Library:Speaking of Indigenous Politics

Speaking of Indigenous Politics: Conversations With Activists, Scholars, and Tribal Leaders
Author	J. Kēhaulani Kauanui
First published	2018

The interview with Jean M. O'Brien was previously published as "Settler Logics and Writ- ing Indians Out of Existence: A Conversation between J. Kehaulani Kauanui and Jean M. O'Brien," special issue on settler colonialism for Politica & Società, Michele Spanò, guest ed- itor (June 2012): 259-78. The interview with Patrick Wolfe was previously published as "Set- tler Colonialism Then and Now: A Conversation between J. Kehaulani Kauanui and Patrick Wolfe," special issue on settler colonialism for Politica & Società, Michele Spanò, guest editor (June 2012): 235-58. Reprinted with permission.

In memory of Gale Courey Toensing (1946-2018), a Connecticut-based journalist of Palestinian and Lebanese descent who was an outstanding staff reporter for Indian Country Today. Her friendship and significant work covering Indigenous issues in Native North America were instructive and continue to inspire me.

Foreword

Robert Warrior

Though you won't hear it said directly in the interviews collected here from

J. Kehaulani Kauanui's radio show Indigenous Politics: From Native New England and Beyond, one way to read this book is as an Indigenous subversion of one of the basic tools of settler-colonial intervention, scholarship, and even entertain- ment. From police and military interrogation to social and behavioral scientific research to sensationalistic journalistic or travelogues, interviewing-too often of rude and invasive imposition-is central to the exercise of the power of white- ness over Native peoples and the places they inhabit.

    Kauanui fights back against those centuries of imposition by showing that a recorded conversation around prepared questions can break its own mold to become something else. She's far from the first Indigenous interviewer to use the form in this way, but the conversations collected here are especially successful at demonstrating that it's possible to achieve the kind of scholarly and intellectual subversion of which Indigenous thinkers so often speak.

    Kauanui harnessed that subversive energy at a particularly opportune mo- ment, just as international Indigenous politics was coming to a critical juncture with the adoption, in 2007, of the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The emergence of global Indigenous studies as a field be- came possible due to, among other things, the development of the Native Amer- ican and Indigenous Studies Association, for which Kauanui and I served on the founding steering committee, acting council, and elected council from 2005 to 2012. Kauanui's radio show is an invaluable chronicle of that crucial period in the intellectual and political life of the Indigenous world. Among her guests are many of the leading figures in global Indigenous studies, including Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Steven Salaita, and Margo Tamez, among many others.

    The interviews from Indigenous Politics: From Native New England and Be- yond remain lively reading, though not just because of a happy coincidence of timing. I want to suggest three factors that imbue them with energy that makes them compelling years later. First, Kauanui clearly becomes masterful at the art

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of the broadcast interview over the life of her show. Along with her interview of me in this book, I've been an interviewee many times for a broad range of radio and television shows, and I can say with some authority that being a good interviewer requires much more than being a raconteur with a quality recording deck and a good Rolodex. Amid the deeply informed questions and sometimes playful back-and-forth in the interviews in this volume, what we can't see is Kau- anui looking ahead at the next question and the next segment, getting ready for a news break or a station identification, and checking sound levels all while keeping an eye on the clock and making notes about any glitches that can be fixed through editing.

    Those things we can't see are part of the magic of radio, its artifice. The fact that in this case the host is also the producer, director, and sound engineer rolled into one behind this aural veil makes that artifice even more impressive. (Another part of the artifice is that the guests sound like they might be sitting in a quiet studio with the host when in fact they are almost always joining the conversation by phone and could very well be wearing pajamas or some other form of loungewear, which is why I love doing radio-but I digress.) The art of the interview, especially for a solo host/producer like Kauanui, is wrapped up in keeping up with the technical aspects while managing simultaneously to keep a high-level conversation moving along seamlessly. Even though the interviews published here come from the radio, they carry with them on the page the cool vibe of the easy (natural) but revealing conversation that one associates with Playboy, Rolling Stone, and, of course, Interview.

    The second factor that gives these interviews such long-lasting impact is the high level of knowledge about so many different places and fields of scholarship Kauanui brings to them. Listening to Kauanui having a detailed conversation with Aileen Moreton-Robinson, for instance, about the military intervention by Australian armed forces that was happening in Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territories in Australia in 2007 is much more meaningful than a lec- ture or prepared talk on the topic. It matters, in other words, that the host of the show knows enough about what is happening halfway around the world to be able to create a meaningful context for dialogue. The same is true for interviews that focus on South America, Palestine, or Florida.

    Factor three has to do with the way Kauanui manages to highlight local and regional Indigenous communities in the midst of a global agenda, which leads us back to the idea of subversion that I started with. The name of the show, Indige- nous Politics: From Native New England and Beyond, is, in fact, a statement of an ethical imperative that provides a fundamental grounding to the show even as it also embraces a global agenda. At the beginning of each show, Kauanui remind- ed listeners that she was speaking from the homelands of the Wangunk people, and she returned often to stories and people from the region. In this, the show is itself a lesson in how to practice recognizing the fundamental truth that every inch of the Americas is Indigenous territory.

Foreword    xi

    What I loved about the show and what I appreciate about these interviews today is how they provide us as listeners and readers with a guide to how to act on the Indigenous ethical imperative of starting where you are. That imperative can seem daunting, especially when you are starting out. In the end, though, the way to build success will involve some version of what you see happening in these interviews: You have to get into conversations with people about what's happening in their communities. To do that, you are going to have to do some reading and some preparation to learn something about the people you are try- ing to be in conversation with. That reading and preparation might very well require you to develop some expertise you don't already have.

    Let me end by pointing out the very first thing that this Indigenous ethical imperative is going to demand, which is this: regardless of whom in the Indige- nous world you are talking to and where you are hoping to make an impact, the first thing you should do is take a good look around and figure out where you are. Whether or not that sounds simple or complicated, do yourself a favor and read these interviews for a great example of how to start from where you are.

Introduction

Indigenous Politics from Native New England and Beyond

The state of Native and Indigenous political resurgence and resistance in this twenty-first century moment is exciting and has much to teach the rest of the world. We can see this in the ongoing #NoDAPL struggle to stop the Dako- ta Access Pipeline. The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe who led this effort is guid- ed by the principle of "Mni wiconi": "Water is life." We have also witnessed a fierce stance in the battle over the Thirty Meter Telescope at Mauna a Wakea on Hawai'i Island, a $1.4 billion project for an eighteen-story observatory on the summit that Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians) consider sacred. Calling out to "Ku Kia'i Mauna," Kanaka Maoli protectors have taken up the struggle to guard the mountain. Both are cases of Indigenous resistance to extractive economies, rampant capitalism, and militarized violence and involve thousands of Indig- enous individuals and diverse allies lending their support and solidarity. And in December 2017, Trump announced he would reduce the size of Bears Ears National Monument in southern Utah-a site sacred to Indigenous peoples in the region-in order to open it up for mining. Leading the resistance, the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition-launched by the Hopi Tribe, Navajo Nation, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, Pueblo of Zuni, and the Ute Indian Tribe-has amassed the support of thirty tribal nations with ancestral, historical, and contemporary ties to the Bears Ears region committed to protecting the site and advancing their own Bears Ears conservation proposal. While these struggles eventually gained some mainstream media attention, most Indigenous peoples' activism is too often invisible to the dominant, settler-colonial society. This underscores the importance of independent media in making visible the diverse struggles and forms of resistance.

    In February 2007, I launched a public-affairs radio show called Indigenous Politics: From Native New England and Beyond at WESU, a radio station affili- ated with Wesleyan University, where I teach.1 The use of "Native New England and Beyond" in the subtitle of the program was a political decision, part of my commitment to support the struggles of Indigenous peoples of the region as well

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as to cover those issues in relation to global Indigenous struggles "beyond." I featured interviews with nearly two hundred Indigenous officials, political lead- ers, activists, scholars, cultural workers, and artists about a range of topics docu- menting Native resistance to settler colonialism. The thirty interviews included here are just a slice of the vast audio archive.2 One of the aims of Indigenous Pol- itics was to address the politics of erasure. Notably, the conversations the radio show produced were themselves a political act against that ongoing violence and the logic of elimination endemic to settler colonialism.

    Patrick Wolfe contrasts settler colonialism with franchise colonialism- through comparative work focused on Australia, Israel-Palestine, and the Unit- ed States-showing how the former is premised on the logic of elimination of Indigenous peoples.3 As Wolfe theorized, and as he discussed in his interview included here, because settler colonialism "destroys to replace," it is "inherently eliminatory but not invariably genocidal."4 He was careful to point out that there are cases of genocide without settler colonialism and that, in the context of set- tler colonialism, "elimination refers to more than the summary liquidation of Indigenous peoples, though it includes that."5 Hence, he suggested that structur- al genocide avoids the question of degree and enables an understanding of the relationships between spatial removal, mass killings, and biocultural assimila- tion. In other words, the logic of elimination of the Native is also about the elim- ination of the Native as Native. Because settler colonialism is a land-centered project entailing permanent settlement, Wolfe says, "settler colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure not an event."6 As a result, settler colonialism cannot be relegated to the past; it is an ongoing process. Importantly, indigeneity is a counterpart analytic to settler colonialism, and indigeneity itself is enduring; hence the operative logic of settler colonialism may be to "eliminate the Native," but Indigenous peoples exist, resist, and persist. Moreover, settler colonialism is a structure that endures indigeneity, even as it holds out against it.7

    Wesleyan University, and its listener-supported radio station WESU, are lo- cated in Middletown, Connecticut. The Indigenous place-name is Mattabesset, and the Indigenous people of the land are the Wangunk, part of the Algonquin cultural-linguistic group. Although regarded as largely "extinct" prior to the American Revolution, Wangunks continue to live into the twenty-first century. This is a little-known history-one submerged within a landscape overdeter- mined by settler colonialism. The history of erasure of this place and its original inhabitants is common not just in Middletown but throughout the Northeast. When I first moved to Connecticut from California in 2000, I wanted to find out who the people of the land in the place we call Middletown are. I called the city council and asked, but was told there were none, and my asking was not taken kindly to.8 Others I asked mentioned the Mashantucket Pequots and the Mohegans-the only two federally recognized tribes in Connecticut, both better known in some part due to their casinos, Foxwoods and the Mohegan Sun, respectively.

    It wasn't long before I caught wind of the anti-Indian initiatives emanat- ing from officials in the state, including then-Attorney General Richard Blu- menthal (now a U.S. senator) and then-U.S. Senator Christopher Dodd. The tribes' wealth had visibly stirred non-Native (predominantly white) resentment by those I call the "twenty-first-century Indian haters." During that same period in the early 2000s, some even held town hall meetings to confer on "the Indi- an problem," namely, the possibility of new Indian casinos of the three tribal nations-the Schaghticoke, Eastern Pequots, and the Golden Hill Paugussetts- that were petitioning for federal recognition at the time.

    One way I made a few inroads within that climate was through the an- choring of the radio program. To my knowledge, it was the only Native-issues show produced in New England at the time.9 However, I didn't come at it with a journalistic approach, but out of a responsibility to the Indigenous peoples of the region where I reside (as someone not of that place) and in an effort to en- gage in the work of a public intellectual. The show was explicitly pro-sovereignty and in solidarity with Indigenous people(s). My aim was to connect my ongoing academic work to my political activism to the public realm to address what I see as major social concerns. The program aimed to reach multiple audiences about serious political and cultural issues. I designed it to provide a platform for the general public to think carefully about a range of Indigenous politics that shape everyday life in "Native New England and beyond" in an accessible language that was also analytically rigorous. This was my own version of "digital humanities," engaging the public in critical conversations. As such, the show became an ex- periment in civic education by, in part, unpacking legal issues for a lay audience.

    The program included episodes on Indigenous activism in various parts of Canada, Latin America (including Mexico, Chile, Bolivia, and Peru), Pales- tine, Hawai'i, Australia, and Aotearoa (New Zealand). I focused on themes such as land desecration, treaty rights, political status, and cultural revitalization. I aimed to bring American Indian and other Indigenous voices to the airways by providing crucial commentary rooted in the scholarly research and activism of Native peoples and our allies.

    The air dates of the program-from 2007 to 2013-spanned many criti- cal developments in the Indigenous world globally. An international academic meeting held at the University of Oklahoma in April 2007 led to the establish- ment of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association the following year, which I helped found as part of a six-person steering committee. On Sep- tember 13, 2007, the UN General Assembly passed the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, despite opposition from the United States, Canada, Aus- tralia, and New Zealand. Other exciting developments during the years the show aired include the launching of the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, which is part of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement called for by Palestine civil society to put nonviolent pressure on Israel until it complies with international law. That same year, we saw Bolivia write provisions

for Indigenous peoples into its state constitution through a narrow but major referendum. The year 2011 saw the founding of the Maori Party, a New Zealand political party with Hone Harawira initially at the helm. And in 2012 we saw the formation of Idle No More, an ongoing grassroots movement among the First Nations, Métis, and Inuit peoples along with non-Indigenous supporters chal- lenging Canadian state power. These are just a few important developments that occurred during the program's airing.

    For readers (and past listeners) asking what the value of publishing these interviews is now, after the show has ended, I suggest that they can still teach us about the politics of settler colonialism and Indigenous resistance. In relation to Native and Indigenous studies alone, the interviews provide a window into an entire field in an accessible form from some high-profile scholars. They also serve to document a period of history in terms of regional and global Indigenous resistance. But besides offering a rich archive of these myriad developments, be- cause the struggles facing Indigenous peoples have not changed in structural terms, but have intensified in many ways-especially with the onslaught of neo- liberal policies-most of these interviews offer crucial genealogical contexts for so many ongoing political cases.

    Most immediately, in the U.S. context, the show sought to address the gen- eral public's profound and pervasive ignorance and denial regarding the legal rights of Indigenous peoples, especially since they are often treated as racial mi- norities rather than sovereigns. For example, the conflation of race and indi- geneity is one issue American Indians face in confronting challenges to their distinct legal status that presume their rights are based on "racial privileges" rather than political formations as nations. In American Indian Politics and the American Political System, David E. Wilkins (Lumbee) and Heidi Kiiwetinepine- siik Stark (Turtle Mountain Ojibwe) outline four realities that set American In- dians apart from racial minorities in the United States.10 First, American Indians were the original inhabitants of what is now considered the United States. Sec- ond, this preexistence necessitated the negotiation of political compacts, treaties, and alliances with European nations and the United States. Third, as recognized sovereigns, Indian peoples are subject to the Federal Trust Doctrine, which is supposed to be a unique legal relationship with the U.S. federal government that entails protection. Finally, stemming from the trust relationship, the United States asserts plenary power over tribal nations, which is exclusive and preemp- tive. The latter issue is the most difficult due to the ways in which the U.S. judi- ciary has interpreted the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution to mean full and total power over tribal nations. The Commerce Clause gives Congress the power to "regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes."11 In other words, the U.S. government will not allow any state or foreign nation to interfere in commerce with tribal nations, since the government reserves the right to interact in a nation-to-nation capacity.

    Historical recognition for state-recognized tribes from the original thirteen colonies is different from that of the "treaty tribes" in the western states or the Pueblo Indians because of their earlier incorporation into the U.S. nation-state. Furthermore, the contemporary backlash against casino development through- out the United States continues to be instrumental in the opposition to federal recognition. It appears that most non-Native residents and U.S. citizens have a difficult time uncoupling the question of tribal economic development, which is about the political economy of a nation, and the issue of social justice in honor- ing the U.S. trust doctrine.

    The Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988-a U.S. federal law passed to regulate the conduct of gaming on Indian lands-served as a catalyst for re- newed political opposition to Native sovereignty movements throughout the United States. This took the form of "reverse racism" arguments to challenge laws recognizing Native rights to sovereignty and self-determination. As such, the identification of Indigenous peoples as both "special interest groups" and "racial minorities" is used to undermine the unique status of Indigenous peo- ples under U.S. federal law and international law. This changing political terrain creates the need for multiple interventions on different fronts when challenging the logic and workings of settler colonialism and how the logic of capital func- tions in relation to settler colonialism. Here we see the distinct ways capital- ism acts in these different contexts-whether through the gaming industry or the commodification of land-both tied to state economics. This is all the more complicated because non-Native communities can be affected by Indian gam- ing establishments in both positive and negative ways. Also, there is growing resentment among some Americans who see Indian gaming rights as an unfair advantage based on race privileges. This climate grossly affected Connecticut tribes, an issue featured on the program.

    The show also closely tracked the long-drawn-out federal recognition case of the Schaghticoke Tribal Nation (and intervention by the Connecticut state government) and the protracted battle over federal recognition in Hawai'i con- cerning Native Hawaiians. Briefly examining them here together gets at the heart of what my show aimed to do-to educate listeners about the distinctions regarding Indigenous politics as they differ from region to region and are often determined by their own settler-colonial historical specificities.

    In the Connecticut case, the conflation of federal recognition with the specter of Indian casinos indicates that most non-tribal residents in these states refuse to uncouple questions of tribal economic development-that is, tribal nations' political economies-and the social justice issues of honoring the U.S. trust doctrine. This is yet another reason why independent community radio is so crucial to the democracy project and self-determination struggles. The prob- lem with mainstream coverage of the Indigenous sovereignty struggle in Con- necticut is that the media venues and individual journalists have aligned with

the state instead of conducting investigative research and reporting on the issues they cover. In Connecticut, citizens' rights groups have bolstered the hostile re- sponse by state officials, who have implicated the federal process for tribes across the entire United States as they intervene to change policy more broadly through their extralegal meddling.

    While tribes can secure federal recognition via judicial ruling and con- gressional legislation, the most common path in the last three decades has been through the Department of the Interior. From 1978 to 2015 (the regulations were revised after that under the Washburn administration at the Bureau of Indian Affairs), tribes seeking federal recognition were required to satisfy seven crite- ria according to the Office of Federal Acknowledgment of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), including one requirement that they prove they have maintained political authority or influence on a "substantially continuous basis from his- torical times until the present," and another that they be externally viewed as a tribe on a continuous basis since 1900.12 The criteria have changed slightly since then,13 but essentially tribes are still expected to show that they have survived every government policy and doctrine designed to destroy them-markers of settler-colonial violence and its attendant structural genocide-as distinct, col- lective entities.

    Nowhere was (and still is) this more apparent than in Connecticut, where the state government set new legal precedents in cases involving the Schaghti- coke Tribal Nation.14 As journalist Gale Courey Toensing reported extensively for Indian Country Today throughout that period, State Attorney General Rich- ard Blumenthal, with support from Senators Chris Dodd and Joe Lieberman, interfered in the BIA's decision. In these cases, we saw the misuse of the concep- tion of tribes as racial minorities-and in a way that fueled ignorance and ha- tred. My show featured the political leader of the Schaghticokes, Chief Richard Velky, twice at different stages of the tribe's struggle. Despite the fact that the tribe had painstakingly followed the process and achieved recognition on their thirty-thousand-page petition's merits, political opponents launched a public- relations campaign accusing the tribe of politically manipulating the process to gain federal recognition. Then they launched their own secret campaign to politically manipulate the process to reverse that decision. In 2005, under pres- sure and illegal lobbying that violated a court order, the BIA reversed its federal acknowledgment of the Schaghticoke in 2004 (the BIA also did the same thing that same year with the Eastern Pequots, who had received a positive acknowl- edgment decision in 2002).

    The state defended its actions by saying it speaks for the non-Native res- idents of Connecticut. It is also bolstered by "citizens' rights" groups such as Town Action to Save Kent (TASK) and the Connecticut Alliance against Ca- sino Expansion, both of which hired one of the most powerful lobbying firms in the world, Barbour, Griffith and Rogers, to try to stop regional tribes from

securing federal recognition. TASK argued that the Schaghticoke Tribal Nation's impending recognition was a threat to the "traditions" that "took settlers more than three hundred years to build" and that their ability to "preserve them for generations to come" was at risk. Thus, TASK positioned the Schaghticoke as the "colonizers" and reversed the usual position regarding whose traditions have been attacked by settler colonialism.

    The Schaghticoke appealed their case in the federal court in January 2006 and followed up with a motion for summary judgment for their claim that their loss of federal status resulted from unlawful political influence by pow- erful politicians and a White House-connected lobbyist, who violated federal laws, agency regulations, congressional ethics rules, and court orders to have the BIA decision reversed. But, in his fifty-four-page ruling, the judge opined that pressure on agency officials did not amount to undue political influence on the agency process.

    The state of Connecticut's current stance marked a 180-degree shift com- pared to earlier cases of federal recognition. In 1983, Connecticut and feder- al representatives recognized the Mashantucket Pequot's tribal status via the Mashantucket Pequot Indian Land Claims Settlement Act. Arguably, the po- litical terrain was quite different at the time, given that the tribe had not yet gained the wealth and power for which it is notable today and was not then a major contender. In any case, the state benefits financially from the Foxwoods Resort Casino owned by the Mashantucket Pequots, as it does from the revenue (25 percent) brought in by the Mohegan tribal nation's gaming establishment.

    This contrast reveals the differences and overlaps at work in confronting present-day conditions of settler colonialism in the United States, in which a state may take a different stance depending on what it may gain financially. This means that some states may support a Native nation's quest for federal recog- nition, while others remain strongly opposed. But it also indicates a different political climate overall, given the political and economic power among the Mashantucket Pequot and the Mohegan tribal nations (at least prior to the finan- cial crisis of 2007-8)-presumably as a result of casino revenues that have state budget implications as well as political lobbying within and beyond the state.

    Unlike the cases in Connecticut, from 2000 to 2012 the government of Hawai'i pushed a federally driven bill in favor of Native Hawaiian federal recog- nition known as the "Akaka Bill," named after then-U.S. Senator Daniel Akaka. The legislative proposal aimed to reconstitute a Native Hawaiian governing entity under U.S. federal law. The bill, officially named the Native Hawaiian Reorgani- zation Act, stalled in the Senate due to Republican opposition and has been de- feated each session since 2000, with neoconservatives in the Senate condemning it as a proposal for "race-based government." The proposal was hotly contested and repeatedly reintroduced until 2012, when it finally seemed to die. However, those driving the legislation found an alternative route through the executive

branch by appealing to the Department of the Interior to craft a new administra- tive rule to recognize a "Native Hawaiian governing entity" that would have the political status comparable to Native American tribal nations without having to meet the same criteria they are subject to.15

    In the Hawaiian context, federal recognition would allow for nothing more than a Hawaiian nation as a domestic and dependent entity under the full and exclusive plenary power of the federal government. Most immediately, it would set up a process for the termination of Hawaiian land claims in exchange for that recognition. And if past versions of the Akaka Bill are any indication, this form of federal recognition would mean a degraded version of the tribal na- tion model, since past proposals specified that Hawai'i state law would apply in both civil and criminal application, and there was no land designated for the projected Native Hawaiian governing entity (NHGE). At stake here is the oblit- eration of unadjudicated claims to the former Crown and Government Lands of the Hawaiian Kingdom, which amount to 1.8 million acres. These lands are currently held in trust by the state, which leases them out to select corporate entities. The U.S. government would then have its federally reorganized NHGE empowered to negotiate a cash settlement in exchange for forfeiting land title, which is why many Hawaiian activists oppose federal recognition in favor of full independence under international law. One of the factors fueling this problem is that the government wants to clear the way for U.S. military expansion on sub- stantial part of the lands, and the state wants to sell the rest.

    In February 2009 the U.S. Supreme Court heard a major case on Hawaiian land issues, State of Hawaii v. Office of Hawaiian Affairs, et al., which addressed whether or not the state has the authority to sell, exchange, or transfer these same lands. Included in this volume is my interview with one of the original plaintiffs in the case, Jonathan Kamakawiwo'ole Osorio, who fought the state's attempt to sell. This land base constitutes 29 percent of the total land area of what is now known as the State of Hawai'i, and almost all the land claimed by the state as "public lands." These lands were claimed by the U.S. government when it unilaterally annexed the Hawaiian Islands through a joint resolution by the U.S. Congress in 1898, after they had been "ceded" by the Republic of Hawaii, which had established itself a year after the armed and unlawful overthrow of the Ha- waiian monarchy under Queen Liliuokalani in 1893. These are the same lands mentioned in a 1993 joint resolution "To acknowledge the 100th anniversary of the January 17, 1893 overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii," in which Congress acknowledged and apologized for the United States' role. Specifically, the apol- ogy affirmed that "the indigenous Hawaiian people never directly relinquished their claims to their inherent sovereignty as a people or over their national lands to the United States, either through their monarchy or through a plebiscite or referendum."

    Prior to the state government's appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, the state supreme court ruled unanimously, based on the 1993 joint resolution, that the

state should keep the land trust intact until Native Hawaiian claims to these lands are settled, and it prohibited the state from selling or otherwise disposing of the properties to private parties. What looms in the background of all of this is the question of a political settlement with Native Hawaiians about the status of and title to these lands and the potential to restore Hawaiian nationhood. What kind of nation would it be? An independent nation-state, or a domestic depen- dent nation under U.S. federal policy?

I understood my radio show to be playing a critical role in bringing these con- tested histories into the public sphere. As the dominant culture continues to marginalize Native issues, so too does the academy see them as "niche." This double discount needs urgent attention as the detrimental state policies against Indigenous peoples arguably constitute a new wave of twenty-first-century at- tempts at genocide. In other words, the politics of settler colonialism and their ramifications continue to deal hard blows to Native nations, despite the UN's adoption of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

     The ongoing relevancy of the interviews included here also point to the high stakes involved. For example, the two interviews with Margo Tamez-cofounder of the Lipan Apache Women Defense-provide a crucial genealogy for the con- temporary politics of the U.S.-Mexico border wall. The interviews detail her and her mother's legal battle with the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to prevent the Texas-Mexico border wall from cutting through Indigenous lands in El Calaboz ranchería in South Texas. These interviews take on added significance when situated in relation to candidate Trump's calls to "build the wall." On January 25, 2017, just days after his inau- guration, President Trump signed two executive orders related to immigration and border security.16 The orders are related, as one concerns the active depor- tation of people who are in the country illegally, while the other focuses on his plans to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. Related to this development, DHS announced on August 1, 2017, that it will use its authority to bypass envi- ronmental laws and other regulations to "ensure the expeditious construction of barriers and roads" near the U.S.-Mexico border south of San Diego.17 The waiver focuses on fifteen miles of contiguous land stretching eastward from the Pacific Ocean and enables the avoidance of the legal requirement to complete an environmental impact study before building on public lands.18 DHS says it has "the authority to waive all legal requirements" that its secretary deems necessary "to deter illegal crossings in areas of high illegal entry into the United States." The waiver is pursuant to authority granted to the DHS secretary by Congress and covers a variety of environmental, natural resource, and land-management laws.19 This development has broad implications for Indigenous peoples across the country. Tamez recently explained to me that this "no-constitution zone" prevails because neither Bush nor Obama repealed section 102 of the Secure

Fence Act, which she addressed in her two interviews included here.20 Hence we see the significance of this volume in providing critical genealogies to ongoing obstacles to Native self-determination and Indigenous peoples' efforts to chal- lenge the states that dominate them.

    In another example, the interviews included here with Steven Salaita and Omar Barghouti on the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) campaign pro- vide a foundation for comprehending Israel as a settler-colonial state and for understanding the legal and social challenges to BDS and Palestinian activism today by both the Israeli and U.S. governments. In my interview with Salaita, besides discussing the ethics of BDS and its resonance with conditions in Native America (a comparison addressed in his book The Holy Land in Transit: Colo- nialism and the Quest for Canaan), including a comparative analysis of colonial- ism in the New World and the Holy Land, exploring the ways in which settler societies transform theological narratives into national histories to justify their occupation of foreign land. As part of the backlash against BDS and Palestin- ian advocacy, Salaita gained a heightened public profile after writing a series of editorials in the wake of the backlash against the resolution for academic boy- cott of Israel passed by the American Studies Association. Increased surveil- lance has greatly affected his livelihood, and in 2014 the University of Illinois withdrew or "de-hired" Salaita from a professorial post in the American Indian Studies Program after the university's board of trustees' attention was drawn to his tweets on the Israeli military's onslaught in Gaza.21 The following year, the Illinois legislature unanimously passed a bill that prevents the state's pension fund from investing in companies that boycott Israel.22 This was the first anti- BDS law passed in the country, and governments across the United States have passed comparable legislation since then. 23 At the time of this writing there is a bill before the U.S. Congress, the Israel Anti-Boycott Act (H.R. 1697/S. 720). The radio archive and interviews included here offer vital, prescient insight into these developments.

    In the case of the interview with Omar Barghouti, it is important to note that he is a cofounder of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cul- tural Boycott of Israel, founded in 2004, as well as cofounder of the broader BDS movement and call issued in 2005. He is arguably one of the best-known spokes- persons about the issue and has gained notoriety for his indefatigable activism. As a result, he has also endured repeated attacks by the Israeli state, including re- pression, attempts to undermine his residency, and travel bans to prevent his in- ternational advocacy and hinder his work. In March 2017, Israeli tax authorities invaded his home and detained and interrogated him on unfounded tax fraud charges.24 Again, the significance of Barghouti's interview, like so many others from Indigenous Politics radio, is in offering a foundation for understanding the current moment and beyond.

From Palestine to Aotearoa, the interviews included here offer a platform

for critical voices-highlighting Indigenous agency and resurgence-in their immediate context through a global approach to addressing the ongoing nature of settler-colonial domination and Indigenous resistance. These conversations about the past and future, then, enable public engagement that can lead to mobi- lization and broad-based solidarity. This book is meant to provide both context for contemporary Indigenous resurgence and inspiration for its continuance.

Individuals Included on the Program

Ali Abunimah

Tupac Enrique Acosta (Nahuatl-Xicano) Czarina Aggabao Thelen

Julian Aguon (Chamorro) Christina Akanoa

Z 'Aki (Kanaka Maoli) Ahmad Amara

S. James Anaya (Purepecha and Chiricahua Apache) Chris Andersen (Métis)

Michael Anderson (Nyoongar Ghurradjong Murri Ghillar) Mikki Anganstata (Eastern Cherokee)

Tim Aqukkasuk Argetsinger (Iñupiaq) José Aylwin

Jessie Little Doe Baird (Mashpee Wampanoag) Omar Barghouti

Joanne Barker (Delaware Tribe of Indians) Giovanni Batz (K'iche' Maya)

Shanadeen Begay (Diné) Nicholas F. Bellantoni Clayson Benally (Diné) Jeneda Benally (Diné) Sherna Berger Gluck

Ned Blackhawk (Te-Moak Tribe of Western Shoshone) Eva Blake (Assonet Wampanoag)*25

Victoria Bomberry (Muscogee) Alexis Bonogofsky

Jesse Bowman Bruchac (St Francis/Sokoki band of the Abenaki) Steve Brady (Northern Cheyenne Tribe)

James BrownEagle (Elem Pomo Tribe) Lisa Brooks (Abenaki)

Kathleen A. Brown-Pérez (Brothertown Indian Nation) Margaret Bruchac (Abenaki)

Luis E. Cárcamo-Huechante (Mapuche)

Andrea Carmen (Yacqui) Tony Castanha (Jibaro)

'Iokepa Casumbal-Salazar (Kanaka Maoli) Jessica Cattelino

Clarence Kukauakahi Ching (Kanaka Maoli) Marty Cobenais (Red Lake Ojibwe) Radmilla Cody (Diné)

Betsy Conway*

David Cornsilk (Cherokee Nation)

Glen Coulthard (Yellowknives Dene First Nation)* Sarah Croucher

Sarah Deer (Muscogee [Creek] Nation) Philip J. Deloria (Dakota descent)

Paul DeMain (Oneida)* Jennifer Denetdale (Diné) Amy Den Ouden

Judy Dow (Abenaki)

Sir Edward Taikahurei Durie (Ngati Kauwhata) Bruce Duthu (Houma)

Tom Dye

Angelique EagleWoman (Sisseton-Wahpeton Dakota Oyate) Walter Echo-Hawk (Pawnee)

John EchoHawk (Pawnee)* Jorge Estevez (Taino) Alicia Ivonne Estrada Farrett (Cree)

Stephanie Morning Fire Mugford Fielding (Mohegan) Maurice Fox (Mashpee Wampanoag)*

Katherine Fuchs Nancy Gallagher

Ruth Garby Torres (Schaghticoke Tribal Nation) Tiokasin Ghosthorse (Cheyenne River Lakota) Mishuana Goeman (Tonawanda Band of Seneca)*

Tonya Gonnella Frichner (Onondaga Nation, Snipe clan) Wendy Gonyea (Onandaga)

J. Noelani Goodyear-Ka?opua (Kanaka Maoli)* Corrina Gould (Karkin and Chochenyo Ohone) Rae Gould (Nipmuc)*

Shane Greene

Hone Harawira (Ngati Hau, Ngati Wai, Ngati Hine, Te Aupouri, Ngapuhi, and Ngati Whatua)

Joy Harjo (Mvskoke)

Suzan Shown Harjo (Cheyenne and Hodulgee Muscogee) Kimberly Hatcher-White (Mashantucket Pequot)

Stanley Heller

Mose Herne (Akwesasne Mohawk) Susana Hito

Santi Hitorangi (Ma?ohi)

James T. Jackson* (Mashantucket Pequot) Moonanum James (Aquinnah Wampanoag) Hannibal B. Johnson

Tevita O. Ka?ili (Tongan) Kamuela Kala'i (Kanaka Maoli)

Ka'anohi Kaleikini (Kanaka Maoli) John Kane (Mohawk)*

Philomena Kebec (Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa) Taylor Keen (Cherokee Nation)

Rashid Khalidi Jackson T. King Jr.* Suzanne Koepplinger Annette Kolodny

Mike Krebs (Blackfoot descent)* Jennifer Kreisberg (Tuscarora) Winona LaDuke (Anishinaabe)

Richard Anguksuar LaFortune (Yup'ik), Maria LaHood

Gloria Larocque (Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation) Kent Lebsock (Lakota descent)

Erica Lee (Cree)

Stacy Leeds (Cherokee Nation) Randolph Lewis

José Antonio Lucero

James Luna (Luiseño, La Jolla band of Mission Indians) Andy Mager

Ka'iulani Mahuka (Kanaka Maoli) Lynn Malerba (Mohegan)

Daniel Mandell*

Wilma Mankiller (Cherokee)* Desireé Reneé Martinez (Gabrieliño) Jose R. Matus (Yaqui)

Malinda Maynor Lowry (Lumbee) Kevin A. McBride

Steven Paul McSloy*

Marianela Medrano-Marra (Taino)*

Rigoberta Menchú Tum (Quiche-Mayan)*

Robert J. Miller (Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma) Sherri L. Mitchell (Penobscot)

Cindi Moar Alvitre (Tongva) Rosa Moiwend

Richard Monette (Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa) Tristan Moone (Diné)

Aileen Moreton-Robinson (Quandamooka) Alyssa Mt. Pleasant (Tuscorora)

Kaimana Namihira (Kanaka Maoli) Steven Newcomb (Shawnee/Lenape) Vivian Newdick

Jean M. O'Brien (White Earth Ojibwe) Dana Olwan

Paco de Onís

Jonathan Kay Kamakawiwo?ole Osorio (Kanaka Maoli) Karla Palma (Mapuche)*

Pamela Palmater (Mi'kmaq) Lorrin Pang

Violet Parrish (Kashi Pomo)

Vivian Parrish Wilder (Kashi Pomo) Sherman Paul (Maliseet)

Andre Perez (Kanaka Maoli)

Ramona Nosapocket Peters (Mashpee Wampanoag) Victoria Phillips

Alexandra Pierce (Seneca) Kealoha Pisciotta (Kanaka Maoli) Robert Odawi Porter (Seneca)*

Rick Pouliot (Megantiquois Abenaki) Evan Pritchard (Mi'kmaq descendant) Mazin Qumsiyeh

Renya Ramirez (Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska) Jonathan Ramones (Mi'kmaq)

Madeleine Redfern (Inuit) Debbie Reese (Nambe Pueblo)

Trudie Lamb Richmond (Schaghticoke) Janet Marie Rogers (Mohawk)

Judy Rohrer

Loriene Roy (Minnesota Chippewa)

L. Mixashawn Rozie (Mahicanu) Keanu Sai (Kanaka Maoli)* Katoa Sailusi

Steven Salaita Dean Saranillio

Katherine Saunders

Brandon J. Sazue Sr. (Crow Creek Sioux Tribe) Binayak Sen

Charles Norman Shay (Penobscot Nation)

Moana Sinclair (Ngati Rangatahi, Kauwhata, Raukawa, and Maniapoto) Niigaanwewidam James Sinclair (Anishinaabe, St. Peter's/Little Peguis) Sonia Smallacombe (Maramanindji)

Paul Chaat Smith (Comanche)

Alex Soto (Tohono O'odham Nation) Loren Spears (Narragansett)

Circe Sturm (Mississippi Choctaw descendant) Annette Sykes (Te Arawa)

Margo Tamez (Ndé Konitsaaiigokiyaa'en) Wendy Giddens Teeter

Ty Kawika Tengan (Kanaka Maoli) Gale Courey Toensing

Rebecca Tsosie (Yaqui)*

Dale Turner (Temagami First Nation) Marilyn Vann (Cherokee Nation) Valerie Nana Ture Varges (Taino) Chief Richard Velky (Schaghticoke) Herman Wainggai

Harry B. Wallace (Unkechaug)

Wanbli (Sioux Valley Dakota descendant) Robert Warrior (Osage Nation)

Brian Baguck Wescott (Koyukon and Yup'ik) Charles Whalen (Oglala Lakota)

Philip Whiteman (Northern Cheyenne Tribe) Deborah White Plume (Oglala Lakota)

Violet Wilder (Kashi Pomo) David E. Wilkins (Lumbee)*

Alexandra Wilson (Opaskwayak Cree Nation) Patrick Wolfe

Cedric Woods (Lumbee)

Kristen Wyman (Natick Nipmuc) Jessica Yee (Mohawk)

Michael Yellow Bird (Sahnish/Arikara and Hidatsa Nations)* William S. YellowRobe Jr. (Assiniboine Tribe of the Assiniboine and

  Sioux Tribes of the Fort Peck Indian Reservation) Melissa Tantaquidgeon Zobel (Mohegan)

Notes

    1. Notably, WESU is the second-oldest student-run college radio station in the Unit- ed States. It is unique in that it also allows community members who are not affiliat- ed with the university to produce and host programs. See www.wesufm.org for more information.

2. The archive can be accessed at www.indigenouspolitics.com.

    3. Patrick Wolfe, "Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native," Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (December 2006): 387-409.

4. Ibid., 387.

5. Ibid., 390.

    6. Ibid., 388. Wolfe's earlier work advanced the same analysis: "The colonizers come to stay-invasion is a structure not an event." See Settler Colonialism and the Transfor- mation of Anthropology (London: Continuum International, 1998), 2. Wolfe's first book provided a history of settler colonialism in Australia through a history of anthropology that explores the links between metropolitan anthropological theory and local colonial politics from the nineteenth century up to the late twentieth century, settler colonial- ism, and the ideological and sexual regimes that characterize it. The work is an incisive analysis of the politics of anthropological knowledge given its production through the historical dispossession and continuing oppression of Indigenous peoples.

    7. J. Kehaulani Kauanui, "'A Structure, Not an Event': Settler Colonialism and En- during Indigeneity," Lateral 5, no. 1 (Spring 2016), http://csalateral.org/wp/issue/5-1/ forum-alt-humanities-settler-colonialism-enduring-indigeneity-kauanui/#fnref-351-4.

    8. The radio program eventually served as one of the catalysts for my teaching a service-learning course in the fall of 2015, "Decolonizing Indigenous Middletown: Na- tive Histories of the Wangunk Indian People." The course engaged the field of settler- colonial studies and critical Indigenous studies, along with Native American history and historiography addressing southern New England. Taking up a decolonizing method- ological approach, the class focused on the sparsely documented history of the Wan- gunk, with students conducting primary research through the seventeenth-century archives of the Middlesex Historical Society and eventually launching a Wikipedia entry about the Wangunk.

    9. Further south, in New York City, there was and still is Tiokasin Ghosthorse's pro- gram First Voices Indigenous Radio on WBAI.

   10. David E. Wilkins and Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark, American Indian Politics and the American Political System, 4th ed. (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), 33-37.

11. Ibid., 37.

   12. The criteria until 2015 were: "1. a statement of facts establishing that the tribe has been identified as an Indian entity by reliable external sources on a substantially continuous basis since 1900; 2. evidence that it has maintained a continuous communi- ty; 3. evidence that it has maintained political authority or influence on a substantially continuous basis from historical times until the present; 4. a copy of its governing docu- ment, or if it does not have one, a statement describing its membership criteria and gov- erning procedures; 5. a list of all current members, who as a whole must descend from

a historic tribe or tribes that amalgamated; 6. evidence that it consists mainly of people who are not already federally recognized; and 7. a statement that it is not the subject of congressional legislation that has terminated or forbidden the federal trust relationship." Bureau of Indian Affairs, "Revisions to Regulations on Federal Acknowledgment of In- dian Tribes (25 CFR 83 or Part 83)," June 29, 2015, https://www.bia.gov/WhoWeAre/ AS-IA/ORM/83revise/index.htm.

   13. In 2014, the same summer that DOI officials held public meetings in Hawai'i on the Advanced Notice of Proposed Rule Making, another set of public meetings was held on the federal regulations for tribal acknowledgment. As a result, the regulations on federal acknowledgment were revised in 2015 (https://www.doi.gov/hawaiian/reorg). See Bureau of Indian Affairs, "Revisions to Regulations on Federal Acknowledgment of Indian Tribes (25 CFR 83 or Part 83)," June 29, 2015, https://www.bia.gov/WhoWeAre/ AS-IA/ORM/83revise/index.htm.

   14. This also affected the Eastern Pequot Tribal Nation in Connecticut, but it did not result in a legal battle afterward.

   15. U.S. Department of the Interior press release, "Considers Procedures to Reestab- lish a Government-to-Government Relationship with the Native Hawaiian Community," June 18. 2014, http://www.doi.gov/news/pressreleases/interior-considers-procedures-to

-reestablish-a-government-to-government-relationship-with-the-native-hawaiian

-community.cfm.

   16. President Donald Trump, "Executive Order: Border Security and Immigra- tion Enforcement Improvements," The White House, January 25, 2017, https://www

.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/01/25/executive-order-border-security-and

-immigration-enforcement-improvements; Bill Chappell et al., "'A Nation without Bor- ders Is Not a Nation': Trump Moves Forward with U.S.-Mexico Wall," National Public Ra- dio, January 25, 2017, http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/01/25/511565740/ trump-expected-to-order-building-of-u-s-mexico-wall-wednesday.

   17. Colin Dywer, "Homeland Security to Waive Environmental Rules on Border Wall Projects," National Public Radio, August 1, 2017, http://www.npr.org/sections/ thetwo-way/2017/08/01/540892890/homeland-security-to-waive-environmental

-rules-on-border-wall-projects?sc=17&f=1003&utm_source=iosnewsapp&utm_ medium=Email&utm_campaign=app.

18. Ibid.

   19. Department of Homeland Security press release, "DHS Issues Waiver to Expe- dite Border Construction Projects in San Diego Area," August 1, 2017, https://www.dhs

.gov/news/2017/08/01/dhs-issues-waiver-expedite-border-construction-projects-san

-diego-area.

   20. As a now permanent fixture of the state, in conjunction with the authority being imposed by federal agencies, the Secure Fence Act threatens federally recognized tribes, including those located far from the border, as evidenced in the logic already applied in the Standing Rock case.

   21. For an overview of the legal case, see Center for Constitutional Rights, "Professor Steven Salaita," February 9, 2015, https://ccrjustice.org/professor-steven-salaita.

   22. Eugene Kantorovich, "Illinois Passes Historic Anti-BDS Bill, as Congress Mulls Similar Moves," Washington Post, May 18, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/

volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/05/18/illinois-passes-historic-anti-bds-bill-as-congress

-mulls-similar-moves/?utm_term=.9b986cbbb97b.

  23. "Anti-BDS Legislation Updates: Illinois, Florida, Colorado, Arizona (Up- dated)," Palestine Legal, March 24, 2016, http://palestinelegal.org/news/2016/3/24/ antibds-leg-update-co-fl-il.

   24. Amnesty International, "Israeli Government Must Cease Intimidation of Human Rights Defenders, Protect Them from Attacks," April 12, 2016, https://www.amnestyusa

.org/press-releases/israeli-government-must-cease-intimidation-of-human-rights

-defenders-protect-them-from-attacks/; "Israeli Attacks on Omar Barghouti Part of Ongoing Attempt to Silence and Criminalize Growing BDS Movement," Samidoun: Palestine Prisoner Solidarity Network, March 22, 2017, http://samidoun.net/2017/03/ israeli-attacks-on-omar-barghouti-part-of-ongoing-attempt-to-silence-and-criminalize

-growing-bds-movement/.

   25. An asterisk following the name indicates an occasion when a talk by that individ- ual was aired, rather than an interview.

Jessie Little Doe Baird on Reviving the Wampanoag Language

In 2009, a year before she was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship, I had the privilege of interviewing the indefatigable Jessie Little Doe Baird, cofounder of the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project. This is an intertribal effort that began in 1993, between the Mashpee, Aquinnah, Assonet, Herring Pond, and Chappaquiddick Wampanoag. The aim of the project is to reclaim Wôpanâak as a spoken language after there had been no speakers of the language for six gener- ations. Little Doe is a citizen of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe and Wampanoag Women's Medicine Society. She lives in Mashpee, Massachusetts, and teaches Wôpanâak in Aquinnah and Mashpee. Little Doe received her master of science in linguistics from MIT in 2000. She has completed a layperson's grammar of the language as well as a curriculum for teaching and is currently working toward the completion of a dictionary and expansion of the curriculum. She has also assisted in rebuilding the Pequot language and teaching at Mashantucket, Con- necticut. She also serves as the vice-chair of the Mashpee Wampanoag Indian Tribal Council. Her work on language revitalization is featured in a documentary film by Anne Makepeace, We Still Live Here-Âs Nutayuneân (2011), which had its broadcast premiere on the PBS series Independent Lens in November 2011.

This interview took place on April 4, 2009.

J. Kehaulani Kauanui: I want to ask if you could start off by telling more about your background and what led to the birth of the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project.

Jessie Little Doe Baird: Well, my background. I am a Mashpee Wampanoag woman, born and raised in the community, and I think that really the language chose me rather than me choosing it. We have a prophecy around language, leaving our home and returning to our home and, I think that the work that we are doing right now, all of us together, is really fulfillment of a part of that prophecy.

1

JKK: When you say that it chose you rather than you choosing it, could you say a little bit more about that, and how you came to it or how you felt that it chose you?

JLDB: I guess I'm just talking about the fact that when there is prophecy, when there's knowledge from outside of us, it generally knows what's best and what people need and when they need it. I think when work needs to be done, people are asked to pitch in, and sometimes people are ready and have the time and energy to pitch in, and in those times I think our best and most hopeful work gets done. I think that's what's happening now in my community, and it involves me as well as others behind me.

JKK: And this began in 1993, when you were called to do this work, right?

JLDB: Yes.

JKK: How long had it been that the language lay dormant or left home, so to speak?

JLDB: As near as I can count, for six generations there were no speakers. And there weren't any until this seventh generation, so roughly 150 years.

JKK: Can you tell our listeners more about how this is a result of the joint collaborative effort among the Mashpee, Aquinnah, and Assonet Wampanoag communities?

JLDB: Well, originally, when the project started, I contacted an elder here- one of the few elders that I had any information about or any background relationship with-and by "here" I mean Aquinnah. I contacted Miss Helen, who has since deceased. She was well respected in this community, and has been in her community, and that's really important for people here, so I asked her if she thought that there were any ways in which we could start to have a dialogue about bringing language home. She was completely receptive to that and said that she had been thinking about it for a long time and thought that we should get together and meet to discuss the possibilities and the impli- cations of the prophecy and whether or not this was the time. So we met initially, and then we started to organize monthly meetings, which the Mash- pee and Aquinnah would trade off hosting. Eventually, the Assonet Band of Wampanoag-which is not a historic tribe, but a Wampanoag community- joined the project in, I think, 1994. Last year, we had the Chappaquiddick people and the Herring Pond people join the project, so now there are actually five communities participating.

JKK: Are you the instructor for all five communities, traveling from place to place?

JLDB: Not always. I've had some students in my class for eight years now and

some of those students have taught classes at various times, so I don't have to teach all of the classes. During our Emerging Camp Beach Summer there are plenty of other facilitators to help with instruction.

JKK: Now, in terms of the language itself; I understand that it's one of more than three dozen languages classified as belonging to the Algonquian language family. Could you speak to that, in terms of the context of the language and how you came to do the early translation work that relied on the Eliot Bible in the Massachusett language?

JLDB: The language is one in nearly forty languages in a family called the Algonquian family, and so they are sister languages in the same way that Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, French, all of those are sisters in the Romance family. Wampanoag is just one of those languages with at least two dialects- the mainland dialect and an island's dialect. We don't call it Massachusetts; that's a designation that's given to the language by non-Native folks. We

do call the language Wampanoag, because it's a language spoken by the Wampanoag Nation.

   There were originally sixty-nine tribes in the nation, so the language is, as you said, just one of over three dozen languages in the family, and the Eliot Bible is but one of lots of documents-in fact, Wampanoag people were the first Amerindian people to use an alphabetic writing system to codify their language. There are many Native-written documents so we use all of those documents, not just the Bible specifically. I'm actually working on a body of research right now to display something I suspect, to prove that Eliot didn't actually do the translation of the Bible, but more supervised it, and it was done by Native speakers.

JKK: And this was when there were several-six or seven-Natives that were selected, and he supervised them and they were at the Indian college at Harvard?

JLDB: I don't think that that was the case. I don't think that he was really trying to rely on those students to do the translation. I know that he initially worked with one of his protégés by the name of John Sassamon, who got himself into trouble and turned up dead. Then he started working with another informant by the name of Joel Neesum, and I don't have the evidence that Joel Neesum was ever a student at the Indian college [Harvard Indian College], but I do know that he did some translation work with Joel Hiacombs. I doubt that even six or seven people could have completed the work, because there was a point in time when John Eliot wrote to his benefactors and basically said, "Okay, well, I think I was too ambitious trying to translate a whole Bible. Both of my infor- mants have died, so maybe I'll just do some selective religious tracts and we'll just have to go with those."

   Some eight months later, we have a whole Bible, and he said too that some of the Indians about the country laughed at him because his grammar was not very good. If you look at his attempt at the book of Genesis, in 1655, and

then you look at the book of Genesis in the finished whole Bible, in 1663, there are significant differences. I think that when he says in his memoirs that he decided to try to teach some Wampanoag people about English grammar he found that they're all "genius." I think what he did was he farmed the work out among lots of people, probably a lot of the converts that were coming from all around Wampanoag country-from Cape Ann and Gloucester to the Cape and Islands-who were converging anywhere in the area of Massachusetts, which is a place-name north of Boston. I think there was a large body of people that did the work.

JKK: So this is another one of those epic cases where one singular European man gets the credit for the labor of a larger collective?

JLDB: Well, I do honestly think that he worked really hard. And I honestly think that he supervised this work and collected it, but because of the fact that there are places in that Bible where English idioms are used, clearly the person trans- lating the idiom didn't understand what it meant, so they translated it literally and it came out really hilarious.

JKK: Could you give an example of that?

JLDB: If somebody says they were sitting around "chewing the cud," we all know what that means; that means having a casual conversation. If somebody trans- lates that as "and then they all began to chew on the insides of their cheeks," these are the types of things that get translated when people don't understand what the idiom is. An English translator would not do that, because they would understand the idiom, so there are these sorts of problems.

   And then there are also other issues. There are times when a particular translator picks a verb that talks about something that is possible within the realm of Wampanoag philosophy but not possible within the realm of Christi- anity, so a Christian translator wouldn't select that particular verb. For exam- ple, there's this very common stem-nup, NUP, nup-and it means "to die." Of course, you see that all over the Bible, because people are dying left and right. In one instance, there is an idiom that says "and he gave up the ghost." We all know that when somebody says "and he gave up the ghost," they mean, "and he died." In this particular case, at least in two instances in the Bible, this translator does not say "he died." He doesn't say "wânah nupuw," "he died," and he also doesn't say "wânah 'makuw wunahshânut8ah," "and he gave away his spirit," or anything like that. What he says is, "wânah âhqapuw," and that's amazing because if you pulled apart the morphemes of the verb stem âhqapuw is a verb meaning "to cease to exist in any form." So he didn't die, he ceased to

exist in any form. In Christianity, that's not a possibility; you are going to die, and you're either going to go to the boogey man or you're going to go onto some wonderful reward somewhere up in the sky. To choose "to cease to exist in any form" isn't an option in Christianity. So clearly, this translator is reading the story, saying oh no, no, no, the story doesn't really mean he died. The story means this: this guy decided he'd had it, period. He was not going to exist any- more in any form, spiritually or otherwise. Clearly, this is not something that a Christian translator would pick for a verb.

JKK: Your example really highlights the difference in epistemological frames.

   Speaking of Christianity, you mentioned converts earlier on, helping Eliot doing some of that translation work. In terms of the primary reason for the development of an alphabet, was it the goal then for missionaries arriving from England in the early 1600s to convert the language into written script in order to convert the Wampanoag to Christianity?

JLDB: I can say this. If I feel led to convert people, and I arrive at a place where there are literally tens of thousands of people speaking a particular language, I imagine I've got two choices. I've either got to teach those tens of thousands of people to speak whatever language all the material is in, or I need to get the material converted into their language. So, it just makes common sense if you

have to use this written material that it has to be understandable across a wide number of people.

JKK: And so there is the first Christian Bible published in (British) North America in 1663?

JLDB: Well, the first complete one. There were some texts and the Old Testa- ment prior to that. There's the book of Psalms and the Psalter, and there are some other religious documents that had been translated.

JKK: You mentioned earlier, too, that the language was used to record other documents that were non-religious. I wanted to ask you, in terms of personal letters, wills, or deeds-what constitutes the corpus of the material that you're able to go to now, and also how long was the language in use? I read that Wampanoag rivaled English literacy during the eighteenth century. What is the breaking point for the language going away after having been so successfully taken in written form among the communities?

JLDB: The language itself actually has the largest corpus of Native written docu- ments on the continent. We're talking about everything from something called the logic primer-which is a document that teaches us about rhetoric and debate-to personal letters of complaint, personal letters of apology, personal wills, deeds that are recorded in proxy of land transactions that took place a hundred years earlier, personal marginalia along the edges of Bibles. There are

documents occasionally turning up, still, and there are probably lots more out there yet to be surveyed. That's the body material besides the Bible that's being used. It's not a simple question as to what happened; a lot of things happened. One thing that happened prior to the advent of even codifying the language using an alphabetic writing system-most people aren't aware that in the Wampanoag nation, from 1616 to 1619, approximately forty thousand peo- ple died before the Mayflower even landed here, from yellow fever that was brought by a previous trading ship. That in itself wiped out lots of elders and lots of children all the way to Narragansett Bay, which is the critical group for any language: your elders and your babies.

   So disease was happening, and then there was also warfare-there was also King Phillip's War. Then there was economics. Then there was forced citizen- ship, which is a whole separate topic that not too many people are aware of-it was sort of like an Indian Reorganization Act that the state of Massachusetts conducted in 1742. After that, at one period of time, the only place with any virgin hardwood left in the region was Mashpee and Aquinnah, and those were also the only two places left with any Native governments and Native popula- tions still in place. The wood was needed for fuel; there was no kerosene, there was no oil, people weren't using coal, and so there was a movement to force

U.S. citizenship on both of these communities, even though the communities voted against it. By 1869 both Mashpee and Aquinnah had U.S. citizenship forced upon them, and what that did was it took all of the lands in common from the tribes and it separated the land-sixty acres for every person eighteen years or older-and then eight months later everybody got a tax bill. If you couldn't pay the tax, and somebody else could pay the tax, they could then cart the wood off.

   All of this push started in the 1820s, and by 1833, when things were really reaching a boiling point, we read about William Apess, a Pequot preacher, coming here from western Massachusetts to see what was going on. He actually encouraged Mashpee to take their territory back, but one of the complaints at the time was that there was a white minister by the name Phineas Fish who was being paid $500 a year by the Williams Fund at Harvard College to preach the gospel to the Indians. One of the complaints was that he speaks English, we don't even speak English, and he was taking over our meetinghouse. I think a lot of things happened, but long story short, let's say by 1900 there were very few speakers left, if any. Along with citizenship [issues] that we can read in the hearing transcripts of these meetings, there was a push for Wampanoag to start educating the children and having schools in English.

JKK: The push for assimilation, that process between 1742 and 1883, sounds like the IRA [Indian Reorganization Act] and the General Allotment Act rolled into one.

JLDB: If you look at it, I mean, even the formation of Harvard College. I think that there were two things going on. I'm not a historian by any means, but I know my people, and I know my people's history in Mashpee, and I know how they feel about their history now. Just looking back, I can clearly see that if I were an investor and I wanted to reap the benefits of the resources here in New England, one of the things I might do is try to fund a missionary effort. There were actually people that really felt like they were called by God to save a peo- ple from themselves, whether that was good, bad, or otherwise. Investors, like the New England Company, looked at this and said, "Okay, well, the easiest way for us to appropriate some of these resources is to get the people there thinking more like us, and to get them involved in the capital economy." One of the ways to do that is to let them be converted, so they supported the mission effort and supported the building of an Indian college to assimilate people so that there would be less fighting, less strife, and so that their workers wouldn't leave and their investors would be willing to send more money over.

JKK: These are the large dynamics of the colonial process that you're talking about.

JLDB: Yes. I also think that a lot of people had to eat and pay their bills. Clearly, looking at some of these documents-like, I was looking at one by Josiah Cot- ton the other day-by putting themselves out to be more knowledgeable about the language than they are, they become more useful to the colony.

   There were problems with the translation, but some of the other problems were with cultural limitations. There were all these terms in this language that can mean "sister," so I was looking at a term for "sister," "my sister," "your sister," that's fine. It does mean "sister," but it only means "sister" if it's said by a male. "Brother" says that it means "my sister." If a sister says it, it means "my brother."

JKK: So it's very context-specific.

JLDB: It just means "sibling of the opposite sex," depending on the speaker. So there are these translation problems with the documents as well.

JKK: Now, when you were working at the beginning of the project to get things started, were you influenced by other, related efforts? Did you look at other models for language revitalization efforts elsewhere?

JLDB: No, I didn't have the first clue about language revitalization. In fact, none of us knew that this had never happened before, that there had been a language that was reclaimed. We just knew that there were lots of American Indian languages, we knew that a lot of them weren't spoken anymore; we didn't

know that there were none that weren't spoken that were then being spoken again. We just didn't know, and we were just trying to look at the possibility of welcoming language home if people were ready to do that. Then we discovered

that we were going to definitely need an Algonquian linguist, and then we real- ized we couldn't afford one and that someone was going to have to go off

to school.

JKK: And that someone was you.

JLDB: Yes. And you know, I don't think we realized that that someone would be me either. I know I certainly didn't. But that's just the way it turned out.

JKK: What's the central aim of the language reclamation project, in terms of the relationship between the language and the nation?

JLDB: Well, I think that depends on who you ask. The people in the community are so varied, so there can never be any single answer, really, for your people. You get lots of different answers. For me, my aim is to bring the language back to a place where it's the principal means of expression in the community. For other folks, they might say the same thing, they might say, "I'd like to be able to present myself in my language when I die." For other people, it might be that they're Wampanoag and they've been away from home and they want to better understand their history and their philosophy and their culture by looking at language. A lot of people will go away from home, and a lot of times, lately, it's through no fault of their own; parents raise them wherever, and while they're members of the community it's hard to really get hold on what that means. I think people miss out on a huge piece of what it is to be that, without having come up in that community. Learning about language and learning about the semantics of each item really gives us a window for the people that are born and raised here. This is why we do the things the way we do them.

   Language answers that question: "Oh, this is where that came from. This is the philosophy and that makes perfect sense." And for people that haven't had the privilege of having been raised home, it gives them a better understanding of their own people and the motivations of their own people and the process- es that take place within the community. All of those things are reflected in language. There are still practices that happen at burial ceremonies and nobody understood why, and now when we look at language we can clearly see why we do certain things at burial ceremonies, and language gives us those answers.

But I think the answers to why are varied. I do know our next step: our next goal in the project is to get our immersion school opened.

JKK: Yes.

JLDB: Right now, we're working on getting the master apprenticeship program going better so we can grow more Native speakers and get some fluent speakers on board with teaching.

JKK: I want to ask more about that, but first I want to go back to this question of philosophy. You're talking about language acquisition giving your people

insight into the traditional worldview and Indigenous knowledge. In terms of returning to fluency, you've mentioned to me that you're raising your toddler to speak Wampanoag as a first language, right? Please tell us more about that process, in terms of raising somebody as one of the first Native-born speakers, so to speak.

JLDB: It's really hard. It's really hard. I mean, it's not a whole lot of fun some- times, because it's gotten to the point-which is good-where she will correct you and she challenges your skill at every minute because she's asking you to explain things. She's four and a half now, so her concepts are becoming more complicated and her abstract thought process is becoming more honed, so she's asking me to explain things. They're topics and subjects that really press you to further your own level of speaking ability in order to communicate back to her properly, so it's a real challenge. It is rewarding, but it doesn't mean that May will be a teacher. It doesn't mean anything really. It means that it's one small thing that helps to welcome language home, because she could decide not to

be involved in the work at all as an adult-and that would be her choice and I would still love and respect her either way-but it is a challenge. It means that, come the fall, we need to make some hard decisions about her schooling and what's going to happen, and jut how to keep her speaking when there won't be anyone else at school speaking if she goes to public schools.

JKK: So having to ensure that she has access to a community of speakers?

JLDB: Yeah, and she won't at school. She just won't because they don't exist.

JKK: Right. Now, in terms of the immersion school, would you speak more to that as a project? I also want to ask you what the project's successes are to date, since you started the language revitalization project.

JLDB: Well, the goal right now is to secure some funding to get some speakers, from novice speakers to more intermediate or advanced speakers, in the hopes that once that's complete we're ready to hit the ground running with an immer- sion school. The immersion school is initially for preschool, kindergarten, first and second grade, but maybe expanding if we can get more teachers trained to add a grade every other year. That's the goal with the immersion school. One

of my students-Nitana Hicks, who's a brilliant young woman-went to grad school and got her master of science and linguistics as well. She has now been accepted to one school and waiting for answers from others to get her PhD in education, so that we can get the school credentialed as well. That's the goal.

JKK: So now there are two credentialed Wampanoag linguists?

JLDB: Yes.

JKK: Excellent. And would you tell us about the dictionary project?

JLDB: The dictionary project started in 1996. I chuckle because I got a research fellowship and I just thought, "Well, I'll do something really useful with the year. I can make a dictionary, certainly you should be able to make a dictionary in a year." Well, you can't make a dictionary in a year.

   It's been since 1996, so it has now been about thirteen years. There are things being worked on; there are approximately eleven thousand items in it today, which are basically verb stems and nouns, because the language is

poly-synthetic, where you start with a piece that carries meaning and then you inflect that meaning by adding a system of prefixes, suffixes, and fixes to com- plete a phrase. Usually, one word in our language is really a whole sentence in English, so it gets pretty complicated.

   Let's say something is black-if I wanted to say the bear is black and the road is black-black would be different, because the verbs come in pairs.

Because the bear is considered animate and the road is considered inanimate, I would say, "mashq m8usuw," and the "m8usuw" means "he or she (singular) is black." "Mashq" is the bear. But if I said "the road is black," then I would say "may m8âyuw," with "may," meaning "the road," which is an inanimate noun, and "m8âyuw," meaning it (singular) is black. It's inanimate and it's black, so you would have "M8usuw" as opposed to "M8âyuw" for singular.

   Most of the verbs work in this way. If I see something, "I see" is going to come out differently depending on whether what I'm seeing is animate or inanimate. So, really, the dictionary is about eleven thousand of these items with a citation for where the verb stems come from, where the nouns pull from, and the original sentence or paragraph where the word is found is retyped

in its original orthographic system. Then, underneath that, it's retyped in the standardized orthographic system, because there was no regularized spelling for Wampanoag or English for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. You can find a word spelled twenty different ways, which is not helpful, so we stan- dardized that and then underneath that there's an example of the word used

in context, which is really important, because you don't want something to be ambiguous. If somebody wants to name their child Free you want the name "she is free" to mean "unrestricted" rather than "she is free" as in "anybody can have her." There are those sort of confusions that take place in English that you don't want to take place, and you have to have the items used in context. One of my colleagues, Norman Richards, who I met in what might have been my final year at graduate school, has been putting in a ton of work on that dic- tionary. He likes to do that, and I told him, "Knock yourself out," so that's the dictionary.

JKK: Such vast cultural differences. In terms of developing curriculum, could you speak a bit around the pedagogical styles you use and also the curriculum for adult learners versus children? Are you writing books for both speakers in terms of adult learners?

JLDB: Yes. One of the problems that I found was that we looked around to find curriculum for an Algonquian language, and it just really doesn't exist. There's no curriculum that you can pick up that covers an Algonquian language and that covers all parts of speech; there's no comprehensive curriculum that you can supplant that Algonquian language with, whichever one happens to be yours. That frame doesn't exist, so we've had to experiment with curriculum. Your students will usually tell you what's working and what's not working,

so we have workbooks that are all recorded-in case people either can't read them-or, in a couple cases, we've had blind students, and we've had the books done in Braille as well as audio. We have workbooks, we have coloring books, we have story books, we have a general phrase book that's pretty popular that gets handed out during large events when people are home or gathering. We have some script materials done for some DVDs that we're hoping to develop, but we always have to get more folks to volunteer their time to get this stuff done. It's been difficult.

JKK: It sounds really exciting.

JLDB: We also have TPR curriculum-which stands for total physical response-so they're a set of classes where people don't get any written material at all, they just watch and they hear and they say. I really like that, in combination with the NEST [Newborn Enhanced Support Team] system that Hawaiians have going. A group of us went to Hawai'i two years ago to look

at the various types of curriculum, and the school system, and Punana Leo [private, nonprofit preschools run by families, in which the Hawaiian language is the language of instruction and administration], and we got some ideas for curriculum style that way, but it's constantly being adjusted.

JKK: So you tailor it for the specific needs of the nation.

JLDB: Yes, and people will tell you, you know, "This works really well for me, I like this, let's do this again?" or "This really doesn't do anything for me, can we change this, can we change that?" To build a decent curriculum is to listen to folks and respond, and that seems to work out.

JKK: Now, in terms of the human labor you need to do that work. It's my under- standing that the language reclamation project receives no government fund- ing, neither tribal nor federal, state or local. Is that right?

JLDB: Yes, pretty much. This year my community has actually given me some money to teach some classes, which is great, but no, we don't receive any fund- ing for all of us. It really is just doing what needs to be done to take care of the community, and I think that there has to be a balance; we do definitely have to pay our bills, and that's the real world we live in. On the other hand, as Indige- nous nations, when we talk about self-determination and sovereignty, it sounds great and it sounds really sexy and romantic and all of that, but you need to

walk the walk. You need to take care of your own business and get things done and not really whine about why something can't get done-just get in there and do it-and if you're not sure how to do it, then mess it up. And if you mess it up, at least the next time you'll know what not to do, so you've learned some- thing and just keep working. That's been my philosophy.

JKK: Besides the tireless work of your volunteers-those who are financially generous or able-in terms of individuals that are committed to your mission, what kinds of materials would financial support go toward?

JLDB: Probably just the stuff we've been doing, which is workbooks, camp mate- rial, children's books, subject books, and things for immersion camp. I definite- ly am going to try to get some funding from the National Park Service this year. I'm putting out a request for proposals to work on traditional place-names. I found a document that has roughly four thousand traditional place-names in it, and I'm going to start working on this ethnohistory map project to overlay maps from the 1600s to today, to account for all of the historic boundaries, start to place the place-names on the map, fix the spelling, translate them, and see what they can tell us about the region and about activities and history. So I'm going to try and get some money from the federal government for that

this year.

JKK: It sounds like an incredible project.

JLDB: Yes, it'll be a lot of fun, and hopefully we'll get some money to work on that this year. We just missed the Administration for Native Americans grant application, but my council had actually just voted to establish an official language department with the Mashpee Tribal Council, and I've been pushing for that for sixteen years, so I'm really glad that finally happened this month. That'll give me some more teeth to go after funding. It's hard to get funding for a language department if the department doesn't exist.

JKK: That's also part of new tribal leadership at Mashpee, right?

JLDB: I think so. Most of the people who are actually in the leadership are-or have been-students of the project, so that's definitely helpful.

JKK: That's great. As we're wrapping up, I want to ask if you'd speak to some- thing that I read, something you said in an interview. You've mentioned that bringing back the language is the tribe's sacred privilege and right.

JLDB: I think I probably said it's a privilege and a responsibility. I think the point that I was probably making was that everything we have in the world has a balance, and the balance is a lot of times a privilege and a responsibility. We talk about the privileges that we have, and in our teachings the privileges are only there if we keep the responsibility to those privileges. So, while we can say that language is a privilege, there's also a responsibility that goes with it.

The language is our privilege because it helps us communicate with the rest of creation; but, on the other hand, our responsibility to language is to use it, to keep it changing, because language has to change in order to be vital. When people stop using it, it stops changing, and it stops being vital, so that's what I'm talking about.

JKK: Beautiful. Would you be willing to tell us about the lullaby that your hus- band did?

JLDB: Yes. It's a song that he sings to May; he sings to the baby. It's a grieving song as well, meaning "Please don't be sad; today is a new day, and all things are going to be good."

JKK: And that's your husband, Jason Baird.

JLDB: Yes. He sings beautifully, and I can't carry a tune with a forklift. I'm glad somebody in this house can.

JKK: I want to invite you to leave us with anything that you want us to consider.

JLDB: I would like people to consider that if they want to look at history, to un- derstand the motivations and reasons and "whys" and the "what for" of history, that they consider learning about a people's language before they start to study that culture. I know that a lot of historians are doing this and have, indeed, in southern New England. But sometimes I think they rest a bit too much on the fact that there's not a lot of Native written material. The Native written material that is there is good. And there are places where people definitely have some- thing to say about their conditions as Indian people, and about their feelings around attempted assimilation and their feeling about their connectedness to the land.

   I think that I, as a human being, would be seen as preposterous if I set out to study, say, the country of China and to write a history of the country of China, if someone asked me, "Do you know the language?" and I said, "No." "Do you read the language?" "No." "Do you know anything of the language?" "No, but I'm still going to make a history of those people and their place in history." People would see how ridiculous that is, but when we talk about American Indian history, people find that it is acceptable not to study these languages. I think that is not acceptable.

Omar Barghouti on the Ethics of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions

My interview with Omar Barghouti was featured in the first part of a two-part series (which also included Steven Salaita, whose interview is included later in this volume) exploring Palestinian self-determination as a question of Indige- nous sovereignty and the politics of Israeli occupation and settler colonialism with a specific focus on the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement. Bar- ghouti is a founding committee member of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel and cofounder of the Boycott, Divest- ment, Sanctions movement. He is the author of Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights (2011). Here he answers frequently asked questions such as Why "single out" Israel? Doesn't an academic boycott create more barriers at a time when we should be building bridges? What does the boycott entail? How does this relate to issues of academic freedom? How can we productively critique Israel and Zionism and stand firm against all forms of anti-Semitism?

This interview took place on May 5, 2009.

J. Kehaulani Kauanui: I want to start by asking you about your personal back- ground in relation the question of Palestine, and also how you became involved in the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel [PACBI].

Omar Barghouti: As a Palestinian son of refugees, as most Palestinians are, I had no choice but to be involved in the question of Palestine. The core of the ques- tion of Palestine is the question of refugees and our right to return. By coinci- dence, I got married to a Palestinian citizen of Israel, and through an arduous and long, long process I finally attained permanent residence in Israel a while back. Since then I've been living in this country as a permanent resident, not a citizen. Chances are I will not become a citizen, because I am not Jewish and my wife is not Jewish and this is part of the apartheid reality we live through.

14

All these issues put together-status as a refugee, the apartheid reality, the occupation, and so on-forces many of us to get involved. It's not a choice that you consciously make; you just have to resist this oppression in order to attain any sense of freedom and dignity.

   This was the main motive for me to join the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, after seeing how the academic community, the so-called international community, world governments, the

United Nations, and so on have failed us miserably for six decades. They have failed to hold Israel to account for international law and have failed to protect our basic fundamental human rights, including our right to self-determination. That pushed us to appeal to people of conscience and to civil society around the world to act, to carry the moral burden, so to speak, as they did during the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. So that's the basic motive behind PACBI.

JKK: I see. You use the word "apartheid." Could you speak to the use of that cat- egory? In the United States, many who are resistant to the boycott and indeed resistant to the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions [BDS] campaign targeting Israel are very resistant to acknowledge that there is a system of apartheid in place.

OB: Sure. Even some well-meaning people say, "Well, Israel is not identical to South Africa, so how can it be apartheid?" That's a misunderstanding of apart- heid, it's a misunderstanding of international law. Apartheid is a generalized crime. It's not South African patented, it's not something that was created only in South Africa. It's true that South Africa gave it its name, and that's how it became famous-like how the Palestinians gave the name intifada to the world, but you have many intifadas around the world.

   The UN conventions on the crime of apartheid have specific criteria. If these criteria apply to a specific situation of racial discrimination that is per- sistent, that is prevalent, that is lasting, then they define that situation as an apartheid situation. If anybody had done retrospective research on the U.S. South, they would have found out that it absolutely was an apartheid situation because there were two sets of laws-one applying to a certain set of people with a specific identity, and another applying to the people with a different identity-and that's what apartheid is.

   In Israel, unlike what many people think, it's not just a problem of occu- pying Palestinian territories, which is the most obvious part that everybody acknowledges, including the U.S. government. The basic question about Israel is that it has ethnically cleansed most of the Palestinian people-now, the majority of Palestinians are refugees-and refuses to let them back simply because they are not Jewish. Pure and simple. Any Jew around the world can go to Israel and attain citizenship and nationality on the spot. Palestinians, the indigenous people of Palestine, the Palestinians who were expelled and who

were ethnically cleansed from their land, cannot go back home as international law stipulates. They cannot go back home, simply because they're not Jewish. That's one aspect that's extremely important in our specific Israeli apartheid reality. Other than the denial of UN-sanctioned refugee rights, inside the coun- try itself there are twenty-plus laws that institutionally discriminate between Jews and non-Jews among citizens of Israel. The Jewish citizens are considered nationals and are entitled to the rights of nationals. Palestinians, the indigenous people of the land who are citizens of Israel, are not nationals, they're just citi- zens, and they're not entitled to the rights that nationals are entitled to.

   There's a two-tier legal system that discriminates across the board in every important domain of life, from education, to health, to land ownership, to jobs, to every major aspect of life. So the fact that Palestinian citizens of Israel can vote, unlike South African Blacks, who could not vote, is minimal. It's sym- bolic, that's the difference, but it's a meaningless difference. The basic reality of apartheid is across the board, in every vital domain of life.

JKK: Given this reality that you're talking about, in terms of its touching ev- ery major aspect of life, how then are we to respond to the claim that Israel is a democracy? You know, the saying that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East . . .

OB: You cannot reconcile democracy with apartheid. South Africa was a democ- racy for whites and an apartheid for Blacks. Israel is certainly a democracy for Jewish Israelis and it's an apartheid for Palestinians. And again, if a democracy does not include all the citizens and if the state is not defined as a state with

all its citizens, it's not really a democracy. That's a real far-fetched definition of democracy that does not conform to any of the standard definitions. In Israel, the Palestinians are simply disenfranchised from most of the decision-making processes in the state. It's not a real democracy when you have institutionalized racial discrimination.

JKK: I wanted to know if you could discuss the linkages you see. You've ac- knowledged that Palestinians are an indigenous people, and there's definitely a paucity of understanding of Palestinians as indigenous. Could you speak to question of ethnic cleansing, indigeneity, and also the linkages to genocide?

OB: Yes, the Palestinian people are such a mix. I also joke about it, and I say we must be the least pure people on Earth because we are such a mix of every

occupying power that came, generation after generation, and we're proud of it. We're proud of being such a mix of so-called races and ethnicities and nation- alities and so on, but that's the Palestinian people, and this is the people that existed on this land for many, many, many generations. White settler-colonists came mainly from Europe and colonized the state, just like North America, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and so on were colonized. There were so

many indigenous Palestinians, predominantly Arabs, that in order to establish this white colony, you had to get rid of them. The basic tenet of the Zionist ideology is "a land without a people to a people without a land." The problem is that Palestine did have a people.

   It's a self-fulfilling prophecy; in order to make this a reality, they had to ethnically cleanse between 700,000 and 900,000 Palestinians in 1947 and 1948, creating the massive refugee population outside the borders of current Israel and destroying their villages in order to prevent their return. This is a very im- portant part that people forget. Destroying the villages continued many, many years after the refugees were ethnically cleansed in order to create a new reality, whereby the refugees had nowhere to go back to. So, even if they went through the borders clandestinely somehow, they wouldn't find any place to go back to and they would be caught and expelled again or killed. We did not see the same level of genocide that Native Americans did in North America or Aborigines did in Australia, for example, but that was a different era, when white settlers could get away with mass genocide without any accountability.

   Israel came a bit too late for that. It was created in 1948, and you already had a United Nations, you already had a certain international system in which, to a large extent, coming after the Holocaust, it was completely unacceptable for mass genocide to occur. So Israel and Zionists opted for what was the second-best choice from their perspective: ethnic cleansing. Get rid of the population. Kill a few, terrorize them, kick them out, and bulldoze their homes. And since then, Israel has been continuing this process of ethnic cleansing and very slow genocide. We cannot compare the genocide that happened in North America. Even the recent massacre in Gaza, for example. It's really an act of genocide, what they've been doing in Gaza-not just war against Gaza, but the year and a half of siege prior to that aggression which starved people almost to the verge of death. It's a very slow death. It's not a massive death as happened in the Holocaust or as happened in North American genocide of the Indigenous population, but this is an act of genocide.

JKK: Thank you for explaining that. That's really helpful in understanding the situation. Within the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, I've heard the term "scholasticide" used to describe Israeli assaults in Gaza that have targeted institutions of education. Did that term originate with the Palestinian campaign?

OB: No, actually, it did not come out of PACBI. I think one of the Palestinian academics in Britain, Dr. Karma Nabulsi, was the first to coin that term, but I'm not 100 percent sure. In any case, it's a term we certainly endorse. Israel's war against Palestinian education is decades old. It did not start with destroying buildings in the Islamic university in Gaza or with destroying tens of schools- partially or fully-including some UN-run schools in Gaza. That was the

latest chapter of Israel's war against Palestinian education, but that war started long ago.

   Ever since the ethnic cleansing of 1948, which we call the nakba (catastro- phe), ever since the existence of the state of Israel on top of the ruined Pales- tinian society, they've targeted our institutions for education, especially high education. They've prevented any possibility of establishing higher education until Palestinians established universities despite the occupation, despite all the restrictions. And ever since Palestinian universities were established under occupation, in the '70s, '80s, and so on, Israel did its best to prevent them from developing. During the First Intifada, for example, in 1987, until 1993, Israel closed all Palestinian universities, some of them for four consecutive years.

Imagine a university closed for four consecutive years. It closed all schools and it banned alternative education, so as a little kid, if you were caught with books in your hands, you would go to jail, and you would be tortured. Every child had to hide their books under their clothes, because if an army patroller was pass- ing by and they noticed the books, they would be in real trouble for carrying them. This was a reality that is undeniable, that is extremely well documented by many reliable sources.

   Closing schools and universities for years on end was intended to make Palestinians a less-educated people, a people who cannot ask for their rights, a people who cannot realize their aspirations. It was what Professor Sara Roy of Harvard University calls de-development. This policy of de-developing Palestinian society and Palestinian reality is an ongoing Israeli policy, from 1948 to the present. The massacre and acts of genocide in Gaza, the destruc-

tion of so many schools and academic institutions in Gaza is just a chapter in a long book. It's the most massive, the most criminal chapter in a long record of Israel's targeting of Palestinian education.

JKK: In terms of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, could you please speak to the origins of that initiative and your role?

OB: Sure. PACBI was established in 2004. It has issued its call for academic and cultural boycott of all Israeli institutions since then. In July of 2005, a year after the International Court of Justice had ruled against Israel's wall built on occu- pied territories as illegal, that general Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions campaign was launched. PACBI called specifically for boycotting academic and cultural institutions, generating a lot of criticism, a lot of debate, a lot of controversy: Why start with the academy? Aren't they your natural allies? Aren't academics and cultural figures the most progressive? So on and so forth.

   All the myths put out by the so-called Zionist class-the academy in Israel and cultural institutions in Israel-are in fact no different than general Israeli society. They're as racist, they're as supporting of racial discrimination, of oc-

cupation, of apartheid. Academic institutions have never taken a position, for example, to end occupation. Never, ever. No academic institution or union in Israel has ever taken a stand against occupation, let alone for ending the apart- heid reality within Israel itself or for the refugee's right of return. So, even the simplest, most basic, black-and-white issue of ending the occupation has been off the agenda for Israeli academic institutions and individuals, and this applies to cultural institutions as well.

   Second, academic and cultural institutions play an extremely important role as an organic part of the military-security complex in Israel. They play an ex- tremely important part not just in perpetuating occupation through research, studies, justification, and so on, but they also act as an ambassador for Israel, giving Israel this deceptive image of an enlightened, Western democracy that does not have any problem except some disputes with its neighbors. This false image has been created meticulously over decades, mainly by academics and artists from Israel and academics' and artists' institutions.

   Now, we do not call for boycotting artists, writers, and academics, but we do call for boycotting their institutions, and that's an important difference. It's not a blanket boycott; it's an institutional boycott. It always was. We never called

for boycotting individuals. We don't believe in boycotting individuals, for the simple reason that that would involve some form of McCarthyism-we'd have a political test and decide who's the good artist, who's the good academic,

and who's not. We oppose this on principle, and we oppose it on pragmatic grounds as well. We're in no position to have a political test to decide who's a good Israeli and who's a bad Israeli. We don't believe in that. This happened during the South African anti-apartheid struggle, but much later on, by the UN. The UN did have a political test to decide who was a good South African, who was not a good South African. We're not there, and we are certainly, as a campaign, not interested in being that thought police to decide who's a good person and who's not.

   With institutions, it's 100 percent complicity. There is no academic or cultural institution in Israel that has ever stood out as calling for the ending of occupation or for ending any form of Israeli oppression against the Palestin- ians. They don't recognize our rights. They play a major part in our oppression, and they must be boycotted.

JKK: Would you speak to the conditions for the boycott in terms of compelling Israel to abide by certain precepts of international law? What are the key issues of compliance?

OB: Yeah, what's the endgame? People always ask us: Do you want to destroy Israel? Do you want a one-state solution? What exactly do you want?

   In fact, the BDS campaign, which PACBI is a key part of, is not a political- solution-based campaign, it's a rights-based campaign. In other words, we focus

on three fundamental, basic rights that are recognized by international law. Those are the most basic rights, without which there can never be a just peace and, therefore, there can never be a durable or sustainable peace. Those rights are, first, the right to live in freedom without occupation-without coloniza- tion in the West Bank in Gaza, including in Jerusalem. The second right is the right to live free from racial discrimination inside Israel. In others words, the Palestinian citizens of Israel deserve full individual and collective equality. The third is the right of return for our refugees. According to UN Resolution 194, they have a right to their homes of origin and to reparations. This is basic. Ev- ery refugee in the world has a right to go home; that's basic in international law. Palestinians have been denied that just for being non-Jewish. This has to end.

JKK: Any thoughts you want to leave us with?

OB: Yes. I think our nonviolent civil form of resistance had a lot of potential, as its South African predecessor did, in turning the tables against Israel and the hegemonic powers that support Israel, including the EU and the U.S. govern- ment. I think it's the responsibility of people of conscience to fight back, to resist this hegemony, and to show solidarity among ourselves from the Indige- nous peoples of North America to the Palestinians to people fighting for justice and for ending of oppression everywhere in the world. We stand together in one fight against injustice, against this oppression.

Lisa Brooks on the Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast

Lisa Brooks (Abenaki) was a guest on the show in 2009 to discuss her new book, The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast, which focuses on the role of writing as a tool of social reconstruction and land recla- mation. In it she documents and analyzes the ways in which Native leaders- including Samson Occom, Joseph Brant, Hendrick Aupaumut, and William Apess-adopted writing as a tool to assert their rights and reclaim land. At the time, Brooks was an assistant professor of history and literature and of folk- lore and mythology at Harvard University, where she was promoted to associate professor before taking up a position at Amherst College in 2012. Among her other projects, she coauthored the collaborative volume Reasoning Together: The Native Critics Collective (2008) and served on the editorial board of Studies in American Indian Literatures, on the council of the Native American and Indig- enous Studies Association, and on the advisory board of Gedakina, a nonprofit organization focused on Indigenous cultural revitalization, educational out- reach, and community wellness in northern New England. Her newest book, Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip's War, was published in 2018.

This interview took place on September 8, 2009.

J. Kehaulani Kauanui: I want say how incredibly rich I found your book [The Com- mon Pot] to be, and that I learned an awful lot from it. It's really important that people all over read it, but particularly those like myself who are not from this land, but living in the Northeast. I'm really happy to include an exploration of this book, especially given the subtitle of my show: "From Native New England and Beyond."

Lisa Brooks: Right, right. Thank you. And thank you for doing the show and helping us to tell our stories.

JKK: Yes. I find that this book is a major contribution. I really see it as a way that you've reconsidered the historical record and reframed it-and I'll ask you

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some questions about that. You've really provided an important genealogy writ- ten in the appropriate cultural framework to understand what's going on right now today, whether it be state domination of tribal nations or intertribal rival- ries, and you're bringing about an understanding of how Indigenous peoples responded to that colonial encroachment. I want to start by asking you if you would talk some about your personal background, and how you came to study the early writings of Native Americans in the Northeast.

LB: Sure. It's a long story, so I'll try to give a brief version of it. I think there are so many places where I could begin the story, but one of the places where the book came about was back when I was in my early twenties, when I was an undergraduate working in the tribal office of the Abenaki Nation. One of the reasons I was working there is because I, as a young person, like a lot of young people, was trying to find out and understand more of where I and my family fit into the larger Abenaki network. I was trying to connect a lot of the stories that my dad and grandpa told me to other people's stories, and also trying to give back in a way.

   I had grown up outside of northern New England, where my family's originally from-where my dad and his granddad were from-so it was really important to me to reconnect. Especially since the early nineties were a time of real strong resistance in the Abenaki Nation, I was really fortunate to get my education during those times, when people where fighting very hard for sovereignty and for land rights and land reclamation. That's where I got a lot of my education and training in history, working on those land-rights cases and aboriginal rights cases and having teachers like Chief Homer St. Francis and the tribal judge Michael Delaney, elders like Bob Wells and Doris Minckler.

And especially, for me, it was really doing a lot of work and sitting up late over coffee with the Lampman family-especially Louise Lampman Larivee and her brother Lenny Lampman-trading stories back and forth and being taught how important it was to understand how the oral history, the written documents, and land-based knowledge are combined. And then, learning how you translate that to non-Native people, how you explain that, how you fight to protect the land by doing that kind of diplomacy. It's not an easy thing, and it's a tightrope that a lot of Native leaders walk all the time.

   I was a student then, and I'm a student now. I don't think I will ever be in the position of a leader where I'd be able to do the kind of diplomacy that those folks did, but I sure learned a lot from being there with them. And I'm still learning a lot today. Basically, it's a long way of saying that at that time, I

was totally immersed in a lot of these documents and in the stories themselves. Then, years later, when I decided to go to graduate school, I was really shocked when I took my first classes-and they were classes on early New England liter- ature and a class in American nature writing-and I was shocked that there was nothing by Native people or about Native people in those classes. Because to

me that was central; for me, when I was learning the history of New England, our struggles were the main story, right? It was shocking to me that none of it was there.

   My dad had always said that there's a reason why American history starts with the Pilgrims and then goes immediately to the Revolution. He said it was because of the 150 years in between, where we had the upper hand, where Native people had the upper hand, and there was a way that was hidden. Sure enough, that's what I found when I went to graduate school, and when I talked to the professors about it I was even more shocked to learn that from their point of view, there was nothing out there that they could teach, that the mate- rial just wasn't there. They assumed that there were no writings by Native peo- ple that would really fit in, and this shocked me even more, because a couple of other Abenaki people-authors Cheryl Savageau and Joseph Bruchac-had introduced me into the networks of Native writers through Wordcraft Circle,

and I knew that there were hundreds and thousands of Native writers out there living today. So the idea that mainstream professors of, say, literature and histo- ry didn't know the wealth of material that was out there, that motivated me to get out there and show how much there was, and also prove the people wrong who said there wasn't anything out there, that there were no writings.

   When I set about to do the research on it, I was amazed at just how much there was. It was like I knew there was a good amount of material out there, but once I started doing the research and archives I found that there was enough to fill ten books easily, and that was just restricting myself to the Northeast. It was just amazing how much writing is out there by Native people. And, of course, what you have to realize is that Native people weren't writing poetry and short fiction. They were using writing as a tool that would help them to take back their lands and to reconstruct their communities. They were saying, How could we make this useful to our communities? So that was a really important thing that I learned while I was doing my research.

JKK: Right. Now, I'll come back around in terms of how that early writing tech- nology's been regarded, but I want to ask first if you could tell us more about the title of your book and the metaphor of the common pot?

LB: Sure. I think it's a metaphor that a lot of Native people will automatically understand, on both a basic and a more complicated level. It was interesting to me because it was really when I was immersed in a lot of the writings by Native people that the title came to me, and I knew right away that that had to be the title because I kept finding these writings by Native leaders and treaty litera- ture, as well, where this metaphor was used. It was used in so many different ways, but it all meant the same thing. Whether somebody was talking about the dish with one spoon, in reference to a large network of Native nations who are in alliance, or talking about the village as a dish that needed to be protected,

or, later on, there was a petition from the Stockbridge Mohicans where they talked about how they had to cut up their dish into pieces. There's one by the Mohegans like that, and then there's another one by Stockbridge later on. And then, of course, in the language there are all these metaphors for land, where the land is like a dish. You see this in both Algonquin writings and in Iroquois writings, which to me seemed really important. It's in the Great Law as well, this metaphor, the common pot. It's difficult to talk about in short because it means so many things, and in some ways it's a metaphor for the land as a bowl that contains everything.

   You've heard, in European history, about how people once thought the world was flat, and then had this grand discovery that it actually was round. Well, for Native people the world was always round, but if you can imagine it being a bowl where whatever you put in is there. It's not like if you put some- thing into the bowl, you can then take it out later on. You've got to deal with it. Whatever's in the bowl, you have to deal with.

   It also means that everything is in the bowl together, so that everything that you do within the bowl impacts something else. So, sort of like this idea of a web; if you pull on the spider's web, it affects every other part of the web. Well, a bowl is like that, and in some ways it really fits well with how ecologists understand the way the world works now. I think in a lot of ways, people were thinking in ways that really mesh with ecology now, and ecologists are just coming on to this idea.

JKK: So, a holistic approach that talks about that interdependency in terms of, say, an ecosystem.

LB: Exactly. Yes, and in addition to understanding people and everything that's in the world as part of that ecosystem, in our languages, a lot of the things in the world that would be objects in English are actually very much alive and acting on us, and we're acting on them. It's also about all those social networks, right, that everything we do impacts everything else. Part of the metaphor

is that the bowl is a shared space, and that it's a space where we have to keep balance. If a bowl has too much on one side, it could lean over and everything makes a mess. You need to keep that balance, and the way that people in the Northeast believed that that balance could be kept was by making sure every- thing was distributed evenly. So, one of the roles of leaders in Native networks was to ensure that resources within the community were distributed equally among the community, but also that they were giving out resources to other folks in the network, and that they were coming back.

   War often resulted when people failed to achieve that goal, and I think what a lot of people assume is that Native people were living in some kind of perfect harmony or something like that, before the colonists came. Of course, we know that's not true. I mean, harmony was the ideal goal, and we had a lot of strate-

gies in place to try to maintain that goal and achieve that goal, but just like any other human beings on Earth, we also failed in doing that. A lot of the stories that we have come out of learning from those failures.

JKK: Well, and you do talk in the book about balance always being the aim, and sometimes the way that that romanticization takes place today-for example, when people romanticize Native cultures in a precolonial era-is to assume, say, there is no violence when, in fact, violent retribution is in some cases actually a part of achieving balance once somebody's overstepped, so to speak, right?

LB: Yes, that's right.

JKK: I want to go back to that concept of Native space, because one of the things you mentioned when you were talking about balance is living on the land to- gether. In your focus on Native writings during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, you examine the centrality of land, community, and the shared space of sustenance among relations. I wonder if you could talk more about how

you worked with the concept of Native space. I also want to acknowledge the subtitle of your book, "The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast," and ask you to speak to that.

LB: Sure. In some ways, using the phrase "Native space" was a way to talk about this place before it was called "New England," and also that this place continues to be Native space even after "New England" is imposed upon it. I think a lot of people, again, when they look at the Northeast, they assume that it's almost as if New England has always been here, like this has always been destined to be New England. There's that sort of underlying current in a lot of the scholarship I see, and one of the things I wanted to do was to acknowledge this place as Native territory both before and after colonization. One of the ways I tried to do that in the book, and hopefully succeeded at somewhat, was to dislocate the reader and put them in what for many people would be an unfamiliar territory, in many ways mirroring how the colonists would have come into this place.

They didn't come into it as a known territory of New England; they came into it as it being Indian Country.

   The idea of Native space focused on the networks of riverways that Native people traveled and the networks of relations-the networks of kinship that connected people in this space. The riverways were really our highways, and even a lot of the place-names of villages and other gathering places, you can really only understand the place-names if you're in a canoe on the river. They're not names from an outside place, they're names from within the river, they're about navigating the riverways, about navigating and getting to these places that are named often in relation to the riverways themselves. Oftentimes people don't understand how these rivers connected Native people almost all the way

across the continent. It's really phenomenal, when you look at a map of the Northeast just with the riverways, it's an incredible thing to see, and also to un- derstand the networks of kinship that connected people, because so often when we see Native people in American history or literature we only see individuals or we just see "Indians" as a mass. I really wanted to get to the people as parts of families, and as parts of communities, and turn the way that we often look at New England history around. Whereas historians of New England always know the Mathers-the individuals of New England history on the English side- very few people understand who the individuals or families are on the Native side. That's a lot of how I oriented my research, too, was looking up family names and things like that, to try to find the writings of particular Native peo- ple. I don't know if that completely gives the sense of what I mean by "Native space," but I guess it gives a little bit of a snapshot, anyway.

JKK: Certainly. Well, and as you say, you are locating individuals within that- how they are enmeshed with their own social and familial networks and then beyond their own Native nation. Speaking of orientation, you mention the strategy of dislocating the unfamiliar reader from the get-go, and I want to look at that a little bit with you. Your book includes pictures of many maps, and very different kinds of maps, and I wonder if you could talk about how they func- tion and how your strategic placing of them assists in reframing the historical landscape of the region. You really give us a new picture of Native space before and after colonization, and in the transitional period. I also wonder about something very provocative that you say at the beginning, where you state: "The map and the book are the same thing." Can you speak to both of those?

LB: Sure. So the maps, I love. The maps were one of my favorite parts of doing the book. They actually just came about, originally, as a tool for me because I found that once I was enmeshed in the writings and in a lot of the land-based research that I was doing, none of the maps that I had worked to help me understand where all these places were. I found myself taking an old road map and redrawing things and putting sticky notes on it, and then, one day-I was just a graduate student and I was at Cornell-I said, "I need a new map. I need a map that just has the riverways." Luckily, Cornell had a map department in the library, so I went there and told the map specialist, look, this is what I need.

And, of course, there is no such map, so she actually helped me at that time to make a really rudimentary map of the riverways just in New England using

GIS. And the funny thing was that at the time, we couldn't put Canada on there because the systems for Canada and the U.S. were completely separate. Then, even later on, when we went to make a map for the book, we found we had to use two separate programs. We always talked about those borders separating us, and that was a great example; we had to work really hard to get the rivers in Canada and the rivers in the U.S. to match.

JKK: Isn't that something? And that's GIS as in Geographic Information Systems.

LB: Right. It's a computer-based program that we were using, which was really the only route to doing this, and that allowed me to create maps that would have as the base the riverways and the mountain ranges and the lakes and ponds that were really instrumental to Native people in terms of understanding their own territories. I was really happy that we were able to create maps for the book. I had a research assistant, a former student named Jenny Davis, who really had a fantastic grasp of Native geographies. She worked closely with me in creating those maps and using GIS, and it was an exciting thing for both of us to work on.

   In the book, they really function as guides. I feel like it would be almost impossible to understand the chapters without using the maps as reference.

My hope is that readers use the maps and constantly go back and forth, because there are a lot of Native place-names in the chapters and I don't often note what the colonial names are of those places, so it's important to be able to go back and forth with the maps. Really, what the maps do is remind and relocate the reader in that Native space and in the Native places, because the writers that I'm working didn't understand, say, "New Hampshire" as a place. They didn't understand the Connecticut River in the way the colonists did, they under- stand Kwinitekw as this central trade route that had lots of Native villages

on it, that people traveled through and that connected people all over the country. They understood that area-it's interesting, because they understood that area as being central, whereas today we think of the Connecticut River as the boundary between Vermont and New Hampshire. Native people never

would have seen the Connecticut River as a boundary; instead, the mountains are more boundaries, which sort of makes sense when you think about

it geographically.

   I wanted people to understand these places had names-and still have names-that precede the colonial cities and the colonial states and the colonial boundaries. It was really important to me to take away the maps of the states, because I think a lot of misunderstanding happens when we assume that places existed during those times, when they really didn't.

JKK: It's interesting that you've turned the map on its head. I mean, often we think of maps as being a tool for colonization because it abstracts the land, yet you're decolonizing this cartographic approach. I want to use that as a segue to talk about this binary between oral and literate cultures, and I wonder if you could tell our listeners a bit more about that. To me, when you say "the map and the book are the same thing," it really challenges that; and this goes to one of the central arguments of your book, where you suggest that Native individuals learning Western literacy were not corrupted by forms of writing

introduced by the European colonizers, but instead that they were using these skills they acquired to compose petitions and political speeches. I wonder if you could speak to that, to writing as a tool of resistance rather than merely being cast as what you call a "coercive colonial enterprise," and challenging that notion.

LB: That, for me, was one of the most exciting things to work on, because when I was in graduate school I was again shocked to discover that many literary scholars sort of assumed that once Native people took up writing it was some- how a corrupting influence. They assumed that it would make them abandon their oral forms, and also that an oral story recorded by an anthropologist

was somehow a purer form of Native American literature than, say, one of the Pequot author William Apess's very strong political treatises.

   I just wouldn't accept that argument. I found more and more that it was rooted in European and European-American anthropologists' ideas about purity, about what's a pure culture and what's a corrupted culture. One of the things that I found in looking at the early writings is that, although there are plenty of Native people that have adopted that point of view, many of the early writers did not see writing that way at all. Instead, they saw writing as a com- plement. In fact, I was also pushed into looking at some of the earlier forms of writing-such as wampum and birch-bark scrolls and even the Mayan codices. There have been many Native authors, including Craig Womack, Leslie Mar- mon Silko, and Louise Erdrich, who have talked about this, that in indigenous languages and indigenous practices, this graphic way of writing-with petro- glyphs, or with the codices or birch-bark scrolls or wampum-it's the same thing as writing in script.

   In fact, our word for "book" in the Abenaki language, awikhigan, evolved from the words for "birch-bark writing." That word encompasses all sorts

of writing-from letters to maps to what many people would see as artistic representation-but they are all part of the same thing, and they are all tools for marking, writing, drawing, for communicating. And they could be tools for remembering as well, for remembering histories, for remembering stories.

   For Native people, writing came to be used in the same way that wampum was used or that birch-bark scrolls were used or, in the case of Mesoamerica, that the codices were used. In many ways, writing has always been complemen- tary to oral tradition, and in practice it has, too. Today we are often using writ- ings that were put down by the people who came before us to recover language or to recover traditional stories, and if we use them in that way then they are really important tools for maintaining and recovering oral tradition.

JKK: Well, if we could dwell for moment on the wampum. You refer to wam- pum as an example, in terms of the relationship between that and the written word, to take down that binary, that wampum, along with birch bark, can be

a tool for communicating. For those unfamiliar with the way wampum was worked into early treaties, as written word, could you just explain that a bit more? When you get into these examples of different conflicts that you go into in the different chapters, wampum plays a really central role.

LB: Yes. We could probably do a whole hour on wampum and, again, that's something I feel like I'm a student in, but let me give it a try.

   Again, there's this perception that wampum was sort of like money-and that's the way that the English perceived it and adopted it in their own colonial networks-but for Native people, wampum was a vehicle for so much more.

One of the things that wampum did was "bind words to deeds." I think that's a quote from Arthur Parker, the Seneca scholar. Wampum was used in councils, in treaties, in marriages, and what it would do is if you said words with wam- pum, it would bind you to those words. So it wasn't seen as something that was just symbolic either; wampum itself is seen to have a power, much like writing, that could be used either for destruction or creation. It could either be used to create relationships or it could be used to destroy relationships. It's something that you have to be really careful with, and you don't want to put wampum with your words unless you really are serious and mean to stand by them.

   One of the really interesting things, in regards to writing, is that one of the authors whose writings I talk about in the book-Hendrick Aupaumut, who was a Mohican sachem and who was very instrumental in playing a mediating role in the 1780s and '90s-talked about that if a message was relayed without wampum, or writing, it was disregarded. So it was thought to not have real weight. I think that's really important, because it's showing writing fulfilling that role of wampum, but not replacing wampum. They were both in use at the same time; and, in fact, during that time, say when you see the United States sending a message to Native nations, they would often send their message with wampum, because they understood the importance of that. In the same ways, Hendrick Aupaumut was sometimes asked by other nations to send a message and to record it in writing to bring to those nations, because they were both serving the function of binding those words to deeds and of recording the words in earnest. So both continued to play a really important role.

JKK: I'm so glad you've laid that out too, because even in contemporary comedy and cartoons on television, the joke about wampum is that money gets linked to the stereotypes of "casino Indians"-without any acknowledgment about

the symbolic and in some ways ritualistic importance of wampum. I recall in your book that you talk about it also as a valued conduit for rebalancing, as a material.

LB: Yes. Especially in times of real conflict, wampum was high in demand because it was used in important ceremonies where the emotions that cause violence would be appeased. These were long ceremonies that we're lucky

enough to have, in some case, recorded by Native speakers, not as anthropolo- gists or informants but as important records of political council. These ceremo- nies went on for days, and they had to happen before any political agreements could happen. And you had to have wampum in order to do this, in order for people to clear their minds of the things that would cause violence and conflict between them. Again, wampum wasn't just symbolic here, but it was thought to be a really important material that would help cause this transformation. It's part of many, many nations' very old stories about how to appease conflict.

JKK: You have a chapter on Joseph Brant and Aupaumut as they were in conflict due to competing visions of the common pot, "Two Paths to Peace." I found that really enriching, also, because in what little I've read in terms of different individual Native leaders, Joseph Brant gets talked about, but I had never heard of Aupaumut before reading your book.

LB: Yes, Joseph Brant's really famous. I was surprised too, because I felt so much of a pull to looking at Aupaumut that I've been surprised in that past couple

of years to learn that so many people have not heard of him. He was such an important and often controversial figure, much like Joseph Brant was during that time. For me, the conflict between Aupaumut and Brant was fascinat- ing, because here you had two Native leaders-one a Mohican leader, one a

Mohawk leader-both of whose communities had been ravaged by the Revolu- tionary War, even though they served on different sides. Neither of them made out well, and in the aftermath of that-they were both young captains in that war-both of them went to try to forge a peace between the nations to the west and the Ohio Valley-that entire region-and the United States. They both had different visions of how that was to be done, and I felt like I learned so much by putting those two side by side. You know, there's plenty of books out there on Joseph Brant or that deal with Joseph Brant, and then there's some book chap- ters and articles that deal with Hendrick Aupaumut, but seeing the two of them together, I learned so much.

   One of the really important things about their story and that chapter is-just ask your readers, how many of them have heard of the United Indian Nations? I always ask that question to folks, and I hadn't heard of it before I started doing this research, and so few Americans know about it. It's one of the most important confederations in our history, whether we're Native people or we're Americans, it's really something that we need to know about and that I think should be taught in schools. There was this incredible confederation of Native nations in, again, the Ohio Valley region-but by that region I'm talking about a huge area, all the way from New York out into Illinois, probably, and south to Cherokee territory. There were Cherokees and Creeks that had repre- sentatives that went into the United Indian Nations. At one time in American and Canadian and Native history, there was a real possibility that there would

be an entire country that would be called the United Indian Nations that would consist of this confederation of Native nations, that would be to the west and north of the United States-and again, let's remind ourselves that the United States didn't exist to the west of the territories at that time-and that would be south of British Canada.

   Both Joseph Brant and Hendrick Aupaumut were involved in an agreement between these nations and the United States. The story is really compelling, and almost heartbreaking, in some ways, because it came so close. For reasons it would take me too long to get into, in the end the negotiations unfortunately collapsed. But it was probably two decades where Native leaders were work- ing with each other and counciling with each other for months on end every summer, to figure out what to do in the wake of the American Revolution and how they were going to survive. This sort of metaphor of the common pot and, in their words, the dish with one spoon was an important way of them thinking about themselves as a confederation.

JKK: And what's so important, what I learned from that chapter, is how none of what we see as the U.S. empire's expansion was inevitable.

LB: Right! That's right.

JKK: Now, speaking about the American Revolution, I wanted to ask you about your chapter on William Apess, the Pequot author. You give an account of his writing on the Mashpee Woodland Revolt, where you argue that Native people not only used writing to resist but that they also used the political rhetoric of American independence to assert their own Indigenous claims. Can you tell us about that revolt, how they worked with that rhetoric and writing as a tool for resistance?

LB: Sure, absolutely. That chapter is really important because it takes place long after the American Revolution, during the 1830s, when a lot of people tend to believe that all of the Indians had already "vanished" from New England. It's important to see that Native people, including the Mashpee Wampanoags, were seeing themselves as still continuing and as reclaiming their land, that again, like you said, it's not like the existence of the U.S. is an assumed thing. It's not like the eradication of Native peoples is an assumed thing; it goes in cycles,

and Native people in the 1830s were also reclaiming their lands and reclaim- ing their communities as sovereign nations, and the Mashpee Revolt is a great example.

   Just to give a quick summary, during the Mashpee Revolt, the Mashpees reasserted their right as a community to their land base, and especially to their resources on that land base. They were one of the only places in Massachu- setts that was still forested, and it was largely due to the fact that they were still practicing indigenous forest management techniques. As you can imagine,

their neighbors were coveting their woods. With William Apess's help, and in council together, they created this fantastic declaration that was much like the United States' Declaration of Independence, saying that they reclaimed and claimed the rights, the resources, and the self-control of their communi- ties, the self-government of their community. One of the things they did to publicize their cause was that William Apess and the Mashpees wrote many

times in newspapers, and spoke to the Massachusetts Senate, and talked about their struggle in comparison to the American struggle against the British. This was a great move because the Americans, at the time, were really celebrating their own separate identity from the British and so the last thing they would want to have done to them is to be compared to the British tyrants, and this

is exactly what the Mashpees did. For example, in the Barnstable Journal they compared their revolt to the Revolution, saying, "We unloaded two wagons of wood in place of English ships of tea." They have a great quote where they say, "And now, good people of Massachusetts, when your fathers dare to unfurl the banners of freedom amidst the hostile fleets and armies of Great Britain, it was then that Mashpee furnished them with some of her bravest men to fight

your battles, yes by the side of your fathers, they fought and bled and now their blood cries to you from the ground to restore that liberty so unjustly taken from us by their sons."

   So the Mashpees had sent many men to fight on behalf of the Americans and the Revolution-side by side, as brothers-and so they're then asking, as neighbors, as the people of Massachusetts, where the Revolution started, why they then are not fulfilling their commitment as brothers to respect the rights of these people who have fought and died beside them and on their behalf? So it's a very powerful statement and a powerful strategy, and it worked.

JKK: Pointing out that hypocrisy.

LB: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. And pointing out the uneven power relations too. Yeah, I mean, we went and helped you, why are you now not helping us?

JKK: I want to make sure to ask you about the chapter that you wrote that focuses on the Mohegan land case, which was a legal battle that spanned nearly a century. I wonder if you might speak to that and the role of Samson Occom, and also how writing played an instrumental role in that conflict, as well as women's resistance, which you also point out.

LB: Yes. That chapter, I think, in some ways for me started with Samson Occom. He was one of the writers who I saw too many literary critics focusing on as somebody who was somehow a victim, who had been corrupted by writing and Christianity, and when you look at Samson Occom's life as a whole, rather than focusing on, say, his time, his association with Eleazar Wheelock; if you don't focus on, say, his Christianity, you see an incredibly rich and complex lead-

er. One of the things that bothered me is that people tended to focus on two texts of Occom's: his one published sermon, which is understandable, because as literary folks we often want to look at the things that people have actually published, and I get that, but the other thing that people focused on was some- thing that was called his autobiography but wasn't an autobiography; it was simply a fragment of a letter that he wrote. A lot of literary scholars focused

on it because it fit this European form, and one of the things that I wanted to do with this chapter is feature some of Occom's other writings, specifically his petitions and letters that were more political in nature and that showed his efforts as a Mohegan leader on behalf of the Mohegan people to restore land rights and to restore territory that had been illegally taken from them by the Connecticut colonists.

   One of the things that I discovered in looking at his papers was that that fragment of writing, called his autobiography, was actually written as a result of the Mohegan land case. This was really interesting because he was so involved in the Mohegan land case that some of his mentor's-Eleazar Wheelock's- benefactors wanted to withdraw support for Occom because he was so politi- cal. He was so much of an activist on behalf of his people, and he had to write this little snippet of an autobiography to dispel the rumors that were circulating about him. Some people even were putting rumors around as if he wasn't even Mohegan, as if he was some white guy pretending to be the Mohegan preacher. So, he actually talks about genealogy, he had to lay down how he was born, and who he was born to, and where he was born, and that he was actually a "savage" originally. And he had to write this in order to prove himself to outsiders. But it was not an autobiography in the sense of Samson Occom decided at the end of his life to write down his life story.

JKK: Right.

LB: So that frames that document-that everybody uses, that even got pub- lished in anthologies of American literature-in a different way. And I think Samson Occom becomes a much more interesting person when we're looking at his petitions where he's arguing as a spokesperson for the Mohegans on be- half of the community to people like William Johnson, to the king of England, and where he's actually making an effort to bring two factions who have been fighting for generations together and to make them a whole. He uses that lan- guage, and one of his life's goals was to get Mohegans to see each other as one family, to ameliorate some the common conflicts that had divided them and [to show that] they were really colonial conflicts that were tearing them apart. For me, that was one of the most important things to look at. I think one of the things that I learned when I was young, working in the tribal office, is that the worst thing that can happen to any community is to be divided by these colo- nial conflicts and these land cases that don't turn out so well.

JKK: That's right.

LB: And that a lot of times those conflicts create fissures, create breaks in the community that we cannot seem to find any way to heal.

   So, one of the things I wanted to look at in this book is how did other lead- ers deal with that? How did they heal the community from those terrible, ter- rible divisions that had torn people apart? And what tools did they use-what Indigenous tools did they use and what non-Indigenous tools did they use to be able to do that? I knew that I'd never be a person who could actually do that work, but there were other people out there who have those skills, so if I could at least understand how people did it in the past, I figured it could work as a resource for those people who have the diplomatic skills to be able to do that, that maybe we could learn something from the leaders that came before us.

JKK: Absolutely. And when you say that Occom was striving to have people become a whole again, that reminds me of your discussion of decolonization, where you really take up that fuller meaning of decolonization as the process of striving to become whole again.

LB: Yes.

JKK: I want to acknowledge that your book is a really important contribution that also is exemplary in its use of decolonizing methodologies. In conclusion, I want to invite you to leave us with anything that you'd like us to consider.

LB: I guess I can go back to what you just mentioned with Ngugi wa Thiong'o's theories of decolonization. One of the ideas that he speaks about that really resonated with me is the idea of rememberment, and that memory is a way for us to put ourselves back together. Part of the reason why I wrote the book was the hope that New Englanders in general-not just Native people but

non-Native people as well-that perhaps the book could help serve as a tool for that process of rememberment. Because I don't think that any of us can heal, and I don't think that the land itself can heal, unless we do the really hard work that William Apess asked us to do 150 years ago or more: to confront the his- tory of this place, to confront all of our ancestors rolled in it, and really, to con- front the hard parts of history that too many of our ancestors worked too hard to forget. And that maybe we weren't ready to hear William Apess until now.

   My hope is that this is the time to really listen to his plea. He talked about colonial violence as a cancer that would spread out of control and devour us all, and I think, in many ways, that's an illness that we are still suffering from, in our treatment of each other and in our treatment of the land and in the way we understand each other or don't understand each other. I think that's my biggest hope, that this is a book that can help New Englanders confront that history and to see this land in a whole different way.

Kathleen A. Brown-Pérez on Tribal Legitimacy in the Face of Termination

When I interviewed Kathleen A. Brown-Pérez (Brothertown Indian Nation) she was chair of her tribe's Federal Acknowledgment Committee and liaison to the Bureau of Indian Affairs' Office of Federal Acknowledgment. On August 17, 2009, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) issued a "proposed finding against ac- knowledgment" of the Brothertown Indian Nation because, according to the of- fice, "the petitioner does not meet five of the seven mandatory criteria for federal acknowledgment." These criteria, which were in effect from 1978 to 2015, were part of the U.S. federal procedures for "Establishing That an American Indi- an Group Exists as an Indian Tribe" and determining whether any petitioning group is an Indian tribe within the meaning of federal law. The BIA's finding that the tribe was terminated by an 1839 act of Congress is the most controver- sial, because one of the seven criteria is that Congress must not have terminated the petitioning tribe. The Brothertown Indian Nation was formed in 1785 by members of various eastern coastal nations-Mohegan, Pequot, Narragansett, Montauk, Niantic and Tunxis-who moved to Oneida territory in upstate New York, where the Oneida Indian Nation had set aside land for them. The Brother- town was formalized in 1785 and later moved to Wisconsin, where a majority of members still live. Brown-Pérez is an assistant professor in the Commonwealth College at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She has a BA in political science from Augustana College (Illinois) and a JD and an MBA (with a con- centration in discrimination law) from the University of Iowa. For three decades she has worked with her tribe on their quest for federal acknowledgment. She currently practices federal Indian law in a pro bono role for her tribe and serves as liaison to the BIA and a research consultant.

This interview took place on October 27, 2009.

J. Kehaulani Kauanui: I'm glad to have you on the show, and especially to talk about this really important case and the rich history of the Brothertown Indian

35

Nation and the struggle that the tribe is up against with regard to the Bureau of Indian Affairs' decision for the Office of Federal Acknowledgment [OFA]. I want to start by asking if you would give some historical background and some basic facts about the tribe: Where is the tribal nation based, and how many members are there and how did the tribe become formalized?

Kathleen A. Brown-Pérez: Well, it really starts with the Great Awakening of 1740, which will take us back a few years. It was during that Great Awakening in the colony of Connecticut that my tenth great-grandfather, a man by the name Samson Occom, discovered Christianity, you might say-or it discovered him. He was a Mohegan Indian and he was very interested in how to read the Bible because of the Great Awakening. He wanted to learn how to read and write English, so at about the age of twenty, in 1743, he had his mother approach

a man by the name of Reverend Eleazar Wheelock to learn a little bit about the English language, as well as Latin, French, Greek, and mathematics-and Eleazar agreed to teach him. Samson was under the instruction of Reverend

Wheelock for about four years, and he was pretty much forced to stop studying at that time because he had bad eyesight and he couldn't read as well, so he stopped his instruction. He actually became a schoolmaster of the Montauk Indians of Long Island, where he stayed for several years. Over time, he real- ized what was really necessary in New England was a school specifically for Indian youth, and Eleazar Wheelock helped him found this school.

   In about 1760 they had the idea of sending Samson over to England to preach. By this time he was an ordained Presbyterian minister and, of course, he was Mohegan, so he spoke the Mohegan language as well. He also spoke Oneida and English, so he went over to England and, as you can imagine, he was almost like a carnival show attraction. It's not that he was the first Indian in England, but he was very different: he dressed like an Englishman, he spoke like an Englishman, and he was a minister. He spent about two and a half years there raising funds, and these funds were supposed to go for an Indian school. He raised about 12,000 pounds, which was a record sum for a colonial charity-I believe it comes to about $1.9 million in 2009 dollars. He raised all

this money, and he entrusted it to Eleazar Wheelock to found an Indian school. And what was actually founded was Dartmouth College, which-it's not that they did not have any Indian youth there in the beginning, but it really was not a school for Indian youth.

JKK: The hidden history of the Ivy Leagues, right?

KBP: Yes, exactly. What happened as a result of that was that my grandfather became very disheartened by what was happening in New England. He tried so hard to follow the rules and be "a good Indian," to do what was expected of him, and he thought it would help his tribe and other Indian people. Instead, like I said, he became very disheartened; he thought that he had done what

he could and it wasn't good enough for the English people in the colonies, so he had an idea of bringing together what we tend to term the "Christian

remnants" of various tribes in New England. That would include his tribe, the Mohegan, his mother's tribe, the Pequot, the Narragansett, the Montauk that he had schooled in Long Island, and the Niantic tribe as well.

   He brought them all together thinking that he would form sort of a Chris- tian Indian tribe, because all of the members at that point would have been Christian. The Oneida that he had missioned to several years earlier offered him some land in upstate New York, so he accepted that land. Unfortunately, right about that time the American Revolution took place, and it took place right through Oneida country. Those of us who had already moved up to up- state New York from New England and Long Island were actually forced down into Massachusetts, in the area of Stockbridge, and lived with the Stockbridge Indians-who were also a Christian Indian tribe-throughout the Revolution.

   After the Revolution we all, including the Stockbridge, moved back up to upstate New York, and we continued to live there for many years. The New England tribes moved up there, and we lived there from about 1785 until about the late 1820s. At that point in time, we realized that we had not moved far enough away from the non-Indian settlers and everyone was moving in on top of us, so we started looking for land elsewhere, and Wisconsin was actually the state that we ended up in and it's where we are today. We have land that was previously owned by the Menominee Indians right on the eastern side of Lake Winnipeg. It's a beautiful area, and we are still there and that's obviously where we are trying to continue to survive to this day.

JKK: Right. Now, you used the term "remnants"-the Christian "remnant" tribes. These would be people who survived King Philip's War and united together, regrouped?

KBP: Yes. It's important that you know that we make a point of distinction that the Mohegan, Pequot, Narragansett, and Montauk tribes still exist today. It was only a few of the members of these tribes that left them and joined with the Brothertown Indians. I think that, for the most part, it was heavily Mohegan, but the Mohegan tribe still exists in Connecticut, as does the Pequot, and the Narragansett are still in Rhode Island. So it definitely was not a confederacy

of all of these tribes' governments joining together; it was just a few people leaving.

JKK: And also you mentioned the shift in Wisconsin coinciding in the late 1820s, is that right? Now, that's also coinciding with the context of Indian re- moval. Would you speak to that just a bit?

KBP: I can. The BIA wants me to make sure that I never say that we were removed: we moved. We sold our land in upstate New York, we were very

involved with the state legislature, and we asked for their assistance as well as the U.S. government's approval to sell the land that the Oneida had giv- en us. We received money for it, we purchased land in New York, and the leftover money was put into a trust fund. But like you said, this did coincide with the Indian Removal Act, which was passed by the infamous President Jackson, so-

JKK: In 1830, right?

KBP: We were very aware of that as a tribe, and we thought that we were in control of our destiny. We definitely had that illusion, because the BIA keeps saying they did not remove us, but that we moved to Wisconsin. What actually happened after we moved there was that within a year, the federal government thought that perhaps we should be removed further west, and they thought of the Kansas area. Some of our tribal members did move to Kansas, and many of them died. The few that made it back up to Wisconsin said, please do whatever it takes to not be removed to Kansas, because we will die there. And so we did become very involved in our own survival at that point. We wanted to make sure that we could stay in Wisconsin, so my ancestors had the idea to petition Congress for U.S. citizenship as well as allotment of our tribal lands, because we thought that they could not remove U.S. citizens.

JKK: Interesting. So they're really trying to negotiate with these colonial struc- tures to protect their people.

KBP: Yes, exactly. And they still did everything as a tribe. We had tribal leaders, we certainly knew our history, we knew that we were not part of the domi- nant culture, but we were trying to negotiate the rules the dominant culture had set up and do what we could to survive. Because we knew they were not going away.

JKK: Now the Brothertown Indians did become U.S. citizens at that time-this is in the early 1830s?

KBP: Actually, what happened was that the first time we petitioned Congress for citizenship, Congress said absolutely not, American Indians couldn't be citi- zens. It took a second petition, which they did approve, and on March 3, 1839. We became the first American Indians to receive U.S. citizenship. Our land was also allotted at that time, so I consider that to be a bit of a precursor to the

Allotment Act, which of course was very, very devastating for all Indian people.

JKK: I see. And we know the General Allotment Act was passed in 1887, so we are talking several decades prior. Now, in terms of where the tribe is now, you said the east side of Lake Winnebago.

KBP: We no longer have a reservation, unfortunately. It was about twenty-five thousand acres originally, and the land was allotted and, very much like what

followed with the General Allotment Act, we pretty quickly lost a lot of our land to tax foreclosures and swindling. So, now as a tribe we actually own only one acre of that original reservation. Therefore, we're trying desperately. We have a fund, and we save up our money, and we ask for donations, and we are attempting to purchase more land. Obviously, it's a very slow process if we don't have a lot of money.

   As for tribal members, we have almost four thousand tribal members right now, about half of whom live in Wisconsin. The other half are spread out around the United States, mostly in the Midwest, but throughout the United States-and actually the world: we also have members who live in China.

JKK: You said at the beginning that the BIA really does not want you to say the tribe was ever removed or relocated. Could you explain why? What are the politics of that?

KBP: It's sort of the difference between us being a victim-victimized by the federal government-versus us taking control, and we always did try to take control. The truth of the matter is, though, we were very aware of what was going on in this country. We had some amazing leaders in our tribe, and they knew what was going on. They did try to sort of navigate that stormy sea of colonialism, and so it appeared that we were making decisions. But the truth of the matter was we were still trying to operate within that colonial system. We made a lot of decisions we would not have otherwise made. Certainly, we did not ask to become U.S. citizens because we were no longer Indians-that was definitely not the case-but I think the BIA would like people to believe that.

JKK: That gets to some of the mythmaking in terms of the BIA. Was U.S. cit- izenship for the Brothertown Indian Nation in the early nineteenth century cited as a reason that the petition was rejected?

KBP: It was. It was cited as one of the reasons why our petition was rejected, and we were shocked. I mean, honestly, the entire proposed finding is very poorly written. It's very hard to dig through, and I know our history inside and out.

I know the petition, our original petition. Though our original petition was submitted to the BIA in 1995, it sat and waited and waited and waited, and about ten years later we asked them what was going on with our petition and if could we submit some more documents, and they said we could submit more documents, so I actually sat down with our original petition and I rewrote a bit and organized it a little differently, and we submitted ten bankers boxes full of supporting documentation in 2005. And we submitted more materials in 2008.

   I know the Brothertown documentation inside and out, so the proposed finding should have been very clear to me. But it wasn't. I had a hard time fol- lowing it. I believe that the proposed finding was written in a way to be inten- tionally misleading. It was anything but clear, even to me. I should have at least

been able to follow it. What was especially frustrating was that the proposed finding is available for anyone to read. The confusing and misleading way in which it was written would lead many people to agree with the finding. This would put the general public and other Indian tribes on the side of the OFA.

   The truth is that this type of writing-which I don't know what to call other than BS-I think it really is intended to brainwash the general public, but I'm not going to allow that to happen. I want to make sure that everyone gets the truth and becomes aware of exactly what the OFA is like. I no longer consider this quest to be just about my tribe. Having seen how horribly they demean us in this document, I decided this is actually about all American Indian people, and if they can do this to us, they can do it to anyone.

JKK: Right. Now, you said that the petition was submitted in 1995 and you had to register an intent to submit a petition, which was much earlier, right? This has been going on for three decades?

KBP: It has. We sent in our original letter, where we expressed intent to send a petition, in 1980, so this has been going on for about thirty years. There was concern from the very beginning that the BIA would interpret our U.S. citizen- ship to be a termination from Congress. Because of the way that the regulations are written, because it is an administrative agency that is determining which tribes are really tribes; they may not undo an act of Congress. So, if Congress terminated you, the BIA may not "un-terminate" you. So that was a concern, definitely, from the very beginning.

   One of the things that we did was request a determination from the solici- tor's office-the solicitor is the attorney for the Bureau of Indian Affairs-and we received a letter back stating that we had not been terminated by Congress, and that was why we continued to work on our petition for so many years.

This was a letter that came out of Minneapolis, the Twin Cities regional BIA office, and then there was a follow-up memo sometime later. It was really that 1993 memo that made it very clear that we could continue with our petition for federal acknowledgment and that there was really no reason to think at that point that Congress had terminated us. Of course, when we look at the act in which Congress gave us citizenship, there is no language about termination at all, unlike what happened to the Menominee and Klamath and other tribes in the fifties and sixties.

   Congress did not have a clear intent to terminate our tribe in 1839 when we got citizenship, and that was what the solicitor's office made very clear in 1993. We spent a couple more years getting everything put together, and in

1995 sent off our petition, and then waited, and waited, and waited for fourteen years. And it breaks my heart when I think of all of the tribal elders who died in the fourteen years and weren't able to see this come to fruition. They wast- ed fourteen years of our lives. And when I think of how many years I've been

dealing with this personally . . . I can remember in the summer of 1980, I was fourteen years old, and my mother took me up to Wisconsin-I grew up in northern Illinois-because there was going to be a tribal meeting. At that point the BIA had decided that we were no longer a tribe, and we needed to fix that. So, here I was, fourteen years old, the bored kid in the back of the room, not really wanting to be there, but I remember how passionate everybody was at that initial meeting.

   And then, many years pass and it's 1995 and I'm in law school. I was at my great-uncle Cy Welch's house in Madison, Wisconsin, and he said, "You know, we just sent this petition to the federal government. I want you to have this copy of it, you're going to need it." And I thought, "Please, God, don't let me ever need this." And sure enough, many years pass-Uncle Cy passed away a couple years ago-and sure enough in 2005 we sent more supporting docu- mentation and kept sending material and researching. I can't even tell you how much money and time we spent researching and sending all of this material to the BIA. Had they-in 1980, when we sent in our letter of intent to petition,

or in 1995, when we sent the original petition-had they just said "Congress terminated you," we would have gone to Congress. But they wasted years and years of our lives and, honestly, the interesting thing is that I actually think that they have made a legal error in determining that Congress had terminated us. So we are going through the regular administrative appeals process, we're exhausting our administrative appeals before we even think of doing anything with Congress, but I really think they simply made a mistake.

JKK: In terms of interpreting that 1993 memorandum?

KBP: Exactly, and in the lack of weight they're giving their own solicitor's opin- ion. That's sort of shocking. It wasn't like our own attorneys told us that we had not been terminated by Congress; their attorney told us Congress had not terminated us, and it's sort of a shocking revelation, really.

JKK: Now, for those who may be unfamiliar with this process overall, one of the things that I want to make sure that people are aware of is that it is not in the

U.S. federal government's interest to federally recognize a tribal nation.

KBP: Correct.

JKK: The last thing the federal government-or any of the fifty states-wants is to have another sovereign entity within their boundaries. The politics of gain- ing federal recognition are many-fold, and tribes historically have been able to secure federal recognition through the judiciary, through the legislative branch, and then also through the executive branch of government-that is, through the administrative process under the BIA.

   Now Kathleen, you've used the word termination several times, and I want to ask you about the criteria for federal acknowledgment: the seven criteria

that the OFA uses. If you could first back up and tell us why, why wasn't the Brothertown Indian Nation federally acknowledged in the first place? And what is the history of treat-making, or is that just something that people use to cite to try and destabilize a petition? Could you speak to that history, and then eventually work us up to these seven criteria?

KBP: Well, the Brothertown Indian Nation was federally recognized for a very long time. Federal recognition is a government-to-government relationship with the federal government. And it is more or less unilateral: the decision of whether that relationship exists is unilateral, and the federal government is the only party that gets a say in whether this relationship exists. If your tribe has this relationship with the federal government, you are eligible for Indian Health Services and various educational funding. You're eligible to have a reservation, and you're a much more sovereign nation. The U.S. government, as a sovereign nation, recognizes you.

   If your tribe does not have that government-to-government relationship, you don't have any of these so-called "benefits," and I always put that in quota- tion marks because we all know that it's not quite like what the general public thinks it is. We don't receive a monthly check from the government. We do pay taxes, you know. It's not quite like what a lot of people think it is.

   But there's a certain amount of legitimacy that comes from that government-to-government relationship. And, unfortunately, the federal government has actually convinced federally acknowledged tribes [of that], so members of those tribes do not respect those of us that come from tribes that aren't federally acknowledged, and so there really is a tiered system of, well, is your tribe federally acknowledged or not? You know, people will always ask that. And we were acknowledged, like I said, for a very long time-certainly, according to the federal government, up until 1839, and we did have trea-

ties as well with the federal government. The year 1839 was when we be- came U.S. citizens. They're even saying in the proposed finding that we were definitely federally acknowledged as late as 1855.

   Now, interestingly enough, I told you we had this meeting back in the sum- mer of 1980 because we were no longer federally acknowledged. It was in the late 1970s that members of our tribe started receiving rejection letters from the regional BIA office in Ashland, Wisconsin, saying we're not going to give you money for school anymore. But the federal government is saying they really don't have a good explanation for why we continued to receive funding. We didn't have a reservation and all of that in the 1970s, but it was really about that time that the Congress started cleaning house a little bit and started thinking about who else can we get rid of, because they had already gone through this official termination era in the 1950s and '60s. The Menominee are probably the classic example out of Wisconsin of a big tribe that was terminated, and once they were terminated their reservation was allotted and the whole bit.

   That formal termination process did not happen to most tribes. For most tribes, the BIA just decided, we're not going to federally acknowledge you anymore. All of those tribes are eligible for the petition process due to federal regulations. If a tribe was actually terminated by Congress, then they can only become un-terminated-this is probably the best word-through an act of Congress. We considered ourselves federally acknowledged up through the late 1970s, and when I was kid I never thought about whether my tribe was federally acknowledged or not; the conversation never came up. And then

we decided, well, you know, we do need to start in on this process of getting federally acknowledged.

   It was a lot of work, but at least we had something written down. Congress had recently passed these federal regulations with seven criteria that a tribe must prove in order to become federally acknowledged. It was really easy in the beginning, for the early tribes whose petitions were looked at-they were just

a few pages long, maybe twenty pages long. It took a few months. Originally, when the regulations were passed, the BIA estimated that it would take about four months to review a petition, and that did happen in the very beginning, but not for more than a few tribes I believe. And then the process became years long, and then decades, and so that's how we're sort of thirty years into this process. But it never occurred to us-certainly after we got that memo from the solicitor's office-that we should have been going through Congress. But we did work on trying to prove these seven criteria, and if you'd like I can go through those quickly.

JKK: And again, to clarify, this is part of the federal regulations?

KBP: Yes. These are the regulations that were passed in the late 1970s by Con- gress. The first criterion that we are suppose to prove is that external observers have identified the petitioners as an American Indian entity on a substantially continuous basis since 1900. So that's the first one: very vague, there's a lot of debate on how do you even prove this; external observers include anthropol- ogists, historians, people outside the tribe see us as a tribe. The year is 1900.

Well, because in looking at our petition the BIA determined that we had unam- biguous previous federal acknowledgment, they changed the year 1900. They replaced it with 1839. So, they actually made that criterion harder for us. They decided that, well, we certainly federally acknowledged you in 1839, so that's the year we're going to use. From that starting point, we can see that we feder- ally acknowledged you up through 1855, so then we were supposed to provide documentation between the years of 1855 and 1981.

JKK: So they switched the rules on you, violating their own federal criteria for federal acknowledgment.

KBP: There's actually a little caveat in those federal regulations that says that they can change those years on you. Of course, we didn't know this when we

submitted the evidence, because we did not know they were going to determine that we had unambiguous previous federal acknowledgment and change the year. We had no idea we had to go back to 1839, so we submitted no evidence between the year 1839 and 1900, because we didn't know we had to.

JKK: And that's what you had to prove, that you were a historical Indian tribe- not just any old group of people who get together and call themselves an Indian tribe, right?

KBP: Correct. So we're supposed to go back many years, but had we known what the years were going to be, we certainly would have submitted different evidence. And we're now in the process of gathering this evidence from 1839 to 1855.

   Okay, so that's the first criterion. The second one requires that a dominant portion of the petitioning group has comprised a distinct community since historical times. So, in our case, because they've determined that we were for- mally reorganized at that meeting that I was at in the summer of 1980, they've determined that we really only have to prove that we have been a distinct com- munity since 1980.

   So in this case you'd think they've made it a little easier: only since 1980. But then they go in and they look at what we've done since 1980 and, you know, we have powwows and picnics and get-togethers.  Most of us really know what's

going on in Wisconsin, and yet they kept raising the bar and raising the bar, that our powwows weren't quite good enough and there seemed to be some people there that weren't that interested in being there. Really, it's a very subjec- tive criterion, so they're able to come in and visit us in Wisconsin and decide that we really don't appear to be a distinct community.

   Now, one of the ways that they were trying to show that we had not proven these criteria was that last fall they had an anthropologist from the OFA visit us during homecoming or powwow weekend. I guess I was being very naive in that it didn't occur to me that we were guilty until proven innocent, because she wasn't looking for evidence of community: she was looking for evidence

that we were not a community. She was looking for anything that could be held against us. I know that now in retrospect, and it sort of shocked me.

JKK: So, a bad-faith effort there.

KBP: Oh, absolutely. And the sad thing about this particular anthropologist is that if you're thinking, oh, someone from the dominant culture who's colo- nizing Indians, she was actually a Narragansett Indian, and that is one of our historic tribes. Most of us descend from Narragansett Indians, but she was so intent on proving that the Brothertown Indians were not really a tribe. [For example,] she went so far as to, in doing interviews with individual tribal members, that when she interviewed me, she tape-recorded it, and never cited a single thing I said in the entire proposed finding.

JKK: Is that right?

KBP: She interviewed one of my mother's cousins, who is a "full blooded In- dian." He's half Brothertown, he's half Mdewakanton Sioux, he is a dark man. She looked at him and said, "So, when you were growing up, did you know you were Indian?" And we knew it was downhill from there. I mean, we knew we were in trouble. She did not tape-record the interview with my second cousin. She did ask him a very demeaning question, but she'd already made up her mind at that point. I'm still not sure exactly what the OFA is going to look for in proving community.

   Criterion three requires that a petitioning group has maintained political influence over its members as an autonomous entity since historical times. And, again, they changed the phrase "historical times" to be the year 1839, and it really has to do with governance or political influence, and whether we had tribal leaders. They don't like the fact that, for many years, we never called our leader a chief. "Chief" is a French word. We never used that. Most of us descend from Uncas (from the Mohegans)-he wasn't really a chief either.

   The fourth criterion requires that the members descend from a historical Indian tribe. They actually determined that we don't even meet that criterion. They determined that only 51 percent of our members that were on the trib- al role we submitted in 2005 had demonstrated descent from an individual known to be a member of the historical Brothertown Indian Tribe of Wiscon- sin. Now, the interesting thing about that is that they're saying we didn't really exist as a tribe until we were in Wisconsin, and that's not true. So that was an interesting interpretation.

JKK: So no acknowledgment of that migration between New York, Massachu- setts, and the survival that it took to band together, to stay . . .

KBP: No recognition of that at all, and I found many spelling errors of names that their genealogists had written up for this particular criterion. But I thought it was interesting that their genealogist had used Ancestry.com, which is really not accurate at all-the sort of website that people use to share genealogy infor- mation. Those aren't birth and death certificates. This is just people saying, this is who my grandmother was. It's not exactly scientific.

   Okay, so the next criterion-actually, I'm sorry, I've actually only been going through the five that we did not meet. The final one that we did not meet requires that my tribe not be subject to congressional legislation that terminat- ed or forbade our federal relationship. Of course, they said that we had failed that one.

   The only criteria that we actually met-there was one criterion that re- quires us to submit a copy of our governing document. We did that, and they apparently didn't have a problem with our governing document. There's also a criterion that says that none of our members belong to other tribes, and we did

meet that criterion as well. But we met the two that pretty much anyone would meet. I think the Boy Scouts would meet those two criteria. But the other five, we did not.

JKK: So, in saying that Brothertown Indian Nation did not meet five of the seven mandatory criteria for federal acknowledgment, they basically denied the petition at large.

KBP: Oh, absolutely. And, you know, the truth is, they could have looked at everything we submitted, they could have looked at the criterion that required that we not be terminated by Congress at any point in time and said we're go- ing to stop the review right here. They didn't do that. Instead, they did a review of the petition, and slaughtered us so that they've made it very, very hard to go to Congress and ask to be un-terminated, because the waters have sort of been poisoned. It was a gratuitous analysis. It was absolutely unnecessary.

   After the OFA determined that the Brothertown had been terminated by Congress, its analysis should have stopped. There was no reason to consider the other six criteria. The regulations require that a tribe submit evidence proving all seven criteria. Failure to prove even a single criterion must result in the tribe's failure. Once the OFA determined Congress had terminated the Brother- town, there was no reason to review the other six criteria. It was not just a waste of time and taxpayer dollars, however. The OFA went above and beyond to ensure that the Brothertown did not deserve federal acknowledgment. It put on public record, for anyone to read, its detailed analysis of how we had failed to prove five criteria. I don't know how this cannot impact the support of mem- bers of Congress when we approach them to pass an act reversing our termina- tion. They should have stopped right then. But they chose not to.

JKK: Can you give an example in terms of that gratuitous nature of the document?

KBP: Honestly, the whole thing. It's really hard to pick out one thing. They nitpicked through every sentence, every newspaper article we submitted. We would submit various articles from some of our historic tribes as well, or references to them, because I know that I have Narragansett grandparents and Pequot and Mohegan. We submitted articles certainly referencing them because we still have a connection to those tribes, and they discounted those

entirely and were wondering why we had included them at all. They had issues with the fact that we had trouble coming up with proof that we had a governing body in the 1940s. Well, a lot of our tribal members were in the war, and they didn't seem to really care or acknowledge the fact that many of our men were in Europe fighting.

   So, there was not really a lot of common sense used, in my opinion, in an- alyzing this document, but I think the thing that bothers me most is to read it.

And I didn't see it so much as a personal attack, I saw it as an attack on Indian sovereignty. I saw it as an attack on all Indian people. I consider us a historic tribe-we've existed since 1785, and everything we've done has been written down, including those times we went to the New York State Legislature and to Congress. We are very documented.

   Many thought we had this easy, because we did have it written down, but because the process is so subjective they were still able to take us through the wringer on this, and they did. One of the things I've decided is that the

Brothertown Indian Nation has played nice long enough. We followed the rules for centuries, and we continue to exist as a tribe, but it really hasn't gotten us any brownie points with the federal government.

   I've been contacted by wonderful people such as Linda Locklear from the Lumbee Tribe, who is a federal Indian law attorney working to get Lumbee unterminated by Congress, and we have a great deal of support. What I want to make sure is that what really comes out of this, it may not be federal acknowl- edgment for my tribe, but what I want to see is a change in the process, and that's actually what I'm working on now.

JKK: Excellent. And now you, as well as the Brothertown Tribal Council chair- man, will be traveling to DC this month in October for different meetings around your appeal, is that right?

KBP: That's correct. We are allowed to ask for technical assistance. We're also allowed to request a formal meeting with the OFA with this team of three that reviewed our petition, which includes an anthropologist, a genealogist, and a historian. We're allowed to ask them exactly why they made various decisions that they made, so that we can respond. We're also in the comment period, which goes until I believe February 22, 2010, during which time any interested and informed party may send a comment to the OFA, either in support of the office's determination or against it.

   So this really is supposed to be a very public process. It has not always been in the past; it's been sort of secretive, I thought. But I plan on being very vocal about what's really going on so if people want to support us and they want to support Indian sovereignty against this colonizing government, they can do that. I think it's important for all of us.

JKK: Right. Absolutely. I want to back up on one other thing to clarify. What was issued in August 2009 was the proposed finding, and you've just men- tioned the 180-day comment period. That is, that they are supposed to take notice of any outside opinions before a final determination.

KBP: Correct.

JKK: Okay. So there is still a window period where this could be turned around.

KBP: There is. Now, the interesting thing about this comment period is that, as an attorney, I would call it a legal fallacy in a way, because it gives us this impression that there's almost an appeal process, because people can submit their comments and we're supposed to see them, and the OFA is, of course,

supposed to see them, and then OFA makes the final determination. The truth is, any additional information that we receive, or any comments that the OFA receives-it's not really an appeals process, because there isn't another layer. We are "appealing" to the exact same people who already decided that we did not meet five of seven criteria. They're not going to change their mind. I mean, I really don't see this happening, and so I consider us in this process of exhaust- ing our administrative remedies so that we can say we did it. We really are doing what we can, but we are very mindful of the fact that they are probably not going to change their minds, and our next step is then going to be to appeal to Congress.

JKK: Yes, I see.

KBP: We're looking at many decades ahead of us still, I believe.

JKK: But the fight and struggle continues.

KBP: Absolutely.

JKK: And the other thing I just want to point out for those who may be new to this whole topic of federal recognition is that those seven criteria that tribes have to meet-the people in the tribal nations have to prove survival of ex- istence in the exact same areas the U.S. federal government has been in the business of destroying for these centuries.

KBP: Yes, this is twenty-first-century smallpox. It really is. This is trying to de- fine Indians out of existence. And it makes me think of that saying from World War II: first they came for the Catholics and I didn't speak up because I wasn't Catholic, and by the time they came for me there was no one left to speak up. And, to me, that's exactly what we're dealing with here, because when you think of who came up with these criteria and who can really meet them-I mean,

I think there are tribes that are currently federally acknowledged that if they were asked to meet these seven criteria, they could not, they could not provide the evidence. And nobody knows we were federally acknowledged until the late 1970s, and then one day we were not, and nobody knows. No tribe knows whether they're going to be next. And it's a scary process.

JKK: I mentioned the ways that tribes can get federal recognition through the courts, the legislature, or the administrative process through the BIA. But what I didn't note is that many tribes have secured federal recognition through the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 and other means prior to the late twentieth century; there were other ways, right, but then it was very limited.

KBP: It was a very ad hoc process, really, until recent years when tribes started insisting on some sort of process. Like I said, the criteria are so subjective that just trying to meet them is really awful, and maybe we should go back to the ad hoc process-who knows. But there has to be something better than what exists currently.

JKK: And this also suggests that not much changed under the Obama administration.

KBP: No, sadly, it doesn't appear that anything at this point has changed. I don't think President Obama is really aware of the violence against Indigenous peo- ple in this country. And that violence, of course, includes structural and cultur- al violence. The Indian wars and the scalping of Indians may have stopped, but this process continues, and they really are trying to define us out of existence.

I mean, a classic example is that the federal government invented that one- quarter blood quantum rule.

   And that doesn't exist for any other so-called "minority" in this country. If you say you are African American or Hispanic American, nobody ques-

tions that, nobody asks you what your blood quantum is. If you say you are an American Indian, they ask you what tribe you are, they ask you if your tribe

is federally acknowledged, and how much Indian blood you have. And, you know, I grew up hearing this, really being colonized in my own brain to think, well, that's the way it is. Our blood matters. And then I realized who was mak- ing the rules, and it is violence and it is continuing.

JKK: And that is really particular to, as you say, Indigenous peoples. I should just note that the U.S. federal government defines Native Hawaiian using a 50 percent blood quantum rule, which was developed in 1920 and is still used against the Kanaka Maoli people.

KBP: Did the Native Hawaiian people get a vote on that?

JKK: No, absolutely not, that's part of a congressional law, the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act of 1920. And it goes against our own principles of how we genealogically define ourselves and each other.

KBP: Absolutely.

JKK: And, as you're pointing out, this is all in the service of dispossessing Indig- enous nations.

KBP: Exactly, it is. And things really have not gotten better. I am hopeful that Barack Obama and his administration will change this, but I think that it's going to take some of the Brothertown and some of our supporters being very vocal about how horrible this process is.

JKK: Yes. Now, in concluding our interview I want to invite you to leave with any lasting thoughts that we might consider about this case.

KBP: Thank you, Kehaulani. One of the things that we would like to make everyone aware of is how broken the federal acknowledgment process is. This isn't just about the Brothertown Indian Nation. This is about all of us. And it's about the federal government trying to tell us exactly who we are, and it's time for us to stop that. And that's going to include support from federally acknowl- edged tribes in particular who are going to have the guts to stand up and say, okay, maybe we have the status, but it is a broken process and this is not what our ancestors were looking for. So that's really all we want to come from this: somehow fixing what's broken, because in the year 2009 we shouldn't be deal- ing with this still.