December 16, 2025 • 52 mins
This week, Theo speaks with Professor Dina Gilio-Whitaker, author of the new book Who Gets to Be Indian? Ethnic Fraud, Disenrollment, and Other Difficult Conversations about Native American Identity. We also take a look at the new ghoulish policies that stand to force people into houselessness in the new year, and revisit the story of Brendan Glenn, an unhoused man killed by an LAPD officer ten years ago.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Previously on Withian House, and so that's.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
What we're really trying to do with this film is
center the voices of live experts, elevate those voices, and
do some meaningful what I've come to call homelessness narrative work.
We can't solve a problem as a society that we
don't understand. We need to make sure that we as
a broader society and then therefore as a body politic,
are understanding this problem so we can address it, so
(00:28):
we can vote in people into positions of power, making
these funding allocations and decisions that actually address the problems
and don't just serve to uphold states of oppression, and
in the perfect world, even elevating these voices so high
that they are the electeds.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
Welcome to Wiian House. I'm your host, Theo Henderson. I
would like to start this episode by sharing a quote
from the incomparable Ralph Ellison. I am an invisible man.
No I am not a spook like those who haunted
Edgar Allan Poe, nor I am one of your Hollywood
(01:15):
movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance of flesh
and bone, fiber and liquids. And I might even be
said to possess a mind. I am an invisible man
simply because people refuse to see me. This episode would
(01:36):
explore what it means to be invisible in a very loud,
visible world. But first, on House News, our first story
begins with a number of people who could be forced
out of the street. In Los Angeles. Fourteen, five hundred
(02:00):
people could be forced out of their current subsidized housing
and onto the streets or into the shelter next year
due to loss of federal funding. This dearth of funding
will roll back progress on lowering the number of people
on housed. Since twenty twenty three, Los Angeles Council member
(02:24):
Nitthie Raman states, there is a potential for the entire
houseless services team that we have built up here to
fall apart. Here is a more specific breakdown. Between five
thousand and seven thousand additional households could be common house
because their rent and permanent homes is paid by a
(02:45):
separate federal program known as Continuum of Care. About three thousand,
five hundred households are at risk, mostly because of state funding,
and additional six thousand households could lose housing because a
federal emergency housing voucher program, which was launched during the pandemic,
(03:06):
is set to expire next year, four whole years ahead
of schedule. The Trump regime announced it with flashing the
amount that programs would distribute for permanent housing and shift
dollars to temporary housing options that mandate people enroll in
such services as job training and mental health treatment. As
(03:30):
we've talked about on the show many, many times, these
programs are not helping the unhoused, but rather forcing car
through solutions and stripping the community of their ability to
choose and direct their own lives, all the while putting
up more roadblocks to permanent housing. The local government will
(03:52):
then be beholden to Trump's aggressive enforcement of camping bands
in order to keep their funding. The Trump administration is
also holding the Continuum of Care funding hostage and putting
it up for competitive bidding. This will force cities to
comply with his demands, just as they have for so
many other marginalized communities in the last year. It's yet
(04:15):
another example of how normalized has become to openly disparage
communities like the Young House. I'll remind you that just
a few months ago, Fox News hosts Lawrence Jones and
Brian Kilmead said this on the air.
Speaker 3 (04:28):
They have given billions of dollars to mental health and
the homeless population. A lot of them don't want to
take the programs. A lot of them don't want to
get the help that is necessary. You can't give them
a choice. Either you take the resources that we're going
to give you and or you decide that you're going to.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
Be locked up in jail.
Speaker 3 (04:46):
That's the way it has to be now, or involuntary
lethal injection or something.
Speaker 4 (04:50):
Just kill them.
Speaker 1 (04:51):
They experienced no professional repercussions. Our last story ends with
ex Los Angeles police officer Clifford Proctor, who killed an
unarmed hun house man in Venice in twenty fifteen. He
was arrested at Liaxis past October. The man Procter shot
and killed on May fifth, twenty fifteen, was named Brendan Glenn.
(05:16):
Following an apparent dispute that occurred between Glenn and a
bar bouncer, Proctor intervene and placed Glenn on his back
when he stepped back, and shot him twice. At the Times,
then police Chief Charlie Beck recommended that Proctor be charged,
but former District Attorney Jackie Lacy declined the press charges
(05:38):
back in twenty eighteen, the case was reopened with a
different former district attorney, George Gaston, shortly after he took
office in twenty twenty. Charges were filed last year, prompting
Proctor to flee to Trinidad. When he returned, he was
finally arrested for the murder of Brendan Glenn over ten
(06:00):
years later. And that's on House News. When we come back,
I speak with Indigenous activists and author Dina Jillio Whittaker.
Welcome back to Weedian House. I'm Theo Henderson. My guest
(06:23):
this week is prolific writer, educator, and activist Dina Jillio Whittaker.
A member of the COVID Confederated Tribes, Dina has spent
her career reporting on and educating the public on Indigenous issues,
the colonization, and environmental justice. She's written books like All
the Real Indias, Died Off and Twenty Other Myths about
(06:46):
Native Americans and As Long as Grass Grows. She also
lectures on American Indian studies at California State San Marcos.
Dina joined me to discuss her new book, Who Gets
to Be Indian? Ethnic fraud, is enrollment, and other difficult
conversations about Native American identity. Let's jump into the conversation.
(07:12):
Today's guest is a professor, a lecturer at cal State
University of San Marcos, and a journalist who has written
a book, and I encourage you wall to go out
and read it. It is Who Gets to Be Indian?
I apologize, I'm not trying to mislabel ethnic fraud and
other difficult conversations about Native American identity. Thank you very
(07:35):
much for your time. Can you tell us a little
bit about the book.
Speaker 4 (07:38):
Let me properly introduce myself. Why hustle halt pia Ea
Squeistina Julia Whitaker and I am a descendant of the
Callville Confederated Tribes of Washington State and born and raised
in Southern California, Los Angeles, currently teaching at cal State
San Marcos in San Diego Go, where I am also
(08:02):
the assistant director of the California Indian Culture and Sovereignty Center. So,
you know, aside from all my other outside school pursuits
like writing and being a journalist and those kinds of things,
so Southern California based this book, Who Gets to be
Indian is, and I appreciate your reluctance about using that term,
(08:24):
and I know why you were reluctant to use it,
because there's a lot of confusion about like what's the
right word to call Native Americans right or American Indian people,
And so I appreciate your sensitivity to that. This is
the third book that I've written. The first book I
wrote was called All the Real Indians Died Off and
Twenty Other Myths about Native Americans in which we talk
(08:44):
about what is the right term to use for Native people.
That's one of the chapters in that book. So I
recognize where you're going with that. The second book that
I wrote was called As Long as Grass Grows The
Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice as from colonization to Standing Rock.
And so this new work, it's related to those previous topics,
(09:08):
but it is a topic all on its own, and
how I come to that topic is a direct result
of who I am. The book is equal parts academic study, storytelling,
and auto ethnography or memoir. So it comes out of
my personal lived experience as a Native person, like a
(09:29):
mixed ethnicity Native person who was born and raised away
from my tribal community in California at a certain place
and time, and so that leads to a lived experience
that really forms how I understand myself in my own
native identity and my own liminality within that, and how
(09:54):
nativeness is. We often say in an Indian country that
being Indian and identity is very complex, and there's a
lot of reasons for that, you know, having to do
with the historical processes of colonization, you know, settler colonialism,
being dispossessed. So you know, I mean, I'm thinking about
the theme of this podcast being unhoused and the through
(10:18):
lines of that, like what does it have to do well.
Native American people in this country are the first unhoused people. Absolutely,
we are the first people to be to be rendered homeless,
to be dispossessed of our lands. And it's that beginning
point that creates all the other problems that we have,
(10:40):
including the problems of identity and why we are in
this conundrum of how we identify, how what our identities
are based on what kind of documentation or lack thereof,
like all, there's so many complexities of this issue that
you know, It's one of the things that Native people
(11:02):
write about a lot because it hits us all, like
there's nobody that's not impacted by it. So this book
is an attempt to even though there have been you know,
you know, numerous books written on this topic, my starting
place was the need to create a historically based trajectory,
(11:26):
like how did we get here? Like an analysis? So
I wanted to create an analysis. We don't have enough
analysis in these spaces, but also to to create this
historical context trying to understand how do we get here?
Why is it that ethnic fraud is so prevalent in
Indian country as a group of people. There is no
(11:48):
other group of people who is whose identities are so
co opted wrongfully bar none. That's the point of the
book is to like understand, like how do we get here?
And why is this just a growing problem? And what
are the what are the implications for it?
Speaker 1 (12:07):
You mentioned something to two things, one ethnic fraud and
two there's something that connects with today's time. There's no
way around it. This Trump regime has taken an active
role in minimizing people of color, particularly African Americans. Contributions
or historical I want to say lineage or historical existence,
and I want to say that some of the similarities
(12:30):
is the same thing I'm seeing with the indigenous community
is that they go out of their way to try
to erase everything from the language from uh, you know,
the culture from closing and things of that nature, and
the difficulty to set or right what historical is fact
because if what they say and the African culture, until
(12:52):
the lamb or the gazelle writes the book, the story
is always going to be from the perspective of the lion.
So so obviously the stories has been narrated or truncated
in many respects to favor the white supremacist culture and
in white supremacist narrative in order to advance that narrative
(13:15):
in the community. What was the awakening or how aha
moment for that where when you started to notice a
lot of which I have to say, many white people
will always claim that they had native Indigenous blood and
it can be the most virulent races that you could
ever meet. But I digress.
Speaker 4 (13:32):
So, yeah, no, I mean, there's so much there in
what you just said, a lot of a lot of
things to unpack. But as as far as when I
first noticed it, it's been probably in the nineteen eighties,
when it really started, I started to go really deep
into my culture as somebody who was disconnected. And my
(13:53):
research on what I show is that the history of
ethnic fraud, it's over a century old. It begins here
in California with the film industry, and it has to
do with the way that subtler colonialism and capitalism intersect
(14:13):
and it led to the commodification of nativeness. And so
you know, there would have been no reason for although
cultural appropriation is as old as the Boston Tea Party,
when it comes to the right, so you know, people
rebels are, you know, dressing up as Indians in dumping
(14:38):
tea in the Boston Harbor, and that sets fire to
the to the revolution, right, it creates the American Revolution.
So that there's a history that goes back a long
long ways for cultural appropriation. But cultural appropriation is only
part of this equation. At some point, cultural appropriation just
taking the aspects of native cultures and using them for
(15:02):
various purposes, at some point turns into becoming Indian. So
you know, when people are culturally appropriating nativeness, like in
the example of the Boston Tea Party and other there
are many other examples in early American history where that
was happening. At the end of the day, it was
cosplaying and the costumes came off and people went to
(15:24):
their white lives. Right, there's no need to really be Indian.
There's no advantage in it because Native people were being
genocided against and their land stolen and their children stolen
and all of that stuff. So but at some point,
and it's during and after the Civil Rights era, that
nativeness it loses its stigma, where it had a stigma,
(15:49):
you know, all the way up until the nineteen sixties.
Then we have the Civil Rights era. The Civil Rights era,
you know, includes not just the black communities, but you know,
Hispanic communities and Native communities, and they all form their
own ethnic nationalist movements. Well, that's the moment that becoming
Indian becomes cool, or that being Indian becomes cool. Prior
(16:13):
to that, you know, there was a lot of reasons
people would would not want to be out front with
their nativeness, and in fact did lie. But for several
complicated reasons, it becomes sheep and trendy to be Native American,
And it has a lot to do with the counterculture, bohemianism.
(16:35):
As I write about it, in the book, especially in California,
that draws from lots of different kinds of cultures, especially
Native cultures, that morphs into the New Age movement. But
then it all has become an industry, and so the
commodification of nativeness has carries through the twentieth century in
(16:59):
the with the these different inflection points and different reasons.
Sorry I'm getting off, I'm rambling.
Speaker 1 (17:07):
No, No, you're not, actually, because this is like a
great history lesson because when you were saying this, there
are a couple of things that I'm remembering from my
own childhood. I'm really dating myself now. I was watching
the original Long Ranger. You ever remember the stereotypical native
partner that yeah, Himu Sabi and all of that. And
(17:28):
then I remember, too, is when I was growing up
to the always the negative switch that made it sound
like similar to like black people at any moment, they're
going to come around and surround you and start killing
you for no reason at all. And it never it
was never elucidated that what the heck, why would why
would they just for no reason start attacking you until
my father, Juicer says, well, look at it like this,
(17:49):
why would someone start to attack someone just for no
reason at all, and this is their land. These people
were taking their land without permission or whatever. Whatever thefarious activities,
of course they're going to be said. Of course, if
if someone comes and breaks into our home, you're going
to fight. So why do of course he was, in
his way militant and so before that was a word
(18:10):
that was so he was always questioning that because of
I don't know if the blackface movement and the parodying
of African Americans was really rubbed him rob So he
definitely didn't. So he definitely was always on a different
type of understanding where it was generally accepted by people
that didn't question it. And when you were saying this,
(18:30):
I saw that metamorphosis too, going into schools learning how
to make moccasins and all of these things that didn't
really touch on why it was important for the culture
and to also disabuse of the narrative that they had espoused.
Speaker 4 (18:46):
Yeah, so like there's there's so many layers of this
that we can analyze, like what is the psychological mechanism,
what's in play? What's at work here for people to
you know, I mean beginning with cultural appropriation to cause
play being Indian. I mean, it's a very American phenomenon.
(19:08):
The Boy Scouts of America was started out as a result,
you know, YMCA camps. There were all kinds of you know,
a century ago, people were you know, were playing Indian
in all these different kinds of ways. It was just
a thing that Americans did. But again, like at some point,
like the costumes come off and people go back to
their lives, but at some point it turns into becoming Indian.
(19:33):
People have this need to become Indian. Well, what's behind that?
What's this fascination with Indians? Especially when Indians have been
reviled and throughout American history native people have been hated.
As Philip Deloria, who wrote this seminal book called Playing Indian,
he said that, you know, Americans simultaneously reviled but also
(19:55):
respected Indians. And it wasn't respect. I can't remember the
word that he used, but there was a tension between
hating Indians and needing to get rid of them, but
also needing to emulate them. And it comes down to
the need for Americans to form their own identities. As
they move out of Europe, they come to this land,
(20:17):
taking over this land in the name of freedom and democracy,
right and justice, come here with all these high ideals,
but proceed to commit genocide against the people here to
take their land. Like, these things don't match up, they
don't square. So it's about the need to create a
new identity, to become indigenous, to become legitimately belonging onto
(20:43):
a land that is not legitimately theirs. So it's the
psychological process that's always been here in this country, and
it's done nothing but like kind of grow and shift
and change. So a lot of the way a lot
of scholars have written about it all also is about
the need to disavow whiteness and to not be part
(21:04):
of that ugly history. Like if I'm native, then i
can say that it wasn't me that did it, or
it wasn't my ancestors. I'm on the side of the
people who were wronged. I'm a victim here, right, So
regardless of who your people are, where your family came from,
it's a way out, it's a way to disassociate from
(21:27):
this horrible, horrible history. And so that's one level of
how we can you know, understand this phenomenon. But it's
also about how settler colonialism is a system. It's a
structure that is predicated on eliminating native population. Settler colonialism
(21:49):
is always about the elimination of the native in order
to get the land, and when they do that, they
then replace the native population. So there's this thing that
we call replacement narratives. And so all of this thing
about you know, coming here and needing to form this
authentic American identity is wrapped up in the need to
(22:14):
become indigenous to a place where you just aren't indigenous
to it and then disavow the injustices and the heinous
things that we're done. There's another term that we use
too that is related that has been called subtler moves
to innocence. That's another way of understanding oneself is not
(22:37):
complicit with these histories of profound violence and injustice. So
all of these things, you know, and more set the
stage for this bizarre phenomenon where people have evolved stories
about themselves being native, being indigenous, and often it's just
(22:58):
family lore, is just people saying, yeah, we have you know,
we have my Cherokee princess great grandmother. That's the most
common one, but there's lots of versions of that. Story
that people latch onto. It's it's this again. It's just
a bizarre phenomenon that people hold onto so deeply, even
(23:20):
in the face of absolutely zero evidence. I remember one
time I was in a conversation with somebody that that
had that story about oh, yeah, we're Cherokee and these
are white people, right, and yeah, we're Cherokee. And my
friend it was her mother, and she one of my
(23:41):
professor friends actually, and so we were at this event
and her mom is at the table telling me the story,
and my friend was mortified. She said, Mom, remember you
did that DNA test and there's absolutely no Native American
DNA that in that test. Like the tenacity of these
stories is like beyond logic, you know, Like in that example.
Speaker 1 (24:05):
I was going to mention too, that it's two things, like,
for example, the feeling the only time, like when you're
saying to the shift to innocence is like, for example,
the Thanksgiving holiday when I was in high school, I
wrote again, I could say, I think it was influenced
by some of the militancy of my parents that looked
on a skew about the holiday and how it has
(24:26):
been perpetuated like a bunch of Native people came up
and seeing this downtrodden people, and they offered to help.
And then that was it. Everyone was just you know,
dancing down the street the way it's pictured. It was
of course to white sensibilities, and I spoke out against it.
I was like, okay, on the part of the native,
they probably extended the hand of courtesy welcoming, but you
(24:49):
certainly didn't dance down the street. You guys went and
had a plan and wiped them out. Be course, the
white teacher that I had set this whole essay against
my the newspaper and tried to debunk it or tried
to really willfully will it away. That that was what happened.
That when you know, they all were in had skills together,
(25:10):
they just held hands and they said Kumbaya and all
of this kind of stuff. And it is excellent point
to to see how this is enacted in regular times,
even in the educational environment. I was in high school.
In order for me not to get you know, expelled
or get called to the principal's office, I had to
just let it go because the way he basically just
(25:31):
tried to eviscerate or decimate my arguments was it was
messed up, but it was, but it may imprint on
me on understanding how willful and how determined people can
try to cast a different narrative, which I have to
say this again, it ties into today with the Trump
magiene erasing every culture, not only just African American, but
(25:55):
other people of culture's achievement and existence into a white
approved kind of you know, happy kind of state where
they have used now that say about slaves, slaves were
unpaid workers and that kind of thing.
Speaker 4 (26:12):
Okay, writing of history exactly, yeah, But but it's like,
it's not just the rewriting of history. But we know,
as people of color, as people who are other than white,
you know, European descendant people, we know that our histories
were written without us, like they were, and until our
(26:36):
ancestors became educated in those white systems, they learned to
speak that language, they learned to think in that way.
They and you know, as people, as people of color,
And I don't even like the use. I don't like
the phrase people of color when it comes to Native people.
And there's there's a reason for that, as Native people
(26:57):
racializing us. It's not the right way to think about it.
But sometimes there's no other phrase to understand ourselves as
having a similar historical experience of oppression. We know that
our histories were written for us before we had the
ability to write them for ourselves.
Speaker 1 (27:17):
Exactly.
Speaker 4 (27:17):
We have ancestors that go back as early as the
seventeen eighteen hundreds that got educated. Were writers, we're philosophers,
we're thinkers, and we're pushing against the systems that they
were trapped by. But those were the outliers, right, They
were not common until we get to the mid twentieth
century in the civil rights movement and we really start
(27:39):
to see systemic change, right, and our communities take charge
of our education systems. We get college educated, so we
start to write the books ourselves. We start talking about
our own lived experiences and get those perspectives validated for
(28:00):
what they are from our own lived experiences. So we've
written our histories. We've changed the narratives to be more truthful.
But we are also in a moment of major backlash
to the civil rights era, and that has been the
case since the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties. The conservative
(28:22):
movement as we know it is built on that backlash.
That's how we get the Southern strategy under Nixon, we
get not new racism, but racism continuing to rear its
head because of the gains that were made with the
Tea Party movement, you know, the post Reagan years. White
(28:43):
America has been in backlash ever since. And that's how
we get Trumpism, That's how we get Mega, you know.
So it is not new, It is just the regurgitation,
but re entrenchment of whites premisey, the pervasiveness of it.
(29:03):
It has never gone away, and we know that it
just got emboldened with the Mega movement, and that's what's
so disturbing about it. But of course, now that they
have power, they're going to try to rewrite the histories again,
and they have. They've gone after the museums, they've gone
after the education systems. The book binds all of those things.
(29:27):
It's desperation because they know that the browning of America
is a real thing and they can't do anything about it.
This country is based on immigration, but it's actually based
on subtler colonialism. But settler colonialism is not the same
as immigration, but that's a different conversation. But the United
(29:49):
States is a country of multiplicity and that's just the
way it is, and it's getting that way more and
more and more, and white people are afraid of losing
their power, and that's why we are in this position
now with the rewriting of our history. And god, I mean,
what's so crazy is next year is the two hundred
and fiftieth anniversary. You know, they are going to completely
(30:13):
erase any you know, Native history of the Revolution. And
this is all about whitewashing, you know, whitewashing and upholding
American exceptionalism, and not in a good way. You know.
We when we hear that term American exceptionalism, that's used
in two different ways. One of them is that, yes,
(30:33):
America is an exceptional place and we deserve to be
and we should celebrate it in and it's and we lauded, right,
it's laudatory. But for people with different perspectives, we look
at American exceptionalism when we say no, American exceptionalism, it's
based on the oppression of lots of other people. And
(30:53):
we have to push back against that. And we have
to recognize that the United States is founded on some
of the most profound injustice, and we have to advance
our counter narratives to.
Speaker 1 (31:07):
Those absolutely when we come back more with Dina, Welcome
back to Wittian House and THEO Henderson, Let's get back
into the conversation with Dina, Jilli O Whitaker. They're going
(31:27):
to do everything in their power to erase the realities
of what depression looks like. And it also fosters another
thing that I hate that I hear people doing is
like both side argument or making it sound like it's
okay to oppress, but when someone fights back, they are
the ogre. They are the ones that should be justifiably so.
(31:48):
And I think that's one of the lynch pins of
what the American exceptionalism and American narrative that is pervasive
in our society. We can't seem to figure out that,
you know, if we go over let's say, for example,
we go over to Iraq and start bombing people's homes
over there, and then they decide to create a makeshift
kind of military or militia to fight back, and then
(32:11):
we have the propaganda that the Middle East hates America.
And again it goes back to what my parents said
when I was younger, like you go in someone's house,
tear off their house, attack their family, members. You think
they're going to be sitting ready to sit down and
have a meal with you, or skip down the street
with you. Of course they're going to fight back. They
don't have the mic necessarily all the military wherewithal like
(32:32):
America has, so they have to be creativist, and so
you can't judge how they're going to go after you
after you've gone through them every kind of way. So
I think that's one of the driving points of whitewashing,
is to always paint that the other side was the
guilty party, or if you can't do that, things make
it sound like it was both sides. And that's one
(32:54):
of the things that really drives me crazy when I
hear people do that, Like, no, it wouldn't be a
side at all if you wouldn't bother you know.
Speaker 4 (33:01):
Yeah, no, that's absolutely right, and we've certainly seen that
throughout our histories and in the United States. I mean
it's even written in the Declaration of Independence, I mean
the Declaration of Independence, you know, all it is is
a series of grievances that the colonists had against the king,
right the twenty seventh grievance, I think it's the very
(33:23):
last one or The second to the last one is
where they talk about the merciless Indian savages and how
I don't remember exactly the word, but they're blaming the
king for supporting the Indians to bring violence on the colonists.
It's in one of our foundational documents. Like that's never
going to go away, you know, unless somebody decides to
(33:46):
change it. I don't see that ever happening. But Native
people have been frozen in our institutional frameworks as savages
that needed to be defeated. Why did they need to
be defeated because they were fighting to defend their lands.
Just what you're describing, thank you, I mean exists. I mean,
(34:06):
so we're we're always going to be frozen as that.
And throughout the rest of American history it's been the same,
Like you know, it was. It was a war of
aggression to get native lands, and when Native people fought back,
they were the aggressors. They were the ones who were
the bloodthirsty savages. And and it's always been that way,
(34:27):
and you know, we can even see it even today,
you know, I mean in mainstream society there is still
an idea that Native people were uncivilized, they needed to
be christianized. What was the white man's burden to bring
civilization and Christianity to the ignorant savages? And you know,
(34:48):
sorry for all the trouble, but you know that was
just inevitable, like it was just the way that it was.
And yeah, and get over it. You know, that's still
really prevail in so much of American society.
Speaker 1 (35:03):
I was going to ask, too, do you think that
there's a link to that, because I mentioned earlier on
the top of the interview about the incident that I'm
starting to see is ICE agents are running up on
Native people and you mentioned this more than one case
I seen just release it I think yesterday where this
is a Native family was just minding their business, they
(35:24):
you know, and they tried to deport them, and they
kept telling them, we are native people, you know where
you're going to deport us back into our own home land.
This is it, you know. So they're just looking justifying
some reason, to justify the narrative that America is being
overrun by Again, what you mentioned the savages or the
criminals or whatever, is if you can demonize a person,
(35:47):
then you can criminalize them. I've always said that that's
a quote I always in is particularly what they're in
the house, and the African American and you know, the
Native and his Latino community. These are things that seem
to be running much more truur than I ever imagined.
Speaker 4 (36:02):
Yeah, there's always some boogeyman hiding behind the next bush,
coming to get you. And and it's all such a projection.
Speaker 5 (36:10):
Right, I mean it's like, you know, the people that
came here and genocided against the indigenous populations were the
ones who were perpetuating all the crimes against humanity, and
yet they're projecting that onto everybody else.
Speaker 4 (36:25):
You know. It's I've been hearing a phrase lately and
in the media. I'm really a news junkie, and so yeah,
so I've been hearing this phrase lately that says, their
accusations are their confessions in the Trump administration, So all
the things that that they accuse other people of doing
(36:47):
are what they're actually doing themselves. They're always looking for
some enemy. It's some enemy to fight, some enemy to
be to be aggressive forward so that they can maintain
their white American state. I mean, that's what it comes
down to. It's you know, pure and simple white supremacy.
But with the ice I mean they've you know, green
(37:10):
lighted racial profiling, and the Supreme Court green lights.
Speaker 1 (37:14):
Yes, exactly, I've pelt it yep right.
Speaker 4 (37:16):
So Native people And this is why, you know, racializing
Native people is such a slippery slope because a lot
of people look a lot alike. A lot of American
Indian peoples can look like Iranians, or can look like Filipinos,
or can look like you know, there are a lot
of brown skinned people that are really hard to tell
(37:38):
the difference, like you know what they are, you know
what their their ethnicity or their nationality is. And that's
true for Native American people. There was a case back
a couple of months ago when it was there were
a lot of wildfires in the state of Washington. There
was an incidence of ICE agents. I don't have you
(38:00):
heard about this one that they raided people fighting on
a fire line.
Speaker 1 (38:04):
Yeah. I heard that two.
Speaker 4 (38:05):
Of the people that they took away were tribal members
of the Umatulation.
Speaker 1 (38:11):
Not doubting that.
Speaker 4 (38:12):
Yeah, So they were in Washington fighting fires, trying to
protect their homeland and they get raided by ice and detained.
And you know, of course they don't, you know, they
they try to say they're tribal members, but they don't care.
These ICE agents, they're not they're they're not checking identities,
they're not checking people's status. It's just round them up.
(38:36):
Why because Stephen Miller has a quota of three thousand
people a day which they haven't been able to meet.
So of course they're going after anybody that looks suspiciously ethnic.
Speaker 1 (38:50):
Yeah, and has an accent or God forbid or it's
like it's it's spilling over in different communities. But not
only that, it is our populist that is wilfully resistant
to seeing the reality unless it happens to them. You know,
I would say what happened to many of the communities,
like for example, I don't know who we've seen in Atlanta.
(39:11):
These workers were h I believe H one or H
two workers. They were literally working, and they went in
there and after off the the insistence of someone that
was running for office running there and rounded all of
them up, and it's caused such a it's still an
international incident and embarrassment toward the Trump regime that they
(39:33):
are trying to get them to come back, and many
of them are not wanted to come back. Well, I
can't blame them because you know, the treatment that they
endure at these these centers really negates the narrative that
they keep playing, making it sound like it's just holding
people temporary. The second one was the incident where they
were trying to rush off children in the middle of
the night and they had to get an emergency in
(39:55):
joction to stop them from deporting them to places where
these kids are not from saying the parents wanted them back.
And all of these these kind of atrocities that are
happening in front of my eyes, and there's also a
swath of people that are trying to justify this. You know,
it's just deplorable.
Speaker 4 (40:12):
Yeah, it really is. I mean, it's just it's hard
to get one's head around what's happening in this country
and how it's gotten to this point. I mean, it's
full blown fascism. And I remember I saw it coming,
you know, in twenty sixteen when Trump got elected the
(40:32):
first time. The writing was on the wall. I mean
in that first term, in all his campaign speeches, all
of it was there, and I think people of color
could see it much more easily than white people could.
I think they heard what they wanted to hear, they
saw what they wanted to see. And I don't think
(40:54):
people believe that it could get this bad, but I
knew then that It's like, oh, you know, it didn't
happen as fast as I thought it would. But here
we are nine years later and in Trump two point zero,
you know, and now the full fascist agenda is upon us.
(41:16):
And of course, in fascism, one of the key components
of it is the criminalizing of people of color, people
who don't fit a white profile, you know, or Christian
white Christian, so you know, white Christian nationalism, of course
is what we get. And you know, it's just crazy
(41:40):
that we are here and in this moment when it
felt like we made so much progress right in the
last half century, and in many ways we did. But again,
the backlash, the white resentment toward the rights gained by
people of color and women and gendered alternative people, right,
(42:03):
I mean, yes, it's the resentment that's at the bottom
of all of this, that is driven by religious fanaticism.
Speaker 1 (42:14):
Well, you've said a mouthful. Let me parse some of
the things that you mentioned that I wanted to talk
about about the fires and how a native because I
live in Los Angeles and as you know, they're the
indigenous group here that the fires that impacted the native community.
Do you think our society has addressed the issues correctly
(42:35):
or do you think there's room for improvement.
Speaker 4 (42:38):
Well, there's always room for improvement.
Speaker 1 (42:41):
Spoken like a lecturer, but okay.
Speaker 4 (42:45):
As somebody who lectures on and teaches about environmental issues
and traditional knowledge, indigenous knowledge. California has always been a
landscape that was managed by Native people. It was not
the pristine, untouched environment that Europeans thought they were looking at,
(43:07):
and nowhere was it like that on the continent, and
especially in California. It wasn't that way. Indigenous people managed
the landscape with fire for thousands of years, and they
understood what it meant to live in a healthy environment.
They always understood fire's medicine. Fire is medicine on the land.
(43:28):
And when settler populations outlawed native burning in the nineteenth century,
they imposed a regime that was about fearing fire and
it was about managing land in order to maximize timber
production in forests. That's when they stopped native cultural burning.
(43:52):
So it's really it becomes forest's mismanagement, and that's how
we get to a condition now driven by climate change
or exacerbated by climate change that has put us at
risk of these dramatic, out of control megafires. So, you know,
(44:13):
restoring indigenous knowledge onto the land is a key component
of what it means to keep land managed in a
healthy state. What does it look like in urban environments.
That's a whole other conversation. It's a whole other question.
What if the land around Pacific Palisades in Malibu had
(44:35):
been subject to managed control birds, would that have made
a difference in potentially preventing the fires from from January.
I don't know, but their questions worth pursuing. And we're
seeing that throughout California. Where native knowledge is being restored
(44:58):
to the land, we are seeing the restoration of some ecosystems.
I'm thinking now about the dam removals on the Klamath River.
I don't know how much you know about that, but
there were six dams built on the Klamath River in
the twentieth century, And anytime you build dams, it leads
to different kinds of ecological impacts. In the case of
(45:21):
the Klamath River, as in other rivers like the Columbia
River up north it leads to the collapse of salmon populations.
Salmon is a keystone species, and when you lose a
keystone species, it causes a cascade of other impacts to
other species. And so anyway, Native people led a campaign
(45:45):
for over twenty years to remove four of the major
dams on the Klamath River in order to restore salmon runs.
That happened this year. So in fact, that was one
of the reasons that they Trump said that he turned
turned on a water faucet, Like, remember what he said
about the fires. He turned on a water faucet, and
(46:06):
that's what they like, beat the fires. And Jesse Frick
and Jesse Waters on Fox News actually came out and
said he said the reason for those fires was the
fault of Indians because they wanted the dams taken out.
Like he actually said that. He said it was Indian's
fault that there was no water in southern California to
(46:28):
fight the fires. But anyway, so the dams have come
out this year and and it's led to almost an
instant restoration of salmon population. Some species of salmon that
hadn't been seen in the river for over a century
are now filling those rivers, and and and and so
(46:49):
it's a beautiful story of recovery at restoration by you know,
eliminating dams and restoring indigenous knowledge onto the land.
Speaker 1 (46:59):
That's impressive. When you said Fox News, I'm like, well,
their solutions for unhoused people is to involuntarily eject them,
to kill them off. So it's it's not I saw
that insane. I could believe it, but you know, then
I could believe it. This is Fox News. And they
basically gave a half hearted apology and just kept right
on going, and just you know, it's so normalized. They
(47:23):
might make a shock in first about trying to kill
off unhoused people, but more and more that they're like
there was a mayor talking about giving fentanyl to unhoused
people and killing them off in his neighborhood. So there's
a little bit more of outrage, but it's time is gone.
When people make these kind of solutions or the final solution,
if you will, in this time, then it's going to
(47:46):
be like, you know, you stretch it off, you know,
that's hyperbole whatever, And then look what that happened with
the hyperbole of Trump in this regime. Look where we're
at at this point. You know, it's that's the things
that us as a society where must be vigilant, We
must guard against it, and we must fight with every
fiber of our being to stop this from happening.
Speaker 4 (48:07):
No, absolutely right, because it's the other ring, right, it's
the other ring of non mainstream people, and it can happen.
It has happened to people of all kinds of ethnicities
in the history of this country. Think about the Irish.
How the Irish were considered non white and persecuted in
(48:31):
the nineteenth century and they were white people, right, So
there's this whole study of how how the Irish became white, right,
in order to fit in and to basically say themselves.
And they were pitted against black populations in Boston, right,
(48:52):
So you know, during a time when there was stiff
competition for jobs. So people are always going to be
pitt against each other, the most vulnerable. But yes, it's
the other ring of people who are the undesirables in
a society. In this society, that leads that demonization and dehumanization.
(49:14):
So when you can see somebody is nonhuman, that that
leads to rationalizations and justifications of all kinds of atrocities,
and that's what settler colonialism did in this country. The
way that the land was taken, you know, so violently
from Native people was through dehumanizing them, which provided the
(49:36):
rationalization for the violence that was unleashed for four hundred years.
Speaker 1 (49:43):
Absolutely well, I enjoyed having this excellent talk with you.
Where can we find your book?
Speaker 4 (49:49):
The book can be purchased any place where good books
are in LA I would recommend Skylight Books. I did
a reading there a few weeks ago. It actually launched
a book launch there. Oh okay, so you know, visit
Skylight Books which is on Vermont, and it can be
you know, it can be ordered online through be Compressed.
(50:10):
That's the publisher. I don't do a lot of social media.
I've tried to distance myself from social media because I
think it's a very unhealthy space. But I can be
found there, and you know, I just really encourage people
to read the book, especially if you are somebody who
(50:30):
has a family story about being Native American that you're
sticking to, but you have absolutely no connection to a
Native community, or if you're somebody who does have a
liminal identity, you know you are Native, you are you know,
you are, but you've been disenfranchised for whatever. This book
will appeal to a wide audience, so I really recommend
(50:52):
if you're interested in this subject.
Speaker 1 (50:55):
Well, thank you again for taking time out to talk
with me, honest and I enjoyed that conversation. And I
want to thank our audience for listening in. Thank you
very much for your time.
Speaker 4 (51:06):
All right, thank you Theo.
Speaker 1 (51:10):
Thanks so much to Dinna for her time and her
continued work. To get your own copy of Who Gets
to Be Indian and follow her on social media check
out the links in the description. Before we sign off
this week, I'd like to share a few more words
from mister Ralph Ellison. Life is to be lived, not control,
(51:31):
and humanity is won by continually to play in the
face of certain defeat. Thank you once again for listening in.
If you have a story you'd like to share, please
reach out to me at Weedianhouse at gmail dot com
or weedian House on Instagram. Until the nd May we
again meet in the light of understanding. Weedian House is
(51:54):
a production of iHeartRadio. It is written, hosted, and created
by Me Theo Henderson, our producers Jamie Loftus, Hailey Fager,
Katie Fischer and Lyra Smith. Our editor is Adam Wand,
our engineer is Joel Jerome, and our local art is
also by Katie Fischer. Thank you for listening.
Previously on Withian House, and so that's.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
What we're really trying to do with this film is
center the voices of live experts, elevate those voices, and
do some meaningful what I've come to call homelessness narrative work.
We can't solve a problem as a society that we
don't understand. We need to make sure that we as
a broader society and then therefore as a body politic,
are understanding this problem so we can address it, so
(00:28):
we can vote in people into positions of power, making
these funding allocations and decisions that actually address the problems
and don't just serve to uphold states of oppression, and
in the perfect world, even elevating these voices so high
that they are the electeds.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
Welcome to Wiian House. I'm your host, Theo Henderson. I
would like to start this episode by sharing a quote
from the incomparable Ralph Ellison. I am an invisible man.
No I am not a spook like those who haunted
Edgar Allan Poe, nor I am one of your Hollywood
(01:15):
movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance of flesh
and bone, fiber and liquids. And I might even be
said to possess a mind. I am an invisible man
simply because people refuse to see me. This episode would
(01:36):
explore what it means to be invisible in a very loud,
visible world. But first, on House News, our first story
begins with a number of people who could be forced
out of the street. In Los Angeles. Fourteen, five hundred
(02:00):
people could be forced out of their current subsidized housing
and onto the streets or into the shelter next year
due to loss of federal funding. This dearth of funding
will roll back progress on lowering the number of people
on housed. Since twenty twenty three, Los Angeles Council member
(02:24):
Nitthie Raman states, there is a potential for the entire
houseless services team that we have built up here to
fall apart. Here is a more specific breakdown. Between five
thousand and seven thousand additional households could be common house
because their rent and permanent homes is paid by a
(02:45):
separate federal program known as Continuum of Care. About three thousand,
five hundred households are at risk, mostly because of state funding,
and additional six thousand households could lose housing because a
federal emergency housing voucher program, which was launched during the pandemic,
(03:06):
is set to expire next year, four whole years ahead
of schedule. The Trump regime announced it with flashing the
amount that programs would distribute for permanent housing and shift
dollars to temporary housing options that mandate people enroll in
such services as job training and mental health treatment. As
(03:30):
we've talked about on the show many, many times, these
programs are not helping the unhoused, but rather forcing car
through solutions and stripping the community of their ability to
choose and direct their own lives, all the while putting
up more roadblocks to permanent housing. The local government will
(03:52):
then be beholden to Trump's aggressive enforcement of camping bands
in order to keep their funding. The Trump administration is
also holding the Continuum of Care funding hostage and putting
it up for competitive bidding. This will force cities to
comply with his demands, just as they have for so
many other marginalized communities in the last year. It's yet
(04:15):
another example of how normalized has become to openly disparage
communities like the Young House. I'll remind you that just
a few months ago, Fox News hosts Lawrence Jones and
Brian Kilmead said this on the air.
Speaker 3 (04:28):
They have given billions of dollars to mental health and
the homeless population. A lot of them don't want to
take the programs. A lot of them don't want to
get the help that is necessary. You can't give them
a choice. Either you take the resources that we're going
to give you and or you decide that you're going to.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
Be locked up in jail.
Speaker 3 (04:46):
That's the way it has to be now, or involuntary
lethal injection or something.
Speaker 4 (04:50):
Just kill them.
Speaker 1 (04:51):
They experienced no professional repercussions. Our last story ends with
ex Los Angeles police officer Clifford Proctor, who killed an
unarmed hun house man in Venice in twenty fifteen. He
was arrested at Liaxis past October. The man Procter shot
and killed on May fifth, twenty fifteen, was named Brendan Glenn.
(05:16):
Following an apparent dispute that occurred between Glenn and a
bar bouncer, Proctor intervene and placed Glenn on his back
when he stepped back, and shot him twice. At the Times,
then police Chief Charlie Beck recommended that Proctor be charged,
but former District Attorney Jackie Lacy declined the press charges
(05:38):
back in twenty eighteen, the case was reopened with a
different former district attorney, George Gaston, shortly after he took
office in twenty twenty. Charges were filed last year, prompting
Proctor to flee to Trinidad. When he returned, he was
finally arrested for the murder of Brendan Glenn over ten
(06:00):
years later. And that's on House News. When we come back,
I speak with Indigenous activists and author Dina Jillio Whittaker.
Welcome back to Weedian House. I'm Theo Henderson. My guest
(06:23):
this week is prolific writer, educator, and activist Dina Jillio Whittaker.
A member of the COVID Confederated Tribes, Dina has spent
her career reporting on and educating the public on Indigenous issues,
the colonization, and environmental justice. She's written books like All
the Real Indias, Died Off and Twenty Other Myths about
(06:46):
Native Americans and As Long as Grass Grows. She also
lectures on American Indian studies at California State San Marcos.
Dina joined me to discuss her new book, Who Gets
to Be Indian? Ethnic fraud, is enrollment, and other difficult
conversations about Native American identity. Let's jump into the conversation.
(07:12):
Today's guest is a professor, a lecturer at cal State
University of San Marcos, and a journalist who has written
a book, and I encourage you wall to go out
and read it. It is Who Gets to Be Indian?
I apologize, I'm not trying to mislabel ethnic fraud and
other difficult conversations about Native American identity. Thank you very
(07:35):
much for your time. Can you tell us a little
bit about the book.
Speaker 4 (07:38):
Let me properly introduce myself. Why hustle halt pia Ea
Squeistina Julia Whitaker and I am a descendant of the
Callville Confederated Tribes of Washington State and born and raised
in Southern California, Los Angeles, currently teaching at cal State
San Marcos in San Diego Go, where I am also
(08:02):
the assistant director of the California Indian Culture and Sovereignty Center. So,
you know, aside from all my other outside school pursuits
like writing and being a journalist and those kinds of things,
so Southern California based this book, Who Gets to be
Indian is, and I appreciate your reluctance about using that term,
(08:24):
and I know why you were reluctant to use it,
because there's a lot of confusion about like what's the
right word to call Native Americans right or American Indian people,
And so I appreciate your sensitivity to that. This is
the third book that I've written. The first book I
wrote was called All the Real Indians Died Off and
Twenty Other Myths about Native Americans in which we talk
(08:44):
about what is the right term to use for Native people.
That's one of the chapters in that book. So I
recognize where you're going with that. The second book that
I wrote was called As Long as Grass Grows The
Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice as from colonization to Standing Rock.
And so this new work, it's related to those previous topics,
(09:08):
but it is a topic all on its own, and
how I come to that topic is a direct result
of who I am. The book is equal parts academic study, storytelling,
and auto ethnography or memoir. So it comes out of
my personal lived experience as a Native person, like a
(09:29):
mixed ethnicity Native person who was born and raised away
from my tribal community in California at a certain place
and time, and so that leads to a lived experience
that really forms how I understand myself in my own
native identity and my own liminality within that, and how
(09:54):
nativeness is. We often say in an Indian country that
being Indian and identity is very complex, and there's a
lot of reasons for that, you know, having to do
with the historical processes of colonization, you know, settler colonialism,
being dispossessed. So you know, I mean, I'm thinking about
the theme of this podcast being unhoused and the through
(10:18):
lines of that, like what does it have to do well.
Native American people in this country are the first unhoused people. Absolutely,
we are the first people to be to be rendered homeless,
to be dispossessed of our lands. And it's that beginning
point that creates all the other problems that we have,
(10:40):
including the problems of identity and why we are in
this conundrum of how we identify, how what our identities
are based on what kind of documentation or lack thereof,
like all, there's so many complexities of this issue that
you know, It's one of the things that Native people
(11:02):
write about a lot because it hits us all, like
there's nobody that's not impacted by it. So this book
is an attempt to even though there have been you know,
you know, numerous books written on this topic, my starting
place was the need to create a historically based trajectory,
(11:26):
like how did we get here? Like an analysis? So
I wanted to create an analysis. We don't have enough
analysis in these spaces, but also to to create this
historical context trying to understand how do we get here?
Why is it that ethnic fraud is so prevalent in
Indian country as a group of people. There is no
(11:48):
other group of people who is whose identities are so
co opted wrongfully bar none. That's the point of the
book is to like understand, like how do we get here?
And why is this just a growing problem? And what
are the what are the implications for it?
Speaker 1 (12:07):
You mentioned something to two things, one ethnic fraud and
two there's something that connects with today's time. There's no
way around it. This Trump regime has taken an active
role in minimizing people of color, particularly African Americans. Contributions
or historical I want to say lineage or historical existence,
and I want to say that some of the similarities
(12:30):
is the same thing I'm seeing with the indigenous community
is that they go out of their way to try
to erase everything from the language from uh, you know,
the culture from closing and things of that nature, and
the difficulty to set or right what historical is fact
because if what they say and the African culture, until
(12:52):
the lamb or the gazelle writes the book, the story
is always going to be from the perspective of the lion.
So so obviously the stories has been narrated or truncated
in many respects to favor the white supremacist culture and
in white supremacist narrative in order to advance that narrative
(13:15):
in the community. What was the awakening or how aha
moment for that where when you started to notice a
lot of which I have to say, many white people
will always claim that they had native Indigenous blood and
it can be the most virulent races that you could
ever meet. But I digress.
Speaker 4 (13:32):
So, yeah, no, I mean, there's so much there in
what you just said, a lot of a lot of
things to unpack. But as as far as when I
first noticed it, it's been probably in the nineteen eighties,
when it really started, I started to go really deep
into my culture as somebody who was disconnected. And my
(13:53):
research on what I show is that the history of
ethnic fraud, it's over a century old. It begins here
in California with the film industry, and it has to
do with the way that subtler colonialism and capitalism intersect
(14:13):
and it led to the commodification of nativeness. And so
you know, there would have been no reason for although
cultural appropriation is as old as the Boston Tea Party,
when it comes to the right, so you know, people
rebels are, you know, dressing up as Indians in dumping
(14:38):
tea in the Boston Harbor, and that sets fire to
the to the revolution, right, it creates the American Revolution.
So that there's a history that goes back a long
long ways for cultural appropriation. But cultural appropriation is only
part of this equation. At some point, cultural appropriation just
taking the aspects of native cultures and using them for
(15:02):
various purposes, at some point turns into becoming Indian. So
you know, when people are culturally appropriating nativeness, like in
the example of the Boston Tea Party and other there
are many other examples in early American history where that
was happening. At the end of the day, it was
cosplaying and the costumes came off and people went to
(15:24):
their white lives. Right, there's no need to really be Indian.
There's no advantage in it because Native people were being
genocided against and their land stolen and their children stolen
and all of that stuff. So but at some point,
and it's during and after the Civil Rights era, that
nativeness it loses its stigma, where it had a stigma,
(15:49):
you know, all the way up until the nineteen sixties.
Then we have the Civil Rights era. The Civil Rights era,
you know, includes not just the black communities, but you know,
Hispanic communities and Native communities, and they all form their
own ethnic nationalist movements. Well, that's the moment that becoming
Indian becomes cool, or that being Indian becomes cool. Prior
(16:13):
to that, you know, there was a lot of reasons
people would would not want to be out front with
their nativeness, and in fact did lie. But for several
complicated reasons, it becomes sheep and trendy to be Native American,
And it has a lot to do with the counterculture, bohemianism.
(16:35):
As I write about it, in the book, especially in California,
that draws from lots of different kinds of cultures, especially
Native cultures, that morphs into the New Age movement. But
then it all has become an industry, and so the
commodification of nativeness has carries through the twentieth century in
(16:59):
the with the these different inflection points and different reasons.
Sorry I'm getting off, I'm rambling.
Speaker 1 (17:07):
No, No, you're not, actually, because this is like a
great history lesson because when you were saying this, there
are a couple of things that I'm remembering from my
own childhood. I'm really dating myself now. I was watching
the original Long Ranger. You ever remember the stereotypical native
partner that yeah, Himu Sabi and all of that. And
(17:28):
then I remember, too, is when I was growing up
to the always the negative switch that made it sound
like similar to like black people at any moment, they're
going to come around and surround you and start killing
you for no reason at all. And it never it
was never elucidated that what the heck, why would why
would they just for no reason start attacking you until
my father, Juicer says, well, look at it like this,
(17:49):
why would someone start to attack someone just for no
reason at all, and this is their land. These people
were taking their land without permission or whatever. Whatever thefarious activities,
of course they're going to be said. Of course, if
if someone comes and breaks into our home, you're going
to fight. So why do of course he was, in
his way militant and so before that was a word
(18:10):
that was so he was always questioning that because of
I don't know if the blackface movement and the parodying
of African Americans was really rubbed him rob So he
definitely didn't. So he definitely was always on a different
type of understanding where it was generally accepted by people
that didn't question it. And when you were saying this,
(18:30):
I saw that metamorphosis too, going into schools learning how
to make moccasins and all of these things that didn't
really touch on why it was important for the culture
and to also disabuse of the narrative that they had espoused.
Speaker 4 (18:46):
Yeah, so like there's there's so many layers of this
that we can analyze, like what is the psychological mechanism,
what's in play? What's at work here for people to
you know, I mean beginning with cultural appropriation to cause
play being Indian. I mean, it's a very American phenomenon.
(19:08):
The Boy Scouts of America was started out as a result,
you know, YMCA camps. There were all kinds of you know,
a century ago, people were you know, were playing Indian
in all these different kinds of ways. It was just
a thing that Americans did. But again, like at some point,
like the costumes come off and people go back to
their lives, but at some point it turns into becoming Indian.
(19:33):
People have this need to become Indian. Well, what's behind that?
What's this fascination with Indians? Especially when Indians have been
reviled and throughout American history native people have been hated.
As Philip Deloria, who wrote this seminal book called Playing Indian,
he said that, you know, Americans simultaneously reviled but also
(19:55):
respected Indians. And it wasn't respect. I can't remember the
word that he used, but there was a tension between
hating Indians and needing to get rid of them, but
also needing to emulate them. And it comes down to
the need for Americans to form their own identities. As
they move out of Europe, they come to this land,
(20:17):
taking over this land in the name of freedom and democracy,
right and justice, come here with all these high ideals,
but proceed to commit genocide against the people here to
take their land. Like, these things don't match up, they
don't square. So it's about the need to create a
new identity, to become indigenous, to become legitimately belonging onto
(20:43):
a land that is not legitimately theirs. So it's the
psychological process that's always been here in this country, and
it's done nothing but like kind of grow and shift
and change. So a lot of the way a lot
of scholars have written about it all also is about
the need to disavow whiteness and to not be part
(21:04):
of that ugly history. Like if I'm native, then i
can say that it wasn't me that did it, or
it wasn't my ancestors. I'm on the side of the
people who were wronged. I'm a victim here, right, So
regardless of who your people are, where your family came from,
it's a way out, it's a way to disassociate from
(21:27):
this horrible, horrible history. And so that's one level of
how we can you know, understand this phenomenon. But it's
also about how settler colonialism is a system. It's a
structure that is predicated on eliminating native population. Settler colonialism
(21:49):
is always about the elimination of the native in order
to get the land, and when they do that, they
then replace the native population. So there's this thing that
we call replacement narratives. And so all of this thing
about you know, coming here and needing to form this
authentic American identity is wrapped up in the need to
(22:14):
become indigenous to a place where you just aren't indigenous
to it and then disavow the injustices and the heinous
things that we're done. There's another term that we use
too that is related that has been called subtler moves
to innocence. That's another way of understanding oneself is not
(22:37):
complicit with these histories of profound violence and injustice. So
all of these things, you know, and more set the
stage for this bizarre phenomenon where people have evolved stories
about themselves being native, being indigenous, and often it's just
(22:58):
family lore, is just people saying, yeah, we have you know,
we have my Cherokee princess great grandmother. That's the most
common one, but there's lots of versions of that. Story
that people latch onto. It's it's this again. It's just
a bizarre phenomenon that people hold onto so deeply, even
(23:20):
in the face of absolutely zero evidence. I remember one
time I was in a conversation with somebody that that
had that story about oh, yeah, we're Cherokee and these
are white people, right, and yeah, we're Cherokee. And my
friend it was her mother, and she one of my
(23:41):
professor friends actually, and so we were at this event
and her mom is at the table telling me the story,
and my friend was mortified. She said, Mom, remember you
did that DNA test and there's absolutely no Native American
DNA that in that test. Like the tenacity of these
stories is like beyond logic, you know, Like in that example.
Speaker 1 (24:05):
I was going to mention too, that it's two things, like,
for example, the feeling the only time, like when you're
saying to the shift to innocence is like, for example,
the Thanksgiving holiday when I was in high school, I
wrote again, I could say, I think it was influenced
by some of the militancy of my parents that looked
on a skew about the holiday and how it has
(24:26):
been perpetuated like a bunch of Native people came up
and seeing this downtrodden people, and they offered to help.
And then that was it. Everyone was just you know,
dancing down the street the way it's pictured. It was
of course to white sensibilities, and I spoke out against it.
I was like, okay, on the part of the native,
they probably extended the hand of courtesy welcoming, but you
(24:49):
certainly didn't dance down the street. You guys went and
had a plan and wiped them out. Be course, the
white teacher that I had set this whole essay against
my the newspaper and tried to debunk it or tried
to really willfully will it away. That that was what happened.
That when you know, they all were in had skills together,
(25:10):
they just held hands and they said Kumbaya and all
of this kind of stuff. And it is excellent point
to to see how this is enacted in regular times,
even in the educational environment. I was in high school.
In order for me not to get you know, expelled
or get called to the principal's office, I had to
just let it go because the way he basically just
(25:31):
tried to eviscerate or decimate my arguments was it was
messed up, but it was, but it may imprint on
me on understanding how willful and how determined people can
try to cast a different narrative, which I have to
say this again, it ties into today with the Trump
magiene erasing every culture, not only just African American, but
(25:55):
other people of culture's achievement and existence into a white
approved kind of you know, happy kind of state where
they have used now that say about slaves, slaves were
unpaid workers and that kind of thing.
Speaker 4 (26:12):
Okay, writing of history exactly, yeah, But but it's like,
it's not just the rewriting of history. But we know,
as people of color, as people who are other than white,
you know, European descendant people, we know that our histories
were written without us, like they were, and until our
(26:36):
ancestors became educated in those white systems, they learned to
speak that language, they learned to think in that way.
They and you know, as people, as people of color,
And I don't even like the use. I don't like
the phrase people of color when it comes to Native people.
And there's there's a reason for that, as Native people
(26:57):
racializing us. It's not the right way to think about it.
But sometimes there's no other phrase to understand ourselves as
having a similar historical experience of oppression. We know that
our histories were written for us before we had the
ability to write them for ourselves.
Speaker 1 (27:17):
Exactly.
Speaker 4 (27:17):
We have ancestors that go back as early as the
seventeen eighteen hundreds that got educated. Were writers, we're philosophers,
we're thinkers, and we're pushing against the systems that they
were trapped by. But those were the outliers, right, They
were not common until we get to the mid twentieth
century in the civil rights movement and we really start
(27:39):
to see systemic change, right, and our communities take charge
of our education systems. We get college educated, so we
start to write the books ourselves. We start talking about
our own lived experiences and get those perspectives validated for
(28:00):
what they are from our own lived experiences. So we've
written our histories. We've changed the narratives to be more truthful.
But we are also in a moment of major backlash
to the civil rights era, and that has been the
case since the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties. The conservative
(28:22):
movement as we know it is built on that backlash.
That's how we get the Southern strategy under Nixon, we
get not new racism, but racism continuing to rear its
head because of the gains that were made with the
Tea Party movement, you know, the post Reagan years. White
(28:43):
America has been in backlash ever since. And that's how
we get Trumpism, That's how we get Mega, you know.
So it is not new, It is just the regurgitation,
but re entrenchment of whites premisey, the pervasiveness of it.
(29:03):
It has never gone away, and we know that it
just got emboldened with the Mega movement, and that's what's
so disturbing about it. But of course, now that they
have power, they're going to try to rewrite the histories again,
and they have. They've gone after the museums, they've gone
after the education systems. The book binds all of those things.
(29:27):
It's desperation because they know that the browning of America
is a real thing and they can't do anything about it.
This country is based on immigration, but it's actually based
on subtler colonialism. But settler colonialism is not the same
as immigration, but that's a different conversation. But the United
(29:49):
States is a country of multiplicity and that's just the
way it is, and it's getting that way more and
more and more, and white people are afraid of losing
their power, and that's why we are in this position
now with the rewriting of our history. And god, I mean,
what's so crazy is next year is the two hundred
and fiftieth anniversary. You know, they are going to completely
(30:13):
erase any you know, Native history of the Revolution. And
this is all about whitewashing, you know, whitewashing and upholding
American exceptionalism, and not in a good way. You know.
We when we hear that term American exceptionalism, that's used
in two different ways. One of them is that, yes,
(30:33):
America is an exceptional place and we deserve to be
and we should celebrate it in and it's and we lauded, right,
it's laudatory. But for people with different perspectives, we look
at American exceptionalism when we say no, American exceptionalism, it's
based on the oppression of lots of other people. And
(30:53):
we have to push back against that. And we have
to recognize that the United States is founded on some
of the most profound injustice, and we have to advance
our counter narratives to.
Speaker 1 (31:07):
Those absolutely when we come back more with Dina, Welcome
back to Wittian House and THEO Henderson, Let's get back
into the conversation with Dina, Jilli O Whitaker. They're going
(31:27):
to do everything in their power to erase the realities
of what depression looks like. And it also fosters another
thing that I hate that I hear people doing is
like both side argument or making it sound like it's
okay to oppress, but when someone fights back, they are
the ogre. They are the ones that should be justifiably so.
(31:48):
And I think that's one of the lynch pins of
what the American exceptionalism and American narrative that is pervasive
in our society. We can't seem to figure out that,
you know, if we go over let's say, for example,
we go over to Iraq and start bombing people's homes
over there, and then they decide to create a makeshift
kind of military or militia to fight back, and then
(32:11):
we have the propaganda that the Middle East hates America.
And again it goes back to what my parents said
when I was younger, like you go in someone's house,
tear off their house, attack their family, members. You think
they're going to be sitting ready to sit down and
have a meal with you, or skip down the street
with you. Of course they're going to fight back. They
don't have the mic necessarily all the military wherewithal like
(32:32):
America has, so they have to be creativist, and so
you can't judge how they're going to go after you
after you've gone through them every kind of way. So
I think that's one of the driving points of whitewashing,
is to always paint that the other side was the
guilty party, or if you can't do that, things make
it sound like it was both sides. And that's one
(32:54):
of the things that really drives me crazy when I
hear people do that, Like, no, it wouldn't be a
side at all if you wouldn't bother you know.
Speaker 4 (33:01):
Yeah, no, that's absolutely right, and we've certainly seen that
throughout our histories and in the United States. I mean
it's even written in the Declaration of Independence, I mean
the Declaration of Independence, you know, all it is is
a series of grievances that the colonists had against the king,
right the twenty seventh grievance, I think it's the very
(33:23):
last one or The second to the last one is
where they talk about the merciless Indian savages and how
I don't remember exactly the word, but they're blaming the
king for supporting the Indians to bring violence on the colonists.
It's in one of our foundational documents. Like that's never
going to go away, you know, unless somebody decides to
(33:46):
change it. I don't see that ever happening. But Native
people have been frozen in our institutional frameworks as savages
that needed to be defeated. Why did they need to
be defeated because they were fighting to defend their lands.
Just what you're describing, thank you, I mean exists. I mean,
(34:06):
so we're we're always going to be frozen as that.
And throughout the rest of American history it's been the same,
Like you know, it was. It was a war of
aggression to get native lands, and when Native people fought back,
they were the aggressors. They were the ones who were
the bloodthirsty savages. And and it's always been that way,
(34:27):
and you know, we can even see it even today,
you know, I mean in mainstream society there is still
an idea that Native people were uncivilized, they needed to
be christianized. What was the white man's burden to bring
civilization and Christianity to the ignorant savages? And you know,
(34:48):
sorry for all the trouble, but you know that was
just inevitable, like it was just the way that it was.
And yeah, and get over it. You know, that's still
really prevail in so much of American society.
Speaker 1 (35:03):
I was going to ask, too, do you think that
there's a link to that, because I mentioned earlier on
the top of the interview about the incident that I'm
starting to see is ICE agents are running up on
Native people and you mentioned this more than one case
I seen just release it I think yesterday where this
is a Native family was just minding their business, they
(35:24):
you know, and they tried to deport them, and they
kept telling them, we are native people, you know where
you're going to deport us back into our own home land.
This is it, you know. So they're just looking justifying
some reason, to justify the narrative that America is being
overrun by Again, what you mentioned the savages or the
criminals or whatever, is if you can demonize a person,
(35:47):
then you can criminalize them. I've always said that that's
a quote I always in is particularly what they're in
the house, and the African American and you know, the
Native and his Latino community. These are things that seem
to be running much more truur than I ever imagined.
Speaker 4 (36:02):
Yeah, there's always some boogeyman hiding behind the next bush,
coming to get you. And and it's all such a projection.
Speaker 5 (36:10):
Right, I mean it's like, you know, the people that
came here and genocided against the indigenous populations were the
ones who were perpetuating all the crimes against humanity, and
yet they're projecting that onto everybody else.
Speaker 4 (36:25):
You know. It's I've been hearing a phrase lately and
in the media. I'm really a news junkie, and so yeah,
so I've been hearing this phrase lately that says, their
accusations are their confessions in the Trump administration, So all
the things that that they accuse other people of doing
(36:47):
are what they're actually doing themselves. They're always looking for
some enemy. It's some enemy to fight, some enemy to
be to be aggressive forward so that they can maintain
their white American state. I mean, that's what it comes
down to. It's you know, pure and simple white supremacy.
But with the ice I mean they've you know, green
(37:10):
lighted racial profiling, and the Supreme Court green lights.
Speaker 1 (37:14):
Yes, exactly, I've pelt it yep right.
Speaker 4 (37:16):
So Native people And this is why, you know, racializing
Native people is such a slippery slope because a lot
of people look a lot alike. A lot of American
Indian peoples can look like Iranians, or can look like Filipinos,
or can look like you know, there are a lot
of brown skinned people that are really hard to tell
(37:38):
the difference, like you know what they are, you know
what their their ethnicity or their nationality is. And that's
true for Native American people. There was a case back
a couple of months ago when it was there were
a lot of wildfires in the state of Washington. There
was an incidence of ICE agents. I don't have you
(38:00):
heard about this one that they raided people fighting on
a fire line.
Speaker 1 (38:04):
Yeah. I heard that two.
Speaker 4 (38:05):
Of the people that they took away were tribal members
of the Umatulation.
Speaker 1 (38:11):
Not doubting that.
Speaker 4 (38:12):
Yeah, So they were in Washington fighting fires, trying to
protect their homeland and they get raided by ice and detained.
And you know, of course they don't, you know, they
they try to say they're tribal members, but they don't care.
These ICE agents, they're not they're they're not checking identities,
they're not checking people's status. It's just round them up.
(38:36):
Why because Stephen Miller has a quota of three thousand
people a day which they haven't been able to meet.
So of course they're going after anybody that looks suspiciously ethnic.
Speaker 1 (38:50):
Yeah, and has an accent or God forbid or it's
like it's it's spilling over in different communities. But not
only that, it is our populist that is wilfully resistant
to seeing the reality unless it happens to them. You know,
I would say what happened to many of the communities,
like for example, I don't know who we've seen in Atlanta.
(39:11):
These workers were h I believe H one or H
two workers. They were literally working, and they went in
there and after off the the insistence of someone that
was running for office running there and rounded all of
them up, and it's caused such a it's still an
international incident and embarrassment toward the Trump regime that they
(39:33):
are trying to get them to come back, and many
of them are not wanted to come back. Well, I
can't blame them because you know, the treatment that they
endure at these these centers really negates the narrative that
they keep playing, making it sound like it's just holding
people temporary. The second one was the incident where they
were trying to rush off children in the middle of
the night and they had to get an emergency in
(39:55):
joction to stop them from deporting them to places where
these kids are not from saying the parents wanted them back.
And all of these these kind of atrocities that are
happening in front of my eyes, and there's also a
swath of people that are trying to justify this. You know,
it's just deplorable.
Speaker 4 (40:12):
Yeah, it really is. I mean, it's just it's hard
to get one's head around what's happening in this country
and how it's gotten to this point. I mean, it's
full blown fascism. And I remember I saw it coming,
you know, in twenty sixteen when Trump got elected the
(40:32):
first time. The writing was on the wall. I mean
in that first term, in all his campaign speeches, all
of it was there, and I think people of color
could see it much more easily than white people could.
I think they heard what they wanted to hear, they
saw what they wanted to see. And I don't think
(40:54):
people believe that it could get this bad, but I
knew then that It's like, oh, you know, it didn't
happen as fast as I thought it would. But here
we are nine years later and in Trump two point zero,
you know, and now the full fascist agenda is upon us.
(41:16):
And of course, in fascism, one of the key components
of it is the criminalizing of people of color, people
who don't fit a white profile, you know, or Christian
white Christian, so you know, white Christian nationalism, of course
is what we get. And you know, it's just crazy
(41:40):
that we are here and in this moment when it
felt like we made so much progress right in the
last half century, and in many ways we did. But again,
the backlash, the white resentment toward the rights gained by
people of color and women and gendered alternative people, right,
(42:03):
I mean, yes, it's the resentment that's at the bottom
of all of this, that is driven by religious fanaticism.
Speaker 1 (42:14):
Well, you've said a mouthful. Let me parse some of
the things that you mentioned that I wanted to talk
about about the fires and how a native because I
live in Los Angeles and as you know, they're the
indigenous group here that the fires that impacted the native community.
Do you think our society has addressed the issues correctly
(42:35):
or do you think there's room for improvement.
Speaker 4 (42:38):
Well, there's always room for improvement.
Speaker 1 (42:41):
Spoken like a lecturer, but okay.
Speaker 4 (42:45):
As somebody who lectures on and teaches about environmental issues
and traditional knowledge, indigenous knowledge. California has always been a
landscape that was managed by Native people. It was not
the pristine, untouched environment that Europeans thought they were looking at,
(43:07):
and nowhere was it like that on the continent, and
especially in California. It wasn't that way. Indigenous people managed
the landscape with fire for thousands of years, and they
understood what it meant to live in a healthy environment.
They always understood fire's medicine. Fire is medicine on the land.
(43:28):
And when settler populations outlawed native burning in the nineteenth century,
they imposed a regime that was about fearing fire and
it was about managing land in order to maximize timber
production in forests. That's when they stopped native cultural burning.
(43:52):
So it's really it becomes forest's mismanagement, and that's how
we get to a condition now driven by climate change
or exacerbated by climate change that has put us at
risk of these dramatic, out of control megafires. So, you know,
(44:13):
restoring indigenous knowledge onto the land is a key component
of what it means to keep land managed in a
healthy state. What does it look like in urban environments.
That's a whole other conversation. It's a whole other question.
What if the land around Pacific Palisades in Malibu had
(44:35):
been subject to managed control birds, would that have made
a difference in potentially preventing the fires from from January.
I don't know, but their questions worth pursuing. And we're
seeing that throughout California. Where native knowledge is being restored
(44:58):
to the land, we are seeing the restoration of some ecosystems.
I'm thinking now about the dam removals on the Klamath River.
I don't know how much you know about that, but
there were six dams built on the Klamath River in
the twentieth century, And anytime you build dams, it leads
to different kinds of ecological impacts. In the case of
(45:21):
the Klamath River, as in other rivers like the Columbia
River up north it leads to the collapse of salmon populations.
Salmon is a keystone species, and when you lose a
keystone species, it causes a cascade of other impacts to
other species. And so anyway, Native people led a campaign
(45:45):
for over twenty years to remove four of the major
dams on the Klamath River in order to restore salmon runs.
That happened this year. So in fact, that was one
of the reasons that they Trump said that he turned
turned on a water faucet, Like, remember what he said
about the fires. He turned on a water faucet, and
(46:06):
that's what they like, beat the fires. And Jesse Frick
and Jesse Waters on Fox News actually came out and
said he said the reason for those fires was the
fault of Indians because they wanted the dams taken out.
Like he actually said that. He said it was Indian's
fault that there was no water in southern California to
(46:28):
fight the fires. But anyway, so the dams have come
out this year and and it's led to almost an
instant restoration of salmon population. Some species of salmon that
hadn't been seen in the river for over a century
are now filling those rivers, and and and and so
(46:49):
it's a beautiful story of recovery at restoration by you know,
eliminating dams and restoring indigenous knowledge onto the land.
Speaker 1 (46:59):
That's impressive. When you said Fox News, I'm like, well,
their solutions for unhoused people is to involuntarily eject them,
to kill them off. So it's it's not I saw
that insane. I could believe it, but you know, then
I could believe it. This is Fox News. And they
basically gave a half hearted apology and just kept right
on going, and just you know, it's so normalized. They
(47:23):
might make a shock in first about trying to kill
off unhoused people, but more and more that they're like
there was a mayor talking about giving fentanyl to unhoused
people and killing them off in his neighborhood. So there's
a little bit more of outrage, but it's time is gone.
When people make these kind of solutions or the final solution,
if you will, in this time, then it's going to
(47:46):
be like, you know, you stretch it off, you know,
that's hyperbole whatever, And then look what that happened with
the hyperbole of Trump in this regime. Look where we're
at at this point. You know, it's that's the things
that us as a society where must be vigilant, We
must guard against it, and we must fight with every
fiber of our being to stop this from happening.
Speaker 4 (48:07):
No, absolutely right, because it's the other ring, right, it's
the other ring of non mainstream people, and it can happen.
It has happened to people of all kinds of ethnicities
in the history of this country. Think about the Irish.
How the Irish were considered non white and persecuted in
(48:31):
the nineteenth century and they were white people, right, So
there's this whole study of how how the Irish became white, right,
in order to fit in and to basically say themselves.
And they were pitted against black populations in Boston, right,
(48:52):
So you know, during a time when there was stiff
competition for jobs. So people are always going to be
pitt against each other, the most vulnerable. But yes, it's
the other ring of people who are the undesirables in
a society. In this society, that leads that demonization and dehumanization.
(49:14):
So when you can see somebody is nonhuman, that that
leads to rationalizations and justifications of all kinds of atrocities,
and that's what settler colonialism did in this country. The
way that the land was taken, you know, so violently
from Native people was through dehumanizing them, which provided the
(49:36):
rationalization for the violence that was unleashed for four hundred years.
Speaker 1 (49:43):
Absolutely well, I enjoyed having this excellent talk with you.
Where can we find your book?
Speaker 4 (49:49):
The book can be purchased any place where good books
are in LA I would recommend Skylight Books. I did
a reading there a few weeks ago. It actually launched
a book launch there. Oh okay, so you know, visit
Skylight Books which is on Vermont, and it can be
you know, it can be ordered online through be Compressed.
(50:10):
That's the publisher. I don't do a lot of social media.
I've tried to distance myself from social media because I
think it's a very unhealthy space. But I can be
found there, and you know, I just really encourage people
to read the book, especially if you are somebody who
(50:30):
has a family story about being Native American that you're
sticking to, but you have absolutely no connection to a
Native community, or if you're somebody who does have a
liminal identity, you know you are Native, you are you know,
you are, but you've been disenfranchised for whatever. This book
will appeal to a wide audience, so I really recommend
(50:52):
if you're interested in this subject.
Speaker 1 (50:55):
Well, thank you again for taking time out to talk
with me, honest and I enjoyed that conversation. And I
want to thank our audience for listening in. Thank you
very much for your time.
Speaker 4 (51:06):
All right, thank you Theo.
Speaker 1 (51:10):
Thanks so much to Dinna for her time and her
continued work. To get your own copy of Who Gets
to Be Indian and follow her on social media check
out the links in the description. Before we sign off
this week, I'd like to share a few more words
from mister Ralph Ellison. Life is to be lived, not control,
(51:31):
and humanity is won by continually to play in the
face of certain defeat. Thank you once again for listening in.
If you have a story you'd like to share, please
reach out to me at Weedianhouse at gmail dot com
or weedian House on Instagram. Until the nd May we
again meet in the light of understanding. Weedian House is
(51:54):
a production of iHeartRadio. It is written, hosted, and created
by Me Theo Henderson, our producers Jamie Loftus, Hailey Fager,
Katie Fischer and Lyra Smith. Our editor is Adam Wand,
our engineer is Joel Jerome, and our local art is
also by Katie Fischer. Thank you for listening.
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