 We need to move out of the range to the camera, and we'll also work to make sure that if there's something you do want to share with that moment, but you may not want it on camera, we've warned Thea about that. This is Thea Rogers from HALRA. She's our support here. A couple of announcements. Downstairs now, there are post-its per room, so that tomorrow morning, if you decide you'd like to convene or be a part of an affinity group, you could sign up or start one. Some of the rooms like this are larger, so you could say, hey, we'll be over in this corner and make draw a line and create however many to share a room to. Also, I want to share with you that at 11.20, our space will become a space that includes everybody that's here in the building this morning, within our conference, because we're making a special plan. And I'd like to invite everybody to stay for that, and it will involve a plan for later today. So, we'll give more details then. With that, is there anything else we need to mention? No, public service nonsense? I think that's it for now. This is Mary Catherine Nagel. Good morning. She'll share more about herself. I'm Leslie Ishii, and I'd like to start as I often do with Brett. So, if you care to stand, lay down, or sit, I'll sit. Feel your feet on the floor. And at any time throughout our session, please, I have an acupuncturist that says, if you have pain or discomfort, move. Change your position. So feel that you can do that at any time. Go for the floor. Hi, Deb. Welcome. We're in hell now, so at any time you can knock out at the end of this floor. Put your collective breath together, breathing in. Making sound down is also an option. Breathing in again, your gaze, or perhaps close your eyes, if you feel safe. We're holding this space here for you, for safety. Knowing that we all share this dialogue that we've gone this morning. Acknowledging our privileges so that we make space for those who have been underrepresented. Endure depression. Knowing the barriers and the challenges in speech or the visible. So that there is room and time to express. For everyone to be heard as they choose. Continuing to breathe, bringing your hand to your belly. Noticing you could also open up and widen your back as you breathe. And in this next breath, we acknowledge our ancestors breathing in and breathing out. And we acknowledge the land upon which we are set, the first nations, indigenous natives that came before us. And who are still with us now. Breathing in, notice your breath, notice your rhythm. What is your rhythm? There's no need to regulate or manage. Breathing into your back. You could actually let the gut go. And then teeter back and forth a little bit on your sit bones. Feeling your feet to the floor. Again the ground upon which we are set. Respect for Mother Earth. Acknowledging Oregon Shakespeare Festival who has generously lent this space. And who holds a particular history in the building of this organization as well. Knowing their intentions are to move forward to reclaim equity, diversity and equity. And a big sigh of relief. We breathe in our own rhythms. For her to catch. To marry Catherine Nagel. My beloved creative partner. Thank you. I'm going to stand because I can't sit and talk. I'm like, you need a lawyer or anything. So I'm really thrilled and honored to be here today. And especially to get to work with Leslie who is phenomenal as I'm sure many of you know. And I'm really excited about the session that we have. But I think we've constructed this session that we think we'll get to the core of some of the issues we're facing as we collaborate together on a new musical called Sunrise Prayer. But on that note, this is really a session that is designed to foster dialogue, to create communication. We don't have to follow the PowerPoint. We don't have to follow any set agenda. And we are going to be talking about things that are deeply personal because these stories that we're telling are deeply personal. And sharing them does make us vulnerable in a way. So if at any point in time you have something you really want to share or you feel like I don't want to go to that next slide. You had something about a Supreme Court case that I really need to talk about. And please don't feel like it's not like we have this PowerPoint and we have to get through it. And there's no rules if that makes sense. So, what do you think? So I have a little PowerPoint. I don't want to dwell on it too long, but I think it will provide some of the context for how it comes. So just a little bit background on me. I'm a citizen of Cherokee Nation. I was born in Oklahoma. But before the removal, my great-great-grandfather was in what is now northern Georgia or Rome, Georgia today. Anyone here is from Georgia, familiar with the area. And actually in the 1830s fought very hard in the United States Supreme Court and won an amazing victory. But I'd love to tell you all about even more in depth and I have written a separate play on that called Wooster v. Georgia. And it was a phenomenal case in which the Supreme Court said Cherokee Nation is a sovereign nation. The state of Georgia can't come in and try to exercise jurisdiction on its lands. Georgia was trying to kill Cherokees and take their land because, well, many things, but mostly just greed. And they discover gold on Cherokee lands, et cetera, et cetera. So that's where I come from when I come to tell these stories and to share these stories. And that's a very specific perspective and it's one that, you know, obviously I can't speak for everyone, but I think when Leslie and I started to work together on this musical, and we have two other collaborators that can't be with us today, Ty and Tatya, who are phenomenal. And they're working on kind of the music and the lyrics and by no means is there like anything that's a finished, polished product. It's been a lot of research and conversation. But we recognize that we essentially were bringing to the table, you know, two Asian, two Native American collaborators. And what did that mean? Because when you look around the United States, and this is me speaking, and I don't want to put words until Leslie, you know, so, but I, as a native playwright, I see, and I actually wrote a how-round piece on this like a couple years ago, where statistically Americans are more likely to walk into a theater today and see a performance of red face on the American stage than an actual depiction of an actual Native artist. You could do the math, right? If you count up, because Bloody Bloody has red face, I don't want to start listing all the red face plays in the world, but they have far more circulation right now, especially once they get to Broadway, than legitimate plays by Native artists. Now, I think that we're at the tipping point. You know, OSF has commissioned numerous Native playwrights now. They're producing Randy Reinholtz's musical Off the Rails next year, and that's amazing. I mean, I don't think they've produced a Native playwright in 90 or so years, but they're doing it. And the majority of American theaters can't point to a single Native playwright they've produced. Okay, so that's my little soapbox. And I can't speak for the Asian community, but my assessment is it seems somewhat similar in that yellow face is still very popular. And it's not about hitting us against each other and saying, who has it worse? That's a horrible conversation that has been used for horrible purposes for hundreds of years, so we're not going to have that conversation here today. Instead, we're discussing, what do we understand about why these two yellow face and red face still exist? And how do we come together? If we want to tell a story, which our story specifically, is the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II on Indian reservations, okay? And we know these are two tokenized communities whose identities are frequently appropriated and misrepresented on the American stage. And we're coming together, and I'm not Japanese American, and Leslie's not Native American. How do we communicate with one another? So that actually, we have a really exciting PowerPoint, because I'm also an attorney, so I write a hand. The beauty of it completely. You know, so yeah, you'll be like, why are we talking about all these legal cases? So these are some of the questions that we started asking ourselves, is how do we come together and create art for both of our communities without repeating the harmful misrepresentations and appropriations that surround us? There might be some hard conversations. There might be some moments where I write a character and Leslie says, are you kidding me? Like, where did you get that? You know, where did you get that idea that a Japanese American would ever say something like that? But these are the conversations that we have to prepare ourselves to have and be comfortable having, and not come from a place of entitlement or, you know, I'm an artist. I mean, this is what I hear all the time when I say, well gosh, do you understand that we have this history of, we have the highest rates of suicide in our Native American community. So when you portray, when this is your use of red face on stage and you have the character that's not played by a Native person, kill himself, do you understand how that impacts our Native youth who might see this? And they get very, you know, peaceful kind of conversations like that and a lot of times non-Native artists will get very defensive instead of being open to exploring how something they don't understand about an identity they're putting on stage could really harm or further perpetuate a harmful stereotype. So knowing that we are going to operate in certain areas without some sufficient knowledge or experience, can we create some protocols or some agreements between ourselves about how we're going to engage in this work and have these conversations? So that, I want to agree with you, this is what I hear. I think more quickly. Do you want to say something? No, I just want to, I was just going to kind of, yeah. I don't want to sit here on a power point. I don't want to be talking about you before you go through it. So we can come back to these points. And this is the coolest synopsis of it. And essentially, it's about a young girl on the animal side. She's Japanese-American. She gets picked up by the FBI and taken, it's a long story about how plot-wise we get there because the FBI was picking, many of you may know, picking up people on December 7th right after the bombing but picked up different people for various reasons and then the next May rounded everyone up on the West Coast. But the Poston War Relocation Center was the largest and it's on the Colorado River Indian Tribe Reservation. And a lot of the internment camps were placed on reservation. The Colorado River Indian Tribe is, I mean, every tribe is unique, but it's an especially unique situation because it was created in 1865. The reservation was by the federal government and it's on the traditional homelands of the Mojave. And the Mojave, Mojave in their language means people by the river. They lived by the Colorado River for thousands since time immemorial. And they have their creation story comes from a mountain where the Colorado River Indian Tribes is today, their reservation, the mountain's just a little bit north of there. That's their creation story. This is where they come from. Well, the federal government just started putting other tribes and people on their reservation, forcibly removing in some instances. So the Chimawavi are there now and there are Hopi and Navajo folks as well. So you've got four different Native peoples, right, all living under one tribal government, one now sovereign Indian nation, which is the Colorado River Indian Tribes. So they have their own story and actually to do research with them, I went and met with their tribal council and, you know, because I'm not Mojave, I'm not the citizen of Colorado River Indian Tribes, right? Like I'm just as much of an outsider as anyone else. And said we really want to do this work, but we want to do it in a respectful way. And they said, well, please put in an application about what the research is that you want to do. And so I did that. And so I've met with them several times. They did vote and they gave me approval to do this research and tell this story. And they're like, our only request is that you do the first performance of the musical here on the reservation. I know, isn't that cool? So what you're noticing is part of the protocol, permission from the elders first, right, and then our proposal and then further conversation. Yeah. And so I've actually gotten to talk to people who were around when this was all happening in the 40s, because some of them are still with us, thankfully. And one person who I interviewed, Veronica Homer, who was on the tribal council for a long time and has been a really amazing leader nationally in Indian country, her father worked at the internment camp. And I mean, just as it's crazy to think about and at Boston, the tribal council vetoed, so the federal government came in and basically said, we're going to create an internment camp here for the Japanese. And that's what we're going to do, the ward apartment. And the tribal council for the tribe said, no, you're not. This is our land. And we're saying, no, you don't have our permission. And the federal government was like, we don't care. You don't have a say. And they opened it up anyways. So the tribe still has all these archives of the resolutions they passed saying, this is illegal under our law. We're not allowing this to happen. And then of course, but as you can imagine, just like with many tribes across the country, their own life force and their way of sustaining themselves for thousands of years was cut off. You can't access those lands to farm anymore. We're going to kill all the game you live off of, et cetera, et cetera. So you get to the point around World War II where most tribal populations are living in extreme poverty because they can't feed themselves the way they have for thousands of years. And it's like, oh, just go be a capitalist. And it's like, well, wait a second. We're living in a really remote area. Do you expect me to engage in? So we have high unemployment on the reservation. And so numerous people turn to the Relocation Center for employment. So you've got this story that is just really true, based on true things that really need to be told, but it's also very sensitive, right? Because we're dealing with Japanese-American internment and Indian reservation. And with a very specific story that a lot of people might gloss over. So I want to breeze through this so we can get you started. Do you have someone to add? No, go for it. We're getting there, yeah. So this is, you know, November 19, 1942, President Roosevelt signed executive order 9066. And so, I mean, for those of you who may not believe that, numbers, it's during World War II that 17,867 individuals of Japanese ancestry, many were American citizens, were incarcerated in Boston. And so you can go there today. And actually, I wish I could put some of these photos in here. But they have, in the 90s, they got back together with some survivors of the camp and members of the tribe, and they created a beautiful memorial. That's really, it's very nice. And so you can go to the actual site of the camp. And so there's part of it. There were separate sections of the camp. And there was like one, two, and three. And a couple of them are just totally gone, but one is still there. It's actually, it's a little sad because when you go, it's very dilapidated, and they haven't kept it up. And it just is like, so the tribe has talked about maybe trying to restore it, but it's like, make it a museum, I don't know. You know, but maybe that's something that could come from doing a musical like this. It's not kind of a collaboration, and restoration of the play to honor. I would add, too, that we have folks here that interminate their legacy in the room if I'm correct. Yes? What camps were your families at, if you care to share? My, I'm from Oregon. I'm with a group of people from Alaska. My father was born in Hood River. And when he was like 16, they were sent to Tulee Lake, which had a reputation of being a horrible camp. So that was really, yeah, it was. My father's family was in the Bay Area and the Gays Bay in California. And they were sent to Topaz in Utah. And my mom's family actually was living in a town called Delta, Utah. My grandfather worked for the railroad. And so when he lost his job, they got moved from Delta to Salt Lake City because Delta was a small little railroad town and he had no reason to be there any longer. But strangely enough, Delta's the railroad stop for Topaz. So all of the California, Japanese that were going to Topaz got offloaded in Delta as my mom's family was moving to Salt Lake. Yeah, from my, actually I'm from Canada. Don't tell anyone. But yeah, my family was in Vancouver and they got moved to. But the system was similar but different in the sense that in Canada there was a whole valley of the Silicon Valley which is in the interior of British Columbia, the province. And a number of camps and a number of sites were in that area and my family was there and then moved east to Toronto. Yeah, understanding my own research. We both would be back on that. I have four great uncles who were in the Fort 42nd. They weren't interns as the family was in Hawaii but they were removed from their business and three of the uncles were in the back one who was lost in Italy. My grandparents were in Vanzanar and actually my dad's parents met there. There were marriages and families started in camp. It's really ironic. I know my family was interned in Minidoka. Yeah, Idaho. They were out of Seattle, Washington. So there were ten camps total. Part of his project is to see how awarely, our challenge is to see how awarely we can create a play never forgetting the historical context. So many plays are created on our emotion and certainly our imagination opens up. But when we do things around history, but I'm learning for myself, I think I have to look at historical context no matter what. Again, the ground upon which we are set what informed my imagination. What shaped me to have this thought to think that I might want to write a play or create, you know, collaborate on any idea really. Or even the way I move through our confests, our theater, the world. It's informing everything. It's reshaping how I actually proceed in life. And that is a couple of thickets, obviously with how you create your day every day. So did you have a thought, Randy? I have a question. In creating a play, why a musical and how does music play into the decision process of making musical, but also the cultures? Because I think musicals are very interesting about how that gets translated into cultural play, right? So you see something like in the heights, and it's something about that, and then something like allegiance, right? Which is what does that music represent? How does that music represent the culture? Right. Well, I can't seem to put Tai to the floor or to Tai our composers and lyricists, but I was interested in a musical and this collaboration because I think at least coming from my own Japanese heritage background and deep conversations with Tai around music and rhythm, I think one of the ways we feel the essence of who we are is in our own rhythm. I mentioned mind your own breath. Assimilation would manage that. How we pretzel ourselves constantly into a mainstream kind of work our way through our lives changes our rhythm. So I was interested in reclaiming my own rhythm and what it would mean for our team to reclaim or utilize their rhythms, and I feel that's the essence of culture. And a lot of times when we're misappropriated or appropriated, the rhythm's completely obliterated. So it starts with, for me, it starts with that essence. And what would it be to have a musical where we have those two cultural rhythms get to figure out how to coexist and to me symbolically as director and collaborator on this, that would be an interesting process of feats even. How do we do that? If we complicate that different than the simplistic misinformation of a stereotype or an appropriation. So that was my charge for myself, yeah. And if musicals, as we know them, share a heightened state, what is that going to sound like for us? We don't even know yet. And I'll share with you that one of the key things Tye and Mary Catherine and Tye and I have talked about is we're very clear that this process is going to be a healing process. We're not just riding and saying, hey, here we go. It's actually every step of the way it may take a while because we're healing as we go. We know that's got to be part of it if we're going to actually reclaim and find our rhythms and what that means together. Yeah. The first idea of it was really came about a year and a half ago and I spent the last year and a half going to the reservation in Arizona and just spending time with people and creating relationships and not forcing anything. And actually it was kind of funny. I don't know. Everyone has their own belief system. But for me, I try not to feel... I always want to question, am I feeling entitled to this story? Why am I telling this story? What does this story mean to me? And why should I be the one to share it? And maybe I shouldn't be the one to share it. And that's fine too. Maybe it's that I go on this exploration and someone else is supposed to share this story because I truly believe it should be shared. But you put yourself in the place and things happen and I just ended up sitting next to Veronica Homer at a dinner in San Diego, a mutual... We were at an Indian law conference and a mutual friend of ours was having a birthday and she's like, yeah, I'm from Crip. And I was like, what? Just because I had just been out there the day before just to meet with people and I hadn't met her. And we're now like in San Diego, which is a couple hours, several hours away. And anyways, we just started talking. She's like, you have to come... I have to introduce you to this person and this person. And it just happened. But I went into it with the idea of maybe this isn't my story to share. And maybe this is someone else's story to share. And then if I am going to be the conduit, then what does that look like and how do I respect that process? And the music part is... It's funny, I've never worked on a musical before. I'm writing the book. And I love music and I obsessively listen to it. I am very obsessive constantly when I write. I'm always listening to music and I have a somewhat obsessive personality that might be oversharing. But I will listen to sometimes the same song on repeat if I'm in the zone or whatever. But I don't write music. It's not... And I like this question because I think it raises some important issues. I'm used to seeing native music depicted on stage or in movies as... It's always like some horrible drum beat that has no affiliation with any actual tribal culture. And then it's like some country artist coming out of a teepee and talking about a wigwam. And I don't know, it's always some horrible music video. That's how our music has been portrayed in mainstream culture in America. So how do we put... So the Mojave have this beautiful bird song. I don't know if I can play one. I don't know if I can find it. I'm like anything you've ever heard. And when I was out there this last time... Let's see if I can just find bird song. Because I know I sent it to you guys. I think the research inspired the entire development of the bird song. Oh, it would have been in March. I think that's a little bit of an ecosystem of research that was found in the Japanese culture too. But we have some similarities now. Yeah. Yeah, I thought... I thought I'd film it. I did though, right? I think you did. But while you look, I can share with you that also our inspiration came because my brother goes to the Tule Lake Pilgrimage, again, in Northern California. There's a camp there every two years. And he's gone into... was a musician in New York and a French hornist. And then eventually became someone who's practicing acupuncture herbology. And it goes to China. And this is doing its own very deep exploration of healing and practice. And we keep talking about how do we share with the Tule Lake Pilgrimage that was... How do we share a healing process? When folks go, it is. But we want to bring in the native culture because that particular camp was built on sacred burial ground. And it's like, oh, it's like unconscionable. So how do we continue to develop a healing process for our communities? And how do we do it together? And when I met Mary Catherine and Ty to Tyette, that made sense to maybe this is part of that, a response, at least one of the responses. So, yeah, yeah. And it also led to... In meeting Mary Catherine, it led to, as I mentioned, examining the legislature. You know, everything we have today in this society is largely shaped by the law, right? And so there's... I share with folks at EDNI workshops now that if we forget when we name off communities of color, we forget natives often. It's because they were forcibly removed. There's a reason they fell off the list. They didn't fall off, they were forced off the list. And we just forget. Or sometimes, you know, any group we miss is partly because the normative has pushed them out, or forced them out. So we're working to reclaim that and always keep naming, right, in that actually diverse inclusion work. So one of the things that also drove me about this piece was how do we bring the unnamed back into our stories and reclaim it in the greater culture and American theater in particular, too? So I'm trying to... Should we circle back? We can circle back to it later. Yeah, yeah. Oh, you found it? Yeah, it's like... It is not a smooth mix. I mean, I... Oh, hey. Oh, you have? We can also hook it up over there to that jack. Oh, yeah? I don't want to play the whole thing. I just wanted to share a little bit. What do I hook it up to? Yeah, you just hit play on there. Yeah, that's what it's going to be. If you go away from the screen, it shuts down. Because I don't know how to use technology, and so I... I'll start with working. What is that process like, you know, wondering whether it's not important, because I know music is a very sacred, you know, all the pieces. It feels like sort of reclaiming this sort of theater space in this, you know, in this sort of sacred way, you know? So I'm wondering, in terms of the music in particular, if it feels or feels important to work with, you know, musicians from the... I think those are steps that are coming. Ty, you can probably speak specific to... Or even just, yeah, where you're at. Ty DeFoe is very bursted with the sound and music making in his native tribal culture. Yes, I will just say his culture has nothing to do with the Mahave. And the music... I mean, you can probably like any music, right? Like, I don't know a lot about... I don't want to start making generalizations, because I don't know a lot about it. You know, I think a lot of people... And this is a bit of a generalization, but a lot of people who are not native think that all native music is just like, boom, boom, boom, boom, you know, some horrible drum beat. And the drum beat is very significant in a lot of different cultures, but it is not uniform. It is different. It is unique. And, you know, an Oto song is very different from a Panko song, a Native American church song is very different from a Cherokee hymn, a Creek hymn is very different from, you know, some of the specific Northwest music that you'll hear from, like the Tulalip. Native American music. I mean, you can go into, like, a store in the Denver airport and hear Native American flute, you know. But, like, that's not... You know, once again, it's a lot of what people encounter in terms of Native music in the United States is just a misappropriation of what was at one point an actual piece of music in my view. So I would love... I mean, I'm sorry that I can't figure out how loud I'm at, but I think you'll be able to hear it. I'll be curious. I'm going to play a little bit. The Mojave have bird songs and I had never really heard anything quite like this until I went out there and I think it's just so beautiful and it's really kind of amazing, but I got to tape some of it. So you kind of get the feeling and... I love that. So I got to go out with Veronica and I'm not from the community and these guys were doing the bird songs and I was like, oh, I really want to tape this. And I look around like everyone from there has their, like, you know, their iPhones out and they're taping it and I was like, okay, I'm going to tape it. But, you know, if I were to... and Ty, so I'm not doing... I don't personally... I'm not writing music. But, like, let's say I was and Ty's going to take, I think, we haven't had this explicit conversation, but we... I'm sure we'll because this is an important question, but yeah, I could put cherry music into this musical and probably most Americans wouldn't bat an eyelash because they're like, oh, she's native and that sounds kind of native and there's a drum, you know. But, like, this... the Mojave bird songs are so beautiful and very specific. And so, I mean, I think we do in Ty and I have had this conversation of how do we get that music into the play and you do think musical and you think commercial or you think... I mean, it doesn't have to be a commercial production, but you think it goes out into the world and you're not going to be sitting in the room every time with the production team saying, well, who did you hire that's Mojave to sing the bird song? I mean, you know, that may not be realistic, so how do we take that authentic music and put it into a musical in a way where it doesn't become bastardized? You know, that's it's not easy. It's really not. So that's a challenge that we face, but... Can you talk a little bit about the Removal Act versus Yeah, so... What I really want to talk about is some of the legal framework and I can share that this is a setup because we want to do a little bit of an activity with you as well. So this is some of the native land so these are just some of the tribes so you know, well, first of all, all native land at one point, right? But you can see here where some of the tribes are as of today and I'm not going to dwell on this for too long but Colorado River is right on the border of California Oh, wow, that just worked. It's right on the border of California and Arizona. In fact, they have land in both states. I try, should I try? Okay. So here are some maps that show where some of the tribes you can see that all the native tribes are going to be on the far left. A little bottom corner there, kind of the brownish one. I feel they're going to have a camp There's just a lot that we're at Yeah, I'm not going to say a lot of them You can see it's kind of a little fuzzy. Here's the other one. And then do you want to, like, call it on the right or the left? Yeah, here we go. A little fuzzy one. And then here's kind of a bigger view of, like, the process on the other side of the map. You can see the squares with the various hands. So there was also one in Texas called Crystal City that's concentrated. So for me as a lawyer you know, we we do have this awesome thing called the Constitution in the United States and it provides deep process and everyone has all these rights. And we're very, you know, you talk to Americans and it's all about our democracy and we take it to the world because the world needs to understand our democracy is important. We provide freedom because we're very proud of the rights in our Constitution. Korematsu is a very assertive place where an individual who has been intern in a Japanese-American internment camp took the case all the way to this before that this violates my two process rights as a Constitution. You know, the President of the State of Order 9066 and I didn't commit a crime and not only that, I've never had my day in court. So usually when you are in prison you are interned because you've committed a crime. What the Constitution requires is that the state or the federal government whoever is imprisoning you must, you know, give you a day in court where you get to see what you've been challenged with and litigate it, right, like defend yourself. Well, the Supreme Court said that basically no and that the federal government's actions enforceably removing 120,000 Japanese-Americans from their homes and incarcerating them solely based on their race. That was the only basis, right. There was no, you know, individual evaluation of, well, you've committed this crime or you've done this. It was just you are this race therefore the federal government can take you from your home and imprison you. Very scary. And this decision has never been overturned or overruled. So as of today in the United States Executive Order 9066 and the internment of 120,000 Japanese-Americans during World War II is still totally legal. It's, it would be in my view it would be like if plus Divya Ferguson had never been overturned, right, like every, you know, we're so proud of Brown v. Board of Education so much that Chief Justice Roberts will give wonderful speeches about it at the opening of the African-American Museum. Great. He should celebrate Brown v. Board of Education. How is it that we still have Korematsu as good law in this country? We also at the same time have a case in, yes. It only is used, for example, to round up Muslims in this country with no change. Right. So when we talk about detainment as even Trump is that's scary. This can be activated at any moment. And Asian Pacific Islanders have a history throughout time of being given even after fighting World War I and earlier than that we've had a history of being fighting for citizenship, being given citizenship and then it's revoked. So we don't have this sense of once you're a citizen that's it, I'm a citizen. It can be taken away at any time. Yeah. But couldn't that order be implemented upon those that created it? No. Yeah. I mean, if I'm using power, right? I mean that's the whole third question is doing the power. Yeah. I just wanted to name that you know, this is a very that's already been happening. That's right. Yes, absolutely. In terms of like people being coined as terrorism through the Putin Act and folks being incarcerated in federal facilities all over the U.S. So just, you know, it's not And in the Japanese American National Museum to your point during that response after 9-11 the Japanese community really rose up because the protocol, the system of going toward internment was exactly the same as an inciting incident. Then there's a hysteria. It gets whipped up. And then the legislation starts to come in, right? And then it gets into it. Yeah. There's a whole document about that. Well, the last point, did not seem overruled or overturned. I think, I'm not a lawyer, but I think the Cormont case was the decision was vacated at a lower level. But they so it's never been technically overturned and overruled in a sense, but the government gave up its case at a lower level because Cormont's lawyers for him appealed that case on the basis of I think some government misbehavior or something like that. But in any case... You're saying they released him? Well, no, this is like 40 years later. 40 years later where they at a lower level lower than the Supreme Court, the government basically vacated their case. Sorry, it was a mistake. And so, and lawyers love to... There are all these nuances, right? And I can explain the procedural makeup of different cases, but for me, I look at this and I'm like, you know, these theater artists know that the power of story, right? Story is powerful. I think that's why we're all in this room, that's why we're all in careers that involve theater to some extent. And I'm also, as a lawyer, I see the power of story in the law, right? And I think there's this constant question of do the laws shape our culture and our stories or do our stories shape the law? And I think there's, I think it's a two-way street, but I think that, you know, what is good law for the Supreme Court becomes our story, right? It does. And the Supreme Court tells stories to justify the law. So if you read Korematsu, there's a story about the dangerous, you know, the dangers imposed by these enemy aliens. That story is strung throughout. It's used to justify the outcome in this case. So when the case, even if, like, let's say, you know, you could talk to someone in the Obama administration that say, of course we're not going to force this decision. You know, we're not going to cite Korematsu in a brief and say, well, we get to do XYZ because of Korematsu. So they might argue it doesn't even have any practical effect anymore. No one's using it. Why is it still in the books? You know, when is the Supreme Court going to make that proclamation? This was a mistake. It was wrong. You know, that hasn't happened. And so the narrative that was used to achieve this result in a Supreme Court case has never been publicly disclaimed, right? Has never been altered. And how does that affect us still today? And I see it as a citizen of Cherokee Nation very explicitly because we have a case that happened in 1978 where the Supreme Court took away the jurisdiction of our tribes to exercise criminal jurisdiction over non-Indians who come onto our lands and commit crimes. So today, if you're a non-Indian, you could, for instance, walk on to the Colorado Indian Tribe Reservation as a non-Indian rape, kill, murder, whatever, and the tribal government can't arrest you, can't prosecute you. They have no jurisdiction to do anything over you whatsoever. And so Oliphant is a very troubling case, but they cite a horrific case for us from 1823 that's never been overturned called Johnson v. McIntosh. And in that case, and Oliphant quotes this case, quote, their right to current Indian nations to complete independent nations are necessarily diminished. And in Johnson v. McIntosh, the Supreme Court said that Indian nations cannot claim legal title to their land because keep in mind, you know, poor Motsu, the need is, we need to forcefully remove everyone from their home and lock them up. In Johnson, the need was, we need to take their homes from them, right? We need that land, and so we need to justify that they're racially inferior and the words were savages and heathens was what the Supreme Court used in 1823 to basically say, it's totally cool to take their land. In fact, it's our legal right to do so. Now, that case has never been overturned. And these are some awesome quotes from Johnson. The one in the red in the middle is one of my favorite. The Johnson court said, Conquest gives a title which the courts of the conqueror cannot deny. Basically saying, we're the court of the conqueror, Indian nations are being conquered, they can't claim title to their land, we're the court of the conqueror. That has been overturned. And so for me, I look at, and yeah, the other really awesome quote is the bottom one, but the tribes of Indians inhabiting this country were fierce savages whose occupation was war and whose subsistence was drawn chiefly from the forest, blah, blah, blah, it's just horrific. Still good law today. Now in the 1830s when my grandfathers were fighting to save Cherokee Nation, President Andrew Jackson passed the Indian Removal Act, which said using these principles of law, Indian nations, you're going to be moved out west of Mississippi. And you know, that was, you know, for greed and other things, as you can imagine. They wanted to expand cotton and slavery and everything in the southeast. At that time, the performance of native identity on the American stage was being appropriated and red face was becoming very popular. There were plays in New York at that time where Indian white people would get on stage and put a fake headdress on and their face red and whoa, you know, horrible offensive, stupid thing you could think of. Indians were portrayed as a costume, as, you know, a prop, as something to laugh at, as something that could be killed without consequence. Because that's the story, that's the narrative that was necessary to promote this legal framework. And it's sad to me that today in 2016 very little has changed. And this is my whole mantra on red face, which we don't have to sit here and read through. But I guess a part of, as a theater artist, when I hear our communities talk about, well, why is red face more popular than producing actual native artists? Well, why do they use yellow face? Look at us. We're here. Why don't they just let us represent ourselves? It's like, well, what is the dominant narrative in our legal structure, right? And how have over the last several hundred years, years, performance of our identity been used to support that legal structure in the Supreme Court and across the United States? And so how, how, and how do we start to talk about that in a way? And I think when, when most Americans hear, hey, do you know there's this 1823 Supreme Court case and how problematic that is? They're like, oh my gosh, what can we do to change that? Well, let, let native people tell their own stories. Put actual native people on stage, because I think the narrative is a false one, right? The narrative that perpetuates these horrible legal inequalities or injustices depend intrinsically on a false narrative, on a narrative that strips us of our inherent identity, right? That dehumanizes us. You have to, to conquer a people, to destroy them, you have to strip them of their humanity first. That's what yellow face and red face do. And so anyways, I just, I just wanted that part of what we're doing here is to place it in the larger context of what does this really mean in the United States today? So for me, putting actual, you know, actual Asian people, actual Native American people on the American stage is an act of revolution. I think. Politically and socially. So, alright, that's, that's all I got. Turn it back over to Leslie. Sure, sure. Hi, can you take a picture of me with us? Yeah, so I'd like to take us through now, just for a few minutes. But I actually want to give the group the opportunity to have choice here, because this isn't personal work. So if we want to bring our how-round session to a close and say farewell to our friends for now about it just, I'll describe a little bit about the process and I would like you to weigh in to see if you'd like it to, to have our session come to a close so we can continue with the activity. I'll be breathing you back, generation and giving you the opportunity to process what is your historical context? What have you been carrying with you and bring us back into the present here and we'll have an opportunity to share with it and for you to be able to because that's the work, the basis of the work that we've been conducting for ourselves along with all this research that we've shared in order to continue to move through this process hopefully as awarely as possible and even reclaiming, like I mentioned, a thoughtful process for ourselves. So is that something that you would like to do without being on camera? I think that's my instinct but I just want to make sure we have the will of the group. I see a couple of yeses okay I think that's all we need to know there, yeah even if one person feels that way. So for how around, thank you so much I hope folks who have been able to tune in are enjoying the Confest captures that we've been able to provide and we'll sign off for now. Thank you so much. Okay.