FROM THE EDITORS: It is with great joy that we share the transcript of one of our favorite podcasts, All My Relations, with two hosts, Matika Wilbur and Adrienne Keene, who share with us honest conversations about identity, colonialism, territory, sex, art, food, motherhood, resistance, in short. On multiple issues of concern to indigenous and non-indigenous peoples in our common effort to advance decolonization. Thanks to a collaboration with All My Relations, this will be the first of several episodes that Awasqa will translate into Spanish.
SOURCE: To listen to the original episode in English:
Ep #1: All My Relations and Indigenous Feminism
Introduction
MATIKA WILBUR: Hi, I’m Matika! I belong to the Swinomish and Tulalip nations. I am a photographer and creator of the photographic project Project 562.
ADRIENNE KEENE: And I’m Adrienne, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, an academic, and the writer behind the Native Appropriations blog. This is All My Relations. Welcome.
MATIKA: All My Relations is a podcast that explores relationships, relationships with the earth, with our ancestors, and with ourselves.
ADRIENNE: In this space, we talk with amazing and inspiring Native people in order to explore indigeneity in all its complexity.
MATIKA: Thank you for joining us and tuning in. We are glad they are with us. And we start by telling you, in case no one has told you today, that you are wonderful, amazing, and so loved, and even more loved for clicking to listen to this podcast.
Family, we have a great first episode of the All My Relations podcast for you. And we immediately dove into the discussion of the “All My Relations” concept and how we approached the determining factors that led us to choose this topic. By way of introduction, we discuss why representation is important to both Adrienne and me, discover how Urban Outfitters brought Adrienne Keene to an “Aha!” moment, discuss why we are committed to representational work, even if we agree to have a public apprenticeship. Next we will discuss the origin of Project 562, and how it impacts the lives of the people I love. We’ll make a slight transition to our discussion of indigenous feminism, and you can hear Adrienne’s way of getting super academic on the subject of colonization. He sums it up well, describing how they “left,” how they “left everything a mess,” or how they “never left.”
We will quickly discuss some basic concepts of our current status as indigenous nations and leave you with an overview of what is to come for the remainder of this first season. So thank you once again for joining us, please like, share, subscribe, if you like it. We like that.
Source: All My Relations
ADRIENNE: Let’s talk about All My Relations [Todas Mis Relaciones]. Why do we call the podcast that? What is the story behind the name?
MATIKA: That’s a good question Adrienne. You know, “all my relations” is a pretty popular song throughout Indian Territory, ultimately popularized by our Lakota, Nakota and Dakota brethren. But in reality, we know that throughout Indian Country, and really for me in particular during my travels, I discovered that our core identity is inextricably connected to our relationships. Whether it be our relationships with the land, when we call ourselves the peoples of the blue-green water, or the peoples of the tall pines, or the peoples who live among the four sacred mountains, or for us in this part of the country, the peoples of the clear salt water, of the tides. This relationship with water and land is our way of identifying ourselves. And then of course, we also see ourselves as our grandmothers’ granddaughters, and we see our role, responsibility and purpose in being directly connected to our lineage. And I really wanted to explore this topic because I think it’s one of the best ways to shed light on what those identities really are. And understand that throughout the indigenous territory, we have that understanding. I am excited and thrilled to be able to talk about this concept with each of our guests and also to be able to introduce this concept not only to our own indigenous communities, but also to the visitors who now live here.
ADRIENNE: Using that as the backbone of the podcast is really powerful because, as you said, it’s something that we share across the indigenous territory, these ideas of being relational people. Not to exist when we are not in relationship with a place, with people, with a culture, it is always about those relationships.
MATIKA: We don’t always have to reinvent the wheel. You know, there are in our communities those old concepts that we continue to pass on and continue to talk about, because these concepts were taught to us and we have a responsibility as granddaughters of our grandmothers to carry forward the conversations that were shared with us. I grew up with a very solid understanding of my place in my community, as a member of the Wilbur family, as a member of the Joseph family. And also as a person of the tides, as a person of the salmon people. And my relationship within my identity is deeply rooted in those concepts. And in our language, at [palabra indígena] the way we refer to all my relationships is [palabra indígena] and that concept, you know, I actually had to check with my community linguist and ask how do you say this? Because, like many in our community, I did not grow up with the opportunity to have access to my own language. So I think part of what we would like to explore with this project is to talk with some of our guests about how they talk about their relationships in their community.
ADRIENNE: And I know that for me, as someone who grew up without those relationships, without connection to a community, without knowing what it meant to be a Cherokee woman, a Cherokee person, that has been the most important anchor in my journey of reconnection, building and finding those relationships. So when we were talking about, well, what are the equivalents of these concepts in our communities, in our language, I had no idea. I had to go to my friend Patrick, Patrick Del Percio, who works as a translator for the Cherokee Nation. And I asked him what the equivalents would be in our language, and I’m going to try to pronounce them, I’m going to get tangled up. He gave me three sentences, and I think they all more or less relate to different aspects of this idea of “all my relationships” or “we are all related”. So, Patrick, sorry, [necesita la grafía para las partes en Cherokee] you mean “let’s look out for each other’s welfare” or something like “let’s love one another”. I think it is beautiful. And then [necesita la grafía en Cherokee], which means “let us all consider ourselves sacred or important to one another”. And the last one is [necesita la grafía en Cherokee] which means “we all belong or are related to each other”. I love that in our community there are also these ways of thinking relationally and that there are these foundational concepts. And just the knowledge encapsulated by it, such as the idea that “taking care of each other’s welfare” is the translation of Let’s love one another, seems pretty nice to me. There is something very powerful in learning, in understanding, as well as discovering what it means to be in a relationship, and how each of us relates differently to these ideas of “all my relationships”.
ADRIENNE: We are both people who are deeply interested in representations and how our communities, our families and indigenous peoples in general are represented in the media and in society. So, maybe each one can talk a little bit about where that interest comes from, and why we think it’s important, and then what we hope to do with this podcast space.
MATIKA: So, why are the representations important? Go ahead, Adrienne.
ADRIENNE: The beginning, or the origin story of Native Appropriations, begins with my entry into graduate school. When I was a first-year doctoral student at Harvard. I came from California. Yes, Harvard. He came from California, where he was a student at Stanford, and there is a large Native Community there, a very diverse Native community, the campus still has a lot of work to do, but he recognizes that there are Native people and they are on campus. Whereas at Harvard, that is simply not the case. I was the only Native doctoral student in the entire Graduate School of Education [Graduate School of Education]. It seems to me that there were only two other Native PhD students in all 13 Harvard schools. For the first time I was confronted with the shocking reality that most people know nothing about Native people and don’t encounter anything to do with Native people and have deeply ingrained stereotypes about who we are. Those stories you always hear from people saying, “I thought you were all extinct” or “I thought you didn’t exist anymore” really happened to me during orientation. There was a classmate who said, “Well, in America, we just exterminated them. And so we don’t have to deal with them anymore.” Yes, I was saying that in contrast to the situation in Canada where, you know, they still have to “deal with them.” So, across from the campus across the street is an Urban Outfitters and it used to be possible to use the Urban Outfitters as a shortcut to get to the other side of Harvard Square, which I did with some frequency. And one day, I was walking through the basement in the bargain section, and it was like cultural appropriations central. I well remember a platform for jewelry stands in the form of a totem pole. And there were also neon dream catchers made in India, which I found ironic, faux mukluks and T-shirts with Indian headdresses. And some dream catcher earrings. Plain and simple a total mix of horrors and something kind of clicked for me that day. And I said to myself, here’s a connection between the fact that right across the street from Harvard there’s this Urban Outfitters with all this Native knockoff crap and the fact that my classmates don’t know that Native people still exist. I was always someone who was interested in Native art design and the way we are represented in museum spaces. But then I decided I wanted to start exploring more about these things that we see every day but don’t stop to think about, like Urban Outfitters merchandise, or sports team logos, or on packages, or whatever, to start arguing that collectively, all of these images matter. And this is what people think of us, it affects everything we are trying to do in our communities and that everything we are trying to change is tinged by the fact that non-Native people only think of these false stereotypes when they think about us. Once I started looking into it in more detail, it’s like taking the lid off and realizing how deep it all really goes. And that it transcends to all sectors of society. And if we want to make great strides in our communities, if we want to work towards goals of decolonization, of revitalization, we can’t do that if in the minds of most settlers we are nothing more than these banal stereotypes that are ingrained in cartoons, western movies and in the past.
MATIKA: And you decided to write about it.
ADRIENNE: That’s right. The early days of the blog were essentially me taking pictures of things. And I really didn’t know what I was writing about or how to talk about it, because the phrase cultural appropriation was a phrase I had come across in my anthropology classes. Back in 2010, when I started the blog, it wasn’t the kind of conversation it is now, people weren’t aware of it and I didn’t even know how to talk about it. So a lot of the blog posts were questions, it said, “I think this is bad Do you?” And then little by little, as the years went by, I kind of found my voice and the confidence to be able to talk more about it. And also to develop those other conversations about identity, health, and about relationships, or whatever, which for me, all in all, are related to these issues of representation. It’s been eight years since I started blogging, with almost 400 posts since then. The conversation, in short, has evolved. I have the impression that now the public knows more about cultural appropriation but certain incidents have not stopped happening, there is still a lot of work ahead.
MATIKA: The idea of identity that I find really interesting is the way I see myself, the way I know myself, how I have come to know myself and then also the way you see me. If I see myself one way and the world sees me in a completely different way, then that means our children are always going to have that conflict when they encounter people in any space outside of their own comfortable identity space. Your story about Urban Outfitters, what is surely happening in thousands of other spaces, is a perfect example of how it is something that is churning inside us all the time and is constantly all around us. And I love what you said about the need to have representations available, because very rarely do we have the opportunity to see ourselves represented in the mass media when we turn on the television, when we listen to a podcast, or when we tune in to the radio, or when we open the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times. It is very rare to find any kind of publication or redissemination that represents us, made by Native people, who identify themselves as such and have a connection with the community. How does that affect our children? And how it affects our lives is a big part of why we’re doing this so that, hopefully, young Natives out there have the opportunity to hear and get involved, and likewise non-Natives. Okay then, Adrienne, before I tell you why I’m doing this, tell us about how Native Appropriations, writing the blog, and well, that learning process you’ve been in, how it’s shaped you, what you’ve learned, and why you’re still committed to this work.
ADRIENNE: Sure. Well, I’ve learned so much during this process, from the basics and the mechanics of how to cultivate an audience and how you use your voice to make a change, and how to use Twitter, all of those fundamental things have been really important. But it has also been a journey to, I guess, simply find my own affinity with my voice and my identity. And I think the power of having our two voices together is in the fact that we come from such different Native backgrounds. For me, growing up in the mostly white suburbs of San Diego, where, to my knowledge, there were no other Natives and also because I was assuming white codes and could pass as white, no one ever knew I was Native. So being able to take that on and not be ashamed of it and just realizing that my perspective as a Native person is valid, because it’s a Native perspective, because I am a Native person, and just being able to free myself from that grief of not having grown up with my traditions, not having grown up in ceremonies, I grew up without access to a lot of those things. But it’s okay and it’s not my fault. And I think writing was what really allowed that learning process to happen for me. And to realize that there are also many people like me and that they share the same feelings, that they are valid and important, and that those feelings of shame and embarrassment are part of the colonial project with the intention of making us feel that way.
So I think writing has been very important in that sense. And just having the ability to find my voice, in a general way, and learning how to learn publicly. And that’s something I discuss quite a bit on the blog, consenting to learn in public and how that feels, and making mistakes in public as well as learning to apologize publicly. And that kind of thing has been very important, and it’s also something that I’ve seen carry over into my academic work.
MATIKA: I’m super stoked to be able to do this with you, Adrienne. You should know that I first discovered Adrienne when I started Project 562 and found her on the internet and started reading her blogs. I said to myself, my God, who is this woman? I have to meet her. I was so encouraged because I don’t think before reading your blog I had ever come across a blog written by a Native woman. So it was such a powerful thing for me. And then, later on, I had the opportunity to meet you in Arizona after I started this project. Back then I would have never imagined that we would be here in Seattle recording this podcast. What a throbbing. How splendid. I love it, yes.
ADRIENNE: Tell us about the origin of Project 562.
MATIKA: Yes, yes, yes, yes. Well, first let me explain what this is all about. It is an initiative to bring together a collection of images and stories representative of all indigenous peoples in the United States. Now, when I say that, I say it carefully as I believe it would be impossible for me to represent all indigenous peoples in the United States. When I started with this project, I thought, well, I’ll go visit the federally recognized peoples, and at that time, there were 562 federally recognized nations. And when I made the decision to visit these federally recognized nations, I thought, well, if I visit state-recognized nations, I don’t know how I’m going to find them. So I will go to those places that have an address listed, and that’s why I chose that number. Now, on second thought, I realize that was somewhat naïve because having traveled for over five years, I have also visited indigenous urban centers and many state-recognized pueblos as well as communities that identify themselves as pueblos and perhaps have a quite different understanding from my own understanding of indigenous nations. I believe that by the time this project comes to an end, I will have visited something like 750 Native communities. It is quite a lot. I started Project 562 because I was a teacher at the Native school on my reservation. I didn’t start out wanting to be a teacher, you know, I actually started out studying photography and advertising.
And I did like everyone else does when we come out of a commercial program, I was trained to become a photographer who does it more to make money. And I distinctly remember one of my professors telling me, if you want to make money, you should think about photographing more white people, if you want to work, you need to have a lot of thin white women in your portfolio. And that’s what I did. And when I graduated from college, I had a portfolio full of thin, white women. I went to Los Angeles and started working in advertising and photographing famous people. And I remember one day in particular when I was near Sunset and La Brea. I looked up at a commercial I had created and it was of a woman who, when we were photographing her, started crying on the set because she was so hungry. And I said, hey, it’s no big deal. I’ll bring you carrots or something, you know, we have beautiful catering. And he said, Oh no, I don’t eat. Not like before the photo shoots. And I remember thinking, I can’t believe I’m participating in this. And then, looking at this advertisement a couple of months later, I saw that it said “Live the life you’ve always wanted to live”. And I resigned immediately. So I did what many do when they have an existential crisis in their youth, I left for South America. I traveled a bit, I had the opportunity to meet many wonderful indigenous people, I photographed them. And it was there, when I was there, working with indigenous people that I had that revelation that I had never even photographed my own people. Because I came from a small community called Swinomish, which is my mother’s hometown, while my father’s hometown is Tulalip Village. And we are an island people, we are tidal people, we are people who depend on their relationship with the water to live. And when I left that community, I really didn’t want anything to do with my reservation when I left. That is a separate story. But it was many years later that I finally returned to that home and started taking pictures of my own people. Then I had some important exhibitions, I had an exhibition here at the Seattle Art Museum. The wise elders of my community came to see me and told me Matika, we want you to be a teacher. We want you to work with the children. I said, I don’t particularly enjoy being with children. And they told me, you don’t need to teach them. I was given the job and it turned out that I love children. I had a lot of fun teaching. They said to me, you know, we would like you to develop an indigenous curriculum because I was teaching photography and oral narratives and we were working with photography, film and music. And at the time I didn’t manage to accumulate enough images of Native photographers to put together a curriculum for a full year. And in no way did I want to teach about Edward S. Curtis or Aaron Huey, you know, these terrible deformations of Indian culture. And at the time, I wasn’t even able to explain why I couldn’t use these guys. I just know that when I showed my students the Aaron Huey TED talk, or the Edward S. Curtis photos, they had a visceral reaction, of tears, of contracting, of feeling uncomfortable, of dissociation, of not wanting to participate, and I had to stop showing those kinds of images because I was losing my students. I was literally losing students, there were so many deaths in our community. I buried so many of my students. And I remember us wondering, what are we doing wrong? You know, we were in the community house [espiritual], praying, and we had group discussions and meetings with the school committee and we were constantly, we felt a constant anguish and a constant struggle. Why do students kill each other? What is happening? What are we doing wrong? And it was about that height that I was introduced to Stephanie Fryberg. And she doesn’t know and probably wouldn’t even remember the things that she was teaching, she was talking about representations and about her work as a sociologist and as a psychologist and her research, and she revealed the way in which representations were affecting our students. In fact, their studies show that representations, when false, lower the self-esteem of our Native students. When we realized this, we decided that we needed to have more images, we needed enough images to put together a full year’s curriculum, to teach students about themselves, from our perspective. If we start with Washington and only represent the people of Washington, how are they going to learn about Pueblo culture? How will they learn about [expresión Nativa]? How will they meet the Dakotas? Or what is happening with the Wampanoags? Or with the Seminoles or the Miccosukees? Or with the Cherokees? How will they know about these things if we don’t teach them? In order to achieve that, we need representations from all those places. There is no such thing as a “Native American”, there are no “American Indians”, those things do not exist. What exists is our original understanding of ourselves and that has to be understood individually. And so I decided that I would go and visit all the villages. When we talked about it they said, well, you’re a photographer, you could visit all the villages. So I said, well, I live in a fabulous apartment that I love, I just bought a sofa from Pottery Barn, I have a 401K pension plan. I don’t know, I have friends here in Seattle, I don’t feel like going anywhere. And they said to me, well, if you don’t do it, who is going to do it? We started praying and decided together, without further ado, that we would do it. And I’ve been traveling all over the place ever since. So to me, representations are important because they affect the lives of my loved ones, in quite concrete ways, in the sense that our bodies are affected, our body safety is affected by how we are perceived and how our lives are valued, and if the supreme court and congress and the people who hold power in this country don’t know anything about us and make decisions for us, that in the end, they end up putting us in jail, or that as women, they rape our bodies and we end up with these horrible statistics like, three out of four of our women are sexually assaulted, or a youth that continues to commit suicide, and we have these huge social discrepancies and lack of achievement. Those people affected being my cousins and my best friends. It is of utmost importance to me. So representation is not the answer to everything but it is what I can contribute as a photographer and as an educator. And this is how I contribute, by doing things that matter.
Indigenous Feminism
ADRIENNE: Maybe we can talk a little bit about our relationship to this idea of feminism, and what it means for Native women to have that relationship.
MATIKA: Mm hmm. I find it fascinating to talk about feminism in general because generally speaking, I don’t identify as a feminist because when I think of feminists, I think of white women. And I consider how indigenous women were excluded from the benefits of the feminist movement. In my own scathing style, I have refused to self-proclaim myself as a feminist, and when I say this in front of the public, that I would not identify myself as a feminist, people get upset. People are horrified, they give me a crazy face when I say this, but you know, once I explain what we just discussed here, they calm down a little bit, but it’s still kind of taboo. And it’s something I’ve had to fight against. I have not openly or thunderously discussed this topic on my blog, or with my twittering fingers, not that I am a twitterer. I’m horrible with Twitter, but you know, out loud, in public, I haven’t had this conversation.
ADRIENNE: Yes. I find it interesting because I think you are one of the most feminist women I know, in relation to your desire for women and people marginalized because of their gender identity to be themselves and to be able to have their own role in communities. In my case, I share similar feelings. Feminists, self-proclaimed feminists were not people I wanted to associate with. They were mostly privileged white women, young women who had an obsession with talking about their [incomprensible]. It was like, a concept. And it took me many years to try to understand why this made me feel so deeply uncomfortable and why I had this impression that it was not an identity that I could cope with. And the truth is that reading other indigenous feminists was what brought me to my place of identity as an indigenous feminist woman. And I think of people like Jessica Yee, now Danforth, who is working with the Native Youth Sexual Health Network (Native Youth Sexual Health Network) and was one of my first internet idols, she wrote some of the most amazing blog posts about what it means to be an indigenous feminist. And I realized that white feminism and white feminists, that you don’t have to be white to be a feminist. I think white feminism is this idea of the many ways in which your identity as a woman should trump your other identities. And that struggle against patriarchy. However, patriarchy is like a nebulous thing that exists and is being fought against. The difference is that for indigenous communities we know exactly what it is that introduced patriarchy to our communities. And that was colonialism. There was no history of oppression of women in our communities prior to the arrival of colonialism. We are capable of imagining another paradigm, because we have that history, we have a model of what it means to live in a society without patriarchy. And mainstream feminism does not recognize the role of colonialism. So in my opinion, being an indigenous feminist means that I am not only fighting against patriarchy, I am also fighting against colonialism.
MATIKA: May I ask you to further describe colonialism, what that concept means to you.
ADRIENNE: Sure, it’s important. Yes. This summer, these past two summers, I have been teaching a course for a program called College Horizons which is wonderful. It is for Native students who are about to start their first year of university. And I teach a course called Settlement Colonialism, Resistance and Resilience. And it’s a lot of fun because for me as an instructor, it’s the only time I get to teach in a classroom full of Native students. And we have the opportunity to talk about our experiences. And I can arm them with the tools they’re going to need when they go to college, so they realize that the spaces they’ll be entering are colonial spaces. And we discuss colonialism in two different ways, there is extractive colonialism and settler colonialism. Now I’m getting a little academic. Extractive colonialism is what happened in places like the countries of Africa or in India, or in places where an external nation-state, like Britain or Belgium or whatever, came in and extracted resources from these already existing places to send to their respective metropolises. This increased the wealth and power of these countries. They establish a presence in those places and take them over, without establishing a new nation-state, in contrast to what happened in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand where the idea was to destroy in order to replace. That’s called settlement colonialism, which was when people came and completely got rid of what was there so they could found a new nation-state. Aside from this, the phrase I taught my students to relate to extractive colonialism is, “They left, but they left everything a mess.” And for settlement colonialism it is, “They never left.”
MATIKA: And they arrived violently as well.
ADRIENNE: Sure. In both situations, very violently. So settlement colonialism means that each of the structures of what is known as the United States is an external construction. It is not something that comes from within our communities. And obviously we are still here, and we still exist but we have to operate under an external power that was erected above us without our consent.
MATIKA: So, when you talk about indigenous feminism and resisting colonialism, in a way, you are talking about restoring our original identity and our original commitments to our own people, to our land, to our identity based on relationships, and to those original commitments that we had built in our societies. A space where I would not say it lacked equality, because if feminism is the struggle for equality between men and women, then I do not think that was a problem. And as Adrienne said, it wasn’t until colonialism came along. Because for me, as a Potlatch person and as a person from communal houses, we had well-defined, prominent and important roles, decision-making roles, power roles within these societies. And I would not go so far as to say that we were a matriarchal society, but rather a balanced society. So, if I am fighting for any kind of right, it is the right to restore that balance that already existed here prior to 1800.
ADRIENNE: Because a lot of the icons of mainstream feminism, if you think about the suffragettes, those people were quite racist and actually fought to exclude black women from voting, or whatever it was, so those values are not something I would necessarily want to identify with. And the other misunderstanding is that many times non-Native people look at our communities and the traditional roles that were assigned to the different genders. in our communities and see that as oppressive, without coming to understand that the integrity of the cultural structures surrounding all of that means that women’s work was valued at the same level as men’s work, and that having those different roles and spaces was not necessarily oppressive. So, the woman being in charge of cooking or gathering food was not seen as something of lesser value in relation to the man in charge of the hunt. And there is also the fact that our communities also had roles that did not necessarily fit either of those two gender roles. And that is something that, clearly, our colonizing society has yet to grasp. That is also part of indigenous feminism, having a space for people who do not fit into that gender duality is something that our communities understood.
MATIKA: Sure. In some of our communities there were five genders.
ADRIENNE: Absolutely, and it was interesting when I asked my high school students if they identified as feminists. Ultimately it wasn’t the case but once we had that discussion about that understanding of what indigenous feminism is, and how it relates to our…I don’t like to use the word “traditional”, in quotes…. community understanding of gender, I think it really changed the way he thought about that relationship. Being an indigenous woman means that you understand that women have an equal position, an important position, that they have an important role, that they deserve an important role and that our community recognizes that, that it is perfectly acceptable for you to identify yourself only as an indigenous woman because inherent in that is an understanding of equality and gender roles, something that does not exist in mainstream white society. If it’s the label that makes you uncomfortable, I think clearly, everything you do and your values and what you put into practice, is what could be called feminist. They are just labels, being an indigenous woman covers all those things.
MATIKA: Yes, and it’s quite complicated too. You know, in some communities that I’ve been through we can see that the fingerprinting of colonialism has become so deeply ingrained that we often adopt its principles and believe that they are ours. So patriarchy is alive and kicking in indigenous territory. And you know, in many of our communities we had to adopt a Western style of government to maintain our sovereign status, that style of government that is mostly male dominated, and the electoral system. You know, our people were equally affected by Western concepts and ideas, those systems of thought have not been entirely suppressed from our memory or subtracted from the way we act as governments, as communities, as societies. I would love to see the original order restored in my own community, that we move away from the electoral system and return to a clan chief leadership, a matriarchal system, in which the clan mothers elect the chiefs. To me that’s a pretty functional system and is accountable to the clan mothers. Like in Haudenosaunee territory, where they still practice a traditional form of government, and where the clan mothers still elect the chiefs, and the best part of that for me is that if the chiefs don’t act right, the clan mothers can remove them from the chieftainship. Does that word exist? Headquarters? Boss, boss? Headship?
ADRIENNE: Yes, the role of the boss.
MATIKA: They get the bosses. I think it’s great that there is another way of doing things, in a functional way that can be restored. I would love to work towards that.
ADRIENNE: I think people don’t know that our constitutions were a requirement of the federal government. In the 1930s, with the Indian Reorganization Act, the federal government said that to be a people you needed to have a tribal constitution. And they distributed some generic constitutions that were modeled after the U.S. Constitution, and they said, this is how your governments are going to function, you are going to have a principal leader, and you are going to have a council that is elected this way, and if you want to create your own constitution, you can do it, but we have to approve it. But of course, that time was a time of much turmoil for our communities, they were displaced from their lands and that sort of thing. So many peoples still have these generic tribal constitutions that do not conform at all to their traditional forms of government. It was never understood that, obviously, our societies functioned throughout millennia, before submitting to those pieces of paper that established this current electoral system. And it makes sense for some of the communities that continue to use them as it fits very well with their traditional form of government. Traditionally, they had a senior leader and a council that functioned in a similar way where things were done by consensus and by vote, so it was reasonable. However, there are more than 570 different nations, and they all had different forms of government. Then with those systems came the presumption derived from patriarchy that, of course, you’re going to follow the Western model, which presupposes that men will be in control and that is carried out through democratic voting, quote unquote, but that doesn’t necessarily coincide with traditional values.
MATIKA: When we walk the path of recovery, we begin by learning about our origins, and that is true for indigenous and non-indigenous people, because the space we occupy has a history of indigenous creation and a place-based identity. We should all know about the creation story and about the place-based identity of the space we occupy, and discover our role and our place within that story, and how we can contribute to the rebirth of that commitment.
ADRIENNE: Sure. That made me think of Wayne Yang and Eve Tuck and their article titled “Decolonization is not a metaphor“. It’s a pretty powerful article that I use with my students where they talk about how the big difference between Indians and settlers is that Indians have origin stories while settlers have colonization stories. So we have as indigenous people the history of where we came from and how we came to be from that place. And for the settlers, the only stories they have are of how their ancestors came to this place through a process of colonization, and that that is the big difference between settlers and indigenous people, that relationship to the land, and being part of the land, coming from the land, as opposed to coming to it in a process of settlement, and that relationship really shows in all the ways that settlers relate to the land and the people that come from it.
Conclusion
MATIKA: Adrienne, do I have a question for you, Adrienne? Can you tell us a little bit about where you live and what you are currently doing?
ADRIENNE: Sure. I guess it is important. I live in Providence, Rhode Island, which is Wampanoag and Narragansett territory. I am on the faculty at Brown University, where I teach American Studies and Ethnic Studies and where I am one of three faculty of Native descent, three Native women in charge of sustaining [el proyecto]. I have had the opportunity to teach really wonderful students about indigenous education, about indigenous representations, about new media, critical race theory. And well, Matika. Can you tell me about something you see in your travels and in your work that makes you excited about the future of the indigenous territory?
MATIKA: Well, you know, I’m really excited to see all the work that all of our communities are doing, like the artists that I’ve had the opportunity to meet, like Jared Yazzie and Louis Gong’s work, and the films that are being made, like. [falta el nombre] who was working on an interesting film called “Call Me By My Name”. And I’m very excited about all the upcoming projects and creative products, and I can’t wait to see how they will be unveiled. And I am also very excited by the fact that we are living in a time when it is legal to be indigenous. You know, I went on a canoe trip recently and the most beautiful thing happened the night before it ended. One family brought a canoe carved from a tree, and these boys had spent three years making this canoe in order to give it to someone. And then these guys had some tears in their eyes, of joy, and I’m sure also a little bit of sadness and loss for what they were doing, and as they were carrying it, and it was well into the night, they tell us, “We did this for you, thank you for having us.” And then the old man came and told us, “You know, when I was a kid, I never saw anything like that. I never saw canoes on the water. I never had a chance to listen to my songs. I never felt this feeling. I never stood before a council of elders to introduce me to my own language. Now I look at these kids. And I realize that they will never have to say that, they will always carry this inside of them, in their memory, that when they were kids, they made a canoe. They sang the songs that gave it momentum. They know how to speak the words to our ancestors and they know the prayers.” And he said, “I can die now feeling happy, knowing that this is what awaits us in the future.” And I don’t think I could have said it better.
A salute to the Tacoma Art Museum!
MATIKA: The first season of All My Relations, is being filmed at the Tacoma Art Museum, yayyyy!
ADRIENNE: And we are so grateful to have the opportunity to be in this space, because ultimately, it’s a space that Matika has had a long relationship with.
MATIKA: In my opinion, I think it is the best model and the best possible outcome for a relationship between an artist and an institution like this one. I think the institution has a responsibility, especially, by the fact that it is illegally squatting on Puyallup Nation land, to foster, enliven, nurture and give back to this Native community, and I think the Tacoma Art Museum has done a splendid job of that.
ADRIENNE: Well, thank you all very much for listening and joining us. We are very grateful for your support for this new project.
MATIKA: No doubt. We adore them and are very grateful. Tune in for our next few episodes in which we’ll welcome our first studio guests, like the amazing Valerie Segrest, and start thinking about the things we put inside our bodies. It’s not what you’re thinking, I’m talking about the food. We are talking about indigenous dishes, you will love it. To support this podcast, subscribe, give a rating on iTunes, comment, share with your friends, your mother, share with all your relations. Don’t forget to follow us on Instagram at @allmyrelationspodcast. We have also prepared a detailed blog post to accompany this episode on our website, allmyrelationspodcast.com, where you can find links to comment and communicate with us. You can follow us individually, of course. Dr. Keene has his Twitter account @NativeApprops, and I’m @MatikaWilbur or @project_562.
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