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Relational Engagement with Indigenous Communities through the Heritage Lands Collective - Ep 86
648 Plays6 months ago
On today’s episode, Jessica goes more in depth with Joseph Gazing Wolf (Executive Director, Heritage Lands Collective [formerly Living Heritage Research Council]; Lakota, Nubian, and Amazigh) from Episode 84 on the Boulder Ethnographic-Education Project. On this episode, Joseph talks about how his childhood in Egypt and on the Standing Rock reservation inspired his interest in land, heritage, traditional ways of life, and working with elders. He talks more about his work with his buffalo relatives and how that led him to academia. He discusses how the settler-colonial context of academia is harmful to Indigenous scholars and how people in academic settings can engage with Indigenous communities in a relationally respectful manner. Finally, we conclude by talking about the work Heritage Lands Collective is doing and where Joseph would like to take it in the future, including Indigenous youth internships and youth-elder camps.
Transcripts
- For rough transcripts of this episode go to https://www.archpodnet.com/heritagevoices/86
Links
- Heritage Voices on the APN
- Heritage Lands Collective website
- Traditional Ecological Knowledge Section of the Ecological Society of America Resources Page
- More links available at: https://www.archpodnet.com/heritagevoices/86
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Transcript
Introduction and Acknowledgments
00:00:00
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
00:00:10
Speaker
Welcome to Heritage Voices, Episode 86. I'm Jessica Uquinto, and I'm your host. And today we are talking about respectful engagement with Indigenous communities with the Heritage Lands Collective. Before we begin, I'd like to honour and acknowledge that the lands I'm recording on today are part of the Nooch, or Ute, People's Treaty Lands, the Dneita, and the ancestral Puebloan homeland.
00:00:33
Speaker
And today we have Joseph Gazing Wolf back on the show.
Joseph's Background and Heritage Lands Collective
00:00:37
Speaker
So excited to have you, Joseph. Would you mind introducing yourself?
00:00:42
Speaker
Sure. Thanks for having me. I'm Joseph Gazing Wolf. I'm Lakota from Standing Rock. My mother is also a homozyg and a Nubian from Upper Egypt. And I'm currently a PhD student finishing up my PhD at Arizona State University in Environmental Life Science. I'm also the new executive director of the Heritage Lands Collective.
00:01:07
Speaker
Yes. Okay. So Joseph was on the show. You'll remember a couple episodes back when we were talking about the Boulder Ethnographic Education Project. And there's been a change since that episode. So you may have noticed that he said the Heritage Lands Collective. So Joseph, do you want to talk a little bit about that?
00:01:30
Speaker
Yeah, sure. So we've recently changed our name. The Heritage Lands Collective was once known as the Living Heritage Research Council. And, of course, you, Jessica, also have an organization called Living Heritage Anthropology.
00:01:46
Speaker
And so it kind of became confusing to function as the two organizations together for many of our partners and for ourselves. So we decided to change the name and of course with new leadership, we're taking a little bit of a different focus and expanding our purview a little bit.
00:02:06
Speaker
in terms of the communities we work with, but also what we're emphasizing as we move forward.
Cultural Preservation and Personal Experiences
00:02:12
Speaker
So we thought a change of name would help maintain our sanity on both ends, but also kind of with new leadership and expanding our purview, we thought the name change would be a good fit.
00:02:25
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, for context, I run living heritage anthropology, like Joseph mentioned, which is my for profit. And then I co-founded heritage lands collective back when it was living heritage research council. And basically people just started calling both of them living heritage and thinking of them as one organization. And they're really not, they're two, two very separate organizations.
00:02:51
Speaker
even though I am involved with both of them. So for all the reasons Joseph mentioned and that, it seemed like a time for a new start. And I think Joseph and the rest of the Heritage Lands Collective team did a great job in reframing that name. I'm very excited about it personally.
00:03:12
Speaker
All right. So Joseph, I'm very excited to have you obviously for many reasons, us working together on lots of different things and also because you are coming to the show from a different background from most of our guests that I think is really important. It's really important for people to see how
00:03:33
Speaker
environmental sciences and cultural resources are not so different. So anyway, if you could talk first about, you know, what got you into this work? Well, I think, I mean, initially for me, it was the
00:03:50
Speaker
It was just the way I was raised, the way I grew up. I was born in Egypt and with my mother's people and growing up there, it became quite clear because of the context in which I was born. I was born into severe poverty and indigenous peoples there are
00:04:10
Speaker
The history there is much like the history here in terms of land displacement, etc. A lot of tribal communities in Northern Africa have been extremely marginalized. In Egypt, in particular, the Nubian people have been displaced by the Aswan Dam.
00:04:28
Speaker
And when that dam was built by Europeans, it flooded our traditional lands along the Nile. And so what ended up happening is we were displaced to the city of Aswan and lost much of our ancestral lands. So anyway, that experience, kind of the daily experience of seeing my culture disappear, my language disappear,
00:04:54
Speaker
And then because I grew up in poverty, I had to leave. I never met my biological parents initially, and I had to leave my grandparents who were raising me at the time, and I had to go work at the age of five. And so being away from my grandparents and kind of being sucked into a system that was not created by me or for me, right?
00:05:16
Speaker
But that gave me greater privileges, right? So getting to work, I worked for free for Egyptian farmers, but I got room and board, which is better than living in a giant landfill in garbage city, right? So being able to work and get a better life for myself, but seeing how that's costing me my very identity because of historical factors,
00:05:43
Speaker
For me, that was kind of the foundation of it. And then leaving Garbage City and going to Upper Egypt to my actual ancestral homelands and working on somebody's farm who's replaced my people and seeing how beautiful the Nile is, the Nile riparian areas, as well as the Sahara Desert that's right outside of the riparian areas and how absolutely mystical and beautiful it is. You know, I never wanted to return back to the city and I never
00:06:11
Speaker
I promised myself, I remember sitting under the stars with my donkey and looking up at the stars and kind of promising myself that not only will I never leave this place, but also that
00:06:22
Speaker
everything that created this place in terms of indigenous heritage and culture, everything that created the absolute mystery and beauty of Upper Egypt, as well as the Amazigh people and the Oasis that I never actually got to visit. But these beautiful places of heritage
00:06:41
Speaker
that I would live the rest of my life protecting these places and protecting the cultures and revitalizing the cultures and restoring the cultures that have produced these beautiful places. Because in my mind, there was never a separation between people and land. And so if you walk upon a land that you consider beautiful or majestic or that inspires awe in you, that's a direct result of the people that have stewarded that land for thousands of years.
00:07:11
Speaker
So that's kind of where it began for me. And then it just got, as my life, personal life developed, and I came to the U.S., I ended up losing my grandfather right away after I moved here, my Amazigh grandfather. And his loss shocked me even more in terms of like, oh my gosh, like there's so much I had still wanted to learn from him. And he was gone. And then
00:07:40
Speaker
And then later, you know, I'm living here with my local father and his family and seeing and re-experiencing the same history here. And so I realize, oh, well, I still have my grandmother alive in Egypt, and I would love to go back and visit her. And I cut the ticket, right? I finally worked my butt off and saved some money to be able to afford a really expensive flight to Egypt. And she was looking forward to seeing me and us reconnecting again.
00:08:09
Speaker
And sure enough, like a month and a half before I was going to go, she ends up passing away suddenly. So, and she was just, she's an Amazigh woman, sorry, half Amazigh and half Nubian. And she had, this woman grew up without any formal education whatsoever. And yet she lived her entire life, for example, without refrigeration.
00:08:34
Speaker
She knew every like she knew how to preserve meat fish cheese I mean she would she would make wonders in a kitchen that most Western folks would not even recognize as a kitchen right because it's a it's a stone
00:08:50
Speaker
you know, a piece of stone masonry kind of thing that she would put sticks in and cook and make amazing things in that. And she knew how to preserve everything without refrigeration because that's what our people learn for tens of thousands of years. I mean, preservation for Amazigh and Nubian people is dumb founding. There have been seeds recovered in Egypt, for example, that are 30,000 years old and still viable.
00:09:20
Speaker
Wow, that's insane. So not only were our people masters of agriculture, but masters of preservation. And of course, it's thanks to the ecology, right? Because the Sahara Desert will preserve anything, right? The mummification wasn't in Egyptian. People associate that with Egyptians. It's really the Sahara Desert that taught us what mummification is, really.
00:09:47
Speaker
So, anyway, yeah, and part of the reason why Egypt is such a rich place of history is because of the preservation of so much about our history and the history of humanity. I mean, if you, like you, Jessica, you're a Jewish person and many Christian folks value the Bible as something that's very important, right? And the Tanach and
00:10:11
Speaker
and the Torah are central to your identity. And for Christians, of course, the Greek Bible is as well. And the oldest manuscripts, almost all the oldest manuscripts we have of the Bible were discovered in Egypt because they're preserved by that wonderful arid environment for millennia. And so the most accurate manuscripts we have of many of our important spiritual
00:10:39
Speaker
come from Egypt as well for that same reason. So yeah, you have the Codex Sinaiticus, the Codex Alexandrinus, things people can Google and look up. But these are, you know, it's a history that is incredibly rich and has influenced much of global history, but is virtually unknown. And that, to me, is what inspired me to try and protect that culture and that history and that knowledge.
00:11:07
Speaker
Okay. Wow. So first of all, I, I can't tell you how happy that made me when you said that to knock. I'm like, Oh my God. I don't think I've ever had a non Jew repeat or, you know, like no, a word that in depth before that, that just made me so happy. Cause usually it's like, I don't know, like happy Hanukkah. And it's like, okay. That's like not even an important holiday at all. It's just somebody throw a word like that at me. It's like, whoa.
00:11:37
Speaker
I just made me so happy. So going from there, that is what got you interested in this type of work, but how did you go from that point to where you are today?
Buffalo Stewardship and Cultural Revival
00:11:58
Speaker
Yeah, so I think the loss of elders early on in life and not knowing my parents early on in life was kind of the driving force. And so it encouraged me to spend as much time with local elders, knowledge holders, people that can teach me.
00:12:17
Speaker
not just about my own history and identity as well as language, but also people that can teach me skill sets that have been either lost or replaced. The driving force for me was like, okay, I'm losing all these elders and with every elder that passes away, an entire library of knowledge passes with them.
00:12:43
Speaker
this cannot be acceptable, this is not sustainable for our communities, and it's really not sustainable for the planet. When we lose this knowledge and these ways of life, I mean, I honestly, you know, people
00:12:58
Speaker
People might call me a little too dramatic as an ecologist when I say this, but if we lose tribal knowledge in Indigenous heritage across these lands, I see no hope for humanity in terms of addressing climate change and the incredible drastic reverberations, negative reverberations it's going to have on human communities across the world.
00:13:21
Speaker
So, yeah, so anyway, yeah, the losing elders early on, I think is what kind of shocked me into realizing that they're incredibly precious. And so I'm going to take every opportunity I can, given the very difficult life I was given.
00:13:36
Speaker
take every opportunity I can to spend time with them. And so I engrossed myself in land management, you know, every job I can get, you know, I beg the farmers that I worked for to let me stay there for, you know, work for them for free, as long as I stay there on the land and keep working.
00:13:52
Speaker
And then when I came here to the States, I got into agriculture and ranching and buffalo ranching right away because that's where I was able to connect with these elders, these land stewards that hold this knowledge. And so part of the reason I chose that path is not just to protect these beautiful landscapes that are important for our life, but also to reconnect with the knowledge holders who have stewarded these lands.
00:14:19
Speaker
Yeah, so can you talk a little bit more about your experience with working with your elders in Buffalo and... Yeah, so like more specifics about how I got into all of that. So the community where I lived, you know, I grew up in Bullhead, South Dakota.
00:14:40
Speaker
I grew up actually on Tatanka Road, which is funny. Tatanka is a Lakota word for buffalo. Part of the reason it's called that is because the tribal buffalo herd originated there.
00:14:55
Speaker
and has since changed over time, but it was essentially run out of that area. My family, my relatives have been involved in buffalo stewardship for quite some time. My ancestors, my grandfather was involved in the reintroduction of a herd at Standing Rock.
00:15:18
Speaker
in other places and so that kind of situated me well to be able to develop an early relationship. And again, realizing that my grandparents, my Lakota grandparents grew up without ever encountering buffalo until they decided to reintroduce a herd and the opportunity came up for them to do so.
00:15:40
Speaker
Like they they they they themselves never encountered Buffalo because they were, you know, as you know, they were, you know, taken away to boarding schools and they had their language ripped from them, et cetera, et cetera. So like the fact that they were that fact that they were reconnecting with Buffalo themselves at the same time that I was connecting with Buffalo is just dumb. I mean, it still boggles my mind. But anyway, and my grandfather was he was a poet and a very romantic
00:16:10
Speaker
person. And so he would write poetry about Buffalo and would teach me in his own kind of loving poetic way about Buffalo. And so like, because I was very close to my grandfather here, as I was in Egypt as well, the connection I had with
00:16:30
Speaker
with the person connected me with the land. And so you might notice that when we're like out in the field, I get, I'm not a very good ethnographer because I go off script quite a bit and I get lost in conversation with these elders because to me, it's like being in the presence of my grandfather and grandmother once again.
Academic Journey and Challenges
00:16:52
Speaker
And so like the,
00:16:54
Speaker
you know, I go off script quite a bit and like start talking about other things that I shouldn't probably be asking them. But yeah, it's via my family here that I was able to connect with Buffalo. And then, you know, once you're in the presence of
00:17:11
Speaker
Once you're in the presence of buffalo and you're touched by them, it's really difficult to let go. It's really difficult to not want that experience on a daily basis because I bring out a lot of my non Lakota, non indigenous friends and they love to spend time with buffalo and I give them some guidelines as to how to do it.
00:17:37
Speaker
be present like try not to talk too much trying to try to be present with the with.
00:17:42
Speaker
with this relative, this important relative. And when they do that, you know, the most common feedback I get is when a buffalo looks at me, I feel like it's piercing my soul. And that's exactly right. I mean, that's exactly the first feeling I got when I had one-on-one time with the herd of buffalo. And so there is a very special relationship between
00:18:07
Speaker
you know, all the Oceti Shakawin people, but that special relationship, it's a relationship. And so it's inspired as much by the nature of our Buffalo relatives as it is by our response to them. And so, yeah, so anyway, yeah, I started working with the tribal herd and then expanded from there, moved to, when I moved to Afrez after my parents passed.
00:18:31
Speaker
Some of my cousins and other relatives continued to work in Standing Rock. I went and consulted with Lala Lakota for a while and then went and worked in Montana and Wyoming at several Buffalo Ranches there. And then from there, you know, decided to sell my soul to the devil and become an academic. But yeah, that's kind of the story of how I got into that.
00:18:59
Speaker
All right. Well, on that note, first, I will say that Joseph, you are an excellent ethnographer. So don't note, no saying that. And second, we are at our first break point. So we are going to take a break here and then we will be right back.
00:19:16
Speaker
Okay. Okay. So we are back from our break and you left off there talking about how you sold your soul to the sun devils, uh, of academia. Um, and so yeah, I'd love to hear more about like what you.
00:19:36
Speaker
what your experience was like or is like, I guess, has been like going through that journey of academia and what you've ended up focusing your work on.
00:19:48
Speaker
Yeah, so what's fascinating, so I left off talking about my experience in Buffalo. And so, you know, to me, the natural thing was if I was going to become or pursue education anyways, that I was going to I was going to research and become a researcher in, in, you know, large animal grazing, and Buffalo has a particular focus. And that's how I started off was as a, you know, strict, strict ecologist, right. And
00:20:16
Speaker
You know, looking back, I was so adorable. You're still adorable, Joseph. I was adorably naive because I thought joining the Academy meant I was going to be joining a community of learned scholars who are highly intelligent and capable of critical thinking.
00:20:39
Speaker
I mean, you were going to ASU. Sorry, the Arizona Wildcat and me had to throw that out. You have eight people.
00:21:00
Speaker
I mean, very early experiences. I mean, from the first week I started my PhD program, I actually started at a different program than ASU. After leaving the Res, I worked primarily, even on the Res, I worked primarily with white ranchers, white rural folk.
00:21:21
Speaker
And yeah, there were just typical generic ignorance, but I'd never experienced any form of explicit racism or alienation or degradation of my skill sets and intelligence and things like that. Yeah, I'd never experienced anything like that. In fact, quite the opposite. Many of my white brothers and sisters that I worked with,
00:21:44
Speaker
You know, I remember, I remember times where, yeah, we'd be out working and, you know, dudes would drive by in their truck and yell out. I don't know if I can use expletives on your show, but you also don't have to, though, you know, they would they would yell out, you know, red niggas and things like that. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's a quite common experience, especially when you're when you're working in Buffalo, because, you know, they don't want that dirty animal back back on their land or what they perceive as their land.
00:22:14
Speaker
So, yeah, yeah, so there's a lot of, when you're a buffalo rancher, you know, you get to experience a lot of very interesting things. But when I would experience those things, including when I would go out with my, the cowboys that worked with me, and many, many of them would stand up, I mean, many of them would be more offended than I was by these experiences, right? And they'd get very angry and protective of me. And so, if anything, the people I worked with were, you know, were good
00:22:46
Speaker
And then I came to the Academy and here are people that have zero life experience whatsoever. They've only ever been in school their whole life. Most of them come from white suburbia.
00:22:59
Speaker
have little to no understanding of virtually anything in the world. And I say that with all due respect. It's just reality, right? When you grow up in white suburban America, what experience of the real world do you really have, right? Everything is convenient. You've never had to work a hard day in your life, especially if you're a white kid who's in your early 20s, right?
00:23:23
Speaker
It's a life that's nice. It's very nice. It's very cushy, but it's extremely limited in its purview of what the hell is happening in the world. And yet people think they're saving the earth and they're the magnificence of all things. The high rates of arrogance and narcissism in the academy is
00:23:49
Speaker
untenable, and I've never experienced anywhere near the amount of grotesque racism in rural white America as I have in the liberal white academy, right?
00:24:04
Speaker
Anyway, I ended up actually got so grotesque at the first program that I ended up transferring to ASU to complete my PhD. The biggest complaint that the people I work with, the mentors who are wonderful, most of whom are white and are wonderful human beings, the biggest complaint they had was, hey, you're not coming to campus enough. I was like, yes. Exactly.
00:24:35
Speaker
So the way I've been able to survive at ASU is working with wonderful scholars, but doing it at a distance from the campus itself. And that's really unfortunate, but that's kind of the way it has to be because I have high tolerance for racists. I can actually work with racist people because I see that more as a curable disease.
00:25:00
Speaker
It's a disease of ignorance and so it could be curable. Narcissism on the other hand, arrogance on the other hand, that is just simply not a curable disease. It's a much, much, much more difficult disease to cure than racism is. And so to me, I can work with people that are considered horribly grotesque by liberal white folks. I cannot work for the most part with liberal white folks who have such high levels of narcissism.
00:25:29
Speaker
And the reason I recognized narcissism in that community is because I had worked in contexts of like domestic, you know, a lot of my community work has been focused on domestic violence and sexual abuse of children and women and all of that. And so you see the impact that narcissism has on real people's lives, right? Many, many of the perpetrators of these horrifying crimes are really high narcissists. So, you know, whereas Western culture has just completely glamorized
00:25:59
Speaker
narcissism to be this cutesy personality quirk. It's not. It's a horrifying disease, and it should be addressed as such, and it's related to all sorts of vicious violence. I have zero tolerance for narcissism, which is why I stay away from academic campuses in general.
00:26:21
Speaker
And so, yeah, so that's been my experience in the Academy. And because of that, I realized, well, a lot of the reason that I'm experiencing this is because these white kids from white suburbia and their white older kids of PIs that they work with, right? Because they all come from the same place. The principal investigator is exactly the same as his or her student.
00:26:46
Speaker
And so these folks have just not had any encounter, any experience of native communities, native cultures, native knowledge, right? And so I realized, okay, well, what I need to do is gather my people around me. And so I started doing that via the traditional ecological knowledge section of the Ecological Society of America. So I used a more diverse community of scholars who were more likely to
00:27:13
Speaker
respond to claims of diversity and inclusion. I applied to a grant via the National Science Foundation and brought together 21 native ecologists and environmental scientists from across North America and began, essentially just began my own community of natives that are working in similar ways with similar knowledges.
00:27:38
Speaker
And so that's the only reason I've remained in the academy at all, is because I created the academy. I created my own experience, essentially, in the academy. And so my dissertation focus now, instead of being Buffalo, which is what I wanted to study initially, is now, you know,
00:27:54
Speaker
But essentially, how do we maintain indigenous persistence in STEM, right? How do you fit an indigenous way of knowing and the people that carry that indigenous way of knowing into a settler colonial system that was designed precisely to erase them?
00:28:12
Speaker
This is the question now with all this diversity and inclusion stuff and interest in indigenous knowledge, a lot of universities are working really hard to recruit native people and native students. That's great, but to ask somebody to come into a settler colonial context and say, now, it's nice that you're native, but you need to act white, talk white, dress white, poop white, burp white. You have to be white in every way, rid yourself of your identity completely.
00:28:42
Speaker
That's nothing other than extreme racism and exploitation. You're just supercharging settler colonialism with a pretentious diversity and inclusion agenda.
00:28:57
Speaker
So what I do now, my research now, is to say, well, here's how your institution needs to change from the perspective of Native scholars. Here's how your institution needs to change in order for you to actually have any kind of genuine relationship with Native people. Otherwise, all you are is a system of erasure. And so the only way to deal with a system of erasure is to destroy it, to dismantle it completely.
00:29:24
Speaker
anyone who wants to actually engage with Native communities at their institution, you have to begin by dismantling the settler colonial institution itself and its many mechanisms of exclusion and erasure of Native people.
00:29:37
Speaker
All right. Well, I'm going to ask the big, hard question, which is, what did you find? Like, what is, what recommendations would you give? Well, I mean, there are many, what you, what I ended up discovering is that it's essentially that my, my experience wasn't abnormal. I mean, in the first, so the first, I Hello Workshop in Montreal, Canada in 2022.
00:30:00
Speaker
right before the Ecological Society of America's conference. And, you know, I spent two entire days just listening to many, I mean, the majority of them were Native women and my sisters sitting there talking about how, you know, they experienced all sorts of dehumanization in their lab groups. They were sexually assaulted by their PIs. They were
00:30:22
Speaker
dehumanize to the point where they ended up leaving their phd programs altogether or transferring to another program right or leaving the academy even after they got their phd and leaving the academy and going somewhere else right and so i spent two full days of of like hearing this and i grew up
00:30:40
Speaker
being a traditional Native man and being very protective of my sisters. And so at the same time, what's funny is we held it right before ESA's conference so that we can report out from the workshop. So two days the weekend right before a full week of ESA conference. And then I applied to give a workshop where I had the entire panel of the 21 Native scholars sitting up front. And each of them got up to speak briefly.
00:31:09
Speaker
Anyway, in order for you to do that, you submit a proposal to ESA, it gets reviewed, the reviews come back, and then either your presentation is accepted or denied.
00:31:21
Speaker
at that conference right right right while I was holding the workshop one of the reviews came back saying something to the effect of I was really worried that you were saying we should listen to these aboriginal peoples but now I understand that you're talking about ecologists and indigenous ecologists so I'm not as worried anymore right and by the way he gave us bad reviews which means
00:31:47
Speaker
in the ESA system that goes back to the ESA administration, somebody has to look at it, approve it and send it back to me as the presenter. In other words, ESA saw this, said it was okay to send it to a native scholar. Oh my god. Yeah, yeah. So anyway, so two days of hearing like abuse of my sisters and then this review and then I had that
00:32:13
Speaker
On the Monday, I had requested to meet with the administration of ESA to discuss, like, how the hell is your system so incompetent that this is possible, right? That's basically what I want to discuss with them. And the leader of ESA, the director or whatever the name of the office is, didn't end up showing up. It ended up being the same people, the same diversity in
00:32:35
Speaker
inclusion folks that always have worked with me from ESA. They're the ones who ended up showing up. The leaders did not. And so I was really irate at this point because it's like, wow, dude. Wow. In a single shot, I've brought you 21 indigenous scholars, which is unprecedented in your entire history, ESA. And this is how you
00:32:59
Speaker
Like, this is how you respond to this, right? While giving me a bunch of BS about wanting to work with native people, etc, etc, right?
00:33:08
Speaker
So anyway, during the workshop, you know, I had the panel of people there, of my people there, and I wasn't going to speak at all. I was already exhausted two days of not sleeping, right? And so, but my sisters, two of my sisters who were there turned to me and they're like, hey, you have to get up and talk about this racist review. It's important for these people to hear that. So I was like, dang it. I'm tired.
00:33:34
Speaker
I was exhausted and wasn't planning on speaking, so I had nothing to prepare. But I always do what my sisters tell me to do because my mama didn't raise no fools, so I got it. It's generally a good policy.
00:33:50
Speaker
Right, yeah. They're much wiser than I am. So I got up to speak and I just tore into the crowd. And this is not even a standing room only. There are people literally packed outside in the hallway. So the interest from non-Indigenous ecologists is huge in Indigenous knowledge.
00:34:10
Speaker
And so this room is just packed with hundreds of people and I just tear into everybody in the room. So anyway, I end up of course being like brought up on code of conduct charges. Oh my God. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No one paid attention to the fact that I'm talking about, you know, my sisters being sexually assaulted. That didn't matter. They just didn't like the language I was using. You made us feel uncomfortable. Right. You made us feel uncomfortable, right? Like five sisters and them being assaulted, right?
00:34:38
Speaker
So, yeah, good old white sensibilities, right? And I can literally sit here, Jessica, for the next 24 hours and just give you one incident like that
Vision for Heritage Lands Collective
00:34:53
Speaker
after another. And that incident, by the way, is actually like, is watered down. That's not
00:35:01
Speaker
even close to the worst things I've experienced in the academy. I mean, that's like a footnote to some of the worst things I've experienced. So yeah, so I'm staying away from academic communities in general, just trying to finish off my PhD and then see if I can find a way to remain embedded in my communities.
00:35:23
Speaker
or with Native communities in general doing the work that I'm doing with the nonprofit. And then I can consult with universities where we bring students out to the field. Because I also don't like anything about how Western universities do pretty much anything, including how they teach. I always say the classroom is where education goes to die.
00:35:43
Speaker
And it's just not me. The way I grew up, I can't be in a classroom with damn PowerPoint and doing all of that. I'd much rather be doing what I'm doing with Heritage Lands Collective, which is bringing our youth out to work with their own communities and in the field and experience that.
00:36:03
Speaker
wondrous experience of being with elders in these sacred sites. I mean, that's real education, right? And working with these Native scholars, by the way, who have become family to me, it's been an incredible blessing because now I'm working on multi-million dollar grants of
00:36:22
Speaker
developing buffalo curriculum for native producers and, you know, working with several different tribal colleges to develop the curriculum for their students on buffalo handling and we're developing a buffalo certificate for the University of Montana and Nuita Hidatsa College.
00:36:39
Speaker
And so there's a lot of wonderful things that have come out of that, wonderful richness. And so I really don't need to be on a campus anywhere. I've developed the network. I've developed my own university, if you will, of indigenous scholars and wonderful allies as well that work with us. And so, yeah, so there's a lot of work for me to do. I really don't need a traditional academic position.
Engaging with Indigenous Communities
00:37:07
Speaker
Yeah. Okay. So we're at our second break point, but when we come back, I'd like to talk more about how you recommend people respectfully engage with tribes and talk more about Heritage Lands Collective and what you'd like to be doing with that in your vision for the future.
00:37:25
Speaker
Okay. So we left off the last segment talking about, you were starting to talk about how to respectfully engage with tribes and indigenous people. So can you talk more about what you recommend to people when it sounds like you get a lot of emails with people saying, how do I work with tribes? What would you tell those people?
00:37:48
Speaker
Yeah, I think maybe, at least based on now rather extensive experience with people wanting to work with tribes and seeing their approach, I think it might be helpful for me to outline kind of how one typically goes about doing it and then to talk about what parts of that not to do. Because there have been trends, right? I'm a scientist, so I tend to notice trends about human behavior and other
00:38:17
Speaker
So, one of the trends is, well, I'll send people an email, right? I'll find out somebody that I could potentially work with and send them an email. And typically, the email is this.
00:38:32
Speaker
When people send me, like I have many white colleagues who'll send me emails and say, hey, like, is this appropriate to send to so and so the tribal person that I want to work with? And typically what the email looks like is a giant dissertation of like, here's who I am. Here's like all the wonderful work I've done. And here's some more about me and how special I am and things like that.
00:38:55
Speaker
And it's like, that's cool. And that works in Western context. That's not the way you introduce yourself to a native person, right? I mean, if you really want to turn somebody off, you know, that's the perfect way to do it is to send them your resume and tell them how amazing you are and like, you know, all how much you like want to save native communities and things like that. Like don't get bad approach. Right. You know, the
00:39:21
Speaker
So the first thing I tell people is if you want to work with Native communities, you have to become a certain type of person first. And that's where things lie down because they think of it as like a process. There's a 12-step process of, you know, what's the protocol? Where do I step and what do I do?
00:39:41
Speaker
That's not how it works. You have to become a certain type of person first, right? Kind of like in order for you to have a healthy relationship with any other human being, you have to become a certain type of person first, right? It's not a, there isn't like, oh, what's the, where's the manual to having a good healthy relationship with somebody? There is no such thing. You have to work on yourself quite a bit, both outside of a relationship and within the relationship, right?
00:40:07
Speaker
So what kind of person should you be or what sort of characteristics do you need to develop first? Well, number one, I've already mentioned if you grew up in Western contexts in a typical suburban home and with kind of Western culture, you know,
00:40:25
Speaker
really, really, really self-assess whether you've adopted any form of arrogance or narcissism or self-importance, because that will come off really clearly when you interact with Indigenous people, and it's one of the biggest turn-offs right away.
00:40:41
Speaker
So that kind of deep sort of self-investigation, if you will, of how was I raised? Was I raised to serve others? Did my parents ever take me to serve in a food shelter, in a soup kitchen or a shelter of some kind?
00:40:57
Speaker
And my parents emphasized that my guardians, whoever raised me, emphasized like thinking about others in any way. Or was it all about me and my needs and the toys I need and the privileges I get to have and things like that? Because if that's the way you were raised, that's not your fault. But there are certain characteristics that develop about a person, if they're raised that way, that will not fit
00:41:23
Speaker
Well at all with native communities and if anything you'll end up just causing harm rather than good and so So so a whole lot of kind of self probing if you will to understand where you come from what your position is positionality is very important and then a whole lot of like understanding of the community or communities that you want to work with and so take a lot of time and
00:41:45
Speaker
reading and investigation and learning as much as possible, as much as possible about the community itself from the perspective of the community. So if you can find books, articles, websites, panels, anything that tells you about a particular community from their perspective,
00:42:08
Speaker
And I really emphasize that from their perspective, that that would be a great way to start in terms of at least building basic knowledge. And that's all you're doing when you're doing that. So it's important to understand you're not going in as an expert about them. You're building very basic knowledge, right? It's like me reading somebody's dating profile or something, right?
00:42:31
Speaker
I'm learning very basic things about you maybe, but I'm only going to learn that you like cats versus dogs or something like that. I'm not going to learn anything deeper about you until I engage with you in a relational reciprocal manner. You can start off that way, you can start off by self-assessment and then gain some book knowledge, some background knowledge about the community.
00:42:59
Speaker
And then after you do that, you can then honestly say to yourself, do my priorities and the community's understanding of the world, does my worldview and the community's worldview, do those actually go together at all? Is there a point of connection here? Find the way that you can connect to the community. Again, just like you would with somebody you're interested in romantically or friendship wise or anything. You find a way to connect
00:43:26
Speaker
with the community where it's important for them and where you have the skill sets to be able to connect there. So as an ecologist, you might be concerned about ecological restoration or certain plant communities or animal communities, and those might be important to that tribe. And you can start by connecting there.
00:43:48
Speaker
Find out who to call. Usually it's the Department of Natural Resources folks, whoever, the Historic Preservation Office folks.
00:43:59
Speaker
depending on your particular focus of research and skill sets as a scholar, and then you would contact those people by calling them. I wouldn't really email, try to find their numbers and call them, and then begin a conversation by saying, hey, I'm so-and-so from such-and-such university. I work at the university that was once the tribal homelands of the whatever people, the Apache people. I work at this university that has
00:44:29
Speaker
benefited from your lands and from which I benefit now, which brings different meaning to land acknowledgements. We're not doing them for pretentious reasons to feel like good liberal white people. We're now saying, hey, I realize I'm getting paid because your people were genocided from this area and then the university was taken.
00:44:49
Speaker
by force from these lands. And so now what I'm doing, I realize is giving back. I want to give back as a gift and an appreciation for the benefits I've gotten to enjoy by being a faculty member or student or whatever at this university. And so find out whatever
00:45:08
Speaker
wherever you happen to be in the country, find out what tribes were there historically, and try to connect with those tribes first and foremost. Try to give back to those tribes that you've benefited from. And again, through a phone call, you would introduce yourself very briefly, and then you would say, the skill sets, the things I have to offer to serve the tribe,
00:45:32
Speaker
are the following i'm a vegetation ecologist i'm a whatever right let them know what your skills happen to be in and say you know i would love it if i can somehow connect with you guys on something that's a high priority for you based on your current needs and priorities and and could you tell me a little bit more about you know
00:45:55
Speaker
What are some projects or things of interest to you and the community now? And we can maybe talk about areas where I can serve. And so approaching it with a servant's heart, right? Approaching it with the heart of somebody who wants a genuine, deeper relationship with somebody they care about.
00:46:14
Speaker
If you don't know, again and again, in order for you to do that properly, you have to be a certain type of person, right? Because your brain is always going to default to whatever it is you have historically done, right? So if you approach people in an exploitative manner, like, oh, she's hot, I want to have her whatever, or he's hot.
00:46:31
Speaker
If that's the way you approach humans and if that's the habit you've built over the course of your life, please don't do anything with tribes. Stay awake because you're going to approach them in an exploitative manner. That's where your brain is going to default. Develop the important habits of real relationship building first before you try to work with tribes or any vulnerable, underrepresented, minor authorized community for that matter.
Iterative Research and Community Involvement
00:47:00
Speaker
So yeah so you would say you know hey what do you care about you person you tried that i care about what do you want what do you care about the typical way people approach at this point is they've already applied for a proposal right because academia academia has no.
00:47:17
Speaker
consciousness at all with how things work in terms of connecting with tribes. And so they encourage their academics to go and apply, you know, you apply for funding, you propose the research you're interested in, and then you go to a tribe and see if you can work with them. No, no, no. How do you know that you give two bits of our ass about your research? Like, you don't know that that's important to them at all. That's like, that's like you
00:47:43
Speaker
you know, me know, like, like, I know that you like chocolate covered almonds, Jessica, you've outed me. But then I go and buy, you know, whatever I think you should like, and then give it to you and say, Hey, you should enjoy this, because I think it's what you should like. And it's like, no, dude, that's not how you know, right? I don't want those calories. Right, right.
00:48:10
Speaker
So, right, so you have every right to like throw that back in my face and say, hey, you know, I like chocolate covered almonds. Right. So, so yeah, so it's, I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's basic relational knowledge, but which, which has been part of my, been part of the shock to my system of like how abjectly ignorant people are of just basic relational
00:48:40
Speaker
knowledge like how do you approach somebody you care about do you know what it means to care about somebody like we have to go back to basics on that because. Clearly so like really clearly so so so yeah so so approach with humility build build habits of humility approach with humility and then,
00:48:58
Speaker
approach with skill sets that are important to genuine relationality. And when you do that, it'll come off. It'll come off clearly. You'll begin your research through a relationship with the tribe. What's important to you?
00:49:11
Speaker
Now that I know what's important to you, now we can go look for funding that fits what's important to you. Let's apply to the funding together. Let's make sure that the funding pays you and your youth. What I want to do is make sure that any benefits that I get as an academic when I apply for funding goes to the tribe, not just to me.
00:49:35
Speaker
It's okay, I need to pay my bills too. So it's okay for me to get paid through grants, but it needs to also benefit the tribe as much as possible. So if I'm gonna hire interns, I'm gonna hire tribal youth from that community. If I'm gonna hire research associates, it's gonna be from that community as much as possible, right? Building capacity within the community, making sure that the benefits go directly to the community. So the proposal has been developed with them.
00:50:01
Speaker
under their guidance. The research is developed with them under their guidance. The outcomes are developed with them under their guidance and the outputs go to benefit them under their guidance. So as long as, right, as long as that's the approach, everything else is kind of minor cultural things that you'll learn over time, right? Other things are really minor. So learning how to conduct research with tribes in terms of them leading. It has to be community led.
00:50:32
Speaker
and it has to be an iterative process, meaning that the entire time that you're conducting this research from conception, before you even conceive of what your questions are going to be, to the end, the entire time, it has to be under tribal guidance, and it has to be iterative, meaning that you're always going to the tribe and saying, hey, am I still doing this correctly? Is this still within your interest? Is this within your purview? Or do we need to change anything, et cetera, right? Now, when you consider it that way,
00:51:02
Speaker
Here's the thing, Jessica, when you consider it that way, it's almost virtually impossible for a Western academic to conduct proper research with a tribe because all the timelines on the funding end, on the university end, all the timelines have no contact, no consciousness at all with what it means to work with tribal communities, right?
00:51:22
Speaker
I mean, today you submitted a request for an extension for one of the grant projects we're working on. There's a reason for that. We need to give proper time for our tribal partner to review the report that we're sending them. We need to have review sessions with our federal agency partners, et cetera, right? There's a huge, right? And that report may not be a priority for the tribe anytime soon. So what happens with the funding agency, if we go back to them and say, hey,
00:51:52
Speaker
It's now December 2024 and we still haven't heard from the tribe. Sorry, we have to wait, right? That funding agency is far less likely to come back and say, yeah, we're going to fund your future projects, dude. It's like you're, you're lagging here. You know, we have timelines. We have to meet.
00:52:07
Speaker
and they're not in accord with tribal priorities. And so it makes it incredibly difficult to be in a settler colonial institution and continue to work with tribes in any meaningful manner because you have to meet a certain timeline that has no conscious connection whatsoever with tribal timelines.
00:52:27
Speaker
Absolutely. Yeah. I want to add a couple like specific things that people who are hearing what you're saying might not have heard of or I mean thought of. Well, and first of all, just to touch on what you were saying right there, know that it's going to take a lot longer than you think and plan for that and ask for more time in the beginning.
00:52:47
Speaker
much more time than you think you're going to need. And also the parts that are under your control, try and do those parts as quickly as you can or like time it to leave as much time as possible for the tribe, like their, their aspects of the grant to try and make sure that there's going to be adequate time.
00:53:08
Speaker
But touching on a couple of the things that you were talking about there, you mentioned it being an iterative process and going back. So I think a lot of times people make that first phone call. And I mean, obviously we're guilty of this too, and the work that we do in cultural resource management, because like you said, a lot of times it's like we get the
00:53:29
Speaker
grant and then we have to approach the tribes, which is really not the way that it's supposed to be done. But that first conversation that you have where they're like, oh yeah, we're on board. These are our goals, blah, blah, blah. That's not enough, like you were saying, to go pursue funding or things like that necessarily. If you haven't worked with that community before, ideally, you're going to want to go in person and meet people
00:53:53
Speaker
bring food, do all of those things. And expect, for example, that your proposal might need to go through council. So it might not be up to that office on whether or not you're allowed to do the kind of work that you need to do.
Future Vision and Youth Involvement
00:54:07
Speaker
And so again, if you're pursuing a grant, you want to make sure things are ready on your end after the tribes told you what they want as soon as possible so that they have enough time if they need to go through those processes of getting on
00:54:20
Speaker
the council's docket or whatever, which again, and then they put out these call for proposals that are like two weeks and you're like, I don't know. But just some specific thoughts on moments where I see people tripping up, myself included. Yeah, for sure. Because I think people don't understand that you're not, at least here in the United States, you're not working with a community, you're working with a sovereign nation.
00:54:49
Speaker
So, that's a very important distinction to make, because no one can just, it's not, you don't just contact, say, the director of the Department of Natural Resources at whatever tribe, and they just make the decision. No, they have to take it to council in, you know, Congress, essentially, and Congress needs to decide on whether this is worth their time and effort, whether they trust you or not, right? Whether they want to dedicate any time or resources to this. So, yeah, so it's, yeah, that's kind of the next step, like when people
00:55:19
Speaker
understand those first few steps that I mentioned of the basics. That's kind of the next step where I take people where I'm like, okay, now let's get into the nitty gritty of the actual step-by-step process of how to do this properly and what to expect, what to expect on the tribal end because that's the other thing that's missing.
00:55:39
Speaker
All right. Well, man, you and I, we've talked for quite a while. So real quick, I want to hear about your vision for Heritage Lands Collective and the work that you want to be doing. Yeah. So thanks to the foundational work you and Dr. Kathleen Van Vlack have done,
00:55:58
Speaker
We can take Heritage Lands Collective now into a new era in terms of its purview. For native communities, cultural heritage and ecological heritage are one and the same thing. There's no difference between plant and animal relatives, rocks, waters, sky, etc. These are all sacred
00:56:24
Speaker
Beings of existence right and and they're all interconnected and so there's no differentiation like i always get criticized as being in settler colonial institutions i was get i've always been criticized even when i was an undergraduate of like.
00:56:39
Speaker
You're not focused enough. You need to be, like, laser focused on one subject matter, right? And people don't understand anything about how Indigenous people do science. And so the reason I can do anthropological work and ecological work is because in my mind, they're the same dang thing. They're the same exact thing, right? There is no separation between how people live and how our plant and animal relatives thrive, survive, and interact with us. We're all one.
00:57:08
Speaker
We're all one big relationship. So what we're going to do is we're going to, for Heritage Lands Collective, we're not going to differentiate between those two things anymore. We're starting, for example, a project in Hovenweep where this is a wonderful project because our federal partners are literally applied for funding based on tribal desire. And so based on conversations with tribal members,
00:57:38
Speaker
We're going to go and restore via tribal knowledge. We're going to go and do some ecological restoration of the Hovenweep springs that are important to the communities. Because the park wants to restore those springs, this is again one of those points of connection where the tribe wants them restored and want their plant and animal relatives restored there and the National Park Service wants the same thing.
00:58:04
Speaker
So we're doing ecological restoration, we're doing applied ethnographic heritage work, and all of those things are combined. And what we're going to be focusing on moving forward is not just having where we bring the people
00:58:23
Speaker
to these heritage sites for visits on occasion, but where we're moving towards, you know, bringing them to the sites and then, you know, extracting knowledge from them. You have knowledge that will go back to the tribe, first and foremost, but will also inform the federal agencies on how to manage these lands. That's wonderful in itself.
00:58:43
Speaker
What we want to do is reach a deeper relationality between all of us, between tribes and federal agencies in terms of land management. We're going to be moving towards co-management as much as possible in every avenue that we can, where via our indigenous internships, what I'm hoping to do is connect tribal students with these federal agencies and then
00:59:10
Speaker
have some kind of a relationship developed there where they're able to apply for federal jobs. And so there's an immediate connection between communities and these federal agencies via their own youth where now tribal priorities become
00:59:28
Speaker
over time, hopefully become the priorities of our federal partners. And co-management can then begin in that manner via relationships, via these deeper relationships. Yeah, and many more things coming down the pike. You know, not just co-management, but also I'm trying to raise funding for something that you did, Jessica, youth elder camps.
00:59:52
Speaker
And these experiences would be incredibly rare and wonderful for both the elders and the youth going out to these heritage sites together and youth learning directly from their elders in place in situ. You know, that's a dream. It's a dream come true and hopefully we can make it work. And I'm working like a madman to try and raise funding to support that for hopefully for 2025.
01:00:19
Speaker
But yeah, that's kind of the vision is that we move from sort of tribal consultation for us to manage the land before you, kind of attitude to you are co-equal partners, and more importantly, you're not stakeholders, you're rights holders. This is your land.
01:00:40
Speaker
this is your land, and so being rights holders as sovereign nations, your perspective isn't just something that, you know, we're being nice people by respecting your perspective. No, no, no, your perspective, we have to respect by every right of human dignity, of law, et cetera. And so now the tribe becomes a co-equal partner in management of these sacred sites and ecologies.
01:01:07
Speaker
and hopefully it's run by future generations of Indigenous youth going forward.
01:01:15
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And if you, if anyone out there listening, uh, wants to help support these types of efforts that Joseph just mentioned, uh, you can always go to heritage lands.org slash donate, or if you just go to heritage lands.org, there's a big old donate button. So I definitely encourage everyone if they're interested to support our internship programs, to support these youth elder camps that, that Joseph is working on, on finding funding for.
Conclusion and Call to Action
01:01:44
Speaker
and just, you know, all of these other efforts, like the Hovenweep one that he mentioned, which I agree, I'm super excited about and is a really special opportunity that I'm glad we get to be part of. So on that note, I just want to say thank you again, Joseph, so much for coming back.
01:02:02
Speaker
and spending more time with us. I certainly could have asked you a lot more questions. I know that there's a lot more that we could have talked about, so maybe sometime we'll have to have you back on the podcast. But yeah, thank you again. Yeah, thanks for having me. It's been wonderful. Always a good conversation with you, Jessica.
01:02:21
Speaker
And if I've left any questions unanswered for people, you know, I'm fairly easy to find online. You can connect with me on Twitter or X, I guess, and Facebook or whatever it's called now, and Facebook and through the university and things like that. But yeah, feel free to reach out and happy to have a conversation with anyone who's willing and wants to work with tribes. I highly encourage people to do so. Yeah, or through Heritage Lands Collective.
01:02:51
Speaker
That's right. Yeah. And as always, I wish that the off-air conversations had been aired because it was hilarious. I haven't laughed that hard in a while. But I'll keep everybody wondering what that was. But we'll talk to you later.
01:03:17
Speaker
Thanks for listening to the Heritage Voices podcast. You can find show notes at www.archaeologypodcastnetwork.com slash Heritage Voices. Please subscribe to the show on iTunes, Stitcher, or the Google Play Music Store. Also, please share with your friends or write us a review. Sharing and reviewing helps more people find the show and gets the perspectives of Heritage Voices amazing guests out there into the world.
01:03:39
Speaker
No, we just need more of that in anthropology and land management. If you have any more questions, comments, or show suggestions, please reach out to me at Jessica at livingheritageanthropology.org. If you'd like to volunteer to be on the show as a guest or even a co-host, reach out to me as well, Jessica at livingheritageanthropology.org. You can also follow more of what I'm doing on Facebook at livingheritageanthropology and the nonprofit Living Heritage Research Council or on Twitter at livingheritagea.
01:04:05
Speaker
As always, huge thank you to Liable Enqua and Jason Nez for their collaboration on our incredible logo.
01:04:22
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Cultural Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Rachel Rodin. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.