Attack of the Fifty Foot (Lakota) Woman | Tiffany Midge

Institute for Ethnic Studies Author

04/06/2021 Added

150 Plays

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Tiffany Midge's talk "Attack of the Fifty Foot (Lakota) Woman" for the Spring Celebration: Colloquium on Racial Justice.

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[00:00:48.720]Wonderful.
[00:00:52.230]Welcome everyone.
[00:00:54.300]We are so glad that you've joined us
[00:00:56.490]for the keynote event of our three day spring celebration.
[00:01:00.600]The lecture, "The Attack of the 50 Foot Lakota Woman"
[00:01:03.730]by award-winning Lakota writer, Tiffany Midge.
[00:01:07.690]I am your host Joy Castro, and I direct
[00:01:10.970]the Institute for Ethnic Studies
[00:01:14.050]at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln,
[00:01:17.010]nebraska's flagship research one institution.
[00:01:20.620]Before we begin, the institute
[00:01:22.660]would first like to acknowledge and honor
[00:01:25.330]the Pawnee, Ponka, Odomissouria,
[00:01:29.420]Omaha, Dakota, Lakota, Arapaho,
[00:01:32.960]Cheyenne and call peoples,
[00:01:34.880]as well as the relocated Ho-Chunk, Iowa and SAC
[00:01:38.580]and Fox peoples,
[00:01:39.870]upon whose homelands now reside the campuses and programs
[00:01:43.280]of the University of Nebraska, a land grant institution.
[00:01:47.910]We recognize the legacies of violence, displacement
[00:01:51.690]and survival that bring us here today.
[00:01:55.860]The Institute for Ethnic Studies founded in 1972
[00:01:59.480]is an academic interdisciplinary unit
[00:02:01.880]comprising 22 faculty members from six disciplines
[00:02:05.850]whose work occupies the nexus,
[00:02:08.510]where traditional academic fields,
[00:02:10.580]such as modern languages and sociology,
[00:02:13.915]intersect with issues of race, ethnicity and social justice.
[00:02:17.770]With programs in African and African American studies,
[00:02:21.170]Latin X and Latin American studies
[00:02:23.230]and native American studies,
[00:02:25.330]we offer two majors, seven minors,
[00:02:28.070]including a brand new minor in racial justice,
[00:02:30.640]equity and inclusion,
[00:02:32.370]and graduate specializations at the MA and PhD levels
[00:02:36.010]as well as co-curricular programs
[00:02:39.370]like our annual spring celebration.
[00:02:41.720]We're proud and grateful to be celebrating our 49th year
[00:02:45.590]at the University of Nebraska.
[00:02:47.290]And we are very happy
[00:02:48.970]that higher education nationwide
[00:02:51.590]is beginning to catch up with the kind of work
[00:02:54.640]that we have been doing for decades.
[00:02:58.380]We're also very proud to congratulate this evening
[00:03:00.690]our colleague, Dr. Mark Garcia
[00:03:02.720]for receiving the Edgerton Award
[00:03:04.650]for excellence at the junior faculty level,
[00:03:07.860]and our colleague professor Janine Cappo Cruset,
[00:03:10.327]the renowned writer,
[00:03:12.730]for receiving a distinguished Rosovsky professorship.
[00:03:16.270]We celebrate your success.
[00:03:19.330]Before Dr. Tom Gannon introduces Tiffany Midge,
[00:03:22.520]I'd like to also offer a very warm thanks
[00:03:24.630]to the academic administrators who support our work.
[00:03:28.100]Chancellor Ronnie Green has risen
[00:03:30.440]to this national political moment with rare sincerity
[00:03:33.510]and commitment to anti-racist education and transformation.
[00:03:37.888]Thank you, Ronnie.
[00:03:39.720]We are grateful to the dean
[00:03:41.040]of the College of Arts and Sciences, Mark Button,
[00:03:43.450]who is centering equity inclusion and diversity
[00:03:46.060]in the college's strategic plan.
[00:03:48.140]And to the associate deans, Pat Dusalt, Will Thomas
[00:03:51.810]and June Griffin for supporting our work.
[00:03:55.210]We want to publicly thank the chairs
[00:03:57.540]of our six departments
[00:03:58.700]who joined appoint with ethnic studies for your generosity
[00:04:01.750]and unflagging support.
[00:04:03.520]We know it can be a logistical challenge.
[00:04:06.190]Thank you Margo Abel in English, James Le Sueur in history,
[00:04:10.400]Nora Peterson in modern languages and literatures,
[00:04:13.870]David DeLillo in psychology,
[00:04:16.000]Kevin Smith in political science
[00:04:18.120]and Jolene Smith in sociology.
[00:04:20.540]We could not do our work without you.
[00:04:23.620]We'd also like to thank the friends of ethnic studies.
[00:04:26.200]This year, three new memorial funds have been instituted
[00:04:30.570]to support students and faculty
[00:04:32.230]at the University of Nebraska.
[00:04:34.320]The first, a scholarship for a junior
[00:04:36.500]or senior film studies major who's minoring in Latin X
[00:04:39.500]or Latin American studies,
[00:04:41.300]honors the late Lebano Fabio Castro
[00:04:43.400]who loved cinema all his life,
[00:04:45.480]but could not afford to attend college
[00:04:47.420]until after he retired
[00:04:49.100]when he took his first film studies course and loved it.
[00:04:52.970]Here to announce the second new fund,
[00:04:56.150]is the winner of this year's Sorenson Award
[00:04:59.290]for distinguished teaching in the humanities,
[00:05:02.100]our colleague, Dr. Amelia Montez, an associate professor
[00:05:05.260]in Latin X and Latin American studies and English.
[00:05:08.750]Amelia.
[00:05:09.920]Thank you so much, Joy.
[00:05:11.860]And I want to do what we do in ethnic studies,
[00:05:15.210]which is support and congratulate each other.
[00:05:17.760]So thank you for that.
[00:05:19.310]I also want to congratulate Dr. Joy Castro,
[00:05:23.020]who has just signed a two book deal
[00:05:25.130]for her novel "Flight Risk" appearing this October, 2021,
[00:05:29.970]and also her second novel, "Smoke",
[00:05:32.630]which is a historical novel set in 19th century key west.
[00:05:36.390]We congratulate Joy.
[00:05:38.830]Dr. Raphael Grehether, was my mentor
[00:05:42.930]when I started at UNL
[00:05:44.730]and I feel very grateful to have had that mentorship.
[00:05:49.480]He received his doctorate there at UNL.
[00:05:52.840]His dissertation was one of the first in the country
[00:05:56.560]to a dissertation focusing on Chicano literature.
[00:06:01.520]He was the founder of the Chicano studies department
[00:06:04.400]in 1974, which became what we know now
[00:06:08.250]as the Institute for Ethnic Studies.
[00:06:11.290]He also founded that Chicano Awareness Centers
[00:06:14.280]in Omaha and Grand Island.
[00:06:16.790]And this graduate student support fund in his name
[00:06:24.470]will support graduate students pursuing coursework
[00:06:27.320]and research in Chican X and Latin X studies,
[00:06:30.500]and a graduate degree in English.
[00:06:32.530]It is our sincere hope that receiving support
[00:06:35.300]bearing his name keeps Rafael, Ralph's memory
[00:06:39.320]and his legacy in our field alive and vibrant.
[00:06:43.030]Thank you.
[00:06:44.350]Thank you so much, Amelia.
[00:06:46.300]We are thrilled.
[00:06:48.400]Here to announce the third new fund is Dr. Greg Rutledge,
[00:06:52.600]an associate professor in African
[00:06:54.760]and African American studies and in English.
[00:06:58.350]Greg.
[00:07:00.380]Good afternoon, everyone.
[00:07:01.400]I hope that you are doing well.
[00:07:03.620]This is a very eventful year.
[00:07:05.330]And this fund that I am going to announce
[00:07:10.220]is one about one of the long standing members
[00:07:14.600]of the political science department and also a pastor
[00:07:18.310]and an activist in the community,
[00:07:19.670]who also I believe was a director for a moment,
[00:07:24.180]for a few years with the Institute for Ethnic Studies.
[00:07:27.730]This is the Reverend Dr. Michael W. Combs Memorial Fund
[00:07:30.760]for Scholars of Equality and Justice,
[00:07:33.280]which came online in December officially
[00:07:36.740]and is now receiving donations.
[00:07:39.550]It is to honor inspired and compassionate learning,
[00:07:43.540]teaching, activism and change
[00:07:47.400]across the board, human and civil rights,
[00:07:49.380]social justice and equality, multiculturalism,
[00:07:52.720]LGBTQ rights, immigrant rights, environmentalism,
[00:07:56.130]the whole gamut,
[00:07:56.963]things that would have been very close to him
[00:07:58.780]and that are close to many of us.
[00:08:01.310]These are IES administered supports.
[00:08:05.380]One would be for scholars,
[00:08:06.780]and this is what Dr. Combs called
[00:08:09.290]many students over the years.
[00:08:11.440]Scholarships are undergraduate and graduate students
[00:08:13.940]based on academics and also their community activism,
[00:08:17.910]and also a teaching award.
[00:08:20.530]One in which the ethnic studies faculty themselves
[00:08:23.090]would be judging their colleagues work in the classroom,
[00:08:27.220]that's smart, inspired, transformative teaching,
[00:08:30.070]that reaches from the classroom out into the campus
[00:08:32.990]and the broader communities.
[00:08:34.920]The first application should be received,
[00:08:37.150]I believe in fall of this year,
[00:08:38.740]with the announcement of the first recipients in February,
[00:08:42.850]black history month,
[00:08:43.683]and also the month in which Dr. Combs was born.
[00:08:46.860]Donations are now being received.
[00:08:49.020]You can send them into the nufoundation.org
[00:08:52.610]or the URL down at the bottom.
[00:08:58.020]There's also checks that you may send in as well,
[00:09:01.750]but if you have any information,
[00:09:04.100]if you need more information,
[00:09:05.110]please email me at grutledge2@unl.edu
[00:09:11.100]and I can give you more information.
[00:09:13.380]Thank you very much.
[00:09:17.500]Thank you so much, Greg.
[00:09:19.320]This is so amazing.
[00:09:20.610]And warm thanks to Dr. Alice Kang,
[00:09:26.060]who also helped with the institution of this fund
[00:09:29.070]and of course, to Dr. Gwendolyn Combs,
[00:09:32.320]who is a guest tonight on this webinar.
[00:09:34.500]Thank you, Gwen.
[00:09:38.240]To learn how to apply for these special resources
[00:09:40.930]or to contribute to any of these funds
[00:09:43.330]and make a real difference in students' lives,
[00:09:46.140]please visit our website at ethnicstudies.unl.edu
[00:09:50.580]or feel free to contact me directly.
[00:09:53.990]And now to introduce our guest of honor, Tiffany Mich,
[00:09:57.200]we have Lakota literary critic, Dr. Tom,
[00:10:01.490]who was joined appointed within native American studies
[00:10:04.200]and the Department of English.
[00:10:06.310]A wonderful colleague and an award-winning teacher,
[00:10:09.610]Tom serves as the academic advisor in ethnic studies
[00:10:12.970]and will begin the position of associate director
[00:10:15.380]this August.
[00:10:16.850]His scholarly work includes the Monograph,
[00:10:19.197]"Skylark Meets Meadowlark:
[00:10:21.800]Reimagining the Bird in British Romantic
[00:10:24.630]and Contemporary Native American Literature"
[00:10:27.030]and his new memoir,
[00:10:28.657]"Life Look: Confessions of a Cross Blood Birder"
[00:10:32.440]is forthcoming from the Ohio State University Press.
[00:10:35.880]After Dr. Tom Gannon introduces Tiffany Mich,
[00:10:39.850]and professor Mitch speaks,
[00:10:41.900]we will have a little time for audience questions.
[00:10:44.620]So please do be sure to write your questions
[00:10:47.470]in the Q&A.
[00:10:49.250]Tom.
[00:10:54.240]Oh yes.
[00:10:55.813]Tiffany and I first met at a John R Milton conference
[00:10:59.250]at the University of South Dakota.
[00:11:01.930]She may not remember this.
[00:11:05.430]She was reading, I think mostly from her book
[00:11:07.110]of poems and progress about beastiality of bears
[00:11:10.060]or something like that.
[00:11:11.960]And after the reading, I got her to autograph
[00:11:13.720]my copy of "Outlaws, Renegades and Saints."
[00:11:19.100]I won't tell you how long ago it was,
[00:11:21.110]but let's just say your email address ends with aol.com.
[00:11:26.720]It still does.
[00:11:29.210]Later we became friends on Facebook.
[00:11:31.340]You know, that deepest kind of friendship.
[00:11:35.390]And now I've taught a good number
[00:11:36.500]of Tiffany's poems in my classes through the years.
[00:11:38.870]In fact, her poem "Written in Blood"
[00:11:40.980]is still one of my all time favorites.
[00:11:43.430]I also like to teach a short story of hers called "Beats"
[00:11:46.760]about a young native girl that goes to a school
[00:11:48.640]called Helen Keller Elementary.
[00:11:51.360]And the story is in part a humorous portrayal
[00:11:53.360]of cross-cultural misunderstandings
[00:11:54.970]about pilgrims and plains Indians, raising crops.
[00:11:57.800]And well, one of my students came up with this idea,
[00:12:01.810]or maybe I came up with the idea myself
[00:12:03.760]and repressed the fact,
[00:12:06.170]that the name Helen Keller worked well in the story
[00:12:08.370]as a very clever metaphor, as a stroke of genius even.
[00:12:11.940]And so I Facebook messaged her about it
[00:12:13.780]and she replied no,
[00:12:16.960]no Tom, Helen Keller Elementary
[00:12:19.680]was simply the name of the school I went to as a kid.
[00:12:23.390]Okay.
[00:12:25.110]So much for English major symbol hunting.
[00:12:29.580]Tiffany Midge is Hunkpapa Lakota,
[00:12:31.490]enrolled at standing rock reservation,
[00:12:33.810]but she grew up in Washington state.
[00:12:35.260]So unlike most Great Plains tribal people,
[00:12:37.150]she's probably actually seeing the ocean.
[00:12:39.880]She earned her MFA in creative writing
[00:12:41.600]from the University of Idaho in 2008.
[00:12:45.680]I see that her dissertation
[00:12:46.790]is titled "The Fertility Circus".
[00:12:48.700]So I'm kind of afraid to ask you what it's about,
[00:12:51.970]but by the then, she'd already published a good deal.
[00:12:53.750]For instance, her first book was
[00:12:55.047]"Animal Lore and Legend: Buffalo"
[00:12:58.350]in 1995 illustrated children's book by Scholastic.
[00:13:01.390]You remember them,
[00:13:02.660]in which she got to write about our native heritage,
[00:13:04.870]but which probably was a great outlet
[00:13:06.330]for a characteristically irreverent humor.
[00:13:09.310]Also that short story "Beats" I was talking about
[00:13:11.736]was anthologized in at least two native lit collections
[00:13:14.580]in the late 1990s.
[00:13:16.860]But I think my favorite book of hers is still
[00:13:20.547]"Outlaws, Renegades and Saints:
[00:13:22.460]Diary of a Mixed-up Halfbreed"
[00:13:25.133]published in 1996.
[00:13:26.500]For one thing I just wished
[00:13:27.620]that I'd have thought of that subtitle.
[00:13:30.941]This collection won the Native Writers Circle,
[00:13:33.080]the America's first book award for poetry.
[00:13:36.010]And the poem I was talking about from this book,
[00:13:37.517]"Written in Blood" can also be found in Harjo and Bird's
[00:13:40.010]renowned anthology of native women's writing
[00:13:43.017]"Reinventing the Enemy's Language".
[00:13:46.210]And then she received even more accolades
[00:13:47.850]for her collection,
[00:13:48.857]"The Woman Who Married a Bear" in 2016
[00:13:52.870]which won the Western Heritage Award for poetry book
[00:13:55.900]and the Kenyon Review Earthworks Prize
[00:13:58.660]for indigenous poetry.
[00:14:02.140]I should also note that for a good number of years,
[00:14:03.950]Tiffany was a humor columnist for Indian Country Today,
[00:14:07.830]maybe one of the most important online outlets
[00:14:09.960]for all things indigenous.
[00:14:12.260]And of course your frequent funny takes on Facebook
[00:14:14.530]are a constant source of entertainment
[00:14:15.990]for her Facebook friends.
[00:14:18.240]Over the years, I've got to know Gus and Jay.
[00:14:22.380]One of them is her dog.
[00:14:24.940]Following Tiffany on Facebook
[00:14:26.390]is kind of like a Netflix binge,
[00:14:28.330]just not so darn time consuming.
[00:14:31.340]But her reputation as one of the great
[00:14:33.270]native American humorist has recently been solidified
[00:14:36.330]with the 2019 publication of her collection
[00:14:39.120]of humorous essays,
[00:14:40.297]"Bury My Heart at Chuck E. Cheese's"
[00:14:43.280]published by our own University of Nebraska Press.
[00:14:47.020]Most of you get the title joke,
[00:14:48.600]since you've read or at least heard
[00:14:50.070]of Dee Brown's classic history,
[00:14:51.997]"Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee".
[00:14:54.550]And that's a book that's still admired
[00:14:55.870]by many native Americans,
[00:14:57.770]but it is at last an allergy,
[00:15:00.600]falsely signaling the end of tribal peoples,
[00:15:02.830]who were supposedly passive victims
[00:15:04.460]in the face of genocidal force.
[00:15:07.120]We now know, thanks to the writing of Tiffany Midge
[00:15:09.320]and others, that this is certainly not the case.
[00:15:12.260]In fact, survival for native Americans
[00:15:14.870]in the 20th and 21st centuries has taken many forms,
[00:15:19.260]including the occasional foray to Chuck E. Cheese's.
[00:15:24.090]And so without further ado,
[00:15:28.690]Tiffany Midge.
[00:15:32.776]Oh boy.
[00:15:37.240]Okay, I'm going to double check
[00:15:38.660]and make sure that people can hear me.
[00:15:42.560]I don't have any way of knowing
[00:15:43.850]whether or not you can hear me.
[00:15:47.700]All right, good.
[00:15:50.600]Thank you so much, Tom.
[00:15:52.780]That was really interesting to listen to.
[00:15:55.120]It sounded like days of your life,
[00:15:58.210]or like a eulogy of sorts.
[00:16:01.040]So I give you permission to speak at my eulogy,
[00:16:04.800]if I have one,
[00:16:07.240]which is questionable.
[00:16:10.380]Yeah, well, thank you so much and welcome everyone today.
[00:16:18.090]And thank you Joy Castro, faculty and staff,
[00:16:21.630]from the Ethnic Studies department
[00:16:24.720]and the Department of University of Nebraska, Lincoln.
[00:16:27.950]Of course I'm honored and I'm very thrilled
[00:16:30.660]to be joining with you
[00:16:32.690]and also thanks to the students
[00:16:35.090]and those of you who are tuning in today.
[00:16:39.650]Thank you so much.
[00:16:42.293]So I just, it feels good
[00:16:44.990]to be able to stretch my legs a little bit with this talk.
[00:16:52.300]And also, you know, to title the talk, you know,
[00:16:55.687]"Attack of the 50 Foot Lakota Woman."
[00:16:59.940]The subtitle of that is
[00:17:01.257]"Representations of Indigenous Women in Popular Culture",
[00:17:05.980]which sounds pretty, eh, you know,
[00:17:09.490]pretty milk toast, really representation.
[00:17:12.010]So like, you know, English 101 paper or something,
[00:17:15.300]but I was out of ideas at that point, I guess,
[00:17:20.590]because basically those are the things
[00:17:22.120]that I do wanna talk about,
[00:17:23.780]but when I say stretch my legs,
[00:17:26.050]I mean, stretch my legs in that academic,
[00:17:30.190]you know, keynotes, you know,
[00:17:31.383]because they tend to be, I mean,
[00:17:33.780]I'm sure they're wonderful to the people
[00:17:36.100]that are interested in the topics,
[00:17:37.430]but they tend to be a little bit dry.
[00:17:39.800]And so it's nice to be able to stretch my legs
[00:17:43.000]and sort of, you know,
[00:17:44.580]make fun of representation and have a humorous talk.
[00:17:49.685]At least it's fun for me.
[00:17:52.220]I don't know about the rest of y'all,
[00:17:54.750]but I hope that you'll all bear with me
[00:17:58.470]while I make my way through this talk.
[00:18:03.540]I thought that I would give a little bit of background
[00:18:06.180]to my discussion,
[00:18:07.900]Representation of Indigenous Women in the Media.
[00:18:11.840]I wanted to offer some personal impressions and anecdotes
[00:18:17.250]and then I wanted to offer a survey type of retrospective
[00:18:22.250]of those images and icons.
[00:18:25.770]And I'm going to share samples of the types of egregiousness
[00:18:31.120]of what I have been tracking all of these years,
[00:18:34.660]along with one or two examples,
[00:18:37.380]which are deserving of their own exhibit.
[00:18:41.890]And just so you know, for warning,
[00:18:44.486]I'm also going to read sections from my book,
[00:18:48.077]"Bury My Heart at Chuck E. Cheese's"
[00:18:50.580]as they relate to various points in my discussion.
[00:18:59.150]There were no American Indian dolls when I was a kid.
[00:19:03.410]There were no American Indian GI Joe's
[00:19:06.470]doing the karate chop either.
[00:19:09.090]The American doll company that introduced Kaia
[00:19:12.330]as part of their historical doll series
[00:19:14.670]hadn't entered the milo yet.
[00:19:17.860]Native kids like me were pretty hard pressed
[00:19:21.300]to locate representation in popular culture
[00:19:25.000]that held any resemblance to ourselves.
[00:19:28.890]Now, I was born in 1965
[00:19:33.440]and while hippies had entered the national conversation
[00:19:37.500]along with civil rights and the American Indian movement,
[00:19:42.090]I didn't learn about those things until college age.
[00:19:46.320]If you can believe it.
[00:19:48.710]We had Bonanza and episodes that depicted
[00:19:53.310]all manner of Indians from the speech lists
[00:19:57.120]to the monosyllabic, to the whooping,
[00:20:01.080]but no one seemed, well, no one seemed actually human.
[00:20:07.590]They were white actors in face paint and wigs and headbands
[00:20:13.150]to keep their wigs attached.
[00:20:15.260]And they acted like feeble minded sociopaths.
[00:20:20.980]Another hallmark of this illustrious golden age
[00:20:24.300]of television and motion pictures
[00:20:26.820]is that native women were often literally kicked
[00:20:31.010]in their literal asses by the likes of the male stars
[00:20:35.870]of the great western frontier, such as John Wayne.
[00:20:40.270]And if John Wayne wasn't literally
[00:20:42.700]kicking Indian women around,
[00:20:45.140]the characters he played were planning on worst treatment
[00:20:49.870]and worst fate.
[00:20:51.750]Anyone who has seen "The Searchers"
[00:20:54.020]will know what I'm talking about.
[00:20:57.190]Now, this isn't to say that all representation was horrible
[00:21:00.480]with a capital H.
[00:21:02.390]I know that some of the TV shows
[00:21:04.090]and films progressively received
[00:21:05.980]more and more sensitive treatment as the years went by,
[00:21:09.730]but I can't say that they were always ideal.
[00:21:14.300]I do have to mention that the John Ford era
[00:21:17.390]of Cowboys and Indians and how the west was won
[00:21:21.790]in filmmaking, because the popularity of those films
[00:21:25.670]had horrendous consequences for native peoples
[00:21:29.130]in terms of how we were perceived and how we were treated,
[00:21:33.840]which in all likelihood contributed
[00:21:36.350]to the lack of representation available to me
[00:21:39.880]as a native kid growing up in the seventies
[00:21:41.817]and the eighties, which was, as I said, very marginal.
[00:21:49.280]I'm starting off here with one representation,
[00:21:55.320]which was and wasn't a representation.
[00:21:58.200]And that representation growing up was that of Cher.
[00:22:04.690]And who did I have the representations growing up?
[00:22:09.010]Cher, in her Vegas show girl feathered head dresses
[00:22:12.830]singing about being a half-breed.
[00:22:15.750]She isn't even native,
[00:22:18.040]but since pretending to be native is a national pastime,
[00:22:22.690]her long black hair and her Armenian features
[00:22:26.070]gave her a special passport.
[00:22:28.650]And the rest of the world believes she was Cherokee,
[00:22:31.590]or something.
[00:22:33.990]Some estimation of whatever passes for indigenous,
[00:22:38.470]which as Elizabeth Warren will tell you,
[00:22:42.090]they are high cheekbones.
[00:22:45.070]And a few years ago, my Christmas day of all days,
[00:22:50.980]native Twitter got into a major Twitter war with Cher.
[00:22:55.480]And this went on for hours.
[00:22:57.890]At one point, Cher called my friend, a journalist,
[00:23:01.810]Jacqueline Keeler, a B I T C H.
[00:23:06.780]What was the point of the Twitter war?
[00:23:09.950]What was the point?
[00:23:12.400]These are my notes from that time,
[00:23:15.310]December, 2017,
[00:23:18.900]Chergate is over for now.
[00:23:21.490]She apologized.
[00:23:23.720]We can all go home.
[00:23:25.800]We can all tell our grandchildren
[00:23:27.750]that we fought on the front lines in the 2017 Twitter war
[00:23:32.650]against Cher.
[00:23:34.620]I love the smell of burnt fake head dresses in the morning.
[00:23:41.780]Why can't Cher just wear meat dress like Lady Gaga,
[00:23:45.920]if she wants to be provocative or controversial?
[00:23:49.560]Why can't she burn a cross like Madonna?
[00:23:52.960]Maybe a nice swan laying egg dress like Bjork.
[00:23:57.200]She's already Bob Mackied the shit out of red carpet land,
[00:24:00.860]mostly naked.
[00:24:02.350]What's next?
[00:24:04.530]I am still trying to parse out what being nursed
[00:24:07.300]on an old cotton pick sack
[00:24:09.460]has anything to do with Cherokee ancestry,
[00:24:13.070]but like Cher, who's Apache reservationist Dallas, Texas,
[00:24:17.983]and who is on the logs,
[00:24:21.030]or Elizabeth Warren who's bonafide include high kick bones,
[00:24:24.760]anything goes, and the general public
[00:24:27.400]will buy into, whatever.
[00:24:31.240]The headline of one article read,
[00:24:34.457]"Cher Refuse to Apologize for Aalf-breed
[00:24:37.820]After Twitter War Fueled by Trump's Diversity
[00:24:41.000]Coalition Appointee."
[00:24:43.930]The appointee was a former member of the Pussycat Dolls,
[00:24:49.040]Kaya Jones.
[00:24:51.900]You'll have to look that one up.
[00:24:53.130]Excuse me.
[00:25:01.250]Another figure for native representation
[00:25:04.110]when I was growing up,
[00:25:06.750]was Tiger Lily from Walt Disney's Peter Pan.
[00:25:12.456]No.
[00:25:15.730]An online India publication had put out a call
[00:25:18.920]for submissions based on the theme
[00:25:21.760]of taking back Tiger Lily.
[00:25:25.610]And it said that this project seeks submissions
[00:25:29.600]from native American artists recreating Tiger Lily
[00:25:33.370]to fit a real role model of indigenous womanhood.
[00:25:39.190]Ouch.
[00:25:40.930]Okay.
[00:25:42.070]So the way I see it,
[00:25:43.190]what this call for submissions was suggesting,
[00:25:47.360]and bear with me because I am being sarcastic,
[00:25:49.690]is that somehow Indian people are in such dire need,
[00:25:53.090]are apparently at such a loss
[00:25:55.020]for native American role models to look up to,
[00:25:57.910]who have no cultural heroes or icons
[00:26:00.060]to claim as their very own,
[00:26:02.230]that they only solution is to exume from the mausoleum
[00:26:05.410]of 20th century relics,
[00:26:07.610]the Disney cartoon character Tiger Lily,
[00:26:11.080]who in the 1950s was brought to universal consciousness,
[00:26:15.530]ushered into the hearts and imaginations of millions,
[00:26:19.160]shrink wrapped, merchandised, packaged and delivered
[00:26:22.600]by a much rumor to be anti-Semite and a gender bigot.
[00:26:27.510]Fast forward to 2015,
[00:26:30.070]which is the time that I wrote this,
[00:26:32.310]this call for submissions proposes
[00:26:34.710]that Tiger Lily be resuscitated, repurposed,
[00:26:38.730]attempt a re prescriptive and reappropriated identity.
[00:26:43.400]Here she is, miss American Indian,
[00:26:47.300]and she will be played by Johnny Depp
[00:26:49.100]in the Tiger Lily biopic,
[00:26:51.440]coming soon to theaters near you in 3D.
[00:26:56.220]Just kidding, sort of.
[00:26:58.830]I'm referring to the motion picture, Pan,
[00:27:01.860]which had come out at that time
[00:27:04.060]and jury had erred due to the white actress
[00:27:07.600]selected to play Tiger Lily.
[00:27:10.810]When I think about my model of indigenous womanhood,
[00:27:14.440]I immediately think of my mother,
[00:27:17.290]a woman who lost her own mother tragically
[00:27:20.060]when she was 16,
[00:27:22.290]who became widowed at 21
[00:27:24.840]with a baby girl who had no education or prospects,
[00:27:29.750]who left the reservation,
[00:27:31.540]settled in Seattle, remarried and had me.
[00:27:38.130]And then raise two daughters
[00:27:40.000]and put in 30 years as a civil servant for King County.
[00:27:45.080]And she was beloved by a great many friends and family.
[00:27:50.000]She would be my model of indigenous womanhood.
[00:27:54.020]And when I think of a model of indigenous women,
[00:27:56.540]I think of my grandmother, Eliza,
[00:27:59.550]who grew up very, very poor.
[00:28:02.140]Who scraped out a living,
[00:28:04.340]her clothes threadbare,
[00:28:06.130]just eating the same meal for weeks.
[00:28:08.320]A young woman with so few choices,
[00:28:10.120]she married a widower and raised his daughters,
[00:28:13.780]even though for many years she loved another man,
[00:28:16.910]who she eventually did marry
[00:28:19.190]and also came to adopt my mother.
[00:28:22.700]She's my role model of indigenous womanhood.
[00:28:25.920]Also my grandmother, Charity,
[00:28:28.080]also my sisters and my aunts and my cousins.
[00:28:33.570]The call for submissions noted this project,
[00:28:36.070]taking back Tiger Lily is symbolic and representative
[00:28:40.180]of reclaiming indigenous womanhood for mainstream dialogue
[00:28:44.220]that has excluded the very subject of its conversation.
[00:28:48.480]Now it was difficult for me to visualize Tiger Lily
[00:28:51.950]as any sort of symbol of empowerment,
[00:28:54.100]considering she never spoke a word.
[00:28:57.140]If this image is being used as a symbol,
[00:29:00.960]speechlessness and victimhood is pretty symbolic.
[00:29:04.560]Throughout most of the films, she was tied up
[00:29:07.300]and at the mercy of pirates.
[00:29:09.260]So I fail to see how her legacy
[00:29:11.200]would arouse anyone's admiration
[00:29:13.640]beyond that as an exotic rival for Peter Pan's affections.
[00:29:19.110]Add that to the fact that she is a projected
[00:29:22.140]piece of celluloid.
[00:29:23.800]She bears no resemblance to anyone or anything
[00:29:26.450]remotely indigenous,
[00:29:28.210]and certainly bears no resemblance
[00:29:30.100]to anyone or anything remotely real.
[00:29:33.300]And I found this project at best fetishistic
[00:29:36.630]and essentialising,
[00:29:38.490]and at worst apologist and racist.
[00:29:41.410]It upheld and privileges
[00:29:43.570]a white supremacist power structure.
[00:29:46.820]There's no taking back,
[00:29:48.190]no reclamation of an idea
[00:29:49.900]that never belonged to Indians in the first place.
[00:29:53.260]A writer, friend of mine noted, reclaim Sambo,
[00:29:58.280]taking back Sambo, for whose sake?
[00:30:01.930]And of course I echo that.
[00:30:03.890]Would anyone want to reclaim Frito Bandido,
[00:30:07.260]Aunt Jemima, Charlie Chan, God, no.
[00:30:10.770]Those images are analogous to images of Tiger Lily.
[00:30:13.910]They're made from the same poison
[00:30:16.920]and they came from the same polluted well.
[00:30:20.670]The suggestion is unsettling, volatiles,
[00:30:23.300]it creates a something very wrong about this
[00:30:25.740]sick to my stomach kind of feeling.
[00:30:29.170]The presentation for this call for submissions
[00:30:31.250]is tone deaf and poorly conceived.
[00:30:33.530]It is a not well thought out slice of an idea
[00:30:36.060]that does little to uplift anyone
[00:30:37.840]and contribution to, perpetuate harmful stereotypes.
[00:30:43.340]No one would wanna take back any of these offensive
[00:30:45.790]and racist images.
[00:30:47.550]Why would anyone suggest taking back Tiger Lily?
[00:30:52.440]I had a list of things that I felt were analogous
[00:30:56.370]to that take back Aunt Jemima,
[00:30:59.460]which we have since 2015, which that's marvelous, right?
[00:31:06.160]Take back Frito Bandido,
[00:31:07.590]he's already been out of the cultural fray
[00:31:09.750]for quite some time.
[00:31:11.200]Take back Charlie Chan, take back Susie Wong,
[00:31:14.650]take back Land O'Lakes butter maiden.
[00:31:19.470]Of course, and we have done so,
[00:31:22.370]take back a little black Sambo,
[00:31:25.280]take back the Cleveland Indian mascot,
[00:31:27.990]that sounds familiar.
[00:31:30.360]Take back uncle Remus, take back Tiger Lily.
[00:31:34.730]And of course, some of those images that icons,
[00:31:39.600]have been canceled along with Mr. Potato head
[00:31:43.130]and six of Dr. Seuss's books.
[00:31:47.230]Cancel culture.
[00:31:49.810]And so, I don't know, I think we're making progress.
[00:31:53.300]So that's good.
[00:31:55.740]Another cultural icon that is familiar to me
[00:31:59.360]from seeing as a kid growing up, was Sacagawea,
[00:32:04.900]and I wrote a little bit about her,
[00:32:09.540]how Sacagawea got her groove back.
[00:32:13.990]Go west, they said.
[00:32:16.290]It'll be fine, they said.
[00:32:19.130]Little did our iconic heroine know
[00:32:21.440]that she would be stuck for months on end forging trail,
[00:32:25.620]with 30 unruly laborers and a baby strapped to her back.
[00:32:30.650]Little did she realize that after enduring illness,
[00:32:34.330]flash floods, temperature extremes,
[00:32:37.870]food shortages and mosquitoes swarms,
[00:32:41.690]all she'd receive in compensation
[00:32:44.470]was a commemorative coin just shy of 200 years to live.
[00:32:50.740]What's an Indian guide to do?
[00:32:53.370]Go to Jamaica?
[00:32:54.980]Sit mimosas on the beach and indulgent and island fling
[00:32:58.140]with a much younger man.
[00:33:03.290]Now because there were no American Indian dolls
[00:33:06.350]when I was a kid, I chose the very best,
[00:33:09.950]the very next best thing.
[00:33:13.050]In 1971 for Christmas,
[00:33:16.970]her name,
[00:33:19.020]my doll's name was Tamu, which is Swahili for sweet,
[00:33:25.320]and I had picked her out of the toy section
[00:33:27.900]in the Sears catalog.
[00:33:30.220]What I did know is that when I pulled her string,
[00:33:33.780]her talking string, she spoke the phrases,
[00:33:37.490]my name is Tamu.
[00:33:39.520]Cool it, baby.
[00:33:41.500]Do you like my dress?
[00:33:43.580]Socket to me.
[00:33:45.840]I'm sleepy.
[00:33:47.610]Can you dig it?
[00:33:49.620]Let's play house.
[00:33:51.710]I love you.
[00:33:53.890]Tamu means sweet.
[00:33:56.030]I'm hungry and I'm proud like you.
[00:34:02.610]But what I didn't know where at Tamu's origins.
[00:34:06.350]She was created by Shindana Toys,
[00:34:09.710]a division of a company called Operation Bootstrap, Inc,
[00:34:15.680]founded as a set of initiatives in south central Los Angeles
[00:34:20.090]in 1968, following the 1965 Watts riots.
[00:34:25.760]A goal of the company was to raise black consciousness
[00:34:29.440]and improve self-image.
[00:34:31.320]I pulled on Tamu's talking string
[00:34:33.710]with such frequency
[00:34:35.670]that I ended up breaking her and she never spoke again.
[00:34:40.250]Later that same year,
[00:34:42.270]my mother unearthed her old talking baby doll.
[00:34:46.060]Susie had a cracked porcelain head
[00:34:48.790]and most of her original Silicon yellow hair had fallen off.
[00:34:53.610]My mother told me that Susie would gurgle
[00:34:56.130]and fuss when she was laid down,
[00:34:58.650]that Susie would say mama,
[00:35:01.520]but she was very, very old.
[00:35:03.800]A 1940s era doll,
[00:35:06.340]and she had also become mute with age.
[00:35:10.790]These were the only baby dolls I ever wanted or ever kept.
[00:35:14.660]And my grandmother told me
[00:35:17.600]this was because I was Iniwashde, a good mother.
[00:35:26.320]And I'm gonna go back to talking about
[00:35:28.820]Land O'Lakes butter maiden,
[00:35:31.660]because she was also very iconic image,
[00:35:36.770]an icon growing up.
[00:35:40.170]And in 2020,
[00:35:44.530]we witnessed a string of major long fought four advances
[00:35:49.010]in Indian country.
[00:35:50.990]The McGirt decision,
[00:35:52.760]the Washington NFL team finally retiring their racist name,
[00:35:56.900]dozens of Christopher Columbus statues taken down,
[00:36:00.520]and Land O'Lakes butter removed the Indian maiden
[00:36:04.140]from their packaging.
[00:36:06.580]In mid April, just as COVID-19 gripped the nation,
[00:36:11.180]it had come to the public's attention
[00:36:13.660]that the Land O'Lakes butter maiden
[00:36:15.340]was quietly discontinued.
[00:36:18.330]Its removal sparked massive media discussion
[00:36:22.320]along with controversy, petitions,
[00:36:25.600]and boycotts opposing the removal of the butter mascot.
[00:36:30.950]Now this ridiculousness had prompted me to tweet out,
[00:36:35.380]the Land O'Lakes Indian maiden,
[00:36:37.620]they only Indian women gone missing
[00:36:40.400]that America notices, let alone cares about.
[00:36:45.500]I was referring of course
[00:36:46.990]to the murdered or missing indigenous women and girls.
[00:36:51.120]It was distressing to see how there was more concern
[00:36:55.210]for a cardboard cartoon, than for actual indigenous women.
[00:37:00.980]Additionally, the irony that the image had been named Mia,
[00:37:06.190]M I A by the artist.
[00:37:11.100]How could he have known?
[00:37:13.890]The poem that I wrote for this event,
[00:37:21.550]is called "Distracted From COVID 19:
[00:37:25.540]Attention Shifts to MIA Maiden
[00:37:28.690]From Land O'Lakes Butter Box".
[00:37:32.840]America mourns for the Indian figure
[00:37:35.800]who knelt like a supplicant before dairy,
[00:37:39.510]flatly blessed our milks, our cheeses,
[00:37:43.070]anointed our lands and shores.
[00:37:47.430]The Google tutorials surface, the boob trick,
[00:37:51.980]score the box and fold to make a window
[00:37:55.110]for her knees to jut through.
[00:37:58.730]Oh, our butter maiden
[00:38:00.860]brought all the boys to the yard.
[00:38:04.347]Twittersphere so prostrate with grief.
[00:38:07.310]Petitions are launched for the dairy princess.
[00:38:11.260]Oh, our Pat, oh, Americana.
[00:38:14.380]Oh, our dab, oh Disney-esque.
[00:38:17.470]Oh, our dollop, oh, heritage.
[00:38:21.330]The morning procession bear witness,
[00:38:24.400]jolly green giant and chicken of the sea mermaid,
[00:38:28.030]uncle Ben and Aunt Jemima,
[00:38:30.570]magically delicious leprechaun and Peter Pan.
[00:38:35.490]Even the Argo cornstarch maiden and Mazola margarine,
[00:38:40.270]you call it corn,
[00:38:41.840]we call it maize.
[00:38:43.700]Spokes Indian raised stocks in solidarity,
[00:38:48.600]Mia, aptly named, our butter girl mascot,
[00:38:53.430]the only Indian woman gone missing
[00:38:56.110]that anyone notices,
[00:38:58.210]anyone cares about.
[00:39:05.660]Also other images that were saturated
[00:39:11.410]within my environment,
[00:39:14.330]were buckskin romance novels.
[00:39:19.590]It had very interesting covers, of course.
[00:39:24.340]I don't know if everyone's familiar with such things,
[00:39:26.640]but after I share this with you, you will be.
[00:39:31.730]Buckskin romance novels or 50 shades of Mexican,
[00:39:37.140]native American romance novels,
[00:39:40.500]or historical romance novels,
[00:39:43.330]have been around for a while now.
[00:39:45.890]Typically, they are trade paperbacks
[00:39:47.670]with Brawny half-breed braves,
[00:39:49.300]posed in various compromising positions
[00:39:53.120]with scantily clad white women and fiery red tresses.
[00:39:57.230]Think of 20th century Fabio,
[00:39:59.680]in a 17th century loincloth.
[00:40:02.820]The Braves, direct from central casting,
[00:40:06.260]appear out of the covers like preferred members
[00:40:08.840]of Gold's gym on the Prairie replete
[00:40:11.670]with listening pecs and rippling savage six packs.
[00:40:16.400]They look like they could lift a Buffalo,
[00:40:19.370]and that's the whole point, isn't it?
[00:40:21.750]Because devotees of buckskin romances want to be lifted.
[00:40:28.280]They want to be carried away.
[00:40:31.510]And the girth of the braves arms,
[00:40:35.440]is in direct proportion to the sizzling force
[00:40:39.650]of the narrative.
[00:40:41.220]Also the cover arts lead us to believe.
[00:40:46.740]The biggest offender of buckskin style romances
[00:40:49.510]are savage historical novels.
[00:40:52.490]This series sells worldwide to millions of fans.
[00:40:56.440]The book title include, "Savage Heat"
[00:41:00.207]"Savage Moon", "Savage Wonder", "Savage Passions",
[00:41:04.637]"Savage Spirit", "Savage Thunder", "Savage Hawk",
[00:41:09.287]"Savage Illusion", "Savage Stomach Indigestion Much."
[00:41:14.620]Well you get the point.
[00:41:16.630]The author has cornered the market,
[00:41:18.650]and if it's got savage in the title,
[00:41:21.290]you know who probably wrote it.
[00:41:24.250]Now, just for fun, I'll pick up one of these books
[00:41:26.300]and skim to a particularly steamy scene
[00:41:29.710]and mentally replace this sexually
[00:41:32.020]objectified half-breed hero
[00:41:33.640]with that of a Palomino stallion,
[00:41:36.390]because that is the way the authors of these books
[00:41:38.520]draw their characters as wild savage beasts.
[00:41:42.680]If any of the genres readers
[00:41:44.580]ever talk to an actual native person,
[00:41:46.950]or set foot in any actual native community,
[00:41:49.920]they might be in for a shock,
[00:41:52.300]because the reality of actual natives lives
[00:41:54.820]is in sharp contrast to the lies presented in these books.
[00:41:58.820]So to help reconcile this
[00:42:00.200]and help clear up any malignant distortions,
[00:42:03.210]I decided to create some contemporary literary scene,
[00:42:06.520]straight from the ENL annals
[00:42:08.160]of what I imagined to be a more realistic portrayal,
[00:42:12.180]albeit a fictional version of native American romance.
[00:42:17.670]Skinny Jeans and All.
[00:42:20.640]Jenelle John John Fasto, got up off the couch
[00:42:23.540]and drove to the mall to buy light bulbs
[00:42:25.580]and a rotisserie chicken,
[00:42:27.790]but dark storms were brewing.
[00:42:30.260]Her check card wouldn't work.
[00:42:32.490]So she tried calling the bank,
[00:42:35.070]but our cell phone had run out of minutes.
[00:42:37.920]In a cruel twist of fate,
[00:42:39.630]she had to drive home again,
[00:42:41.900]but her car stalled out in the middle of an intersection,
[00:42:45.760]a harrowing saga replete with breathtaking vistas
[00:42:49.890]and romantic intrigue.
[00:42:52.330]Along the way, Jenelle meets a tall Ashlynn haired stranger
[00:42:56.630]wearing suspenders, and an ironic mustache.
[00:43:00.920]She's been warned by her elders not to date hipsters,
[00:43:05.260]but the tall stranger's mischievous eyes,
[00:43:08.820]lure her heart to him, skinny jeans and all.
[00:43:14.740]Fibrate Grease.
[00:43:17.500]Danny's all bad boy, acidified urban skin,
[00:43:21.410]who's into hip hop and always organizing
[00:43:24.040]free Leonard Pilcher rallies.
[00:43:26.410]But that all changed when the super tradish
[00:43:29.040]old-school Sandy came into his life.
[00:43:31.770]Sandy can talk to coyotes like Mr. Doolittle.
[00:43:34.840]So sweet she could write your teeth
[00:43:36.580]just being in the same room.
[00:43:38.760]She runs the elder program on the Rez.
[00:43:41.420]Can their love survive?
[00:43:48.120]Stands With a Stiffy.
[00:43:50.810]As long as Petunia Snodgrass could remember,
[00:43:54.700]she has been haunted by unbidden images
[00:43:58.070]of a Comanche warrior called Stands With a Stiffy,
[00:44:02.010]until one fateful day her curiosity about the strange dream
[00:44:06.660]is forever quenched.
[00:44:08.530]Who would have thought she'd discovered the reincarnation
[00:44:11.110]of her one true love at the nearby tribal casino?
[00:44:14.640]And who would ever have imagined
[00:44:16.500]that her forevermore love
[00:44:18.600]would be in the form of a slot machine's assistant manager
[00:44:22.830]who drove a silica hatchback?
[00:44:26.260]Good Medicine.
[00:44:28.380]Ever since Nancy Medicine Duke could remember,
[00:44:31.350]she's always wanted to be a registered nurse,
[00:44:34.170]but was that really enough?
[00:44:36.190]Why stop there when she could be an MD?
[00:44:39.360]How would she ever pay for tuition
[00:44:40.950]and cover her bills at the same time?
[00:44:43.610]The answer to her dilemma soon arrived
[00:44:46.580]in the form of a big wiling modern day snake oil salesman,
[00:44:51.960]Damien Keefe,
[00:44:53.720]who recruits naive Nancy
[00:44:56.260]into his native American spirituality retreats seminars.
[00:45:00.827]For $1,000, participants are given sacred directions
[00:45:05.600]for cleansing.
[00:45:07.320]Nancy suspects something strange when Damien introduces her
[00:45:12.870]to the first rite, which involves a brush,
[00:45:16.740]ammonia and the dashy Damien's kitchen floor.
[00:45:23.320]Crow Fair Sunrise.
[00:45:26.330]It is fiery red trust Madison Monroe's first visit
[00:45:29.380]to the infamous Crow Fair in Indian country.
[00:45:32.840]And she could scarcely believe her emerald green eyes.
[00:45:36.800]She mistakenly assumed there would be carnival rides.
[00:45:40.150]And initially it's disappointed,
[00:45:41.900]but soon discovers a different and better kind of ride
[00:45:44.760]she would never have anticipated,
[00:45:47.230]when Raven haired Napoleon pretty girl
[00:45:49.740]saunters up to Madison and rubbishly inquires
[00:45:53.410]if she would like to wear zapi as pemmican,
[00:45:57.040]what else can a girl do?
[00:45:59.040]When in Rome...
[00:46:02.050]Per Caps in Paradise.
[00:46:05.080]it's so hard to find a decent par flesh bag
[00:46:07.970]to match my Jeep Wrangler,
[00:46:09.720]photo journalists Tru Latrek laments.
[00:46:12.810]A girl's got to hunt and gather after all.
[00:46:16.000]Meet Tru,
[00:46:17.370]the sassy incarnation of Sacagawea and Calamity Jane.
[00:46:21.860]Meet her trusty sidekick, Shenikawasha,
[00:46:25.200]her loyal three legged, German Shepherd.
[00:46:28.760]While scouting for pictorials on the Fort Benz reservation,
[00:46:32.320]Tru encounters the dazzling Zola,
[00:46:35.580]fancy dancing to a lame remix of purple rain
[00:46:39.020]at the local watering hole.
[00:46:41.300]It's not long before the two girls started mending
[00:46:43.730]some dance steps on their own,
[00:46:45.900]with surprising and sizzling results.
[00:46:50.750]Dances With Werewolves.
[00:46:54.120]Legends prevail darkly along the Wishawa coast
[00:46:58.050]Indian reservation.
[00:47:00.190]And the locals warn visitors
[00:47:01.790]against traversing the forest at night.
[00:47:05.780]So when Abigail Houses defiant nature,
[00:47:08.340]sets into motion a series of supernatural events,
[00:47:12.420]the inhabitants of Wishawa
[00:47:14.170]and all of the future is threatened.
[00:47:17.130]That is unless the reclusive Wolf clan,
[00:47:19.770]led by the mysterious Julian Ross,
[00:47:22.280]can lay claim to Abigail's soul
[00:47:24.530]before the terrifying spirits are released.
[00:47:29.870]Moccasin Telegraph.
[00:47:32.760]Thelma two moccasins thought her life held no more surprises
[00:47:36.300]until her grandson, Tiger,
[00:47:38.160]hooked her up to a computer and a wifi
[00:47:40.640]in her small apartment at the tribal assisted living center.
[00:47:44.340]Soon, she was surfing the web like a boss.
[00:47:48.110]And when a kindly instant message popped up
[00:47:50.710]with a screen name, Yogi bear for you,
[00:47:54.430]Thelma's fate was about to turn a sharp corner,
[00:47:58.690]but would she accept destiny's offer?
[00:48:04.110]And the last piece that I'm gonna share,
[00:48:06.850]'cause we're coming up to our time,
[00:48:08.900]is "The Dignity Sculpture",
[00:48:12.150]which I didn't see growing up necessarily,
[00:48:15.760]but I just want to put a bookend on this,
[00:48:19.560]attack with a 50 foot Lakota woman.
[00:48:24.220]In September, 2016,
[00:48:26.613]a 50 foot monument bearing the likeness
[00:48:28.760]of an unnamed Lakota woman,
[00:48:32.880]replete with a blowing in the wind star quilt,
[00:48:36.650]was installed upon the banks of the Missouri river
[00:48:39.800]in Chamberlain, South Dakota.
[00:48:42.520]Her creator titled the giant test sculpture, Dignity.
[00:48:48.800]At the time of Dignity's launch,
[00:48:51.180]if you follow the Missouri river to the north,
[00:48:53.810]another launch took place.
[00:48:55.810]Concussion grenades, water cannons,
[00:48:58.570]rubber bullets, dog attacks,
[00:49:01.320]a launch of incalculable greed and disregard for life.
[00:49:05.910]The no dapple demonstration and standoff was an event
[00:49:09.780]on a scale, which the world has never seen.
[00:49:13.470]And it sparked universal awareness and attention
[00:49:16.890]towards the most critically urgent issue of our time,
[00:49:21.650]protecting the water.
[00:49:24.200]Mannie Washonie, water is life.
[00:49:27.850]The Dakota access pipeline project
[00:49:30.930]expected to cover 1,172 miles,
[00:49:35.760]and to connect the Balkan and three forks production areas
[00:49:39.230]in North Dakota to Pataka Illinois.
[00:49:42.910]It will enable a domestically produced light sweet crude oil
[00:49:46.110]to meet major refining markets.
[00:49:49.070]The pipeline cut straight through ancestral lands,
[00:49:53.680]sacred to the standing rock nation,
[00:49:56.530]and threatens their main water supply, the Misery river.
[00:50:01.120]The donor brave bird, Elard,
[00:50:02.680]standing rock Sioux tribal preservation officer
[00:50:05.530]owns the North Eastern land
[00:50:09.320]of the standing rock reservation.
[00:50:11.230]The Northern border is the Cannonball river.
[00:50:13.910]The Eastern border is the Missouri river.
[00:50:17.340]And from her land, you can see the pipeline corridor.
[00:50:21.210]The land she grew up on,
[00:50:24.270]tells the history of this river back two thousand years.
[00:50:29.630]When I think of the Dignity sculpture
[00:50:32.230]and the militarization and standoff
[00:50:34.890]in the small otherwise peaceful communities
[00:50:37.150]on standing rock where my own mother
[00:50:39.480]and grandparents were born,
[00:50:41.330]and specifically when I think of monsters
[00:50:44.450]in regard to the black snake prophecy,
[00:50:47.460]I cannot help but think of the 1958 creature feature,
[00:50:51.637]"Attack of the 50 Foot Woman."
[00:50:55.040]In the movie, a rich socialite
[00:50:56.670]encounters and alien life form is
[00:50:58.740]and is transformed into a giantess,
[00:51:02.110]a 50 foot she beast.
[00:51:04.380]The Kings Kong sized woman goes on a rampage
[00:51:08.100]after discovering her husband in a bar
[00:51:11.010]with no good floozy.
[00:51:13.320]Age industrial sized hooks,
[00:51:15.110]four links of chain, 40 gallons of plasma,
[00:51:17.950]an elephant syringe and an electrical fire later,
[00:51:21.300]she is finally subdued.
[00:51:23.940]The authorities responsible for successfully capturing
[00:51:27.070]and bringing her down, holler things
[00:51:29.210]like I can't shoot a lady.
[00:51:31.700]What do you want me to do?
[00:51:32.910]Salt her tail?
[00:51:35.150]In my reveries, the Dignity sculpture
[00:51:38.610]breaks from her foundations,
[00:51:40.640]secures that blue star quilt firmly around her shoulders,
[00:51:45.350]and follows the Missouri river North to Cannibal,
[00:51:49.110]up to the Oceti Sakowin, Seven Council Fires,
[00:51:53.510]straight into the heart of things
[00:51:56.360]and gets to work killing the black snake.
[00:51:59.870]In my reveries, the authorities do not succeed
[00:52:02.980]in bringing her down.
[00:52:04.660]Eight industrial sized hooks,
[00:52:06.210]four links of chain, 40 gallons of plasma,
[00:52:08.970]an elephants syringe and an electrical fire.
[00:52:12.750]In my daydreams, she is not defeated,
[00:52:15.750]but victorious and freeze framed eternally,
[00:52:19.330]despite concussion grenades and dog attacks,
[00:52:21.910]water cannons and rubber bullets.
[00:52:24.810]The land she grows up on tells this history
[00:52:27.690]of this river back 2000 years.
[00:52:30.940]What stories of this river will be told in 2000 more?
[00:52:38.460]All right.
[00:52:39.660]Thanks.
[00:52:40.540]That brings me to the end of my talk.
[00:52:44.390]Thank you.
[00:52:49.330]Thank you so much, Tiffany.
[00:52:51.710]Thank you for the wonderful observations
[00:52:53.880]and for sharing your work with us.
[00:52:56.090]Much appreciated.
[00:52:59.050]Wonderful.
[00:53:01.580]Thank you.
[00:53:03.190]At this point, any of the audience members
[00:53:05.650]can put questions in the Q&A,
[00:53:08.810]and we will ask those of Tiffany for you.
[00:53:12.480]While people are starting to do that,
[00:53:14.860]Tiffany, I'm just wondering,
[00:53:16.430]I know that in the guest list tonight,
[00:53:19.290]there are a lot of people who write,
[00:53:24.160]whether they write creative work or scholarship.
[00:53:28.140]Well, many of them do try to write back
[00:53:32.330]against dominant cultural norms.
[00:53:35.400]This takes a lot of courage
[00:53:36.970]and you do it so interestingly, humorously, brilliantly,
[00:53:42.380]but it's not easy to write back against a dominant culture.
[00:53:47.330]I wonder if you could talk a little bit
[00:53:49.410]about anything related to that.
[00:53:51.520]How do you fortify yourself in order to be able to do that?
[00:53:55.120]How do you plunge in?
[00:53:57.365]You know, what kinds of things
[00:53:58.530]have worked beautifully for you?
[00:54:02.210]Oh, thank you so much for those very nice compliments.
[00:54:07.000]It's very much appreciated.
[00:54:10.750]I kind of work in my own little bubble, really.
[00:54:14.681]I have outlets, of course.
[00:54:16.730]You know, there's like one or two places
[00:54:19.080]that we'll publish some of that stuff in the mainstream,
[00:54:24.010]but it's kind of,
[00:54:25.710]for me personally, it's not been a really fast and easy way
[00:54:35.550]to place some of those pieces.
[00:54:39.630]Indian Country Today, of course, you know,
[00:54:41.963]I had snagged, not snag, literally snag,
[00:54:45.340]but I mean I had an editor there that I was,
[00:54:51.410]I guess liked my stuff and was supportive
[00:54:54.060]and willing to,
[00:54:55.470]he was editor of the op-ed section,
[00:54:57.120]and he was willing to, you know, put those up.
[00:55:02.030]And he was a little bit of a iconic classic sort of bad boy.
[00:55:08.570]And I think that it was something
[00:55:11.290]that he was very supportive of and he liked the humor.
[00:55:14.820]And so I really lucked out, because it's,
[00:55:18.490]a lot of people don't really want those sorts of,
[00:55:21.030]the kind of humor that I, 'cause I'm lashing out, right?
[00:55:29.190]It's not popular within the mainstream
[00:55:31.120]to be critiquing the mainstream.
[00:55:33.610]And, you know, the idea of sort of
[00:55:36.180]when you do that as sort of like counting coup
[00:55:38.698]on your enemy a little bit,
[00:55:40.530]because what you're doing is you're ridiculing
[00:55:42.780]and critiquing them and making fun.
[00:55:46.080]And yeah, that's not a very popular thing to do,
[00:55:49.210]especially when you're from the positionality
[00:55:51.780]of where, you know, my culture and my community
[00:55:55.540]and my people are from.
[00:55:58.070]It's, you know, it's just, yeah.
[00:56:00.940]So the people that have actually published
[00:56:03.680]some of that stuff, you know,
[00:56:04.760]I give them a hats off.
[00:56:07.080]I think it's very brave of some of the publishers
[00:56:08.750]to do that.
[00:56:10.890]And so it's mostly the editors and the publishers.
[00:56:14.560]I'll keep writing, you know,
[00:56:16.710]certain things like that, critiquing, you know,
[00:56:19.060]the overall culture in however, you know,
[00:56:22.360]hilarious way I can,
[00:56:25.010]but it's not always a popular thing.
[00:56:28.720]Only it's has been gaining a little bit of ground.
[00:56:31.430]There's a recent book that's just been published
[00:56:34.970]within the mainstream.
[00:56:37.171]It's based on native American comedians, not writers,
[00:56:42.750]unfortunately,
[00:56:44.600]but native American comedians and performers,
[00:56:48.170]called, we had a little real estate problem
[00:56:50.790]to take a line from Charlie Hill.
[00:56:54.340]And the book, you might wanna check that out,
[00:56:57.340]it has a whole wealth of comedians
[00:57:00.320]and people that are basically doing exactly what it is
[00:57:02.940]that I'm doing only they're performing it,
[00:57:06.050]and not publishing books yet.
[00:57:09.700]So I don't know if that answers your question very much,
[00:57:11.650]but there has been a little bit of pushback here and there
[00:57:15.180]and critique and flack,
[00:57:18.320]I have received some flack
[00:57:19.550]for certain things that I've written,
[00:57:21.400]but I think that's true of any satirist
[00:57:24.500]and any person that, you know,
[00:57:26.810]writes the kind of humor that I write.
[00:57:32.060]Can you talk a little bit more for us
[00:57:34.790]about choosing satire and humor as a vehicle
[00:57:39.140]for expression of very serious political critiques?
[00:57:46.250]For me, it's,
[00:57:49.070]I think it's just a form of,
[00:57:50.780]'cause, you know, I didn't do it until later.
[00:57:53.553]I mean, I think it's ingrained in most native Americans
[00:57:57.550]and most indigenous people
[00:57:59.930]to make jokes out of things that are infuriating,
[00:58:05.040]because it feels like there's really no other recourse
[00:58:08.930]in a lot of, in some of those ways,
[00:58:10.690]and just a psychological recourse.
[00:58:13.290]I mean, we do have activists of course,
[00:58:16.090]that, you know, go through the laws
[00:58:18.550]and go through the courts and fight back in those ways,
[00:58:23.390]and then just put their bodies on the line
[00:58:25.900]to fight back in those ways,
[00:58:28.420]but for a writer, for an introspective person like myself,
[00:58:33.770]I tend to just wanna take pen to paper
[00:58:36.200]and just, or typewriter,
[00:58:39.591]and go that way, go that course.
[00:58:42.320]So that's just sort of my own, you know,
[00:58:44.940]my own way of dealing with these kinds of things,
[00:58:49.420]is just to be able to write things,
[00:58:52.050]to write funny things.
[00:58:54.110]You know, it's a, what do they call that?
[00:58:56.990]It's avail for fury, is what I've said.
[00:59:00.570]And so this is always sort of been my mode.
[00:59:06.050]Okay.
[00:59:06.883]Terrific.
[00:59:08.220]There's actually a question now
[00:59:11.046]from an audience member, Lewis Othiniel Rosa,
[00:59:14.750]who actually will be presenting tomorrow on a panel
[00:59:17.550]for the spring celebration, a professor here.
[00:59:20.070]He writes, and it's about humor also.
[00:59:22.630]He writes, thanks for a brilliant talk.
[00:59:25.630]I wish you could see my family laughing out loud
[00:59:28.430]so many times during your talk.
[00:59:31.140]My question is precisely about laughter and humor,
[00:59:35.800]so impossible to share in Zoom times.
[00:59:38.070]How is laughter such a powerful intellectual
[00:59:41.087]and decolonial tool for you?
[00:59:44.210]Can you talk a bit more about your precursors here?
[00:59:53.760]I did one talk that talked a little bit about,
[00:59:56.860]you know, laughter is sort of the sacred medium
[01:00:01.660]and the thing that I related it to
[01:00:05.430]is the idea that, you know, the Dene, the Navajo,
[01:00:09.260]they have a ceremony for when their baby's first laugh.
[01:00:13.960]And of course what I'm doing is very far away from that,
[01:00:19.020]but it's sort of like on the other end of the spectrum,
[01:00:22.060]this idea that, you know,
[01:00:24.630]that laughter and humor is, you know,
[01:00:27.830]is this sacred medicine,
[01:00:30.610]that it's uplifting,
[01:00:31.840]that it, you know, cures what ails people.
[01:00:34.630]And I love that idea.
[01:00:37.720]I love that example,
[01:00:39.782]that one protocol of Navajo people
[01:00:42.343]having a ceremony for their baby's first laugh.
[01:00:47.410]I just think that's a really terrific example.
[01:00:49.710]Although of course, you know,
[01:00:50.930]what I do or what satirists do is very much different,
[01:00:53.690]like I said before.
[01:00:56.620]Yeah.
[01:00:58.380]Yeah, wonderful.
[01:01:00.070]Tom, I noticed you made...
[01:01:02.213]I have nother question along the same lines
[01:01:04.840]about your magnificent humor and satire.
[01:01:08.210]I mean, I laughed out loud too at lions like the,
[01:01:13.620]these Harlequin romance natives on the covers,
[01:01:16.490]who looked like they could lift a Buffalo.
[01:01:19.270]And of course, the woman who talks to coyotes
[01:01:23.660]like Dr. Doolittle, you know I'm laughing out loud.
[01:01:26.740]And then I think back to your first book,
[01:01:28.930]your first main major collection.
[01:01:31.220]I mean, the poems that I teach are so darn serious,
[01:01:34.240]like Mount Rushmore and the Army Crazy Horse
[01:01:36.230]and Written in Blood,
[01:01:37.785]there are a good number of poems in here
[01:01:40.160]that like, that are funny,
[01:01:43.370]but I'm thinking, was there a point in your life,
[01:01:45.420]or talk about the evolution of where,
[01:01:47.517]did you come to some realization that your main voice
[01:01:51.560]was one of satire and humor,
[01:01:53.150]as opposed to the more serious poems
[01:01:55.826]that you find in that collection?
[01:01:59.862]I think there's some pretty funny stuff
[01:02:01.310]in that first collection.
[01:02:03.200]And I often forget about it because it was so long ago.
[01:02:07.181]You know,
[01:02:10.666]I've been accused of just copying Sherman Alexie
[01:02:14.170]in those poems and those stories.
[01:02:17.290]And although that was sort of a jumping off point,
[01:02:20.030]you know, those are in my own voice
[01:02:22.220]and those, you know, do cater to my own experiences.
[01:02:27.000]So, but that wasn't really,
[01:02:28.444]I should try to bring that book back in some form.
[01:02:33.130]'Cause I, you know, some of those are really hurtful though.
[01:02:36.900]I mean, they just kind of like,
[01:02:38.540]sort of physically like pain me,
[01:02:40.420]or you just kind of wince there so auch in some ways,
[01:02:45.360]and, you know, that actually speaks to
[01:02:47.920]this sort of rugged Indian humor that a lot of people,
[01:02:53.380]a lot of Indians enjoy, I guess.
[01:02:59.074]That sort of like painful hard to say thing
[01:03:02.890]that just makes people go, whoa.
[01:03:06.502]So a lot of those pieces don't really work for me anymore
[01:03:09.760]and they're slightly dated,
[01:03:13.650]but I do appreciate you bringing it up Tom,
[01:03:16.670]and it's it is fun to sort of, you know,
[01:03:19.200]revisit some of those,
[01:03:22.180]but they're painful.
[01:03:24.010]You know, dying dogs
[01:03:25.580]and it's just like really rough kind of stuff.
[01:03:32.690]But the question that you were asking me
[01:03:34.140]was did I realize that I was writing humor at the time
[01:03:36.630]and that's hard to say.
[01:03:39.000]I don't really know
[01:03:40.180]what I thought that I was writing at the time.
[01:03:42.200]I know that there was like some little zingers
[01:03:45.130]and some funny things and some interesting commentary
[01:03:49.980]and a lot of irony, of course,
[01:03:53.270]but I was so young that in so far as saying consciously,
[01:03:57.270]you know, attempting to do something,
[01:03:59.810]I really don't know,
[01:04:02.010]but I've always been cynical.
[01:04:05.180]And I think that that carries a lot of weight
[01:04:08.750]for this sort of material for being a satirist
[01:04:11.560]or being a humorist,
[01:04:13.730]it's just being able to,
[01:04:15.550]just having a lot of cynicism from the world around you.
[01:04:20.400]And just growing up with an Indian mom
[01:04:23.610]and a dad that like watches a lot of satire
[01:04:26.610]like Monty Python and reading national Lampoon magazines.
[01:04:30.960]I mean, you know, so it's sort of
[01:04:32.960]like a perfect storm for developing,
[01:04:36.660]you know, a writer who enjoys satire and funny stuff.
[01:04:44.100]Lovely.
[01:04:45.840]We have a question from audience member, Rosemary Sikora.
[01:04:49.180]She is a graduate student and a publisher.
[01:04:52.840]Is there an essay, Tiffany,
[01:04:55.000]that you had to leave out of your latest book,
[01:04:58.140]or an essay that you included,
[01:05:00.090]but wish you could now expand on or change?
[01:05:03.960]This is in while editing and revision, really?
[01:05:06.730]Yeah.
[01:05:09.390]There is, I had a lot of columns
[01:05:12.810]in Indian Country Today over the space of about two years.
[01:05:17.250]And most of them made it into the book,
[01:05:21.660]but there were of course some that I held back,
[01:05:24.900]just because out of my own sense of, you know,
[01:05:27.970]what I wanted to, you know,
[01:05:30.380]include and what I didn't want to include.
[01:05:34.550]So I don't know that I could really speak specifically
[01:05:38.600]to them right now because I don't really want to,
[01:05:40.970]but I will say that I did hold back on some of the pieces
[01:05:46.450]that I did publish in Indian Country Today.
[01:05:48.640]And I think it was more out of a sense of, you know,
[01:05:51.700]I just didn't want to repeat them
[01:05:52.850]because they were contentious.
[01:05:55.080]Some of the reason why I named my talk
[01:05:56.957]"Attack of the 50 Foot Lakota Woman",
[01:05:59.630]or counter attack as my boyfriend called it,
[01:06:05.570]is because, you know, they were contentious
[01:06:07.940]and they were targeted at people who were, you know,
[01:06:11.300]personal attacks.
[01:06:14.210]And I think that attack of the 50 foot Lakota woman
[01:06:17.290]is a really apt representation
[01:06:20.875]of that type of humor,
[01:06:25.180]which may or may not be humor, I don't know.
[01:06:28.720]but I don't know,
[01:06:31.290]sometimes it's okay to, you know,
[01:06:33.160]punch up or punch, you know, parallel,
[01:06:35.260]but sometimes I feel like I'm punching down a little bit
[01:06:38.050]and those are probably the pieces
[01:06:39.950]that I pulled from the collection,
[01:06:42.420]but they're published online,
[01:06:43.480]so you can still find them.
[01:06:46.430]Okay, all right.
[01:06:48.150]You know, that leads me to something else you mentioned
[01:06:51.680]in your previous answer
[01:06:52.930]about pieces being dated,
[01:06:55.800]or sort of having past the moment
[01:06:57.890]when they're having the most impact.
[01:07:00.990]You are very active on Twitter.
[01:07:03.420]I follow you on Twitter and I'm wondering,
[01:07:05.820]what's you think about a forum like Twitter,
[01:07:10.080]social media with short bursts, for writers?
[01:07:14.470]So it's a very different way to engage political issues.
[01:07:17.850]How do you use it?
[01:07:18.740]How do you not use it?
[01:07:20.930]What have your thoughts been about?
[01:07:22.450]I know that you've observed a great deal on Twitter.
[01:07:26.100]How do you use it as a vehicle for your own expression?
[01:07:29.830]I don't know, it's a mixed blessing.
[01:07:33.450]It just feels like, you know, it's good to know,
[01:07:37.097]you know, I like knowing what the climate is, you know,
[01:07:43.530]I like seeing what all the various thoughts are.
[01:07:46.453]I like reading the jokes.
[01:07:48.790]I think it was a terrific place to hone a joke,
[01:07:52.320]to learn how to write a joke,
[01:07:54.830]back when it was 40 characters,
[01:07:57.160]because that was, you know,
[01:07:58.670]a very great exercise in keeping it really short.
[01:08:04.510]And I wish we would go back to 40 characters,
[01:08:10.070]but it gave me an overview of, you know,
[01:08:12.680]what's going on kind of.
[01:08:15.390]And they say that the truth tellers
[01:08:17.630]aren't people in the news anymore.
[01:08:19.750]The truth tellers are like the comedians.
[01:08:23.940]I mean, they're the ones that you can get the truth from.
[01:08:27.100]And that was kind of why I would go to Twitter as well,
[01:08:31.923]is to just figure that out.
[01:08:33.560]But, and I think the other mixed part is,
[01:08:36.217]you know, why are we online anyway?
[01:08:39.350]Of course being online is sort of, you know,
[01:08:41.630]saving grace when, you know, during the Corona,
[01:08:46.350]definitely this last year,
[01:08:49.170]it's definitely been a saving grace,
[01:08:51.050]but overall, you know, I'm not so sure,
[01:08:54.270]I'm just, you know, I have reservations about that idea
[01:08:57.570]of just, you know, being so tuned in online
[01:09:00.690]and having such bifurcated existences anymore.
[01:09:06.380]'Cause I probably spend way too much time online,
[01:09:10.320]and it's like I don't know what my life would be otherwise,
[01:09:14.680]and that's sort of concerning in a way,
[01:09:18.200]like what would your life be like if you weren't
[01:09:20.220]spending all of those hours, you know,
[01:09:22.700]looking into other people's ideas and opinions
[01:09:25.310]and quick takes and spit takes,
[01:09:27.530]and, you know, I wonder about that.
[01:09:31.720]Is that healthy or is it not healthy?
[01:09:35.330]But yeah, I mean, it's a great tool for communication
[01:09:40.570]and cultural commentary, things like that.
[01:09:44.617]Having Twitter wars with Cher on Christmas day,
[01:09:48.480]it was very weird,
[01:09:50.790]but at the same time, it's like it's just really surreal
[01:09:54.860]and interesting to me at the same time.
[01:09:58.569]Yeah.
[01:10:00.210]I'm sure a lot of our viewing audience would agree.
[01:10:03.440]Yeah, this question is being asked often.
[01:10:07.050]You know, I'm not seeing another question in the Q&A,
[01:10:10.360]but I did want to ask if you could tell us
[01:10:12.670]what you're working on now.
[01:10:18.030]I have a few projects that I sort of,
[01:10:23.330]I don't know, I'm so distracted
[01:10:25.860]and doing so many different things all at the same time
[01:10:28.680]that insofar as the long term projects,
[01:10:31.630]they just don't seem to get as much attention.
[01:10:34.230]But I did recently,
[01:10:36.350]I have sent out a manuscript for humorous short stories,
[01:10:41.940]the "Urban Indian Women's Guide to Dating."
[01:10:46.630]It's not a romance novel.
[01:10:48.340]It's just sort of an ironic twist on the idea of romcoms,
[01:10:54.650]like romantic comedies,
[01:10:57.100]which, you know, I don't see a lot of romantic comedies
[01:11:00.370]on television, you know, about native American women.
[01:11:06.050]And so I have like a short story collection
[01:11:09.630]that addresses that.
[01:11:11.706]And it's basically just really fun
[01:11:13.660]and really fun to read and really fun to write.
[01:11:17.580]So I have that collection and I have young adult fiction
[01:11:22.576]that I'm that I'm getting through
[01:11:25.150]and working with editors on.
[01:11:29.920]I have another poetry book, which is more humorous.
[01:11:33.530]And again, it's very representative of women,
[01:11:37.910]like the grotesque and horror stories of of women,
[01:11:44.190]and not just native women.
[01:11:48.330]And yeah, so those are the foremost ones that come to mind,
[01:11:53.770]the foremost projects.
[01:11:55.760]This leads to a question that someone has asked.
[01:11:58.690]This is professor Ingrid Robin,
[01:12:01.310]who is a literary scholar and herself a poet as well.
[01:12:04.690]She's very interested in the relationships
[01:12:06.700]between trauma and humor, but her questions about genre.
[01:12:10.397]And the question is, why poetry?
[01:12:14.170]Oh, why poetry?
[01:12:16.133]I think I started out as a poet.
[01:12:19.070]I think it's a terrific place to start out.
[01:12:21.710]It teaches you how to, you know,
[01:12:24.700]how to be economical,
[01:12:27.190]how to get to, you know, the absolute,
[01:12:30.570]you know, kernel of an idea through poetry.
[01:12:37.320]And teaches you about rhythm and tone
[01:12:41.260]and all of these sorts of things and language,
[01:12:44.320]you know, you have to be so precise
[01:12:45.530]to just choose the red word,
[01:12:47.660]you know, and I just think that's a terrific place.
[01:12:50.130]And I think a lot of kids would start out there,
[01:12:53.020]you know, learning how to write a poem,
[01:12:54.410]because it's short and it doesn't require, you know,
[01:12:58.060]massive amount of a thought.
[01:13:01.470]And, you know, I mean, although it does require thought,
[01:13:03.910]of course, but you know,
[01:13:05.391]it's a great place for a newbie to start out,
[01:13:09.380]I think in my opinion,
[01:13:13.210]but it's also, I mean, it's long form,
[01:13:15.870]always feels like such an ordeal
[01:13:17.570]and there's just such a like commitment for me.
[01:13:21.210]And a lot of times when I work on my long form,
[01:13:25.910]it's always sort of vignette, you know,
[01:13:28.420]like just, it's always very flash fiction.
[01:13:30.990]Like I write flash fiction.
[01:13:33.730]And at the same time, I could call those
[01:13:35.790]flash fiction pieces, which are less than a thousand words.
[01:13:38.960]I could call those poems.
[01:13:41.040]And a lot of times I do.
[01:13:43.480]So I switched up genres a lot in that way,
[01:13:46.580]you know, based on what experience it is
[01:13:48.830]that I'm talking about.
[01:13:51.930]So there's just a lot of different forms of poetry,
[01:13:54.850]but I study poetry,
[01:13:56.790]I got my MFA in poetry and I'll always go back to poetry.
[01:14:02.070]I love it, I love reading it.
[01:14:04.130]I love being part of that world
[01:14:07.408]and doing readings, things like that.
[01:14:09.640]So, yeah.
[01:14:12.150]Thank you.
[01:14:13.070]Another question came in also about genre.
[01:14:15.670]This is from professor Kelly Stage,
[01:14:17.550]who is a literature scholar.
[01:14:19.140]She asks, do you think that your voice
[01:14:22.760]or your activism changes with genre?
[01:14:26.300]Is there a topic you would address
[01:14:27.890]in one way and not another.
[01:14:30.110]Like I think in one genre and not another, why or why not?
[01:14:34.200]I suppose it just depends upon the, what the,
[01:14:44.420]it would depend on what the publication
[01:14:48.440]or the editor or whatever it is that they were requesting,
[01:14:52.480]because I do switch around so much,
[01:14:54.670]because I do have creative non-fiction
[01:14:57.580]that could very well also be presented as a poem, right?
[01:15:02.110]Or I have a fiction piece that I could present
[01:15:06.600]as a non-fiction creative, non-fiction piece or a poem,
[01:15:13.080]but in so far as like the form of it,
[01:15:16.310]whatever, I think it's just whatever the day
[01:15:19.800]the wind is blowing or whatever the wind
[01:15:22.260]is blowing that day,
[01:15:23.410]is that the term I'm trying to think of.
[01:15:25.950]However the wind blows that day.
[01:15:29.410]I think a lot of it depends upon when,
[01:15:32.180]and there's not a lot of thought to it.
[01:15:35.460]It's just whatever feels right
[01:15:38.380]for whatever given publication that I'm writing it for.
[01:15:43.440]So it's a very organic intuitive process?
[01:15:46.750]Yeah, that's a better way of saying.
[01:15:48.710]Thank you.
[01:15:50.640]Yeah, no, that's very interesting.
[01:15:52.120]We have another question about writing,
[01:15:54.440]and this is from Dr. Jeanette Jones, who is a historian.
[01:15:58.820]She says, thank you for your wonderful performance.
[01:16:01.810]What advice would you give to BIPOC writers
[01:16:05.230]who would like to use humor in their writing
[01:16:07.760]about their identity?
[01:16:09.900]Is there anything off limits for you?
[01:16:13.210]Great question.
[01:16:19.523]Yeah, I've taught like a workshop,
[01:16:22.720]you know, for humor writing
[01:16:25.010]that addresses those kinds of issues.
[01:16:28.100]It's called "Laughing Matters."
[01:16:31.914]And, you know, sort of the, you know, the hallmark of that
[01:16:35.930]is the idea of, you know, punching,
[01:16:40.910]punching up rather than punching down,
[01:16:45.463]or, you know, lateral pressure and lateral violence.
[01:16:53.007]And a lot of times people will say that my work isn't funny.
[01:16:56.650]I mean, I'm here I'm writing about, you know, identity
[01:16:59.070]and things that, you know,
[01:17:00.510]have happened to native people throughout history,
[01:17:03.920]and I'll have a white person tell me that that's not funny.
[01:17:08.370]And indeed, it's not, indeed it's not funny,
[01:17:13.010]but I think that you have to be
[01:17:14.270]within a particular culture
[01:17:15.640]to really get the joke, sometimes.
[01:17:18.490]Unfortunately, you know,
[01:17:20.160]a lot of non-natives have gotten, you know,
[01:17:23.270]at least part of what I'm trying to be funny about.
[01:17:27.150]But I think the question was asking me
[01:17:30.580]about what sorts of things that I would avoid,
[01:17:34.810]or how I would treat.
[01:17:42.180]Yeah, I'm blanking out right now.
[01:17:44.333]It's okay.
[01:17:46.600]Jeanette was asking if there's anything that's off limits
[01:17:49.210]for you when you use humor to write about identity.
[01:17:52.610]Like, I don't know if she means maybe some personal things,
[01:17:55.930]like areas where you just don't go,
[01:17:58.010]like you don't reveal particular things,
[01:17:59.650]or if there are things in the world
[01:18:02.230]that you don't take on when you're writing about identity.
[01:18:06.630]Yeah, I think the bottom line for that
[01:18:10.180]would be, you know, the whole idea of punching down.
[01:18:15.460]Yeah.
[01:18:18.350]Right.
[01:18:21.190]Tiffany, wonderful.
[01:18:22.110]Trudy Evelyn asks, well, first she says,
[01:18:25.100]thank you for a marvelous lecture.
[01:18:27.240]She asks, what female author do you most often turn to
[01:18:31.670]for either comfort or humor?
[01:18:37.050]Well, I love to read, Alexandra Petri
[01:18:44.960]from the Washington Post.
[01:18:47.060]I mean, she's,
[01:18:49.320]like hands down absolutely brilliant.
[01:18:52.280]About two or three times a week,
[01:18:53.630]she writes a new column that addresses current events
[01:18:59.730]and she always nails it a hundred percent
[01:19:02.940]and it's, you know,
[01:19:04.217]and I think that's the other aspect
[01:19:05.820]that I absolutely love about writing humorous,
[01:19:09.130]is I don't have to like go at it,
[01:19:11.380]like, you know, go at it head forward, you know.
[01:19:17.690]I can go at it from the side and she does that.
[01:19:21.200]So she'll address current events
[01:19:23.121]and by creating these like really
[01:19:25.970]hilarious sort of scenarios,
[01:19:27.570]where they're always sort of adjacent
[01:19:29.920]and off to the side.
[01:19:32.740]And I just think it's a really clever way
[01:19:34.860]of addressing such things.
[01:19:38.454]She's somebody that, and I have her books
[01:19:40.500]and I try to read her columns quite a lot.
[01:19:45.660]And that's one of the people that I can think of right now.
[01:19:49.540]Thank you.
[01:19:50.760]Wonderful, we have a couple more questions.
[01:19:54.180]This one is from professor Greg Rutledge,
[01:19:56.350]who spoke at the beginning of the presentation this evening.
[01:19:59.720]He writes, I used some African epic performances
[01:20:04.380]in my research, and I watch a lot of
[01:20:06.840]South Korean cinema and series.
[01:20:10.280]In both cases, humor and comedy is a natural extension
[01:20:15.550]of the plot even when the mode is dramatic or epical.
[01:20:19.920]One might argue that modernity is too serious,
[01:20:23.710]too rule-bound and has an attenuated sense
[01:20:27.120]of a natural aspect of our humanity.
[01:20:30.530]Your 50 Foot Lakota Woman has aspects
[01:20:33.260]that align with this observation.
[01:20:35.250]Yeah.
[01:20:36.083]The same might be said of the role of song.
[01:20:38.730]Modern Americans don't sing collectively
[01:20:41.830]at the risk of essentializing.
[01:20:43.570]What is your sense of being in genre or mode?
[01:20:50.110]What's your sense of being in genre or mode?
[01:20:54.710]That's very interesting.
[01:20:56.689]I think I was talking about that before,
[01:20:58.900]you know, creative non-fiction, you know,
[01:21:00.850]versus poetry versus fiction, op-eds,
[01:21:06.240]which I'm still trying to write those.
[01:21:09.190]And, you know, I tend to go towards the short form,
[01:21:14.350]which is an op-ed,
[01:21:16.800]mostly because of, you know, I'm distracted.
[01:21:19.690]And also because, you know, I have to write a new one
[01:21:23.330]like every two weeks for our local paper,
[01:21:27.750]which is an interesting prospect as well,
[01:21:31.460]because if I were to just like,
[01:21:33.450]if I were writing for Indian Country Today,
[01:21:35.479]I would be writing a very different column
[01:21:38.830]than I am for a mainstream small town publication in Idaho.
[01:21:47.000]And it's very different.
[01:21:48.390]There's a lot of things that I can say
[01:21:50.290]in Indian Country Today,
[01:21:51.570]that I really have to like pull the brakes on
[01:21:54.810]and say, they're probably gonna like come to my house
[01:21:58.090]with like pitch forks and torches,
[01:22:03.550]if I write or publish that.
[01:22:06.980]So, in so far as the mode,
[01:22:10.490]it's probably short form for right now,
[01:22:12.400]but it switches so much and so often.
[01:22:16.335]I can't even really address that,
[01:22:19.540]because it switches so often,
[01:22:22.150]if I'm making any sense at all.
[01:22:25.190]No, that's so interesting.
[01:22:26.950]I mean, you're addressing the material conditions
[01:22:29.430]of publishing, right?
[01:22:30.730]Of writing for particular audiences
[01:22:32.960]and at a particular pace.
[01:22:35.150]And that really does shape the length
[01:22:37.550]and the approach that you...
[01:22:40.310]Yeah, and I like what he said about,
[01:22:41.797]you know, the Korean, like the Korean aspect
[01:22:45.916]of what he's observing as being humorous.
[01:22:49.300]And, you know, there's that line by Vine Deloria
[01:22:55.900]that says that the greatest way to know a people
[01:22:59.300]is to know what make them laugh.
[01:23:02.320]And then Albert Brooks, you know,
[01:23:04.718]'cause Albert Brooks had that whole movie about, you know,
[01:23:08.470]Comedy in the Muslim World, I think was the title.
[01:23:12.320]And he just went to various countries,
[01:23:14.870]in different communities like in India,
[01:23:18.260]and, you know, was just interviewing and observing
[01:23:23.260]all the people and trying to like bring
[01:23:26.330]his stand up to the people and no one got it.
[01:23:29.980]And those were some of the funniest scenes,
[01:23:32.710]is to to see this like comedian bombing
[01:23:36.012]in other country.
[01:23:39.400]And so I think I love that aspect
[01:23:41.660]of just being able to observe and analyze, you know,
[01:23:45.220]the comedy from all the different kinds of cultures.
[01:23:49.330]You know, Jay, my partner, has lived in different countries
[01:23:54.850]all over, and he'll go and talk to me at length
[01:24:00.370]about, you know, what the French people laugh about
[01:24:03.790]or what the Brits laugh about,
[01:24:05.220]or the Japanese and, you know,
[01:24:07.360]and a lot of these things are puns
[01:24:09.540]and play on language of lamb words.
[01:24:13.530]And it's really interesting to listen to.
[01:24:15.570]And it's really interesting to, you know,
[01:24:18.010]talk about and analyze.
[01:24:19.870]Yeah.
[01:24:20.890]Thank you.
[01:24:21.820]Okay, we will have one final audience question.
[01:24:26.070]This is from Dr. Cynthia,
[01:24:29.460]who is joint appointed in psychology
[01:24:31.820]and native American studies.
[01:24:34.300]She asks, publishers have made a lot of money
[01:24:38.720]from writers like Cassie Edwards
[01:24:41.180]and the blatantly stereotyped images of indigenous people.
[01:24:45.690]What do you envision will replace this genre?
[01:24:50.510]Will publishers try to incorporate more indigenous writers
[01:24:53.930]and perspectives to fill the void?
[01:24:55.970]Or will there be a lack of any representation
[01:24:58.910]of indigenous people in new literature?
[01:25:01.380]Oh, let's hope not.
[01:25:02.430]What do you think?
[01:25:06.980]I know of some romance writers right now
[01:25:10.230]that are starting to get their, you know,
[01:25:13.380]just trying to get their work out there.
[01:25:15.630]I know someone who's self publishing
[01:25:17.380]and he has their own publishing company
[01:25:20.010]that's writing, you know, native American romance novels.
[01:25:25.140]And I get like,
[01:25:27.260]I get a lot of different threads of that happening all over
[01:25:30.400]and in so far as like, you know, big name publishers,
[01:25:33.640]like people actually making millions off of this.
[01:25:38.260]I know, you know, I don't know,
[01:25:40.750]because I don't know if that's really the goal
[01:25:43.400]for a lot of native writers,
[01:25:45.480]is to just like make a million dollars.
[01:25:48.470]Maybe it is, I don't know.
[01:25:49.970]But in so far as the future, you know,
[01:25:53.710]it's hard to say.
[01:25:54.900]I don't read a lot of native American romance,
[01:25:58.480]because it's a little bit sketchy for me,
[01:26:01.260]but it's not say that, you know, other native writers
[01:26:05.700]shouldn't be able to write that
[01:26:08.240]and be prosperous from it.
[01:26:12.570]You know, that's the most, it's the best selling genre
[01:26:16.140]the world over, is romance novels.
[01:26:19.640]You know, and the buckskin romance novels is a part of that.
[01:26:24.620]So that's really surprising to know.
[01:26:28.892]And I think there is more pressure, you know,
[01:26:30.740]with the own voices campaign and the diversity campaigns.
[01:26:37.690]I think there is a lot for pressure
[01:26:39.900]and I see it happening
[01:26:41.860]and I see a lot more attention to that.
[01:26:46.000]Yeah.
[01:26:49.270]Wonderful.
[01:26:50.103]Thank you so much.
[01:26:51.860]Tom Gannon has a special gift
[01:26:55.230]that he cannot give you in person.
[01:26:56.870]Tom if you could come back on virtually please.
[01:27:01.500]Oh yes, Tiffany.
[01:27:02.480]We can't give you a million dollars,
[01:27:04.550]but native American studies would like to gift you
[01:27:08.300]this a fountain blanket.
[01:27:11.010]Oh my gosh.
[01:27:12.950]Wow.
[01:27:18.721]Oh my God.
[01:27:21.880]It looks real nice on you, Tiffany.
[01:27:23.983]It's so great.
[01:27:26.780]In actuality, it'll be in the mail.
[01:27:29.400]Oh my gosh.
[01:27:30.711]That is so nice.
[01:27:32.790]Thank you so much.
[01:27:36.750]We're delighted.
[01:27:37.583]We're really delighted.
[01:27:38.416]Thank you, Tom.
[01:27:42.440]Thank you Tiffany, for a wonderful evening.
[01:27:44.980]Thank you all of you who have joined us this evening.
[01:27:49.070]I wanna invite you to the third and final event.
[01:27:52.350]Oh, beautiful Tom.
[01:27:53.380]That is lovely.
[01:27:54.213]I wish we could have that as a backdrop of everything.
[01:27:58.250]I wanna invite you to the third and final event
[01:28:00.610]of our spring celebration,
[01:28:02.250]tomorrow's colloquium on racial justice.
[01:28:05.010]It's called "Social Justice and Intellectual Allyship:
[01:28:10.370]When the Culture you Research or Teach is not Your Own."
[01:28:14.830]And this is at noon central time.
[01:28:17.600]The link to register for the event can be found
[01:28:19.920]on our website at ethnicstudies.unl.edu
[01:28:24.540]Thank you all and good night.
[01:28:28.554]Thank you.
[01:28:30.811]Thank you, joy.
[01:28:32.380]Thank you, Tom.
[01:28:34.374]Got you.
[01:28:35.408]Thank you.
[01:28:36.593]It's really pretty, thank you.
[01:28:42.300]Wonderful, I think people are leaving.
[01:28:45.170]You're welcome to stay on chat for a moment with Tom,
[01:28:48.230]but I'm sure you have an evening to get to.
[01:28:51.720]This was really just lovely.
[01:28:53.000]Thank you for sharing your work with us.
[01:28:55.200]Yes, absolutely.
[01:28:56.410]It's my pleasure.
[01:28:57.320]And it was an honor to be here.
[01:28:58.630]Thank you so much.
[01:29:01.120]It's so sad that you didn't have a,
[01:29:02.410]that the audience couldn't react to you,
[01:29:04.443]and you couldn't hear the audience laughing.
[01:29:06.410]I mean, I'm sure,
[01:29:09.200]glorious laughter throughout.
[01:29:18.684]I spit out what I was drinking a couple of times.
[01:29:20.590]Hi.
[01:29:22.360]Hi.
[01:29:26.065]Do we have Tiffany's home address?
[01:29:27.950]Yes, we do.
[01:29:29.140]Okay.
[01:29:31.750]Usually we just say the check is in the mail,
[01:29:33.750]but now we can say also the blanket is in the mail.
[01:29:35.890]The blanket, this is marvelous.
[01:29:38.850]I'll get it in the mail in the next few months.
[01:29:42.780]Well, take your time.
[01:29:45.158]You'll have it for the next winter.
[01:29:46.970]Yeah, for next winter.
[01:29:48.010]No, I think that's marvelous.
[01:29:49.920]No one's ever done that.
[01:29:51.040]I'm just like, Really?
[01:29:52.510]Yeah We're the first.
[01:29:54.955]You're the first, it's really wonderful.
[01:29:56.920]Thank you.
[01:29:58.190]Can I do a quick question?
[01:30:01.217]I wanted to know have you ever daydreamed
[01:30:03.840]and given Tiger Lily words?
[01:30:07.271]Have I personally?
[01:30:08.180]Yeah. No, but a whole bunch
[01:30:09.850]of other people have.
[01:30:12.710]Yeah, I mean, it was a project that was, you know,
[01:30:16.070]that started up and there was like a Xen,
[01:30:19.970]a collection of all those kinds of anecdotal things.
[01:30:23.610]It used to be online,
[01:30:25.400]but it's not online anymore,
[01:30:28.620]but yeah.
[01:30:30.490]I'll look for it.
[01:30:32.280]It's not online anymore,
[01:30:35.480]but a lot of people are just like really interested in it.
[01:30:38.320]And I just made a really strong case
[01:30:40.080]why I didn't think it was a good idea,
[01:30:43.410]which isn't to say that anyone shouldn't attempt it.
[01:30:45.800]I mean, you know, creativity is, you know,
[01:30:49.820]behold the eye of the beholder,
[01:30:52.920]whatever grabs people.
[01:30:56.420]And yeah.
[01:30:58.920]I haven't though.
[01:31:01.449]I don't want to.
[01:31:03.600]I love the way you brought the dignity to life.
[01:31:08.080]So I was imagining something like that for Tiger Lilly.
[01:31:11.680]Yeah, they wanted to re-envision,
[01:31:14.860]you know, what she would be like if she had a voice,
[01:31:17.890]but I was like, no, you can't.
[01:31:19.280]She's like a celluloid invention of a racist white man.
[01:31:24.090]But I mean, it brings into the play
[01:31:26.130]all of that idea of taking back certain images,
[01:31:28.830]and I'm like you can't take it back though.
[01:31:30.200]We never had it in the first place.
[01:31:31.840]It wasn't our image.
[01:31:34.070]Exactly.
[01:31:36.990]But I know that there's artists that are doing
[01:31:38.730]like really remarkable things
[01:31:40.273]with that notion of taking back.
[01:31:43.849]So just really extraordinary, you know, pieces of art.
[01:31:48.630]My guitar buddy lives in Chamberlain.
[01:31:50.290]I've driven by the Octalacolic Museum many times.
[01:31:54.140]Oh my gosh.
[01:31:55.700]I'd love to see that, I haven't seen it.
[01:31:58.220]It's nice.
[01:31:59.260]But I mean, but you know, the whole Dakota
[01:32:00.423]it's just follow these incredibly stereotypical
[01:32:03.430]tourist representations of the native American.
[01:32:05.590]It's just atrocious, isn't it?
[01:32:08.663]Yeah, and I don't know.
[01:32:09.800]I mean, how do you feel about
[01:32:11.877]the 50 foot sculpture sitting there
[01:32:15.954]on the Missouri river?
[01:32:19.640]Well, my main reading of most of that stuff
[01:32:21.470]is white deal at work.
[01:32:25.650]And tourism, right.
[01:32:27.510]That's well up, it's right off 90.
[01:32:30.347]You can see it from interstate.
[01:32:32.720]Yeah, I mean, and then the big, you know,
[01:32:34.962]the big, crazy horse monument.
[01:32:39.654](laughs)
[01:32:43.490]Yeah, I mean, yeah, so it's just,
[01:32:46.430]when I see a sculpture like that,
[01:32:48.360]I just think, well, that million dollars,
[01:32:50.090]it would have been fantastic
[01:32:51.230]if they had asked native American artists
[01:32:53.820]to do something to commemorate that.
[01:32:57.050]They could use that money.
[01:32:58.800]I mean, that's a lot of money to give one artist.
[01:33:03.520]Yeah, I would like to have seen
[01:33:05.270]a different representation of that.
[01:33:08.681]So you have Gus tied away in a different room somewhere?
[01:33:11.170]No he went to go live in Idaho.
[01:33:15.050]He went to go live like down with his other daddy.
[01:33:20.910]That was a while back.
[01:33:23.430]Yeah.
[01:33:26.528]It's great to meet you again.
[01:33:28.110]I mean, your talk was just wonderful.
[01:33:31.062]It really was.
[01:33:32.280]Thank you so much, Tiffany.
[01:33:34.090]Thank you, Tom.
[01:33:34.940]You did a beautiful job introducing and blanketing.
[01:33:37.870]and Tommy, thanks,
[01:33:39.250]Tiffany, Tommy is the associate director
[01:33:41.760]of the Institute for Ethnic Studies and just joined.
[01:33:44.630]She didn't have a chance to talk,
[01:33:46.370]but she's here with us.
[01:33:48.572]Well, congratulations
[01:33:49.673]and congratulations to your books coming out too, Joy.
[01:33:53.157]I have heard it speaks very, very highly of you.
[01:33:56.480]Ahh, good.
[01:33:57.610]Everyone should have a friend like that.
[01:34:00.270]Yeah, thank you.
[01:34:03.000]Twitter, I have really enjoyed reading what you write.
[01:34:05.881]Great, thank you.
[01:34:07.720]Okay, well thank you all so much.
[01:34:10.280]It was great to meet everybody.
[01:34:12.070]Likewise.
[01:34:14.040]Bye bye.
[01:34:14.880]Bye bye.
[01:34:22.910]I have no idea how to log off.
[01:34:24.330]So, there it is, leave.
[01:34:27.760]Goodbye.

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Attack of the Fifty Foot (Lakota) Woman | Tiffany Midge

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