November 21, 2023 • 69 mins
In episode 1585, Jack and guest co-host Joelle Monique are joined by Professor of Alaska Native Languages at the University of Alaska Southeast and host of The Tongue Unbroken, X̱ʼunei Lance Twitchell, to discuss… Indigenous Languages: The State Of Them, The Impact Of Representation In Media On Marginalized Communities and more!
READ Adam Tod Brown's Ace Of Base Article: How A Pop Band Tricked 9 Million Americans Into Being Nazis
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello the Internet, and welcome to Season three, fourteen, Episode
two of Daily Zai Guys Stay production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
This is a podcast where we dig.
Speaker 1 (00:11):
A deep avenue Marria's share Council. It is Tuesday, November
twenty first, twenty twenty three, and my name is Jack
O'Brien aka Potatoes O'Brien. Let's go with a savory potato
dish for this Thanksgiving week and I'm thrilled to be
joined by a guest co host who is the producer
(00:34):
behind shows like Fake Doctor's Real Friends and along with
Anajosea and other and many others, the Next Up podcast Initiative.
She's a brilliant writer who you can read a Vulture,
the av cluv teen Vogue. You've heard her on Pop
Culture Happy Hour, and most importantly on this podcast. It's
Joe Elmony Happy Tuesday, Tabby Tuesday. Have you Tuesday, Joel? Yes,
(01:05):
that's right? And what you you will be having? Turkey Columbia. Yeah,
it amazing.
Speaker 3 (01:14):
Play some bake rolls. You know we're keeping it simple.
I think we ordered a ham. Yeah you know, I.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
Think we're order a ham. Yes, have ordered it yet?
I need to go order some ham. Hold on and
we're back. The ham's all sold out. I'm coming to
your Thanksgiving. My wife's family is coming into town. So
(01:40):
we usually have a Korean feast and then a handful
of kind of small traditional Thanksgiving sides and like one
sort of meat.
Speaker 3 (01:50):
But like an American tapas.
Speaker 1 (01:53):
I think, oh, for sure, it's so good. But yeah,
my kids are like starting to call it Turkey Day,
and like mashed potatoes Day was something says this morning. Yeah,
I showed him the damn Charlie Brown Thanksgiving and that
blew it for me because I do typically serve popcorn
(02:16):
and little little things of candy instead of just whatever
I have and on the shelves.
Speaker 3 (02:22):
I like calling it Turkey Day because then it's just
the day we eat turkey, and there's nothing else counting around.
It's just this is the day we eat turkey. It's
a day that's been solidified to eat turkey with your family.
I take no joy in anything Unit says has ever
done in its entire existence. It's a hot mess over here.
But you know, then there's a turkey on the table
(02:43):
and that's always nice.
Speaker 1 (02:45):
Yeah, you know, it's pretty and it's not letting us
who don't prepare well off the hook. It's like there
better be some fucking turkey. All right, well, Joelle, we
are thrilled to be joined in our third seat by
one of our favorite guests on the Daily Zeitgeist, a
professor of Alaska Native languages at the University of Alaska
(03:08):
Southeast and the host of the podcast The Tongue Unbroken,
which will be dropping season two on all our asses
in the not too destined future. Season one is us
so worth your time? Please welcome back to the show,
Doctor June Lance Twitch.
Speaker 4 (03:25):
I saw the saw and it opened up my eyes.
D colon Nizes, nothing can stand it. White supremacies underhand.
I saw the sigh and it opened up my eyes.
De Calonnize. When you're gonna smarten up and give the
(03:49):
land back to whom it belongs, come tell me where
does it belong?
Speaker 1 (03:57):
Why all the bomb drops? I was?
Speaker 4 (04:04):
I thought of that while I was walking my dogs.
I walk my dogs at night and it's snowing, like
we got blizzard conditions, which is fine because it's Alaska.
But I was just thinking, it's like, I gotta have
some kind of cute like jingle or something. I like
my goal is to take a whole bunch of pop
songs and just make them decolonial anthems.
Speaker 1 (04:24):
So they're working on over here. I wonder if Bass
would approve. I'm not sure. I haven't you know, I'd
like to, just haven't checked with them.
Speaker 4 (04:32):
I'll reach out, say what's your standpoint on this whole
colonization thing. Then I'll decide whether or not.
Speaker 3 (04:38):
Have a secret. I don't know if I'm just talking
internet rumors right now.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
I don't know if it's Internet rumors are not, but
I do think that one of the members had a
Nazi pass and there is like some weird similarities between
like Ace of Basses, it was like the name of
the Nazi submarine base during World War Two.
Speaker 4 (05:03):
If they turned out to be like Nazi supporters and
I just took their ship for.
Speaker 1 (05:07):
The Yeah take yeah. Adam Todd Brown from Unpopular Opinion
podcast has written wrote a really cool article about that
for us back at Cracked and has a lot of
It's worth checking out because it's definitely makes you to
(05:27):
take a look. And also like All that She Wants
Is Another Baby was their other hit and it was
basically a portrait of a welfare Queen. It was kind
of what first song, Yes, those aces of Bassis, The
Aces of Bassis. When when you say blizzard conditions and
(05:49):
you're talking Alaska, what are we looking at?
Speaker 4 (05:52):
Yeah, so Juno is not the snowiest place in Alaska.
We are We are the most how did you say it?
We get the most precipitation per day.
Speaker 1 (06:03):
I think.
Speaker 4 (06:04):
So there's some there's some communities south of us that
get the most rain. We're talking like one hundred and
forty inches a year, and so we don't really compare
to that, but we have the most rainy days I think,
out of anywhere on the Northwest coast.
Speaker 1 (06:17):
And so we've got some folks.
Speaker 4 (06:19):
Who are not from Juno, and when that came out
in the paper, they're kind of walking around head down sad,
you know, because I think what I try to tell
people is the weather is not an emotional barometer. So
just because it's raining doesn't mean you had to be sad.
I don't care what the commercials say. And so I
was like, we're the champions. Because on the newspaper says
(06:41):
Juno has the most rainy days on the Northwest coast.
I was like, we did it. We did it folks.
And so for us to get a bunch of snow
kind of messes us up a little bit. And so
we're talking like sixteen to twenty four inches in a day,
which is a lot for us.
Speaker 1 (06:57):
Yeah, so it's a lot for most people. That is,
in my professional opinion, too much snow.
Speaker 4 (07:05):
Yeah, So this and so this will also see like
how much have you been putting off for winter? Because
we've got to get ready for winter here. You got
to get your heating system looked at. You got to
get your shovels out from wherever they are. You got
to put the broom thing in your car. You got
to make sure you've got wipers that are worth the
dam and aren't you know, just faded pieces of cracked
(07:26):
rubber that are trying to like scratch some stuff off
your windows.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
Coming for me with that description that is you're coming
from my wipers, I guess because my wipers are like
curved and only making contact with the windshield at the
very edges right now. But you can get away with
it in Los Angeles, you know.
Speaker 4 (07:44):
For for Youno again, like we're really wet and it
does get cold, like we're right on the ocean, so
if it gets twenty ten zero, that's cold because it's
just something about the humidity and the cold that does it.
And if you go out boat on the ocean, that's
that's pretty serious stuff, the.
Speaker 3 (08:03):
Coldest you've ever experienced.
Speaker 4 (08:04):
But so if you go inland from here, like so
we have Thlingett communities that are in what is now
Canada for some reason. I say, for some reason, because
it's all thing get onie, like it's all our land.
And then they come and like cut it in half
and say you need a passport to get to this side.
Speaker 1 (08:22):
And so to go down the street.
Speaker 4 (08:23):
Yeah, but we'll have language classes. We have folks who
call in from Canada and we'll start, you know, having
conversations and we'll be complaining about the weather, as humans
like to do, and we'll say, yeah, it's cold, and
then they'll say, yeah, it's forty below here and that's
celsius and forty below is like the level point. It's like, yes,
a matter if you're doing fahrenheit or cel.
Speaker 1 (08:43):
Fahrenheit and celsius meet. I just discovered this. Yeah, fahrenheit
and celsia should never meet in a in a temperature.
Speaker 3 (08:50):
The coldest i've ever experienced. It was like twenty eleven
there was snow apocalypse in Chicago, so it's snowed all
day and then overnight the temperature just plummeted, so like
cars like froze on. Like Short Drive, which is our
longest street that runs along the lake, it was bare.
I was like, this is new levels of just complete
(09:12):
icy coldness. I can't even I can't imagine that being like, yeah,
this is sort of our average around here every days.
You gotta It's like when I watch people in Russia
and they're like, no, it's fine, I have a fur
coat walking around. It's gonna like this is the human
body is incredible.
Speaker 1 (09:28):
Fur coat, jogging pants. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (09:30):
Two fun things about like forty to fifty below is
because we lived in Fairbanks for a while, my family
and I, And so if you open the door, you
can see the cold roll in like fog like it
just like rolls in really quickly into the house. Like
you can see the cold, see.
Speaker 1 (09:46):
The air like kind of it has a different quality
to it. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (09:50):
Yeah, and then amazing you could take a hot beverage
like coffee or tea and go outside and throw it
in the air and it just turns into steam. It
just turns into like a little cloud.
Speaker 3 (10:00):
We tried the experiment when it was very cold with
bubbles where we would try to freeze bubbles instantly, which
was kind of fun. And you just blow a bubble
and then it icicles will just form around it because.
Speaker 1 (10:13):
It just falls to the ground like you.
Speaker 3 (10:16):
Blow it on like a surface where your mouth canch.
I guess you could be ground level. We had like
a little ledge on our patio so that it had
some time to cross over, but it took like seconds.
Speaker 2 (10:26):
It was crazy.
Speaker 1 (10:27):
Turns into Christmas tree ornaments.
Speaker 3 (10:29):
Basically perfect, yes, exactly exactly. Prepare for winter. Everybody is coming.
Speaker 1 (10:35):
Not for me. I'm not doing fuck all that. I
have to assume that, like all the schools are closed
down with sixteen inches of snow.
Speaker 4 (10:48):
Like, uh no, the schools are like they you know,
everybody was talking last well, I guess there's these like
Facebook groups and so people were saying, hey, school canna
be canceled, and I think a bunch of kind of
old schoolers this part were like nah, man nah, and
you know, and people are like, well, I got to
figure out what to do. How am I going to
get my kids there am I going to get them home?
I lived in this one place and the school closed
(11:09):
and they had to just sleep in the school. But yeah,
but we get snow, like they'll be out plowing this stuff.
They're out there right now. Like the people who like
the city of Juno and the and the state of Alaska,
the folks who like work on roads, they'll get this
stuff cleared out. Although there's a community anchorage which they
are not good at plowing their streets, but in.
Speaker 1 (11:32):
And you know, it's like some local it is. It's
so it's yeah, there's anchorage sucks plowing their streets.
Speaker 4 (11:41):
Well, there was a guy and he's like this super
conservative politician and he won. He won, and his whole
thing is like budget cuts, and I think he ran
on this these platforms of kind of hate and budget cuts,
which which seems to be kind of a conservative platform.
And so now the streets don't get plowed. And so
there was some sort of it was a great little
(12:02):
Internet picture and it showed like be careful what you
asked for was one of his campaign signs, and so
there's a picture of him it says be careful what
you ask for, and like just a ship ton of snow,
like on the roads because you people and people can't
really get around. But the school's here, Like they'll usually
send us a text like six in the morning and
they're like, yeah, just dust it off, bro and get
(12:25):
your kids to school. But the after school stuff will
be closed because you know, get too wild. But the
school itself like, let's go get.
Speaker 1 (12:32):
To tunnel and get tunnel in folks. That's that's amazing.
I lived in Kentucky for a while and it's like
thinks of itself as southern, but it still gets snow
most winters and it just has to be the rumor
of snow and they will shut down school for like
a week. They're just like, we're gonna be this is
(12:56):
this is a mess. We're a mess during a snowstorm.
Speaker 3 (13:02):
Their highways are already terrible, so even the hint of
snowfall is just chaos.
Speaker 1 (13:07):
Forty eight hours of traffic down exactly. It's like that
exact longitudinal or latitudinal line of like Lexington, Kentucky, Atlanta.
You don't want to get caught there during the snowstorm. Well,
we're going to get into some of the things, some
of the things just generally that we wanted to. We've
(13:29):
been talking about wanting to talk to you about hun
every time you come on the show. So we're going
to devote a whole episode to kind of talking about
We're going to get into Buffy, Saint Marie, the concept
of pretendians or Native movies, what's the new Scorsese movie
Killers of the Flower Moon, And then just indigenous languages
(13:50):
and the role that language has played in genocide, among
many other things. But before we get to any of it,
we do like to get to know you a little
bit better and ask you what is something from your
search history?
Speaker 4 (14:05):
Yeah, so my search history is usually a lot of
policy for the United States government and trying to get
to the bottom of it, you know. So there's some
different things I was thinking about with boarding schools and
how did these boarding schools run, who was running them?
And so we're doing some There's a group that I'm
(14:26):
involved with, a council called the Alaska Native Language Preservation
and Advisory Council, and we're talking about the history of
boarding schools and what they were for Native American peoples
and for a lot of people that might not be
something that they have to think about on a regular
basis is that there were schools where children were forcibly
taken from their parents and brought to these places and
(14:49):
completely stripped of their identity. And so if you want
to just sort of like think of scenes from movies
about Auschwitz or about the Holocaust that was happening here
just to brown people. And so a lot of people
don't pay attention to it. So sometimes we got to
take a look at this stuff. And so some of
(15:10):
the things that we've been searching for is could we
make a list of every boarding school that was running
in Alaska, and then could we have some sort of
acknowledgment in healing ceremony with these places because they were
run by the United States government, and they're also run
by religious organizations, Christian organizations in the United States who
(15:32):
were colonizing and trying to eliminate Indigenous languages and indigenous cultures.
And so there's a wonderful colleague of mind. His name
is doctor Waki Charles, and he teaches the Yuchten language,
the Yupik language. He's at Fairbanks and he was at
one of these schools. So it did happen long time ago,
(15:53):
but it happened for a long time as well. So
there are people alive today who went to these schools,
and he talks about how he went there and how
his mother had no idea where he was going. She
didn't speak English, she had no idea when he was
coming home. They just took him and they took his
clothes and they put a number. His name was taken,
(16:14):
and his new name was number twelve, and number twelve
was written on all of his clothes. Number twelve was
written on all of his belongings, and that's what he
was referred to. And so he talked about, you know,
and where he went. So his family is from western Alaska,
which is very far from where we are, but he
was brought here to a community called Wrangele, to a
(16:34):
school called Wrangel Institute. And at some of these schools,
these teachers have written books. I'm not going to say
their name. I'm not going to say the name of
the book because it's trash. But in the book they say,
you know, so this is basically their memoir of teaching
in Alaska. They said, we couldn't get them to stop
speaking their own language, and we wanted them to learn English,
(16:56):
but we developed and this is their where its a
heroic remedy, which was to take these two chemicals, one
that's very bitter and one that burns the inside of
your mouth, and we would soak a rag in that
and then when one of them started speaking their language,
we would stuff the rag in their mouth.
Speaker 1 (17:15):
So it's stuff like that.
Speaker 4 (17:16):
But every now and then I'll be on the internet
looking for something that's not horrible. But I think people
need to look at this and not be afraid of
examining it, because as a nation, if we don't say, like,
this was part of our history, this was something that
we did. This is what education was for Native people.
I think if you don't examine that, then it never
(17:37):
fully changes into something else.
Speaker 3 (17:40):
I can I ask you about acknowledgement, and because I
feel like every time he knows part of like the
black community, there are a lot of times people like,
what does acknowledging slavery do for you? There's like this
very it happened forever ago, it's history. Why do we
need these things? And I'm just curious. You know, you're
(18:02):
such a large part of your community organizing, and what
does for you? What do these acknowledgments mean?
Speaker 4 (18:07):
Well, part of these acknowledgments are to say. Colonization is
an act of like complete dehumanization on every possible aspect.
So you have to dehumanize the people that you're doing this.
And when we talk about colonization, we're not talking about like, oh,
let's go move over here and build a house and
(18:28):
search for our own personal freedom, which is usually what
we're sort of sold on is life was tough. So
they found this place where they could make it work.
And they had belt buckles on their hats or something.
Speaker 1 (18:39):
You know, we're not really taught a whole lot about that. Shoes,
everything was covered in belt buckles. Just get us more buckles.
How the fuck am I going to find enough belt buckles?
Maybe that was a problem, and they keep expanding.
Speaker 4 (18:54):
They see all these native people, like these motherfuckers, they
don't got no buckles.
Speaker 1 (18:57):
We gotta wipe them out, you know.
Speaker 4 (18:58):
So there's probably more complic But the problem is is
in order to really like completely try to annihilate someone,
you have to dehumanize them because the population has to
figure out how to be on board with that. Because
you can get individuals who can subscribe to bascist beliefs
and say, yeah, like fucking wipe them out. But to
(19:21):
get like a whole population to do that, you have
to sort of create this collective denial, which I think
the United States is very good at collective denial.
Speaker 1 (19:31):
And so we're not.
Speaker 4 (19:35):
Just a shining example, right, And so one is just saying, Okay,
this happened, and this is something we have to rectify.
Because if I burned your house down and then we
were going to stay friends or just even live next
to each other, and if I never talked about it
and nothing ever happened to me, that would be so
(19:56):
it would be awkward at the minute least, right, see me,
like burn my house down, your fucker, And I was
just like, hey, I'm just getting my newspaper.
Speaker 1 (20:04):
What why you gotta yell at me? Right?
Speaker 4 (20:05):
And so, but then also like how if that is
part of the foundation story of the United States of America,
then how do you reconcile with ending that violence against
people's if you'd never even look at the thing. And
so to say like, let's let's actually look at that
(20:27):
one of the things that can be really tremendously healing,
because I don't think we talk enough about any of
this stuff. But the colonizer also must dehumanize in order
to do that kind of stuff, because on a day
to day basis, you don't just I don't think you
don't just walk into someone's kitchen and eat all their
food and slap them in the face and just like
claim their kitchen as theirs as yours. But we've done
(20:50):
that collectively, right, Like colonizers have done that to indigenous peoples.
And so I think there's opportunities when you embrace decolonization
for the descendants of the colonizers to also reconnect with humanity.
But I think they're really terrified to I was given
some talks the other day and I was saying, I
really like science fiction films. I like horror films, but
(21:13):
sometimes if you watch a science fiction movie, it's like
there's these white people and then aliens come or some
kind of monster and they're gonna like take their take
all their stuff and take their language and take everything.
It's like this it's a horror you know. Or there's
some huge apocalypse, right, And so these post apocalyptal kind
(21:34):
of films I think about them, but I watch them,
I'm like, yeah, yeah, that's we've lived that. We've done that, right,
Like they came, they took the stuff like, you know,
it must be scary for you, but it's our reality.
But I think about that stuff a lot because I
think as we talk about concepts like decolonization, there are
probably quite a few white people who think, oh, now
(21:54):
they're gonna put us on reservations and make us stop
speaking always.
Speaker 3 (21:58):
To go to They're like, well, if we acknowledge it,
then there'll be white slavery, Like I don't want to
own slaves, like my answers to survived, you, why would
I put someone use in such a ridiculous thought?
Speaker 1 (22:10):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4 (22:11):
I mean there was a survey that came out of
Harvard a while ago and there was like interviewing I
guess people in the South, and they're saying, do you
think that white people have it harder now than black
people did during the era of slavery, and that there
was a lot of them that checked the box yes, Like, yeah,
it's real hard for us. People are real mad at us,
(22:33):
so that's got to be really hard, right. So, but
I think the acknowledgment, as well as saying like could
we become something else? Like there's you know, about five
hundred languages that were on this continent in California was
the most diverse, is the most linguistically diverse part of
North America, and every one of those languages is almost gone.
(22:57):
And so as we look at that, like what happens
when a language is gone? What happens when a species
is gone? And I want to be careful with that
because a lot of times Native Americans, you know, if
you go to some big museum, we're not there with
like Monet and these you know, whoever else is making
a bunch of art. Right, We're over by the wolves
(23:18):
and the moose and you know, we're by the animals.
Speaker 1 (23:21):
And so yeah, you taught you said the different distinction
between art and artifact and the tongue unbroken.
Speaker 4 (23:27):
But yeah, yeah, right, And so we see like the
way that dehumanization enters into academics as well, where you know,
like white people get literature and we get stories, and
white people get art, and we get artifacts, and white
people get science and we get ecological knowledge. Right, and
so trying to sort of also just say now let's
(23:47):
just like everything is a thing, and let's just sort
of say, yeah, we can have multiple perspectives, and then
you can also but you know, one of the things
where science has a hard time with us is they'll say, oh, oh,
is that a medicine? But like, yeah, that the thing
that comes out of a tree. You could put it
on a wound and they'll seal it right up. Oh well,
how do you guys know that? Like, oh, because Raven
(24:09):
got that information from the sea otters and he tricked
them and now we know it. And that's that's fine
for us, But I think for science they need some
sort they need They need probably a white guy in
a lab coat.
Speaker 1 (24:22):
Yeah, story of a white guy and a lab coat. Yeah,
with like a bad mustache and like weird glasses that's
strapped to his ears or something. All right, let's take
a quick break and we'll come back. We'll keep talking
about this. We'll be right back, and we're back. And
(24:48):
for first of all, we talked. We started off this
episode talking about Thanksgiving, and I'd just be interested in hearing,
like as to your metaphor of the person who burns
down your house else and then it is just like
expects you to be cool with it, and it continues
living there and then they're like, hey, we're having a
(25:09):
party to celebrate that time I burned down your house
and you are cool with it. Do you want to
come over or don't come over and just just continue
being cool with it? What is Thanksgiving like for you?
And like where you live? Yeah?
Speaker 4 (25:26):
Yeah, And colonization is so interesting because there's some things
I think Indigenous peoples accept and some things that they reject.
And so one of my examples is, you know, we
get people keep track of our blood quantum, the government
keeps track of I've got a card, I've got to
actually let's say what my fraction is of my indigenous identity.
(25:48):
And so that's not something I think that very many
people get, but that's something Indigenous people get. And that
tells you whether or not you qualify for things or
if you can go shoot a seal. And so a
lot of times as we look at that stuff, and
blood quantum is what it's called, and so sometimes we'll
be like, fuck blood quantum, man, you can't measure me,
can't measure my indigenous identity. But then we got a
(26:10):
dog and I'll be like, this dog is one hundred
percent German shepherd. I'll show you the papers. It's a
pure bread, right, right. So some things we reject in
some things we accept and sometimes those are similar things.
And so for us, we we eat, we throw down
a turkey. I mean, that's just something I grew up with.
And then we'll we'll do stuffing, we'll do all that stuff.
They have thinget names, and the thlinget names are not
(26:32):
great because when we saw that turkey and it had
you know, and turkey is are indigenous to North America,
but they're not indigenous to where we are, and so
it's got that sort of long thing that hangs down
from its beak or whatever. I don't always called the
gobbler gobbler. Yeah, so they called it, which means it's
not news, which is not a nice name. We're usually
(26:54):
so respectful to our food. But then I had an
elder over. We had this big Thanksgiving dinner and we
were stuffing the bird, or maybe we're pulling stuffing out
of the bird because we're having the dinner. I said,
and thing in I said, well we gonna call this
the stuff because you know, I don't that's not a
great word either, just in English. And then we're like, well,
(27:16):
you know, I think you kind of put it in
the turkey's ass. And then then you like, you know,
we mix a bunch of stuff. It's yummy, And so
we were we started up with like the bread that's
in the turkey's butt, and then we end up with
like turkey poop. Yeah, and so it's like like, okay,
we're just gonna have to stick with stuffing for somebody.
Speaker 1 (27:35):
Stuff.
Speaker 4 (27:36):
But at our university, some of our students had a
great idea, which is, you know, there was a time
when universities usually had Thanksgiving break and Christmas break and
Easter break, right, and so as we look at that,
we say, well, a university is not a Christian institution,
so we don't need to have those we can have.
(27:58):
So at our university, we had winter break and then
we had spring break, and so we said, well, why
don't we have fall break instead of Thanksgiving break? And
what was interesting again coming back to colonial overreactions, which
are you know, this was a classic colonial overreaction, I think.
So we pitched this idea, everybody's on board and was like, yeah,
(28:19):
that's that's great because not everybody acknowledges, you know, the
story behind Thanksgiving, which was you know, sometimes they'll say, oh, well,
these Native Americans and these pilgrims had a great meal
and they they really shook hands and figured it out.
I guess you know which is. I remember I saw
this some sort of little clip. I can't find it anymore.
(28:42):
I have to do some internet digging, if you all
can do some deep dives. There was this little skit
of these kids re enacting the first Thanksgiving and the
pilgrims murder all the Indigenous people, and it's it's you
could laugh at it because it's so horrible, but it's
also like just sort of goes in the against what
we're usually taught, which is these artificial narratives of just
(29:04):
how nice white people were here.
Speaker 1 (29:06):
Yeah, that's also in Adam's family values, by the way.
Speaker 4 (29:09):
Oh that's right, that's right where she's you know, she
burns down the village, right.
Speaker 1 (29:13):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (29:13):
And so, but as we had this one meeting, we said, yeah, well,
all we're doing is on the calendar of the university,
it won't say Thanksgiving closure, I'll say Fall closure. That's
all we're trying to do, right, And someone says, well,
I think the students should be able to eat turkey,
and I said, bro, I never said anything about turkey,
(29:33):
Like I don't. Yeah, like the like they could serve
whatever kind of food they want to no one suggesting
that changes. And then he said, well, I think people
should be able to gather with their families over this
break and I said, I never said they, Like, I
don't know where you're getting this information, Like it's literally
just changing what the thing is called on a calendar.
I'm not going to go into your house and like
(29:54):
make you disperse, like I don't understand. There's no there's
no Gestapo coming for your Thanksgiving gathering and so and
then that same person he wanted to talk to me more,
so I gave him my phone number, and when I
picked up the phone, he said, thanks for taking the time.
I was like, yeah, like I'm happy to talk about
this stuff. He said, I just don't think you know
(30:16):
how hard it is to be a Christian these days.
And I'm thinking, this is not the conversation I want
to have, but okay, let's listen. Because you know, the
same thing with the War on Christmas and this this
idea that Christianity is under threat, Like I can drive
this one loop in town and I think I hit
like twelve churches.
Speaker 1 (30:36):
I'm like, where are they going? Right?
Speaker 3 (30:39):
I think what's particularly wild about that? Is Thanksgiving is
not a Christian holiday in Rome. The Vatican's not preparing
a Thanksgiving. Damiel bizarre to equate the two. I don't
that's wild to me, that's wild.
Speaker 1 (30:55):
Yeah, you made this metaphor in season one of the
Tongue I'm broken about they take your land, the colonialists
to take your land. And when you say, and then like,
build a beautiful home on it. And then when you say, like, okay,
I'm going to also build a home here, they say,
you can't because that will destroy my home. Like and
(31:17):
I don't know, it's just really resonated to me as
just someone who lives in this culture, Like you know
the things I've been hearing in conversations around Gaza as well,
and you know that people aren't able to continue to
live there because somehow their continued existence is devaluing to
(31:37):
the existence of the people who are kind of forcing
them off their land. And it just it seems to
have this same corrupted, overall logic over and over again repeatedly.
Speaker 4 (31:50):
Yeah, I think some of the things that are happening
over there are really difficult for people in the United States,
because I think the United States, it's very easy to
hate people who are Jewish, and it's very easy to
hate people who are Muslim and so, and that's very
easy to hate people who are brown. It's kind of
baked into the culture, and you have to you have
(32:11):
to consciously move against these things at all times in
order to sort of not by default have these these
feelings of hatred or otherness. And so I think it's
really hard because they're like, oh, well, what side do
I pick? Because these guys look kind of like me,
so they pick those guys. But also, you know, there's
just so many different things that are coded in language,
(32:33):
that are coded in film and entertainment, where we're supposed
to like just hate these people and other them. And
so I think it's when people look at this stuff,
we see so much violence, and we hear about violence,
and we like, well, yeah, they're in hospitals, so we
got to blow up the hospitals so that we can
we can get the bad guys, you know. And so
(32:56):
but I don't know if that's really a heroic tactic.
I don't know if that's a tactic that's really has
an ethical sort of grounding, and you know, to say,
like it doesn't matter who's there we need to get
this small group of people, and so we'll kill all
these people to get them. And so there's some things
I think that really ring true for a lot of
Indigenous peoples, which is battle over land. But then there's
(33:19):
some things that I think for a lot of our
indigenous communities might be difficult for us to understand, like well,
whose land is it? Because they crossed an ocean to
get here, and so that was pretty clear. You know,
I know there's some people who someone people like to
tag me in things. And so there was this wonderful
news article about a Native American language center that was
(33:40):
starting an organ but then it was through an organ newspaper.
And then all these people from Oregon, which is a
place with its own problems because I think until not
too long ago, it was like illegal for black people
to live there, and like, you know, it's it's a
complicated place. That was in southwest Organ and there was
(34:01):
there's a road there called Dead Indian Memorial Road, and
they have this, yeah, they have this big sign that says,
you know this place, this road used to be called
Dead Indian Road. We realized that was not a sensitive name,
so we changed the name to Dead Indian Memorial Road and.
Speaker 1 (34:21):
Oregon. I was you were so close and you landed
so far.
Speaker 4 (34:29):
And so some of the problems I think that are
present in a lot of Native American communities, which are
probably present all through the United States, is we don't
get educated on the history of the Middle East. We
don't get educated on why are people in this fight
over the land and about nations and belonging. And people
(34:50):
are very quick to say, oh, you're anti Semitic just
because you're saying, like, don't blow up hospitals.
Speaker 1 (34:57):
And then that seems to be the one point that
you can just whether you know a lot about the
history or not. It just feels like the one thing
that I feel like we've been consistent on on this
show is just like, but anytime there's killing of innocent people,
like there wasn't October seventh or has been since in Gaza,
(35:20):
like that's pretty self evidently not the way to go,
and like something that should be opposed in all its forms.
Speaker 4 (35:28):
But yeah, yeah, and it's complicated too, because you've got people,
you've got people of color over whether you've got it's
a real mixing zone. It's a real mixing zone. And
so but also, like you guys are talking about this
the other day, we grew up in the nineteen eighties,
like who are the bad guys in films? It was
Russians and Muslims, right, and so probably more Muslims and Russians.
(35:49):
And so I think there's a lot of stuff that
you can attach to to just hate people because they
are Muslim and you don't understand that. And so instead
of sort of looking into who are these people and
what do they do and how can I get.
Speaker 1 (36:03):
To know them more?
Speaker 4 (36:04):
And again can you connect to humanity? But it all
gets very quickly twisted as well, through a bunch of
different distorted lenses.
Speaker 1 (36:14):
Yeah, one thing that I wanted to drive home is
just you know, in talking about the you know, erasure
of cultural value and languages as a cultural and linguistic genocide.
Like you mentioned throughout the first season of The Tongueunbroken
that youth suicide rates among Native Alaskan youse is tragically high.
(36:42):
And it's something that you hear a lot in the
in you know, accounts of people who are being actively
oppressed and who not not just in physically, but you know,
in these ideologically like philosophical ideological conditions that are inhospitable
(37:02):
to the human like to human life like that, and
I just I feel like that is clarifying in a
way that this erasure of identity and the choking off
of the ability to create meaning for oneself and identity
for oneself causes people to actually lose their lives, causes
children to like harm themselves, and that just connecting those
(37:26):
two things, Like there are a lot of schools of
philosophy and psychology that identify the search for meanings like
one of the most important human needs, like it will
sustain you through the prison camps in Auschwitz, but without
it you can't survive anything. You know, you can't survive
(37:47):
daily life. And it feels like a lot of the
things that you're talking about in the boarding schools and
just throughout the history of colonization are very systemic exams
samples of attacks on those things that make a life possible,
make it possible to live and find mean it.
Speaker 4 (38:09):
Yeah, last week was the birthday of a man Noeled
Kajakte's English name was Walter Sobolev and he lived to
be one hundred and two years old, and he was
so fun to talk to, like his Thlingate was so
good and he was a pastor in a church for
a long time. They closed his church because he would
(38:29):
do his sermons and fling it as well as English,
and so I guess like but on that note, the
Presbyterian Church, who has a hand in language and culture suppression,
a bunch of horrible stuff in this part of the world.
They they held a community listening session, and they held
several of them. Then they came back a month or
(38:52):
two later and they said they made a public apology
and they said they were wrong. It was racist, and
they said, you know, like, it wasn't our decision, but
it was our institution, and we recognize that and we apologize.
And then they made a million dollar commitment to language
and culture revitalization in our region. And that stuff is
important because Walter Soboloff he used to say, people who
(39:13):
know who they are don't kill themselves. And when we
look at suicide rates and Alaska Natives, it's a very
horrifying thing because it's the leading cause of death among
Alaska Native youth. The suicide rates are by far the
highest in the nation. I remember I was listening to
you Guys podcast and you had a guest on this
(39:34):
is years ago who said, like, white males are the
ones with the highest suicide rates, And I just remember thinking, oh,
not even close, maybe by like just like the number
of people. But if you're talking like per capita, if
you're talking like per person, if we were white people,
it would be a national emergency. There would be there
would be movements, there be posters, they'd be all kinds
(39:55):
of stuff. But it's a native problem, so you know,
people just look the other way at this kind of stuff.
But coming back to the boarding schools, like they came
and they took the children, Like, so they taking your
children out of your home is huge, Like we cannot
overlook the impact of this because then the parents like
(40:16):
what are they going to do, because then they're also
losing the land, and so they they turned to alcohol,
they turned to you know, things to try and fill
those voids. And so it's it's we're connected with this
group called the Polynesian Voyaging Society and sometimes they're called
the Kalaya because one of their one of their canoes
(40:36):
called the hook leya Hawaiian voyagers who have brought back
their traditional way of navigating way out in the open ocean,
just incredible, incredible indigenous science. And so we had them
over here and there was a guy named Uncle Billy
who was just really breaking it down for me. He's like,
here's Colonialism's complicated. It's complicated because what they did simultaneously
(41:03):
was they banished our warrior society, so they kept us
from defending ourselves and our own peoples. And then they
began to rape and murder the women. Like we have
lots of stories in our community. When they built a
naval base there, that's when our women started washing up
on the beaches dead, you know, and so they and
we gain our clans through our mothers, and so when
(41:25):
they started to take out our mothers and our sisters,
and our aunties and our daughters, it really began to
crush us. And this is where we talk about colonialism
and the absolute inhumanity that it was. Is there's a
place it's called they call it Seduction Point, and I
have a real problem with that because it's called k
(41:48):
the place where a dog cries, which is there's nothing
wrong with that name. But the story that we were
told was there was a thinget settlement there. They were
running a fish camp and the men went out to
fish and to work on stuff, and these navy soldiers
showed up and they sexually assaulted the women. And then
they gave it that name Seduction Point. And so the
(42:10):
level of disgusting is very high when we look at
some of this stuff. So then you separate the people
from the land by saying you have to live here. Now,
this is ours. You have to move over here. And
in Alaska's, especially southeast Alaska, they would form these Indian
towns like y'all got to go live here. Now, y'all
got to go live there. Now, y'all got to go
(42:31):
live there. And again like this is not ancient history.
There's a village just across the way. Well, there's a town.
It's called Douglas, and it used to be a village.
And when the people, like our lifestyle was we would
go to a fish camp in the summer, fish and
put up your foods and pick berries and do all
this stuff. Then you come back to your homes in
(42:52):
the winter. So they're gone in the summer. And so
white people burn their homes down. This is the nineteen sixties.
And then they built the city on top of it.
Because then and then your language is banished. And one
of the big, big problems is, but if you think about,
like all these movements to try and make English just
a nicer language, right, because some people will say, how
(43:14):
come they can call themselves out but I can't. And
I was like, let's have that conversation. Because this was
a weapon, This was a social weapon, and people took
control of it. And we've got all kinds of communities.
And so the queer community, the black community, were they,
the Asian community, they have these different things that were
derogatory terms for them and they take them. They say, oh, yeah,
we'll call each other that. Well, you can't, and there's
(43:37):
a whole history behind that. But so if we look
at this kind of stuff, and we look at English
is trying to get nicer as a language, and some
people get really angry, right they call it politically correct.
And so if you say politically correct, you probably need
to work on yourself and your your understanding of how
the world works and your sense of humanity. But if
(43:58):
you think of what was English one hundred years years ago,
what was English two hundred years ago, probably a lot
worse in terms of talking about Native Americans, talking about
black people. And if that's the language you're replacing our
language with. Like our language, we love ourselves in our language,
we love each other in our language. And then we
have this other, this English, that is not capable of
(44:18):
doing it the same way. So then one of the
other sort of things. And this is called inward banishment.
So for Native American people, you take this child, you
cut their hair, you make them wear, you know, white
people clothes, and you give them a number instead of
a name, and then eventually you just give them an
English name or her, and then you put them through
(44:41):
the school. And these schools are horrible. There's so much
torture that happened at them. There's such gross food and
such physical and sexual abuse at these places, and people
kids got killed. And then you say, okay, now you
have to be white. You have to be white. If
you are yourself, I will physically punish you, I will
(45:02):
torture you, all stuff, things in your mouth, all kinds
of stuff. We got all kinds of stories of what
kids have gone through. But then when they try to
be white, then they'll say, who are you trying to
be us? You're just a second class citizen. There's this
one elder she said, my teacher's never hit me for
speaking my language. But when I was a little girl,
this one school teacher called me over every day and
(45:25):
she'd say, you know, you, people think you're just as
good as us, but you're not and you never will be.
You're a second class citizen.
Speaker 1 (45:33):
So this is how.
Speaker 4 (45:33):
School teachers used to talk to kids, and so trying
to sort of look at that and just dealing with it.
And you know, I know white people get scared that
people are coming for them, which is you know, I
think there's a lot of guilt there, just because like,
oh man, we would fucking everything up, but someone gonna
come fuck us up to Yeah, but I think it's
not nobody's. Well, there probably are some people, but collectively,
(45:55):
I don't think indigenous peoples are looking for that. We're
just looking for a little bit of balance. And so
but I think trying to look at that stuff is
very terrifying because then you have to rectify it somehow. Yeah,
And you know, and for us, if we have to
carry the burden on our own, you know, people they're
just killing themselves. And if we look at this, we say,
(46:16):
you're going to let these kids just completely lose themselves
and it's hard. It's hard to figure out what to
do now. But I think if we can get more
people on board with conversations about what could decolonization look
like and what could a place that's not assimilating anymore
look like, and we might have a more equitable place.
Speaker 1 (46:37):
Yeah, all right, let's take let's take another quick break.
Speaker 2 (46:40):
We'll be right back, and we're back.
Speaker 1 (46:53):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (46:54):
I wanted to ask you about representation in the media.
Killers of the Flower Moon is out right now. Lots
of stories going around about that film. You and I've
talked a lot about reservation dogs and about the impact
that has had on you, and you know, I'm curious,
as you know, I think a lot of like in
my community, we talk a lot about seeing black boy
(47:16):
joy first time. A lot of times black men are
either depicted as being very hard or the femal system
or trying to overcome civil rights. Usually like these are
the spaces you can occupy as a black man. So
seeing you know, black dudes get to be silly and
goofy and funny with each other. There's an element of
recognization like, oh no, that's actually what my family and
(47:40):
my friends look like. There's a feeling of at least
for speaking just for myself, like hopefulness of oh this
is something cool that children can watch and see themselves,
because I remember when there was almost nothing on TV
for me to watch where people looked like and as
(48:01):
we're seeing I think more obviously not enough indigenous representation
in medias're like, what is feeling good for you? How
are you feeling vollkulors of the flower moon? And what
do you hope the future of indigenous representation looks like?
Speaker 4 (48:17):
Yeah, gonna cheese. Everyone should just go see reservation docs,
like that's that's a good like starting point. Just get
into indigenous stories and indigenous television. It's such a wonderful
and groundbreaking thing to have. And but also like it's
not quite mainstreamed, you know, it kind of is what
(48:39):
you got to have a Hulu subscription, I think. And
so it's and maybe we're beyond the days of what
sort of these types of shows would have been and
you could do a lot more if it's not on
broadcast television. So I get that because you know, you
could have shit ass in there like a million times,
and so which is what they call each other, and
(49:00):
so as indigenous peoples as well, Like sometimes you have
these endearing terms that a lot of people might be
offended by. But some of the things I think about,
like I understand the conversations about, you know, is this
just trauma porn for white people where they get to
watch us suffer, and you know, and it does. It's
triggering to see Native women. There's whole movements about missing
(49:24):
and murdered Indigenous women because Indigenous women, they experience violence
at rates per capita higher than probably anybody in the
United States, and eighty percent of those perpetrators are white.
And you know, when there was a study that came
out from the Department of Justice that said that, like,
if you look at major sort of racial groups in
(49:45):
the United States, Native Americans are the only ones who
experience the majority of violent crimes from outside their own group,
and it's by white perpetrators. And so it's very difficult
to see. But I remember when the Watch Sahman series
came out on HBO, and like, how many people got
alerted to the Tulsa race massacre and would they have
(50:11):
known about that otherwise? And so to have a production
like this and say you got to see how brutal
these white people were, and I started to get really
interested once I started seeing the trailers and they're saying
they're using this book and saying like, can you can
you see the wolf? Can you see the wolf? Or
something like that, right, and they're really and then they
showed these pictures of these white guys and I look
(50:33):
at that old pitia.
Speaker 1 (50:34):
I was like, oh, yeah, those those guys are all bad.
Speaker 4 (50:36):
And then to sort of see these characters and what
they would do to try and get the land, because
to get the land you have to engage in complete
in humanity again, coming back to that, and I think
it's important to have that conversation.
Speaker 1 (50:54):
And it's tough.
Speaker 4 (50:54):
It's tough to sort of say, Okay, do we have
to have a white guy come and tell our story
and do we have to have of these prominent white
characters in there, especially male characters, And the answer is
probably yes, because I don't know if there's an if
there's a feature film about just Native people, it's going
to go direct to it's a direct to DVD thing,
whatever the whatever the equivalent of that is, and so
(51:18):
that that's for the indigenous eyes and we need that,
we need those types of movies. But I think we
also need some movies that are going to push it
into the national conversation as well, because we have someone,
you know, if you look at Lily Gladstone, her performances
as out of this world. It's amazing. And to see
her walking around with you know, big time actors and
(51:39):
big time movie makers is incredible because there's going to
be Native people out there and say, oh, I could
do that, and then maybe that opens the door for
a Native production, and maybe that opens the door for
a Native story to hit that level of you know,
and I hate to use those sort of stepping stone
type of metaphors, sure, but that door's not open for us.
(52:00):
It just isn't. But it's starting to get open. So
we have children's shows like Malia of Dnale and I've
been a cultural consultant and a writer on that show
for since it began almost and so it's been really
amazing that my children could turn on PBS and there's
a lead character who's an Alaska Native girl and she's
(52:21):
got agency, and she's smart, and she's cool and she's funny,
and so we're able to sort of like break some
of the stereotypes through the children's programming. And then hopefully
by time those kids are grown up, they're like what
they used to not be, like major motion pictures about
Native people. That's crazy, yeah, you know. And so because
(52:42):
we go back to like Dances with Wolves, which is groundbreaking, yes,
but it's about two white people who fall in love
in Native America, and then we've got wind River, which
is groundbreaking. Yes, it's about two white people who fall
in love in Native America. So I'm like, well, being
a background your own story, Yeah, there's two white people
(53:02):
didn't fall in love in this movie. Like it's like, okay,
we just get crumbs. We'll make what makes a fucking
damn good pie these chroms and we have for Thanksgiving dinner.
But it's a little bit more than like take what
we can get, because there's a lot of consultation in
this film. And what I hope is that people will
watch it because the other the danger is that people say,
(53:25):
I don't want to watch it because just a white
guy tells these stories. I don't want to watch it
because it's people. There's violence against Native people there, and
that's triggering, and it is like get yourself ready. It's
also three hours, three and a half hours long figure
out like don't drink a whole bunch of water before
you go in. But also if people don't go then
(53:47):
it just allows Hollywood to say I told you people
don't watch movies Native people.
Speaker 2 (53:52):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (53:52):
And I also think you know, you're just speaking for myself,
seeing like in the Micainia have similar conversations around like
slaves narratives. People are like, we are always depicted as slaves,
which I think is a slight exaggeration, but I hear you,
and then there's frustration at that and as like, I'm
not to me personally, I'm not ashamed to come from
(54:12):
people who were enslaved. I'm not ashamed of our survival.
I'm not ashamed of how we were able to take
that experience and evolve as a community and survive and
thrive and be where we are now. None of that,
to me is shameful or something I want to look
away from. I am exhausted by slave narratives that focus
(54:38):
specifically on like demonic white masters. Specifically. I'm tired of
seeing enslaved people depicted only by the grueling work they
were forced to endure, when we know that we were
writing beautiful music, when we know we were dancing and
having loving relationships, and there was culture preserved and created
(55:00):
during this time, and I think a lot of people
I understand the instinct to be like, I don't want
to invest in anything that makes my culture look less
than or that doesn't aspire to our best selves. For example,
some people had a real problem with Like Boys in
the Hood when it came out, even though we know
that film is a masterpiece, where they were like, you're
just showing like young kids doing gang violence. Why would
(55:22):
you want to promote that. It's like, well, people are
actually living and leading these lives, and exploring them and
giving them humanity allows you to understand why when you
see you know, there was a murder and Compton tonight,
you can't just write it off as like, oh, that's
what happens there. They're individual beings and it's important to
examine that. And I think you know to your point
(55:43):
earlier about these horrifying schools. The first time I ever
saw that depicted in media was in the Netflix and
a green Gable series, which I think came out like
twenty fifteen, if I'm not mistaken, and it was so
like it brings you to you because it's like, Oh,
there's this happy story about this orphan and she finds
a good family and it's kind of rough for her.
Oh she made a friend with like this indigenous girl
(56:05):
who is also like living and thriving with her family,
and then in the middle of the last season, she's
just taken and you're like, wait, what's happening? And you
kept like, at least I kept expecting, like, oh, there
will be a resolution to this, Like they will win
because it's Anna Green Gables and she's plucky and she
can do it. And what I really admired about that show,
for you know, that has faut It's not a perfect show,
but what I admired about that show is its ability
(56:25):
to be like, no, it wasn't resolved and it was
just horrible, and her parents had to leave the land
so that they could just camp outside of her school
in the hopes that they could be close to her
and one day find a resolution. And I think when
we get visual representation like that, it's like sometimes, you know,
people's best access to these stories is through entertainment media.
I think there's a lot we can say about that
(56:47):
versus the educational system goes and where we should be
learning these things, but knowing that, you know, I think
getting a variety of stories that explore both the trying
times we've had and the weird, awesome, amaze and places
we are now. I think I just think it's like
vitally important.
Speaker 4 (57:05):
Yeah, and I think for some for a lot of
Indigenous people, and you know, I'm not going to speak
for anybody, but sometimes I wonder like, are you mad
because you're seeing this thing that happened to people? Are
you mad about the movie itself? Because sometimes it's hard
to separate that stuff because we don't get our story
really told on big, big screens where these are. You know,
(57:26):
there's a whole bunch of commercials about this, there's a
whole bunch of press, and I know the writers strike,
which I'm glad it happened because there needs to be
equity for folks who are working in the movie industry.
But it also just it impacted the opening of this
film because you know, they couldn't really heavily promote it,
and especially actors who were in it. But I think
(57:47):
people should engage in it and people should should go.
But I think also there's there's movies like Skins and
smoke signals and on tanajuat the Fast Runner, and even
outside of North America, there's a film called Rabbit Proof Fence,
Like if you want to really get the boarding school experience,
like watch that movie. It is heartbreaking and incredible. It's
(58:12):
about these these kids who were taken from boarding school
and they they run away and it's it's amazing. It's
based on a true story. They have the you get
to see images of these little girls as the elders
that they became. And you know, and when we think
about our elders, when we think about our ability to
stand up and speak our language, and we just had
(58:33):
a cultural ceremony this weekend, it was wonderful, like we
can do that stuff because people went to these boarding
schools and found a way to be themselves. They found
a way to hold on to who they are and
what they are. And when we look at some of
the things and Killers of the Flower Moon, like, there
was an incredible amount of Indigenous agency in that film,
(58:53):
which I think, you know, that's what brought the FBI there,
and I think there was a real temptation, probably because
once the FBI stepped in, it was like, oh is
this gonna be about this guy, and it kind of
wasn't like it was like a still kind of a
side character. And you know, there's certainly things that I
would I would want more out of, Like I just
wanted more Indigenous depth and character. But there was a
(59:16):
lot of depth and there was a lot of character,
and so I think it's for me.
Speaker 1 (59:21):
I look at it.
Speaker 4 (59:21):
I'm like, this is a worthwhile thing, and this is
a thing that I hope gets people talking and that
they think about what happened to these people who did it?
What happened to the people who did it, because even
though you know, the FBI gets involved and there's investigations,
like white people get away with things back then and
they still do now.
Speaker 2 (59:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (59:43):
Well, I feel like every time you come on, we
say like that we could keep talking for hours. In
this case, we're breaking a record because we only got
to the search history. We didn't even get to the
Overrated or Untraded within the first hour. But yeah, I
mean truly until next time, because I feel like we
could just keep this conversation going indefinitely. But yeah, thank you,
(01:00:08):
thank you for coming on. This has been an amazing conversation.
Where can people find you and follow you and hear
you and all that good stuff. Who nae.
Speaker 4 (01:00:18):
Yeah, So the Tongue Unbroken does come out season two
so excited is coming out in mid January, and we've
got I've just been able to really track down some
great people and have some amazing conversations with them, and
so like this is this is just a taste of
some of the stuff that we're doing. We're really trying
(01:00:39):
to like just keep it casual and also enjoyable because
these conversations are difficult, but that doesn't mean you can't
have fun and still laugh and enjoy life and think
about a potentially brighter future.
Speaker 1 (01:00:53):
But you can find me on.
Speaker 4 (01:00:54):
Twitter what is it x Twitter?
Speaker 1 (01:00:58):
You can find me on Twitter, which is right and
tell you by a fascist Twitter the end of the
search box stops working, and then maybe I'll change what
I refer to it as.
Speaker 4 (01:01:07):
But right I'm not as active on there, just because
it's such a disappointment that a racist person can just
buy the whole thing. But you know, it's also go
America what you're all about? And I'm also on Facebook
and Instagram. I find me under my think at names,
which we'll just have to link to it's funny or
do anicao danuk And then I would say the piece
(01:01:32):
of media. I don't know if you ask about that,
and you guys usually do I do.
Speaker 1 (01:01:36):
Yeah, is there a work of media that you've been enjoying.
Speaker 4 (01:01:39):
Yeah, there's a comedian Sheng Wang who has this opening.
I think it's it's in his comedy act on Netflix.
It's about Costco is bigger than all of us. It's
so funny, like just really going into like you haven't
really given up on life until you walk around in
some Kirkland pants and he is. So it's so hilarious,
(01:02:00):
so funny, and you could find it on social media,
but they they cut all the space out of in
between his talking, which kind of drove me a little nuts.
Speaker 1 (01:02:09):
It's like just like yeah that YouTube edit, hurry yeah,
Like have you seen the YouTube ddit of Killers of
the Flower Moon. It's like forty five minutes. It's just
every every space, just all words just from together. I'm
not a fan of the YouTube d like, let there
be space.
Speaker 3 (01:02:28):
We need silence.
Speaker 1 (01:02:29):
I just want to say about The Tongue Unbroken. I
was re listening to season one this weekend. One of
the things I love about it is getting to hear
you interact with, you know, other teachers of children and
like talk about your experience teaching your own children and
children in general, and then getting you to getting to
hear you interact with your kids. There's just like this gentle,
(01:02:52):
lovely energy. And as I was listening to that, my
own children, like I was just kind of sitting in
bed listening to that, it was bedtime, and my own
children just like ran over to me where I was
laying in bed and lay on me and started to
fart on me while telling me that they were farting
on me and that I was their bed, and so
(01:03:15):
it was just a real it was like listening to this,
oh man, I aspired like this lovely energy, and then
my kids were like, you know, letting me know that
I was their bed and they were free to fart
on me whenever they wanted.
Speaker 4 (01:03:28):
It sounds about right. I really love working with teachers
because we could joke about all this kind of stuff.
We're like, you know, someone put up a meme and
they'd say Native people in public, the children are our
future Native people at home, Dan, these kids are messy.
Speaker 1 (01:03:48):
Joel, thank you so much for joining and co hosting
with me today. Where can people find you? Follow you?
And what is work a media you've.
Speaker 3 (01:03:58):
Been enjoying y'all mean Joel Monique find me all over
the internet at Joel Monique. It's j O E L
L E M O N I q u E pieces.
I've been reading a lot. I think you talk about
this last time I was on. I've been picking up
more books, reading a lot, listening to a lot of
audio books. Ar Kong wrote this absolute stunner. It's called
Babbel or The Necessity of Violence, which is a fictionalized
(01:04:20):
history of translators at Oxford, a school she actually attended,
I think especially got her master's degree. And it's it's
a lot about about a lot of things, but essentially,
a boy is created in China and brought back by
a professor who says, hey, you've got just enough language
(01:04:43):
to translate, but I've removed you early enough that you
have no connection to your culture. You'll now translate all
of your language for me so I can use it
as I need to basically invade China. And he has
to figure out he's raised in Europe in England, trying
to figure out who he is as an individual. He
gets to school and meets a lot of other kids
who are similar to him, and his world explodes, and
(01:05:06):
yet he's still under some of this horrible professor. And
it talks about what is revolution, how does it happen?
When is violence a necessity? And what does that do
to the soul? And it's so beautiful and difficult, but
ultimately I think inspiring feels like a weak word, but
it really set me a light. I love that book.
(01:05:27):
I like it's one of the books. I'm like, I
can't wait to read this.
Speaker 1 (01:05:29):
It's too soon.
Speaker 3 (01:05:29):
I don't want to burn out on it. But I
really really enjoy reading it. And ar Quang I think
just hit thirty. This is her fourth book. They're all phenomenal.
She's an incredible, incredible writer. So if you have time,
if you're into reading Babbel or The Necessity of Violence,
I highly recommend it.
Speaker 2 (01:05:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:05:44):
That sounds amazing and intense. It's so good. You can
find me on Twitter at Jack Underscore O'Brien Working Media.
I've been enjoying kim at Kimmy Monty tweeted the person
who named tits really nailed it.
Speaker 3 (01:06:01):
Success.
Speaker 1 (01:06:05):
You find us on Twitter at Daily Zeigeist. We're at
the Daily Zeitgeist on Instagram. We have a Facebook fanpage
and a website Daily zeikeist dot com, where we post
our episodes and our footnotes link off to the information
that we talked about in today's episode, as well as
a song that we think you might enjoy. A super
producer Justin is there a song that you think people
(01:06:28):
might enjoy? First of all, if you listen to the
new Andre three thousand, Yes, that.
Speaker 5 (01:06:33):
Was actually one of the songs I was gonna recommend. Yeah, yeah,
So New Blue Sun just came out on Friday.
Speaker 2 (01:06:40):
It's amazing.
Speaker 5 (01:06:41):
I know people really wanted a rap album from Andre,
but still do.
Speaker 1 (01:06:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (01:06:46):
I mean, but I love the fact that his take
on this is I'm forty eight, I don't be knowing
what to talk about, you know, And it's just I
love that self awareness and a lot of other artists
should take note.
Speaker 1 (01:06:56):
This is a very meditative, ethereal.
Speaker 5 (01:06:59):
Song and the title of the track is a mouthful
that in honor of hun being here. It also posits
a linguistic question, not one you need to answer, but
a question nonetheless. It's called the slang word pussy rolls
off the tongue with far better ease than the proper
word vagina.
Speaker 2 (01:07:15):
Do you agree?
Speaker 5 (01:07:16):
And both the statement and follow up is maybe something
you can ponder as you sit back, relax and explore
with this damn near fifteen minute long song has to offer.
Speaker 1 (01:07:25):
Wow, the whole album is incredible. By the way, me
saying I still want to rap aubum from them doesn't
mean that I don't appreciate this. As we talked about
on Yesterday's a Weekend Trending episode, it's an incredible word. Yes,
and it's exactly what you because you you wouldn't be
able to predict what was going to come from him,
So in that way, this is the predictable thing that
(01:07:47):
would come from three thousand. It's like that some somehow
so perfect, unpredictable, exactly right.
Speaker 5 (01:07:54):
And exactly what the world needs right now. Yes, it's
very calming. If you really need to relax, just please
this on and turn your brain off and you can
find this song in the footnook.
Speaker 1 (01:08:05):
And who do you agree? Because yeah, well so song.
Speaker 4 (01:08:09):
The thing it word for for vagina is goose. And
so sometimes around here, like we got to sort of stop,
kids are playing duck duck goose, we got to step
in out, you know what, Like our kids are going
to have a really different interpretation of how this game
is working. Or a someone says, oh, yeah, silly goose,
and well yeah, if we're all over here chuckling, then.
Speaker 1 (01:08:31):
You know what's going on.
Speaker 4 (01:08:32):
But yeah, it's a nicer term, I think, and so amazing.
Speaker 1 (01:08:39):
Well we will link off to that song in the footnotes.
The Daily Zeitgeist is a production of iHeart Radio. For
more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
That is going to do it for us this morning,
back this afternoon to tell you what is trending and
we will talk to you all then.
Speaker 2 (01:08:58):
Bye.
Speaker 1 (01:09:00):
Two children, A two children,
Hello the Internet, and welcome to Season three, fourteen, Episode
two of Daily Zai Guys Stay production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
This is a podcast where we dig.
Speaker 1 (00:11):
A deep avenue Marria's share Council. It is Tuesday, November
twenty first, twenty twenty three, and my name is Jack
O'Brien aka Potatoes O'Brien. Let's go with a savory potato
dish for this Thanksgiving week and I'm thrilled to be
joined by a guest co host who is the producer
(00:34):
behind shows like Fake Doctor's Real Friends and along with
Anajosea and other and many others, the Next Up podcast Initiative.
She's a brilliant writer who you can read a Vulture,
the av cluv teen Vogue. You've heard her on Pop
Culture Happy Hour, and most importantly on this podcast. It's
Joe Elmony Happy Tuesday, Tabby Tuesday. Have you Tuesday, Joel? Yes,
(01:05):
that's right? And what you you will be having? Turkey Columbia. Yeah,
it amazing.
Speaker 3 (01:14):
Play some bake rolls. You know we're keeping it simple.
I think we ordered a ham. Yeah you know, I.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
Think we're order a ham. Yes, have ordered it yet?
I need to go order some ham. Hold on and
we're back. The ham's all sold out. I'm coming to
your Thanksgiving. My wife's family is coming into town. So
(01:40):
we usually have a Korean feast and then a handful
of kind of small traditional Thanksgiving sides and like one
sort of meat.
Speaker 3 (01:50):
But like an American tapas.
Speaker 1 (01:53):
I think, oh, for sure, it's so good. But yeah,
my kids are like starting to call it Turkey Day,
and like mashed potatoes Day was something says this morning. Yeah,
I showed him the damn Charlie Brown Thanksgiving and that
blew it for me because I do typically serve popcorn
(02:16):
and little little things of candy instead of just whatever
I have and on the shelves.
Speaker 3 (02:22):
I like calling it Turkey Day because then it's just
the day we eat turkey, and there's nothing else counting around.
It's just this is the day we eat turkey. It's
a day that's been solidified to eat turkey with your family.
I take no joy in anything Unit says has ever
done in its entire existence. It's a hot mess over here.
But you know, then there's a turkey on the table
(02:43):
and that's always nice.
Speaker 1 (02:45):
Yeah, you know, it's pretty and it's not letting us
who don't prepare well off the hook. It's like there
better be some fucking turkey. All right, well, Joelle, we
are thrilled to be joined in our third seat by
one of our favorite guests on the Daily Zeitgeist, a
professor of Alaska Native languages at the University of Alaska
(03:08):
Southeast and the host of the podcast The Tongue Unbroken,
which will be dropping season two on all our asses
in the not too destined future. Season one is us
so worth your time? Please welcome back to the show,
Doctor June Lance Twitch.
Speaker 4 (03:25):
I saw the saw and it opened up my eyes.
D colon Nizes, nothing can stand it. White supremacies underhand.
I saw the sigh and it opened up my eyes.
De Calonnize. When you're gonna smarten up and give the
(03:49):
land back to whom it belongs, come tell me where
does it belong?
Speaker 1 (03:57):
Why all the bomb drops? I was?
Speaker 4 (04:04):
I thought of that while I was walking my dogs.
I walk my dogs at night and it's snowing, like
we got blizzard conditions, which is fine because it's Alaska.
But I was just thinking, it's like, I gotta have
some kind of cute like jingle or something. I like
my goal is to take a whole bunch of pop
songs and just make them decolonial anthems.
Speaker 1 (04:24):
So they're working on over here. I wonder if Bass
would approve. I'm not sure. I haven't you know, I'd
like to, just haven't checked with them.
Speaker 4 (04:32):
I'll reach out, say what's your standpoint on this whole
colonization thing. Then I'll decide whether or not.
Speaker 3 (04:38):
Have a secret. I don't know if I'm just talking
internet rumors right now.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
I don't know if it's Internet rumors are not, but
I do think that one of the members had a
Nazi pass and there is like some weird similarities between
like Ace of Basses, it was like the name of
the Nazi submarine base during World War Two.
Speaker 4 (05:03):
If they turned out to be like Nazi supporters and
I just took their ship for.
Speaker 1 (05:07):
The Yeah take yeah. Adam Todd Brown from Unpopular Opinion
podcast has written wrote a really cool article about that
for us back at Cracked and has a lot of
It's worth checking out because it's definitely makes you to
(05:27):
take a look. And also like All that She Wants
Is Another Baby was their other hit and it was
basically a portrait of a welfare Queen. It was kind
of what first song, Yes, those aces of Bassis, The
Aces of Bassis. When when you say blizzard conditions and
(05:49):
you're talking Alaska, what are we looking at?
Speaker 4 (05:52):
Yeah, so Juno is not the snowiest place in Alaska.
We are We are the most how did you say it?
We get the most precipitation per day.
Speaker 1 (06:03):
I think.
Speaker 4 (06:04):
So there's some there's some communities south of us that
get the most rain. We're talking like one hundred and
forty inches a year, and so we don't really compare
to that, but we have the most rainy days I think,
out of anywhere on the Northwest coast.
Speaker 1 (06:17):
And so we've got some folks.
Speaker 4 (06:19):
Who are not from Juno, and when that came out
in the paper, they're kind of walking around head down sad,
you know, because I think what I try to tell
people is the weather is not an emotional barometer. So
just because it's raining doesn't mean you had to be sad.
I don't care what the commercials say. And so I
was like, we're the champions. Because on the newspaper says
(06:41):
Juno has the most rainy days on the Northwest coast.
I was like, we did it. We did it folks.
And so for us to get a bunch of snow
kind of messes us up a little bit. And so
we're talking like sixteen to twenty four inches in a day,
which is a lot for us.
Speaker 1 (06:57):
Yeah, so it's a lot for most people. That is,
in my professional opinion, too much snow.
Speaker 4 (07:05):
Yeah, So this and so this will also see like
how much have you been putting off for winter? Because
we've got to get ready for winter here. You got
to get your heating system looked at. You got to
get your shovels out from wherever they are. You got
to put the broom thing in your car. You got
to make sure you've got wipers that are worth the
dam and aren't you know, just faded pieces of cracked
(07:26):
rubber that are trying to like scratch some stuff off
your windows.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
Coming for me with that description that is you're coming
from my wipers, I guess because my wipers are like
curved and only making contact with the windshield at the
very edges right now. But you can get away with
it in Los Angeles, you know.
Speaker 4 (07:44):
For for Youno again, like we're really wet and it
does get cold, like we're right on the ocean, so
if it gets twenty ten zero, that's cold because it's
just something about the humidity and the cold that does it.
And if you go out boat on the ocean, that's
that's pretty serious stuff, the.
Speaker 3 (08:03):
Coldest you've ever experienced.
Speaker 4 (08:04):
But so if you go inland from here, like so
we have Thlingett communities that are in what is now
Canada for some reason. I say, for some reason, because
it's all thing get onie, like it's all our land.
And then they come and like cut it in half
and say you need a passport to get to this side.
Speaker 1 (08:22):
And so to go down the street.
Speaker 4 (08:23):
Yeah, but we'll have language classes. We have folks who
call in from Canada and we'll start, you know, having
conversations and we'll be complaining about the weather, as humans
like to do, and we'll say, yeah, it's cold, and
then they'll say, yeah, it's forty below here and that's
celsius and forty below is like the level point. It's like, yes,
a matter if you're doing fahrenheit or cel.
Speaker 1 (08:43):
Fahrenheit and celsius meet. I just discovered this. Yeah, fahrenheit
and celsia should never meet in a in a temperature.
Speaker 3 (08:50):
The coldest i've ever experienced. It was like twenty eleven
there was snow apocalypse in Chicago, so it's snowed all
day and then overnight the temperature just plummeted, so like
cars like froze on. Like Short Drive, which is our
longest street that runs along the lake, it was bare.
I was like, this is new levels of just complete
(09:12):
icy coldness. I can't even I can't imagine that being like, yeah,
this is sort of our average around here every days.
You gotta It's like when I watch people in Russia
and they're like, no, it's fine, I have a fur
coat walking around. It's gonna like this is the human
body is incredible.
Speaker 1 (09:28):
Fur coat, jogging pants. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (09:30):
Two fun things about like forty to fifty below is
because we lived in Fairbanks for a while, my family
and I, And so if you open the door, you
can see the cold roll in like fog like it
just like rolls in really quickly into the house. Like
you can see the cold, see.
Speaker 1 (09:46):
The air like kind of it has a different quality
to it. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (09:50):
Yeah, and then amazing you could take a hot beverage
like coffee or tea and go outside and throw it
in the air and it just turns into steam. It
just turns into like a little cloud.
Speaker 3 (10:00):
We tried the experiment when it was very cold with
bubbles where we would try to freeze bubbles instantly, which
was kind of fun. And you just blow a bubble
and then it icicles will just form around it because.
Speaker 1 (10:13):
It just falls to the ground like you.
Speaker 3 (10:16):
Blow it on like a surface where your mouth canch.
I guess you could be ground level. We had like
a little ledge on our patio so that it had
some time to cross over, but it took like seconds.
Speaker 2 (10:26):
It was crazy.
Speaker 1 (10:27):
Turns into Christmas tree ornaments.
Speaker 3 (10:29):
Basically perfect, yes, exactly exactly. Prepare for winter. Everybody is coming.
Speaker 1 (10:35):
Not for me. I'm not doing fuck all that. I
have to assume that, like all the schools are closed
down with sixteen inches of snow.
Speaker 4 (10:48):
Like, uh no, the schools are like they you know,
everybody was talking last well, I guess there's these like
Facebook groups and so people were saying, hey, school canna
be canceled, and I think a bunch of kind of
old schoolers this part were like nah, man nah, and
you know, and people are like, well, I got to
figure out what to do. How am I going to
get my kids there am I going to get them home?
I lived in this one place and the school closed
(11:09):
and they had to just sleep in the school. But yeah,
but we get snow, like they'll be out plowing this stuff.
They're out there right now. Like the people who like
the city of Juno and the and the state of Alaska,
the folks who like work on roads, they'll get this
stuff cleared out. Although there's a community anchorage which they
are not good at plowing their streets, but in.
Speaker 1 (11:32):
And you know, it's like some local it is. It's
so it's yeah, there's anchorage sucks plowing their streets.
Speaker 4 (11:41):
Well, there was a guy and he's like this super
conservative politician and he won. He won, and his whole
thing is like budget cuts, and I think he ran
on this these platforms of kind of hate and budget cuts,
which which seems to be kind of a conservative platform.
And so now the streets don't get plowed. And so
there was some sort of it was a great little
(12:02):
Internet picture and it showed like be careful what you
asked for was one of his campaign signs, and so
there's a picture of him it says be careful what
you ask for, and like just a ship ton of snow,
like on the roads because you people and people can't
really get around. But the school's here, Like they'll usually
send us a text like six in the morning and
they're like, yeah, just dust it off, bro and get
(12:25):
your kids to school. But the after school stuff will
be closed because you know, get too wild. But the
school itself like, let's go get.
Speaker 1 (12:32):
To tunnel and get tunnel in folks. That's that's amazing.
I lived in Kentucky for a while and it's like
thinks of itself as southern, but it still gets snow
most winters and it just has to be the rumor
of snow and they will shut down school for like
a week. They're just like, we're gonna be this is
(12:56):
this is a mess. We're a mess during a snowstorm.
Speaker 3 (13:02):
Their highways are already terrible, so even the hint of
snowfall is just chaos.
Speaker 1 (13:07):
Forty eight hours of traffic down exactly. It's like that
exact longitudinal or latitudinal line of like Lexington, Kentucky, Atlanta.
You don't want to get caught there during the snowstorm. Well,
we're going to get into some of the things, some
of the things just generally that we wanted to. We've
(13:29):
been talking about wanting to talk to you about hun
every time you come on the show. So we're going
to devote a whole episode to kind of talking about
We're going to get into Buffy, Saint Marie, the concept
of pretendians or Native movies, what's the new Scorsese movie
Killers of the Flower Moon, And then just indigenous languages
(13:50):
and the role that language has played in genocide, among
many other things. But before we get to any of it,
we do like to get to know you a little
bit better and ask you what is something from your
search history?
Speaker 4 (14:05):
Yeah, so my search history is usually a lot of
policy for the United States government and trying to get
to the bottom of it, you know. So there's some
different things I was thinking about with boarding schools and
how did these boarding schools run, who was running them?
And so we're doing some There's a group that I'm
(14:26):
involved with, a council called the Alaska Native Language Preservation
and Advisory Council, and we're talking about the history of
boarding schools and what they were for Native American peoples
and for a lot of people that might not be
something that they have to think about on a regular
basis is that there were schools where children were forcibly
taken from their parents and brought to these places and
(14:49):
completely stripped of their identity. And so if you want
to just sort of like think of scenes from movies
about Auschwitz or about the Holocaust that was happening here
just to brown people. And so a lot of people
don't pay attention to it. So sometimes we got to
take a look at this stuff. And so some of
(15:10):
the things that we've been searching for is could we
make a list of every boarding school that was running
in Alaska, and then could we have some sort of
acknowledgment in healing ceremony with these places because they were
run by the United States government, and they're also run
by religious organizations, Christian organizations in the United States who
(15:32):
were colonizing and trying to eliminate Indigenous languages and indigenous cultures.
And so there's a wonderful colleague of mind. His name
is doctor Waki Charles, and he teaches the Yuchten language,
the Yupik language. He's at Fairbanks and he was at
one of these schools. So it did happen long time ago,
(15:53):
but it happened for a long time as well. So
there are people alive today who went to these schools,
and he talks about how he went there and how
his mother had no idea where he was going. She
didn't speak English, she had no idea when he was
coming home. They just took him and they took his
clothes and they put a number. His name was taken,
(16:14):
and his new name was number twelve, and number twelve
was written on all of his clothes. Number twelve was
written on all of his belongings, and that's what he
was referred to. And so he talked about, you know,
and where he went. So his family is from western Alaska,
which is very far from where we are, but he
was brought here to a community called Wrangele, to a
(16:34):
school called Wrangel Institute. And at some of these schools,
these teachers have written books. I'm not going to say
their name. I'm not going to say the name of
the book because it's trash. But in the book they say,
you know, so this is basically their memoir of teaching
in Alaska. They said, we couldn't get them to stop
speaking their own language, and we wanted them to learn English,
(16:56):
but we developed and this is their where its a
heroic remedy, which was to take these two chemicals, one
that's very bitter and one that burns the inside of
your mouth, and we would soak a rag in that
and then when one of them started speaking their language,
we would stuff the rag in their mouth.
Speaker 1 (17:15):
So it's stuff like that.
Speaker 4 (17:16):
But every now and then I'll be on the internet
looking for something that's not horrible. But I think people
need to look at this and not be afraid of
examining it, because as a nation, if we don't say, like,
this was part of our history, this was something that
we did. This is what education was for Native people.
I think if you don't examine that, then it never
(17:37):
fully changes into something else.
Speaker 3 (17:40):
I can I ask you about acknowledgement, and because I
feel like every time he knows part of like the
black community, there are a lot of times people like,
what does acknowledging slavery do for you? There's like this
very it happened forever ago, it's history. Why do we
need these things? And I'm just curious. You know, you're
(18:02):
such a large part of your community organizing, and what
does for you? What do these acknowledgments mean?
Speaker 4 (18:07):
Well, part of these acknowledgments are to say. Colonization is
an act of like complete dehumanization on every possible aspect.
So you have to dehumanize the people that you're doing this.
And when we talk about colonization, we're not talking about like, oh,
let's go move over here and build a house and
(18:28):
search for our own personal freedom, which is usually what
we're sort of sold on is life was tough. So
they found this place where they could make it work.
And they had belt buckles on their hats or something.
Speaker 1 (18:39):
You know, we're not really taught a whole lot about that. Shoes,
everything was covered in belt buckles. Just get us more buckles.
How the fuck am I going to find enough belt buckles?
Maybe that was a problem, and they keep expanding.
Speaker 4 (18:54):
They see all these native people, like these motherfuckers, they
don't got no buckles.
Speaker 1 (18:57):
We gotta wipe them out, you know.
Speaker 4 (18:58):
So there's probably more complic But the problem is is
in order to really like completely try to annihilate someone,
you have to dehumanize them because the population has to
figure out how to be on board with that. Because
you can get individuals who can subscribe to bascist beliefs
and say, yeah, like fucking wipe them out. But to
(19:21):
get like a whole population to do that, you have
to sort of create this collective denial, which I think
the United States is very good at collective denial.
Speaker 1 (19:31):
And so we're not.
Speaker 4 (19:35):
Just a shining example, right, And so one is just saying, Okay,
this happened, and this is something we have to rectify.
Because if I burned your house down and then we
were going to stay friends or just even live next
to each other, and if I never talked about it
and nothing ever happened to me, that would be so
(19:56):
it would be awkward at the minute least, right, see me,
like burn my house down, your fucker, And I was
just like, hey, I'm just getting my newspaper.
Speaker 1 (20:04):
What why you gotta yell at me? Right?
Speaker 4 (20:05):
And so, but then also like how if that is
part of the foundation story of the United States of America,
then how do you reconcile with ending that violence against
people's if you'd never even look at the thing. And
so to say like, let's let's actually look at that
(20:27):
one of the things that can be really tremendously healing,
because I don't think we talk enough about any of
this stuff. But the colonizer also must dehumanize in order
to do that kind of stuff, because on a day
to day basis, you don't just I don't think you
don't just walk into someone's kitchen and eat all their
food and slap them in the face and just like
claim their kitchen as theirs as yours. But we've done
(20:50):
that collectively, right, Like colonizers have done that to indigenous peoples.
And so I think there's opportunities when you embrace decolonization
for the descendants of the colonizers to also reconnect with humanity.
But I think they're really terrified to I was given
some talks the other day and I was saying, I
really like science fiction films. I like horror films, but
(21:13):
sometimes if you watch a science fiction movie, it's like
there's these white people and then aliens come or some
kind of monster and they're gonna like take their take
all their stuff and take their language and take everything.
It's like this it's a horror you know. Or there's
some huge apocalypse, right, And so these post apocalyptal kind
(21:34):
of films I think about them, but I watch them,
I'm like, yeah, yeah, that's we've lived that. We've done that, right,
Like they came, they took the stuff like, you know,
it must be scary for you, but it's our reality.
But I think about that stuff a lot because I
think as we talk about concepts like decolonization, there are
probably quite a few white people who think, oh, now
(21:54):
they're gonna put us on reservations and make us stop
speaking always.
Speaker 3 (21:58):
To go to They're like, well, if we acknowledge it,
then there'll be white slavery, Like I don't want to
own slaves, like my answers to survived, you, why would
I put someone use in such a ridiculous thought?
Speaker 1 (22:10):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4 (22:11):
I mean there was a survey that came out of
Harvard a while ago and there was like interviewing I
guess people in the South, and they're saying, do you
think that white people have it harder now than black
people did during the era of slavery, and that there
was a lot of them that checked the box yes, Like, yeah,
it's real hard for us. People are real mad at us,
(22:33):
so that's got to be really hard, right. So, but
I think the acknowledgment, as well as saying like could
we become something else? Like there's you know, about five
hundred languages that were on this continent in California was
the most diverse, is the most linguistically diverse part of
North America, and every one of those languages is almost gone.
(22:57):
And so as we look at that, like what happens
when a language is gone? What happens when a species
is gone? And I want to be careful with that
because a lot of times Native Americans, you know, if
you go to some big museum, we're not there with
like Monet and these you know, whoever else is making
a bunch of art. Right, We're over by the wolves
(23:18):
and the moose and you know, we're by the animals.
Speaker 1 (23:21):
And so yeah, you taught you said the different distinction
between art and artifact and the tongue unbroken.
Speaker 4 (23:27):
But yeah, yeah, right, And so we see like the
way that dehumanization enters into academics as well, where you know,
like white people get literature and we get stories, and
white people get art, and we get artifacts, and white
people get science and we get ecological knowledge. Right, and
so trying to sort of also just say now let's
(23:47):
just like everything is a thing, and let's just sort
of say, yeah, we can have multiple perspectives, and then
you can also but you know, one of the things
where science has a hard time with us is they'll say, oh, oh,
is that a medicine? But like, yeah, that the thing
that comes out of a tree. You could put it
on a wound and they'll seal it right up. Oh well,
how do you guys know that? Like, oh, because Raven
(24:09):
got that information from the sea otters and he tricked
them and now we know it. And that's that's fine
for us, But I think for science they need some
sort they need They need probably a white guy in
a lab coat.
Speaker 1 (24:22):
Yeah, story of a white guy and a lab coat. Yeah,
with like a bad mustache and like weird glasses that's
strapped to his ears or something. All right, let's take
a quick break and we'll come back. We'll keep talking
about this. We'll be right back, and we're back. And
(24:48):
for first of all, we talked. We started off this
episode talking about Thanksgiving, and I'd just be interested in hearing,
like as to your metaphor of the person who burns
down your house else and then it is just like
expects you to be cool with it, and it continues
living there and then they're like, hey, we're having a
(25:09):
party to celebrate that time I burned down your house
and you are cool with it. Do you want to
come over or don't come over and just just continue
being cool with it? What is Thanksgiving like for you?
And like where you live? Yeah?
Speaker 4 (25:26):
Yeah, And colonization is so interesting because there's some things
I think Indigenous peoples accept and some things that they reject.
And so one of my examples is, you know, we
get people keep track of our blood quantum, the government
keeps track of I've got a card, I've got to
actually let's say what my fraction is of my indigenous identity.
(25:48):
And so that's not something I think that very many
people get, but that's something Indigenous people get. And that
tells you whether or not you qualify for things or
if you can go shoot a seal. And so a
lot of times as we look at that stuff, and
blood quantum is what it's called, and so sometimes we'll
be like, fuck blood quantum, man, you can't measure me,
can't measure my indigenous identity. But then we got a
(26:10):
dog and I'll be like, this dog is one hundred
percent German shepherd. I'll show you the papers. It's a
pure bread, right, right. So some things we reject in
some things we accept and sometimes those are similar things.
And so for us, we we eat, we throw down
a turkey. I mean, that's just something I grew up with.
And then we'll we'll do stuffing, we'll do all that stuff.
They have thinget names, and the thlinget names are not
(26:32):
great because when we saw that turkey and it had
you know, and turkey is are indigenous to North America,
but they're not indigenous to where we are, and so
it's got that sort of long thing that hangs down
from its beak or whatever. I don't always called the
gobbler gobbler. Yeah, so they called it, which means it's
not news, which is not a nice name. We're usually
(26:54):
so respectful to our food. But then I had an
elder over. We had this big Thanksgiving dinner and we
were stuffing the bird, or maybe we're pulling stuffing out
of the bird because we're having the dinner. I said,
and thing in I said, well we gonna call this
the stuff because you know, I don't that's not a
great word either, just in English. And then we're like, well,
(27:16):
you know, I think you kind of put it in
the turkey's ass. And then then you like, you know,
we mix a bunch of stuff. It's yummy, And so
we were we started up with like the bread that's
in the turkey's butt, and then we end up with
like turkey poop. Yeah, and so it's like like, okay,
we're just gonna have to stick with stuffing for somebody.
Speaker 1 (27:35):
Stuff.
Speaker 4 (27:36):
But at our university, some of our students had a
great idea, which is, you know, there was a time
when universities usually had Thanksgiving break and Christmas break and
Easter break, right, and so as we look at that,
we say, well, a university is not a Christian institution,
so we don't need to have those we can have.
(27:58):
So at our university, we had winter break and then
we had spring break, and so we said, well, why
don't we have fall break instead of Thanksgiving break? And
what was interesting again coming back to colonial overreactions, which
are you know, this was a classic colonial overreaction, I think.
So we pitched this idea, everybody's on board and was like, yeah,
(28:19):
that's that's great because not everybody acknowledges, you know, the
story behind Thanksgiving, which was you know, sometimes they'll say, oh, well,
these Native Americans and these pilgrims had a great meal
and they they really shook hands and figured it out.
I guess you know which is. I remember I saw
this some sort of little clip. I can't find it anymore.
(28:42):
I have to do some internet digging, if you all
can do some deep dives. There was this little skit
of these kids re enacting the first Thanksgiving and the
pilgrims murder all the Indigenous people, and it's it's you
could laugh at it because it's so horrible, but it's
also like just sort of goes in the against what
we're usually taught, which is these artificial narratives of just
(29:04):
how nice white people were here.
Speaker 1 (29:06):
Yeah, that's also in Adam's family values, by the way.
Speaker 4 (29:09):
Oh that's right, that's right where she's you know, she
burns down the village, right.
Speaker 1 (29:13):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (29:13):
And so, but as we had this one meeting, we said, yeah, well,
all we're doing is on the calendar of the university,
it won't say Thanksgiving closure, I'll say Fall closure. That's
all we're trying to do, right, And someone says, well,
I think the students should be able to eat turkey,
and I said, bro, I never said anything about turkey,
(29:33):
Like I don't. Yeah, like the like they could serve
whatever kind of food they want to no one suggesting
that changes. And then he said, well, I think people
should be able to gather with their families over this
break and I said, I never said they, Like, I
don't know where you're getting this information, Like it's literally
just changing what the thing is called on a calendar.
I'm not going to go into your house and like
(29:54):
make you disperse, like I don't understand. There's no there's
no Gestapo coming for your Thanksgiving gathering and so and
then that same person he wanted to talk to me more,
so I gave him my phone number, and when I
picked up the phone, he said, thanks for taking the time.
I was like, yeah, like I'm happy to talk about
this stuff. He said, I just don't think you know
(30:16):
how hard it is to be a Christian these days.
And I'm thinking, this is not the conversation I want
to have, but okay, let's listen. Because you know, the
same thing with the War on Christmas and this this
idea that Christianity is under threat, Like I can drive
this one loop in town and I think I hit
like twelve churches.
Speaker 1 (30:36):
I'm like, where are they going? Right?
Speaker 3 (30:39):
I think what's particularly wild about that? Is Thanksgiving is
not a Christian holiday in Rome. The Vatican's not preparing
a Thanksgiving. Damiel bizarre to equate the two. I don't
that's wild to me, that's wild.
Speaker 1 (30:55):
Yeah, you made this metaphor in season one of the
Tongue I'm broken about they take your land, the colonialists
to take your land. And when you say, and then like,
build a beautiful home on it. And then when you say, like, okay,
I'm going to also build a home here, they say,
you can't because that will destroy my home. Like and
(31:17):
I don't know, it's just really resonated to me as
just someone who lives in this culture, Like you know
the things I've been hearing in conversations around Gaza as well,
and you know that people aren't able to continue to
live there because somehow their continued existence is devaluing to
(31:37):
the existence of the people who are kind of forcing
them off their land. And it just it seems to
have this same corrupted, overall logic over and over again repeatedly.
Speaker 4 (31:50):
Yeah, I think some of the things that are happening
over there are really difficult for people in the United States,
because I think the United States, it's very easy to
hate people who are Jewish, and it's very easy to
hate people who are Muslim and so, and that's very
easy to hate people who are brown. It's kind of
baked into the culture, and you have to you have
(32:11):
to consciously move against these things at all times in
order to sort of not by default have these these
feelings of hatred or otherness. And so I think it's
really hard because they're like, oh, well, what side do
I pick? Because these guys look kind of like me,
so they pick those guys. But also, you know, there's
just so many different things that are coded in language,
(32:33):
that are coded in film and entertainment, where we're supposed
to like just hate these people and other them. And
so I think it's when people look at this stuff,
we see so much violence, and we hear about violence,
and we like, well, yeah, they're in hospitals, so we
got to blow up the hospitals so that we can
we can get the bad guys, you know. And so
(32:56):
but I don't know if that's really a heroic tactic.
I don't know if that's a tactic that's really has
an ethical sort of grounding, and you know, to say,
like it doesn't matter who's there we need to get
this small group of people, and so we'll kill all
these people to get them. And so there's some things
I think that really ring true for a lot of
Indigenous peoples, which is battle over land. But then there's
(33:19):
some things that I think for a lot of our
indigenous communities might be difficult for us to understand, like well,
whose land is it? Because they crossed an ocean to
get here, and so that was pretty clear. You know,
I know there's some people who someone people like to
tag me in things. And so there was this wonderful
news article about a Native American language center that was
(33:40):
starting an organ but then it was through an organ newspaper.
And then all these people from Oregon, which is a
place with its own problems because I think until not
too long ago, it was like illegal for black people
to live there, and like, you know, it's it's a
complicated place. That was in southwest Organ and there was
(34:01):
there's a road there called Dead Indian Memorial Road, and
they have this, yeah, they have this big sign that says,
you know this place, this road used to be called
Dead Indian Road. We realized that was not a sensitive name,
so we changed the name to Dead Indian Memorial Road and.
Speaker 1 (34:21):
Oregon. I was you were so close and you landed
so far.
Speaker 4 (34:29):
And so some of the problems I think that are
present in a lot of Native American communities, which are
probably present all through the United States, is we don't
get educated on the history of the Middle East. We
don't get educated on why are people in this fight
over the land and about nations and belonging. And people
(34:50):
are very quick to say, oh, you're anti Semitic just
because you're saying, like, don't blow up hospitals.
Speaker 1 (34:57):
And then that seems to be the one point that
you can just whether you know a lot about the
history or not. It just feels like the one thing
that I feel like we've been consistent on on this
show is just like, but anytime there's killing of innocent people,
like there wasn't October seventh or has been since in Gaza,
(35:20):
like that's pretty self evidently not the way to go,
and like something that should be opposed in all its forms.
Speaker 4 (35:28):
But yeah, yeah, and it's complicated too, because you've got people,
you've got people of color over whether you've got it's
a real mixing zone. It's a real mixing zone. And
so but also, like you guys are talking about this
the other day, we grew up in the nineteen eighties,
like who are the bad guys in films? It was
Russians and Muslims, right, and so probably more Muslims and Russians.
(35:49):
And so I think there's a lot of stuff that
you can attach to to just hate people because they
are Muslim and you don't understand that. And so instead
of sort of looking into who are these people and
what do they do and how can I get.
Speaker 1 (36:03):
To know them more?
Speaker 4 (36:04):
And again can you connect to humanity? But it all
gets very quickly twisted as well, through a bunch of
different distorted lenses.
Speaker 1 (36:14):
Yeah, one thing that I wanted to drive home is
just you know, in talking about the you know, erasure
of cultural value and languages as a cultural and linguistic genocide.
Like you mentioned throughout the first season of The Tongueunbroken
that youth suicide rates among Native Alaskan youse is tragically high.
(36:42):
And it's something that you hear a lot in the
in you know, accounts of people who are being actively
oppressed and who not not just in physically, but you know,
in these ideologically like philosophical ideological conditions that are inhospitable
(37:02):
to the human like to human life like that, and
I just I feel like that is clarifying in a
way that this erasure of identity and the choking off
of the ability to create meaning for oneself and identity
for oneself causes people to actually lose their lives, causes
children to like harm themselves, and that just connecting those
(37:26):
two things, Like there are a lot of schools of
philosophy and psychology that identify the search for meanings like
one of the most important human needs, like it will
sustain you through the prison camps in Auschwitz, but without
it you can't survive anything. You know, you can't survive
(37:47):
daily life. And it feels like a lot of the
things that you're talking about in the boarding schools and
just throughout the history of colonization are very systemic exams
samples of attacks on those things that make a life possible,
make it possible to live and find mean it.
Speaker 4 (38:09):
Yeah, last week was the birthday of a man Noeled
Kajakte's English name was Walter Sobolev and he lived to
be one hundred and two years old, and he was
so fun to talk to, like his Thlingate was so
good and he was a pastor in a church for
a long time. They closed his church because he would
(38:29):
do his sermons and fling it as well as English,
and so I guess like but on that note, the
Presbyterian Church, who has a hand in language and culture suppression,
a bunch of horrible stuff in this part of the world.
They they held a community listening session, and they held
several of them. Then they came back a month or
(38:52):
two later and they said they made a public apology
and they said they were wrong. It was racist, and
they said, you know, like, it wasn't our decision, but
it was our institution, and we recognize that and we apologize.
And then they made a million dollar commitment to language
and culture revitalization in our region. And that stuff is
important because Walter Soboloff he used to say, people who
(39:13):
know who they are don't kill themselves. And when we
look at suicide rates and Alaska Natives, it's a very
horrifying thing because it's the leading cause of death among
Alaska Native youth. The suicide rates are by far the
highest in the nation. I remember I was listening to
you Guys podcast and you had a guest on this
(39:34):
is years ago who said, like, white males are the
ones with the highest suicide rates, And I just remember thinking, oh,
not even close, maybe by like just like the number
of people. But if you're talking like per capita, if
you're talking like per person, if we were white people,
it would be a national emergency. There would be there
would be movements, there be posters, they'd be all kinds
(39:55):
of stuff. But it's a native problem, so you know,
people just look the other way at this kind of stuff.
But coming back to the boarding schools, like they came
and they took the children, Like, so they taking your
children out of your home is huge, Like we cannot
overlook the impact of this because then the parents like
(40:16):
what are they going to do, because then they're also
losing the land, and so they they turned to alcohol,
they turned to you know, things to try and fill
those voids. And so it's it's we're connected with this
group called the Polynesian Voyaging Society and sometimes they're called
the Kalaya because one of their one of their canoes
(40:36):
called the hook leya Hawaiian voyagers who have brought back
their traditional way of navigating way out in the open ocean,
just incredible, incredible indigenous science. And so we had them
over here and there was a guy named Uncle Billy
who was just really breaking it down for me. He's like,
here's Colonialism's complicated. It's complicated because what they did simultaneously
(41:03):
was they banished our warrior society, so they kept us
from defending ourselves and our own peoples. And then they
began to rape and murder the women. Like we have
lots of stories in our community. When they built a
naval base there, that's when our women started washing up
on the beaches dead, you know, and so they and
we gain our clans through our mothers, and so when
(41:25):
they started to take out our mothers and our sisters,
and our aunties and our daughters, it really began to
crush us. And this is where we talk about colonialism
and the absolute inhumanity that it was. Is there's a
place it's called they call it Seduction Point, and I
have a real problem with that because it's called k
(41:48):
the place where a dog cries, which is there's nothing
wrong with that name. But the story that we were
told was there was a thinget settlement there. They were
running a fish camp and the men went out to
fish and to work on stuff, and these navy soldiers
showed up and they sexually assaulted the women. And then
they gave it that name Seduction Point. And so the
(42:10):
level of disgusting is very high when we look at
some of this stuff. So then you separate the people
from the land by saying you have to live here. Now,
this is ours. You have to move over here. And
in Alaska's, especially southeast Alaska, they would form these Indian
towns like y'all got to go live here. Now, y'all
got to go live there. Now, y'all got to go
(42:31):
live there. And again like this is not ancient history.
There's a village just across the way. Well, there's a town.
It's called Douglas, and it used to be a village.
And when the people, like our lifestyle was we would
go to a fish camp in the summer, fish and
put up your foods and pick berries and do all
this stuff. Then you come back to your homes in
(42:52):
the winter. So they're gone in the summer. And so
white people burn their homes down. This is the nineteen sixties.
And then they built the city on top of it.
Because then and then your language is banished. And one
of the big, big problems is, but if you think about,
like all these movements to try and make English just
a nicer language, right, because some people will say, how
(43:14):
come they can call themselves out but I can't. And
I was like, let's have that conversation. Because this was
a weapon, This was a social weapon, and people took
control of it. And we've got all kinds of communities.
And so the queer community, the black community, were they,
the Asian community, they have these different things that were
derogatory terms for them and they take them. They say, oh, yeah,
we'll call each other that. Well, you can't, and there's
(43:37):
a whole history behind that. But so if we look
at this kind of stuff, and we look at English
is trying to get nicer as a language, and some
people get really angry, right they call it politically correct.
And so if you say politically correct, you probably need
to work on yourself and your your understanding of how
the world works and your sense of humanity. But if
(43:58):
you think of what was English one hundred years years ago,
what was English two hundred years ago, probably a lot
worse in terms of talking about Native Americans, talking about
black people. And if that's the language you're replacing our
language with. Like our language, we love ourselves in our language,
we love each other in our language. And then we
have this other, this English, that is not capable of
(44:18):
doing it the same way. So then one of the
other sort of things. And this is called inward banishment.
So for Native American people, you take this child, you
cut their hair, you make them wear, you know, white
people clothes, and you give them a number instead of
a name, and then eventually you just give them an
English name or her, and then you put them through
(44:41):
the school. And these schools are horrible. There's so much
torture that happened at them. There's such gross food and
such physical and sexual abuse at these places, and people
kids got killed. And then you say, okay, now you
have to be white. You have to be white. If
you are yourself, I will physically punish you, I will
(45:02):
torture you, all stuff, things in your mouth, all kinds
of stuff. We got all kinds of stories of what
kids have gone through. But then when they try to
be white, then they'll say, who are you trying to
be us? You're just a second class citizen. There's this
one elder she said, my teacher's never hit me for
speaking my language. But when I was a little girl,
this one school teacher called me over every day and
(45:25):
she'd say, you know, you, people think you're just as
good as us, but you're not and you never will be.
You're a second class citizen.
Speaker 1 (45:33):
So this is how.
Speaker 4 (45:33):
School teachers used to talk to kids, and so trying
to sort of look at that and just dealing with it.
And you know, I know white people get scared that
people are coming for them, which is you know, I
think there's a lot of guilt there, just because like,
oh man, we would fucking everything up, but someone gonna
come fuck us up to Yeah, but I think it's
not nobody's. Well, there probably are some people, but collectively,
(45:55):
I don't think indigenous peoples are looking for that. We're
just looking for a little bit of balance. And so
but I think trying to look at that stuff is
very terrifying because then you have to rectify it somehow. Yeah,
And you know, and for us, if we have to
carry the burden on our own, you know, people they're
just killing themselves. And if we look at this, we say,
(46:16):
you're going to let these kids just completely lose themselves
and it's hard. It's hard to figure out what to
do now. But I think if we can get more
people on board with conversations about what could decolonization look
like and what could a place that's not assimilating anymore
look like, and we might have a more equitable place.
Speaker 1 (46:37):
Yeah, all right, let's take let's take another quick break.
Speaker 2 (46:40):
We'll be right back, and we're back.
Speaker 1 (46:53):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (46:54):
I wanted to ask you about representation in the media.
Killers of the Flower Moon is out right now. Lots
of stories going around about that film. You and I've
talked a lot about reservation dogs and about the impact
that has had on you, and you know, I'm curious,
as you know, I think a lot of like in
my community, we talk a lot about seeing black boy
(47:16):
joy first time. A lot of times black men are
either depicted as being very hard or the femal system
or trying to overcome civil rights. Usually like these are
the spaces you can occupy as a black man. So
seeing you know, black dudes get to be silly and
goofy and funny with each other. There's an element of
recognization like, oh no, that's actually what my family and
(47:40):
my friends look like. There's a feeling of at least
for speaking just for myself, like hopefulness of oh this
is something cool that children can watch and see themselves,
because I remember when there was almost nothing on TV
for me to watch where people looked like and as
(48:01):
we're seeing I think more obviously not enough indigenous representation
in medias're like, what is feeling good for you? How
are you feeling vollkulors of the flower moon? And what
do you hope the future of indigenous representation looks like?
Speaker 4 (48:17):
Yeah, gonna cheese. Everyone should just go see reservation docs,
like that's that's a good like starting point. Just get
into indigenous stories and indigenous television. It's such a wonderful
and groundbreaking thing to have. And but also like it's
not quite mainstreamed, you know, it kind of is what
(48:39):
you got to have a Hulu subscription, I think. And
so it's and maybe we're beyond the days of what
sort of these types of shows would have been and
you could do a lot more if it's not on
broadcast television. So I get that because you know, you
could have shit ass in there like a million times,
and so which is what they call each other, and
(49:00):
so as indigenous peoples as well, Like sometimes you have
these endearing terms that a lot of people might be
offended by. But some of the things I think about,
like I understand the conversations about, you know, is this
just trauma porn for white people where they get to
watch us suffer, and you know, and it does. It's
triggering to see Native women. There's whole movements about missing
(49:24):
and murdered Indigenous women because Indigenous women, they experience violence
at rates per capita higher than probably anybody in the
United States, and eighty percent of those perpetrators are white.
And you know, when there was a study that came
out from the Department of Justice that said that, like,
if you look at major sort of racial groups in
(49:45):
the United States, Native Americans are the only ones who
experience the majority of violent crimes from outside their own group,
and it's by white perpetrators. And so it's very difficult
to see. But I remember when the Watch Sahman series
came out on HBO, and like, how many people got
alerted to the Tulsa race massacre and would they have
(50:11):
known about that otherwise? And so to have a production
like this and say you got to see how brutal
these white people were, and I started to get really
interested once I started seeing the trailers and they're saying
they're using this book and saying like, can you can
you see the wolf? Can you see the wolf? Or
something like that, right, and they're really and then they
showed these pictures of these white guys and I look
(50:33):
at that old pitia.
Speaker 1 (50:34):
I was like, oh, yeah, those those guys are all bad.
Speaker 4 (50:36):
And then to sort of see these characters and what
they would do to try and get the land, because
to get the land you have to engage in complete
in humanity again, coming back to that, and I think
it's important to have that conversation.
Speaker 1 (50:54):
And it's tough.
Speaker 4 (50:54):
It's tough to sort of say, Okay, do we have
to have a white guy come and tell our story
and do we have to have of these prominent white
characters in there, especially male characters, And the answer is
probably yes, because I don't know if there's an if
there's a feature film about just Native people, it's going
to go direct to it's a direct to DVD thing,
whatever the whatever the equivalent of that is, and so
(51:18):
that that's for the indigenous eyes and we need that,
we need those types of movies. But I think we
also need some movies that are going to push it
into the national conversation as well, because we have someone,
you know, if you look at Lily Gladstone, her performances
as out of this world. It's amazing. And to see
her walking around with you know, big time actors and
(51:39):
big time movie makers is incredible because there's going to
be Native people out there and say, oh, I could
do that, and then maybe that opens the door for
a Native production, and maybe that opens the door for
a Native story to hit that level of you know,
and I hate to use those sort of stepping stone
type of metaphors, sure, but that door's not open for us.
(52:00):
It just isn't. But it's starting to get open. So
we have children's shows like Malia of Dnale and I've
been a cultural consultant and a writer on that show
for since it began almost and so it's been really
amazing that my children could turn on PBS and there's
a lead character who's an Alaska Native girl and she's
(52:21):
got agency, and she's smart, and she's cool and she's funny,
and so we're able to sort of like break some
of the stereotypes through the children's programming. And then hopefully
by time those kids are grown up, they're like what
they used to not be, like major motion pictures about
Native people. That's crazy, yeah, you know. And so because
(52:42):
we go back to like Dances with Wolves, which is groundbreaking, yes,
but it's about two white people who fall in love
in Native America, and then we've got wind River, which
is groundbreaking. Yes, it's about two white people who fall
in love in Native America. So I'm like, well, being
a background your own story, Yeah, there's two white people
(53:02):
didn't fall in love in this movie. Like it's like, okay,
we just get crumbs. We'll make what makes a fucking
damn good pie these chroms and we have for Thanksgiving dinner.
But it's a little bit more than like take what
we can get, because there's a lot of consultation in
this film. And what I hope is that people will
watch it because the other the danger is that people say,
(53:25):
I don't want to watch it because just a white
guy tells these stories. I don't want to watch it
because it's people. There's violence against Native people there, and
that's triggering, and it is like get yourself ready. It's
also three hours, three and a half hours long figure
out like don't drink a whole bunch of water before
you go in. But also if people don't go then
(53:47):
it just allows Hollywood to say I told you people
don't watch movies Native people.
Speaker 2 (53:52):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (53:52):
And I also think you know, you're just speaking for myself,
seeing like in the Micainia have similar conversations around like
slaves narratives. People are like, we are always depicted as slaves,
which I think is a slight exaggeration, but I hear you,
and then there's frustration at that and as like, I'm
not to me personally, I'm not ashamed to come from
(54:12):
people who were enslaved. I'm not ashamed of our survival.
I'm not ashamed of how we were able to take
that experience and evolve as a community and survive and
thrive and be where we are now. None of that,
to me is shameful or something I want to look
away from. I am exhausted by slave narratives that focus
(54:38):
specifically on like demonic white masters. Specifically. I'm tired of
seeing enslaved people depicted only by the grueling work they
were forced to endure, when we know that we were
writing beautiful music, when we know we were dancing and
having loving relationships, and there was culture preserved and created
(55:00):
during this time, and I think a lot of people
I understand the instinct to be like, I don't want
to invest in anything that makes my culture look less
than or that doesn't aspire to our best selves. For example,
some people had a real problem with Like Boys in
the Hood when it came out, even though we know
that film is a masterpiece, where they were like, you're
just showing like young kids doing gang violence. Why would
(55:22):
you want to promote that. It's like, well, people are
actually living and leading these lives, and exploring them and
giving them humanity allows you to understand why when you
see you know, there was a murder and Compton tonight,
you can't just write it off as like, oh, that's
what happens there. They're individual beings and it's important to
examine that. And I think you know to your point
(55:43):
earlier about these horrifying schools. The first time I ever
saw that depicted in media was in the Netflix and
a green Gable series, which I think came out like
twenty fifteen, if I'm not mistaken, and it was so
like it brings you to you because it's like, Oh,
there's this happy story about this orphan and she finds
a good family and it's kind of rough for her.
Oh she made a friend with like this indigenous girl
(56:05):
who is also like living and thriving with her family,
and then in the middle of the last season, she's
just taken and you're like, wait, what's happening? And you
kept like, at least I kept expecting, like, oh, there
will be a resolution to this, Like they will win
because it's Anna Green Gables and she's plucky and she
can do it. And what I really admired about that show,
for you know, that has faut It's not a perfect show,
but what I admired about that show is its ability
(56:25):
to be like, no, it wasn't resolved and it was
just horrible, and her parents had to leave the land
so that they could just camp outside of her school
in the hopes that they could be close to her
and one day find a resolution. And I think when
we get visual representation like that, it's like sometimes, you know,
people's best access to these stories is through entertainment media.
I think there's a lot we can say about that
(56:47):
versus the educational system goes and where we should be
learning these things, but knowing that, you know, I think
getting a variety of stories that explore both the trying
times we've had and the weird, awesome, amaze and places
we are now. I think I just think it's like
vitally important.
Speaker 4 (57:05):
Yeah, and I think for some for a lot of
Indigenous people, and you know, I'm not going to speak
for anybody, but sometimes I wonder like, are you mad
because you're seeing this thing that happened to people? Are
you mad about the movie itself? Because sometimes it's hard
to separate that stuff because we don't get our story
really told on big, big screens where these are. You know,
(57:26):
there's a whole bunch of commercials about this, there's a
whole bunch of press, and I know the writers strike,
which I'm glad it happened because there needs to be
equity for folks who are working in the movie industry.
But it also just it impacted the opening of this
film because you know, they couldn't really heavily promote it,
and especially actors who were in it. But I think
(57:47):
people should engage in it and people should should go.
But I think also there's there's movies like Skins and
smoke signals and on tanajuat the Fast Runner, and even
outside of North America, there's a film called Rabbit Proof Fence,
Like if you want to really get the boarding school experience,
like watch that movie. It is heartbreaking and incredible. It's
(58:12):
about these these kids who were taken from boarding school
and they they run away and it's it's amazing. It's
based on a true story. They have the you get
to see images of these little girls as the elders
that they became. And you know, and when we think
about our elders, when we think about our ability to
stand up and speak our language, and we just had
(58:33):
a cultural ceremony this weekend, it was wonderful, like we
can do that stuff because people went to these boarding
schools and found a way to be themselves. They found
a way to hold on to who they are and
what they are. And when we look at some of
the things and Killers of the Flower Moon, like, there
was an incredible amount of Indigenous agency in that film,
(58:53):
which I think, you know, that's what brought the FBI there,
and I think there was a real temptation, probably because
once the FBI stepped in, it was like, oh is
this gonna be about this guy, and it kind of
wasn't like it was like a still kind of a
side character. And you know, there's certainly things that I
would I would want more out of, Like I just
wanted more Indigenous depth and character. But there was a
(59:16):
lot of depth and there was a lot of character,
and so I think it's for me.
Speaker 1 (59:21):
I look at it.
Speaker 4 (59:21):
I'm like, this is a worthwhile thing, and this is
a thing that I hope gets people talking and that
they think about what happened to these people who did it?
What happened to the people who did it, because even
though you know, the FBI gets involved and there's investigations,
like white people get away with things back then and
they still do now.
Speaker 2 (59:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (59:43):
Well, I feel like every time you come on, we
say like that we could keep talking for hours. In
this case, we're breaking a record because we only got
to the search history. We didn't even get to the
Overrated or Untraded within the first hour. But yeah, I
mean truly until next time, because I feel like we
could just keep this conversation going indefinitely. But yeah, thank you,
(01:00:08):
thank you for coming on. This has been an amazing conversation.
Where can people find you and follow you and hear
you and all that good stuff. Who nae.
Speaker 4 (01:00:18):
Yeah, So the Tongue Unbroken does come out season two
so excited is coming out in mid January, and we've
got I've just been able to really track down some
great people and have some amazing conversations with them, and
so like this is this is just a taste of
some of the stuff that we're doing. We're really trying
(01:00:39):
to like just keep it casual and also enjoyable because
these conversations are difficult, but that doesn't mean you can't
have fun and still laugh and enjoy life and think
about a potentially brighter future.
Speaker 1 (01:00:53):
But you can find me on.
Speaker 4 (01:00:54):
Twitter what is it x Twitter?
Speaker 1 (01:00:58):
You can find me on Twitter, which is right and
tell you by a fascist Twitter the end of the
search box stops working, and then maybe I'll change what
I refer to it as.
Speaker 4 (01:01:07):
But right I'm not as active on there, just because
it's such a disappointment that a racist person can just
buy the whole thing. But you know, it's also go
America what you're all about? And I'm also on Facebook
and Instagram. I find me under my think at names,
which we'll just have to link to it's funny or
do anicao danuk And then I would say the piece
(01:01:32):
of media. I don't know if you ask about that,
and you guys usually do I do.
Speaker 1 (01:01:36):
Yeah, is there a work of media that you've been enjoying.
Speaker 4 (01:01:39):
Yeah, there's a comedian Sheng Wang who has this opening.
I think it's it's in his comedy act on Netflix.
It's about Costco is bigger than all of us. It's
so funny, like just really going into like you haven't
really given up on life until you walk around in
some Kirkland pants and he is. So it's so hilarious,
(01:02:00):
so funny, and you could find it on social media,
but they they cut all the space out of in
between his talking, which kind of drove me a little nuts.
Speaker 1 (01:02:09):
It's like just like yeah that YouTube edit, hurry yeah,
Like have you seen the YouTube ddit of Killers of
the Flower Moon. It's like forty five minutes. It's just
every every space, just all words just from together. I'm
not a fan of the YouTube d like, let there
be space.
Speaker 3 (01:02:28):
We need silence.
Speaker 1 (01:02:29):
I just want to say about The Tongue Unbroken. I
was re listening to season one this weekend. One of
the things I love about it is getting to hear
you interact with, you know, other teachers of children and
like talk about your experience teaching your own children and
children in general, and then getting you to getting to
hear you interact with your kids. There's just like this gentle,
(01:02:52):
lovely energy. And as I was listening to that, my
own children, like I was just kind of sitting in
bed listening to that, it was bedtime, and my own
children just like ran over to me where I was
laying in bed and lay on me and started to
fart on me while telling me that they were farting
on me and that I was their bed, and so
(01:03:15):
it was just a real it was like listening to this,
oh man, I aspired like this lovely energy, and then
my kids were like, you know, letting me know that
I was their bed and they were free to fart
on me whenever they wanted.
Speaker 4 (01:03:28):
It sounds about right. I really love working with teachers
because we could joke about all this kind of stuff.
We're like, you know, someone put up a meme and
they'd say Native people in public, the children are our
future Native people at home, Dan, these kids are messy.
Speaker 1 (01:03:48):
Joel, thank you so much for joining and co hosting
with me today. Where can people find you? Follow you?
And what is work a media you've.
Speaker 3 (01:03:58):
Been enjoying y'all mean Joel Monique find me all over
the internet at Joel Monique. It's j O E L
L E M O N I q u E pieces.
I've been reading a lot. I think you talk about
this last time I was on. I've been picking up
more books, reading a lot, listening to a lot of
audio books. Ar Kong wrote this absolute stunner. It's called
Babbel or The Necessity of Violence, which is a fictionalized
(01:04:20):
history of translators at Oxford, a school she actually attended,
I think especially got her master's degree. And it's it's
a lot about about a lot of things, but essentially,
a boy is created in China and brought back by
a professor who says, hey, you've got just enough language
(01:04:43):
to translate, but I've removed you early enough that you
have no connection to your culture. You'll now translate all
of your language for me so I can use it
as I need to basically invade China. And he has
to figure out he's raised in Europe in England, trying
to figure out who he is as an individual. He
gets to school and meets a lot of other kids
who are similar to him, and his world explodes, and
(01:05:06):
yet he's still under some of this horrible professor. And
it talks about what is revolution, how does it happen?
When is violence a necessity? And what does that do
to the soul? And it's so beautiful and difficult, but
ultimately I think inspiring feels like a weak word, but
it really set me a light. I love that book.
(01:05:27):
I like it's one of the books. I'm like, I
can't wait to read this.
Speaker 1 (01:05:29):
It's too soon.
Speaker 3 (01:05:29):
I don't want to burn out on it. But I
really really enjoy reading it. And ar Quang I think
just hit thirty. This is her fourth book. They're all phenomenal.
She's an incredible, incredible writer. So if you have time,
if you're into reading Babbel or The Necessity of Violence,
I highly recommend it.
Speaker 2 (01:05:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:05:44):
That sounds amazing and intense. It's so good. You can
find me on Twitter at Jack Underscore O'Brien Working Media.
I've been enjoying kim at Kimmy Monty tweeted the person
who named tits really nailed it.
Speaker 3 (01:06:01):
Success.
Speaker 1 (01:06:05):
You find us on Twitter at Daily Zeigeist. We're at
the Daily Zeitgeist on Instagram. We have a Facebook fanpage
and a website Daily zeikeist dot com, where we post
our episodes and our footnotes link off to the information
that we talked about in today's episode, as well as
a song that we think you might enjoy. A super
producer Justin is there a song that you think people
(01:06:28):
might enjoy? First of all, if you listen to the
new Andre three thousand, Yes, that.
Speaker 5 (01:06:33):
Was actually one of the songs I was gonna recommend. Yeah, yeah,
So New Blue Sun just came out on Friday.
Speaker 2 (01:06:40):
It's amazing.
Speaker 5 (01:06:41):
I know people really wanted a rap album from Andre,
but still do.
Speaker 1 (01:06:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (01:06:46):
I mean, but I love the fact that his take
on this is I'm forty eight, I don't be knowing
what to talk about, you know, And it's just I
love that self awareness and a lot of other artists
should take note.
Speaker 1 (01:06:56):
This is a very meditative, ethereal.
Speaker 5 (01:06:59):
Song and the title of the track is a mouthful
that in honor of hun being here. It also posits
a linguistic question, not one you need to answer, but
a question nonetheless. It's called the slang word pussy rolls
off the tongue with far better ease than the proper
word vagina.
Speaker 2 (01:07:15):
Do you agree?
Speaker 5 (01:07:16):
And both the statement and follow up is maybe something
you can ponder as you sit back, relax and explore
with this damn near fifteen minute long song has to offer.
Speaker 1 (01:07:25):
Wow, the whole album is incredible. By the way, me
saying I still want to rap aubum from them doesn't
mean that I don't appreciate this. As we talked about
on Yesterday's a Weekend Trending episode, it's an incredible word. Yes,
and it's exactly what you because you you wouldn't be
able to predict what was going to come from him,
So in that way, this is the predictable thing that
(01:07:47):
would come from three thousand. It's like that some somehow
so perfect, unpredictable, exactly right.
Speaker 5 (01:07:54):
And exactly what the world needs right now. Yes, it's
very calming. If you really need to relax, just please
this on and turn your brain off and you can
find this song in the footnook.
Speaker 1 (01:08:05):
And who do you agree? Because yeah, well so song.
Speaker 4 (01:08:09):
The thing it word for for vagina is goose. And
so sometimes around here, like we got to sort of stop,
kids are playing duck duck goose, we got to step
in out, you know what, Like our kids are going
to have a really different interpretation of how this game
is working. Or a someone says, oh, yeah, silly goose,
and well yeah, if we're all over here chuckling, then.
Speaker 1 (01:08:31):
You know what's going on.
Speaker 4 (01:08:32):
But yeah, it's a nicer term, I think, and so amazing.
Speaker 1 (01:08:39):
Well we will link off to that song in the footnotes.
The Daily Zeitgeist is a production of iHeart Radio. For
more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
That is going to do it for us this morning,
back this afternoon to tell you what is trending and
we will talk to you all then.
Speaker 2 (01:08:58):
Bye.
Speaker 1 (01:09:00):
Two children, A two children,
The Daily Zeitgeist News
Hosts And Creators
Jack O'Brien
Miles Gray
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