Native Erasure and Invisibility is Solvable

The existence of Native people and the challenges to the fundamental values of the United States partially came to a head in July twenty twenty when the Washington football team finally decided to change its mascot and name from a harmful and violent slur against Native people. While this was a highly visible and highly publicized move, applauded by many, for Native folks, this fight is about a lot more than professional sports teams making symbols and icons without permission.

When we define it as just taking from a culture that is not your own, that misses the whole power piece of it. The United States has a long and violent history of oppressing Native and Indigenous people. There are over five hundred and seventy four federally recognized tribes in the United States and many others not recognize by the federal government. That represents a lot of land and a

lot of life and beyond the government. In television, film fashion, native culture is regularly depicted or appropriated without an eye toward accurate or respectful representation. Doctor Adrian Keane thinks it's time for a shift, and that the shift is both urgent and possible, moving the conversation from just sort of like representation matters for representation's sake, to representation matters because you need to know of the people who's land you

are on. You need to know about your relationship to this land. And for Indigenous folks, our identities as indigenous are so deeply tied to being from the land and from a place that it's kind of one and the same. Sionagad Adrian Keene docadi squad de la juila Diega tongva di Gega. I am Adrian Keene. I'm a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, and I'm a Cherokee writer and scholar and author of Notable Native People. Indigenous erasure and invisibility

is a solvable problem. So I know that you grew up in California, but you grew up around a lot of non Cherokee folks and a lot of around a lot of white folks. Can you tell me a little bit about that experience. Yeah, so I am a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, which is based in what is currently known as Oklahoma, and that is where my grandma grew up with her siblings on like rural Cherokee allotment land.

And then she moved to California when she was eighteen and met my Armenian grandpa when she first moved there, and they got married and she stayed in California the rest of her life. She's still alive, she's ninety four. That's how I ended up in California. But I grew up in San Diego, which is Kumiai homelands, but that

was not even something that I was aware of. So I grew up completely surrounded by non natives, and as someone who's very like white coating, white passing, it was so easy to be just completely invisible and not receive any narratives at all about Native existence, especially with the California state curriculum around Natives is like awful in elementary school, high school. So yeah, just never received any messages about

the continued existence of Native people. When do you think you started to connect with your identity as as a Native person yourself, Like when do you do you have an earliest memory when that started to happen for you. Yeah, I mean I think I always knew that I was Native and knew that I was Cherokee, but it wasn't

something that I really understood what that meant. And I have like a few sort of small formative moments when I was really young, Like I remember, in I guess it was fifth grade, we were doing the Native American unit in our class, and our homework was to go home and come up with a quote unquote Indian name, which was the like very stereotypical adjective like plus noun idea,

you know, like running elk or whatever. And I remember I remember like knowing that I could do the assignment and that that would be fine, but like feeling uncomfortable. But I was young and not really you know, activisty, so I didn't know what to do. And my mom was like, well, why don't you say your great grandma's name, Like why don't you just say, like Mona May McDaniel is your Indian name, because that's your family and that's

where it comes from. And I was like okay. So I remember standing up in class and everyone had done the like running antelope or whatever because they're fast and whatever. And I stood up and was like, my name's Monamey McDaniel because that's my great grandma and she's Cherokee. And I remember the teacher looking at me like uh okay, and I sat down and everyone just like continued on

with the activity. But that was kind of one of my earliest memories of being like, no, like this is me as well, like it's I'm not that separated from it. But it really wasn't until honestly, like college time, that I really had the opportunity to engage more deeply because I was an adult with the ability to travel and to do my own research and to ask the right questions of my family and that kind of stuff. So it took a long time because the erasure is real

and colonization has deeply affected all of us. I remember one year of elementary school they had us do an assignment where for Thanksgiving where we had to take the paper bags and turning to vest and you did a headdress thing. And I remember like, even as a kid, just being like, it just seems weird that every single Indian, as we were saying at the time was all the same, and I hated that at the time, but I didn't know why. I was like something about this, but I

couldn't put my figure on it. All of the depictions that I saw of Native folks were always negative, whether in the media and music whatever around us. What was it like for you besides having an experience like that yourself in elementary school, but what was it like for you to see yourself depicted or to see Native folks depicted in that way in media? Growing up? There was not a single positive reference that I remember in media

or popular culture or anything. Like I grew up with Peter Pan and like the whole like what makes the

Red Man red? And then we got Disney Spokehonists, which everyone thought was a sort of good depiction of natives, and it did make some limited strides, But then that meant that everyone would just when I said I was Native, would like sing Colors of the Wind to me or like whatever, so they're really there was such a big disconnect for me where I would look at my family like in Oklahoma and my grandma and be like, this

isn't represented in anything that I see. These messages don't resonate with anything that I know about my family and where I come from. It wasn't even really until graduate school where it all kind of came together, and I realized that because I moved from California to the East Coast, and in California, I mean where I went to undergrad

there was a very large Native population on campus. We had the large student run of pow Out in the US, and there was a Native American Studies department, and so there was at least an awareness of my classmates that like Natives existed in contemporary times and were their classmates and their friends and that kind of thing. But when I moved to the East Coast, it was absolute erasure.

And so being in grad school and I was at Harvard, which you know, is this bastion of knowledge and everything, and to have faculty and fellow students in my doctoral program tell me to my face that they had never

met a Native person before. Or to walk around Harvard Square and see we had an urban outfitters and that's where my blog Native Appropriations came from, was walking through urban outfitters and seeing just all of the like stereotypical and culturally appropriated stuff, and there are still plenty tons of Native people on the East Coast, but it's just like such a deep invisibility that I hadn't ever experienced.

So to me, that's where the connection was finally made, where I was like, these representations are more than just like it makes me personally as a Native person feel bad. It's actually a lot deeper than that. Our existence as Native people really challenges the fundamental values of what we know as the United States, and so it goes all the way to our origins. Let's talk a little bit

about your blog, Native Appropriations. You started that almost twelve years ago, and you mentioned starting it after the reaction to the things you were saying in culture, especially in urban outfitters. How's that work resonated amongst folks. I know you have a large following, but was this a useful tool to get people to see you to feel seeing Yeah, it was wild. I started it solely as a kind of like personal project. I mean back in two thousand and ten when I started it, everybody had a blog

like that was the thing we were all doing. It wasn't a rare thing to the blog. Yeah, it was the height of the personal blogging revolution. But for me. I wanted it to be a place where I was just going to catalog these misrepresentations and sort of have a place where I could point to it and be like, look at how ubiquitous this is, look at how deep

it runs. And then as I was doing it, I realized that I myself didn't even really have the language to talk about why saying like this makes me uncomfortable wasn't enough. So then it kind of forced me to start articulating the language around this is harmful for these reasons.

And part of the reason I wanted to do it is that I'm someone who is very uncomfortable with direct confrontation, which surprises some people because in the early days of the blog, I was super forceful with what I was saying, like very confrontational, like calling people out right and left. But in real life I'm an introvert who is very

shy and has a hard time with that. So I wanted to create something that people could just send a blog post to their boss or to a friend, or to a faculty member or something to explain a feeling that they were having without having to say it in the perfect words in the moment. And why these images, why cultural appropriation is harmful or hurtful, and how to move past it. When I started, I was entering into a conversation that existed, Like I wasn't the first one.

I was building upon the legacy of activists who came before me, like Suzanne Shone Hard Joe and like all the amazing largely Native women who had been fighting against Native mascot simist representations for decades. But the conversation around cultural appropriation was still pretty new then in twenty and ten, Like it was still an academic e term that had come out of anthropology and wasn't really in the mainstream.

So to see the impact of that conversation now, to see every single day there's some headline about cultural appropriation is wild to me, Like that was not a conversation that existed a decade ago. To see that is really amazing. Let's talk about appropriation. Would you talk about specifically how it reinforces systems of power and actively erases Native culture? Absolutely so. I think a lot of the conversation about cultural appropriation misses out on some of the key parts

of it. When we define it as just taking from a culture that is not your own. That misses the whole power piece of it. And so for Indigenous people specifically, we're living in a settler colonial society. Colonization was not something that happened a long time ago and now we're past it. Like colonization is every structure that we live in, every structure we interact with, like the fact we're speaking English right now, like all of these things. We are

in an active settler colonial society. So that power structure of the colonizer and the colonized still deeply exists in everything that we do. So I have written about smudge kits and the fact that white sage is being sold everywhere. And cultural appropriation is not just about like that's an uncomfortable thing or like that's something that we've been working on. It's not acknowledging the systems of power that are in place. It's not allowing Indigenous peoples the power to represent ourselves

in the way that we want to be represented. Native spiritual practices were prohibited by law until nineteen seventy eight. That wasn't that long ago. Like I was born in nineteen eighty five, Like that really was not that long ago.

So before that we could be like fined or sent to jail or insane asylums for practicing our religion, our spirituality, and so now to see those things in stores or oliver Etsy or whatever, it is completely ignores that history and doesn't acknowledge the fact that this is something we're

actively having to protect and reclaim. So there are plenty of things that Native folks are willing to share and are very active about sharing and are very open about sharing, but there are certain things that we should be able to have the power to say that's just for folks

within the community. You know, as a black person, I think that's that's always a tough conversation to have with anyone when you talk about culture or in your cases, some of the spiritual practices that are important, and it seems like there's a lack of education there from the folks who are taking from the dominant culture, who are taking from these subcultures or from these cultures that they're unfamiliar with. One part of fixing this could be found

in education. And I see there's a lot of debate right now about talking about black folks in history and what that looks like to each proper history to teach where black folks were in the place of history. What does that look like for Native folks? What does it look like to reinsert Native culture and Native history into the larger American historical narrative and the world historical narrative.

There is so much space for being able to do that work, because right now the narrative that we do learn in schools is so limited and so one sided. And I think the challenge is that that history does not paint much like the black history in the US does not paint the US in a good light. It does not, But I mean, the United States would not

exist without the genocide of indigenous people. And so I think that's where a lot of the challenge comes from, is that if you start unpacking this history, it's not

a good and positive history. But the work I want to do is not just dwelling on these like horrific acts of the past, but also the ongoing resistance and amazing work of Indigenous people all throughout these types of history that were so devastating for indigenous people, there have always been Native folks working for change, working for cultural reclamation,

working for protection of lands and waters. And to me, a way to bring non natives into the conversation is to focus on those stories of resilience and strength and

let people see that. Well, we can talk about Sarah Winnemucca, who was a Piute translator and go between settlers and her community, and the amazing work that she did, and how she was an activist and really protected her community, and through her story learn about all of those horrible policies that the US was inflicting against her people, the removals of her people from their homelands, and the things

that she was fighting against. We can learn about that painful history through the strength and resilience of someone like Sarah Winnemucca. I mean, we as humans like to connect with other humans, so I think that there's a way to use those stories as a way to bring other folks into the conversation. Speaking of stories, you just published a book called Notable Native People, and in it there are so many names and stories that you are bringing to the forefront and allowing us to kind of round

out history. How far do you think that work like this needs to go and does it only need to come from Native people. It can't just be the work of Native people's. Everyone who is on the lands in what is currently known as the US is on indigenous land, and you have a responsibility as a guest on those lands to form a good relationship with the land and

the people from that land. It's imperative that non native folks begin to do this work on their own too, of uncovering those stories of why the curriculum is so bad, or why they only learned about Sitting Bull and Geronimo and not the millions more Native stories, and why most of the histories that we learn and in the eighteen hundreds.

And that was also what I was really trying to push back on with this book, is I wanted to bring forward stories of the past that we're not as well known, but then also really focus on the present and say, here are fifty Indigenous people that are doing incredible things today. I mean, there are five hundred and seventy seven federally recognized tribes and one hundreds more state

recognized non recognized tribes. And then there's Alaska Native communities and Kannakamali in what is currently known or well what has always been known as Hawaii, and the vast diversity of experience and stories in those communities definitely can't be represented in just the fifty profiles that I did in the book, so plenty, plenty more work to do on that front. One thing that I noted while you were talking is that there's been sub changes. There's been some

high profile changes, I'll say, and I'm saying changes. I say that very carefully because you know, change is a long thing that happens over time. It's not something that happens overnight. And I think about things like the Washington football team changing their name, or Deb Holland being in the cabinet, or even a show like Reservation Dogs being on FX. Yes, I think it's very easy for people to stop at those milestones and say, we did it. Now,

let's let's let's move on. How do you encourage people to push beyond that. Yeah, I think that's a really important question because I think that's often where the representation conversation gets criticized by folks from within community. Is that thinking that representation in itself is the end goal, and that of course can't be farther from the truth. So if we had Native folks represented at every sector of society in every TV show and every movie, that would

be cool. That would be important, And the visibility comes with an acknowledgement that Native people still exist and are here and will always be here. But none of that is really meaningful without actionable change on things like land back, Like bringing land back into indigenous stewardship is kind of the ultimate goal of all of this and all of

the changes that would come along with that. But to me, visibility is really the first challenge that we as indigenous people have to overcome, because we've purposely been erased and made invisible, because our presence is a challenge to the values of what is currently known as the United States.

So in order to begin these conversations about deeper issues of relationship to land, to one another, to non human relatives, there has to be an acknowledgement that we are still around and here and engaging in these practices, Doctor Kane, what would that look like? What are some actionable steps beyond working for representation? To me, moving beyond it is really starting for every non native person to begin a relationship with the land that they're on and the people

from that land. And that can look like well, first of all, figuring out who that is, who the people are whose land you occupy, and then looking up ways to support their sovereignty to support the issues that they're engaged with. Every community has a different set of challenges that they're facing based on their local lands and governments and things like that. There's a website landback dot org,

which is a good place to start. It has a great manifesto that sort of lays out why this idea of land back is so fun to mental to processes of decolonization. And I use that word decolonization very carefully because I think it's something that gets misused a lot to just mean like social justice or like indigenous rights, and that's really not what it's about. It's about the

rematriation of Indigenous land and life ways. So reading landback dot org, it's understanding how that sort of phrase really represents a lot. There are amazing resources, like in the Bay Area there is the sogorotea land trust run by a group of Indigenous women. There are ways for settlers to pay rent for the land that they're on in

different cities. So I think moving the conversation from just sort of like representation matters for representation's sake, to representation matters because you need to know about the people who's land you're on. You need to know about your relationship to this land, and for Indigenous folks, our identities as indigenous are so deeply tied to being from the land and from a place that it's kind of one and

the same in a lot of ways. So learning about us through books and media and all of these things is a start of that relationship to the land. I have two questions about allyship, and I mean and I want to talk specifically about non native folks and allyship with Native folks. The first is that last summer, I noticed that a lot of the momentum that came for the Washington football team changing their name came out of the momentum that came after the fervor of George Floyd.

And I remember even myself tweeting at the Washington football team because they posted a black square on Blackout Tuesday, which is what a lot of people were posting in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. They posted a black square and I immediately said, how could you post that? If you with your name being a slurt, like, how

could you post that? And people went after them, and it looked like a lot of that momentum snowballed into them actually making the decision because then some of the larger corporations pulled their funding for the Washington FOTBA team, and someone or threatened to pull their funding for the Washington football team, and that paved the way for them to change their name. What does that allyship look like in a perfect world? Knowing that natives were doing a

lot of that work early on. I saw them on television shows. I saw folks on John Stewart many years ago talking about the names that need to be changed, whether it be Cleveland, whether it be you know, Florida State, whether it be the Blackhawks, any of these teams. So what does that allyship look like? When is the success? Does it only come in large inflection points like the death of a very public death of a black man, or or are there other ways in which we could

do a better job of being an allyship? You're absolutely right that the momentum around Black Lives Matter is really what pushed a lot of these issues that had kind of been like on the precipice of change for a long time. That pushed them over the edge. And I think that is a powerful message that especially for marginalized communities or even more specifically for Black and Native communities that when we come together on a lot of these issues,

than we're an unstoppable force. I don't even like the term ally anymore. I feel like it's something that people kind of like slap on as a button that says they're doing a good job, and they don't they don't really think about action, I like accomplice or like co conspirator. So I think, yeah, historically our communities have been purposely separated.

Within Black and Native communities, there's a lot of listening and learning that needs to happen and unlearning a lot of the messages that we have been taught through colonization, through the media. Native communities have a lot of internalized anti blackness that we really need to address and work on. And for black communities, black folks have received the same media messages that everyone has received, stereotypical things as well

as the intense and erasure. So there's work to be done within black communities about learning a lot of those misrepresentations. Even though there's a ton of overlap in our communities, tons of black Native folks that don't really get represented in a lot of these conversations. But I think we need to look for those spaces and uplift them and join the work that is already happening, and not pretend like this is a brand new conversation that's happening for

the first time in twenty one. To me, that's the dream is to be able to figure out the pathway forward where all of our identities and connections to this land can really be honored and we can build a world that we all feel safe and represented and can move forward in that good way in relationship to the land. I think the biggest struggle that I've ever had talking to other Black folks about Native issues, especially when you

talk about things like land sovereignty. It's very easy for black folks to be like and me included and actually just talk about myself. There were times that I struggled with, well, I didn't choose to be backing, which is always the

hard question when people talk about land sovereignty. I'm like, yeah, I'd love for you to have it back, but then where do I go, Like there, it's hard to trace it back for some folks, especially in the black community, and I imagine there's some ways in which Native folks feel the same way about Black folks and issues of blackness where they're just like I am Native, I have my own stuff to deal with here. Can you talk more specifically about bringing that together and what is it?

Because we know it would be effective, but how do we convince both sides that it is because we're both struggling that we need to come together. Yeah. I think it's an ongoing challenge and conversation, and I think Land Back is a conversation as a movement is not about replicating what was done to Indigenous peoples in terms of genocide, displacement, all of these attempts to destroy cultural practices. And that's another thing that like a lot of black communities share,

is this like story of constant displacement from land. It's about creating a new system where we all can live in a way that honors our relationship with the land, and that includes descendants of enslaved peoples, that includes immigrants, that include settlers. That's a conversation that is going to be many, many years and decades in the making. Is

not something that's going to happen tomorrow. But I think if we can start collectively dreaming together about what that future would look like, if we can acknowledge the harm that has been done and has continued to be done to our communities separately but also together, and the ways that our own communities engage in harm against one another. Those are all important places to start, but of course coming back to the idea that our communities have not

historically always been separate, contemporarily have not been separate. There's so much solidarity work happening, there's so much co organizing happening, and so many people who embody both of those identities. So I think it's a myth that we're incredibly separate. I feel like you're talking about intersectionality and that a rising tide lifts all boats. Yes, let me ask you

about your your own personal relationship to the land. How did that change as you became more in tuned with your identity and you begin to do more of the work you especially said, especially in grad school, were there any types of differences that you made in your relationship to the land and the communities around you as you know,

grew more into this work. The biggest thing that has helped me move as an indigenous person and feel like I am moving in a good way in the world is to build and maintain a relationship with whatever land I'm on. So I've grown up in very suburban spaces where the land is supermanicured and been completely taken over

by cookie cutter houses and things like that. I've lived in very urban cities, and I think the knowledge and recognizing that even those places that have been so separated from the indigenous people who come from those lands, that is still native land. And so understanding whose land I'm on, knowing their name, knowing where they are now, knowing the stories like from that land is really important to me. And then finding ways for me to reconnect with the

land has also been very important. So making sure that I build in and it's been hard in the last couple of years because of the pandemic, but making sure I build in travel that takes me back to my traditional homelands, which prior to the Trail of Tears, are in what is currently known as North Carolina and Tennessee, Georgia.

Being able to take trips back there is like really transformative and stand on the land that my people have been on for since time immemorial, and that we have these sacred sites that we know our ancestors stood at

and prayed at and we're there is really powerful. And then I've also been doing I'm working on a new kind of art project around my own family's land displacement to be able to understand that story of like where did this disconnection happen for my family in particular, so I mean Trail of Tears, And then we had allotment land in Oklahoma, but then that land was flooded out for the building of a lake, and so thinking by

the department engineers. Yes, And that's another thing that like a lot of black community shares this like story of constant displacement from land, and so in learning the history and sort of uncovering it, that also helps me to build a relationship to the land, and that's really important as well. And to understand why I have grown up so disconnected is that, like, this wasn't a choice that I or my family made. This was a series of policies and events by the settler government that forced me

to grow up in this way. So that's a powerful kind of reclamation as well. Do you feel optimistic about Native erasure being solved? I think on this show we say things are solvable, But do you see an endpoint here or do you do you feel like there's a point where you'll say I've done enough, I can pass the baton on what does that even look like for you? It's actually been kind of amazing in the last decade that like I thought I was going to be fighting

Indian mascots for like the rest of my life. I thought I was going to be like fighting Halloween costumes and like these really low hanging things that to me just seemed so painfully obvious were harmful. And I for ten years on the blog was like every year at Halloween had to do another blog post about how you

shouldn't dress as a Native person for Halloween. And even like this year I was watching on Indigenous People's Day that a lot of my Native friends and like the students at at Brown where I'm a faculty member, like they took the day to actually just rest and like being with their friends and their family and like be on the land or do whatever it is they wanted. And in years past, it's always had to be the big rally, the big talk, the big education campaign that everything.

So those kind of small gains to me, like they seem I mean, they're not insignificant, Like the fact that we can now be having a meaningful conversation about land back where a decade ago I was having to say, please don't wear a sacred headdress to Coachella. Like these are progress? Yeah, I think, Like I said, I don't

think representation is the end goal. But I do think if we get to a point where I and all the other folks who write and talk about representations don't have to keep saying the same things about representation mattering. If folks just recognize that Indigenous folks exist and still exist and will always be on these lands, then it means we can have the more deeper, meaningful conversations, So that to me is solvable. Doctor Keane, this has been

an incredible conversation. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Oh it's my absolute pleasure. Thank you. Doctor Adrian Keane is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. She's an assistant professor of American Studies and Ethnic Studies at Brown University, co hosts the podcast called All My Relations, and she's the author of the new book Notable Native People. It's an inspiring collection of profiles of Native American leaders.

It's available now. It has beautiful illustrations. Go get it wherever you get your books, and check out our episode notes for links to additional resources that doctor Keene mentioned in this episode. Stay tuned for future episodes that dive into additional solutions from native luminaries. Solvable is produced by Jocelyn Frank, research by David Jah, booking by Lisa Dunn, editing help from Keyshell williams. Our managing producer is Sasha Matthias,

and our executive producer is Mia LaBelle. Special thanks to Heather Famee, Carly Migliori, Eric Sandler, Maggie Taylor, and the whole Pushkin team. I'm Ronald Young Jr. Thanks for listening.