Native American Studies, Land, and the Quest for Justice: A Conversation with Mishuana Goeman

This wide-ranging conversation features Professor Mishuana Goeman, Professor of Gender Studies and American Indian Studies, and the inaugural Special Advisor to the Chancellor on Native American and Indigenous Affairs at UCLA. Professor Goeman discusses her personal journey into interdisciplinary scholarship, the relationship and tensions between academia and community-centered work, and the many tangible steps universities and other institutions can make toward reparative justice for Native Americans.

 You can find out more about her project “Mapping Indigenous LA” here.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:19

Every other week we have a historical.

SPEAKER_00: 0:35

Welcome to Then and Now and Happy New Year to our listeners. I'm your host, David Myers, from the UCLA Luskin Center for History and Policy. The Luskin Center for History and Policy acknowledges the Gabriolino Tonva peoples as the traditional land caretakers of Tavangar, on which our institution sits. I'm pleased to welcome today Mashauna Goman, a member of the Talawanda Band of Seneca, who is Professor of Gender Studies and American Indian Studies at OTLA, as well as an affiliated faculty member in critical rights studies at SPLA Law School. Professor Goman is the author of Mark My Words, Native Women Mapping Our Nations from 2013, a book that situates her as a leading scholar working at the intersection of Native American studies, critical theory, and settler colonialism. She's also the inaugural special advisor to the Chancellor on Native American and Indigenous Affairs at UCLA. I want to talk to her today about her own evolution as a scholar, the state of Native American studies as a field, and the quest for justice for Native peoples in the United States. Welcome to Then and Now, Professor Goman.

SPEAKER_02: 1:45

Now I see Khan. Hello, everybody. I'm happy to be here.

SPEAKER_00: 1:48

Great. So can you describe your path to scholarship? How do you recall the time when you first understood that this was a vocation for you?

SPEAKER_02: 1:58

Well, I actually didn't know when I first started off. When I when I um when I was applying to colleges, I took a trip to Dartmouth and I realized how strong the Native community was there. And I decided that's where I want to go. I grew up in northern Maine. I, you know, expectations weren't necessarily that I would go to college. Um my family, as the oldest cousin, and I had I took care of all my younger cousins and tribal communities that can be a lot. I lived with all my aunts and uncles in northern Maine in a place called 12 Corners. It was a place of uh piece of land that my grandfather actually bought, and then everybody lived in different areas on the land, um, kind of made his own reservation in a sense. Uh and we were halfway between uh some of the northern tribes, the Malisee, the you know, Penobscot, uh Pass McQuadi. So we were like kind of a stopping point on the way. So I kind of grew up in this place called 12 Corners in central Maine, northern central Maine. And so um, while I didn't grow up on my reservation, I went off and on. My dad was an ironworker. So we had two home bases, the Panawanda and also um Maine, where my mother, who's white, grew up. So I had um that that side of aspect too. My parents met in high school. So uh it was very much at that point in time, it's changed a lot, even recently over the last years, but it was mostly um all white, very rural. And then there was my family, and and um I come from a family of rebels, a family of maybe troublemakers, somebody see it that way. But uh so that kind of our experience in um Scowhegan, Maine, and Norridwalk, Maine, and Madison, Maine, that was all very much a part of how I came to think through uh who I was. My I did when I, you know, when I first wound up at Dartmouth, it was the only college I applied to, and I got an early decision. So I only had enough money to apply to one or two schools. I think about now what what kids go through. It's just so much work, and there's so much um we didn't have the ability back then, or at least I didn't know about it, to apply to multiple schools. So I had to make those decisions. And so it was the only school I applied to, and I partly applied to that school because of the large American Indian population, Native American population there. And that interested me a great deal, and and it was out of the state of Maine. That's all I needed to know. So I ended up going to Dartmouth, and that gave me a different sensibility. That's actually the first time I ever really was questioned because I am a light-skinned Indian, and um, that's the first time my identity was ever questioned. What I know was kind of shocking to me because I grew up growing up in rural Maine as uh a racialized body in that sense, was could be very rough at times. There is um there's a lot of violence, a lot of racism, and um, but there's also a lot of comradeship to camaraderie. It's it's a it's a very mixed bag of feelings in those particular areas. And in the in the 70s, there wasn't as many uh there wasn't as many um multiracial relationships. So my parents, that was also a big thing. And so it's not, it's it is a little different than it is now, but it kind of definitely informed my thinking about the world. I was kind of thrown into Dartmouth, which is a very different life from somebody from poor rural northern Maine and the reservation.

SPEAKER_00: 5:47

So let me let me just let me jump in and ask how well formed would you say uh was your sense of yourself as a Native American when you arrived at Dartmouth?

SPEAKER_02: 5:57

Very, very I didn't know the history though, and I didn't know the history of why my family was the way they were, or you know, both my grandmothers were in boarding schools and residential schools, which is um incredibly hard, and I think it accounts for a lot of fissures in our families. Um, I, you know, I didn't I had no idea about that history. I had no idea about the way Houghton Shawnee people were treated. I feel very fortunate my kids actually know that history now, and my and I feel like a lot of American Indian kids in the next generation are learning these histories and have more opportunity to do so. Um just because the field of Indigenous studies has grown. But also, you know, the internet helps a lot with getting to know your own history, and there's been a revitalization and resurgence. So since I was born in 1971, my dad was part of the American Indian movement. So that was always, those are my first memories, actually, him coming back from um South Dakota from AIM, he was at Wounded Me. My aunts and my uncles were involved um in the American Indian movement and were at Wounded Me. I actually, as a child, uh, was there. My mother went as well, which was very hard for her. Um, again, you know, my family, my mom and dad were 16 and 17 when they had me. So they met down in Boston. Um, it they lived in the combat zone down in Boston, where Anna Mae Aquash ran the um Indian Center down there. So that's where my parents met down there. People forget that there are several cities that were movement, even on the East Coast as well. Most people, when they think of how AIME developed, they think mostly of Minnesota, but they it developed also in Boston. It was quite a strong community at the time.

SPEAKER_00: 7:43

So I want to get back to Dartmouth in a second, but I'm just curious about the politics, the political consciousness in your home. I mean, you mentioned your father was in in AIM and you know, growing up, was that very much a sense of your own identity that you were destined in life to be uh politically engaged, an activist um and and a fighter for change?

SPEAKER_02: 8:06

Um, I wouldn't say it was kind of uh considering yourself an activist, it's just who you are. Sovereignty wasn't an activist movement, sovereignty is just who you are. You're your your people are sovereign and it's who you are. So I wouldn't, I it wasn't kind of categorized as that's an activist mode, but it's it's that's who you are. So, like my family would post signs, no police allowed on our land. And I grew up with a very much a sense, like a lot of Hoten Ashawnee children, even at that time, a sense of sovereignty, a sense of what that means inherently as like your own sovereign body, but also your own sovereign nation in the history of the US, that we are not Americans. I got kicked out of first grade because I wouldn't pledge allegiance to the flag. That was that's that's the political consciousness that you grow up with, knowing who you are when you're when you're Hot Nashani. You like you're not American, but there's like a you know nation-to-nation relationship. So I knew that before I ever took any native studies classes, Red Vine Deloria, who might whose work um really moved me when I was in college, or met while a man killer who really helped lead my way and my path forward, Louise Erdrick. Um, I actually had such a good experience at Dartmouth because of who the woman that I got to meet, uh Suzanne Shonharjo was probably the first time I realized the kind of path forward I wanted to take in activist scholarship and the work. She kind of took me under a wing. I was, you know, there was a rough woman in college, we all have them, and I was just like, I don't know what I want to do. And and um she she was a Montgomery fellow, and she just had instead of using the Montgomery Fellowship, they give you a really nice house on Auckland Pond at Dartmouth, beautiful, beautiful place, and it becomes like a retreat for a lot of a lot of the the fellows who get it. Um but Suzanne, instead of, instead of uh just keeping it as an isolated place to write or work or whatever, she opened it to the all the native students on campus. And she had like poker games, she invited us, she used those resources to really uh she's she was just amazing. We, you know. So that was the kind of scholar, activist person that I wanted to be in terms of, you know, leading the nation. She was at that time really working against the Redskins in Washington. She's was one of the first leaders to bring that lawsuit. So I was still thinking at that time of going to law school and and how I could combine law school and activism together.

SPEAKER_00: 10:43

And what happened to redirect you to uh graduate studies at Stanford?

SPEAKER_02: 10:49

Um, I weaned off grad school or the idea law school and switched to grad school. Um there was uh there was a professor actually that took a lot of us as native women under her wings. And we had she would have have dinner with us once a quarter, um, all a lot of the native woman, and she would, she was, she wasn't native, but she grew up, she had a really interesting story, and she grew up in the Dakotas, and she saw it as her kind of role. Uh, I remember her saying to me once, like, I want you to, um, I want you in the others here to replace me. Your job as Native students is to replace me, and my job is a professor of Native American literature. So she kind of mentored and guided me. And eventually I did wind up replacing her when I went back to Dartmouth as a professor, which is kind of funny. But um, but she passed away of cancer uh a couple days after I told her I completed a draft of my dissertation, and it was uh pretty amazing moment. She was happy and I'm glad I could give her that.

SPEAKER_00: 11:56

And what one of the hallmarks of your work is is um a wide-ranging interdisciplinarity. And I'm I'm wondering how you came put together the various disciplines that made up your dissertation and and and your first book.

SPEAKER_02: 12:11

Yeah. Well, maybe it was the weaning off of law, and and I just know that as a American Indian person, the law informs your life on every single level, even what identities you can claim, you know, just every little bits and pieces in the way that um American Indian law informs who you are, like it really impacts our lives, even while there's a way that I I always looked at American Indian law or the legal system, American law, property law is all part of that fictitiousness itself, just as much as a story. And um I at the first time I read Louise Zerdrick's Love Medicine, it was such a beautiful book, and it was the first time I read a representation of myself. And I was just always very good at unpacking stories or telling stories or in all of these sorts of elements. I used to, you know, line up again. I was the oldest cousin, and much to their chagrin, I would make them all uh do plays to entertain my grandmother, at least that's what I said, really was so that I can boss them all around and make them do a play with me. So I would love to tell stories in that way, through theater, etc. But I also really know that the league, how the legal impacts us. And so I kind of started early on combining law and literature, but I saw literature as a catharsis, a way of looking forward, not just a way of dealing with the issues that face American Indian people now. Without those stories, I always think of Helena Maria Varamontas, the wonderful Chicano writer, when she says in the making of Melpolitas, like, you know, telling a story is being able to peek over the fence and seeing what's in the distance. So I feel like that's kind of what drew me to kind of the combinations that I have with geography, with literature, with looking at current social issues and social movements and thinking about where they're going. I think our artists and our and our writers are the ones that can really help vision that future forward, right? And so um I think that's when I started to get by. What about scholars? Scholars, yeah. I think I I do believe that we can too if we don't get caught up in our own heads too much, and um also in kind of some of the politics that we have to work with on a on a daily basis being in the academy.

SPEAKER_00: 14:31

Sometimes um you want to unpack that a little? Some of the politics right now.

SPEAKER_02: 14:36

Yeah, I think sometimes, you know, the academy is set up by disciplines, it's set up by traditional disciplines, it's set up by um even humanities versus social science. I have, since I began my academic career, I've been in the humanities and the social science because you need both. Like I I can't um, as an English professor, right, uh I have managed in my work to publish um, you know, on poetry, right? On a poem. But then in the social science, I'm also doing interviews with elders and going out to land-based, doing kind of land-based pedagogy work and land-based work. And um, that means the world to me, the doing the land-based work. It just um it's something that I can't see. I don't see it as separate necessarily from the unpacking or doing a close reading of a poem either. I mean, for me, it's important to bring all of those kind of worlds together and um I and uh tell those stories.

SPEAKER_00: 15:39

So some of those worlds you bring together in your book, Mark My Words, um, which um centers Native women and Native American women's literature as a way of exploring what is a recurrent interest of yours, which is the ongoing legacy of uh settler colonialism um in the United States and in Native American life. Um and so I'm wondering maybe you can explain to us the significance of settler colonialism as a guiding paradigm in your work and how that intersects as part of your sort of interdisciplinary uh way with your study of literature.

SPEAKER_02: 16:18

So uh so mark my words came about because of my lived experience, really. I thought about what it meant to um think about territory differently and the ways that my family always thought about things differently, right? Like whenever we would go somewhere, we would introduce ourselves to um introduce ourselves to the native people that were around. Native people quickly found themselves. I was, I didn't live uh at that point in time there was a a uh split between urban Indian versus res Indians, right? And I didn't fit in any of those paradigms because I was more like a traveling, migrating. I I lived with my father in all different kinds of places. And we traveled with my father because my mother is white, so we didn't live, we lived on and off the res when we would. My dad had a a base, his a job site that was closer to there. So, but I wasn't alone or isolated because we traveled with my aunts and uncles. I wish I was isolated sometimes. I was always with my cousins and I always had to take care of them and I, you know, that kind of thing. So we um we moved around as a family with other families and met other families, and there wasn't um there wasn't that sort of isolation that you're supposed to have if you're urban Indian or you know, uh being separated from your homelands. So being separated from homelands is a real thing, though, I will say that. Like um there's a lot, a lot that happens in those particular moments. So I started to think about um the spaces of the body in relation to also the spaces of territory and how do we get outside of property dynamics or the logics of property? So, really, my work wasn't situated in settler colonialism until much later, but it was really unpacking the underpinnings of property. And Native studies or indigenous, Native American and Indigenous studies has been doing that far longer than settler colonial studies has. I mean, some of the first works by Vine DeLoria, even Ella Deloria in the 1800s, who's who's a predominantly uh Dakota writer, beautiful, you know, anybody should read that work, she's unpacking kind of property logics in her work as well. I think native languages and revitalization, when you work on that, it unpacks those kind of property logics. So I see my work more mired in Indigenous studies and in those stories that uh from Native people from the 1800s who have always contested the US and contested the settler colonial structures. I think settler colonialism gives us a word that helps us look at the structures, but indigenous studies gives us a look into the past, present, and future of Native people. Like I don't feel like settler colonial studies, settler colonial studies without Indigenous studies is a project that doesn't go anywhere, right? It's like, okay, you've examined the problem of this structure. Now what? Indigenous studies, I think, provides an avenue forward from uh being able to make an appraisement of the of the past and also we're not returning to it the past in a nostalgic way, but in a way to get those key elements to move forward. So when I took on thinking through the geographies in my work or remapping, it wasn't that's why I used the parentheses and the re of the mapping. It's not a return to the past in a nostalgic manner, but it's taking what we need, those keys, those tools that our ancestors left us in mapping a way forward and a future forward and thinking about geographies differently outside of property logics and beginning to think of them in ways where uh we have better land-based politics and land-based relationships. So that was the goal of that book. It wasn't just in you know the legal aspects that come in the book. I start at 18, I start with the Confederation of Canada because um people don't talk enough about uh the Canadian US border and think about that critically enough, also, right? Because that is part of the constructing. It is related to what drives me crazy is when people say the border, and they mean the US-Mexico border, right? I'm like, no, there's more than one border. It's there's the borders, the nest, or what Audrey Simpson calls nested sovereignties throughout the US. So I was trying to think of how we can reconceptualize this space so that people can understand also that the US is not a done project. So I start with 1876 and I start with E. Pauline Johnson, who's an amazing Mohawk writer, who contests very clearly the um the way that like Canada and the US are co-constitutive states, settler states, right? So I do start there because I I think there's other ways that we can reconceive of space and geographies in the US where it's not so extractive, it's not so settler in nature and that and that element. And I I think of this a lot. I think of this in working towards climate change issues, for instance. You know, I recently I we may have been in the same meeting, I'm not sure, David, but there was a meeting where where a person was like, we can't look at the past, because we're talking about bringing traditional ecological knowledge from the local tribal people, the Gabrielino Tonva, into conversation with climate change issues that UCLA will face. And this is in my role as special advisor. And they're like, Well, the past isn't going to help us. And I was like, that's not, I mean, if you're thinking about who knows how drought works in the in the Los Angeles County, the people that hold the most knowledge about land, waterways, et cetera, are Gabolino Tomfa people and the Paiu people from where our water comes from. That's not returning to a past. That's actually returning to the things that's going to save us in the future, you know, if if people so choose to uh think about think about that critically in a way. So I think too much Native people are so put in the past that um, you know, settler colonial studies only leaves it there. It doesn't move us forward to think about this about the future. Indigenous studies does that.

SPEAKER_00: 22:50

Right. And it seems to me from what what I have grasped that um you think it's really important that we take full advantage of the tools, the analytic and conceptual tools that were present in Native peoples, uh, not just in uh scholarship about Native peoples or scholarship about settler colonialism. You think there is some very valuable trove of tools to draw on? And is that something that you in your scholarly life attempt to do? To sort of fuse, as it were, Western epistemologies with sort of native uh uh conceptual modes um that allow us to think past, say, as you would put it, property um in its conventional Anglo-American way.

SPEAKER_02: 23:36

Yeah. Uh yeah, you have to you have to deal with the Western because it's always there, right? Even though you you work towards land back, for instance, which is a big a big movement right now, even if you're thinking of that, when people are saying land back, too often people are like, well, that's just ridiculous. That's not gonna, that's not gonna work. You know, we're not gonna give it back, whatever. Um, private property ownership, blah, blah, blah. Um, when Native people are saying that, they're not. I mean, yeah, people would like their land back. I want to be clear there, but it's also not in terms of property driven. It's providing the ability for Native people to maintain their relationship and caretake those sites, have access to their weaving materials, say, or whatever materials they want, and be able to have sovereignty over those spaces as well. And um, you have to deal with federal Indian law, which is a lot property-based. A lot of professors of American Indian law, they're the ones that also teach property law, which is the basis really of the US. Um, I think about Casey Park's work here. She's a brilliant uh legal professor at Georgetown, but she also has a PhD in history, I think, as well. Um, she has a couple PhDs in a law professor. She's brilliant. Um, but she knows she in the key words in gender and sexuality studies that just came out, talked about the relationship of property that develops through colonialism and slavery. And so those are intertwined through how we come to conceive of property, but property didn't even have the same kind of meaning until um the 1600s with colonization. So I think we have those kind of different ideas of how how property develops, but it leads into we have to also talk about I think about the Gabrielino Tanva in my work with them, and they still have a relationship to land outside those property logics. And even though their land is subdivided, divided, there's no access close to the coastal line. Um, if any of your listeners ever have land to donate on the coast, I'm sure the Gabrielino Tanva would love that to be able to watch their TIA. And um I think these these pass forwards are going to be mired in thinking outside like private property and ownership in that particular way.

SPEAKER_00: 26:09

To follow up on that, how does sovereignty um connect to existing logics of property? How does it um, as you understand it, connect to or escape that traditional sort of um essentially capitalist um ownership model of property?

SPEAKER_02: 26:28

So in my research in the first book, right, uh, and I was trying to be very careful of this after you know, you rewrite your tenure book for the fourth or fifth time. Um, but the first time I wrote it, it was like, I'm not saying get rid of territory, because territory is what's protected us as community and those relationships to land. We have to deal with that on some level, that American Indian law and how Indian country is an actual actually defined in American Indian law. We have to deal with uh all the different ways land is categorized through the legal apparatus as well. Feel land, trust land, all of it, right? We have to deal with that. We don't have have that option not to. But I think in the in the quotodian, in the everyday practices of Native people, you can have sacred sites. And there's so many sacred sites across Los Angeles that I have been fortunate that the Gabolino Tandar shared to me, it gives me a different perspective of the land itself in LA. But you can still, even though those logics exist, what really matters as a people is that that relationship that exists outside those property logics. And that's the passing down of uh different knowledges, indigenous geographies, et cetera, that become important. Laura Harjo has uh talked about emergent geographies, which is the way that Native people now are forming relationships with different groups of people, but also within their own communities to develop their own geographic tools to put forward um sovereign practices of territory, et cetera, as well.

SPEAKER_00: 28:06

So And what role do you see um Native American and Indigenous studies playing in that project? Um, in other words, how fluid is the and permeable is the boundary between academy and community? Um should Native American Indigenous Studies be um front and center in this reimagining of the landscape of this land?

SPEAKER_02: 28:31

That's a hard question because it really depends how things are considered. I would say yeah, yes, I really believe, I feel at UCLA we're we're lucky because a lot of the scholars there are able to use their disciplinary methods to promote healthy and wellness in native communities. I think of the work of Randall Aquay with looking at child obesity and all, you know, through economic practices. I think of you know, Angela Riley in the law school. She she really does do a lot through the legal practices. Um, I think it's how we translate it to community members. And sometimes academics are not good at that translation process. Sometimes we have so much to learn from tribal community members. Sometimes it can be, but we have to do that with reciprocity as well. We can't be extractive and we have to have that reciprocity in our practices. And I just think the academy as a whole should learn to have reciprocity with whatever groups they're working with, not just native groups, but you know, most of our groups we should have that reciprocity. Um and then I I actually I I actually think that developing those tools and those skill sets are very important for our students to learn as they move forward as well. Most people don't realize, but in some states like Minnesota, they Minnesota has done UMN has done um. A great job at you know training firefighters. They get a certificate through the Indigenous Studies uh Department for Forest and Fire Tree Fire stuff. But you know, the tribes in Minnesota are some of the biggest employers, not just of native people, but in general as a part of the economy. And we see the same in California as well, where Indigenous and some of the rural areas where Indigenous communities are, they're some of the highest employers as well. In Florida, the Seminole, you know, they've done a really good job at this. So that's to say, if we can create tools to really help train people, not just you know, Native kids, but everybody, to understand the importance of Indigenous sovereignty, to understand their own histories and how they came to be on whose ever indigenous land they're on. If we can train people to do that, we can have more respectful and reciprocal relationships back and forth.

SPEAKER_00: 31:02

Well, you may now be in a position to advance that project because, as we mentioned at the outset, you are now the special advisor to the Chancellor on Native American Indigenous Affairs at UCLA. Um, what is that job and what do you hope to do in it?

SPEAKER_02: 31:16

There's a lot on the surface that I feel can be done, and then there's a lot that happens on the non-surface that's confidential and can be very tricky at times. But um, some of the projects that I've taken up is trying to make UCLA opens it, opens its doors a little wider, um, open it, you know, uh, create more of a presence with the Gabriolino Conva on campus. Um, one of the first things they did was work on the land acknowledgement. And that wasn't just something that was a wham and that I threw together. I talked to the tribal elders about what they wanted in this process. And they wanted to use their language, and they wanted to be seen not as something that had just been lost or stolen from, but they wanted to see that they wanted the acknowledgement to make it clear that they are in relationship with the students that are emerging and coming out of UCLA. So um that was just the first step. I look at them, I rephrased them, I don't call them land acknowledgments, I call them land introductions because once you're introduced to somebody, then you have to have a response, you know, you start to develop that relationship. So um, in some of the other work that I've done that that's out in a journal, um, Western Humanities Review, I talk about the land introductions. So that's how I look at it. Uh, when I worked with the elders on that, they very clearly didn't want to be seen as just a tragic figure of the past. That can be a problem with land introductions. But they wanted to see, they wanted students to think about their water in the daytime, think about their own ancestors, think about their emerging relationships with the Gabalino Tonva, with the land around them, and how that would work itself out. Um, they had been working on a plaque for 20 years, and it again is just a plaque, but there's now a plaque on campus that's next to Founders Rock. So that creates some of the first presence, like an actual physical presence on the land at UCLA. So those are some of the first two projects that I worked on. And from there, um, I've been working on thinking about how to open up the campus for more to develop more relationships between the tribal community members and the students and the staff and the faculty in different disciplines across the university. So that hasn't been easy because of COVID, and our campuses are constantly being shut down. Um, we do have a planning. We hope we had we just rearranged the date because it was on January 15th, but now it's on January 29th. Um, anybody's welcome to come out. And in that, I've been working with Victoria Sork, who's the director of the Mildred Mathis Botanical Gardens. And with that, um working with Victoria, they're working on making a basket weaving garden so that the Tonva don't have to travel two hours away to get their basket weaving materials. So that's one aspect, you know, planting native plants in the botanical gardens. I work at Caravagna Springs, which is a traditional village site, which is a very important site. It's on Uni High's campus. It's open the first Saturdays of every month, and everybody is welcome. I mean, it's been amazing. It's been revitalized by uh Robert Ramirez, who is a uh the president of the Caravagna Springs, and he was a general contractor and landscaper, so he knows what he's doing. So he's combining and building that site, which is all native plants. So during that process, I invited, I've been working with the landscape and ecological um sustainability practices at UCLA, who are redevising the outdoor spaces around uh campus, right? Because as many people may or may not know, uh UCLA has a space crisis. And I kind of knew we weren't going to get a building for Native students. I hope someday in the future there's a way to get a building. Um, so but I do know we have lots of beautiful outdoor spaces on campus. And I do know that it's not just a matter of planting native plants. There was a movement a couple of years ago there started, you know, save white sage started planting around campus and other native plants. But there's a caretaking. It's not you leave a plant and let it grow. You have to have that caretaking process. So in my role as special advisor, I'm trying to work on developing uh more of a caretaking process on campus. And the overall plan, which is um looking 20 years out and trying to also work with climate change on our landscape and those outdoor spaces on campus, um, bringing in Gabriolino Tomville voices and thinking through the plants that they need to be planted so that they can harvest and gather and caretake them as well. So that's what we're working on creating those spaces and harvest gathering and caretaking, in which they can share their knowledge with people in life sciences. I've been working with Sage Hale and Kelly Nor, um Kelly Norbert, um, who's she's just been amazing. She's come out to Caravagna to look at the to help work that land in traditional native planting and stuff. We have a lot of students from life science grad students coming and professors coming out to give back in that reciprocal way as well at Caravagna Springs. Um, UCLA is developing a great relationship. David Shorter helped um with a grant recently with the Theodore Payne Institute to uh do that traditional planting. So I brought our groundskeepers and our sustainability offer, Nari, um, to Caravangna Springs so that they could see that this isn't just a uh talking about planting native plants, but this is what it means to be in community with those plants, to caretake those plants and help develop them. So those are some of the projects that I've been working on as special advisor. And then there's other ones like, you know, uh, I'm sure many students who might be listening will understand this, but um, working on financial aid practices and how to how to respond better to tribal scholarships, which can be quite difficult because each tribe has their own ways they hand out scholarships and processes. But um, but yeah, we're trying to we're trying to lead workshops on uh improving those experiences for our students in terms of retention and recruitment as well.

SPEAKER_00: 37:43

So it sounds like in a certain sense the transition has been somewhat seamless from scholar and critic and activist, um, you know, someone with a critical perspective toward predominantly white institutions, to then being a representative and indeed a very visibly identifiable representative of one large institution. What has that been like? And how what has it been hard to navigate or has it sort of just flowed naturally?

SPEAKER_02: 38:12

Well, you know, sometimes I think it's it's it's been difficult. It hasn't flowed naturally. Again, we've been working with COVID, and I think it's impacted Native communities so badly. Um, losses from our you know, staff having losses to even most of us uh have from reservation communities have lost really important elders and people, um, first language speakers and things like that, people you know who hold whole libraries. So I think uh I I wish there was something more I could do there. It makes it hard. Um but uh it's seamless and it's not like you know, as an academic, I still have to produce research. That hasn't always been as seamless, you know. Uh we run on grants at UCLA a lot of times. A lot of the work that I'm doing is grant work. I have a grant now centering tribal stories in time of disaster, and they have timelines, but tribal communities don't have the same timelines. And so you're trying to, I'm uh, you know, air and be careful and you know, uh work with people, get lots of their feedback. I I never just publish one thing. I always, you know, even the land introduction article, I give all the community members that helped me work on it, like 20 people, the ability to, you know, just tell me what you don't like. I don't, you know, I'll change it or whatever. I always I always ask the community what they think on all of my projects. So um it's it's just been a process. And I think sometimes in academia, you wind up doing two jobs, right? Like the stuff that I publish on has largely been as a as a literary scholar. And then there's the or as a settler colonial studies scholar, interdisciplinary American studies, I'm heavily active in American studies as well. Um so there's that, but then you know, people don't understand necessarily the digital projects that I do, the digital humanities projects, they're harder than writing a book. It's like it's just so much work because you have to run it back and forth with the community. It's always changing. Um, that and it has the dynamic dynamics to change, which is a wonderful thing, but that also means you have to constantly be changing things and keeping up with the projects. So there's there's that. So I see that as the praxis of my theoretical work a lot of times.

SPEAKER_00: 40:45

Right. I I it's a good way to think of it. Um and just building on that, what uh what what do you hope for this institution for UCLA? Where where what's your vision of where UCLA should be? Um if you if you were to realize you know the potential of this position and mobilize people um in ways maybe even beyond your imagination, where would it lead? What would the institution look like with respect to uh Native American people and their presence?

SPEAKER_02: 41:17

We have such a great opportunity as one of the largest indigenous uh cities in the world, you know, in in terms of in the US population-wise, especially if we we consider which I do, Latin American Indigenous Studies populations. Um, you know, there's there's just so many indigenous populations within within California within the state of California. I think we have a potential if we could make space. Literally, the only department that does not have space on campus or soon to be department is American Indian Studies. The the students don't have, they have um, you know, they don't have the space.

SPEAKER_00: 41:58

It's a pretty haunting symbol.

SPEAKER_02: 41:59

Yeah, yeah. I and I really feel like other universities now are creating spaces that are meaningful, even right down to the architectural aspect being mean of meaningful. Like there's a beautiful longhouse space that they have at the University of Oregon where it's just like all cedar and everything's really important. And they have a kitchen and they have a garden where students can uh you have their traditional uh plants and have traditional medicines that are needed. Um, that's what I would like to see. I would like to see a beautiful, beautiful place for our students, like um and at Cornell, uh they have a beautiful house that's shaped like it's all Hot and Ashani focused in many ways, because those are the traditional keepers of that land. Um, but everybody's welcome and everybody learns from that. And it's just, you know, these some of these other universities that are really thinking about how do we create a space with land-based pedagogies. I I would really like to see UCLA into that foray. Um, and I feel like uh there's a lot of people that would love to see that. And it's it's a way that it doesn't just sustain sustain native students because often people are like, oh, it's such a small population compared to the rest that we should forget about it or whatever. But but there's just so much knowledge that could be had there and outside of a numbers game. Sometimes the way we think in the academy is too based on numbers or algorithms, run running off these business models. And I don't think we should ever do that. We should always, we should always think, you know, think about black feminist scholars who always say, you know, the Combahe River Collective, look at the, you know, look at those who are the most vulnerable populations, you know. I really I learned a lot from my Black feminist colleagues around this. And I and I feel we have to learn from each other in those ways. And it outside of these algorithms and who's how many you know, bodies per seat we serve or any of that. Everybody should know whose land they're on, those histories, the meaning, the what the what the land around them is like. Everybody should know where their water comes from. So that's what I would like to see for our uh for our teaching, for everybody to take a class in AIS. And then for the department and the students, I would like to see a really nice space.

SPEAKER_00: 44:25

So thank you for sharing that vision. And and as a final question, I want to zoom out even further and ask you where do you think we are at in the struggle for justice for Native Americans today? I asked this um a day after the Canadian government announced a major new um program uh to compensate first peoples uh to the tune of 40 billion Canadian dollars uh for the removal of children and government and state educational and child welfare institutions. So that's the path of financial compensation. You've talked about land back, land introductions. Where do we need to go in the United States in terms of reparative justice? If you could just sort of in kind of broad summary fashion, give us your sense of where this country needs to go.

SPEAKER_02: 45:15

So, in terms of the UC, very simply, I think California Indians especially should have free tuition in our university systems. Our university systems have made so much money from being on American uh California Indian land that that's the very least that could be done. And there's a whole history there that is very complicated with the losing of treaties conventionally conveniently. And California Indians just really had um had a brutal time of colonization that's pretty recent. So I really believe that every California Indian should be able to attend one of the UCs once they're admitted, it should be tuition-free. Um, and it wouldn't actually break the bank or anything, but it has to go through the state legislature. That's one of the first things I tried to do at UCLA when I was appointed special advisor, but um but it has to go through the state legislature, is what I was told. But that's that's a very easy reparative justice thing that could happen. Um then in terms of the broader land, I believe like unused lands should be given back and uh back to Native communities uh to be to have that kind of sovereignty over it. Uh it'll be interesting to see how the recent decision in Oklahoma, the McGert case, it'll be interesting to see how that plays out in terms of reparative justice. Um I highly suggest if anybody wants to follow up on that, they look at Angela Riley did a special in the law school on that as well, through their Native Nations and Tribal Policy Institute. Um I would really like to see more women's like that, where land is returned to Native people by the states or even at the federal land uh reserve level. Uh that's where I see that that repair to justice can start to go as well. And more universities should also think of be thinking about where their land is and and um providing free tuition for displaced people. University of Oregon, anybody who was displaced from the state of Oregon, they have a tuition fee waiver. Colorado just instituted one because Colorado was one of those states where they kind of made it, they aren't made an architecture of it as white by pushing Native people out of the state. It was very intentional. So most of these states really have to think about think about that free tuition waiver as a whole.

SPEAKER_00: 47:49

Well, this has been a very wide-ranging and I should say stimulating conversation. I thank you for both sort of sharing larger visions and very specific and concrete proposals for reparative justice. Um, it's really been a delight. Thank you, uh Professor Bishana Glooman, for joining us on this episode of Then and Now.

SPEAKER_02: 48:07

Well, thank you. Thank you, everybody. And if you want any more information on these decisions or on education tools and kits, please visit Mapping Indigenous LA.

SPEAKER_00: 48:16

Great. Thank you to our listeners as well. Have a good and safe day.

SPEAKER_01: 48:27

Thank you for listening to that now, a podcast by the UCLA Lesson Center for History. I don't produce it, I think I'm fine. I don't think I'll take a point.