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Episode: Rematriate
Author: Matika Wilbur, & Temryss Lane
Duration: 01:01:52
Episode Shownotes
Send us a textTo rematriate is to return the sacred to the mother. Join us today as we talk about the collective work of Rematriation with Dr. Dian Million (Tanana Athabascan), Michelle Schenandoah (Oneida Nation) and Marquel Musgrave (Nanbe Owingeh). In this episode, we acknowledge that rematriation IS the work
of decolonization; we talk through Indigenous Feminism, Sky Woman, and we even make the connections between Ruth Bater Ginsberg and The Doctrine of Discovery.Dr. Dian Million, is Tanana Athabascan, and is a Professor in American Indian Studies at the University of Washington. She recieved her Ph. D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 2004. She is the author of Therapeutic Nations: Healing in an Age of Indigenous Human Rights, as well the author of “Felt Theory: An Indigenous Feminist Approach to Affect and History,” “Intense Dreaming: Theories, Narratives and Our Search for Home,” and most recently “A River Runs Through Me: Theory from Life”. She teaches courses on Indigenous politics, literatures, feminisms and social issues.Michelle Schenandoah is a Rematriation Activist, media maker, and inspirational speaker. She belongs to the Oneida Nation, Wolf Clan, of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. Michelle is the host of Rematriated Voices with Michelle Schenandoah, an upcoming talk show highlighting the untold stories and contributions of Indigenous Peoples in Turtle Island. She is also the founder of the nonprofit Rematriation, an organization dedicated to uplifting the Indigenous women led movement of rematriation. Marquel Musgrave is a mother, auntie and tribal citizen of Nanbé Owingeh and currently works for the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center. Marquel has previously worked at the Coalition to Stop Violence Against Native Women, as an outdoor experiential educator, and served an elected term as tribal council secretary for the pueblo of Nambe. She is currently a member of the Tewa Language Committee for her pueblo, and serves on the Board of Directors for Pueblo Action Alliance. They are also co-founder of the Rights of Mother Earth and Water Beings Coalition.The Library Rematriation Project defines this topic, and they say, “By “rematriate” we mean “give back,” but unlike the legal term “repatriate,” which signifies a simple transfer of ownership, “rematriate” means something more profound: a restoration of right relationships and a true action of decolonization, aimed not just at righting a past wrong but transforming our collective future.+++Shout out to our All My Relations team that makes this possible. Executive Editor of this episode is Jonathan Stein, mastering and sound design by Max Levin, original live music recording by Black Belt Eagle Scout and Laura Ortman. Live recording in Santa Fe by Teo Shantz, social media by Lindsey Hightower, produced by Jamie Bratcher, Executive Assistant Haidyn Harvey, and Audio Assistant Darrien Camarillo. Special thanks to Orbit Studios, SubCat Studios, and Studio BE. Support the showFollow us on Instagam @amrpodcast, or support our work on Patreon. Show notes are published on our website, Allmyrelationspodcast.com. Matika's book Project 562: Changing the Way We See Native America is available now! T'igwicid and Hyshqe for being on this journey with us.
Full Transcript
00:00:00 Speaker_03
Everybody knows what the violence against Native women is. It's the profound disrespect for us and for the land. It's not only the profound disrespect for our bodies, but for us as peoples and our relations with the land.
00:00:23 Speaker_03
So that's what the real deal about rematriation is, is it's these ways of knowing that people have, they can be gendered any way they want, but for them to live again is rematriation.
00:00:48 Speaker_04
Hehehehe
00:01:02 Speaker_06
Today, we are discussing rematriation and what it means for our communities.
00:01:08 Speaker_06
To help us understand how this concept has developed and the stakes involved, we spoke with Dr. Diane Millian, Professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Washington, whom you just heard.
00:01:19 Speaker_06
We also spoke with rematriation activists, Michelle Shanandoah and Markel Musgrave, who works for the National Indigenous Women's Resource Center.
00:01:29 Speaker_01
Yeah, rematriation is a term that's been taken up a lot in recent organizing and advocacy, and we wanted to get us all on the same page as to how we're thinking about what it actually means.
00:01:41 Speaker_01
And I wanted to start the conversation by sharing a quote from Aguasazni Mohawk Sea Keeper, Rowan White, who says, quote, the indigenous concept of rematriation refers to the reclaiming of ancestral remains, spirituality, culture, knowledge, and resources.
00:01:57 Speaker_01
instead of the more patriarchally associated repatriation.
00:02:02 Speaker_01
It simply means back to Mother Earth, a return to our origins, to life and co-creation rather than the patriarchal destruction and colonization, a reclamation of germination of the life-giving force of the divine female.
00:02:16 Speaker_06
Whoa. Rowan is so amazing. I'm trying to get that life-giving force of the divine female in my life.
00:02:29 Speaker_01
I mean, so Matika, when you're hearing that definition and you're thinking about your own life and your babies and your community, why is rematuration something that we think is important for us to talk about? Why is it important to you?
00:02:43 Speaker_06
Oh my god, well, first of all, it's everything. Right, rematriation is everything. For me, it's just as much about the return to water as it is about the return to our Mother Earth. You know, here in the Pacific Northwest, we still have all of these
00:03:00 Speaker_06
core important ceremonies that tie to our original agreements that tell us who and how we're supposed to be. We still have our salmon ceremonies. You can still go to our longhouse and experience the power of our songs and dances.
00:03:19 Speaker_06
You can still hear Lushootseed being spoken.
00:03:21 Speaker_06
And while we've moved really far away from what was once a matrilineal society, our women are still actively in power-holding roles, centering our ethics and our indigenous intelligence, both in birth and child raising, and also in our tribal governments.
00:03:38 Speaker_06
But for me personally, it's been critically important to be mindful in the decisions that I make as a new mom. How do I raise my baby to
00:03:47 Speaker_06
experience life in a gentle and good way, how do I help her to develop a relationship with land and with water and with her ancestors, you know, and one of the things that we do every day is we greet the sun and the moon, you know, so
00:04:03 Speaker_06
It's really cute, like Homa Bee, every time we go outside, you know, she'll be like, hi, Grandma Moon. And every single time she sees it, she never fails to like to greet the moon.
00:04:16 Speaker_06
And that to me is like really beautiful and profound that she's developed that relationship. We're getting ready to plant. It's that time of year. And spring is here. So we've been preparing for salmon ceremony. We've been weaving.
00:04:33 Speaker_06
We've been waking up our seeds. We're getting ready again for this transition in our lives, which I just am so excited about. I need spring. Hearing the birds outside is making me feel like I can go on. Winter's been way too long here.
00:04:48 Speaker_06
But the truth is, Alma hasn't known any other way of life. She's been to salmon ceremony every year. She has had her birthing way ceremonies.
00:05:01 Speaker_06
She has had this intimate connection to our traditional homelands because of these tiny little decisions that we make on a daily basis. I think that that takes conscious decision-making. I don't think that it just kind of falls into our lap.
00:05:19 Speaker_06
There's work involved, and I like that. That's who I want her to be.
00:05:24 Speaker_06
And then in my personal work as a storyteller, I've also made very deliberate decisions to photograph our matriarchs, to tell feminist stories, to connect with our sisters and amplify their voices. In fact, my next project is about this exactly.
00:05:41 Speaker_06
I feel really proud of the work that we've done here in the podcast with all of the incredible Native women that we've spoken to.
00:05:48 Speaker_06
I feel really good about all of the matriarchs that we've celebrated here, not just in this episode where we talk about rematriation, but like all of the incredible women whose voices have contributed to our collective consciousness.
00:06:01 Speaker_06
And that gives me like this great hope. So Adrienne, how do you think about rematriation?
00:06:06 Speaker_01
No, I think that's so powerful to think about that rematuration really is those daily small decisions. It's raising Alma B in a different way than we were able to be raised. And that is so incredibly powerful.
00:06:22 Speaker_01
And for me, of course, I am the nerdy academic. So I have a couple of like kind of academic-y ways that I think about this. And there's two things that I kind of wanted to highlight.
00:06:33 Speaker_01
The first is that when I'm thinking about rematriation, rematriation is really a response to colonial destruction. So we would not need rematriation if we hadn't experienced colonization.
00:06:47 Speaker_01
So to me, rematriation is not some like separate process from the big and messy work of decolonization. It is decolonization. You can't have decolonization without rematriation. So to me, land back is rematriation.
00:07:03 Speaker_01
Language revitalization is rematriation. Bringing traditional life ways into the future is rematriation. the work that we're all doing to center a relationship with the land, like that work that you're doing with Alma Bee, that's rematriation.
00:07:18 Speaker_01
So you can't have decolonization without the return, the rematriation of indigenous land and lifeways. So to me, we can think about it as rematriation is kind of the action steps of decolonization, if that makes sense.
00:07:33 Speaker_01
And then the second thing that I think about is that I see rematriation as tied deeply to my values as an Indigenous feminist. And I think about it kind of as this revitalization and return to matriarchal values.
00:07:50 Speaker_01
So for me, like on my journey as an Indigenous feminist, it's been about learning that as indigenous feminists, we aren't just fighting against some nebulous capital P patriarchy that exists out there.
00:08:06 Speaker_01
We know as our communities, the moment that patriarchy was brought into our communities and that moment was colonization.
00:08:16 Speaker_01
So baked into the structure of our current colonial world are these like patriarchal values, like greed and capitalism and all of that. And so to me, rematriation is a reversal of all of that.
00:08:31 Speaker_01
Our communities, like we knew a life before patriarchy and we can imagine a life after because of that. So I can't separate these ideas of like my own Indigenous feminism, of decolonization, all of that is rematriation to me.
00:08:54 Speaker_06
So we want to just jump right into our conversation with Michelle Shenandoah. She is a rematriation activist, a media maker, and an inspirational speaker. She belongs to the Oneida Nation and she's Wolf Clan.
00:09:09 Speaker_06
Michelle is the founder of the nonprofit Rematriation, an organization dedicated to uplifting the Indigenous women-led movement of rematriation. Good afternoon, Michelle.
00:09:25 Speaker_02
Oh, Siguli. I'm so grateful to be here. Thank you so much, Matika and Adrienne, for having me here. I'd like to introduce myself. Siguli Sugeg. Galuhya Nuis Niyogets Onyoteaka Ni'ii. Michelle Shenandoah. My Ngw'ehue indigenous name is Galuhya Nuis.
00:09:46 Speaker_02
It means that she's fond of the sky. I am a mother and grandmother, and I'm calling in today from within the traditional homelands of our Haudenosaunee Confederacy.
00:09:58 Speaker_02
And on the lands of the Onondaga Nation, I myself am Oneida, so our sister nation is about 30 minutes east of here. And I'm just really super grateful to be here today. Thank you.
00:10:13 Speaker_06
Michelle, could you please define rematriation for us and tell us the story of how you came to that definition?
00:10:19 Speaker_02
I myself come from a traditional family. My grandmother was a clan mother for our wolf clan. My mom is a faith keeper for us. And my husband also comes from a family of traditional leadership of chiefs and faith keeper.
00:10:34 Speaker_02
And, you know, it's just it's how I live my life. And so it's kind of the world in which I'm I'm living and orientated in. And so for me, you know, I'm trained within, you know, our culture and traditional laws and protocols.
00:10:48 Speaker_02
But I also have a Western legal education and also in business. And, you know, at this point, it's like, how do we just kind of bring this together in a way that really truly honors our people? And so Mama Bear, who's a bear clan mother from Akwesasne,
00:11:04 Speaker_02
She, you know, does a lot of work with the women and children of our community and kind of really helping to strengthen that voice of our women to stand firmly in our cultural ways and for our people.
00:11:17 Speaker_02
And she was using this word in a lot of context, and it was still really very new and being used. And, you know, I said, let's get this word known. It's not in the dictionary. Many people don't know what it is.
00:11:33 Speaker_02
And you're using it in many different contexts from governance to cultural matters to, you know, returning our objects to our people, talking about food.
00:11:43 Speaker_02
And so we spent an evening on the phone and I said, tell me, you know, everything that rematriation means to you.
00:11:51 Speaker_02
We spent about a good 45 minutes listening to her and just really fully explaining this worldview that's very centered around our women and life-giving elements and how this really is the way that our people think and how we orientate ourselves in the world and how we have to come back to that because colonization pulled us so far away from it.
00:12:17 Speaker_02
And also,
00:12:20 Speaker_02
reminding people that the origins of rematriation really come from within the traditional birthing practices where we return the elements that the baby, you know, is brought to this world and connects to the mother is returned back into the earth.
00:12:35 Speaker_02
And so, you know, putting that into a new context of thinking in the way of our governance and food and seeds. It's actually, it's not really new. It's how we have always been, but being able to verbalize it so that we can actually use it in practice.
00:12:53 Speaker_02
So I said, all right, let me spend some time with this, and I'm going to call you back. So, you know, I looked at everything she said. I felt my way through it.
00:13:03 Speaker_02
And, you know, then I like contrasted that to repatriation and looking at, you know, what that stands for. And it's returning a person or an object back to its original owner, back to its country.
00:13:17 Speaker_02
And this is really about returning back to the mother, right? Returning back to life. And so with that, I created this definition of returning the sacred to the mother. So here we are. So I said, let's get this in the dictionary.
00:13:30 Speaker_02
Let's get this wherever we can. And that's really become the mission of what we do now at Rematriation is to help to get people to understand that process. So, yeah, that's the story. That's such a good story.
00:13:43 Speaker_01
I love it so much. Especially the part of having to go back and be like, how do I sit and digest all of this? And to get all of that complexity down into this simple statement of returning to the mother is so powerful.
00:13:57 Speaker_06
Yes, you're right. Returning the sacred to the mother is so powerful. And I want to just take a moment to break that down, because it's not giving something sacred to mommy, right? That's not what we're talking about here.
00:14:16 Speaker_06
And you know, this is a slippery slope to define sacred, because I don't think I'm qualified to define what is sacred and what is not sacred. But I know I always revert back to what Anishinaabe people
00:14:31 Speaker_06
have taught me about their language, which is that in their language, instead of their language being gendered, it's defined by what has a spirit and what doesn't have a spirit.
00:14:41 Speaker_06
And I like to think about how in our languages, we also had ways just of describing on a daily basis things that were spirited or not spirited. So we had like this ongoing relationship with the spirit world.
00:14:56 Speaker_06
And I think that our traditional teachings root us in having a relationship with the sacred.
00:15:02 Speaker_06
And when I think of the mother, I think of the ephemeral mother, the mother earth, the divine life force, the feminine returning to the natural order of natural law. And that's what I think of when they say that, returning the sacred to the mother.
00:15:25 Speaker_01
And I think the powerful thing is that that can be interpreted through every different Indigenous community's lens and understanding, and that everyone's going to have a different relationship between what is sacred and what does it mean to return to the mother.
00:15:42 Speaker_01
And I also, like in these definitions, I think it's important for us to understand why this work is necessary. Why is it that we're having to do this work of rematriation?
00:15:53 Speaker_01
And so we wanted to bring in Dr. Diane Millian here to give some context on how colonization specifically targeted women and families and implemented patriarchal power.
00:16:06 Speaker_03
The way in which we have been dismantled as nations is known. It's known. All of us know it, except for the ones who do not want to see it or hear it. What had been targeted was women's roles. What had been targeted were families.
00:16:28 Speaker_03
And the families, of course, through all the relations that we make in a place, particularly here in Coast Salish country, where families are very tightly bound by their familial relations with other families, okay, one of the first things that is targeted is those relations, you know, by making people choose what reservation that they enroll in, you know, and you're gonna go live up here, and you're gonna go live down there.
00:16:56 Speaker_03
telling Nooksack, for instance, that they have to go have to live with Lummies. Of course, they're gonna say no. You know, that wasn't the relationship. Exactly, you got it. Okay, so we have all that.
00:17:09 Speaker_03
We know those kinds of things, but we don't recognize them sometimes of the way in which very specifically, of course, different governments are put into place And those governments are just like the governments of the patriarchy.
00:17:28 Speaker_03
They are the patriarchal governments. They're the colonial governments. The governments of settler colonialism, which were hierarchical, puts white males at the very top of that hierarchy over everything else that's living.
00:17:44 Speaker_03
All of our governing systems that went down were really lateral. The power wasn't in being power over. It was the power that was given from the spirits of the land.
00:17:57 Speaker_03
And people sought to be in right relation with them because they could take it all away. The fish would not come. If you're not in right relation with those fish, they won't come.
00:18:24 Speaker_01
So Michelle, you talked a little bit about this notion in Haudenosaunee understanding of the balance between genders and how that works traditionally.
00:18:32 Speaker_01
Could you talk to us a little bit more about kind of these, some of these core beliefs and understandings in the Haudenosaunee Confederacy in terms of like governance and gender and all of these ideas and the way they've sort of
00:18:47 Speaker_01
influenced the world in a lot of ways and how that's kind of related to all of these conversations around rematriation as well.
00:18:57 Speaker_02
Yeah, that's a really big topic that I talk about frequently because in the United States and really kind of an influence around the world is the gift of democracy and the modern democracy that the world has come to know and that the United States has come to know is really rooted in the Haudenosaunee Confederacy.
00:19:21 Speaker_02
and our way of life and our great law of peace. And so, the very early founders of the United States, the founding fathers specifically, spent time with our people. They studied us. They made treaties with us.
00:19:38 Speaker_02
Pre-United States, in the colonial times, there was so much treaty making going on.
00:19:44 Speaker_02
There's a great article I like to refer people to, it's on longreads.com, which talks about Washington living in a very native life, but his biography has been erased.
00:19:54 Speaker_02
And it really talks about how he was constantly trading and making wampum belts and having relationships with this nation and that nation. calling for all these treaties to be made, right?
00:20:08 Speaker_02
And so, Benjamin Franklin, he's noted in the forming of the Declaration of Independence and ultimately the formation of the US Constitution is talking about creating a great confederacy in the likeness of the Haudenosaunee people, but that has just disappeared from the history books conveniently, right?
00:20:27 Speaker_02
And in addition to that, Thomas Jefferson, he actually studied our languages. And you think, oh, wow, that's so great. You know, he spent all this time studying the language.
00:20:36 Speaker_02
But really what it was, was an intent to destroy us, to understand, you know, what nations are related to each other. So, in their attacks, they would know who's speaking to who. So, they would be able to have their armies prepared, right?
00:20:50 Speaker_02
But really, ultimately, they were just studying our way of life.
00:20:54 Speaker_02
So when you look at the different branches of government that exists within the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, the way that our clan mothers and with our chiefs and the way they operate is really very much like the state and the federal level.
00:21:06 Speaker_02
That influence is just completely erased. And I went to law school in constitutional law. I brought this up to my professor, and he looked at me like I had three heads. He was just like, didn't believe me.
00:21:18 Speaker_02
And it was so infuriating because I was one voice in this whole law school that was trying to bring this to their attention. It was really frustrating.
00:21:28 Speaker_02
But in addition to that, when we talk about the founding mothers, the suffragists who sought women's rights and the right to vote, that movement actually came out of upstate New York. Well, what's now called upstate New York, right?
00:21:44 Speaker_02
Because these suffragists, they were living among, in spaces being influenced by our Haudenosaunee women. And the lives that white Christian women lived was very, very restricted. They were property, right?
00:21:59 Speaker_02
And then they saw Haudenosaunee women who lived very free. And they're like, I want that. That's what I want, right?
00:22:05 Speaker_02
So, you know, we have and still have full autonomy over our minds, over our bodies, over our thoughts and our property, over our children and over the land, right? So, this is another really big influence that has come to
00:22:22 Speaker_02
to shape the world that we live in, because these, you know, movements are global, right? Democracy and the push for democracy has also been global.
00:22:32 Speaker_02
And really, you know, what was left out, though, when you think about it, right, when you look at the U.S. Constitution, it was created for white males who are land owners.
00:22:43 Speaker_02
But in addition to that, all people of color were left out, you know, women were left out, but also life. right? Mother Earth, water, the plants, all of the animals, right? All of life was completely left out of that.
00:22:59 Speaker_02
And in the Haudenosaunee way of thinking, that is so important and critical to who we are and how we make decisions. So, when we look at gender, gender was not even, you know, considered in that as well, right? It was just for men.
00:23:13 Speaker_01
And additionally, that kind of strict gender binary that's laid out in these founding documents wasn't even the way our communities understood gender at all.
00:23:23 Speaker_06
Yeah, so let's go back to Dr. Millian, who helps us understand how Indigenous communities had a different relationship to gender prior to colonization.
00:23:33 Speaker_03
Many of the indigenous languages had no gender, they didn't gender words, because they actually went by the roles. And so you were born into your body, you know, and a particular spirit inhabits your body.
00:23:53 Speaker_03
And so they watch for what that spirit is, and the spirit expresses itself and becomes what it is. rather than this fixed thing in a hierarchy. You are a female and this is what you do.
00:24:07 Speaker_03
Okay, so that's how also in some places, there were more than one gender, right? Because you had different kinds of roles that were expressed and had to be thought about, not every group of people that had those many genders though.
00:24:27 Speaker_03
There's a lots of ways in which that's all people were asking for. They were asking for the freedom for those roles to be expressed again, for women to freely be part of governing.
00:24:43 Speaker_03
So the outcome of that was, of course, is that they had, for many years, been subjugated by an Indian Act that did really egregious things in terms of the women's roles. But everybody knows what the violence against Native women is.
00:25:04 Speaker_03
It's the profound disrespect. for us and for the land. Not only the profound disrespect for our bodies, but for us as peoples and our relations with the land. So that's, to me, what the real deal about remontreation is.
00:25:27 Speaker_03
It's these ways of knowing that people have They can be gendered any way they want, but for them to live again is remoderation.
00:26:11 Speaker_06
Welcome back from the break, relatives. We're here with Michelle, and let's hear what she has to say about the moccasins-on-the-ground work of Rematriation and how her organization really does this work on a daily basis.
00:26:25 Speaker_02
Yeah, well, one of the things that we recognized very early on in creating the spaces that we had, whether they were in person or digital, was the recognition that we kind of really have two spaces in which we have conversation.
00:26:44 Speaker_02
One, which is among our women, you know, among our own sisters. And one, which is to the public, you know, because as an indigenous person, and I know you feel this, you're always in a space of where you have to educate, right?
00:26:58 Speaker_02
And it's almost a responsibility that we have to be able to help to educate. you know, non-Native people about who we are and what the issues are.
00:27:08 Speaker_02
But as Indigenous peoples, as Indigenous women, one of the things that we had, you know, noticed in particular here in Haudenosaunee territories is that there really were not a lot of spaces in which our Indigenous women could gather.
00:27:25 Speaker_02
And it was exclusively just for us. And it was for us to be able to have open, candid conversations to be able to be in spaces of healing together. And now what's really, you know, you flash forward today and you kind of see that a lot everywhere.
00:27:42 Speaker_02
But if you like look back 10 years ago, 15 years ago, I'm not really sure how it was in your community, but for us, that really was not something that was, you know, on the forefront.
00:27:53 Speaker_02
And there was a lot of hushed conversations about issues that our women faced. And so, you know, knowing that we have, you know, experienced very high levels of violence, sexual violence, and knowing that these things needed to be expressed, right?
00:28:11 Speaker_02
Because, you know, we've been carrying so many traumas for years, whether they're current, or their inherited intergenerational traumas, and they needed to find some way out.
00:28:21 Speaker_02
We couldn't just hold on to them anymore because, you know, the world was changing, evolving, there was so much going on with healing, Mother Earth was calling for us to heal, so in that connection with her,
00:28:32 Speaker_02
you know, naturally, it just happened that the women needed to find space to gather. And so what we also recognize is that when we're together as women, that's our medicine, right? As indigenous women, that is our medicine being together.
00:28:46 Speaker_02
It's not going to the spa or, you know, zenning out and meditation. Those are great things. You know, they help us to become centered.
00:28:54 Speaker_02
But in all reality, like, you know, we gain strength from each other, from hearing each other's stories, to be able to be there. support somebody else and wipe their tears away or wipe their grief away or have yours wiped away, right?
00:29:08 Speaker_02
So that's how we started to really find that place of healing.
00:29:12 Speaker_01
Michelle, in listening to you talk, I'm really curious, when you're thinking about rematriation, how do you see it as different than the goals of mainstream or white feminism?
00:29:25 Speaker_02
What I see is within the understanding of who we are, we haven't had to fight for the right to be seen, or to be protected, or to be heard, or the right to have say over our children, or our homes, or our land, or our property.
00:29:51 Speaker_02
you know, we're protected in Haudenosaunee way of life. We hold an elevated status. There's a very big misunderstanding. You know, people like to say, oh, yeah, among, you know, the Haudenosaunee, you know, women were equal to men.
00:30:06 Speaker_02
And that statement is so problematic because it comes from a Western context that just makes this assumption that men hold the standard.
00:30:17 Speaker_02
And in our way of life, which actually begins with the worldview of a woman, you know, just falling from the sky some other place in the universe and comes here to the earth and brings life here and is the starting point for human life and how we came to be here.
00:30:37 Speaker_02
Our worldview is just so centered. around women and around the life-giving gift and quality that we have. And so that is protected. And that is the role of our men and even of our people, right?
00:30:54 Speaker_02
Like even of our women, like we have to protect that life-giving, that life-bearing element. And that is also our connection to Mother Earth. Right? So we don't have to fight for this place of being equal.
00:31:08 Speaker_02
It's only in this colonized world in which, you know, we've had to fight for our voice. Because, you know, again, it goes back to what I was saying earlier, when the suffragists went on to fight for what Haudenosaunee women had.
00:31:24 Speaker_02
there was so many of the rights of indigenous women being taken away. And so we've had to fight for our children. We've had to fight for our voice to be heard. We've had to fight against violence.
00:31:35 Speaker_02
And that's all what colonization brought here to us and brought to our doorstep and within our families. And to me, it's like we can't center the conversation, you know, looking at white feminism and looking at rematriation.
00:31:53 Speaker_02
I personally believe we can't center those in the same space. We have to look at them in a very different context.
00:32:01 Speaker_02
And if anyone, you know, has read Robin Wall Kimmerer's book, Braiding Sweetgrass, she starts it out very clearly by talking about, you know, the story of Sky Woman and the story of Eve.
00:32:13 Speaker_02
and how, you know, they have very, very, very different journeys. And for all of the people who descend from Sky Woman and those who, you know, descend from Eve, that the way in which you see yourself and walk in the world is very different.
00:32:34 Speaker_02
They're very different.
00:32:37 Speaker_06
For the listeners, maybe Michelle, can you talk a bit about Sky Woman and give the brief explanation of the difference?
00:32:45 Speaker_02
Yeah, so Sky Woman is the creation story of the Haudenosaunee, and I just heard a really, really beautiful expression. Whenever you're trying to find an answer, always go back to the creation story.
00:33:02 Speaker_02
And the creation story for us is that there was another world that exists called Skyworld. Skywoman came here. in fulfilling a dream. And she was either pushed or she fell from this hole that was where a tree of life was uprooted.
00:33:23 Speaker_02
And so she fell through that hole and on her journey here, she had an interaction with a comet. Some people will even call him a lacrosse player. And so when she came here, she was
00:33:38 Speaker_02
like in full-term pregnancy and all that existed here was the water and water animals and they could see this bright light falling from the sky and this was her and they all knew that you know she would die if you know she just came through and hit the water and so they all got together and they they formed a council and they were trying to figure out how are we going to help her
00:34:05 Speaker_02
and they decided that they needed to break her fall and they needed to have a place for her to land. And so it was decided that the geese would come up and they caught her.
00:34:14 Speaker_02
And then they brought her down and it was also then decided that she would be placed on the turtle's back and that she would also need some of the earth. And so with that, it was decided that the muskrat would swim down to the bottom of the ocean
00:34:31 Speaker_02
and bring dirt up onto the turtle's back for her. So when Sky Woman came down, she took that earth and she put it onto the turtle's back and she began to do a dance. She danced on the turtle's back and the turtle's back began to grow.
00:34:46 Speaker_02
So she gave birth to a daughter and The two of them began to, you know, name the different animals. And when Sky Woman came, when she fell from Skyworld, she had grabbed, she tried to catch herself.
00:34:59 Speaker_02
And when she did, she had some of the dirt and the seeds from Skyworld. And so from that, you know, we have different plants and medicine plants that she brought with her and she planted those here. But soon her daughter became pregnant.
00:35:13 Speaker_02
And there's a couple of different stories in terms of, you know, whether it was like the West Wind was the father of her babies or whether it was Turtle Man. And so she gave birth to twin boys.
00:35:26 Speaker_02
And one of the twins was born, you know, through the normal way of giving birth. And then the other twin came out of her left side, out of her armpit. And in that process, it killed her. So her body went back into the earth.
00:35:44 Speaker_02
And from that, there was more foods and tobacco that came from her body, that grew from her body. And so the grandmother, Sky Woman, raised those two boys. One was a right-handed twin, one was a left-handed twin.
00:35:59 Speaker_02
And they began to create the world around us with this earth, right? Because it's magical, it's life-giving, right?
00:36:07 Speaker_02
And so they began to create everything that we see, and the right-handed twin would create something like roses, and the left-handed twin would put thorns on it, and the right-handed twin would make this beautiful stream where you could be in a boat.
00:36:22 Speaker_02
it would take you one direction and then it would bring you right back the other direction. And so the left-handed twin would like throw rocks in it and make it all crooked and it would only go one direction.
00:36:30 Speaker_02
And so they just had different ways of creating and different ways of existing. And so that's the world that we know now. But when you think about it, the story itself begins with a woman. And that's the important thing.
00:36:45 Speaker_02
And that's what we always remember. So that is a very short version of Sky Woman.
00:36:52 Speaker_06
I love the way that Robin describes it in her book, Braiding Sweetgrass, and the way that Thomas King writes about it in The Truth About Stories, where he says, if you believe in this story of Eve, where she comes from a man's rib bone, and that sin is rooted in it, and that we're inherently sinful people, that it sets us up for this framework in a society where we
00:37:18 Speaker_06
are already devaluing women from the very beginning of creation.
00:37:24 Speaker_06
And there's a lot of people that talk about creation stories being our foundation for the way that we create our society and that that goes on to make all of the policies and laws and the critical thinking and the collective consciousness that impacts everything that we do.
00:37:44 Speaker_06
And so, Ascribing to, believing in, reaffirming and upholding our original agreements and our original stories is a huge part of rematriation. Absolutely.
00:37:57 Speaker_02
Absolutely. It absolutely is.
00:38:01 Speaker_06
I want to be sure that we take a moment to talk about your interactions with the Pope last year and how that ties into the doctrine of discovery and even Ruth Bader Ginsburg. big question. This is not a light reading here or light listening.
00:38:22 Speaker_02
It is not light reading at all. Yeah, but that's, you know, it's a great question. You know, just to kind of get to the point, last year
00:38:33 Speaker_02
I traveled with the Assembly of First Nations and served in the capacity of a female spiritual advisor to address the Pope.
00:38:44 Speaker_02
So we were in closed audiences with the Pope, and this request to serve this actually originally went to our clan mother, Mama Bear. And she was unable to go, so she started looking out in our community to see who can go in my place.
00:39:03 Speaker_02
And it came to me, to myself, and to Gajijuni Fox. And we decided that I would speak. And so therefore, that was the role that I was given.
00:39:14 Speaker_02
And I only had 10 days to plan for this, which was probably a good thing, because it really forced me to get into the place of like, what needs to be said? And I just allowed for it to just really like come through.
00:39:27 Speaker_02
And it was almost like in one night during the middle of the night, just all the words just, you know, made their way onto the page. But what really came through was, you know, the doctrine of discovery.
00:39:41 Speaker_02
and, you know, looking at the papal bulls that, you know, really support this theory and have existed, you know, since the time of Columbus and him, you know, setting sail to the Americas and for all of the European explorers who came to claim the land and claim the resources, you know, in the names of, you know, the crowns of Europe and in the name of God, right?
00:40:09 Speaker_02
that it's somehow their divine right to be able to take this, but also to do away with the people, to do away with whatever they wanted with all of our indigenous relatives.
00:40:21 Speaker_02
And basically, the basis of it was that because of the fact that we were not Christians, we were not deemed people. And therefore, they could rape kill, enslave, remove our peoples from the lands, and that's exactly what happened.
00:40:39 Speaker_02
And so bringing this up to the Pope, it became really very critical for so many of the indigenous delegates who went there. The Vatican, as a whole, has basically held this position that they rescinded this particular papal bull,
00:41:00 Speaker_02
And therefore, they really, you know, are trying to stay hands off from this issue.
00:41:06 Speaker_02
But what they're not recognizing is what they set forth into the world was adopted and codified into law in the United States, in Canada, and used throughout all the Americas to commit genocide. And it's still active law to this day. Right?
00:41:25 Speaker_02
So this brings me to the Oneida Nation, you know, to our land claims. And when I was a kid, I grew up in a space where our land claims were really ripe.
00:41:37 Speaker_02
And my great grandmother was also really very instrumental to getting our case heard before the Supreme Court in her lifetime. And I mean, our land claims went on for like, you know, over decades.
00:41:51 Speaker_02
And the Supreme Court said, yes, you know, New York State, you took Oneida Nation lands, now you've got to go work it out with them. And that took a really long time.
00:42:00 Speaker_02
And throughout the course of time, eventually, this small city called the City of Sherrill decided to sue the Oneida Nation because we decided to buy back our land.
00:42:12 Speaker_02
And rather than paying the taxes on the land, we gave a gift to the city, a financial gift, probably about the same as the taxes, but that wasn't enough for them. They said, no, you have to pay it as a tax. You can't pay it as a gift.
00:42:26 Speaker_02
but the land had already been determined to be illegally taken. And so it went back up to the Supreme Court again. And the case, which was then written by Ruth Bader Ginsburg,
00:42:40 Speaker_02
cited the Doctrine of Discovery right off the bat, right on page one of the case. And this was one of the first times that you see the Doctrine of Discovery used in the court cases. And prior to that, it had been the early 1800s.
00:42:57 Speaker_02
And the Doctrine of Discovery has been used in the United States to basically claim all the territory within the bounds of the United States and to extinguish indigenous title to the lands, right? So you flash forward and now you have it in 2005.
00:43:15 Speaker_02
And so it's like, to me, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the court, like breathe life back into this doctrine. And this was my very first year of law school, right? I went to actually go work on our land claims. And I was like, wow, now what do I do?
00:43:33 Speaker_02
Because in that case, it closed the door for all Haudenosaunee land claims in New York, right? And it has had impact on other indigenous nations as well. But this is what happens, right? This is how it has been happening.
00:43:50 Speaker_02
And this doctrine of discovery is used as the theory, as the, the foundation for genocide, for land-taking, for taking our children, for violence committed against our women. And people don't really understand the impacts of it, right?
00:44:09 Speaker_02
But it's right at the bedrock of the creation of the United States of America.
00:44:14 Speaker_02
And so when people begin to understand that this is the law, and it's still active law to this day, law creates policy, and policy informs education, and education informs people on how to treat one another.
00:44:34 Speaker_02
And with that, indigenous peoples have been invisibilized for generations. Our lands have been taken for generations. In policies, we are called the Indian problem. And the government at the federal and state level have been trying to figure out
00:44:50 Speaker_02
What do we do? You know, how do we get rid of these Indians? And how do we get rid of this problem that we have?
00:44:56 Speaker_02
And it all goes back to this thinking that is really centered around these papal bulls and the doctrine of discovery that tells non-indigenous peoples, I have the right to take this, I have the right to own this, and I have the right to tell these people who've lived here since time immemorial, this isn't your land anymore.
00:45:15 Speaker_02
This is not your way of life anymore. You know, you can't exist in this way. And so, you know, that's what I addressed to the Pope.
00:45:24 Speaker_06
Thank you so much for that explanation and for making all of those connections for me and for the listeners and the way that you just articulated that. I just want to acknowledge that was dope.
00:45:37 Speaker_01
I mean I knew about like the RBG stuff like I knew about the cases but when you hear it articulated that way and think about like how she's held up as just this like icon for like Democrats and that's the foundation of
00:45:57 Speaker_06
Yeah, no, what you're saying is she's like the OG of feminism. You know, people think of her as like this woman that sat in her robes for a long time doing things for women's rights in women's liberation.
00:46:11 Speaker_06
But when in fact, you know, she had this massive deciding case that continues to impact Indian law, and indigenous peoples, and results in the dispossession of indigenous lands.
00:46:23 Speaker_06
And therefore, because land informs who we are, land holds all of our teachings, therefore it continues to impact our ability to be healthy and whole, and who we are meant to be. And all of those things are connected.
00:46:38 Speaker_06
One is not separate from the other, right?
00:46:40 Speaker_02
And that's like, it's dope. And I think also, you know, you know, there's there's a greater connection to as well when you think about the doctrine of discovery and the very big issue of missing and murdered indigenous women and people. Right.
00:46:58 Speaker_02
Because again, going back to those times of the founding fathers and them interacting, you know, with with the Haudenosaunee and the development of their their own government. Who stood in the way of that expansion?
00:47:13 Speaker_02
Who stood in the way of taking the land? It was the women, because the women were the ones and continue to be the ones who have the say over the land. And so when you think about it, right, like, what is the goal of the Doctrine of Discovery?
00:47:29 Speaker_02
It's to take the land. And so who's in the way? It's the women. And so there's been this, you know, like silent, you know, decimation of our women in the space of colonization that
00:47:43 Speaker_02
is directly tied and linked to this doctrine that continues to exist as valid law on the books to this day, right? So, when we talk about rematriation and we talk about women being so tied to the land and understanding who we are,
00:48:00 Speaker_02
When we rematriate, we have to undo that. So when we talk about allies and what can they do, change your laws. Take this insidious doctrine off of the books. Figure it out. Who cares if it's been there for hundreds of years? Figure it out.
00:48:17 Speaker_02
There's so many smart people in the world. Figure it out. You can do it without having this doctrine of discovery at play.
00:48:25 Speaker_01
I'm just so, so, I could sit and listen to you talk for hours. This is so enlightening and helpful and empowering. And I'm just so excited that we get to share this conversation with our listeners.
00:48:38 Speaker_01
And thank you for all the work that you do and are doing and have done. It's just incredible.
00:48:44 Speaker_02
Oh, I'm so grateful to be here. Thank you so much for inviting me to be a part of this conversation. It's a real honor.
00:48:51 Speaker_02
It's a real honor to, you know, also be in conversation with, you know, other sisters who are doing this work, who are elevating our people and to talk about rematriation because it really is growing everywhere. But I think it's so important
00:49:07 Speaker_02
for non-Indigenous people to understand and to always center Indigenous women at the core of what's happening in rematriation. It's for everybody. It really is.
00:49:19 Speaker_02
Everybody can rematriate in their lives, but always remember that this movement is centered and grown from and continues to move because of Indigenous women.
00:49:31 Speaker_02
So really, that's where the claim to this movement comes from, is among our sisters and among our women. That's really, I think, very important.
00:49:51 Speaker_01
We wanted to close this episode by bringing in the voice of Markel Musgrave, who is a tribal citizen of Nambe, Owinge.
00:49:57 Speaker_01
This entire episode on rematriation began with our conversation with Markel during our first ever live podcast recording in Santa Fe. And unfortunately, the sound from that event wasn't the best.
00:50:09 Speaker_01
But we love Markel and are so, so grateful she took the time to talk with us in front of our audience.
00:50:15 Speaker_06
Yeah, she really has incredible things to say and she's doing such important work in community. So we really wanted to make sure we included her voice.
00:50:23 Speaker_06
Here she shares with us how she sees this work of rematriation as tied to her values as a Tiwa woman.
00:50:31 Speaker_00
For me, it's really about how we think, how we feel, how we act, how we respond, how we make decisions, how we govern, how we love, how we parent. It's all of those things.
00:50:45 Speaker_00
And essentially, for me as a Tewa person, it comes down to a return to our nangochukwio or our mother earth. and those inherent responsibilities and kinship practices that are given to us by way of reciprocal relationship with the land.
00:51:06 Speaker_06
Absolutely, rematriation is all the things. It's rooting ourself in our inherent responsibilities, our original agreements, our reciprocal relationship with land. I love how beautifully she said that, Markel said that.
00:51:18 Speaker_06
And I love how Michelle and Dr. Millian all spoke with this with incredible eloquence and power. And I also like to think of rematriation as a form of power within ourselves as women.
00:51:34 Speaker_06
as liberating this divine feminine within ourselves and trusting that is, I think, incredibly powerful.
00:51:42 Speaker_01
Absolutely. And I'm just so grateful that we got to have this conversation. And really, it's a start of a conversation, like so many of our episodes. Rematriation and the activists and organizers who are doing work in this area.
00:51:57 Speaker_01
We just barely scratched the surface.
00:51:59 Speaker_01
I'm thinking about all of the folks who are doing incredible work in rematriation around seeds and planting and farming or the folks in the Bay Area who are doing rematriation directly related to land back for communities up there and
00:52:17 Speaker_01
There's just so much amazing work happening and I feel grateful that we got to start this conversation and hopefully folks can explore what rematriation means for them and what it looks like in their own backyards.
00:52:31 Speaker_06
Right, and actually, since we recorded this with Michelle, there has been a big update on the doctrine of discovery.
00:52:37 Speaker_01
Yeah, amazingly, on March 30th, the Vatican released a statement repudiating the Doctrine of Discovery. And basically, this was pretty big news. This is not something that I think anybody ever expected from the church.
00:52:53 Speaker_01
So they released a long statement. And what it basically says is that the papal bulls that were, do you even know what a papal bull is, Matika?
00:53:06 Speaker_06
What the fuck is a papal bull? Is it like the Pope riding around on a bull? I'm not joking. What is it?
00:53:14 Speaker_01
I ask because it is kind of ridiculous. And I think we throw around these terms a lot without actually stopping. I don't even think we actually define what the doctrine of discovery is in our conversation with Michelle. So I'm going to back up.
00:53:28 Speaker_01
And again, I'm not like an expert on law or Catholicism or any of these things. But basically, a papal bull is like a type of public decree issued by the Pope of the Catholic Church. So the Pope has the power to issue a papal bull.
00:53:43 Speaker_01
And that public decree is something that then becomes the basis for what Catholics and anyone who is following the order of the Catholic Church does.
00:53:57 Speaker_01
And the doctrine of discovery is something that is a principle that is not written down from the Catholic Church. It's the way that people interpreted these papal bulls and decided that under public international law, which
00:54:17 Speaker_01
when a nation, a Christian nation, quote-unquote, discovers land, it directly acquires the rights to that land. So that's the whole, like, all of the conquistadors and the colonists and Columbus discovering, quote-unquote, these places. It's the
00:54:37 Speaker_01
the concept that really underlies all of colonization in the Americas is that when you as a European Christian nation come to a land that you haven't seen before, you are discovering it.
00:54:50 Speaker_01
And under the laws of the church, under these papal bulls, therefore you have the rights to that land.
00:54:59 Speaker_01
And that is what Michelle was talking about is the basis for so much of US law up until like 2005 when Ruth Bader Ginsburg cited the doctrine of discovery in that Oneida land rights case.
00:55:15 Speaker_01
And in that case, she directly says, under the doctrine of discovery,
00:55:21 Speaker_01
the land occupied by Indians, I'm reading the quote, when the colonists arrived, became vested in the sovereign, first the Discovery Nation, and later the original states in the United States. So basically under the Doctrine of Discovery in 2005.
00:55:36 Speaker_01
So the fact that the church came out and repudiated, and then we also need to talk about, there's so much here to unpack, we could do an entire new episode about this, but repudiate is a very different verb than rescind.
00:55:50 Speaker_01
So repudiate just means like, I refuse to be associated with this. I refuse to accept this. I think it's bad. It does not mean that the doctrine of discovery has been rescinded.
00:56:03 Speaker_01
It does not mean that the papal bulls that were the basis for the doctrine of discovery was rescinded. It just means basically the Vatican is sane.
00:56:12 Speaker_01
we had these papal bulls, there were concepts in them that were bad toward indigenous people, and we repudiate the fact that those concepts were taken up to create this thing called the Doctrine of Discovery.
00:56:25 Speaker_06
So basically, and they also say like, these documents were manipulated, you know, so they're sort of just kind of apologizing, acknowledging like, what they did was bad. without any sort of real ownership or repercussions or restitutions.
00:56:42 Speaker_01
They're basically trying to hail Mary themselves out of this. Yeah. I mean, we actually can quote Michelle here directly. So Michelle was interviewed by PBS NewsHour to her response to this Vatican statement.
00:56:57 Speaker_01
And she called the statement, quote, another step in the right direction. But she pointed out that it didn't mean rescinding the bulls themselves.
00:57:06 Speaker_01
She said, quote, I think what this does is it really puts the responsibility on nation states such as the United States to look at its use of the doctrine of discovery. This goes beyond land.
00:57:16 Speaker_01
It has really created generation upon generation of genocidal policies directed toward indigenous people. And I think that it's time for these governments to take full accountability for their actions.
00:57:28 Speaker_01
Yeah, it's kind of like, oh, you know, we know we did what we did was really bad, but you know, the United States is really responsible for that, you know, and I'm just... Yeah, I mean, it's just pushing the responsibility back to the nation states that have taken up the doctrine of discovery rather than saying that it was something that came directly from the church.
00:57:50 Speaker_01
Right. I think the bottom line is that it's important that the Vatican release this statement.
00:57:58 Speaker_01
It's important that they repudiated the doctrine of discovery, that they said that these values, that these concepts are bad, that they resulted in harm towards Indigenous people.
00:58:10 Speaker_01
But the bottom line is that it doesn't really mean that much in the grand scheme of things because now what that statement does is it throws it back to all these countries that have taken up the doctrine of discovery as part of their founding principles and says, now it's up to you to kind of figure out how to do that work to undo it.
00:58:31 Speaker_01
and knowing the track record of what's currently known as the United States, the fact that we have cited the Doctrine of Discovery as recently as 2005 in a Supreme Court decision means that I don't hold out a lot of hope that the United States is actually gonna do anything about this.
00:58:50 Speaker_01
But is it good that the Vatican said that the Doctrine of Discovery is bad? Absolutely. Does it really change anything? No, I don't think it really does.
00:59:00 Speaker_06
It's actually really good timing, though. Maybe people in the church can take time to think about this. I mean, this weekend is Easter.
00:59:08 Speaker_06
You know, everybody's going to go to the church for maybe the second time this year because, you know, like most churchgoers go on like Christmas and Easter. And maybe every one of these Catholic churches across the nation can take time.
00:59:22 Speaker_06
you know, to talk about these sort of things on Easter Sunday. That would be cool. This is a good time to talk about it.
00:59:28 Speaker_01
That's actually a very good point, that now that it is something that has come down officially from the church, that gives permission for all churches to talk about it, and they should. So, hopefully it starts some real conversations.
00:59:41 Speaker_01
But we also should point out that this statement truly would not have happened without Michelle and the other Indigenous folks who directly confronted the Pope to talk about these harms.
00:59:54 Speaker_01
So the fact that this came is only due to the activism of Indigenous people, the voices of Indigenous people speaking directly to power.
01:00:03 Speaker_06
It's so true. You're right. It's exactly that. And that's so cool. I mean, What an honor and a privilege to get to talk to people like Michelle who are actively doing the work, you know, like this work of liberation.
01:00:16 Speaker_05
She's a freedom fighter. I love her, you know. I just want to say that much.
01:00:22 Speaker_01
And with that, we'd like to give huge thank yous to the AMR team, Jonathan Stein, Max Levin, Teo Shantz, and Lindsay Hightower. Thank you to our guests, Dr. Diane Millian, Michelle Shenandoah, and Markel Musgrave.
01:00:36 Speaker_01
Special thanks to all the folks who made our Santa Fe recording possible, the team at Form and Concept Gallery, AMR team members, Darian Camarillo, Hayden Harvey, and Jamie Marquez Bratcher, and our live musicians at the event, Laura Ortman and KP of Black Belt Eagle Scout.
01:00:51 Speaker_01
Finally, thank you to Sierra Sana for the gorgeous episode art.
01:00:56 Speaker_01
And a reminder that you can always support the podcast on Patreon and that Matika's book, Project 562, Changing the Way We See Native America, is available for pre-order now anywhere where you buy your books.
01:01:45 Speaker_04
about my relations.