April 9, 2024 • 55 mins
We are joined by Ḵasheechtlaa Louise Brady to talk about the path that led to sobriety and work with protecting the invaluable and threatened herring run to Southeast Alaska. Yaaw (herring) produce a vital food source to the Lingít peoples, and are an indicator species for ecosystem balance within the interconnected worlds of living things in the ocean. Ḵasheechtlaa tells a story about reconnecting to the self and to her Indigenous culture, and how the healing from those reconnections are carried out in her advocacy and stewardship as part of Native Movement (www.nativemovement.org) and the Herring Protectors (www.herringprotectors.org). She also guides us through a conversation on gender balance and equity within Indigenous cultures, and how a rematriation movement can result in increased care for the clan houses of the Lingít and increased ability to protect our lands for the benefit of future generations.
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
They tried to colonizzs, try to genocide. Yet we're still
here with the tongue on brope and just to cut
you on, she'd cut tea kicks at the Ka Beta
on you do a saga a rita on. Welcome to
(00:36):
the tongue unbroken, folks, thanks for listening. We're coming to
you today from Sitka in, a renovated boarding school that
was started by perhaps the father of North American boarding schools.
If we want to call them that, we could probably
call them some other bad names and Clingett if we
wanted to. But this cling Ittt place is on It's
(00:56):
kick Sadi land in a community called she and we
are really honored and lucky today to be here with
who is Brady to talk about some of the amazing
things that she's doing. And I think our conversations are
going to include a topic called the rematriation of indigenous peoples,
which I think is important, which I think brings with
(01:17):
it more safety, more equity, and I'm excited for this conversation.
So would you tell the people who you are and
what you do?
Speaker 2 (01:29):
Kik Sadi Ahnahatsiti cogwantsity. My name Isla and I am
Kiksuti from the point house here in Shitka. Our original
house was up on Nutley what people call Castle Hill,
(01:50):
and I am grandchild of the Cogwantan Wolf House and
a Chotz raised my father, Este and Kiksudi women are
known as the Kakhatja Shaw, the herring ladies, or the
flipping ladies because of our original teachings relating back to
how a Kiksutti woman sang to the herring a long
(02:14):
time ago and was asking them to come to her,
and they honored her request because she was respectful and
she was honoring them. And so it's said that this
is the very first place that the herring came to
the yaut Ay, the Herring Rock. And I'm not quite
(02:34):
sure how long the introduction needs to be. So I
grew up I really didn't know a lot about culture.
My parents married in such a way that they're both raven,
not only both raven, but both Kiksatti, and that was
in nineteen fifty. So my father, who was raised by
Anahutzu had hling It as his first language, was raised
(02:57):
very traditionally, grew up down in what's now called the village,
and then my mother was raised in the cottages which
were established by the Presbyterian missionaries after Sheldon Jackson Training
School was established. My great grandfather was Peter Simpson, who
came here at the request of one of Sheldon Jackson's
(03:20):
friends from Metlakatla and actually helped build this boarding school.
I have probably spent much of my adult life coming
to terms with that, because I did. My mother was
always talking about Peter Simpson, and many people talk about how,
you know, what a great man he was, how wonderful,
(03:40):
how kind he was. And then I read an article
that he had written, and it was called Savage, and
it said how he was telling people how we needed
to turn away from our savage ways, that we needed
to learn English. And it really was rather shocking to
me because I was going to school in Albuquerque. It
(04:01):
was a time when the American Indian Movement was going on.
I grew up reading Vindeloria. You know, I wrote my
papers were based on God is read custard eyed for
your sins, And so when I read that, I was
a little bit in shock. So I really have spent
a lot of my adult life figure out who I am,
(04:21):
what is my history, and how we come to terms
with colonization and how do we heal from colonization? And
I took a look at the history of what was
going on at the time when the Alaska Native Brotherhood
was formed. I'm sure people were looking at federal Indian
policy and going, I'll look at this one federal Indian policy.
They told the tribes down south that if they became farmers,
(04:45):
they could become citizens. And then once they became farmers,
they said, oh, no, no, nope, you can't become citizens.
And then I found one of my great uncles his
citizenship paper and it was from nineteen fifteen. And in
order for him to become a citizen in nineteen fifteen,
he had to go to the Indian school and have
all of the teachers sign and say that he was civilized.
(05:09):
And at that time, I would guess that civilized meant
that you weren't speaking kling It, that you weren't practicing
any of the culture or traditions. And then he had
to go to court, and I think he had to
get four or five white men to testify in court
that he was civilized. And I thought, how would that feel?
(05:30):
How would I feel if I had to go into
court today and deny basically my personhood as a Lingt
person in order to have rights. And I started taking
a look at that perspective, and a lot of struggles on,
you know, because I started having addictions at an early age,
(05:51):
and I knew something was wrong. I always knew something
was wrong, and I think a part of me believed
that the teachers were right, that I was nothing but trouble.
I was never going to mount to anything because I,
you know, I was an adolescent and I was reading
Vine Deloria and I was reading papers, I was researching
in high school how the Bureau of Indian Affairs had
(06:13):
failed us, how the Indian Health Service had failed us,
how the BIA started out in the War Department. Just
all of these things that started coming together and making sense.
And so I think I really became aware of the
harms of colonization very early on. But I internalized that.
(06:34):
I internalized the oppression that we experience. And by the
time I was in my mid twenties, I had gone
to treatment three times. I went to treatment the first
time when I was eighteen, and when I quit drinking
finally at twenty five, I pretty much hated everybody, including myself.
I had survived a lot of sexual assault, a lot
(06:57):
of physical abuse, some pretty horrendous, and I definitely did
not trust. I didn't trust anybody. I really don't like anybody.
I didn't trust women, I didn't trust men. I didn't
trust white people. I think a part of me I
hated men, but most of all, I hated myself because
I identified being a linget woman being an addict meant
(07:22):
that I was going to live a life full of harm,
full of oppression, full of racism, full of sexism. And
it took, and it has taken, and still takes a
lot of work to get to the point to understand
that because I am a singet woman, that gives me
actually an incredible depth of strength and beauty bound within
(07:48):
the culture and found within my identity. And it hasn't
been easy. It has been an easy.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
Road going to cheat for sharing your truths and for
feeling safe enough to talk about these harms. And so
history is so complicated, and our lives are also complicated.
And some of the things that I think of as
I've gotten to know you and see your work, is
just how we can overcome things collectively and individually. As
(08:15):
an individual, you can overcome things that are so incredibly
painful and as you said, horrific, And then you could become,
whether you wanted to or not, a leader of like
a whole movement. Like your life is decolonization, and it's
such a needed thing for all of our peoples to
see the ways you interact, the ways that you stand
(08:35):
up for the hering, to stand up for women, to
stand up for our peoples, to stand up for our culture,
and to think of this long lineage so as we
think of Peter Simpson, and so Peter Simpson is an
incredibly powerful figure in our history, but also a complicated
figure in our history, because I think he was also
on the side of saying, well, maybe we need to
(08:56):
stop doing these ways of being that we were doing
and embrace Christianity and embrace things that were more sort
of American values. But at the same time, a lot
of people who were existing in this time the early
nineteen hundreds were seeing this might be the only way
to survive for now. They start the Alaska Native Brotherhood,
the Alscanative Sisterhood, which are some of the oldest civil
(09:17):
rights groups in the United States, and they say we
have to learn their systems better than they know their
systems so that we can defeat them from within those systems,
which is wild to defeat white people in their own
systems they created to specifically take everything from Indigenous peoples
and to oppress a lot of non white peoples. And
so as we look at that, I think there's a
(09:39):
lot of stories in our indigenous communities as well, where
a lot of these church led groups and these government
led groups would try and learn the laws of our
peoples to say, you're this clan, you're supposed to marry
these other groups, and they would try to break that
down by saying, well, if you marry within your clan,
you can be eligible for a housing loan, and you could.
They would really sort of incentivize the destruction of our
(10:01):
culture in so many ways. And so as I look
at the history of our people, I always try to
feel the compassion of what it might have been like
to live at that time, because we still have those
pieces of paper, that citizenship where you swear to live
a non indigenous life, and that gave you the right
to vote, They gave you the right to claim land.
They gave you the right to say where your kids
go to school, and if you didn't sign that and
(10:24):
get five or six white people to testify to the
fact that you did live that way. Then they could
take your kids. You wouldn't have a right to vote,
you couldn't own land. And so as we think about
those complexities and what are people those decisions that are
people were forced to make, it's been incredible to sort
of try and reconstruct all these different pieces to also
(10:44):
look within ourselves. And the first time I sobered up
it was probably I was twenty two years old, and
I think I was realizing like drugs and alcohol were
not contributing to the things that I wanted to do,
and I was just not being productive. So I just
sort of stopped and then I fell off, and then
I came back on, then I fell out, and so
probably three this is my fourth sort of attempt, and
it seems to be sticking. And I really encourage folks
(11:06):
to find their own way, to find what works for you.
But if things are controlling your life, that are these
external forces, to think about those things and thinking about
the work that you do now in the paths that
led you here, which is an incredible story of survival,
of healing, of coming to terms with perhaps personal and
(11:26):
collective failures, and also colonization, which is this big, horrible
thing that's just it's always there. What kinds of things
are you doing now and what have led you to
these places right now?
Speaker 2 (11:38):
I think, you know, I do a lot of things.
I'm involved with Native Movement, which is an amazing group
of folks that have been fiscally sponsoring harring protectors, and
within that, one of the things that I've seen in
particular is, you know, of course we have m MIIW
and it's missing and murdered Indigenous people. And one of
(12:00):
the things that was really really strong for me and
I moved for a while when I sobered up. I
sobered up in Anchorage, went through treatment, and I came
back and it was really hard because this is where
a lot of the trauma happened. And I tried moving
back a couple of times and I just couldn't And
I finally moved back after five years, and it was
really difficult. It was really difficult because I had been
(12:21):
away because I really, you know, so many of my
social engagement had centered around drinking and drugs, and it
wasn't like there were a lot of people that welcomed
me back. So I made a decision to make sure
that along the way. There are so many things like
it affected me not being welcomed back and not having
a space. So I started deliberately creating safe places for people.
(12:46):
And I remember one time I knew about five people
that have had moved back in about a year, and
so we had a ceremony for them and gave them
eagle feathers and welcomed them back home. Because it's really
it's like I have really I think focused on that
a lot. I think that for me, one of the
(13:08):
biggest turning points was when my father passed. Then my
father was good, honest and William Brady, and the Bill
Brady Healing Center was named after him. And he had
this incredibly beautiful, strong heart and just just very very loving.
And we lost him suddenly in nineteen ninety five. And
(13:29):
you know, I told you before that he had married
my mother, and so he had been ostracized for many years.
Both of them were ostracized from, you know, by elders,
from probably the time they got married to probably for
thirty years. Then he became a judge, he got sober.
He died eighteen years sober. I never saw him treat
(13:50):
anyone with anything less than ultimate respect, no matter who
they were, and that transferred to so much love for him.
And when he passed said he had a heart attack.
And by the time I got to the er, there
were probably twenty people outside the er because word had spread.
And then by the time everybody got going through, there
(14:10):
were probably fifty people out in the halloway wanting to
say goodbye. The opposites came and when they found out
what was happening, by the time we got home three
hours later, they had cooked dinner, they had cleaned house,
and they did that for two weeks, and that's the way.
And I thought, what a blessing, because he was such
a huge loss. And I remember sitting with him and
(14:32):
a friend of mine came in. She's like, I just
don't know how we're going to be in this world
without him, and she said, I can't imagine how you
feel being his daughter. And after all of that, the
opposites came and took care of him, and that was
like a real honor. It was a real honor. I
think he knew it. I know he knew it, but
I wish she had known that he was so well loved,
(14:55):
and I thought everybody needs that. Our culture is really,
really beautiful. I set out to learn the culture and
I just started showing up. Anytime anyone would invite me somewhere,
I would go, and even if they didn't invite me,
I would go and I would help, you know, anytime
there was somebody here lying in state, I'd go to
the store. I'd buy groceries and show up and serve.
(15:17):
And people kind of ignored me for a while until
I think they saw I wasn't going to go away,
and then they started taking me in. Herbin Davis started
talking to me about so this is how you related
to this person, and then Ethel MacKinnon and some of
the other elders, and I'd say, but I you know,
and then asked me to talk. A couple of times
I said I can't. I'm you know, I'm not an elder.
(15:39):
I'm a woman, and they're yeah, but you're kick Sudi
and we need to hear from Kik Sudi. And so
that was really instrumental in my learning, just really delving
into the culture and showing up.
Speaker 1 (15:54):
Yeah, good as cheese. And a really important part they
think of what you shared is how to define yourself
if you've been living in addiction, because sometimes those being
a user and having a sort of community of users,
that becomes your sort of shared identity. And when you
take away that thing that you share, do those folks
(16:16):
know who you are? And are they comfortable with you
being who you are? Because I remember when I sobered up,
there's some people I realized like, oh, I don't know
if we're going to continue to be as close as
we were. And it was heartbreaking to me because I
don't feel like I was pushing them away, but I
felt like there was just a discomfort there because I
wasn't selecting the same sort of collective identity. But in
(16:37):
the culture, I found that as well, when you start
to learn about what it means to be shingit and
what it means the way our peoples took care of
each other, especially in trying to see through some of
the stereotypes that were out there about just always being
mean or always being ready for battle, or just these
different things that were there. And we're pretty hard people.
(16:59):
But I remember I was teaching and cling get here
and someone came up to me and said, oh, that
was so fun and so funny. I didn't realize that
cling get people laugh, I said, and her I think
her father was a teacher out for a long time
at this school, and I said, well, when you were
growing up, like your people were really taking everything from us,
our kids, our land, our language, our culture, everything, and
(17:21):
that wasn't very fun. But we were still over here
telling jokes, and so we like to laugh. And so
when you get into the culture and you're laughing and
you're bonding, and you're seeing things, and you're teaching songs
to children and you're teaching language to each other, it's
it's such a wonderful adventure. And so if you make
that decision to sober up, I think one of the
things that does help is to find things to put
(17:43):
in the places that are now going to be kind
of empty. You're going to have these empty spots in
your life and your consciousness and your spirit, but those
things have been left for you by our ancestors. And
so we're going to take a short break and we'll
come back and we're going to talk about Yao kach
a daily protecting the herring and why that's, in my mind,
a starting point for this larger conversation about being responsible
(18:08):
stewards of the land, of the waters, of everything that
lives and breeze that are our relatives on the land.
Speaker 2 (18:14):
We'll be right back. And it's cheese.
Speaker 3 (18:29):
One or two or three times.
Speaker 2 (18:32):
You try any.
Speaker 4 (18:34):
Friends, you run all around without joy, struggle yesterday, you
struggle still today now, but you'll find a broader away.
Speaker 2 (18:53):
My brother sisters, don't.
Speaker 4 (18:55):
You know about the way to wait it back?
Speaker 1 (19:00):
For those who call.
Speaker 4 (19:05):
Believe in yourself now BULLI in us somehow Gonadi Colorasy.
Speaker 1 (19:23):
Just to cut that t just to cut at ya
tea where yao has to de yeah jenny yah Latin, Yeah,
cut has to I tod s. So I was taught
(19:47):
that there's a spirit in everything, and that's the reason
why we give respect to all things. And so there's
this phrase that we've been using a lot in this area,
especially in the springtime as we get into March we
get into April, but also year round, but especially at
that time when folks are coming to Sitka or calling
people they know in Sitka for herring eggs. It's an
(20:10):
really important food for Thlinget peoples and for people on
the Northwest coast. But one of the things that we
talk about is protecting the herring. And the herring are
subject to a number of different things, and two of
the main things I think that really impact them is
altering the shoreline doing a bunch of fills, so you
could put a road out there, or a big dock
(20:30):
out there or something. And there's a lot of elders
who talked to me. They said, we used to come
up here to Sway to Skyaguay, and there used to
be the beaches were white with herring when they would spawn.
But once they extended this dock out here, it all stopped.
So expanding and just altering the landscape without thinking about
where the fish like to run. And then the second
(20:51):
thing is the over harvesting of commercial fishing and how
we've been in this battle to say, protect our rights
to harvest our food. The indigenous peoples should have human
rights to access the foods that we've always had, but
there's no priorities set for indigenous peoples and the foods
that we live off of, in the foods that are
(21:12):
our life. So it's not like, well, you could just
go to the store and get something else. So you
just go to McDonald's and get something else. But they
say a trai crossity. Our food is our life, and
you're at the point of a lot of these conversations.
So could you share your thoughts and your work on
the heiring and what currently needs to be done.
Speaker 2 (21:32):
It's a long story now, just so really, I think
that it's hard. So, you know how Western civilization, Western people,
they silo things, and of course things are all related,
and it was difficult and it continues to be a
little difficult too. You know, how do we get people
to care about heiring, and not only how do we
(21:53):
get people to care about haring? How do we get
people to care about heiring and sick to sound? And
then okay, so how do we get people people to
care about harry and eggs? And probably most people don't
even know what harry and eggs are? And then how
do I get people to care about harvesting? You know,
maybe thirty people harvesting harry and eggs on branches. And
it's interesting, we've been having a lot of conversations among
(22:17):
harrying protectors and harvesters about what's going on now. But initially, yeah,
we all grew up eating harry nggs on hemlock branches,
and my brother Shko would go out with my nephew
and harvest, and then he no longer had a boat,
and so I would have to rely on friends and say,
(22:40):
you know, do you have any hairy and eggs? And
you know, and people share, have always always shared. One
of my favorite stories, I was walking by Crescent Harbor
and I heard somebody's voice, someone going hey, hey. I
looked down and hey, and there's this young lady done
on this skiff with a blue tarp over it. She's like, hey,
(23:01):
have you gotten harry and eggs? And I thought I
was going to not get any because it was there
towards that and I'm like, no, I haven't, and she
pulls this tarp open, Well, I have a lot. My
dad said to come down here and give them out,
And so I was able to go home. And that's
just the way people are, that's the way the harvesters are.
But one year in particular, I called hand Donald's sek
(23:22):
Chuckie Miller, and I said, you know, can I give
you gas money if you can give me some eggs?
And he said, Louis, it's getting harder. It's getting harder
to find them. We have to go all over the
sound and spend lots of money on gas, and you know,
I thought it had been getting better because when Seka
Tribe in nineteen ninety seven organized people, I was part
of the staff that organized people to testify at the
(23:44):
Board of Fish to say that, you know, we wanted
protections for the harvest. And we did make some progress.
The Seka tribe did make some progress. They entered into
an MoU with the state and there were some some
good things done. And then I moved on to some
other things, working with youth and culture. And so when
(24:05):
I called Chuck, I was really surprised that he said that.
And then we come into you know, standing rocket. Group
of us got active and it felt so good to
do something. We raised ten thousand dollars to send down
to them, and we met afterwards, and we loved working
together and we loved the fact that we were making
a difference, and so we decided to work on something
(24:25):
local and I suggested herring. And there were a lot
of non natives at the table. I didn't know if
they would know about herring, but to my surprise, they
did and they all said yes. And so I had
been thinking about it, and I thought we should have
a Kui. I called Ray Wilson and Juno, he's the
kik Sadi clan leader, and I'm like, hey, Ray, I
(24:46):
think we should we should have a herring KOUI. He's like,
what do you mean. I said, yeah, I think we
should celebrate. Because I had seen the same people over
and over again going to the Border Fish, I could
see just how frustrating it was, and so I felt
like we really needed a way to come together in
celebration and acknowledge the importance of hairing in our way
(25:09):
of life. And somehow we pulled it off. We scheduled
it the day before the testimony started at the Board
of Fish. I hand delivered invitations to the board members.
Four of them showed up. We probably had one hundred,
one hundred and fifty people there are they? And that
was the thing, you know, people, It wasn't them going
to the Board of Fish and saying, you have three
(25:31):
minutes to tell us why hairy and eggs are important
to you and why they've been important to you since
time immemorial. So it was awesome to see, you know,
Herman Davis and all of our elders and harvesters and
get up and be able to talk as long as
they wanted to, how much we love Harry Inks and
for our people to be able to we didn't have
(25:52):
to take them out to a fancy dinner. We invited
down to our territory and said you need to listen
to us. And as time, you know, it's been since
what twenty eighteen, now this is twenty twenty four, and
we've done more of that. It also dawned on me
because I've also been I've also worked as a substance
(26:12):
abuse counselor domestic violence advocate, and that with a hairying
lady playing such an important role, that we needed to
involve Indigenous women. And so when the time came on,
I wanted to, you know, commission a herring lady to naw.
I could have chosen, asked many, many people, but I
asked Jennifer Younger and she said yes. And then it's
(26:35):
just growing and growing and understanding that, you know, also
coming from my feeling like I was separated from the
culture and you know, maybe having some cultural gatekeepers or
sometimes being hard to open it up to everyone, to
open up the cope to anyone who wants to learn,
is a good friend of mine and Juno Candy. He
(26:58):
goes by Candice. Now, she came over a couple of
years ago and she's my age, and she said that
was the first one she's been to and she was
sixty five. Because I grew up in that era of
you know, you know, that long period of time, you know,
starting with Sheldon Jackson, starting with the US coming in
where it was not okay to be us and so
(27:18):
many of us. I was too old for the Second
Native Education Program. I was too old for all of
these other things. And so, you know, just to offer
that opportunity to anyone and everybody who wants to be
a part of is really really important, because that's what
we want to do, is we want to build strong
community based on love and acceptance and safety most of all.
Speaker 1 (27:42):
Yeah. Oh well, and I'm glad you brought up the
three minute time limit. I remember one time I was
given five minutes to testify on something, and I started
off by saying, Okay, I know I have five minutes,
but telling a thing at person. You had five minutes
to tell me everything that's important about this is like
taking a king salmon out of the ocean, putting it
in the bathtub and saying, why don't you swim around
(28:03):
for a little one, And so I had to make
sure I told the little joke and part of it,
and then I wasted like a whole minute sat open.
But as we come back like so, the kuik is
one of our most important ceremonies. And there used to
be lots of them. There used to be sagur kuk
and show and kuk, and so it's a gathering of
(28:25):
people where you feed them and give them gifts. And
one of the real underlying principles is it's hosted by
a clan. And long time ago we never wrote anything down.
So we would pay everybody to say, be a witness
to this and help us to make this into our law.
And that's how laws were made, it's how stories were affirmed,
it's how names were given, so so important. And one
(28:45):
of the things that happened is at first they said, okay,
you can't have a whole bunch of these ceremonies. You
can have one every year, and so they narrow it
down to one. And then in the early nineteen hundreds,
Governor Brady meets with the thing at People's and says,
you can't do this anymore. There'll be no more of
the potlatch, no more koot and they said give us
one more and he said, okay, one more, and so
(29:07):
there was the just I always think about that. I
look at these photos of chet Ka happened here where
the ku Khitan invited all these people in, and just
to think of them thinking, this is the last time
we can live our life. We can have our ceremonies,
we could take care of our deceased, we could name
our people like so much was just being taken. So
it's wonderful to see the approach being one of open invitation,
(29:30):
just come and learn, and we're trying to figure this
out as well, and just to see this concept and
how that's part of it, and coming back to karutja.
So karutja is a word like one time I stepped
off the fairy was taking the ferry to a community
and I saw the water was just rippling, rippling so fast,
and I thought, well, it's not raining, so what am
(29:50):
I seeing? And it was nighttime and it's the herring
flipping their tails on the top of the water. There
were so many of them, and that karut Ja Shah
and that Karutja hit and to think of these movements
for protecting the hearing and protecting the land coming out
of the women of the Kick said, I think is important.
It's like this story that's told and told and told,
(30:12):
and now it's coming back to life, and it's wonderful.
Speaker 2 (30:15):
Geese gonna geese. It is amazing. I think it's also important.
I so appreciate your involvement, and I appreciate when people
are willing to step out because I do think that,
you know, I hear a lot. Actually I heard from
a friend of mine. Okay, I've heard a lot. Women
don't speak, women don't draw, women don't do this. And
(30:36):
so at one of the meetings before some clan leaders
and visitors, I said, I was told I needed to
tell them what it's about, and so I said, you know,
this is what I hear. We need this to be
about respect, respect for each other as clans, respect for
each other, you know, within our clans and across the loyeties,
and also respect for women. Some people didn't like that,
(30:57):
but that's okay, because I think that part part of
what happens is that we get stuck. We get stuck
with saying that's not the way we did it. My
response is, if we are still doing things, if we
are still practicing parts of our culture that are hurtful
to people, stop doing that and find another way to
do it. And I do think that being a survivor
(31:20):
and having worked with women that you know it is
important to step up and it is. And the thing
is is like what our heiring about and the harrying eggs,
it's a time of rebirth. It's a time of our
ability to recognize the beauty of the earth and the
abundance and how women give so much that needs to
(31:45):
be honored, that needs to be honored, and I love
that it.
Speaker 1 (31:50):
Is Yeah, oh wow, every thing get person who has
a clan gains that identity through their mother, and so
to think of the role of the women and things
get cultures and to think of some things like We're
going to come back to this probably after our second break,
because I feel like this is a bigger conversation we're
going to bite into. So before we take our break,
(32:10):
I just want to ask you this one question. We'll
come back to this other big and very important and
sensitive concept of the women's role in cline culture and
also how that role is affected by violence against women,
both from external and internal sources. But before we get
to that conversation, if someone wants to help protect the hering,
(32:32):
what can they do?
Speaker 2 (32:33):
This is a really important time. I encourage people to
go to Herringprotectors dot org, start following us on social
media on Facebook, Hering Protectors, Instagram, Heiring Protectors, and follow
what's going on. Because there is a new committee that
was just formed which I think is going to make
it much worse, and it's called the Herring Revitalization Committee.
(32:53):
This year. This year, eighty one thousand tons was the
quota eighty thousand and tons of hairiness what they were
allowed to take out of Sitka Sound. I think they
got thirteen thousand. And what they're seeing is that the
sacro market is dying. So this committee is set up
to allow more fishing and to broaden the market. And
(33:18):
the way that it's been done has been done very
quickly and with no real participation from tribes, and so
it's going to move forward and we're going to have
to have a really big showing to the Board of
Fish next year. You know, check on the Board of Fish,
see what proposals are happening, and understand our rights understand
(33:38):
our rights as indigenous people. This land is ours to protect,
the waters are ours to protect everything. All of our
relatives all around us our ours to protect, and it's
our responsibility and we need to step up.
Speaker 1 (33:52):
Yeah, well, this work can be so tricky when you're
talking about protecting the land and decolonization. So the metaphor
that I would offer for this is, let's say every
single day I come into your house and just take
half of the food out of your refrigerator and I
just take it to my house to go eat. And
this happens every single day, and you're getting mad and
you're trying to figure out how to stop me. And
then you realize there's this organization called protect your Refrigerator
(34:15):
dot com, and then so you sign up for it.
But then that's actually me and my people, and now
they're going to get half of what's remaining, and so
now we get three fourths of everything in your refrigerator.
So this is the way capitalism works, is that they
will name something to say, oh, we're the actual protectors
of the herring, but they're sponsored by the commercial fishing
(34:35):
industry and all the monies that are behind it. Because
this is the classic sort of problem is that indigenous peoples,
we don't have very much of our land left. We
do have monies, but nothing like huge commercial industries that
are billion dollar industries. And so we're trying to go
against them and their lawyers and they have lobbyists and
they have everything like that. So stand up, contact the
(35:00):
of Fisheries. I know you folks have done the kadej
yuko utku so a shame robe to talk about the
decisions that they have made, so they can be accountable
for those decisions. If you know legislators, if you know
people who have money power, help us to step up
and to make sure this is the last stand of
the herring. It's the herring stronghold. But then they used
(35:22):
to be all over the place, and they still get
smaller runs in different places. But if this run goes away,
it's gonna have this catastrophic effect not just to thing
at people and what we like to eat, but to
the entire interconnected ecosystem of the ocean. And we know it.
Where ocean people. We've been here for twenty thousand years.
(35:43):
We understand what the ocean needs. We've been here since forever.
We will be here for forever and we'll be protecting
our land. We'll be right back and chiesh.
Speaker 3 (36:00):
You are.
Speaker 5 (36:06):
Oh you're you're not said o cod boo, h.
Speaker 3 (36:22):
Oh he.
Speaker 4 (36:29):
E e a.
Speaker 3 (36:37):
Oh Connor talk. He gives away to say d dochart.
Speaker 2 (36:57):
Hey, hey, you.
Speaker 1 (37:09):
To cut you hun senkachha dot kusti. One of the
things is Indigenous people that's very delicate, we'll call it.
It's a sensitive thing, is what are the roles of
people in the culture. And these are things that every
(37:31):
single culture evolves, Like you know, if we look at
white American culture, at some point they are basically burning
women for being free thinkers. And so every culture has
its own things that it analyzes and kind of figures
out and say we could do, we could do better.
And one of the things that we're sort of trying
to balance these days is trying to keep people from
(37:53):
oppressing our own women. And so sometimes these things happen
in indigenous cultures that are brutalized by colonization. Is sometimes
it will internalize a misogyny and become hyper masculine and
then say women can't talk in public, and women can't
do this, and women can't do that, and so but
(38:13):
if you look like we are a matrilineal people's like
we gain our whole identity through our mothers. And I
believe the term that we're sort of embracing here is
rematriarchy to sort of reinvest in women in the role
in in our society, which I know some people are
going to get real mad about it, but it's okay.
I was watching these people play Jenga in Clinget. They're
(38:37):
using clinget and playing Jenga today, and I was saying,
the building's going to fall down, and then I would
say and then they looked at me like grumpy. I said,
it's not going to fall down. And there's a thinget
name that's a which is jas the building won't fall down.
(38:58):
And someone once told me when the role and power
of think that women was taken away, that's when the
clan houses started to fall down. And I think about
that as we think about moving forward with a sense
like let's follow our women, Let's let our women lead
the way, and let's as men protect them and figure
out when it's time for us to talk and when
(39:19):
it's time for us to step back and listen, and
when it's time for us to step up and say
I'll say the difficult thing, and I'll put myself out
there and put myself at risk because what I'm doing
is protecting, but it has to be done in a
way that you're kind of in tune with what the
entire culture and society needs. And so I know, as
we talk about protecting hearing, protecting women safe spaces, I
(39:43):
do think a part of that is investing in the
strength and courage and voices of our.
Speaker 2 (39:49):
Womenesh I do think some of the decisions that have
been made around the coaks and the way we do
things that have been really difficult. And I think that
at one point, you know, as I said, I spent
a good amount of time going to coeches and listening
to people like Herman Davis and you know, having him teach.
(40:13):
And I think it was maybe seven or eight years ago.
I was talking with a friend of mine and I said,
I have a question to ask you, and he said
what I said, well, is there a role for women?
Because if there isn't a role for women, I'm not
sure that I want to move forward because I do
hear all of these really negative things about us, and
(40:35):
if y'all don't want us to be a part of it,
I can step back and he's like, are you serious.
I said, yes, I'm serious, and I said, really now
that the role of the women was to make the decisions.
And you see that, you know, through history, I hear
people say that the women were in charge of the trading,
and the women really did so much. And I always
(40:56):
used to love going to Angoon because I remember I
was at one of their parties and this man got
up and he was talking and he said, you know,
you can see as i'm talking, I'm looking over here
to my right, and that's because I'm looking at the generals.
And he said, the generals are those four elder women
right there, and they will let me know with one
look if I'm saying the wrong thing. And so I
(41:20):
think we do need to if we want to continue
to be a living culture, we need to question. We
need to question what we're doing and making sure that
we are inclusive, because yeah, the easiest way to separate us,
separate us is to keep fighting. And I also go
back to you know, dostia Ethel MacKinnon and many of
(41:40):
the elders. They say, you know, our people, the clans
are like the roots of the tree. And when I
was working in domestic violence. And you know the reason
that's true. I talked to biologists, he said, because the soil.
We had these huge old growth forests, but the soil
is so thin that the trees need the roots in
(42:01):
order to hold up. That's why when you go through
a clearcut, you see the trees on the edge start falling.
And so that's like true when we are separating, whether
we're leaving women out, it's going to weaken our culture
and all the other trees will start falling. It's also
the same if we're not reaching out to the men
who are being violent and who are in the prisons.
(42:25):
It's like either way, we need each other because why
would we have the clan system. Why would we acknowledge that?
Because you know, we can go back and we can
see I mean I just go back maybe five generations,
and I'm related to how many clans, And that's why
it's important to know who we are.
Speaker 1 (42:42):
Yeah. Oh well in this sense, there's a phrase and clinket.
Well there's two I can think of. One is by
a Katye David Katishan, who was a Dantan. He said,
ushin is on this world. We're still holding each other's
hands and to just think about them and how much
love and respect like Atyahwune is built into our culture,
(43:06):
and so many things that are built into our culture
that I just can't see as saying you be quiet
because you're a female, right And so like I understand,
there are things that we have been taught, and there's
things that we have learned, and there's things that maybe
are the way that they have been, but that doesn't
mean we we shouldn't analyze those things. Because we have
this wonderful recording. It's a speech by Naclaw Jesse Dalton,
(43:29):
and that's one of the finest examples of Plingett oratory.
It's recorded in the Lilinkett language. It was recorded by
Kahani Rosita Whirl. It was transcribed and translated about Kahne
Nora Marx Dallenhouer. And we have that thing from the
hands of three gifted and powerful women. And I also
think about some are of our own peoples. And I've
(43:50):
been in meetings before I said, well, I hate to
say it, but if she was a man, they would
have built a thirty foot statue for her with everything
that she's done. And so just to try and think
to say, Okay, just because the white world found a
way to completely dehumanize and devalue our women doesn't mean
that we should buy into that. But I think I've
(44:11):
been told, thankfully by women who are helping me, to
just keep an eye on my own sense of internalized misogyny,
because all of us have internalized misogyny, internalized racism, internalized homophobia,
and to sort of say, okay, I need to be
in this constant state of analysis and our culture is
(44:32):
not this thing that's so rigid that it could never change.
Like if we're speaking our language, we're loving each other
where we're trying to live a life that we've lived,
then I think we're coming back to it in a
way that's kind of get to this second phrases thinking
of which is cut to duke, which means it's whole,
it's solid, and it has these different meanings. It's like
if I had a wound on my arm and it
(44:54):
finally fully healed, that would be cut to duke. And
then if the village is so solid and strong that
people couldn't come in and penetrate it, they couldn't attack you,
that's also cut the duke and it's a sense of wholeness,
it's a sense of unity which I think we really
benefit from. And so in these conversations, if we can
(45:16):
have them without anger, because some of the other things
we have to figure out is if we're having our
cultural ceremony, what do we do when two people want
to come but one of them has a protective order
against the other one, And if it's an act of
violence that has resulted in that, then I think whoever
the perpetrator is needs to step back, and we have
to create these safe spaces, and we have to have
(45:38):
conversations about what do we do about people who cause harm?
Now when do we allow that? Like if they fully
make some sort of restitution or they find a way
to make sure that person feels safe around them, which
might not be possible in some situations, then maybe they
could return. But then we have to educate our youth
(45:58):
to say, don't these levels of harm with each other
to the point where we have to look at you
and say can we trust you to be around us?
Because that creates these very complicated conversations as well, which
is all these things are interrelated. As you talk about
your work and domestic violence, prevention and also just trying
to help people recover from acts of violence. So like
(46:21):
as we try to push these things out and push
back into their place, this sense of wholeness. It's related
to this other conversation we had about removing addictions and
self harm and replacing it with good things.
Speaker 2 (46:34):
Yeah. Well, you know there's a film I would this
is really not a plug for me. There's a film
that's called Carve from the Heart. You can watch it
if you have a library card online, and it's about
a man who carves a totem foil for his son
who and died of a cocaine overdose. I had just
come back this she to cut from college and just
(46:57):
had under read Paulo Frere and really started understanding what
oppression is and internalized depression and lateral violence. And it
was amazing to me that Stan wanted to carve a
pole for his son because addiction was something that we
weren't talking about. And then the brilliance of using our
(47:18):
culture to heal and you know, you see, he started
off alone and then other people joined him and found
that you know what it is, It's like, that's it's
what was stolen that we need to take back. It's
that culture. It's that time when you know, I can't
imagine being in the early nineteen hundreds and having to
go through epidemic after epidemic and not to be able
(47:41):
to speak the language and not have the one thing
that gave us comfort, the coupee, our ties to each other,
and that was you know, it just was such a
light bulb. And that's what this is about. It's like,
you know, I have taken and a lot of other
paths for healing. I've done the Twelve Steps, I've done therapy,
(48:05):
I've done you know, programs with Alkali Lake, and in fact,
here on this campus in nineteen ninety four, after I
had come back from school and I had never sung
a song and I had never danced, and I asked
my daughter, Yady Cook Audione, to record some songs. We
(48:26):
sat up in one of the dorm rooms. I invited
three or four of my friends who were in early
recovery from alcoholism, and I said, I want to start
a dance group to start healing us from colonization, because
this is the way we're going to do it. And
so we sat there and I would press play and
couldn't read cling it, but we did it. We stuck
(48:48):
with it. One person came in a couple weeks late
and she came in. I invited her and she sat down.
We started singing. I don't know how we sounded, doesn't
really matter. We just did it. And she started crying.
And after we were done, I said, do you mind
if I ask you what are the tears about? Said,
(49:10):
you know, I've been sober for years, but there's always
been something missing, and this is it. And that was
so impactful and such an eye opener because I remember
the first time I saw my daughter drum on her own.
It was on the ferry. She was probably ten, and
(49:31):
she was drumming and all of everybody was singing, and
I cried so hard. I was so proud, but I
was also so sad that I never had that opportunity,
and I can't believe. So when I, you know, really
started learning the culture, you know what I knew about it.
I knew that my crest of Frog. I knew that
(49:51):
there were Cogwantans. I knew a few clans. I had
gone to Koeks with my dad and he would translate.
But I knew very very little. And sometimes I sit
and I go, Wow, you know, I guess I've been
paying attention, and I feel so much wholer and so
healed and just so grateful, just so grateful you know
(50:14):
that I am a Linget woman who is clean and.
Speaker 1 (50:18):
Sober Guta hun Yasti. Culture is such a wonderful thing,
and I really just want everybody to come back to
it where wherever they are, and to find their way back,
(50:38):
and for us to be ready to receive people as
they come back to our language. Back to the songs.
The the inside scoop is, we were singing and dancing
right before we're come in here to record, and I
took the lead on one song and my voice started
to blow out towards it. Today might be able to
record a podcast after this, But here we are, and
(51:00):
here we go, you know, like singing and dancing and
speaking language and recording a podcast in a place where
they're actively prohibiting and punishing and torturing and trying to
brainwash children to be something different. And so for that
part of me wants to just sort of take this
person whose name is Sheldon Jackson, who has his name
(51:20):
on a whole bunch of different things, and just kind
of take his name and throw it to the bottom
of the ocean, just to say, like, you can't just
do that to people, even if you say it, well,
I had these intentions to try and protect and to
try and make things better and to save them and
so but at the same time, you can't take away
everything that is their identity. And it's not just him,
(51:43):
but you know, to put his name on everything is
really pretty insulting and just keeps putting salt in the wounds.
And so Norah Dalenhower when she started recording elders one time,
I asked it, I'm so thankful they recorded all these
different elders, and she said, I wish I never did it.
So why would you say that, she said, because when
I first started, they really didn't want me to, and
(52:05):
I had to go against what they asked me. I said, no,
like you have to speak, cling it into this box
and we'll have it. Then we'll have it. And not
too long after that, people started calling her, come record
your uncle one last time. And she even recorded her
dad here in Sitka at Mountechkum Hospital on his deathbed,
(52:25):
and he said, record this speech and play it at
my kotik. And in that speech, he said, ah to
nate A Datagu, you have put your joy onto this
open wound of mine at Khati Kratuseneh. And it's been
(52:46):
like medicine, like skunk cabbage that has healed these wounds.
So I think about this and in the work that
you do, Kashta, I'm so thankful that you were able
to join us today. Check out the herring protectors. See
how you can stand up wherever you're at. What can
you do for indigenous peoples who are fighting for their lands,
fighting for their languages. Colonization is not something that happened
(53:10):
so long ago that the impacts are lost. It's still
happening today as people talk about what they get to
do on our lands and which impacts us. And we
know we have relatives up north who can't even fish anymore,
they can't even go get it, and they talk to
us a lot about how their whole lives change once
the smoke hou's culture was gone. And we look at
(53:32):
places like the United States Forest Service, who burned down houses,
who burned down fish camps, who burned down so much
of our stuff. I was talking with an elder yesterday.
He said, we had a smoke house right here. And
it's not just as you were saying on the break.
It's not just a little shed that you put your
fish in. It's a whole place where people live for
(53:53):
a summer, to put up their foods. It's their home.
And to have the Forest Service come in and burn
that down and then they said, so we build one
over there, and then they came and burned that one down.
And these are people alive today. So it's not ancient prehistory.
This is just a little while ago and there has
not been enough retribution. But we know that we are
(54:15):
strong people at our core. We know that we can
stand up, we can speak out. Kashi Kai, You're an
inspiration to me. I love to watch you work, to
be a part of what you do. And if I
am there, just tell me what to do and I'll
do the thing. I'll be this. What do you want
me to say? Okay, I'll say that, and so but
(54:36):
I sound even if things sound pretty good of this
because you told me to say it, and I want
to give you that credit. Here and now this has
been the Tongue Unbroken. This is a project of the iHeartMedia.
Next up initiative check out Indigenous Voices be stewards of
the land. Be brave, be courageous, be equitable, Protect women,
(54:57):
Protect people in the LGBTQ plus commune unities, listen to
the voices that are pushed out to the margins and
help them move back to the center. Y O Gonachish
They tried to colonizzs, try to genocide. Yet we're still
here with the tongue on brope and just to cut
you on, she'd cut tea kicks at the Ka Beta
on you do a saga a rita on. Welcome to
(00:36):
the tongue unbroken, folks, thanks for listening. We're coming to
you today from Sitka in, a renovated boarding school that
was started by perhaps the father of North American boarding schools.
If we want to call them that, we could probably
call them some other bad names and Clingett if we
wanted to. But this cling Ittt place is on It's
(00:56):
kick Sadi land in a community called she and we
are really honored and lucky today to be here with
who is Brady to talk about some of the amazing
things that she's doing. And I think our conversations are
going to include a topic called the rematriation of indigenous peoples,
which I think is important, which I think brings with
(01:17):
it more safety, more equity, and I'm excited for this conversation.
So would you tell the people who you are and
what you do?
Speaker 2 (01:29):
Kik Sadi Ahnahatsiti cogwantsity. My name Isla and I am
Kiksuti from the point house here in Shitka. Our original
house was up on Nutley what people call Castle Hill,
(01:50):
and I am grandchild of the Cogwantan Wolf House and
a Chotz raised my father, Este and Kiksudi women are
known as the Kakhatja Shaw, the herring ladies, or the
flipping ladies because of our original teachings relating back to
how a Kiksutti woman sang to the herring a long
(02:14):
time ago and was asking them to come to her,
and they honored her request because she was respectful and
she was honoring them. And so it's said that this
is the very first place that the herring came to
the yaut Ay, the Herring Rock. And I'm not quite
(02:34):
sure how long the introduction needs to be. So I
grew up I really didn't know a lot about culture.
My parents married in such a way that they're both raven,
not only both raven, but both Kiksatti, and that was
in nineteen fifty. So my father, who was raised by
Anahutzu had hling It as his first language, was raised
(02:57):
very traditionally, grew up down in what's now called the village,
and then my mother was raised in the cottages which
were established by the Presbyterian missionaries after Sheldon Jackson Training
School was established. My great grandfather was Peter Simpson, who
came here at the request of one of Sheldon Jackson's
(03:20):
friends from Metlakatla and actually helped build this boarding school.
I have probably spent much of my adult life coming
to terms with that, because I did. My mother was
always talking about Peter Simpson, and many people talk about how,
you know, what a great man he was, how wonderful,
(03:40):
how kind he was. And then I read an article
that he had written, and it was called Savage, and
it said how he was telling people how we needed
to turn away from our savage ways, that we needed
to learn English. And it really was rather shocking to
me because I was going to school in Albuquerque. It
(04:01):
was a time when the American Indian Movement was going on.
I grew up reading Vindeloria. You know, I wrote my
papers were based on God is read custard eyed for
your sins, And so when I read that, I was
a little bit in shock. So I really have spent
a lot of my adult life figure out who I am,
(04:21):
what is my history, and how we come to terms
with colonization and how do we heal from colonization? And
I took a look at the history of what was
going on at the time when the Alaska Native Brotherhood
was formed. I'm sure people were looking at federal Indian
policy and going, I'll look at this one federal Indian policy.
They told the tribes down south that if they became farmers,
(04:45):
they could become citizens. And then once they became farmers,
they said, oh, no, no, nope, you can't become citizens.
And then I found one of my great uncles his
citizenship paper and it was from nineteen fifteen. And in
order for him to become a citizen in nineteen fifteen,
he had to go to the Indian school and have
all of the teachers sign and say that he was civilized.
(05:09):
And at that time, I would guess that civilized meant
that you weren't speaking kling It, that you weren't practicing
any of the culture or traditions. And then he had
to go to court, and I think he had to
get four or five white men to testify in court
that he was civilized. And I thought, how would that feel?
(05:30):
How would I feel if I had to go into
court today and deny basically my personhood as a Lingt
person in order to have rights. And I started taking
a look at that perspective, and a lot of struggles on,
you know, because I started having addictions at an early age,
(05:51):
and I knew something was wrong. I always knew something
was wrong, and I think a part of me believed
that the teachers were right, that I was nothing but trouble.
I was never going to mount to anything because I,
you know, I was an adolescent and I was reading
Vine Deloria and I was reading papers, I was researching
in high school how the Bureau of Indian Affairs had
(06:13):
failed us, how the Indian Health Service had failed us,
how the BIA started out in the War Department. Just
all of these things that started coming together and making sense.
And so I think I really became aware of the
harms of colonization very early on. But I internalized that.
(06:34):
I internalized the oppression that we experience. And by the
time I was in my mid twenties, I had gone
to treatment three times. I went to treatment the first
time when I was eighteen, and when I quit drinking
finally at twenty five, I pretty much hated everybody, including myself.
I had survived a lot of sexual assault, a lot
(06:57):
of physical abuse, some pretty horrendous, and I definitely did
not trust. I didn't trust anybody. I really don't like anybody.
I didn't trust women, I didn't trust men. I didn't
trust white people. I think a part of me I
hated men, but most of all, I hated myself because
I identified being a linget woman being an addict meant
(07:22):
that I was going to live a life full of harm,
full of oppression, full of racism, full of sexism. And
it took, and it has taken, and still takes a
lot of work to get to the point to understand
that because I am a singet woman, that gives me
actually an incredible depth of strength and beauty bound within
(07:48):
the culture and found within my identity. And it hasn't
been easy. It has been an easy.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
Road going to cheat for sharing your truths and for
feeling safe enough to talk about these harms. And so
history is so complicated, and our lives are also complicated.
And some of the things that I think of as
I've gotten to know you and see your work, is
just how we can overcome things collectively and individually. As
(08:15):
an individual, you can overcome things that are so incredibly
painful and as you said, horrific, And then you could become,
whether you wanted to or not, a leader of like
a whole movement. Like your life is decolonization, and it's
such a needed thing for all of our peoples to
see the ways you interact, the ways that you stand
(08:35):
up for the hering, to stand up for women, to
stand up for our peoples, to stand up for our culture,
and to think of this long lineage so as we
think of Peter Simpson, and so Peter Simpson is an
incredibly powerful figure in our history, but also a complicated
figure in our history, because I think he was also
on the side of saying, well, maybe we need to
(08:56):
stop doing these ways of being that we were doing
and embrace Christianity and embrace things that were more sort
of American values. But at the same time, a lot
of people who were existing in this time the early
nineteen hundreds were seeing this might be the only way
to survive for now. They start the Alaska Native Brotherhood,
the Alscanative Sisterhood, which are some of the oldest civil
(09:17):
rights groups in the United States, and they say we
have to learn their systems better than they know their
systems so that we can defeat them from within those systems,
which is wild to defeat white people in their own
systems they created to specifically take everything from Indigenous peoples
and to oppress a lot of non white peoples. And
so as we look at that, I think there's a
(09:39):
lot of stories in our indigenous communities as well, where
a lot of these church led groups and these government
led groups would try and learn the laws of our
peoples to say, you're this clan, you're supposed to marry
these other groups, and they would try to break that
down by saying, well, if you marry within your clan,
you can be eligible for a housing loan, and you could.
They would really sort of incentivize the destruction of our
(10:01):
culture in so many ways. And so as I look
at the history of our people, I always try to
feel the compassion of what it might have been like
to live at that time, because we still have those
pieces of paper, that citizenship where you swear to live
a non indigenous life, and that gave you the right
to vote, They gave you the right to claim land.
They gave you the right to say where your kids
go to school, and if you didn't sign that and
(10:24):
get five or six white people to testify to the
fact that you did live that way. Then they could
take your kids. You wouldn't have a right to vote,
you couldn't own land. And so as we think about
those complexities and what are people those decisions that are
people were forced to make, it's been incredible to sort
of try and reconstruct all these different pieces to also
(10:44):
look within ourselves. And the first time I sobered up
it was probably I was twenty two years old, and
I think I was realizing like drugs and alcohol were
not contributing to the things that I wanted to do,
and I was just not being productive. So I just
sort of stopped and then I fell off, and then
I came back on, then I fell out, and so
probably three this is my fourth sort of attempt, and
it seems to be sticking. And I really encourage folks
(11:06):
to find their own way, to find what works for you.
But if things are controlling your life, that are these
external forces, to think about those things and thinking about
the work that you do now in the paths that
led you here, which is an incredible story of survival,
of healing, of coming to terms with perhaps personal and
(11:26):
collective failures, and also colonization, which is this big, horrible
thing that's just it's always there. What kinds of things
are you doing now and what have led you to
these places right now?
Speaker 2 (11:38):
I think, you know, I do a lot of things.
I'm involved with Native Movement, which is an amazing group
of folks that have been fiscally sponsoring harring protectors, and
within that, one of the things that I've seen in
particular is, you know, of course we have m MIIW
and it's missing and murdered Indigenous people. And one of
(12:00):
the things that was really really strong for me and
I moved for a while when I sobered up. I
sobered up in Anchorage, went through treatment, and I came
back and it was really hard because this is where
a lot of the trauma happened. And I tried moving
back a couple of times and I just couldn't And
I finally moved back after five years, and it was
really difficult. It was really difficult because I had been
(12:21):
away because I really, you know, so many of my
social engagement had centered around drinking and drugs, and it
wasn't like there were a lot of people that welcomed
me back. So I made a decision to make sure
that along the way. There are so many things like
it affected me not being welcomed back and not having
a space. So I started deliberately creating safe places for people.
(12:46):
And I remember one time I knew about five people
that have had moved back in about a year, and
so we had a ceremony for them and gave them
eagle feathers and welcomed them back home. Because it's really
it's like I have really I think focused on that
a lot. I think that for me, one of the
(13:08):
biggest turning points was when my father passed. Then my
father was good, honest and William Brady, and the Bill
Brady Healing Center was named after him. And he had
this incredibly beautiful, strong heart and just just very very loving.
And we lost him suddenly in nineteen ninety five. And
(13:29):
you know, I told you before that he had married
my mother, and so he had been ostracized for many years.
Both of them were ostracized from, you know, by elders,
from probably the time they got married to probably for
thirty years. Then he became a judge, he got sober.
He died eighteen years sober. I never saw him treat
(13:50):
anyone with anything less than ultimate respect, no matter who
they were, and that transferred to so much love for him.
And when he passed said he had a heart attack.
And by the time I got to the er, there
were probably twenty people outside the er because word had spread.
And then by the time everybody got going through, there
(14:10):
were probably fifty people out in the halloway wanting to
say goodbye. The opposites came and when they found out
what was happening, by the time we got home three
hours later, they had cooked dinner, they had cleaned house,
and they did that for two weeks, and that's the way.
And I thought, what a blessing, because he was such
a huge loss. And I remember sitting with him and
(14:32):
a friend of mine came in. She's like, I just
don't know how we're going to be in this world
without him, and she said, I can't imagine how you
feel being his daughter. And after all of that, the
opposites came and took care of him, and that was
like a real honor. It was a real honor. I
think he knew it. I know he knew it, but
I wish she had known that he was so well loved,
(14:55):
and I thought everybody needs that. Our culture is really,
really beautiful. I set out to learn the culture and
I just started showing up. Anytime anyone would invite me somewhere,
I would go, and even if they didn't invite me,
I would go and I would help, you know, anytime
there was somebody here lying in state, I'd go to
the store. I'd buy groceries and show up and serve.
(15:17):
And people kind of ignored me for a while until
I think they saw I wasn't going to go away,
and then they started taking me in. Herbin Davis started
talking to me about so this is how you related
to this person, and then Ethel MacKinnon and some of
the other elders, and I'd say, but I you know,
and then asked me to talk. A couple of times
I said I can't. I'm you know, I'm not an elder.
(15:39):
I'm a woman, and they're yeah, but you're kick Sudi
and we need to hear from Kik Sudi. And so
that was really instrumental in my learning, just really delving
into the culture and showing up.
Speaker 1 (15:54):
Yeah, good as cheese. And a really important part they
think of what you shared is how to define yourself
if you've been living in addiction, because sometimes those being
a user and having a sort of community of users,
that becomes your sort of shared identity. And when you
take away that thing that you share, do those folks
(16:16):
know who you are? And are they comfortable with you
being who you are? Because I remember when I sobered up,
there's some people I realized like, oh, I don't know
if we're going to continue to be as close as
we were. And it was heartbreaking to me because I
don't feel like I was pushing them away, but I
felt like there was just a discomfort there because I
wasn't selecting the same sort of collective identity. But in
(16:37):
the culture, I found that as well, when you start
to learn about what it means to be shingit and
what it means the way our peoples took care of
each other, especially in trying to see through some of
the stereotypes that were out there about just always being
mean or always being ready for battle, or just these
different things that were there. And we're pretty hard people.
(16:59):
But I remember I was teaching and cling get here
and someone came up to me and said, oh, that
was so fun and so funny. I didn't realize that
cling get people laugh, I said, and her I think
her father was a teacher out for a long time
at this school, and I said, well, when you were
growing up, like your people were really taking everything from us,
our kids, our land, our language, our culture, everything, and
(17:21):
that wasn't very fun. But we were still over here
telling jokes, and so we like to laugh. And so
when you get into the culture and you're laughing and
you're bonding, and you're seeing things, and you're teaching songs
to children and you're teaching language to each other, it's
it's such a wonderful adventure. And so if you make
that decision to sober up, I think one of the
things that does help is to find things to put
(17:43):
in the places that are now going to be kind
of empty. You're going to have these empty spots in
your life and your consciousness and your spirit, but those
things have been left for you by our ancestors. And
so we're going to take a short break and we'll
come back and we're going to talk about Yao kach
a daily protecting the herring and why that's, in my mind,
a starting point for this larger conversation about being responsible
(18:08):
stewards of the land, of the waters, of everything that
lives and breeze that are our relatives on the land.
Speaker 2 (18:14):
We'll be right back. And it's cheese.
Speaker 3 (18:29):
One or two or three times.
Speaker 2 (18:32):
You try any.
Speaker 4 (18:34):
Friends, you run all around without joy, struggle yesterday, you
struggle still today now, but you'll find a broader away.
Speaker 2 (18:53):
My brother sisters, don't.
Speaker 4 (18:55):
You know about the way to wait it back?
Speaker 1 (19:00):
For those who call.
Speaker 4 (19:05):
Believe in yourself now BULLI in us somehow Gonadi Colorasy.
Speaker 1 (19:23):
Just to cut that t just to cut at ya
tea where yao has to de yeah jenny yah Latin, Yeah,
cut has to I tod s. So I was taught
(19:47):
that there's a spirit in everything, and that's the reason
why we give respect to all things. And so there's
this phrase that we've been using a lot in this area,
especially in the springtime as we get into March we
get into April, but also year round, but especially at
that time when folks are coming to Sitka or calling
people they know in Sitka for herring eggs. It's an
(20:10):
really important food for Thlinget peoples and for people on
the Northwest coast. But one of the things that we
talk about is protecting the herring. And the herring are
subject to a number of different things, and two of
the main things I think that really impact them is
altering the shoreline doing a bunch of fills, so you
could put a road out there, or a big dock
(20:30):
out there or something. And there's a lot of elders
who talked to me. They said, we used to come
up here to Sway to Skyaguay, and there used to
be the beaches were white with herring when they would spawn.
But once they extended this dock out here, it all stopped.
So expanding and just altering the landscape without thinking about
where the fish like to run. And then the second
(20:51):
thing is the over harvesting of commercial fishing and how
we've been in this battle to say, protect our rights
to harvest our food. The indigenous peoples should have human
rights to access the foods that we've always had, but
there's no priorities set for indigenous peoples and the foods
that we live off of, in the foods that are
(21:12):
our life. So it's not like, well, you could just
go to the store and get something else. So you
just go to McDonald's and get something else. But they
say a trai crossity. Our food is our life, and
you're at the point of a lot of these conversations.
So could you share your thoughts and your work on
the heiring and what currently needs to be done.
Speaker 2 (21:32):
It's a long story now, just so really, I think
that it's hard. So, you know how Western civilization, Western people,
they silo things, and of course things are all related,
and it was difficult and it continues to be a
little difficult too. You know, how do we get people
to care about heiring, and not only how do we
(21:53):
get people to care about haring? How do we get
people to care about heiring and sick to sound? And
then okay, so how do we get people people to
care about harry and eggs? And probably most people don't
even know what harry and eggs are? And then how
do I get people to care about harvesting? You know,
maybe thirty people harvesting harry and eggs on branches. And
it's interesting, we've been having a lot of conversations among
(22:17):
harrying protectors and harvesters about what's going on now. But initially, yeah,
we all grew up eating harry nggs on hemlock branches,
and my brother Shko would go out with my nephew
and harvest, and then he no longer had a boat,
and so I would have to rely on friends and say,
(22:40):
you know, do you have any hairy and eggs? And
you know, and people share, have always always shared. One
of my favorite stories, I was walking by Crescent Harbor
and I heard somebody's voice, someone going hey, hey. I
looked down and hey, and there's this young lady done
on this skiff with a blue tarp over it. She's like, hey,
(23:01):
have you gotten harry and eggs? And I thought I
was going to not get any because it was there
towards that and I'm like, no, I haven't, and she
pulls this tarp open, Well, I have a lot. My
dad said to come down here and give them out,
And so I was able to go home. And that's
just the way people are, that's the way the harvesters are.
But one year in particular, I called hand Donald's sek
(23:22):
Chuckie Miller, and I said, you know, can I give
you gas money if you can give me some eggs?
And he said, Louis, it's getting harder. It's getting harder
to find them. We have to go all over the
sound and spend lots of money on gas, and you know,
I thought it had been getting better because when Seka
Tribe in nineteen ninety seven organized people, I was part
of the staff that organized people to testify at the
(23:44):
Board of Fish to say that, you know, we wanted
protections for the harvest. And we did make some progress.
The Seka tribe did make some progress. They entered into
an MoU with the state and there were some some
good things done. And then I moved on to some
other things, working with youth and culture. And so when
(24:05):
I called Chuck, I was really surprised that he said that.
And then we come into you know, standing rocket. Group
of us got active and it felt so good to
do something. We raised ten thousand dollars to send down
to them, and we met afterwards, and we loved working
together and we loved the fact that we were making
a difference, and so we decided to work on something
(24:25):
local and I suggested herring. And there were a lot
of non natives at the table. I didn't know if
they would know about herring, but to my surprise, they
did and they all said yes. And so I had
been thinking about it, and I thought we should have
a Kui. I called Ray Wilson and Juno, he's the
kik Sadi clan leader, and I'm like, hey, Ray, I
(24:46):
think we should we should have a herring KOUI. He's like,
what do you mean. I said, yeah, I think we
should celebrate. Because I had seen the same people over
and over again going to the Border Fish, I could
see just how frustrating it was, and so I felt
like we really needed a way to come together in
celebration and acknowledge the importance of hairing in our way
(25:09):
of life. And somehow we pulled it off. We scheduled
it the day before the testimony started at the Board
of Fish. I hand delivered invitations to the board members.
Four of them showed up. We probably had one hundred,
one hundred and fifty people there are they? And that
was the thing, you know, people, It wasn't them going
to the Board of Fish and saying, you have three
(25:31):
minutes to tell us why hairy and eggs are important
to you and why they've been important to you since
time immemorial. So it was awesome to see, you know,
Herman Davis and all of our elders and harvesters and
get up and be able to talk as long as
they wanted to, how much we love Harry Inks and
for our people to be able to we didn't have
(25:52):
to take them out to a fancy dinner. We invited
down to our territory and said you need to listen
to us. And as time, you know, it's been since
what twenty eighteen, now this is twenty twenty four, and
we've done more of that. It also dawned on me
because I've also been I've also worked as a substance
(26:12):
abuse counselor domestic violence advocate, and that with a hairying
lady playing such an important role, that we needed to
involve Indigenous women. And so when the time came on,
I wanted to, you know, commission a herring lady to naw.
I could have chosen, asked many, many people, but I
asked Jennifer Younger and she said yes. And then it's
(26:35):
just growing and growing and understanding that, you know, also
coming from my feeling like I was separated from the
culture and you know, maybe having some cultural gatekeepers or
sometimes being hard to open it up to everyone, to
open up the cope to anyone who wants to learn,
is a good friend of mine and Juno Candy. He
(26:58):
goes by Candice. Now, she came over a couple of
years ago and she's my age, and she said that
was the first one she's been to and she was
sixty five. Because I grew up in that era of
you know, you know, that long period of time, you know,
starting with Sheldon Jackson, starting with the US coming in
where it was not okay to be us and so
(27:18):
many of us. I was too old for the Second
Native Education Program. I was too old for all of
these other things. And so, you know, just to offer
that opportunity to anyone and everybody who wants to be
a part of is really really important, because that's what
we want to do, is we want to build strong
community based on love and acceptance and safety most of all.
Speaker 1 (27:42):
Yeah. Oh well, and I'm glad you brought up the
three minute time limit. I remember one time I was
given five minutes to testify on something, and I started
off by saying, Okay, I know I have five minutes,
but telling a thing at person. You had five minutes
to tell me everything that's important about this is like
taking a king salmon out of the ocean, putting it
in the bathtub and saying, why don't you swim around
(28:03):
for a little one, And so I had to make
sure I told the little joke and part of it,
and then I wasted like a whole minute sat open.
But as we come back like so, the kuik is
one of our most important ceremonies. And there used to
be lots of them. There used to be sagur kuk
and show and kuk, and so it's a gathering of
(28:25):
people where you feed them and give them gifts. And
one of the real underlying principles is it's hosted by
a clan. And long time ago we never wrote anything down.
So we would pay everybody to say, be a witness
to this and help us to make this into our law.
And that's how laws were made, it's how stories were affirmed,
it's how names were given, so so important. And one
(28:45):
of the things that happened is at first they said, okay,
you can't have a whole bunch of these ceremonies. You
can have one every year, and so they narrow it
down to one. And then in the early nineteen hundreds,
Governor Brady meets with the thing at People's and says,
you can't do this anymore. There'll be no more of
the potlatch, no more koot and they said give us
one more and he said, okay, one more, and so
(29:07):
there was the just I always think about that. I
look at these photos of chet Ka happened here where
the ku Khitan invited all these people in, and just
to think of them thinking, this is the last time
we can live our life. We can have our ceremonies,
we could take care of our deceased, we could name
our people like so much was just being taken. So
it's wonderful to see the approach being one of open invitation,
(29:30):
just come and learn, and we're trying to figure this
out as well, and just to see this concept and
how that's part of it, and coming back to karutja.
So karutja is a word like one time I stepped
off the fairy was taking the ferry to a community
and I saw the water was just rippling, rippling so fast,
and I thought, well, it's not raining, so what am
(29:50):
I seeing? And it was nighttime and it's the herring
flipping their tails on the top of the water. There
were so many of them, and that karut Ja Shah
and that Karutja hit and to think of these movements
for protecting the hearing and protecting the land coming out
of the women of the Kick said, I think is important.
It's like this story that's told and told and told,
(30:12):
and now it's coming back to life, and it's wonderful.
Speaker 2 (30:15):
Geese gonna geese. It is amazing. I think it's also important.
I so appreciate your involvement, and I appreciate when people
are willing to step out because I do think that,
you know, I hear a lot. Actually I heard from
a friend of mine. Okay, I've heard a lot. Women
don't speak, women don't draw, women don't do this. And
(30:36):
so at one of the meetings before some clan leaders
and visitors, I said, I was told I needed to
tell them what it's about, and so I said, you know,
this is what I hear. We need this to be
about respect, respect for each other as clans, respect for
each other, you know, within our clans and across the loyeties,
and also respect for women. Some people didn't like that,
(30:57):
but that's okay, because I think that part part of
what happens is that we get stuck. We get stuck
with saying that's not the way we did it. My
response is, if we are still doing things, if we
are still practicing parts of our culture that are hurtful
to people, stop doing that and find another way to
do it. And I do think that being a survivor
(31:20):
and having worked with women that you know it is
important to step up and it is. And the thing
is is like what our heiring about and the harrying eggs,
it's a time of rebirth. It's a time of our
ability to recognize the beauty of the earth and the
abundance and how women give so much that needs to
(31:45):
be honored, that needs to be honored, and I love
that it.
Speaker 1 (31:50):
Is Yeah, oh wow, every thing get person who has
a clan gains that identity through their mother, and so
to think of the role of the women and things
get cultures and to think of some things like We're
going to come back to this probably after our second break,
because I feel like this is a bigger conversation we're
going to bite into. So before we take our break,
(32:10):
I just want to ask you this one question. We'll
come back to this other big and very important and
sensitive concept of the women's role in cline culture and
also how that role is affected by violence against women,
both from external and internal sources. But before we get
to that conversation, if someone wants to help protect the hering,
(32:32):
what can they do?
Speaker 2 (32:33):
This is a really important time. I encourage people to
go to Herringprotectors dot org, start following us on social
media on Facebook, Hering Protectors, Instagram, Heiring Protectors, and follow
what's going on. Because there is a new committee that
was just formed which I think is going to make
it much worse, and it's called the Herring Revitalization Committee.
(32:53):
This year. This year, eighty one thousand tons was the
quota eighty thousand and tons of hairiness what they were
allowed to take out of Sitka Sound. I think they
got thirteen thousand. And what they're seeing is that the
sacro market is dying. So this committee is set up
to allow more fishing and to broaden the market. And
(33:18):
the way that it's been done has been done very
quickly and with no real participation from tribes, and so
it's going to move forward and we're going to have
to have a really big showing to the Board of
Fish next year. You know, check on the Board of Fish,
see what proposals are happening, and understand our rights understand
(33:38):
our rights as indigenous people. This land is ours to protect,
the waters are ours to protect everything. All of our
relatives all around us our ours to protect, and it's
our responsibility and we need to step up.
Speaker 1 (33:52):
Yeah, well, this work can be so tricky when you're
talking about protecting the land and decolonization. So the metaphor
that I would offer for this is, let's say every
single day I come into your house and just take
half of the food out of your refrigerator and I
just take it to my house to go eat. And
this happens every single day, and you're getting mad and
you're trying to figure out how to stop me. And
then you realize there's this organization called protect your Refrigerator
(34:15):
dot com, and then so you sign up for it.
But then that's actually me and my people, and now
they're going to get half of what's remaining, and so
now we get three fourths of everything in your refrigerator.
So this is the way capitalism works, is that they
will name something to say, oh, we're the actual protectors
of the herring, but they're sponsored by the commercial fishing
(34:35):
industry and all the monies that are behind it. Because
this is the classic sort of problem is that indigenous peoples,
we don't have very much of our land left. We
do have monies, but nothing like huge commercial industries that
are billion dollar industries. And so we're trying to go
against them and their lawyers and they have lobbyists and
they have everything like that. So stand up, contact the
(35:00):
of Fisheries. I know you folks have done the kadej
yuko utku so a shame robe to talk about the
decisions that they have made, so they can be accountable
for those decisions. If you know legislators, if you know
people who have money power, help us to step up
and to make sure this is the last stand of
the herring. It's the herring stronghold. But then they used
(35:22):
to be all over the place, and they still get
smaller runs in different places. But if this run goes away,
it's gonna have this catastrophic effect not just to thing
at people and what we like to eat, but to
the entire interconnected ecosystem of the ocean. And we know it.
Where ocean people. We've been here for twenty thousand years.
(35:43):
We understand what the ocean needs. We've been here since forever.
We will be here for forever and we'll be protecting
our land. We'll be right back and chiesh.
Speaker 3 (36:00):
You are.
Speaker 5 (36:06):
Oh you're you're not said o cod boo, h.
Speaker 3 (36:22):
Oh he.
Speaker 4 (36:29):
E e a.
Speaker 3 (36:37):
Oh Connor talk. He gives away to say d dochart.
Speaker 2 (36:57):
Hey, hey, you.
Speaker 1 (37:09):
To cut you hun senkachha dot kusti. One of the
things is Indigenous people that's very delicate, we'll call it.
It's a sensitive thing, is what are the roles of
people in the culture. And these are things that every
(37:31):
single culture evolves, Like you know, if we look at
white American culture, at some point they are basically burning
women for being free thinkers. And so every culture has
its own things that it analyzes and kind of figures
out and say we could do, we could do better.
And one of the things that we're sort of trying
to balance these days is trying to keep people from
(37:53):
oppressing our own women. And so sometimes these things happen
in indigenous cultures that are brutalized by colonization. Is sometimes
it will internalize a misogyny and become hyper masculine and
then say women can't talk in public, and women can't
do this, and women can't do that, and so but
(38:13):
if you look like we are a matrilineal people's like
we gain our whole identity through our mothers. And I
believe the term that we're sort of embracing here is
rematriarchy to sort of reinvest in women in the role
in in our society, which I know some people are
going to get real mad about it, but it's okay.
I was watching these people play Jenga in Clinget. They're
(38:37):
using clinget and playing Jenga today, and I was saying,
the building's going to fall down, and then I would
say and then they looked at me like grumpy. I said,
it's not going to fall down. And there's a thinget
name that's a which is jas the building won't fall down.
(38:58):
And someone once told me when the role and power
of think that women was taken away, that's when the
clan houses started to fall down. And I think about
that as we think about moving forward with a sense
like let's follow our women, Let's let our women lead
the way, and let's as men protect them and figure
out when it's time for us to talk and when
(39:19):
it's time for us to step back and listen, and
when it's time for us to step up and say
I'll say the difficult thing, and I'll put myself out
there and put myself at risk because what I'm doing
is protecting, but it has to be done in a
way that you're kind of in tune with what the
entire culture and society needs. And so I know, as
we talk about protecting hearing, protecting women safe spaces, I
(39:43):
do think a part of that is investing in the
strength and courage and voices of our.
Speaker 2 (39:49):
Womenesh I do think some of the decisions that have
been made around the coaks and the way we do
things that have been really difficult. And I think that
at one point, you know, as I said, I spent
a good amount of time going to coeches and listening
to people like Herman Davis and you know, having him teach.
(40:13):
And I think it was maybe seven or eight years ago.
I was talking with a friend of mine and I said,
I have a question to ask you, and he said
what I said, well, is there a role for women?
Because if there isn't a role for women, I'm not
sure that I want to move forward because I do
hear all of these really negative things about us, and
(40:35):
if y'all don't want us to be a part of it,
I can step back and he's like, are you serious.
I said, yes, I'm serious, and I said, really now
that the role of the women was to make the decisions.
And you see that, you know, through history, I hear
people say that the women were in charge of the trading,
and the women really did so much. And I always
(40:56):
used to love going to Angoon because I remember I
was at one of their parties and this man got
up and he was talking and he said, you know,
you can see as i'm talking, I'm looking over here
to my right, and that's because I'm looking at the generals.
And he said, the generals are those four elder women
right there, and they will let me know with one
look if I'm saying the wrong thing. And so I
(41:20):
think we do need to if we want to continue
to be a living culture, we need to question. We
need to question what we're doing and making sure that
we are inclusive, because yeah, the easiest way to separate us,
separate us is to keep fighting. And I also go
back to you know, dostia Ethel MacKinnon and many of
(41:40):
the elders. They say, you know, our people, the clans
are like the roots of the tree. And when I
was working in domestic violence. And you know the reason
that's true. I talked to biologists, he said, because the soil.
We had these huge old growth forests, but the soil
is so thin that the trees need the roots in
(42:01):
order to hold up. That's why when you go through
a clearcut, you see the trees on the edge start falling.
And so that's like true when we are separating, whether
we're leaving women out, it's going to weaken our culture
and all the other trees will start falling. It's also
the same if we're not reaching out to the men
who are being violent and who are in the prisons.
(42:25):
It's like either way, we need each other because why
would we have the clan system. Why would we acknowledge that?
Because you know, we can go back and we can
see I mean I just go back maybe five generations,
and I'm related to how many clans, And that's why
it's important to know who we are.
Speaker 1 (42:42):
Yeah. Oh well in this sense, there's a phrase and clinket.
Well there's two I can think of. One is by
a Katye David Katishan, who was a Dantan. He said,
ushin is on this world. We're still holding each other's
hands and to just think about them and how much
love and respect like Atyahwune is built into our culture,
(43:06):
and so many things that are built into our culture
that I just can't see as saying you be quiet
because you're a female, right And so like I understand,
there are things that we have been taught, and there's
things that we have learned, and there's things that maybe
are the way that they have been, but that doesn't
mean we we shouldn't analyze those things. Because we have
this wonderful recording. It's a speech by Naclaw Jesse Dalton,
(43:29):
and that's one of the finest examples of Plingett oratory.
It's recorded in the Lilinkett language. It was recorded by
Kahani Rosita Whirl. It was transcribed and translated about Kahne
Nora Marx Dallenhouer. And we have that thing from the
hands of three gifted and powerful women. And I also
think about some are of our own peoples. And I've
(43:50):
been in meetings before I said, well, I hate to
say it, but if she was a man, they would
have built a thirty foot statue for her with everything
that she's done. And so just to try and think
to say, Okay, just because the white world found a
way to completely dehumanize and devalue our women doesn't mean
that we should buy into that. But I think I've
(44:11):
been told, thankfully by women who are helping me, to
just keep an eye on my own sense of internalized misogyny,
because all of us have internalized misogyny, internalized racism, internalized homophobia,
and to sort of say, okay, I need to be
in this constant state of analysis and our culture is
(44:32):
not this thing that's so rigid that it could never change.
Like if we're speaking our language, we're loving each other
where we're trying to live a life that we've lived,
then I think we're coming back to it in a
way that's kind of get to this second phrases thinking
of which is cut to duke, which means it's whole,
it's solid, and it has these different meanings. It's like
if I had a wound on my arm and it
(44:54):
finally fully healed, that would be cut to duke. And
then if the village is so solid and strong that
people couldn't come in and penetrate it, they couldn't attack you,
that's also cut the duke and it's a sense of wholeness,
it's a sense of unity which I think we really
benefit from. And so in these conversations, if we can
(45:16):
have them without anger, because some of the other things
we have to figure out is if we're having our
cultural ceremony, what do we do when two people want
to come but one of them has a protective order
against the other one, And if it's an act of
violence that has resulted in that, then I think whoever
the perpetrator is needs to step back, and we have
to create these safe spaces, and we have to have
(45:38):
conversations about what do we do about people who cause harm?
Now when do we allow that? Like if they fully
make some sort of restitution or they find a way
to make sure that person feels safe around them, which
might not be possible in some situations, then maybe they
could return. But then we have to educate our youth
(45:58):
to say, don't these levels of harm with each other
to the point where we have to look at you
and say can we trust you to be around us?
Because that creates these very complicated conversations as well, which
is all these things are interrelated. As you talk about
your work and domestic violence, prevention and also just trying
to help people recover from acts of violence. So like
(46:21):
as we try to push these things out and push
back into their place, this sense of wholeness. It's related
to this other conversation we had about removing addictions and
self harm and replacing it with good things.
Speaker 2 (46:34):
Yeah. Well, you know there's a film I would this
is really not a plug for me. There's a film
that's called Carve from the Heart. You can watch it
if you have a library card online, and it's about
a man who carves a totem foil for his son
who and died of a cocaine overdose. I had just
come back this she to cut from college and just
(46:57):
had under read Paulo Frere and really started understanding what
oppression is and internalized depression and lateral violence. And it
was amazing to me that Stan wanted to carve a
pole for his son because addiction was something that we
weren't talking about. And then the brilliance of using our
(47:18):
culture to heal and you know, you see, he started
off alone and then other people joined him and found
that you know what it is, It's like, that's it's
what was stolen that we need to take back. It's
that culture. It's that time when you know, I can't
imagine being in the early nineteen hundreds and having to
go through epidemic after epidemic and not to be able
(47:41):
to speak the language and not have the one thing
that gave us comfort, the coupee, our ties to each other,
and that was you know, it just was such a
light bulb. And that's what this is about. It's like,
you know, I have taken and a lot of other
paths for healing. I've done the Twelve Steps, I've done therapy,
(48:05):
I've done you know, programs with Alkali Lake, and in fact,
here on this campus in nineteen ninety four, after I
had come back from school and I had never sung
a song and I had never danced, and I asked
my daughter, Yady Cook Audione, to record some songs. We
(48:26):
sat up in one of the dorm rooms. I invited
three or four of my friends who were in early
recovery from alcoholism, and I said, I want to start
a dance group to start healing us from colonization, because
this is the way we're going to do it. And
so we sat there and I would press play and
couldn't read cling it, but we did it. We stuck
(48:48):
with it. One person came in a couple weeks late
and she came in. I invited her and she sat down.
We started singing. I don't know how we sounded, doesn't
really matter. We just did it. And she started crying.
And after we were done, I said, do you mind
if I ask you what are the tears about? Said,
(49:10):
you know, I've been sober for years, but there's always
been something missing, and this is it. And that was
so impactful and such an eye opener because I remember
the first time I saw my daughter drum on her own.
It was on the ferry. She was probably ten, and
(49:31):
she was drumming and all of everybody was singing, and
I cried so hard. I was so proud, but I
was also so sad that I never had that opportunity,
and I can't believe. So when I, you know, really
started learning the culture, you know what I knew about it.
I knew that my crest of Frog. I knew that
(49:51):
there were Cogwantans. I knew a few clans. I had
gone to Koeks with my dad and he would translate.
But I knew very very little. And sometimes I sit
and I go, Wow, you know, I guess I've been
paying attention, and I feel so much wholer and so
healed and just so grateful, just so grateful you know
(50:14):
that I am a Linget woman who is clean and.
Speaker 1 (50:18):
Sober Guta hun Yasti. Culture is such a wonderful thing,
and I really just want everybody to come back to
it where wherever they are, and to find their way back,
(50:38):
and for us to be ready to receive people as
they come back to our language. Back to the songs.
The the inside scoop is, we were singing and dancing
right before we're come in here to record, and I
took the lead on one song and my voice started
to blow out towards it. Today might be able to
record a podcast after this, But here we are, and
(51:00):
here we go, you know, like singing and dancing and
speaking language and recording a podcast in a place where
they're actively prohibiting and punishing and torturing and trying to
brainwash children to be something different. And so for that
part of me wants to just sort of take this
person whose name is Sheldon Jackson, who has his name
(51:20):
on a whole bunch of different things, and just kind
of take his name and throw it to the bottom
of the ocean, just to say, like, you can't just
do that to people, even if you say it, well,
I had these intentions to try and protect and to
try and make things better and to save them and
so but at the same time, you can't take away
everything that is their identity. And it's not just him,
(51:43):
but you know, to put his name on everything is
really pretty insulting and just keeps putting salt in the wounds.
And so Norah Dalenhower when she started recording elders one time,
I asked it, I'm so thankful they recorded all these
different elders, and she said, I wish I never did it.
So why would you say that, she said, because when
I first started, they really didn't want me to, and
(52:05):
I had to go against what they asked me. I said, no,
like you have to speak, cling it into this box
and we'll have it. Then we'll have it. And not
too long after that, people started calling her, come record
your uncle one last time. And she even recorded her
dad here in Sitka at Mountechkum Hospital on his deathbed,
(52:25):
and he said, record this speech and play it at
my kotik. And in that speech, he said, ah to
nate A Datagu, you have put your joy onto this
open wound of mine at Khati Kratuseneh. And it's been
(52:46):
like medicine, like skunk cabbage that has healed these wounds.
So I think about this and in the work that
you do, Kashta, I'm so thankful that you were able
to join us today. Check out the herring protectors. See
how you can stand up wherever you're at. What can
you do for indigenous peoples who are fighting for their lands,
fighting for their languages. Colonization is not something that happened
(53:10):
so long ago that the impacts are lost. It's still
happening today as people talk about what they get to
do on our lands and which impacts us. And we
know we have relatives up north who can't even fish anymore,
they can't even go get it, and they talk to
us a lot about how their whole lives change once
the smoke hou's culture was gone. And we look at
(53:32):
places like the United States Forest Service, who burned down houses,
who burned down fish camps, who burned down so much
of our stuff. I was talking with an elder yesterday.
He said, we had a smoke house right here. And
it's not just as you were saying on the break.
It's not just a little shed that you put your
fish in. It's a whole place where people live for
(53:53):
a summer, to put up their foods. It's their home.
And to have the Forest Service come in and burn
that down and then they said, so we build one
over there, and then they came and burned that one down.
And these are people alive today. So it's not ancient prehistory.
This is just a little while ago and there has
not been enough retribution. But we know that we are
(54:15):
strong people at our core. We know that we can
stand up, we can speak out. Kashi Kai, You're an
inspiration to me. I love to watch you work, to
be a part of what you do. And if I
am there, just tell me what to do and I'll
do the thing. I'll be this. What do you want
me to say? Okay, I'll say that, and so but
(54:36):
I sound even if things sound pretty good of this
because you told me to say it, and I want
to give you that credit. Here and now this has
been the Tongue Unbroken. This is a project of the iHeartMedia.
Next up initiative check out Indigenous Voices be stewards of
the land. Be brave, be courageous, be equitable, Protect women,
(54:57):
Protect people in the LGBTQ plus commune unities, listen to
the voices that are pushed out to the margins and
help them move back to the center. Y O Gonachish
Host
X̱ʼunei Lance Twitchell
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