August 8, 2022 • 59 mins
Dr. Sol Neely joins X̱ʼ unei for a conversation on decoloniality and life
journeys towards language revitalization. Sol and X̱ʼ unei talk about the
Cherokee language and the complexities of identity and language in
colonial contexts, and then talk about blood quantum and ways that the
English language currently contributes to Indigenous erasure and
colonial violence. They wrap up the conversation with a dialogue on
raising children in Indigenous languages and building upon a future that
gains strength and momentum. Follow Tongue Unbroken on Twitter
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Play he duty. They tried to telling nicses try to
genocide us. I'm still here with the tongue con rope
(00:24):
and was the wait to cut you on? Goodness cheese
eight yah tesh with the coots ya yata say what
is happening? Everybody? My name is Corney. Goodness cheese. Thank
(00:44):
you for listening. This is the Tongue Unbroken, a podcast
about language revitalization in North America. Today we're gonna be
talking about decolonization how that relates to language real idolization
with a special guest, Dr Saul Neelye, who is a
(01:06):
professor at Heritage University in Washington. We used to work
together at the University of Alaska Southeast and I greatly
admire his way of thinking, approaching life, learning and using
his ancestral language and just going about his day to
day business being amazing. So we're gonna go through a
(01:32):
series of topics. We're gonna hear about Saul and his
language journey. We're gonna talk a little bit about blood quantum,
identity is defined by colonizers. We're gonna talk about colonial vocabulary,
how it's sneaky violent against Indigenous peoples in many different
(01:54):
ways how we can shift our own ways of talking
to embrace the colonial reality and contribute to language revitalization
through English, which is the colonial language and has tremendous
control impact and it just takes up a lot of
(02:15):
space for Indigenous peoples. Then we're gonna wrap it up
by coming back to SAAL's language journey with his daughter Mila,
wife Carry and their wonderful family, and then just kind
of start to wrap things up. So this is a
special episode. I'm so glad that you're here. Episode always,
(02:38):
episode two, and our conversation with Saul Neely is going
to take us right to the end of the episode.
So we look forward to hearing from you. I look
forward to hearing from you and getting some feedback on
some of the topics including we're gonna start suggesting some
(02:59):
reading for you all to take a look and see
how you can continue to educate yourself, add to your
library of information, and utilize good stuff to do good things. Woo,
(03:24):
thank you for joining us. This is our conversation Yak Yuhan.
This is the very first interview that we've done on
the Tongue Unbroken, and I'm so happy to be visiting
with my dear friend and colleague, Dr Saul Neely. We
(03:45):
worked at the University of Alaska Southeast together and begin
construction on an Indigenous studies program there. And I will
allow Saul to introduce himself. Okay, got the solely doc
Wadola saw Nearly dog Wadoo Nego Goti now Kochigi, Ellensburg, Washington. UH,
(04:11):
it's great to be here. Um. I just introduced myself
in Jeriche and I am calling in from Ellensburg, Washington,
which is on land of the Yakima Nation. Yakima Mami
teachum at land of the Yakima people that was seated
(04:32):
in the eight Treaty. But I work and I teach
at Heritage University, which is located on the in top Nish, Washington,
on the unseated lands of the Yakima Nation Reservation, where
I'm Director of Composition and UH currently revitalizing the American
(04:52):
Indian Studies program there and doing some good work on
decolonizing composition program and really doing our best to to
support our indigenous students there in the interest of tribal
sovereignty and indigenous futures. Chief and this is a podcast
about language revitalization in North America. Sometimes we're gonna step out.
(05:17):
We're going to take a look at some other factors
that I think strongly influence the life and sometimes the
death of indigenous languages. And I wouldn't even say death,
I would say the murder of indigenous languages by colonial forces.
And so, can you talk to us a little bit
about your own language journey and uh kind of set
(05:39):
us up for for that conversation that we're gonna move
through a couple of other topics. Yeah, absolutely so. Uh,
you know, I was raised as an army brat when
my I was born after my dad returned from Vietnam,
and um, I oddly enough, if I spent my entire childhood,
(06:02):
even as an army brat moving around every three or
four years, we lived within or within a couple hundred
miles of our ancestral Cherokee homelands, while my friends were
going off to Germany or Korea or all over the
United States. It was a really remarkable coincidence that I
spent my entire childhood right there in what we call
(06:25):
today's southeastern United States, and I grew up with a
rich sense of pride in being Cherokee. That's something that
my grandfather instilled in me. His name was Lucian Buffington Neely.
It's a very rich name. Buffington comes from a Cherokee
chief that he was named after. Everybody called him Hoot though,
(06:49):
and he raised us, my brother and I to feel
very proud of being Cherokee. It wasn't the same experience
that my father experienced growing up, however, it was something
that my grandfather began to reclaim. He was born in Tallaquah, Oklahoma,
and his Cherokee mother died when he was young, about
(07:12):
ten years old, and so my grandfather h had a
hard childhood. He didn't get past the sixth grade. He
was a care keeper for the Talaquas Cemetery. He uh
sort of homeless. At one point he lived in the
trees of the Talaqua Cemetery as he took care of it.
(07:36):
And my uncle, my father's older brother. He was born
in Tallaqua, but my father was born nine years later
in Lodi, California. They had left Oklahoma. They left Taalaqua
for the Central Valley of California, and it was a
tough life. It was a tough life for all of them,
(07:58):
and so my grandfather because the only he went through
sixth grade. He spoke basically handshake Cherokee. So growing up, uh,
you know, and you had to say hello, and you
had to insult somebody, you know. And but his brother,
he had several brothers, but his brother, Sequoia was his
(08:20):
given name. Everybody called him Bull. He was the last
fluent speaker of Cherokee language in my family. He was
actually a linguist for the army. He did a lot
of code talk and stuff like that. Um And when
I was eighteen years old, after I graduated high school
(08:40):
in Georgia, my plan was to go live with him
and learn the language. But he experienced a stroke and
he lost the ability to talk, and it was heartbreaking
for me. It was absolutely heartbreaking because also at that time,
my parents got divorced. My family fell into a pretty
(09:03):
radical crisis. Everything was just really difficult at that time,
and the Cherokee language was going to ground me. That's
what I was gonna go do. I was gonna learn that,
I was going to make sure that Cherokee stayed alive
as a language in our family. But when that happened,
when he had a stroke, and my family sort of
went through this pretty radical crisis. Uh. I remember one time,
(09:27):
just I was eighteen, I remember saying to myself, fuck it,
I'm just an American kid. I just gotta I just
gotta own that. And at the same time, my dad, um,
he and I stayed close through the family crisis, and
at the same time, he was encouraging me to go
study Western philosophy. He wanted, you know, he wanted me
(09:50):
to go study Socrates, he wanted me to go study
European languages. He wanted me to study European literature and
European philosophy. And so I was the first generation and
college kid and my family. That's what I did. I
went and I studied philosophy, Western philosophy, and um it
took a long time for me to come back to
(10:13):
uh a real you know, strong desire to learn the language.
And a lot of that happened after my daughter, who's
now eleven years old, After my daughter was born, and
realizing that I do not want Cherokee is a language
to die in our family and uh and so actually
(10:35):
I would say that my path towards Cherokee language revitalization
with my family had a lot to do with with
you taking clink it with you at u a s
just the joy of learning these sounds that no other uge,
no other language in the world has uh, learning how
to make like the unvoiced all. You know, these were
(10:56):
just really fun things. Learning how to say your name,
you know, corne uh. These are just really inspiring for me.
And I realized that the Cherokee Nation provided free online
language classes, and so I began to enroll in them.
And I remember, you know, I was I was looking
at Cherokee language and books, and as I was trying
(11:22):
to figure out phonetically how to pronounce some of the words.
I see words like to ajia and the book the
dictionary tells me to pronounce it doh chu, And I'm like, well,
that's that's not how my grandpa used to say it.
But I've dialed into the first online language class with
ed Field, Cherokee National Treasure, and he got on and
(11:44):
he said, c oh no God to Wicha, and he
said it just like my grandpa used to say it.
And right away I felt so at home. And I
remember that first lesson to at Field was talking and
I heard and I wouldn't have heard it had I
not taken Clink language. I heard the unvoiced l you know,
for instance, like in the in the word. My my
(12:06):
daughter and I were actually dialing into a Cherokee language
lesson this morning and we were talking about geechy dog,
you know, and you can hear it GEECHI right there,
and so, M yeah, it's it's, it's it's it's become
for my family, a transgenerational homecoming. That's that's what we
call it. And so uh yeah, a lot of just
(12:29):
really thinking about the role that you know, my ancestors played,
you know, through the trail of tears on the other
end of the trail of tears, my great great grandfather
who helped rebuild the nation. Uh. You know, when I
can trace my Cherokee ancestry back to my five times
great grandmother, and when I think about that long generation
(12:53):
from my five times great grandmother to my daughter, that's
nine generations of unbroken uh Cherokee genealogy. And think about
the role that language revitalization plays for the next seven
generations out. It's it's imperative, it's inspiring, um and and
(13:16):
it's kind of like all I want to do at
this point, gonna cheese inky Niki, Oh yeah, Ohsican you team,
he's hip. Yeah, how are you? Thanks for sharing? Going
(13:41):
to cheese. Uh. Sometimes I think about this stuff and
it's like, it's as if the colonizers, not all of them,
but some of them and some very powerful ones, burned
down all of our houses, like on our own ancestral land,
and then built up these wonderful, beautiful homes for themselves homes.
But with our language, we rebuild the homes, and in
(14:05):
these homes the language saves us. We'll be right back.
So what's happening, baby? This colonization ship got you down.
You're gonna get on this decolonization. Yeah, it's time with
language revitalization all across North America, the land of the
(14:26):
language coming back into the hands of future generations where
it all blows drives up and have their voices be heard,
defeat all the colonial forces that try to hold you down.
(14:51):
So thinking about, like some other aspects of colonization and
identity and language and how these things contribute. I've been
really enjoying this awakening of indigenous entertainment. I'm thinking about
Rutherford Falls, I'm thinking about reservation dogs, and I think
(15:12):
about Molly of Denali, and my kids have things to see,
and I have things to see that have Indigenous people
and indigenous content, but some of the things I like
to think a lot about what opened the doors for
some of these things, And so I think a door
opener is a show like Longmeyer, and so long Meier
is a show about kind of a cowboy white guy
(15:36):
and his white team of cops, and so it's kind
of not the greatest setting for indigenous peoples as white
cops who live near a reservation, but he's actually friends
with a lot of Indigenous peoples and it has some
Indigenous perspectives in the show itself. And there was an
episode called Indians, Dogs and Horses, and I was like, Okay,
(15:58):
what's going on, What's going on with this episode of her?
And in the episode, someone mentions the government keeps track
of the blood quantum of three things, Native Americans, dogs,
and horses. So like, I want to talk to you
about this concept of blood quantum because a lot of
people might not know about it, or a lot of
(16:19):
people might have conflicting uh ideas on what it is
and what it should be and what we should do
with it. And you and I probably have similar thoughts
on what we should do with it. Which is throw
it out the damn window. But what are your thoughts
when I start talking about when we start talking about
blood quantum. Yeah, blood quantum was designed to eradicate Native people. Um.
(16:45):
You know. Jack Forbes writes about this, uh in The
Blood Grows Thinner and he talks about how blood quantum
was first used in seventeen oh five when Virginia adopted
laws um which may a so called half blood person
a legally inferior person, right. And so the idea is
(17:08):
that if blood quantum, which is a racialized identity for
indigenous people, if that is enacted and traced through, eventually
the blood quantum will diminish to the extent where Native
people's uh no longer exists in that legal framework. And
(17:31):
if that happens, then treaty obligations are no longer uh,
the federal government is no longer to fulfill their treaty obligations.
And so that's what blood quantum was created for. Um.
You know, it was really reinvigorated h during the DAWs Act,
(17:52):
um during allotment and when they cut up are commonly
held reservation lands, you know, the Cherokee Nation after removal
after the Trail of tears Um. You know, we had
this beautiful reservation of in northeastern Oklahoma, and through the
DAWs Act in general lot Man, it became this sort
(18:13):
of checker board of of sovereignty literally burning down houses
you know as well. Um. But it also picked back
up in ninety four with the in the Reorganization Act
and um. And you know, when you think about blood quantum,
(18:34):
I think what's most insidious about that is precisely this
attempt to racialize Indigenous identity. You know, when you look at,
for instance, the Trump administration, they were all over racializing
Native identity that way. You know, when we talk about sovereignty,
(18:56):
sovereignty then becomes unconstitutional if tribal sovereignty is understood to
be predicated on race and blood quantum. But historically, traditionally, ancestrally,
indigenous identity was not linked to blood quantum. That's absolutely absurd.
It's complete colonial invention. We were, uh, indigenous identity was
(19:18):
connected to political relations and kinship relations, and so you know,
we had some I mean, you know, we've we've talked
in the past about what religion and what Christianity has
done to Native cultures. It's a complicated one. With the
Cherokee nation for sure. For instance, my five times great
grandmother is recorded and manuscript published by the Bureau of
(19:43):
American Ethnology. Uh, she's recorded as being the first Cherokee
to convert to Christianity, and so Cherokee culture and as
Christian culture so intertwined. But we had some Moravian missionaries
before were the removal who were real allies. They were
(20:05):
you know, basically they were Cherokee. They spoke our language,
they practice our culture. So we have somebody like Samuel
Worcester right from the the uh, one of the Marshal
trilogy cases cases, Samuel Worcester actually went on the Trail
of Tears with the Cherokee people. And uh, you can
(20:26):
also look at, you know, other aspects of blood quantum.
For instance, Chief John Ross, the great Cherokee chief who
presided over the Trail of Tears over removal. You know,
he was one eight blood quantum. But he was you know,
one of the great Cherokee chiefs um. And so we
(20:48):
don't really see, we don't really I mean, I guess today,
as a colonial invention, all sorts of tribal nations have
adopted blood quantum. And even though you and I are
all about getting rid of blood quantum. When it comes
down to it, it's you know, uh, in the interest
of tribal sovereignty, each tribal nation has to determine what
(21:12):
how they will relate to blood quantum. So the Cherokee Nation,
you know, there's three federally recognized Cherokee tribes. Basically, there's
the Cherokee Nation, which I'm a citizen of, based out
of Talaquah. There's the uk B, the United Gooda Band.
They're also headquartered out of Talquah, Oklahoma. And then then
then there is the eb c I, the Eastern Band
(21:32):
of Cherokee Indians, whose headquarters is in Cherokee, North Carolina.
Both the uk B and the e b c I
have blood quantum. The e b c I is one
six h u k b um. I can't remember if
you KB is a quarter or one six, but you know,
(21:53):
I'm what I understand is that the uk B is
dealing with the diminishing blood quantum of their grandchildren. So
what happens with their grandchildren? Will they just disenroll their
their grandchildren or what? So? The opposite then, or not
the opposite, but an alternative to blood quantum is of
course is lineal descent. So Cherokee Nation then is lineal descent.
(22:15):
So I trace to be a citizen of the Cherokee Nation,
you have to trace your ancestor back to the dogs roll.
My great great grandfather is the one who was first
born after the Trail of tears in Tallaqua, and he
is the one in our family who is listed on
the dogs role. And so that's why we have this
(22:36):
lineal descent. But as I understand it, among the lower
forty tribes, and folks should know that there are five
hundreds seventy four federally recognized tribal nations, and about a
third of them don't use blood quantum. Uh. And I
understand that the central counts of Clinton and Heida, Uh,
there's no blood quantum for tribal enrollment. But there is
(23:02):
for like for like. See Alaska, right, See Alaska has
got a one quarter. Yeah. So in in Alaska we
have tribes and we also have corporations, and so in
exchange for a significant chunk of land, about nine of
the land in Alaska, there was a land claims agreement
that was reached and it involved a billion dollar settlement
(23:25):
and about eleven million acres of land. Uh, nothing was
given to anybody. It was an exchange for the land.
And it was also you know, it was it was
negotiations at gunpoint. So it's not like there's a lot
of folks who can do something about it, but it's
it's probably the best deal that you could get where
there wasn't a whole lot of relocation from your villages.
(23:48):
Although several villages were burned down by colonizers, there's some
that are right here. And the community of Douglas was
put up over a village that was burned down by settlers.
And so my experience with blood Qualum, though, it comes
down to I've got I've gone to the office of
(24:08):
the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and I have filled out
my paperwork, and I have wondered sometimes why my brothers
says something different than mine does and we have the
same parents and uh, and so sometimes there's a lot
of mistakes that can be made. But basically I get
a there's a fraction on their mine says five eights,
(24:29):
and so I am five eight. And it says like
one has a fraction of this and a fraction of that,
and they also divide it into different types depending on
how your sort of regional office takes care of things.
But then we also have these corporations, so in exchange
for our land, these corporations were developed to care for
(24:51):
the land and the financial settlement, and so we also
belong to these corporations. We have certain numbers of shares,
and there is a one quarter blood quantum requirement, and
sometimes there is that requirement as well to be eligible
for scholarships, and that same one quarter blood quantum minimum
(25:13):
is required to hunt marine mammals exactly Alaska, so my
my children can. But if my children were to have
children with white people, or actually just any non indigenous peoples,
then their children might not be able to would have
to like bust out the calculators and do the math.
(25:34):
But I'm always in favor of tribes determining their own
methods of enrollment and moving away from blood quantum and
getting away from federal government legislating identity, because for me,
the origins of indigenous identity come down to being non
white and being savage, primitive non humans, and so I
(25:55):
think it's coded legally as being non humans. If you
go back to federal Indian law when they say there
couldn't be Aboriginal title because they can't own land because
their primitive savages who have no concept of land ownership exactly.
But that's the courts of the conqueror, just saying something
convenient so that they can then take the land. And
(26:17):
so it allows forced removals. It also allows massacres. It
allows the later following assimilation practices, where you you execute
cultural and linguistic genocide upon hundreds of nations and you
try to destroy them by banishing their identity, not even
(26:41):
through a blood quantum process, but through this other process
that was completely legal in terms of what the United
States government did and wanted to do. And this results
in language, lass identity loss, absolute crisis of health and
well being for Indigenous people's separation of their land, separation
(27:01):
from their land, separation from their languages, the banishment of
warrior societies, the rape and murder of women, which continues
today at rates higher than any other portion of population
the United States of America. And then it also allows
you to get rid of the Native American And so
(27:23):
there's plenty of folks who said, if you have no Indians,
you have no Indian problem, and that is tied to
blood quantum that is also tied to in Canada, they
have status, which is a similar concept but uses different vocabulary.
Although there's were was also complicated by these other patriarchal
(27:44):
laws that said if if a Native American man had
a child with a white woman, their status was uninterrupted,
but if a Native American woman had a child with
a white man, then they could lose their status, and
so it was also just a sort of patrilineal concept
as well. And Indigenous people should be able to define
(28:05):
their own identity and also define who is eligible for
whatever benefits may come from being indigenous, because as you
and I know, there are scholars, there are authors, there
are artists, There are actors who manufacture and indigenous identity
that is false and they write books and they tell
(28:27):
stories and they give speeches about their upbringing and they
are a hundent not indigenous, and that also does harm
to Indigenous people's Yeah, yeah, there there's a lot there. Um.
You know, I think about the the role that blood
(28:47):
quantum plays, not just in terms of what we've been
talking about, in terms of its federal purpose to ultimately
eradicate Native people's so that treaty obligate sans ceased to exist.
But also the way that that impacts families and individuals.
You know, um for instance, you know, I've encountered people,
(29:12):
I've met people who have a higher blood quantum than
I do, but they were not raised in any kind
of proximity to the culture. Right whereas there was never
a moment in my life where I remember not being Cherokee.
I did. I don't ever remember discovering that I was Cherokee,
(29:32):
because it was there from the beginning, because my Grandpa
made sure that we were very proud of it. He
would take my brother and I had to pow wows
in Central Valley, California. And yet my family goes through
this crisis of identity to the point where my dad says,
we don't have enough blood quantum, give it up, and
(29:57):
everybody in my family buys that as b that except me.
Except me, because you know, I know the stories of
my great great grandfather, who was the first born after
the Trail of Tears. I know the story before the
Trail of Tears, my great great great great three times,
four times and five times great grandmothers. They were all
living in Delawna get Georgia what we call Delanna get
(30:21):
today Delanna because the Cherokee we're meaning gold and that
was the first gold Rush, and the United States was
there in eighteen thirty and their land was stolen from
them and they were forced, you know, in eighteen thirty
two into Indian territory. And as soon as they arrived,
by five times great grandmother died. So it's not doing
(30:43):
clear she survived the trail of tears um. But yeah,
that that's pretty powerful, you know, and um, we can't
underestimate that. Yeah. Yeah, Well, we're gonna take a little
break and we're gonna listen to some ads, hopefully about
wonderful stuff, non colonial, decolonial stuff that will make your
(31:06):
life better and that will support this podcast. So we'll
be right back once. I thought about a million birds
all around the world, sharing their songs, thinking about the
ways they have lived and they're gonna live. And this
(31:27):
is the way yet way yeah cock to see woochi
yaka to God. So yeah, we're talking about how blood
(31:52):
quantum serves not only to eradicate Native people and therefore
dissolved treaty obligations that the federal intent, but also the
way it affects us individually, how it affects our sense
of Indigenous belonging and Indigenous identity. And you know, it
almost worked in my family. That's the thing. It almost
worked because when I wanted to go study the language
(32:15):
eighteen years old with my great uncle Bull, and he
had a stroke and can no longer speak. It was
a couple of years later, as I was starting college
my grandfather said to me, when I when I when
I told him, you know that that I really missed
that opportunity. You have learned the language from my great
uncle Bull. He asked me, well, how does it feel
(32:36):
to be the last of the damn Mohicans? And so
this this gives me thinking about some of these terms
and some of these phrases that I think are part
of the colonizers vocabulary that people can dip into. And
so some of the things when I talk about language
revitalization and I think about it, I try to let
people know. I was like, you're gonna have to choose
(32:58):
your role here. You're gonna you can be colonizer who
contributes to genocide. You could be a tourist who's blind
to genocide, or you could be in the side that's
trying to push back against these things and say there's
actually human beings here, and there's actually whole cultures and
languages that are deep and rich and different from each other,
(33:20):
and they've been put into this little box, you know,
and and that box has been shrunk by Hollywood and
by people who think they can they they're like Team
mascots and Indians and braves and and on and on.
But on a day to day basis, there's certain terms
that that I hear sometimes. You know, we're at a
(33:40):
meeting at the the place that we used to work at,
and someone says, yeah, well, I'm just the low man
on the totem poll, And I said, what do you
think that means? Because you were in the land where
these things are made, and and they got really awkward,
and I think they didn't even think about what that
could be or what it be implying. So we we
(34:02):
just launched into a conversation. I said, you shouldn't talk
about that until you learn what a totem pole is
and how it's made and why it's made. And there's
no easy answer there, because it's a rich, complex history
and art form that that has a lot behind it. Yeah, exactly.
And these metaphors runs so deep within our colonial settler
(34:24):
colonial culture. You know, we've talked about some of them
like a circle of the wagons or hold down the fort,
you know, or any of these that our metaphors born
of warfare right there, that their metaphors that are an
extension of warfare. Because this is one of the things
I do in my research and in my publication right now,
(34:46):
is I'm very interested in the way that you know,
I go back to this idea that the settler state
is not born with the cessation of war, but it's
called a fight in the mud and blood of war,
right and so we can think about you know, Michelle
Fuco actually says this that he's quoting. He's quoting the
(35:10):
the Prussian military theorist klaussel Witz, who says that war
is politics pursued by other means. If Uco will flip
that around and say, well, isn't it the case that
politics is war pursued by other means? You know. Roxanne
Unbar where it is, does a brilliant job in the
most recent book, Not a Nation of Immigrants, really revealing
(35:33):
going into the documents and showing us that the United
States is a settler. Colonial government is a form of
codified warfare, absolutely, and these these metaphors are an extension
of that. I mean they are weaponized. Yeah, And the
vocabulary that people use on a day to day basis
(35:54):
is it echoes the gunfire of the colonizer and in
a lot of ways. And so if you look at
Native American peoples and a lot of people don't like
because of American the way that the colonization has rolled
out and resulted in this hegemony that we live in.
Now you can just live your life without thinking about
(36:15):
Indigenous peoples and languages and the fact that they're still
getting murdered and killed because Native Americans experienced violence at
higher rates than most. They experienced suicide at the highest
rates in the nation. Suicide is the leading cause of
death for Alaska Native youth. And then they experienced sexual
(36:38):
violence at rates that are much higher. They experienced violent crimes.
The majority of violent crimes against Native American people's are
committed by white perpetrators. And then you've got this colonial language,
these ways that you can just sort of lump these
ideas in that the Native Americans are the ones that
are violent, and then they're going to circle the wagons
(36:58):
and they're gonna come for And so I want to
turn folks to an article called use these cultural offensive
Phrases Questions at your own Risk by the Indigenous Corporate
Training Incorporated, because I sent this around us some folks
when I started hearing some of these terms and started
pushing back on the idea of of these things being
(37:19):
part of our daily vocabulary because they contribute not only
to erasure, but to these stereotypes of Native Americans as
operating in this simple, one dimensional form. And I think
we've got to continue to adjust the ways that we
talk because we're by nature usually exclusive and by nature
(37:40):
usually white supremacist if we're not careful. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
And it's really fascinating to me. I mean, I loved
my grandfather so much, um, but he's a product of
his time, right, I mean, he left Talaqua for Central Valley,
California right round the time that the Indian Relocation Act
(38:03):
was going into effect. So we know Wilma man Killer,
for instance, was born in San Francisco because of the
Indian Relocation Act. But he was a product of his time,
and so he you know, he said that to me
in my early twenties, how does it feel to be
the last of the damn Mohicans. He was very similar
to all of this too, was this notion of the
end of the trail. You know. He was enamored with
(38:25):
this image, the end of the Trail. You know, it's
that image. It was so iconic in the seventies. Uh,
in particular, where you know, you've got this tired old
Native warrior on a broken horse whose tail is wind
swept between its legs and he's hunkered down over the
back of his horse with the spear. My grandpa had
(38:48):
that image in at least six different places in his house,
in his very small two room house in Stockton, California.
And uh, but it's it's powerful because he identified with it,
you know. And that's how people appropriate these identities. They
don't just appropriate blood quantum. They don't just appropriate the
(39:11):
identity that's showcased on their c d IB. But they
also appropriate these images of the last of the Mohicans,
the end of the trail, Loman on the totem pole,
which I you know, I'm gonna say, I'm really proud
for my daughter every time she hears that expression. She
calls it out, like in public, she'll call out her
teachers if they use that phrase Loman on the total
(39:33):
pole because you know, and she'll say, I was born
in Shangani, I was born in Judeo, Alaska. You know,
you don't know anything about totem poles, right, Yeah. The
position on a totem pole has a lot to do
with the type of totem pole. What it's doing, has
nothing to do with the rank and stuff like that,
where people just sort of think like I've got to
(39:54):
hold everybody else up because I'm just it's just a
total misconception of what's be there. And so like, as
we start to sort of ramp up this conversation, one
of the things we both work in academics, and one
of the things that I see quite a bit is
I would look in the catalog and I would look
up a course description, and in the course description I
(40:17):
would see something like intro to this big topic, intro
to philosophy, intro to art, intro to history. And when
I looked in the course description, I would see this
word Western all the time, and I would think, Okay,
this is coding something here, and then I would start
to examine some things like Western education, Western art, Western music,
(40:43):
and then I would start to couple that with this
other thing that I would see where white people get
to have a thing and Native people don't get to
have that thing. One example would be white people have art,
Native people have artifacts. White people have literature, Native people
have storytelling or oral literature, White people have science, Native
(41:04):
people have ecological knowledge. And I would think about this
other ring, and I would think about this and say,
here's another way that language, the English language, is codifying
erasure and exclusion of the Indigenous people's languages, ways of knowing, history, faces, everything,
mm hmm, yeah, yeah, exactly, And uh, you know, you know,
(41:30):
I'm sorry, I'm thinking about the at u a s.
You know, up until very recently, up until very recently,
the Introduction to philosophy because I'm a I'm a philosopher,
and so I taught intro to philosophy courses and the
catalog was really problematic because it's specifically said introduction to
philosophies and introduction to Western philosophy. And um, you know,
(41:54):
I I think about this notion of of Western and
how problematic it is it is, and the way that
you just described, uh, and it's also problematic, I think
for another reason. Um, if we think about, well, what
does Western mean? And my teacher standard good Art, one
of my dissertation directors, he talks about Western within the
(42:19):
Western European historical experience, which traces itself back through the
Romance language speaking countries to Rome and ultimately to Greece. Right,
and so you've got this, you know, this notion of
the Western historic, Western European historical experiences having its origins
in ancient Greek culture. And of course, any intro to
(42:42):
philosophy course, you know, most every intro to philosophy course
is going to begin with Plato. Plato who famously banished
the storytellers from his ideal republic. But we fetish size Plato.
We fetish is this Socratic moment in in Greek antiquity.
(43:05):
And one of the hypothesis that I love that challenges
that comes from Martin Bernaul's book Black Athena, which is
subtitled The Afro Asiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. And his
hypothesis is that while we might be enamored with the
ancient Greeks, is the origin of what we call this
Western historical experience. The ancient Greeks were in fact enamored
(43:29):
by the North Africans, right, you know, and that in fact, uh,
the North African or sorry, the ancient Greece was an
effect colonized by the ancient Egyptians and the Phoenicians. But
the white supremacist history of the Western historical experience does
not want to have its origins in North Africa, right,
(43:51):
It wants to fetishize it, right there. Uh. And so
that that's part of this genealogy that we need to uncover.
That's part of what I think. Um. You know, we're
talking about academia, right, so, so you know, you and
I have talked about this on several occasions. You know,
this call to de colonize academia. You know, so we
have like um, Eve Tuck and Kwang Yang and their
(44:14):
great essay de colonization is not a metaphor, uh, And
they really want to emphasize that what we're doing in academia,
what we're doing at the university, what we're doing in
our Cage twelve public agitationation schools, what we call decolonization
is not really decolonization. Um. And so I think that's
a fair critique, and I think that's absolutely right, because
(44:35):
that the important aspect of of uh Eve Tuck and
Kay Wayne Yang's article is that when non native people,
non native academics, are able to step up and parade
their work as work that's doing de colonialization, that it
enables them to uh to adopt that they call settler
(44:59):
moves to and it's sense right this this so we
see these subtler moves to innocence everywhere. That's the big
concern about land acknowledgements, the ubiquity of land acknowledgements these days,
is that it simply provides for another settler move to innocence.
And I think that's great. I think that's absolutely fair,
very important point to make. But I also very beholden
to the work of Walter Minolo, Enrique do Sol, Nelson
(45:24):
Maldonado Torres. You know, these are folks, these are de
colonial theorists who are primarily working out of the Latin
American context, and they're doing some incredible work. And uh,
they distinguished between colonialism and coloniality, right, And I think
that's a really powerful distinction to make because it it
allows us to better articulate our sites of critical intervention.
(45:48):
So it may be true that we are not doing
the work of de colonization, but we are doing the
work of de coloniality within academia. And I think that
this is this is part of what we're talking about here.
You know, let's ditch this word Western, let's be specific
about it. Let's talk about UH settler history, settler philosophies,
(46:10):
because that's the work that really fascinates me. And it
goes back to a time on the campus of U
as you came into my office one day and I'll
never forget this. I don't even remember. I think it
was three or four years ago, maybe it was even
longer than that, but I remember you walked into my
office and you closed the door and you sat down,
(46:30):
and whenever you did that, I thought, Okay, this is
gonna be good, right, And all you said was they
beat you're talking about boarding schools. You said, they beat
our languages out of us and replaced it with the
language that hates us. And as a philosopher, as somebody
who does phenomenology in particular, I was fascinated by this phrase,
(46:53):
a language that hates us? What does that mean? To
talk about a language that hates us? And so I
began just I just began to to think about that constantly. Um,
and I've published a couple of articles on how I
interpret that, and uh, you know which which I've I've
been able to talk through with you over the years.
(47:15):
But Guy Answers Spevak, you know, one of the great
post colonial theorists from India. She has this phrase, the
micrological textures of power. And I love that phrase, the
micrological textures of power micro logos, right, meaning word language.
(47:35):
The word cuts through us. You know, the way that
our relationship to language shapes the inner contours of our
sense of self and of our identity. And with the language,
the intimacy of language shapes our relationship to how we
understand ourselves. It actually affects what becomes legible to us
(48:02):
and what what will remain illegible to us. Right, That's
that's the site of decoloniality when we make those kinds
of interventions, and so language revitalization becomes so important, you know,
I remember and I learned this from me. I learned
this from taking your class um at your beginning Clinket
(48:25):
class at u S. You talked about one time that
if you're fluent in the language, you can always survive
on the land on shrinking on you, right, because the
language carries direction, The language is rooted in place, the
place names tells stories. You know, if you know that,
if you're fluent in the language, then you can always
(48:45):
survive in that land. Um And so you know, I
think that that's such a powerful way of thinking about
how power works. And when you talk about a language
that hates us, it's a language that enabled genocide. I
mean the English language is militarized literally through the boarding schools,
as an extension of the warfare pedagogy, as an extension
(49:07):
of warfare. You know, this is something actually Ishmael Hope
and I once once presented at a conference. Um and uh,
I think that's real. I think that's legit. Let me
real quick anecdote. Have you seen the movie Pontypool. No Oh,
it's a brilliant It's my favorite zombie movie. It's my
(49:29):
favorite zombie movie. And the zombie infection occurs not through
being bitten, not through blood, not through viscera. It occurs
through language. It occurs through understanding. And in the movie,
what are the two most infectious languages? English and German?
The jet the languages of genocide, right, the languages of genocide,
(49:52):
and and those are the languages that uh in fact
uh and and perpetuate his zombie phenomenon in that movie Pontypool,
which which I really recommend, yes, because we say, but
Jewish to cut that t at when they there's a
(50:13):
spirit in everything, and because of that, we give everything respect.
And there's a spirit in a language. And then a
population collaboratively sort of figures out what their languages and
what it does. And some of it is active, like
active like go kill them, kill them all off, get
rid of them. And some of it is passive, which
(50:34):
is we need to codify what they are so that
you're okay with us all killing them off. And that's
that's the realization, like how did how did all of
this happen to Jewish people? How did all of this
happen to Native American people? How could people be okay
with it as a population? And the key is language.
And so coming back to Spevak, is can the subalter
(50:57):
and speak? And I would say yes, and they could
speak in their own languages, and their languages are beautiful
and sustain them. And if you live in a place,
you should figure out what the languages of that place.
We had someone who came to apply for a job
at u a S to be an administrator, and so
I went to meet with them and I just had
a couple of questions. I said, oh, so where did
(51:18):
you work before this? And I said, oh, down in
North Carolina? And I said, who are the indigenous people's
of that were there, and that your institution is on
their lands? Who are they? And he said I don't know.
And I said, okay, but what do you think about
indigenous content being mandatory? Everybody has to study a certain
(51:38):
set of indigenous content. And he started off by saying, well,
it's probably a pretty good thing. I need to learn
more about the native people of this place. I was like, no,
you don't, but go ahead, keep talking. And then not
even two minutes later, he's saying, well, why don't you
just take Plato and Socrates and throw them out the window.
So we also have to push back on this idea
(51:59):
that there's only so much room at the table, because
that's the thing is people come, they take your land,
they build a beautiful home, and then when you say, hey,
can I get at home, they say no, because then
my home will have to be destroyed and and it's
it's a false idea of the limitations of place and
space and money and time, and we gotta push back.
(52:20):
And that's that's what declonization does. And some people tell
tell us in our work the decolonization is totalitarianism. But
the reality is is they cannot see a way to
make room at the table for people who have been
pushed out and are starving and are suffering and dying
(52:40):
on their own lands, and they have nowhere else to go,
and they cannot see something other than total white supremacy.
And so they say, if there's not white supremacy, then
I am being oppressed. But they can't see that. The
goggles are all fogged up with racism and with their
own sort of self importance. And that's what we're pushing
(53:01):
back against. And as we close this, I'd like you
to tell us a little bit more about your journey
with your daughter and how you folks are coming back
to the language and how that's changed your lives. Oh yeah,
it's the single greatest redemptive joy of my life. Um.
You know, In fact, my daughter and I just this
(53:23):
morning we were dialed into Cherokee language lessons like I,
like I said earlier, Um, and we we find that
inspiration from shinge Onne. You know I I left shang
It on the uh not quite two years ago. And uh,
(53:45):
but you were talking about the burning of the Douglas
Indian Village. Well, my daughter's school was on that land.
Used to be called Gastoneau Community School. Today it's called
yak Gastineau Community School. They had to say yake I
clink It meaning spirit helper, aimed after the mountain that's
behind the school. And I was so grateful for the
(54:07):
language and the culture and the stories that were taught
in that school. Uh. Andrew Martin was a phenomenal teacher
in that regard. She invited my daughter Mila to drum
every Friday to learn the songs. And uh. You know,
(54:28):
the language efforts in that school, the clink It language
efforts in that school paved the ground, paved the way
for us too revitalize our return to our Cherokee language
because she has an ear for the Cherokee language, because
she developed an ear for the clink It language. Uh.
(54:50):
And so that's powerful when you really think about the
role that the boarding schools played. But now the role
that our schools are attempting, especially on on Indig in
this lands, to bring that back, and so we are
dialed in to the language. We work on it. We
um it's a it's a tip I got from studying.
(55:13):
Clank it with you. Whenever we learn a new Cherokee phrase,
we just get rid of the English one and replace
it with the Cherokee phrase. You know, whenever I dropped
my daughter off at school every morning, it's get gay
you do not hi, And my daughter says, don't you
know she's walking off. It's just really sweet. She takes
(55:36):
pride and yelling it back at me. You know, she's
leaving the car, she's walking to the front building and
she turns around and she yells, no, go hunt all
the um and uh. It's you know, it's just remarkable.
And I think when you pick up that journey, you
just really begin to crave it, because it's absolutely true
(55:59):
that when you're spe in your language, you feel your
ancestors listening to you. I mean, I know what that means.
In my body. I can feel that, I can feel
the presence of my grandfather whenever I say chooch gay
who you know tuja? Like when I say these things.
When I say the vocabulary that he knew, the vocabulary
(56:19):
he taught me, I can feel his presence there um.
And so we're we're, we're, we're we're working on that.
You know. The Cherokee Nation has a They've got a
number of different programs and I'm so grateful for that.
They just built the Durban Feeling Language Complex. They just
built a second immersing school. Uh so it's it's going
(56:41):
through some pretty radical revitalization right now. A lot of
material resources are going into it. Okay, becchie Juhan, thank
you everyone for spending time with us, for listening to us.
Take it upon yourselves to mind what you say. They'll
(57:02):
talk about being low on the totem poles, circling wagons
and of trail having Powell's just day away. Knock it off.
And also, don't use western unless you're talking about the
name of some store or the western side of the island.
And just analyze this stuff, because there's no this was
not meant to happen. This was not something prescribed by
(57:25):
a deity that people should come and just annihilate people
and take their lands and take their stuff and keep
them from being themselves. So here we embrace language revitalization,
re embrace Indigenous identities, we embrace Indigenous excellence. And we're
thankful for Dr Saul Neelye for spending some time with
(57:46):
us here today. Cheech. Just two quick disclaimers before we
get to the rap here folks. First, Saul Neely was
the first interview I did for this show, so that's
why he's mentioned as the first interview. Through the magic
of podcasting, we have rearranged the order of events. The
(58:11):
children were interviewed second, but are released on the first episode.
And see Alaska Corporation has voted triumphantly to do away
with blood quantum ain Gonna Chiese Soul Neely doctor at POSCO.
(58:41):
Thank you to Dr Saul Neely, you're coming here dropping
some incredible knowledge, sharing some of your thoughts with us.
I miss you and it was good to spend some
time with you. This has been the Tongue Unbroken Episode two.
Please join us next week for episode three and if
future episodes Revitalizing, reclaiming, restoring, doing the good things that
(59:06):
need to be done. The Tongue Unbroken is part of
the next up initiative from my heart. You should check
out other podcasts in the Next Up initiative, such as
Beauty Translated and Black Fat FM, Gonna Cheese Playing, Anna Hosni,
Joel Monique and Yen M Day and you really have
(59:31):
helped us. The Tongue Unbroken is produced by Daniel Goodman
and you can find us on social media under the
Tongue Unbroken. You could find me on social media under
either n or do Aniko Danuke. I'd love to hear
from you. Let's chat soon, Catch you next time. Gonna
(59:52):
cheege
Play he duty. They tried to telling nicses try to
genocide us. I'm still here with the tongue con rope
(00:24):
and was the wait to cut you on? Goodness cheese
eight yah tesh with the coots ya yata say what
is happening? Everybody? My name is Corney. Goodness cheese. Thank
(00:44):
you for listening. This is the Tongue Unbroken, a podcast
about language revitalization in North America. Today we're gonna be
talking about decolonization how that relates to language real idolization
with a special guest, Dr Saul Neelye, who is a
(01:06):
professor at Heritage University in Washington. We used to work
together at the University of Alaska Southeast and I greatly
admire his way of thinking, approaching life, learning and using
his ancestral language and just going about his day to
day business being amazing. So we're gonna go through a
(01:32):
series of topics. We're gonna hear about Saul and his
language journey. We're gonna talk a little bit about blood quantum,
identity is defined by colonizers. We're gonna talk about colonial vocabulary,
how it's sneaky violent against Indigenous peoples in many different
(01:54):
ways how we can shift our own ways of talking
to embrace the colonial reality and contribute to language revitalization
through English, which is the colonial language and has tremendous
control impact and it just takes up a lot of
(02:15):
space for Indigenous peoples. Then we're gonna wrap it up
by coming back to SAAL's language journey with his daughter Mila,
wife Carry and their wonderful family, and then just kind
of start to wrap things up. So this is a
special episode. I'm so glad that you're here. Episode always,
(02:38):
episode two, and our conversation with Saul Neely is going
to take us right to the end of the episode.
So we look forward to hearing from you. I look
forward to hearing from you and getting some feedback on
some of the topics including we're gonna start suggesting some
(02:59):
reading for you all to take a look and see
how you can continue to educate yourself, add to your
library of information, and utilize good stuff to do good things. Woo,
(03:24):
thank you for joining us. This is our conversation Yak Yuhan.
This is the very first interview that we've done on
the Tongue Unbroken, and I'm so happy to be visiting
with my dear friend and colleague, Dr Saul Neely. We
(03:45):
worked at the University of Alaska Southeast together and begin
construction on an Indigenous studies program there. And I will
allow Saul to introduce himself. Okay, got the solely doc
Wadola saw Nearly dog Wadoo Nego Goti now Kochigi, Ellensburg, Washington. UH,
(04:11):
it's great to be here. Um. I just introduced myself
in Jeriche and I am calling in from Ellensburg, Washington,
which is on land of the Yakima Nation. Yakima Mami
teachum at land of the Yakima people that was seated
(04:32):
in the eight Treaty. But I work and I teach
at Heritage University, which is located on the in top Nish, Washington,
on the unseated lands of the Yakima Nation Reservation, where
I'm Director of Composition and UH currently revitalizing the American
(04:52):
Indian Studies program there and doing some good work on
decolonizing composition program and really doing our best to to
support our indigenous students there in the interest of tribal
sovereignty and indigenous futures. Chief and this is a podcast
about language revitalization in North America. Sometimes we're gonna step out.
(05:17):
We're going to take a look at some other factors
that I think strongly influence the life and sometimes the
death of indigenous languages. And I wouldn't even say death,
I would say the murder of indigenous languages by colonial forces.
And so, can you talk to us a little bit
about your own language journey and uh kind of set
(05:39):
us up for for that conversation that we're gonna move
through a couple of other topics. Yeah, absolutely so. Uh,
you know, I was raised as an army brat when
my I was born after my dad returned from Vietnam,
and um, I oddly enough, if I spent my entire childhood,
(06:02):
even as an army brat moving around every three or
four years, we lived within or within a couple hundred
miles of our ancestral Cherokee homelands, while my friends were
going off to Germany or Korea or all over the
United States. It was a really remarkable coincidence that I
spent my entire childhood right there in what we call
(06:25):
today's southeastern United States, and I grew up with a
rich sense of pride in being Cherokee. That's something that
my grandfather instilled in me. His name was Lucian Buffington Neely.
It's a very rich name. Buffington comes from a Cherokee
chief that he was named after. Everybody called him Hoot though,
(06:49):
and he raised us, my brother and I to feel
very proud of being Cherokee. It wasn't the same experience
that my father experienced growing up, however, it was something
that my grandfather began to reclaim. He was born in Tallaquah, Oklahoma,
and his Cherokee mother died when he was young, about
(07:12):
ten years old, and so my grandfather h had a
hard childhood. He didn't get past the sixth grade. He
was a care keeper for the Talaquas Cemetery. He uh
sort of homeless. At one point he lived in the
trees of the Talaqua Cemetery as he took care of it.
(07:36):
And my uncle, my father's older brother. He was born
in Tallaqua, but my father was born nine years later
in Lodi, California. They had left Oklahoma. They left Taalaqua
for the Central Valley of California, and it was a
tough life. It was a tough life for all of them,
(07:58):
and so my grandfather because the only he went through
sixth grade. He spoke basically handshake Cherokee. So growing up, uh,
you know, and you had to say hello, and you
had to insult somebody, you know. And but his brother,
he had several brothers, but his brother, Sequoia was his
(08:20):
given name. Everybody called him Bull. He was the last
fluent speaker of Cherokee language in my family. He was
actually a linguist for the army. He did a lot
of code talk and stuff like that. Um And when
I was eighteen years old, after I graduated high school
(08:40):
in Georgia, my plan was to go live with him
and learn the language. But he experienced a stroke and
he lost the ability to talk, and it was heartbreaking
for me. It was absolutely heartbreaking because also at that time,
my parents got divorced. My family fell into a pretty
(09:03):
radical crisis. Everything was just really difficult at that time,
and the Cherokee language was going to ground me. That's
what I was gonna go do. I was gonna learn that,
I was going to make sure that Cherokee stayed alive
as a language in our family. But when that happened,
when he had a stroke, and my family sort of
went through this pretty radical crisis. Uh. I remember one time,
(09:27):
just I was eighteen, I remember saying to myself, fuck it,
I'm just an American kid. I just gotta I just
gotta own that. And at the same time, my dad, um,
he and I stayed close through the family crisis, and
at the same time, he was encouraging me to go
study Western philosophy. He wanted, you know, he wanted me
(09:50):
to go study Socrates, he wanted me to go study
European languages. He wanted me to study European literature and
European philosophy. And so I was the first generation and
college kid and my family. That's what I did. I
went and I studied philosophy, Western philosophy, and um it
took a long time for me to come back to
(10:13):
uh a real you know, strong desire to learn the language.
And a lot of that happened after my daughter, who's
now eleven years old, After my daughter was born, and
realizing that I do not want Cherokee is a language
to die in our family and uh and so actually
(10:35):
I would say that my path towards Cherokee language revitalization
with my family had a lot to do with with
you taking clink it with you at u a s
just the joy of learning these sounds that no other uge,
no other language in the world has uh, learning how
to make like the unvoiced all. You know, these were
(10:56):
just really fun things. Learning how to say your name,
you know, corne uh. These are just really inspiring for me.
And I realized that the Cherokee Nation provided free online
language classes, and so I began to enroll in them.
And I remember, you know, I was I was looking
at Cherokee language and books, and as I was trying
(11:22):
to figure out phonetically how to pronounce some of the words.
I see words like to ajia and the book the
dictionary tells me to pronounce it doh chu, And I'm like, well,
that's that's not how my grandpa used to say it.
But I've dialed into the first online language class with
ed Field, Cherokee National Treasure, and he got on and
(11:44):
he said, c oh no God to Wicha, and he
said it just like my grandpa used to say it.
And right away I felt so at home. And I
remember that first lesson to at Field was talking and
I heard and I wouldn't have heard it had I
not taken Clink language. I heard the unvoiced l you know,
for instance, like in the in the word. My my
(12:06):
daughter and I were actually dialing into a Cherokee language
lesson this morning and we were talking about geechy dog,
you know, and you can hear it GEECHI right there,
and so, M yeah, it's it's, it's it's it's become
for my family, a transgenerational homecoming. That's that's what we
call it. And so uh yeah, a lot of just
(12:29):
really thinking about the role that you know, my ancestors played,
you know, through the trail of tears on the other
end of the trail of tears, my great great grandfather
who helped rebuild the nation. Uh. You know, when I
can trace my Cherokee ancestry back to my five times
great grandmother, and when I think about that long generation
(12:53):
from my five times great grandmother to my daughter, that's
nine generations of unbroken uh Cherokee genealogy. And think about
the role that language revitalization plays for the next seven
generations out. It's it's imperative, it's inspiring, um and and
(13:16):
it's kind of like all I want to do at
this point, gonna cheese inky Niki, Oh yeah, Ohsican you team,
he's hip. Yeah, how are you? Thanks for sharing? Going
(13:41):
to cheese. Uh. Sometimes I think about this stuff and
it's like, it's as if the colonizers, not all of them,
but some of them and some very powerful ones, burned
down all of our houses, like on our own ancestral land,
and then built up these wonderful, beautiful homes for themselves homes.
But with our language, we rebuild the homes, and in
(14:05):
these homes the language saves us. We'll be right back.
So what's happening, baby? This colonization ship got you down.
You're gonna get on this decolonization. Yeah, it's time with
language revitalization all across North America, the land of the
(14:26):
language coming back into the hands of future generations where
it all blows drives up and have their voices be heard,
defeat all the colonial forces that try to hold you down.
(14:51):
So thinking about, like some other aspects of colonization and
identity and language and how these things contribute. I've been
really enjoying this awakening of indigenous entertainment. I'm thinking about
Rutherford Falls, I'm thinking about reservation dogs, and I think
(15:12):
about Molly of Denali, and my kids have things to see,
and I have things to see that have Indigenous people
and indigenous content, but some of the things I like
to think a lot about what opened the doors for
some of these things, And so I think a door
opener is a show like Longmeyer, and so long Meier
is a show about kind of a cowboy white guy
(15:36):
and his white team of cops, and so it's kind
of not the greatest setting for indigenous peoples as white
cops who live near a reservation, but he's actually friends
with a lot of Indigenous peoples and it has some
Indigenous perspectives in the show itself. And there was an
episode called Indians, Dogs and Horses, and I was like, Okay,
(15:58):
what's going on, What's going on with this episode of her?
And in the episode, someone mentions the government keeps track
of the blood quantum of three things, Native Americans, dogs,
and horses. So like, I want to talk to you
about this concept of blood quantum because a lot of
people might not know about it, or a lot of
(16:19):
people might have conflicting uh ideas on what it is
and what it should be and what we should do
with it. And you and I probably have similar thoughts
on what we should do with it. Which is throw
it out the damn window. But what are your thoughts
when I start talking about when we start talking about
blood quantum. Yeah, blood quantum was designed to eradicate Native people. Um.
(16:45):
You know. Jack Forbes writes about this, uh in The
Blood Grows Thinner and he talks about how blood quantum
was first used in seventeen oh five when Virginia adopted
laws um which may a so called half blood person
a legally inferior person, right. And so the idea is
(17:08):
that if blood quantum, which is a racialized identity for
indigenous people, if that is enacted and traced through, eventually
the blood quantum will diminish to the extent where Native
people's uh no longer exists in that legal framework. And
(17:31):
if that happens, then treaty obligations are no longer uh,
the federal government is no longer to fulfill their treaty obligations.
And so that's what blood quantum was created for. Um.
You know, it was really reinvigorated h during the DAWs Act,
(17:52):
um during allotment and when they cut up are commonly
held reservation lands, you know, the Cherokee Nation after removal
after the Trail of tears Um. You know, we had
this beautiful reservation of in northeastern Oklahoma, and through the
DAWs Act in general lot Man, it became this sort
(18:13):
of checker board of of sovereignty literally burning down houses
you know as well. Um. But it also picked back
up in ninety four with the in the Reorganization Act
and um. And you know, when you think about blood quantum,
(18:34):
I think what's most insidious about that is precisely this
attempt to racialize Indigenous identity. You know, when you look at,
for instance, the Trump administration, they were all over racializing
Native identity that way. You know, when we talk about sovereignty,
(18:56):
sovereignty then becomes unconstitutional if tribal sovereignty is understood to
be predicated on race and blood quantum. But historically, traditionally, ancestrally,
indigenous identity was not linked to blood quantum. That's absolutely absurd.
It's complete colonial invention. We were, uh, indigenous identity was
(19:18):
connected to political relations and kinship relations, and so you know,
we had some I mean, you know, we've we've talked
in the past about what religion and what Christianity has
done to Native cultures. It's a complicated one. With the
Cherokee nation for sure. For instance, my five times great
grandmother is recorded and manuscript published by the Bureau of
(19:43):
American Ethnology. Uh, she's recorded as being the first Cherokee
to convert to Christianity, and so Cherokee culture and as
Christian culture so intertwined. But we had some Moravian missionaries
before were the removal who were real allies. They were
(20:05):
you know, basically they were Cherokee. They spoke our language,
they practice our culture. So we have somebody like Samuel
Worcester right from the the uh, one of the Marshal
trilogy cases cases, Samuel Worcester actually went on the Trail
of Tears with the Cherokee people. And uh, you can
(20:26):
also look at, you know, other aspects of blood quantum.
For instance, Chief John Ross, the great Cherokee chief who
presided over the Trail of Tears over removal. You know,
he was one eight blood quantum. But he was you know,
one of the great Cherokee chiefs um. And so we
(20:48):
don't really see, we don't really I mean, I guess today,
as a colonial invention, all sorts of tribal nations have
adopted blood quantum. And even though you and I are
all about getting rid of blood quantum. When it comes
down to it, it's you know, uh, in the interest
of tribal sovereignty, each tribal nation has to determine what
(21:12):
how they will relate to blood quantum. So the Cherokee Nation,
you know, there's three federally recognized Cherokee tribes. Basically, there's
the Cherokee Nation, which I'm a citizen of, based out
of Talaquah. There's the uk B, the United Gooda Band.
They're also headquartered out of Talquah, Oklahoma. And then then
then there is the eb c I, the Eastern Band
(21:32):
of Cherokee Indians, whose headquarters is in Cherokee, North Carolina.
Both the uk B and the e b c I
have blood quantum. The e b c I is one
six h u k b um. I can't remember if
you KB is a quarter or one six, but you know,
(21:53):
I'm what I understand is that the uk B is
dealing with the diminishing blood quantum of their grandchildren. So
what happens with their grandchildren? Will they just disenroll their
their grandchildren or what? So? The opposite then, or not
the opposite, but an alternative to blood quantum is of
course is lineal descent. So Cherokee Nation then is lineal descent.
(22:15):
So I trace to be a citizen of the Cherokee Nation,
you have to trace your ancestor back to the dogs roll.
My great great grandfather is the one who was first
born after the Trail of tears in Tallaqua, and he
is the one in our family who is listed on
the dogs role. And so that's why we have this
(22:36):
lineal descent. But as I understand it, among the lower
forty tribes, and folks should know that there are five
hundreds seventy four federally recognized tribal nations, and about a
third of them don't use blood quantum. Uh. And I
understand that the central counts of Clinton and Heida, Uh,
there's no blood quantum for tribal enrollment. But there is
(23:02):
for like for like. See Alaska, right, See Alaska has
got a one quarter. Yeah. So in in Alaska we
have tribes and we also have corporations, and so in
exchange for a significant chunk of land, about nine of
the land in Alaska, there was a land claims agreement
that was reached and it involved a billion dollar settlement
(23:25):
and about eleven million acres of land. Uh, nothing was
given to anybody. It was an exchange for the land.
And it was also you know, it was it was
negotiations at gunpoint. So it's not like there's a lot
of folks who can do something about it, but it's
it's probably the best deal that you could get where
there wasn't a whole lot of relocation from your villages.
(23:48):
Although several villages were burned down by colonizers, there's some
that are right here. And the community of Douglas was
put up over a village that was burned down by settlers.
And so my experience with blood Qualum, though, it comes
down to I've got I've gone to the office of
(24:08):
the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and I have filled out
my paperwork, and I have wondered sometimes why my brothers
says something different than mine does and we have the
same parents and uh, and so sometimes there's a lot
of mistakes that can be made. But basically I get
a there's a fraction on their mine says five eights,
(24:29):
and so I am five eight. And it says like
one has a fraction of this and a fraction of that,
and they also divide it into different types depending on
how your sort of regional office takes care of things.
But then we also have these corporations, so in exchange
for our land, these corporations were developed to care for
(24:51):
the land and the financial settlement, and so we also
belong to these corporations. We have certain numbers of shares,
and there is a one quarter blood quantum requirement, and
sometimes there is that requirement as well to be eligible
for scholarships, and that same one quarter blood quantum minimum
(25:13):
is required to hunt marine mammals exactly Alaska, so my
my children can. But if my children were to have
children with white people, or actually just any non indigenous peoples,
then their children might not be able to would have
to like bust out the calculators and do the math.
(25:34):
But I'm always in favor of tribes determining their own
methods of enrollment and moving away from blood quantum and
getting away from federal government legislating identity, because for me,
the origins of indigenous identity come down to being non
white and being savage, primitive non humans, and so I
(25:55):
think it's coded legally as being non humans. If you
go back to federal Indian law when they say there
couldn't be Aboriginal title because they can't own land because
their primitive savages who have no concept of land ownership exactly.
But that's the courts of the conqueror, just saying something
convenient so that they can then take the land. And
(26:17):
so it allows forced removals. It also allows massacres. It
allows the later following assimilation practices, where you you execute
cultural and linguistic genocide upon hundreds of nations and you
try to destroy them by banishing their identity, not even
(26:41):
through a blood quantum process, but through this other process
that was completely legal in terms of what the United
States government did and wanted to do. And this results
in language, lass identity loss, absolute crisis of health and
well being for Indigenous people's separation of their land, separation
(27:01):
from their land, separation from their languages, the banishment of
warrior societies, the rape and murder of women, which continues
today at rates higher than any other portion of population
the United States of America. And then it also allows
you to get rid of the Native American And so
(27:23):
there's plenty of folks who said, if you have no Indians,
you have no Indian problem, and that is tied to
blood quantum that is also tied to in Canada, they
have status, which is a similar concept but uses different vocabulary.
Although there's were was also complicated by these other patriarchal
(27:44):
laws that said if if a Native American man had
a child with a white woman, their status was uninterrupted,
but if a Native American woman had a child with
a white man, then they could lose their status, and
so it was also just a sort of patrilineal concept
as well. And Indigenous people should be able to define
(28:05):
their own identity and also define who is eligible for
whatever benefits may come from being indigenous, because as you
and I know, there are scholars, there are authors, there
are artists, There are actors who manufacture and indigenous identity
that is false and they write books and they tell
(28:27):
stories and they give speeches about their upbringing and they
are a hundent not indigenous, and that also does harm
to Indigenous people's Yeah, yeah, there there's a lot there. Um.
You know, I think about the the role that blood
(28:47):
quantum plays, not just in terms of what we've been
talking about, in terms of its federal purpose to ultimately
eradicate Native people's so that treaty obligate sans ceased to exist.
But also the way that that impacts families and individuals.
You know, um for instance, you know, I've encountered people,
(29:12):
I've met people who have a higher blood quantum than
I do, but they were not raised in any kind
of proximity to the culture. Right whereas there was never
a moment in my life where I remember not being Cherokee.
I did. I don't ever remember discovering that I was Cherokee,
(29:32):
because it was there from the beginning, because my Grandpa
made sure that we were very proud of it. He
would take my brother and I had to pow wows
in Central Valley, California. And yet my family goes through
this crisis of identity to the point where my dad says,
we don't have enough blood quantum, give it up, and
(29:57):
everybody in my family buys that as b that except me.
Except me, because you know, I know the stories of
my great great grandfather, who was the first born after
the Trail of Tears. I know the story before the
Trail of Tears, my great great great great three times,
four times and five times great grandmothers. They were all
living in Delawna get Georgia what we call Delanna get
(30:21):
today Delanna because the Cherokee we're meaning gold and that
was the first gold Rush, and the United States was
there in eighteen thirty and their land was stolen from
them and they were forced, you know, in eighteen thirty
two into Indian territory. And as soon as they arrived,
by five times great grandmother died. So it's not doing
(30:43):
clear she survived the trail of tears um. But yeah,
that that's pretty powerful, you know, and um, we can't
underestimate that. Yeah. Yeah, Well, we're gonna take a little
break and we're gonna listen to some ads, hopefully about
wonderful stuff, non colonial, decolonial stuff that will make your
(31:06):
life better and that will support this podcast. So we'll
be right back once. I thought about a million birds
all around the world, sharing their songs, thinking about the
ways they have lived and they're gonna live. And this
(31:27):
is the way yet way yeah cock to see woochi
yaka to God. So yeah, we're talking about how blood
(31:52):
quantum serves not only to eradicate Native people and therefore
dissolved treaty obligations that the federal intent, but also the
way it affects us individually, how it affects our sense
of Indigenous belonging and Indigenous identity. And you know, it
almost worked in my family. That's the thing. It almost
worked because when I wanted to go study the language
(32:15):
eighteen years old with my great uncle Bull, and he
had a stroke and can no longer speak. It was
a couple of years later, as I was starting college
my grandfather said to me, when I when I when
I told him, you know that that I really missed
that opportunity. You have learned the language from my great
uncle Bull. He asked me, well, how does it feel
(32:36):
to be the last of the damn Mohicans? And so
this this gives me thinking about some of these terms
and some of these phrases that I think are part
of the colonizers vocabulary that people can dip into. And
so some of the things when I talk about language
revitalization and I think about it, I try to let
people know. I was like, you're gonna have to choose
(32:58):
your role here. You're gonna you can be colonizer who
contributes to genocide. You could be a tourist who's blind
to genocide, or you could be in the side that's
trying to push back against these things and say there's
actually human beings here, and there's actually whole cultures and
languages that are deep and rich and different from each other,
(33:20):
and they've been put into this little box, you know,
and and that box has been shrunk by Hollywood and
by people who think they can they they're like Team
mascots and Indians and braves and and on and on.
But on a day to day basis, there's certain terms
that that I hear sometimes. You know, we're at a
(33:40):
meeting at the the place that we used to work at,
and someone says, yeah, well, I'm just the low man
on the totem poll, And I said, what do you
think that means? Because you were in the land where
these things are made, and and they got really awkward,
and I think they didn't even think about what that
could be or what it be implying. So we we
(34:02):
just launched into a conversation. I said, you shouldn't talk
about that until you learn what a totem pole is
and how it's made and why it's made. And there's
no easy answer there, because it's a rich, complex history
and art form that that has a lot behind it. Yeah, exactly.
And these metaphors runs so deep within our colonial settler
(34:24):
colonial culture. You know, we've talked about some of them
like a circle of the wagons or hold down the fort,
you know, or any of these that our metaphors born
of warfare right there, that their metaphors that are an
extension of warfare. Because this is one of the things
I do in my research and in my publication right now,
(34:46):
is I'm very interested in the way that you know,
I go back to this idea that the settler state
is not born with the cessation of war, but it's
called a fight in the mud and blood of war,
right and so we can think about you know, Michelle
Fuco actually says this that he's quoting. He's quoting the
(35:10):
the Prussian military theorist klaussel Witz, who says that war
is politics pursued by other means. If Uco will flip
that around and say, well, isn't it the case that
politics is war pursued by other means? You know. Roxanne
Unbar where it is, does a brilliant job in the
most recent book, Not a Nation of Immigrants, really revealing
(35:33):
going into the documents and showing us that the United
States is a settler. Colonial government is a form of
codified warfare, absolutely, and these these metaphors are an extension
of that. I mean they are weaponized. Yeah, And the
vocabulary that people use on a day to day basis
(35:54):
is it echoes the gunfire of the colonizer and in
a lot of ways. And so if you look at
Native American peoples and a lot of people don't like
because of American the way that the colonization has rolled
out and resulted in this hegemony that we live in.
Now you can just live your life without thinking about
(36:15):
Indigenous peoples and languages and the fact that they're still
getting murdered and killed because Native Americans experienced violence at
higher rates than most. They experienced suicide at the highest
rates in the nation. Suicide is the leading cause of
death for Alaska Native youth. And then they experienced sexual
(36:38):
violence at rates that are much higher. They experienced violent crimes.
The majority of violent crimes against Native American people's are
committed by white perpetrators. And then you've got this colonial language,
these ways that you can just sort of lump these
ideas in that the Native Americans are the ones that
are violent, and then they're going to circle the wagons
(36:58):
and they're gonna come for And so I want to
turn folks to an article called use these cultural offensive
Phrases Questions at your own Risk by the Indigenous Corporate
Training Incorporated, because I sent this around us some folks
when I started hearing some of these terms and started
pushing back on the idea of of these things being
(37:19):
part of our daily vocabulary because they contribute not only
to erasure, but to these stereotypes of Native Americans as
operating in this simple, one dimensional form. And I think
we've got to continue to adjust the ways that we
talk because we're by nature usually exclusive and by nature
(37:40):
usually white supremacist if we're not careful. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
And it's really fascinating to me. I mean, I loved
my grandfather so much, um, but he's a product of
his time, right, I mean, he left Talaqua for Central Valley,
California right round the time that the Indian Relocation Act
(38:03):
was going into effect. So we know Wilma man Killer,
for instance, was born in San Francisco because of the
Indian Relocation Act. But he was a product of his time,
and so he you know, he said that to me
in my early twenties, how does it feel to be
the last of the damn Mohicans. He was very similar
to all of this too, was this notion of the
end of the trail. You know. He was enamored with
(38:25):
this image, the end of the Trail. You know, it's
that image. It was so iconic in the seventies. Uh,
in particular, where you know, you've got this tired old
Native warrior on a broken horse whose tail is wind
swept between its legs and he's hunkered down over the
back of his horse with the spear. My grandpa had
(38:48):
that image in at least six different places in his house,
in his very small two room house in Stockton, California.
And uh, but it's it's powerful because he identified with it,
you know. And that's how people appropriate these identities. They
don't just appropriate blood quantum. They don't just appropriate the
(39:11):
identity that's showcased on their c d IB. But they
also appropriate these images of the last of the Mohicans,
the end of the trail, Loman on the totem pole,
which I you know, I'm gonna say, I'm really proud
for my daughter every time she hears that expression. She
calls it out, like in public, she'll call out her
teachers if they use that phrase Loman on the total
(39:33):
pole because you know, and she'll say, I was born
in Shangani, I was born in Judeo, Alaska. You know,
you don't know anything about totem poles, right, Yeah. The
position on a totem pole has a lot to do
with the type of totem pole. What it's doing, has
nothing to do with the rank and stuff like that,
where people just sort of think like I've got to
(39:54):
hold everybody else up because I'm just it's just a
total misconception of what's be there. And so like, as
we start to sort of ramp up this conversation, one
of the things we both work in academics, and one
of the things that I see quite a bit is
I would look in the catalog and I would look
up a course description, and in the course description I
(40:17):
would see something like intro to this big topic, intro
to philosophy, intro to art, intro to history. And when
I looked in the course description, I would see this
word Western all the time, and I would think, Okay,
this is coding something here, and then I would start
to examine some things like Western education, Western art, Western music,
(40:43):
and then I would start to couple that with this
other thing that I would see where white people get
to have a thing and Native people don't get to
have that thing. One example would be white people have art,
Native people have artifacts. White people have literature, Native people
have storytelling or oral literature, White people have science, Native
(41:04):
people have ecological knowledge. And I would think about this
other ring, and I would think about this and say,
here's another way that language, the English language, is codifying
erasure and exclusion of the Indigenous people's languages, ways of knowing, history, faces, everything,
mm hmm, yeah, yeah, exactly, And uh, you know, you know,
(41:30):
I'm sorry, I'm thinking about the at u a s.
You know, up until very recently, up until very recently,
the Introduction to philosophy because I'm a I'm a philosopher,
and so I taught intro to philosophy courses and the
catalog was really problematic because it's specifically said introduction to
philosophies and introduction to Western philosophy. And um, you know,
(41:54):
I I think about this notion of of Western and
how problematic it is it is, and the way that
you just described, uh, and it's also problematic, I think
for another reason. Um, if we think about, well, what
does Western mean? And my teacher standard good Art, one
of my dissertation directors, he talks about Western within the
(42:19):
Western European historical experience, which traces itself back through the
Romance language speaking countries to Rome and ultimately to Greece. Right,
and so you've got this, you know, this notion of
the Western historic, Western European historical experiences having its origins
in ancient Greek culture. And of course, any intro to
(42:42):
philosophy course, you know, most every intro to philosophy course
is going to begin with Plato. Plato who famously banished
the storytellers from his ideal republic. But we fetish size Plato.
We fetish is this Socratic moment in in Greek antiquity.
(43:05):
And one of the hypothesis that I love that challenges
that comes from Martin Bernaul's book Black Athena, which is
subtitled The Afro Asiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. And his
hypothesis is that while we might be enamored with the
ancient Greeks, is the origin of what we call this
Western historical experience. The ancient Greeks were in fact enamored
(43:29):
by the North Africans, right, you know, and that in fact, uh,
the North African or sorry, the ancient Greece was an
effect colonized by the ancient Egyptians and the Phoenicians. But
the white supremacist history of the Western historical experience does
not want to have its origins in North Africa, right,
(43:51):
It wants to fetishize it, right there. Uh. And so
that that's part of this genealogy that we need to uncover.
That's part of what I think. Um. You know, we're
talking about academia, right, so, so you know, you and
I have talked about this on several occasions. You know,
this call to de colonize academia. You know, so we
have like um, Eve Tuck and Kwang Yang and their
(44:14):
great essay de colonization is not a metaphor, uh, And
they really want to emphasize that what we're doing in academia,
what we're doing at the university, what we're doing in
our Cage twelve public agitationation schools, what we call decolonization
is not really decolonization. Um. And so I think that's
a fair critique, and I think that's absolutely right, because
(44:35):
that the important aspect of of uh Eve Tuck and
Kay Wayne Yang's article is that when non native people,
non native academics, are able to step up and parade
their work as work that's doing de colonialization, that it
enables them to uh to adopt that they call settler
(44:59):
moves to and it's sense right this this so we
see these subtler moves to innocence everywhere. That's the big
concern about land acknowledgements, the ubiquity of land acknowledgements these days,
is that it simply provides for another settler move to innocence.
And I think that's great. I think that's absolutely fair,
very important point to make. But I also very beholden
to the work of Walter Minolo, Enrique do Sol, Nelson
(45:24):
Maldonado Torres. You know, these are folks, these are de
colonial theorists who are primarily working out of the Latin
American context, and they're doing some incredible work. And uh,
they distinguished between colonialism and coloniality, right, And I think
that's a really powerful distinction to make because it it
allows us to better articulate our sites of critical intervention.
(45:48):
So it may be true that we are not doing
the work of de colonization, but we are doing the
work of de coloniality within academia. And I think that
this is this is part of what we're talking about here.
You know, let's ditch this word Western, let's be specific
about it. Let's talk about UH settler history, settler philosophies,
(46:10):
because that's the work that really fascinates me. And it
goes back to a time on the campus of U
as you came into my office one day and I'll
never forget this. I don't even remember. I think it
was three or four years ago, maybe it was even
longer than that, but I remember you walked into my
office and you closed the door and you sat down,
(46:30):
and whenever you did that, I thought, Okay, this is
gonna be good, right, And all you said was they
beat you're talking about boarding schools. You said, they beat
our languages out of us and replaced it with the
language that hates us. And as a philosopher, as somebody
who does phenomenology in particular, I was fascinated by this phrase,
(46:53):
a language that hates us? What does that mean? To
talk about a language that hates us? And so I
began just I just began to to think about that constantly. Um,
and I've published a couple of articles on how I
interpret that, and uh, you know which which I've I've
been able to talk through with you over the years.
(47:15):
But Guy Answers Spevak, you know, one of the great
post colonial theorists from India. She has this phrase, the
micrological textures of power. And I love that phrase, the
micrological textures of power micro logos, right, meaning word language.
(47:35):
The word cuts through us. You know, the way that
our relationship to language shapes the inner contours of our
sense of self and of our identity. And with the language,
the intimacy of language shapes our relationship to how we
understand ourselves. It actually affects what becomes legible to us
(48:02):
and what what will remain illegible to us. Right, That's
that's the site of decoloniality when we make those kinds
of interventions, and so language revitalization becomes so important, you know,
I remember and I learned this from me. I learned
this from taking your class um at your beginning Clinket
(48:25):
class at u S. You talked about one time that
if you're fluent in the language, you can always survive
on the land on shrinking on you, right, because the
language carries direction, The language is rooted in place, the
place names tells stories. You know, if you know that,
if you're fluent in the language, then you can always
(48:45):
survive in that land. Um And so you know, I
think that that's such a powerful way of thinking about
how power works. And when you talk about a language
that hates us, it's a language that enabled genocide. I
mean the English language is militarized literally through the boarding schools,
as an extension of the warfare pedagogy, as an extension
(49:07):
of warfare. You know, this is something actually Ishmael Hope
and I once once presented at a conference. Um and uh,
I think that's real. I think that's legit. Let me
real quick anecdote. Have you seen the movie Pontypool. No Oh,
it's a brilliant It's my favorite zombie movie. It's my
(49:29):
favorite zombie movie. And the zombie infection occurs not through
being bitten, not through blood, not through viscera. It occurs
through language. It occurs through understanding. And in the movie,
what are the two most infectious languages? English and German?
The jet the languages of genocide, right, the languages of genocide,
(49:52):
and and those are the languages that uh in fact
uh and and perpetuate his zombie phenomenon in that movie Pontypool,
which which I really recommend, yes, because we say, but
Jewish to cut that t at when they there's a
(50:13):
spirit in everything, and because of that, we give everything respect.
And there's a spirit in a language. And then a
population collaboratively sort of figures out what their languages and
what it does. And some of it is active, like
active like go kill them, kill them all off, get
rid of them. And some of it is passive, which
(50:34):
is we need to codify what they are so that
you're okay with us all killing them off. And that's
that's the realization, like how did how did all of
this happen to Jewish people? How did all of this
happen to Native American people? How could people be okay
with it as a population? And the key is language.
And so coming back to Spevak, is can the subalter
(50:57):
and speak? And I would say yes, and they could
speak in their own languages, and their languages are beautiful
and sustain them. And if you live in a place,
you should figure out what the languages of that place.
We had someone who came to apply for a job
at u a S to be an administrator, and so
I went to meet with them and I just had
a couple of questions. I said, oh, so where did
(51:18):
you work before this? And I said, oh, down in
North Carolina? And I said, who are the indigenous people's
of that were there, and that your institution is on
their lands? Who are they? And he said I don't know.
And I said, okay, but what do you think about
indigenous content being mandatory? Everybody has to study a certain
(51:38):
set of indigenous content. And he started off by saying, well,
it's probably a pretty good thing. I need to learn
more about the native people of this place. I was like, no,
you don't, but go ahead, keep talking. And then not
even two minutes later, he's saying, well, why don't you
just take Plato and Socrates and throw them out the window.
So we also have to push back on this idea
(51:59):
that there's only so much room at the table, because
that's the thing is people come, they take your land,
they build a beautiful home, and then when you say, hey,
can I get at home, they say no, because then
my home will have to be destroyed and and it's
it's a false idea of the limitations of place and
space and money and time, and we gotta push back.
(52:20):
And that's that's what declonization does. And some people tell
tell us in our work the decolonization is totalitarianism. But
the reality is is they cannot see a way to
make room at the table for people who have been
pushed out and are starving and are suffering and dying
(52:40):
on their own lands, and they have nowhere else to go,
and they cannot see something other than total white supremacy.
And so they say, if there's not white supremacy, then
I am being oppressed. But they can't see that. The
goggles are all fogged up with racism and with their
own sort of self importance. And that's what we're pushing
(53:01):
back against. And as we close this, I'd like you
to tell us a little bit more about your journey
with your daughter and how you folks are coming back
to the language and how that's changed your lives. Oh yeah,
it's the single greatest redemptive joy of my life. Um.
You know, In fact, my daughter and I just this
(53:23):
morning we were dialed into Cherokee language lessons like I,
like I said earlier, Um, and we we find that
inspiration from shinge Onne. You know I I left shang
It on the uh not quite two years ago. And uh,
(53:45):
but you were talking about the burning of the Douglas
Indian Village. Well, my daughter's school was on that land.
Used to be called Gastoneau Community School. Today it's called
yak Gastineau Community School. They had to say yake I
clink It meaning spirit helper, aimed after the mountain that's
behind the school. And I was so grateful for the
(54:07):
language and the culture and the stories that were taught
in that school. Uh. Andrew Martin was a phenomenal teacher
in that regard. She invited my daughter Mila to drum
every Friday to learn the songs. And uh. You know,
(54:28):
the language efforts in that school, the clink It language
efforts in that school paved the ground, paved the way
for us too revitalize our return to our Cherokee language
because she has an ear for the Cherokee language, because
she developed an ear for the clink It language. Uh.
(54:50):
And so that's powerful when you really think about the
role that the boarding schools played. But now the role
that our schools are attempting, especially on on Indig in
this lands, to bring that back, and so we are
dialed in to the language. We work on it. We
um it's a it's a tip I got from studying.
(55:13):
Clank it with you. Whenever we learn a new Cherokee phrase,
we just get rid of the English one and replace
it with the Cherokee phrase. You know, whenever I dropped
my daughter off at school every morning, it's get gay
you do not hi, And my daughter says, don't you
know she's walking off. It's just really sweet. She takes
(55:36):
pride and yelling it back at me. You know, she's
leaving the car, she's walking to the front building and
she turns around and she yells, no, go hunt all
the um and uh. It's you know, it's just remarkable.
And I think when you pick up that journey, you
just really begin to crave it, because it's absolutely true
(55:59):
that when you're spe in your language, you feel your
ancestors listening to you. I mean, I know what that means.
In my body. I can feel that, I can feel
the presence of my grandfather whenever I say chooch gay
who you know tuja? Like when I say these things.
When I say the vocabulary that he knew, the vocabulary
(56:19):
he taught me, I can feel his presence there um.
And so we're we're, we're, we're we're working on that.
You know. The Cherokee Nation has a They've got a
number of different programs and I'm so grateful for that.
They just built the Durban Feeling Language Complex. They just
built a second immersing school. Uh so it's it's going
(56:41):
through some pretty radical revitalization right now. A lot of
material resources are going into it. Okay, becchie Juhan, thank
you everyone for spending time with us, for listening to us.
Take it upon yourselves to mind what you say. They'll
(57:02):
talk about being low on the totem poles, circling wagons
and of trail having Powell's just day away. Knock it off.
And also, don't use western unless you're talking about the
name of some store or the western side of the island.
And just analyze this stuff, because there's no this was
not meant to happen. This was not something prescribed by
(57:25):
a deity that people should come and just annihilate people
and take their lands and take their stuff and keep
them from being themselves. So here we embrace language revitalization,
re embrace Indigenous identities, we embrace Indigenous excellence. And we're
thankful for Dr Saul Neelye for spending some time with
(57:46):
us here today. Cheech. Just two quick disclaimers before we
get to the rap here folks. First, Saul Neely was
the first interview I did for this show, so that's
why he's mentioned as the first interview. Through the magic
of podcasting, we have rearranged the order of events. The
(58:11):
children were interviewed second, but are released on the first episode.
And see Alaska Corporation has voted triumphantly to do away
with blood quantum ain Gonna Chiese Soul Neely doctor at POSCO.
(58:41):
Thank you to Dr Saul Neely, you're coming here dropping
some incredible knowledge, sharing some of your thoughts with us.
I miss you and it was good to spend some
time with you. This has been the Tongue Unbroken Episode two.
Please join us next week for episode three and if
future episodes Revitalizing, reclaiming, restoring, doing the good things that
(59:06):
need to be done. The Tongue Unbroken is part of
the next up initiative from my heart. You should check
out other podcasts in the Next Up initiative, such as
Beauty Translated and Black Fat FM, Gonna Cheese Playing, Anna Hosni,
Joel Monique and Yen M Day and you really have
(59:31):
helped us. The Tongue Unbroken is produced by Daniel Goodman
and you can find us on social media under the
Tongue Unbroken. You could find me on social media under
either n or do Aniko Danuke. I'd love to hear
from you. Let's chat soon, Catch you next time. Gonna
(59:52):
cheege
Host
X̱ʼunei Lance Twitchell
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