're done with the first draft, you should read this. I think it's a great, beautiful book that might help you. He said, it's called Love Medicine. And so Love Medicine had literally just come out in the year that I was working on what turned out to be a pretty terrible horror novel that will never see the light of day, but it was the beginning of the process. And then I saw in Louise's work, you know, what was possible. And to imagine all these years later that I'm now participating in that conversation, seemed ludicrous to me at 19. And I've been doing it professionally for a really long time now, but because I believed in the worth of our stories. And so I guess believe in the worth of your story, that's my very short version of it, a long bit of advice. No, thank you. That's a very important piece of advice is believing in yourself. And Morgan, do we have Morgan? Yeah, I'm still here. Okay, there we are. Yeah, no, I would echo a lot of what Eric said. You know, I think, you know, believing in your stories. And I think the big thing too is like, obviously write what you know, but I think there's a really, it's really important to write, you know, if you're gonna write about, you know, your culture, right? Do it as specifically as possible, not for, you know, not for, you know, the market or for anything like that, but like we really need stories that are tribally specific. You know, I feel like for so long and even today, to a degree, you know, the indigenous literature we see out there is like about Indian country, you know what I mean? Like there's this, like we can talk about these books in the context of Indian country, which is good, but they sometimes we can fall short in our conversations about, oh, let's, you know, talk about this book in the context of Penobscot history or in the context of, you know, Hopi history. So I feel like, you know, being specific is like such an important aspect of writing. And the other thing, you know, I will say is to keep writing, you know, it take, you know, if you were a storyteller, you're, it's gonna take a long time to tell your stories. You know, I tell people this all the time, you know, I didn't get a story, you know, I didn't publish a story for nine years, you know, it took me nine years to publish a story in a magazine that actually never even made its way to me that I never even seen, never saw. And so you need, it takes patience, it takes time, but writing, you know, writing a story is entering an act of the sacred and you have to really, you know, have that patience that determination, that diligence and discipline, I always forget the word discipline yet. It's like the most important part. You need the discipline to do it, but don't quit. That's the biggest thing is don't quit telling stories because the moment you quit telling stories is the moment we stop living. Ooh, that's really powerful. Thank you so much for sharing that. Debbie, do you have any authors that we should be seeing? Anyone that is up and coming? There, that's too big a question, I think. Yes, there are, and I'm not going to name them because I want people to just come to my website and click the best books tab and you'll start to see some of that. You could follow me on Twitter because I'm sharing a lot of information there as well. I'm Debrice on Twitter, so you can find me there. I'm really glad that Morgan talked about being tribally specific because we really need to do that. I really like what Chris said about working on that book. That's not his nation, but he worked with people of that nation. And I think that's really important is that, and it points to a problem that I see quite a lot is people who are disconnected or that were taken from their nations and somehow know that story, or maybe not. Sometimes it's just somebody's great-great-great grandmother. But the idea that someone believes that they are native and then they start to write stories about that people and they really haven't re-established connections with that community. And what they end up contributing is a lot of stereotypical romantic kind of stories that doesn't serve us well because it's not tribally specific. So this is especially a difficult problem right now because we have so many conversations going on about ethnic fraud and race-shifting and pretendianism because the market is hot for native writing. And so we do have native people writing and doing right by who they are and who their nations are. And we have a lot of people who are cherry-picking and doing all kinds of things that are not okay. So up-and-coming writers, that's a tough one. There are some, but they'll get elbowed out by the fakers. So it's important to know who you're reading and who you're recommending. Thank you for bringing that up. I think it's really important to understand what's been happening in the last few years about race-shifting and distorted descent, some different topics that are coming up about indigeneity and folks who have misrepresented themselves, sometimes innocently and sometimes not so innocently. So it's really important that when you're looking for an author that they know who their community is and that community accepts them back. That's the bare minimum, other than that. Thank you so much. And your website does have different tabs so you can go by genre and taking a look at your best books. I love, love, love, love reading the best books of the year. Oh my gosh, I'm such a nerd. I buy most of them. So anytime, anytime I see this, I'm like, I have this problem. I should be, my name is Rhonda and I'm a bookaholic. That should be my thing, honestly. One more thing I can say about my blog and the best books and the work that I do really recommend is that native kids need mirrors. And so I really emphasize realistic or modern fiction. And so historical fiction, I don't do as much but I also find that native writers aren't really doing that much historical fiction for kids. They're all creating the kinds of books they wanted when they were growing up. Yeah, right. Like I even have somewhere in here and I probably, will I find it? I don't know because I have bookmarked so many pages in this poor book. Apple Skin to the Core. There was one little sentence, right? You just summed it up for me and here it is. So again, Apple Skin to the Core by Eric, page 103. It's the very last sentences of Wyatt Wingfoot ends up singing that same old song. And I'm gonna start half sentence here. Quote, and because I know this comic is from 1968, what I really want to know is when do I get to see the Indians as the superheroes? Not as the super hapless. When are we the victors? Not the victims. How much longer do I have to wait? End quote. So I think I'm gonna end there. We are just about right up on our time. If we have any question from our immediate audience of our panelists, I'll take one question. We have less than five minutes. So do we have anything? Do we have anything online? No? Okay. Any questions here in the audience? Yes, Dennis. I'll go ahead and patch the story that really dehumanized who we were and what we did. So I really am grateful that I was able to come to this today. I'm grateful that you're here. Gave me a lot of fans. Thank you. And again, I appreciate everyone who's tuning in in the web world and who will be watching this. This will be recorded and saved and archived through the generosity of hell round. Thank you to our amazing panelists for sharing their stories. I wanna say thank you to Double Edge for being the true co-conspirators and providing this safe place for indigenous voices to be heard. And our partnership is invaluable. So Koyanak Pak, thank you so much. And thank you members of the audience for coming out on this gorgeous Sunday and just partaking in active listening, right? Because active listening is the key to making changes, to understanding and knowing what those changes are that need to be made. So Koyanak Nalak Nagivsi, thank you for listening. Tabrah, that's it. Thank you.