#podcastreflection

I was listening to “Native Mascots, Really Still?” and something stood out to me. When talking about the people who support the football team from Washington, and it’s racist mascot and racist name, Matika said: “they’re not thinking of us as real people.” 

That reminded me of the Myths from All the Real Indians Died off, particularly in how the myths are self-serving, how the myths that settlers create then go on to benefit settlers. It disparages nation people, dehumanizes them to the point where then people think its fine to have racist mascots because they don’t know any Native people. 

A thought popped into my head that it’s part of a settler move to innocence, too. That the dehuman portrayal of Native people makes their issues less real, less important and overall just less in the eyes of the settler. Because the way the identity is portrayed affects a lot of things. Like how Muscogee nation had to spend their time trying to prove that they ran a capable reservation.

One thing that is interesting to me in regard to the “debate” over native mascots, is that when Native people are getting hurt, both mentally and physically, to the point that it leads to so many children dead because of suicide on Matika’s reservation, the reaction of the sports fans is to say ‘this isn’t hurting you.’ It makes me really upset to think that people have such a reaction, that they can’t even respond with empathy to native people, or even consider their claims of hurt to be true. 

I guess that plays back into the dehumanization of Native people through mascots. If you aren’t going to consider that native people are people, then you probably wouldn’t consider that they feel pain and that they are being hurt by these portrayals.

So it’s self-serving all over again.

I’m glad that I saw Dawnland before I listened to this episode. I think that I’ve had a profoundly different experience and interaction with the episode, because of Dawnland’s portrayal of the trauma and the bad things that native communities that have suffered because of non-compliance with ICWA.

Honestly, I don’t know much about Adoption practices, but to me, it doesn’t make much sense that Michelle wouldn’t be placed with any of the relatives that actually wanted her. I assume that it has something to do with discrimination, and whatever social worker that was assigned to her thinking that it would be better to place her into a white home with two parent-age people than for her to be emersed in her culture. 

It pisses me off so much that Lisa Blatt equated the importance of allowing native children to remain in touch with their culture, with some kind of discrimination. I can’t speak for other people, but for me, feeling un-moored in my culture is a horrible thing, and I understand that the erasure, the questioning, the isolation from the culture that would come with being adopted by a white couple, would do more harm than good. 

The fact that people think ICWA is about race is definitely a misunderstanding about how Indian sovereignty works. It reminds me of the myth that “Indians are wards of the state” because that myth, removes their sovereignty. To be honest, I hadn’t really made the connection that ICWA was about political affiliation and that it’s more of a matter of citizenship than anything else, until I listened to this podcast. But it makes sense. Other countries can probably put in place laws around international adoptions, Native nations having the same in regards to the United States makes sense. 

The title of this podcast episode has bothered me for a while, it’s part of the reason I never listened to it before now. All the other episodes start with ‘the’ ‘the treaty’ ‘the tribe’ ‘the opposition’. In all of this, “Still Bleeding” seems out of place. And the subject matter seems out of place too. To me, it seems like Rebecca Nagle was planning on having another episode here, one that was entirely reliant upon the supreme court having a decision. An episode that tackled what the decision would actually mean for the tribe, and for Indian Country. The kind of episode that I’d still really like to hear, whenever the supreme court decision ever comes out. 

But instead of that episode, we got Still Bleeding, which by itself is a really interesting episode. It’s interesting it connects the vanishing Indian, to the government process that created the myth, through the bureaucracy. “The process was meant to take our land, but it took so much more” said Rebecca Nagle.

In my final project interviews, the topic of language was brought up as something that was being lost, and while that's true, it can also be revived and revitalized. At the national day of mourning, a group of Crow citizens talked about the importance of language revitalization.

As someone who’s father never taught me his first language. I understand the loss of culture that comes with not having your language. It's like there is something missing, it makes it harder to connect with others who share the same culture, it makes it harder to connect with your relatives. It makes you feel more like an outsider, and more like maybe you don’t really belong to that culture. 

The experience of young Cherokee people not learning their language isn’t the same as not being taught Spanish. For starters, Spanish isn’t dying out. But I can reminisce over the lack of connection. 

Still Bleeding also made me think about how technology has aided in people learning languages. Nagle could practice her Cherokee by calling and talking to native Cherokee speakers, and the really popular company, Duolingo, even offers courses in ‘Ōlelo Hawai’i and Diné Bizaad.

This case has been postponed for so long, that I can say that they didn’t just run out of time like was proposed in this episode. Another calendar has been released by the supreme court between when I did my first reflection and now. The calendar goes until March 5th. There is still no sign of Sharp v. Murphy on the calendar. 

The longer this goes on, the more I’ve wondered about what the supreme court has to gain from postponing the oral arguments. It doesn’t feel like it’s such a difficult decision to make like Brown v. Board or Roe v. Wade, other cases that were reargued before the supreme court. With the evidence proposed, the Muscogee Creek Nation should have their reservation reaffirmed. 

I realized something when I was listening to the opposition article. The people who potentially have something to lose from a decision in favor of Indian Country, like the fossil fuel industry, gain more profits the longer that this decision gets put off. 

The longer that the case is put off, the longer the Muscogee nation goes without their land, which is what it seems like the supreme court wants out of this arrangement. I would hope that the argument, when it does happen, gives Muscogee the upper hand in all of this. That during their time away from the courthouse, they have managed to craft an even stronger argument as to why their reservations still exist, and that it will sway the judges into a decision that benefits Muscogee Nation and their sovereignty over their lands.

Of course, this is only a hope. At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if we don’t get an announcement about Sharp v. Murphy until next June. 

The longer it goes on, I would say that I think I lose a little bit of that hope. Because it definitely feels like the judges don’t have the same opinion I do on the “cut and dry” nature of this case. 

And with the long history of native land dispossession through allotment and termination, and unfair deals that took treaty land, it just feels like this decision, might be another one. Another case of the United States ‘taking back’ land that wasn’t even theirs to begin with.  How I feel about the outcome of this case changes a lot depending on what new information I’ve gotten. Right now, what’s making me think that the court won’t reaffirm their reservation, is what Nelson said in class. That when he told the Mohegan historian about this case, that she laughed and said ‘that would never happen’. It took so much effort for the Mohegan people to get even a small amount of land, it makes sense that the federal government would do as much as they could to stop any land from returning to native people.

How insidious it is that they divided the lands in ways that made it easier to steal. It’s odd to think about, that those “disappearing maps” of native land in the united states, the ones that make the expansion of the United States seem inevitable, are probably due in large part to things like allotment. To using bureaucracy and the law to steal land from native people. In that way it’s kind of ironic that this case is providing an opportunity for bureaucracy to restore the land, using some of the same systems that it initially took the land. 

Because the system was designed to hurt native people. I think a lot of people (including me before I listened to This Land) don’t realize how many steps the US government actively took to disposes of native people of their land. It wasn’t that they gave it up, or that settlers just gradually outnumbered native people and so the land became under the jurisdiction of the United States, it was that things like blood quantum were put in place to allocate land, land was distributed in ways so that it was too far away to be of any proper use, and laws like squatters laws were put in place to allow settlers to more easily take native land.

The fact that the Native people had to actively fight to keep the land that they were give through allotment, while settlers didn’t have to do anything and got the land made me really upset, but it also reminded me about how Muscogee Creek nation had to be constantly arguing in court that they were fit to run a reservation while the Oklahoma government didn’t have to prove a thing about their government’s competency. 

One thing that really shocked me about this episode, is that when Nagle lays out all the facts about the case, it seems so cut and dry. It seems obvious that if the Supreme Court justices were thinking about precedent and the facts when it came to this case, it would have been voted on by now. And the decision would have been to validate the reservations of the tribes.

This episode gave me the kind of history lesson I wish I had gotten in American public schools. Nagle is a storyteller, and a good one. She tells a complex history, one that had many bad sides depending on the angles that you’re looking at, and lets you come to your conclusion. 

“My job isn’t to tell you how to feel one way or another about our history. I just want people to have all the facts. Love or hate the Ridges, that's on you." That quote came from the Cherokee historian Nagle talked to. I liked that. 

There was so much in this episode that the first time I listened to this, I didn’t know. But this time around, I couldn’t shake the question, especially after my last two reflections: “Do the supreme court judges know all this?”

John Ridge, as a lawyer, “us[ing] his white education to fight from within” reminded me of the current lawyers, the ones who are giving the oral arguments in the favor of Muscogee nations. They’ve adapted to the times and are trying to use the current system in order to get their land back, just like John Ridge tried to use his system to keep their land or their sovereignty. 

Ridges’ history about his upbringing also made me wonder about that first Indian boarding school. It was mentioned very offhandedly by Nagle, in a way that didn’t seem to carry the horror that they have been explained within media that we’ve seen before. To me, it seemed like she framed it as a good thing, someplace where he met his wife and got the education to fight the settlers, and eventually sign away their land with the Treaty of New Echota. 

Over the past few episodes, I’ve been wondering something, but it really came up when Nagle quoted/paraphrased Adrinnee Keene: "settlers gave colonization stories And indigenous people have creation stories...but as indigenous people, we know how this land was formed because we have been here since the beginning if time" 

Personally, I think I'm struggling to reckon the Cherokee people's connection to the land with the fact that they don’t live on their ancestral lands anymore. Nagle says that it’s there because they’ve practiced their ceremonies on it for 7 generations, but what about places where native people have been displaced from, do they still have a right to their original lands if now they have lived someplace new for a long time? The lands that the Cherokee, Muscogee, Seminole, Chickasaw and Chocktaw nations now inhabit are also Osage, Oceti Sakowin, Wichita, Comanche, and Caddo lands (according to native-land.ca). Who’s land really is it?

I don't really think that's my place to judge wheater or not they have a right to the land because I'm not indigenous, but that doesn’t mean I understand.

For now, I’m going to act like It's now their land because it is according to the treaty. And that if the treaty where to be respected, then it would be theirs, and so, the treaty should be respected.

I understand that the unceded land of the United States, places. where treaties were made and broke, should be returned to the native people, but what about the places that, by the treaties of the nations or at least by people like John Ridge, were granted to the United States? Are those also lands that should be returned?  I guess it doesn’t really make sense to me, but I also get that it doesn’t have to make sense to me.

“Decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is, obviously, a program of complete disorder.” - Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 1963, p. 36 (via Decolonization is not a metaphor pg. 4)