Well, I think even among indigenous scholars, I'm somewhat unique in that I actually grew up on the reservation. I mean, I grew up in a house that was developed by the housing department when back in a time there was no running water, no running sewer. It was a rough time on the reservation. When I think about what motivates me today, it really stems from seeing both where my family and community has come over the years, but also recognizing the ways in which inequalities have shaped how my community is viewed, how we understand ourselves, what kids see as possible for themselves. If you hang out with my research team, when we get to points where we're struggling, it's often the case that I will remind them that native kids are dying every day in this country. We can't let our little hang-ups be the thing that keeps work from getting out or that stops us from changing the narrative in this country which really omits and erases indigenous people. I think my cultural background by growing up in the reservation I really had, I grew up on a beach community where every house was my relative. I didn't grow up with friends, I grew up with cousins and my cousins were my siblings. I also have siblings, but it turns out in our language the word for sibling and for cousin is the same word. I grew up with the generation of kids and we played on the beaches in the summer. We didn't even know we were poor at that time because our parents and grandparents would come down at the end of the day in the summer, and my grandpa would pull out the crab traps. We had this big huge part we kept down the beach. We'd make crab and we'd all sit around and eat. I mean, it just seemed like we had so much. Our family is very involved culturally as well as in the leadership of the tribe. I've seen the ways in which members of my family have made a big difference in how our tribe has done over the years. It's something that keeps me centered. I really care about my community, my family. I'm deeply passionate about the issues that we're working on at the center, but also the work I've done over the years. That's great. That's a start. I have a hunch that Earl, as you say some words about yourself, there's some things in here that might resonate with you too, maybe. I'm not sure, but how about you, Earl. Well, I often say I'm a product of the segregated South. I was born in the segregated South in 1955. Went to state-sanctioned segregated schools until I was in the 10th grade. The word integration which you use, but I think that's an inappropriate words to describe what I experienced in the 10th grade in the early 70s in Virginia. Rather, it was desegregation. Integration required a sharing of power. What we came to realize in the school settings in particular, there was no sharing of power. This was us. My 10th grade geometry teacher one day somehow went on a reef about the good old days on the plantation. It drilled into my consciousness that this was a particular story. It was her story that recentered the power relationships in the class. The class was 50 percent black and 50 percent white, but this was an attempt on her part to put us back in our place. When I think about the work that I would undertake over the next 30, 35 years after finishing graduate school, it had a lot to do with the understandings that I came to internalize and interpret coming out of that transition from a segregated world to a desegregated world. The interesting part is that in the segregated world, I never use the word minority because it had no context, it had no meaning. It was only in a desegregated world that word minority and word majority came into play. I can remember saying after the publication of my first book, and it was about Norfolk, I made it from Norfolk Virginia, that I had no understanding of that word minority. One of my mom's church members was telling me not to dwell on the past and I kept saying, I'm sorry but you can't understand the present if you actually don't connect it to the past. I hear you, I respect you, but I'm going to ignore you and go forward and do what I think needs to be done to change the world as we move forward. That's the motivating and shaping of the trajectory of my career and as you noted, Barry, in the outset. I have run many things, from schools, to universities, to foundations over the last 20 years. It's oftentimes with this particular framing that we have not achieved the integrated world and hence we need to figure out ways to really activate and desegregated the world. That's great. Thank you. Stephanie, do you see anything in what Earl said that you want to comment on or extend? Yeah. I was really struck. Really, there's so many similarities and yet differences. I similarly went to a school on the reservation. Where I grew up, the world was very much made or white. We went to squat on the reservation and then at six quad transition to school off the reservation in the nearby town. My life was very much influenced by my first year off the reservation. Up until that point I was good student, very active in cultural activities, very involved in the community, but in 6th grade my homeroom teacher turned out to be an extremely racist individual. There's a moment that happened. There are six native kids in the class and she takes us and puts us in her cubicle and she looks at us and she says, "I want to know which one of you stole my money." It turns out it was $5. But we're 11 years old and we're looking at one another and nobody has any idea what she's talking about. We're all quiet. She says, "We're not leaving here until I get my money back." Finally, one of my peers says, "Why do you think it was us?" She looks at us with the most disgusted face and says, "Who else would it be?" It's a moment where I realized that other people don't think about us the way that I grew up thinking about us. They don't see the beauty in our community and our culture and our connection. That to her, we were just these brown kids from the reservation. She had all stereotypes that included that we would be the people who would steal. We went on. That year in her class I got straight Cs despite getting As on everything. I think it was one of those things where I also learned I had to keep my school work. I learned that there was a power inequality. I learned that the world that I had understood up until that point living within the confines of my community was not the world outside of my community. I think these are those moments that I think about my grandma's experience. There's a real connection. My grandmother was in the generation that was taken away and put into federally run boarding schools. When I was a child she told me 100 times about the day they came to her community and took her away. I grew up in the Tuleilep community , the Tuleilep reservation. My grandmother was Kronot which is over on the ocean side. Tuleilep is where most of the kids in Washington State were taken. There was a boarding school that was made here. She was part over here, but she was seven years old when she was taken by the government to the boarding school. She used to tell the story about the day these men showed up and her dad was out fishing, her mom was out doing work and she was home with her grandmother. There was a translator who basically said she has to go. She talks about this moment where she is holding onto her grandmother's skirt and they start to pull her from her grandmother. In each of these moments, I think about that moment from my grandmother and then I think about all these other moments where someone is really pulling from who we are as a people. This teacher took away my sense of wholeness, of connection, my sense that who I was as a young person, who I understood my world to be was not beautiful. My grandmother's taken to this school where she was left-handed, she was beaten for being left-handed. She wasn't allowed to see her family again until she was an adult. I think about how many ways in which we have created these social structures that are undermining the well-being. My community continues to feel the effects of those boarding schools where a lot of physical and sexual abuse happened in most schools. That has continued to be something that we as a community are trying to heal from. This is literally what gets me up every day. I can connect to that story. It isn't the same story but it's a similar history. I've always been fascinated by the ways in which the American story with black Americans versus native Americans has been so similar and yet in some ways the opposite and in someway the same. If we think about the one drop rule versus for native people, it was about getting rid of our our blood levels. We've had these very different ideas, but always with the idea that we're either going to get rid of these people or we're going to figure out how to use them. But it's always to the advantage of someone else and not us. I mean the center is very much a combination of everything that has motivated me to get where I am today. RISE which stands for Research for Indigenous Social Action and Equity, we have really a three-fold mission. One, we want to train generations of native scholars across the humanities and social sciences, to really address the ways in which these larger ideas held in society about indigenous people are actually driving discrimination and inequality. We both want to build that pipeline as well as to work with the university and really in many ways, with leaders across the country, to take this movement that I think has been going on and that we've had the good fortune to be a part of with other native organizations. To really push back. As the academic center for this, our hope is really to work in partnership with native tribes, communities, organizations, to drive home the idea that you can no longer continue to erase us, that it's time to reclaim the truth about history, and to acknowledge the ways in which we continue to oppress and colonize indigenous people and communities in this country. On the second part, we really are about bringing together activates, artists, to both think about what it means for what we refer to our Judith LeBlanc, one of our partners refers to as moccasins on the ground. Connecting with those indigenous people who are out there every day fighting the good fight and really think about what it does for them to have hands on the research, to work in partnership with research, to have data that they can use in their battle, and then artists who are about creating these new representations. They now make way. How do we have a big lock at what it means to change culture? There's this social action piece, there's a pipeline piece, and then ultimately there's a big research piece. We want to be and we really are the academic hub for doing research, looking at how discrimination prejudice and oppression are impacting indigenous people today. Does it exist anywhere else? Of course there are indigenous scholars who do the work, but for us it's really about creating a space where we can bring those scholars together, we can work together. We have partners at Harvard, Brown, Stanford, Washington, Berkeley, and we're coming together and creating these little teams to really think seriously in a long-term way, what needs to be done now, what's the data we need? We want to get to a point where people can no longer say there's a lack of data with native people. There's both this excuse for why we don't have data, there's not enough native people, yet there are other groups that are smaller guess that have data. Also the 2020 Census is showing that we're growing at a tremendous rate. We had 85 percent growth in our population from 2010-2020. We're not going away. We're here right now. Our communities have been thriving and people have not been paying attention. I think we've gotten to a point where we want to leverage that change and start to work together to really see what we can do. I'll go back to Stephanie's narrative about her grandmother. Realizing in large part, the story of America is the story of these individual narratives that began to understand the complexities of the ways in which we have interacted in the interrelationship between both individual experience and public policy. This is my second stint at the University of Michigan. I was here for 15 years from 1989-2004, went away for 14 years. Provost at Emory and President of the Mellon Foundation in New York City and then came back and created the Center for Social Solutions. That center has four areas of focus. The first has to do with diversity and democracy. We published a book series and have a series of other enterprises related to it called Our Compelling Interests, with Princeton University Press. The second area of slavering is aftermath, where we actually try to connect historical slavery to contemporary examples and expressions of force involuntary servitude in today's world. The third area has to do with water insecurity. The fourth is the dignity of labor in an automated world. As we think through the implications of increased automation on the abilities of not only Americans but humans across the planet, to claim some legitimate answer to the most important question, what do you do if you talk about the social dislocation in that we can anticipate. If you can't answer in this global contexts what you can do, I mean, the psychological effects with the sociological and familial and other impact that we're trying to get in and understand and address that issue. The project that came from Mellon when Mellon called for us to think about the new inequalities, lead us to actually then turn to the question of reparations. I have been teaching a course in public policy. I have a new appointment in School of Public Policy on reparations, looking at indigenous people both in the US and in Canada
