In Search of Reconciliation on America's Stolen Lands

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02/28/2023 Added

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CAS Inquire lecture on February 21, 2023 featuring Margaret Jacobs of the Department of History and Center for Great Plains Studies.

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[00:00:01.440]Good evening. I am Dr.
[00:00:02.720]Taylor Livingston,
[00:00:03.720]the director of the College of Arts and Sciences Inquire Program.
[00:00:07.400]Thank you all for coming tonight.
[00:00:09.080]Whether in person or join us online via Zoom for the last lecture
[00:00:14.040]of this year's Inquire series Searching for Common Ground.
[00:00:17.080]In a Polarized World.
[00:00:18.800]The University of Nebraska-Lincoln has created this Inquire program,
[00:00:23.120]which is structured around these lectures and allows students, faculty, staff
[00:00:27.840]and the wider public the opportunity to investigate
[00:00:30.960]how we as individuals and a society understand social phenomena.
[00:00:36.080]And specifically tonight, historical trauma.
[00:00:42.120]Additionally, these lectures created
[00:00:43.680]an opportunity to learn more about the fascinating research
[00:00:46.880]conducted by faculty in the College of Arts and Sciences
[00:00:50.960]and enable students to learn about various disciplinary
[00:00:54.360]perspectives and approaches to the study of a topic,
[00:00:58.080]as well as the necessity of multi trans and interdisciplinary insights
[00:01:02.720]to truly understand human thoughts, beliefs and actions.
[00:01:06.760]Tonight's Lecture In Search of Reconciliation on America's
[00:01:09.960]Stolen Land by Dr.
[00:01:11.280]Margaret Jacobs the Charles Mach professor of history
[00:01:14.680]and director of the Center for Great Plain Studies.
[00:01:17.880]Her talk, which is based on her recently published book
[00:01:20.680]After 100 Winters in Search of Reconciliation
[00:01:24.000]on America's Stolen Lands and the Reconciliation Rising Project
[00:01:29.000], which is a multi-media collaboration along with Lakota journalist Kevin
[00:01:33.720]Zarek, explores how settlers in the United States can support
[00:01:37.680]indigenous aspirations and pursue truth and reconciliation.
[00:01:42.000]After more than a century of U.S.
[00:01:43.960]government policies that dispossessed, impoverished and attempted
[00:01:47.880]to erase indigenous culture and its peoples.
[00:01:51.480]Dr. Jacobs also co-directs the Genoa Indian School
[00:01:54.640]Digital Reconciliation Project.
[00:01:56.960]She held an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship from the Carnegie Corporation
[00:02:00.600]of New York from 2018 until 2020.
[00:02:04.200]For her project, does the U.S.
[00:02:05.960]Need a Truth and Reconciliation Commission?
[00:02:08.600]And was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019.
[00:02:14.000]After her lecture, Dr.
[00:02:15.360]Jacobs will take questions from the audience.
[00:02:17.640]If you're in person,
[00:02:18.720]simply raise your hand and even will bring around a microphone to you.
[00:02:22.560]If you're via Zoom, you can put them in the Q&A and I'll ask them on your behalf.
[00:02:28.080]So thank you so much, Dr.
[00:02:29.640]Jacobs, and please join me in welcoming her to the stage.
[00:02:37.360]Thank you. So greetings, everybody,
[00:02:40.880]and thank you so much for being here
[00:02:44.400]this evening in person or via Zoom.
[00:02:48.400]And I want to especially thank the College of Arts and Sciences
[00:02:52.320]for sponsoring this series, and especially to Taylor Livingston for organizing it.
[00:02:57.200]I know that's a lot of work
[00:03:00.440]and so I want to begin by
[00:03:03.720]just telling you that for the last 19 years
[00:03:07.640]I've been living on the past, present and future homelands of the Pawnee
[00:03:13.240], Missouri, Omaha Core and Kansas Peoples.
[00:03:18.280]We settlers call this place Lincoln, Nebraska.
[00:03:22.640]The Salt Basin. Around present day Lincoln attracted many indigenous nations
[00:03:28.200]to our region, including the Dakota, Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho Peoples,
[00:03:33.800]as well as those of the relocated Ho-Chunk, SAC and Fox and Iowa peoples.
[00:03:40.160]The Omaha called the area
[00:03:42.600]taste for saltwater and their women used eagle feathers
[00:03:47.440]to collect the salt which they used to cure buffalo meat.
[00:03:52.280]Under pressure from federal officials
[00:03:54.640]and settlers, the Missouri ceded the land that became Lincoln
[00:03:59.600]to the federal government in 1833 and 1854.
[00:04:04.480]And this forced out the tribal peoples who'd called
[00:04:07.240]the mosquito home for many generations.
[00:04:10.720]Native peoples of many nations live in Lincoln today,
[00:04:14.880]and they contribute to our communities vitality and diversity.
[00:04:20.320]And I'm grateful for their stewardship of these lands.
[00:04:24.320]And I'm also grateful to my friend and colleague
[00:04:27.480]Kevin address for researching and writing this land acknowledgment.
[00:04:33.240]So I'd like to explain a particular term.
[00:04:36.880]I used to refer to myself and other non-native people settler.
[00:04:43.600]One part of facing up to our history is acknowledging that the United States
[00:04:49.200]is a settler colonial nation, just like Australia and Canada.
[00:04:55.240]The term settler colonialism is widely accepted
[00:04:58.800]and used in those countries.
[00:05:02.760]It refers to a form of
[00:05:05.760]European intervention that dispossessed indigenous peoples of their land,
[00:05:10.320]often violently and transferred nearly all of it
[00:05:14.840]to incoming colonizers.
[00:05:18.400]The United States took almost 99% of indigenous land.
[00:05:23.400]Settler colonialism aimed to eliminate indigenous people both physically
[00:05:28.360]and culturally, and replace them with colonizers who came to stay.
[00:05:36.320]Many settlers today believe that they had nothing
[00:05:39.240]to do with the dispossession or the historical abuses
[00:05:43.640]of indigenous peoples in the United States.
[00:05:47.320]I guess that's true.
[00:05:49.840]As a settler. I did not participate in these atrocities.
[00:05:54.560]And those of you who are settlers did not either.
[00:05:59.200]But all of us who are settlers have benefited
[00:06:02.200]enormously from indigenous land, and we still do.
[00:06:06.040]Even if we had no direct hand in removing indigenous people from it.
[00:06:12.440]For example, UNO is one of 52 land grant universities
[00:06:18.320]which were established by the Moral Act of 1862.
[00:06:22.920]This act gave nearly 80,000 parcels of land
[00:06:27.600]totaling 10.7 million acres to land
[00:06:31.680]grant universities across the nation to fund their endowments.
[00:06:36.320]And the purple areas on this map show those parcels of land.
[00:06:42.040]The American government obtained native land in multiple ways,
[00:06:47.120]sometimes by outright violence, sometimes by signing treaties with native nations.
[00:06:54.040]The idea of negotiating treaties has the air of legitimacy,
[00:06:59.480]but authority is rarely compensated indigenous peoples
[00:07:03.320]adequately or fairly for the land they ceded through treaty,
[00:07:07.480]and tribal leaders often signed many treaties under extreme duress.
[00:07:13.200]And settler authorities routinely violated the treaty's provisions. Treaties
[00:07:18.240]could not protect indigenous people from further violence and land theft.
[00:07:24.720]This stolen land
[00:07:26.760]is still generating income for many land grant universities or what
[00:07:31.280]some have labeled a land grab universities.
[00:07:35.880]You know, whether we like it or not,
[00:07:39.000]we are implicated in settler colonialism.
[00:07:42.880]I thus feel oops, sorry.
[00:07:46.280]To those of you, I just
[00:07:49.960]tagged your ears.
[00:07:52.320]You know, whether we like it or not, we are implicated in settler colonialism.
[00:07:56.640]I just feel a responsibility as a settler
[00:08:00.240]to acknowledge the injustices against indigenous people
[00:08:04.280]and also to take the next step to make redress for past abuses.
[00:08:10.440]And this is not an individual task alone.
[00:08:13.560]It is our collective responsibility.
[00:08:16.040]And it's part of a worldwide movement for truth and reconciliation.
[00:08:21.720]There are many Americans today who claim that acknowledging
[00:08:25.240]the wrongs of the past is divisive and polarizing.
[00:08:30.520]In my work. However, I found the opposite to be true.
[00:08:34.960]Facing up to our nation's hard history is a key task of building
[00:08:40.200]a truly pluralistic and democratic society with respect for all.
[00:08:46.640]If we hope to heal from the past and create a society
[00:08:50.600]where we all can thrive, which I hope we all do,
[00:08:54.720]we must acknowledge that we live in a settler colonial nation.
[00:08:58.840]So I embrace the term settler,
[00:09:01.840]and I embrace accountability and responsibility.
[00:09:06.840]I thought I'd use my time with you today
[00:09:09.200]to tell you a little bit about how I arrived at this point.
[00:09:14.080]As a historian, I've spent a
[00:09:16.200]good part of my career researching and writing.
[00:09:20.600]And helping to expose a particularly damaging
[00:09:23.640]policy and practice of settler colonialism.
[00:09:26.720]Indigenous child removal.
[00:09:29.560]The United States, Canada and all, and Australia all systematically
[00:09:34.160]engaged in this practice beginning in the late 19th century.
[00:09:40.320]Up to World War Two.
[00:09:41.840]They focus their efforts on removing Indigenous children
[00:09:46.360]to institutions in the US.
[00:09:50.520]This was Indian boarding schools in Canada.
[00:09:55.080]They called them Indian residential schools.
[00:09:58.560]And in Australia they simply called them homes.
[00:10:03.240]They didn't make a pretense of calling them schools.
[00:10:06.920]In the US from 1880 to 1940,
[00:10:09.920]about 80% of all American Indian children attended
[00:10:14.160]one of about 350 boarding schools.
[00:10:19.280]After World War Two, all three nations realized that the institutionalization
[00:10:24.080]of indigenous children in special segregated schools or homes
[00:10:28.760]had not led to their assimilation as they had hoped.
[00:10:32.760]Now they all turned to placing Indigenous children
[00:10:35.280]within non-Indigenous foster or adoptive families.
[00:10:39.600]In the US, the Bureau of Indian Affairs
[00:10:42.520]partnered with the highly regarded Child Welfare League of America
[00:10:46.600]to create the Indian Adoption Project in 1958.
[00:10:50.960]And this program continued as the Adoption Resource
[00:10:54.520]Exchange of North America from 1968 to 1978.
[00:10:59.880]Oops, went a little too far there.
[00:11:04.320]As a result, by the late
[00:11:06.320]1960s, about a third of all American
[00:11:10.400]Indian children had been separated from their families and communities.
[00:11:14.720]And sadly, this practice continues.
[00:11:17.760]Indigenous children still face elevated rates of removal
[00:11:21.160]from their families in all of these nations.
[00:11:25.720]And one of the greatest ironies
[00:11:28.000]is that the idea to remove American Indian children
[00:11:32.120]to boarding schools and then to white settler families grew
[00:11:36.880]out of a nascent truth and reconciliation movement in the late 19th century.
[00:11:42.520]Many settlers in that
[00:11:43.920]time had become appalled at the violence that indigenous people had suffered
[00:11:49.000]and sought to reverse their government's policies.
[00:11:52.320]They called themselves the Friends of the Indian.
[00:11:56.680]They'd come to believe that the U.S.
[00:11:58.440]government had deeply wronged American Indian people
[00:12:02.000]and that some form of redress and reconciliation was necessary
[00:12:06.920]to make up for the litany of abuses that indigenous people had suffered.
[00:12:11.400]At first, they sought to write some of the wrongs
[00:12:14.280]by upholding treaty rights and returning land to Indian peoples.
[00:12:18.240]And this is exactly what native peoples wanted.
[00:12:22.120]But within a few years they'd abandoned this agenda.
[00:12:26.040]Instead, they promoted two steps that they believed
[00:12:29.160]would truly bring reconciliation between settlers and indigenous people
[00:12:33.800]and solve what they called the Indian problem.
[00:12:37.840]And paradoxically, these two steps ended up
[00:12:40.800]causing further trauma and injustice for native peoples.
[00:12:46.320]The first step was the allotment
[00:12:49.000]of Indian lands as private property to individual Native Americans.
[00:12:53.720]Through the Doors Act of 1887.
[00:12:56.800]You can see on this map how much land tribal nations
[00:13:00.000]lost between 1919 30.
[00:13:03.240]The government allotted land on most Indian reservations
[00:13:06.440]and then took the so-called surplus.
[00:13:10.000]All told, Native nations lost 90 million
[00:13:13.440]more acres of land due to this policy.
[00:13:18.080]The second step Friends of the Indians proposed was a boarding school
[00:13:22.400]education for Indian children, which entailed the mass
[00:13:28.240]removal of indigenous children from their families.
[00:13:31.120]Authorities claimed that removing children and reeducating them at boarding
[00:13:35.960]schools was necessary to assimilate them into American society.
[00:13:41.560]But school is really a misnomer
[00:13:44.600]for the institutions to which Indigenous Indigenous children were removed.
[00:13:49.720]Children learned academics only in the mornings.
[00:13:53.480]They labored the rest of the day for the school or for local
[00:13:56.960]non-Indian families.
[00:13:58.920]Schools were very abusive and exploitative.
[00:14:02.720]They were highly regimented and run along military lines.
[00:14:08.760]Students endured harsh discipline for speaking their languages.
[00:14:13.200]Many ran away and were punished severely if they were caught.
[00:14:17.640]The schools also were overcrowded and children often did not receive enough
[00:14:22.080]to eat. And moreover, disease and ill health was rampant.
[00:14:28.280]Authorities also forcibly removed many children
[00:14:32.640]to the schools without the consent of their parents or tribal nation
[00:14:36.400]authorities. US officials often withheld rations
[00:14:41.720]to force families to send their children to school.
[00:14:46.480]And rations were something that were guaranteed by treaty
[00:14:50.520]to replace the livelihood of a lot of Native Americans.
[00:14:54.760]Once they ceded most of their lands.
[00:14:59.120]So this hardly looks like reconciliation.
[00:15:03.160]But many friends of the Indian were convinced that the schools
[00:15:06.800]were a benevolent gesture that would save Indian children.
[00:15:12.800]If the true aim of the settler governments had truly been education,
[00:15:16.840]it could have been achieved for a far lower expense through day schools
[00:15:21.400]within Indigenous communities and many Native people.
[00:15:25.600]In fact, one of the schools and even negotiated
[00:15:28.600]for them within their treaties in the US and Canada.
[00:15:32.760]But the true aim of the schools was really to separate
[00:15:35.560]the children from their families and to separate them from their lands.
[00:15:41.440]And so this policy has had a
[00:15:43.200]great legacy of trauma for many Indigenous communities.
[00:15:50.840]And this, of course,
[00:15:52.240]was an untenable situation for Indigenous families.
[00:15:57.640]By the late 20th century, many indigenous leaders
[00:16:00.560]sought to put an end to this egregious human rights abuse.
[00:16:04.400]What Australians call the Stolen Generations
[00:16:08.000]and to work toward restorative justice for those who suffered from it.
[00:16:13.000]In Australia in the 1990s.
[00:16:15.960]After decades of Indigenous pressure, the Government finally held
[00:16:20.000]a formal inquiry into the Stolen Generations.
[00:16:24.160]Over 17 months. The inquiry held
[00:16:27.160]hearings in every state capital and at many regional centers.
[00:16:31.400]It gathered testimony from over 1000 Aboriginal individuals and organizations.
[00:16:38.080]I interviewed one of the inquiry's co-chairs, Nick Dodson.
[00:16:43.280]He is an Indigenous attorney of the AWU roo people in Western Australia.
[00:16:49.760]He told me it was
[00:16:51.720]probably the toughest thing I've ever done in my life.
[00:16:55.720]It's very taxing to sit there
[00:16:58.760]day in and day out and listen to these stories.
[00:17:02.160]They were very painful, but people wanted to tell their stories.
[00:17:06.640]It was an official validation that what they had been saying
[00:17:09.560]for generations was true.
[00:17:12.600]They are now in the official record of the history of Australia.
[00:17:18.040]Indeed, with hundreds of testimonies, it became increasingly difficult
[00:17:22.440]to deny the truths of Aboriginal child removal.
[00:17:26.600]This historical truth finally came to light in Canada
[00:17:30.240]after decades of indigenous activism, notably in October of 1990.
[00:17:36.240]On live TV, Bill Fontaine,
[00:17:39.720]Grand Chief of the Assembly
[00:17:41.560]of First Nations, publicly disclosed that he'd been physically
[00:17:45.520]and sexually abused while attending an Indian residential school.
[00:17:50.440]Soon, other indigenous adults
[00:17:52.360]came forward with their own tales of abuse in the schools.
[00:17:59.080]In 2005, the Assembly of First Nations
[00:18:02.240]launched a $36 billion class action lawsuit against the federal government
[00:18:07.800]on behalf of 70,000 residential school survivors in Canada.
[00:18:12.960]And under pressure, the Canadian government and church
[00:18:15.680]representatives negotiated the Indian Residential Schools Agreement
[00:18:20.160]with the Assembly of First Nations in 2006.
[00:18:24.880]And a lot of agitation built for official apologies
[00:18:29.320]to Indigenous peoples in both Australia and Canada.
[00:18:34.720]In 2008. In February 2008, Kevin Rudd,
[00:18:39.000]the newly elected prime minister of Australia, delivered an apology
[00:18:43.360]to the Stolen Generations before Parliament as his first official act.
[00:18:50.040]Thousands of Australians, Indigenous as well as settler, traveled
[00:18:54.480]to the capital and lined up outside Parliament House to watch the event.
[00:18:59.400]The apology was also broadcast live around the nation
[00:19:03.720]and most communities planned events to accompany.
[00:19:07.760]The day of the apology in Australia was momentous.
[00:19:12.600]Australians remember where they were that day.
[00:19:15.880]Like many Americans, recall where we were when we first heard of 911.
[00:19:23.720]A few months later in June of 2008.
[00:19:30.360]Prime Minister Stephen Harper of Canada
[00:19:33.280]delivered an apology to the survivors of Canada's Indian residential schools.
[00:19:38.440]It had been mandated by the Indian School
[00:19:41.840]Agreement, as in Australia.
[00:19:44.560]So there was practically a national holiday
[00:19:47.600]so that Canadian citizens could view the apology at one of 30
[00:19:51.520]major events across the nation.
[00:19:55.560]Following suit, Barack Obama signed a Native American apology
[00:20:00.360]resolution into law in 2009.
[00:20:04.400]Q Do you remember where you were on the day you heard the apology?
[00:20:11.120]No, it's not that you missed it.
[00:20:17.200]The apology was buried in a document,
[00:20:21.160]the 2010 Defense Appropriations Act.
[00:20:23.920]And I'm not sure what page this is, but probably around 645, something like that.
[00:20:30.920]The White House did not invite the press.
[00:20:34.400]They did not invite any Native American representatives
[00:20:37.880]when the president signed it.
[00:20:40.400]The apology was really vague, too.
[00:20:43.360]It, quote, apologized on behalf of the United States
[00:20:46.880]to all native peoples for many instances of violence, maltreatment
[00:20:51.000]and neglect of native peoples by citizens of the United States, unquote.
[00:20:56.280]That said, nothing specific and certainly nothing about indigenous child removal.
[00:21:03.400]So this apology or not apology has not brought any kind
[00:21:07.440]of healing to the United States in regard to indigenous peoples.
[00:21:12.000]Instead, we have mostly silence, ignorance and denial
[00:21:16.720]when it comes to the abuses that indigenous people have suffered.
[00:21:23.320]Canada followed its apology with a six year Truth
[00:21:27.520]and Reconciliation Commission or te rc.
[00:21:32.360]Which was also mandated by the Indian Residential School Agreement.
[00:21:36.800]Like the Stolen Generations inquiry, the trustee gathered
[00:21:40.680]testimony from thousands of Indigenous people who'd been separated
[00:21:44.480]from their families and forced to attend Indian residential schools.
[00:21:49.160]The T rc created a forum where Indigenous people
[00:21:52.920]could finally make their experiences known.
[00:21:56.920]Since I've been writing about
[00:21:59.480]Indian boarding schools and other institutions
[00:22:02.480]and their counterparts in Australia and Canada for almost two decades,
[00:22:06.920]I decided to attend the Trustees final ceremony in Ottawa
[00:22:11.960]in June 2015, along with thousands of other peoples.
[00:22:16.280]Other people, some settlers, but most indigenous.
[00:22:21.240]Commissioner Murray Sinclair opened the event of Ojibway heritage.
[00:22:27.440]He'd become the first Indigenous judge in the province of Manitoba.
[00:22:33.120]Sinclair declared that the findings of the PRC about the abuses
[00:22:37.560]of the residential schools were, quote, not an indigenous problem.
[00:22:42.040]They were a Canadian problem.
[00:22:45.680]Canada, he said, had sought to erase from the face of the earth
[00:22:50.360]the history and culture of its indigenous peoples.
[00:22:54.240]Sinclair spoke to both in-person attendees and viewers at home.
[00:22:58.800]We ask you to learn, to share and to reflect
[00:23:02.160]on this tragic part of Canadian history.
[00:23:05.400]But more than that, he said, We ask you to act.
[00:23:12.240]During the two days of the final ceremonies,
[00:23:15.560]I witnessed a momentous occasion a nation remembering
[00:23:20.200]and taking responsibility for its past abuses.
[00:23:25.040]I envied Canadians for engaging in this vital process and pondered
[00:23:29.400]what it would take for the United States to face up to its own past
[00:23:34.200]. Attending the Canadian tiara C led me to realize
[00:23:37.720]that I could put my scholarly skills and resources in service
[00:23:41.920]to the cause of truth and reconciliation.
[00:23:45.040]And from that moment on, I asked, how can the work
[00:23:48.720]I do as a settler historian help people come to terms
[00:23:53.040]with the traumas of our past and develop respectful ways of relating to each other?
[00:24:00.480]That led me to co-found the Genoa Indian School Digital Reconciliation
[00:24:05.480]Project with Liz Loring, associate dean of Youth
[00:24:09.840]and Libraries, in 2017.
[00:24:13.600]The goal of the Genoa Digital Project is to contribute to historical recovery,
[00:24:19.000]reconciliation and healing.
[00:24:23.280]Through making the history of the school more accessible to the families
[00:24:27.760]of Indian people who attended the school, to researchers and to the general public.
[00:24:34.000]Janelle's official records currently languish in federal repositories
[00:24:39.160]where they are difficult to locate and to access.
[00:24:42.320]So making these records available widely to American Indians and others
[00:24:47.360]we see is an act of archival repatriation or bringing history home
[00:24:53.160]to families, communities and the wider public.
[00:24:59.280]Many of you may be aware.
[00:25:03.040]First Nations people in Canada have found mass unmarked graves
[00:25:07.040]at a number of residential school sites just in the last few years.
[00:25:11.320]This led the US secretary of the Interior, Deb Haaland, herself
[00:25:16.360]a descendant of boarding school survivors from Laguna Pueblo
[00:25:20.880]to call for an investigation into the schools,
[00:25:24.160]especially children's deaths and their burials and school cemeteries.
[00:25:29.000]Her office has initiated a Road to Healing tour
[00:25:32.480]with listening sessions with native peoples around the nation,
[00:25:36.000]a kind of more informal version of the Stolen Generations inquiry.
[00:25:42.080]So at the Genome Project, our
[00:25:46.640]projects, community advisors from all of the tribal nations here in
[00:25:51.040]Nebraska wanted the to know
[00:25:52.880]a project to help identify the children who died at Chernobyl
[00:25:56.960]and to help find the cemetery which has mysteriously disappeared.
[00:26:02.400]We teamed up with the Genoa Foundation in Genoa,
[00:26:05.360]Nebraska, to identify all the children who died there.
[00:26:08.960]Currently, our count is 86 children,
[00:26:13.200]and we've identified by name 49 of these students.
[00:26:17.240]But we know there are at least 37 more who died between 1884 and 1894
[00:26:23.720]whose names we've not yet found.
[00:26:27.680]And the Nebraska Commission on Indian Affairs, led by Judy Gage.
[00:26:31.560]Kibosh and the State Archeology Office, led by Dave Williams,
[00:26:35.920]are leading a search for the know, a school cemetery
[00:26:39.040]that disappeared after the school closed in 1934.
[00:26:43.800]So our state's own role in Indian boarding
[00:26:46.560]schools is an area that is ripe for truth and reconciliation.
[00:26:53.760]Ottawa also led me
[00:26:56.160]eventually to embark on a book project called Does the U.S.
[00:27:00.280]Need a Truth and Reconciliation Commission?
[00:27:03.280]Thankfully, I came up with a better title than that.
[00:27:07.360]I wanted to explore the disparity and how the Australian, Canadian
[00:27:11.320]and US governments were reckoning
[00:27:13.000]with their histories of Indigenous child removal and family separation.
[00:27:17.280]I hope that my book might prod our nation
[00:27:20.680]to engage in its own restorative justice effort.
[00:27:25.040]But several things happened to take the project
[00:27:27.800]and me in a very different direction.
[00:27:31.360]First, I started out the project very starry eyed about what
[00:27:36.120]a RC could could do it had done.
[00:27:40.680]I thought the US might emulate Canada and Australia.
[00:27:45.000]But I learned that the redress efforts that occurred in Canada and Australia,
[00:27:49.880]while a step in the right direction, have not brought a great deal of healing.
[00:27:55.320]Reconciliation has been elusive,
[00:27:57.800]even in those nations that have spent a lot of money and time on it.
[00:28:02.560]So this led me to ponder what had gone awry in those processes
[00:28:07.680]and how the US might do better.
[00:28:11.840]The second thing
[00:28:12.760]that moved me in a new direction is I decided early on that
[00:28:16.320]I wanted to interview
[00:28:17.240]all sorts of people who were involved in truth and reconciliation efforts,
[00:28:21.160]not just the national figures like Murray Sinclair and Mick Dodson,
[00:28:25.280]but also everyday people who are engaging in truth
[00:28:28.080]and reconciliation in their own communities.
[00:28:31.320]I also decided that I wanted to make these interviews widely available
[00:28:35.720]and that they should be done in the spirit of truth and reconciliation.
[00:28:40.080]So I approached a local Lincoln journalist named Kevin Alvarez,
[00:28:45.640]who's a citizen of the Rosebud Lakota Nation, about working together.
[00:28:50.040]And luckily, Kevin was just as passionate about this topic
[00:28:54.520]because I am. And we started Reconciliation Rising in 2018.
[00:29:00.800]It's a multimedia project that showcases indigenous
[00:29:04.960]people and settlers who are engaged and honestly confronting painful
[00:29:08.960]and traumatic histories and then creating pathways to reconciliation.
[00:29:13.840]Our interviews made me realize that much more was going on
[00:29:18.560]in the United States than I had thought and that few Americans are aware of.
[00:29:25.040]The people we met also provided some valuable models
[00:29:28.960]for working toward truth and reconciliation.
[00:29:31.880]They showed me, in fact, that all settlers can engage in this process.
[00:29:37.400]For example, I want to share the story of Art and Helen Tantra
[00:29:42.560]and the Pankhursts.
[00:29:45.480]Our Uncle Tanner up on a farm
[00:29:48.360]in central Nebraska near Neely,
[00:29:52.040]and this farm spent in Helen's family ever since the late 19th century.
[00:29:57.040]In 2013, the Tanner is joined with other local
[00:30:00.400]farmers and ranchers, as well as members of tribal nations,
[00:30:04.320]to oppose the Keystone XL trans national oil pipeline
[00:30:08.720]that would bisect their farm and homelands of many native nations.
[00:30:14.120]So they started out in a kind of political alliance.
[00:30:18.120]But something else happened along the way.
[00:30:21.040]These political alliances grew into personal friendships
[00:30:24.320]between the tanners and the punker people.
[00:30:29.640]And this blossomed into a new tradition,
[00:30:32.960]the planting of sacred Ponca corn on a tandem farm every year.
[00:30:38.680]These events led to a historic summer day in June 2018.
[00:30:44.160]The tender UPS held a ceremony with two leaders of the Ponca nations
[00:30:48.440]of Oklahoma and Nebraska.
[00:30:52.680]160 years ago. At a similar gathering, Tonka Lehnert
[00:30:57.160]leaders had signed over thousands of acres of their homelands in Nebraska
[00:31:01.760]to the US government in return for a small reservation.
[00:31:06.120]This land was redistributed to homesteaders like Helen's ancestors.
[00:31:11.720]Despite this treaty, the government decided
[00:31:14.760]to relocate the Parkers to Indian territory. Now, Oklahoma
[00:31:19.880]in in the 1870s,
[00:31:22.400]at the point of bayonets, the military forced the punkers to march
[00:31:26.560]600 miles to a foreign land.
[00:31:30.880]Today or in 2018,
[00:31:34.520]the tender ups are signing or signed a reverse treaty or kind of reverse treaty
[00:31:40.320]that returned, in this case, ten acres of their farm to the Parkers.
[00:31:47.400]During the ceremony, Art said it can never make
[00:31:53.080]what went wrong or right, but it can show how we feel about this injustice.
[00:32:00.080]As Art and Helen signed the deed to transfer the land.
[00:32:03.920]Casey camps for Annette of the Ponca tribe of Oklahoma broke down.
[00:32:10.080]When she could speak again, she said, This day our mother,
[00:32:14.080]the earth sustained us and gave us reason to live.
[00:32:19.040]Casey Camp Cornell signed the deed and passed it to Larry
[00:32:23.320]Wright, junior, chairman of the Ponca tribe of Nebraska at the time.
[00:32:27.880]He declared, This means a lot
[00:32:30.840]to be able to sit here as partners, to come together
[00:32:33.800]out of the goodness of your heart and undo what the federal government did.
[00:32:39.880]This ceremony encompasses the
[00:32:42.120]components of restorative justice, of truth and reconciliation.
[00:32:46.720]Hong Kong leaders told the truth of their history,
[00:32:50.160]the mistreatment they'd suffered at the hands of settlers.
[00:32:53.960]The tender ups honestly confronted this history.
[00:32:57.400]They took responsibility for these past harms as witnesses looked on.
[00:33:02.680]And then they offered to redress ten acres of land.
[00:33:08.640]Cynics think that those who acknowledge this history have a lot to lose,
[00:33:13.800]but are says it's something that makes our hearts feel good.
[00:33:20.000]And Legacy Coronet Honker played his drum
[00:33:24.040]and sang at the end of the ceremony that summer day in Nebraska.
[00:33:28.200]Just before he began, he said.
[00:33:30.720]Over the past five years, Art and I got to spend time with each other
[00:33:34.960]and know each other's families to know each other's hearts.
[00:33:39.040]And I know that what he's doing is from his heart.
[00:33:42.600]And he said, From my heart, I just want to say I love you, Art.
[00:33:51.840]I've taken great
[00:33:53.160]inspiration and many life lessons from the tender ups and the podcasts.
[00:33:58.680]First they teach us how vitally important
[00:34:01.640]it is for all of us to become deeply familiar with the places
[00:34:05.320]we occupy, to learn how the land passed from the hands of indigenous people
[00:34:11.560]to settlers, and then to take action to repair the harm.
[00:34:18.120]They teach settlers that truth and reconciliation
[00:34:20.760]efforts must be led by indigenous people
[00:34:24.120]and their aspirations and priorities, not by what settlers think is best.
[00:34:29.680]That's happened so tragically in the 19th century.
[00:34:33.800]We learn from the tender ups and the punkers.
[00:34:36.120]The truth and reconciliation efforts may provide the greatest healing
[00:34:40.880]if they are carried out at the grassroots and the local level
[00:34:44.640]and within all sectors of society.
[00:34:46.840]Churches. Universities. Corporations.
[00:34:49.360]Nonprofit organizations.
[00:34:52.600]This is true for at least two reasons.
[00:34:55.600]Settler colonialism was and is an intimate occurrence.
[00:34:59.840]So a reconciliation also needs to occur at this intimate level.
[00:35:05.000]Indigenous people had and have
[00:35:08.160]sacred connections with and were dispossessed
[00:35:11.640]from particular lands by particular people.
[00:35:16.600]Truth. And the other reason
[00:35:19.880]that's true that these grassroots efforts
[00:35:24.040]can have so much power is that truth and reconciliation
[00:35:28.160]requires settlers to do their part to engage in this process.
[00:35:32.600]And it's at the local and grassroots level where this engagement
[00:35:36.200]can really take place.
[00:35:39.600]The tender and the Parkers teach us to that.
[00:35:42.120]Truth and reconciliation efforts will be most successful
[00:35:45.960]if they address the foundational crime of land dispossession.
[00:35:50.960]And if they take land restitution seriously.
[00:35:55.880]Finally, the planks in the tender app
[00:35:57.880]show us just how much we have to gain by confronting and learning
[00:36:02.280]from our history, not denying and evading it.
[00:36:06.480]Regarding the ceremony at which the Tanners
[00:36:09.080]returned ten acres to the Parkers art for Kevin and me.
[00:36:14.080]To me it was so powerful.
[00:36:16.880]Here we were, the four of us, together.
[00:36:19.680]We were doing something almost magic.
[00:36:23.120]It was powerful.
[00:36:25.080]At 1/2, Art said I had to hold back the tears.
[00:36:28.880]But those were tears of joy.
[00:36:31.200]Here was something happening I thought was almost unimaginable.
[00:36:37.720]The tender ups teach us to that
[00:36:39.600]anyone and everyone can engage in acts of truth and reconciliation,
[00:36:44.640]and that it may be these small gestures
[00:36:47.800]that have the greatest power to heal the wounds of history.
[00:36:52.480]The tender ups and the parkas are not outliers.
[00:36:56.680]Kevin and I have interviewed many other natives and non
[00:37:00.280]native people working together for truth and reconciliation.
[00:37:04.960]For example, the city of Longmont, Colorado, has established
[00:37:08.280]a sister city relationship with the Northern Arapaho Nation,
[00:37:12.640]a group of people who once occupied Northern Colorado
[00:37:15.680]but have been expelled to the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming.
[00:37:20.880]The city of Eureka, California, returned an island in the middle of Humboldt
[00:37:25.800]Bay to its original owners, the wee art nation,
[00:37:29.560]who consider the center of their creation.
[00:37:35.480]Kevin and I became so inspired
[00:37:38.080]by our interviews that we did not just want to document this growing movement,
[00:37:42.440]but we also wanted to take part in it ourselves.
[00:37:46.520]To that end, we reached out to Missouri, a nation,
[00:37:50.680]the native nation that had been dispossessed
[00:37:53.680]to make way for Lincoln and the University of Nebraska.
[00:37:59.160]We brought a delegation of four OTA, Missouri to Lincoln last May,
[00:38:04.160]and we've scheduled kind of a whirlwind of events,
[00:38:08.480]activities and meetings with the Lincoln Indian community, with faith
[00:38:12.800]organizations, with environmental groups, university leaders and city officials.
[00:38:18.320]And one of the things that the delegation asked our mayor, Larry
[00:38:24.320]Gaylor Baird, was if she would establish an auto Missouri, a date.
[00:38:29.400]And she thankfully said yes.
[00:38:32.320]So the photo Missouri determined that the day that they would like
[00:38:38.160]this to be established was September 21st.
[00:38:42.680]So we held our first auto, Missouri Day
[00:38:45.760]on September 21st, and the mayor made an official proclamation.
[00:38:50.440]And we had hoped to hold this.
[00:38:54.080]And looking at my colleagues in the Center for Great Plains Studies,
[00:38:57.280]we'd hoped to hold this in some official chambers of the city.
[00:39:01.480]But at the last minute, this fell through.
[00:39:03.320]And we so we held this in our own center.
[00:39:06.880]And thanks to Keating Newlin for taking these beautiful photographs.
[00:39:12.200]This gives you a taste of the events that day.
[00:39:16.040]More than 50 Oto Missouri citizens traveled from Oklahoma
[00:39:20.480]and elsewhere to attend.
[00:39:22.720]And we had two drum groups perform and a lot of dancing.
[00:39:26.800]And it's our hope to do this every year with the Missouri nation.
[00:39:32.960]But we don't want to just leave it at that.
[00:39:35.000]Our future plans include finding ways to commemorate the Ottoman Syria presence
[00:39:40.400]in southeast Nebraska and to purchase and or return
[00:39:44.440]land to the tribal nation.
[00:39:54.040]We're we work we're working with a couple environmental organizations in the city.
[00:40:00.400]They took us out to several of the prairies that they manage.
[00:40:05.320]Our experience has only confirmed
[00:40:08.560]what I learned from the tender ups in the Parkers.
[00:40:12.160]Confronting the truth and working for reconciliation
[00:40:16.040]is not an exercise in shaming or humiliation or guilt.
[00:40:22.320]Facing our history together is an act of respect,
[00:40:25.720]integrity and interconnectedness.
[00:40:29.440]Accountability is not to be feared by settlers as divisive or polarizing.
[00:40:35.640]It's empowering.
[00:40:37.280]It's liberating.
[00:40:38.360]It's transformative for settlers to engage
[00:40:42.360]in repairing relationships with indigenous peoples.
[00:40:46.520]So that's what I'm going to leave you with today.
[00:40:48.480]Thank you so much again for having me.
[00:40:50.800]And I look forward to your questions and comments. Thank you.
[00:41:13.360]There's somebody coming with the mike. Reassuring.
[00:41:18.880]I very much enjoy that, Margaret.
[00:41:20.880]It's very, very thought provoking.
[00:41:23.480]One of the things I've been wondering is you talked about Canada, Australia
[00:41:27.080]and the U.S., which were all settled by Britain. How about.
[00:41:34.120]I don't know the Spanish and the Portuguese
[00:41:35.960]going into South America or Africa or places like that.
[00:41:39.200]Is there a difference?
[00:41:41.600]Oh, gosh, I wish I knew more about that.
[00:41:45.440]There there are many scholars, historians working on.
[00:41:50.400]Sorry for the feedback.
[00:41:53.680]Is it better now?
[00:41:55.240]Okay, so there's a lot of scholars working on
[00:41:59.160]the Spanish and the Portuguese had really different sorry for this debate.
[00:42:04.160]They had very different relationships with indigenous peoples.
[00:42:07.880]For one thing, they did not frown so much on intermarriage.
[00:42:14.320]And but the English really sought
[00:42:17.800]to keep English people from intermarrying with Native people.
[00:42:22.000]I mean, they couldn't completely stop that, but they tried.
[00:42:25.600]So the nature of
[00:42:29.120]Latin American communities.
[00:42:33.360]We're somewhat different, I think, than most British settler colonial nations.
[00:42:39.680]So, for example, in many of those nations today, Bolivia,
[00:42:43.760]for example, indigenous people outnumber Europeans.
[00:42:48.200]So a settler colonial nation is one in which the outsiders coming in
[00:42:53.680]take over demographically. I thank you.
[00:42:59.400]Exact question from the zoom, sir.
[00:43:01.840]Thank you, Margaret, for an excellent and very informative talk.
[00:43:04.560]What have you discovered thus far during your work on truth
[00:43:07.880]and reconciliation that most surprised you?
[00:43:12.280]Oh, that's a great question. Well.
[00:43:15.960]So when we talk in the United States
[00:43:19.200]about how to resolve and make redress for past atrocities,
[00:43:24.440]whether it's slavery and shit or Jim Crow or mass rates of incarceration
[00:43:29.240]or what indigenous people have been going through,
[00:43:32.560]we often think we often use the word reparations.
[00:43:36.000]And we I used to think before I began this process
[00:43:39.440]that that was like the be all and end all of redress that.
[00:43:46.200]And so many people are agitating for that as well.
[00:43:49.600]And often what they mean by that is, is a fairly narrow
[00:43:53.880]definition, meaning monetary compensation.
[00:43:57.880]But Canada has made reparations to
[00:44:02.840]survivors of the Indian Indian residential schools.
[00:44:07.400]And I went to this fascinating conference up there
[00:44:10.960]with survivors and with people who were
[00:44:14.640]now trying to get some sort of truth and reconciliation process around
[00:44:20.000]what they call the sixties scoop, the children who were removed
[00:44:23.360]to be put in non-native families in the 1960s and beyond.
[00:44:28.680]And it was remarkable because.
[00:44:33.120]These reparations, these monetary reparations
[00:44:36.640]have not brought a lot of healing to people.
[00:44:39.880]And that really surprised me.
[00:44:42.080]And it's not that I think that we shouldn't be doing that, but
[00:44:45.520]if we don't do other things in addition to that,
[00:44:49.680]it it will not bring healing.
[00:44:52.080]And that was that was extremely surprising to me.
[00:44:56.320]And it led me to dig really deep into.
[00:45:01.960]The kind of. Work internationally that a lot of scholars have done
[00:45:07.680]in the International Criminal Court about what does bring healing to people.
[00:45:13.000]And they have like five different categories
[00:45:16.800]that I won't go into tonight, but I have not encountered a nation
[00:45:23.120]that has been able to do all five of those things.
[00:45:26.840]Canada and Australia have come close doing three or four of them, but not all five.
[00:45:31.680]And plus these five principles
[00:45:34.800]were never designed with indigenous peoples in mind.
[00:45:38.760]And so they don't always get to the questions
[00:45:42.240]and to the concerns and the priorities of Indigenous people.
[00:45:47.080]But that's that's a really good question.
[00:45:48.800]I'd love to engage with you all more about that
[00:45:51.040]that talk about reparations sometimes.
[00:46:02.400]Chuck Meyers to watch about Samantha Byrd.
[00:46:04.600]Chickasha Society. Chickasha? No, potentially.
[00:46:07.840]Hello. My name is Samantha Byrd and I am an enrolled citizen of the
[00:46:10.720]Chickasaw Nation, and I'm a student here at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln .
[00:46:14.880]And I'm interested in your perspective on how this conversation of reconciliation
[00:46:20.320]fits in with the ongoing attacks on our sovereignty, our lands and our children.
[00:46:24.280]With current Supreme Court decisions such as the Kirby Oklahoma case
[00:46:29.280]or the current case challenging Akwa.
[00:46:33.320]Yeah. I mean, I thank you so much for bringing that up, Samantha,
[00:46:38.320]because even as there are pockets
[00:46:43.960]of people really working to try to repair the past and repair
[00:46:48.600]what happened in the past and even the repair of things that are going on now,
[00:46:52.920]there's this really strong counter movement
[00:46:57.280]and there are attacks on native sovereignty .
[00:47:00.920]And one of the greatest that you're referring to is the Supreme Court case
[00:47:05.080]that's before the court now about the Indian Child Welfare Act
[00:47:09.840]and attempts to overturn that, which is an attack on native sovereignty.
[00:47:14.680]And so it to me, it's
[00:47:18.160]all the more important to highlight
[00:47:21.960]the ways that individuals and communities and grassroots
[00:47:26.400]people can be doing something in their own community
[00:47:29.800]to learn about the history of their own place, and also to find out
[00:47:36.600]ways that they can get involved to make some form of redress, but also then
[00:47:42.280]to support indigenous people who are fighting for their sovereignty,
[00:47:46.000]fighting to keep laws like the Indian Child Welfare Act
[00:47:49.120]that are universally esteemed by tribal communities.
[00:47:53.560]So it's really important that you bring that out because there is
[00:47:57.960]this really strong other currents going on. Thank you.
[00:48:06.800]Another question from the zooms who?
[00:48:08.560]Dr. Regina Williams. And thank you, Dr. Jacobs.
[00:48:11.560]I admire your focus on meaningful
[00:48:13.200]restorative justice efforts rather than symbolic events and politics.
[00:48:17.400]What is your expectation and what is your hope, if not the same,
[00:48:21.240]regarding how Nebraska's political leadership will respond
[00:48:24.600]to a truth and reconciliation initiative?
[00:48:29.880]Oh, well, that's
[00:48:32.760]an interesting question, because many of you may have seen
[00:48:37.200]Walter Echo Hawk, who was visiting here about a year ago or a year ago
[00:48:42.480]April. He kicked off our reckoning and reconciliation
[00:48:45.600]in the Great Plains Conference,
[00:48:48.880]and he made a very moving
[00:48:53.680]plea for Nebraska to engage in truth and reconciliation.
[00:48:59.120]And since that time, he's been in touch with me and others about
[00:49:04.600]wanting the state legislature of Nebraska
[00:49:07.840]to adopt the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous people.
[00:49:12.640]He, as he's the president of the party
[00:49:15.160]nation and the planning nation, adopted that U.N. declaration.
[00:49:18.240]And they're trying to get all the states where the party ever lived to adopt it.
[00:49:22.440]So Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, Nebraska.
[00:49:26.000]And so, you know,
[00:49:28.840]it was kind of hard talking to Walter about it to say,
[00:49:32.760]I'm just not sure this is going to fly in Nebraska,
[00:49:35.480]in our state legislature, that we're going to be able to do this.
[00:49:39.440]But Walter has achieved some remarkable things in his long career.
[00:49:44.960]I mean, he got the state of Nebraska to repatriate.
[00:49:48.840]He's the one who got a law passed to repatriate
[00:49:52.280]the ancestral remains of native peoples in the state.
[00:49:56.040]And that was no small feat.
[00:49:57.480]So he's not deterred by this.
[00:50:01.040]But I guess in some ways,
[00:50:05.240]this kind of the sense that our legislature is not
[00:50:09.480]not a place that would be welcoming of this makes me think all the more
[00:50:14.120]that this is something we can do more in our own community of Lincoln,
[00:50:18.040]we can definitely do something at the university.
[00:50:21.880]But it's really remarkable, like some small towns in Nebraska
[00:50:25.760]are also, in my mind, practicing truth and reconciliation.
[00:50:29.560]The town of Dannenberg, Nebraska, where Roger Welsh lived,
[00:50:34.520]when Roger gave 60 acres of land back to the colony,
[00:50:38.200]they established a really strong bond between the city of Dannenberg,
[00:50:42.760]I think it was 800 residents and the planning nation
[00:50:47.880]and the city of Genoa, Nebraska, where the Genoa Indian School is.
[00:50:53.200]Residents there, non native residents,
[00:50:56.920]created a museum way back in 1990 about the school
[00:51:01.760]and they're still going strong. They host a reunion every year.
[00:51:05.400]So whereas even even the state
[00:51:08.880]level might be too high for us to engage in truth and reconciliation,
[00:51:12.960]but there are things we can do within our own communities.
[00:51:17.640]And sometimes those are more productive,
[00:51:21.080]I think. Thank you.
[00:51:27.200]I'm Julia by Margaret.
[00:51:28.600]Thank you so much for this wonderful talk.
[00:51:30.600]I'm actually going to keep pressing on the same theme
[00:51:34.040]and bring it down to the level of Lincoln. Right.
[00:51:36.920]Because I was struck by your opening land
[00:51:40.440]acknowledgment of the extent and
[00:51:44.000]and then the at the very end
[00:51:46.760]the the celebrations with the signing with the mayor
[00:51:52.960]there and Julia Baird and and noting that, like we are in the middle
[00:51:56.960]of a series of protests here in Lincoln over the approval of some of that land
[00:52:04.720]to be used for development, kind of over the very strong objections
[00:52:08.800]of native voices here in Lincoln and those who are seeking
[00:52:13.440]to recognize this past of
[00:52:16.360]of land theft and ways that we can not only
[00:52:20.720]meaningfully acknowledge it verbally, but really enact going forward.
[00:52:24.800]And so, you know, how can we find ways when there are resources involved? Right.
[00:52:30.880]You know, like that that seems to be the test case. Right?
[00:52:33.840]Like it's it's easy to say
[00:52:35.600]when there's nothing on the line, but then, you know, when there are actual,
[00:52:39.520]you know, like consequences to saying when you're giving back land, right.
[00:52:43.280]Which, you know, is a valuable resource.
[00:52:45.520]And it was very encouraging to hear your examples of this happening
[00:52:49.000]in smaller towns.
[00:52:50.440]But like, you know, we're in the middle of one of those examples now.
[00:52:53.680]So is there a way that the truth and reconciliation process can?
[00:53:00.520]Involve some kind of
[00:53:02.640]commitment not to commit
[00:53:05.960]the same kinds of errors going forward.
[00:53:09.000]Right. You know, are there ways, you know, to.
[00:53:14.880]Not only acknowledge the past, but to try to insist
[00:53:19.120]that it not be replicated in the following year in this case. Right.
[00:53:24.080]And are there other and therefore, anyways, you know, we here in this room,
[00:53:28.040]in our city of Lincoln, you can productively take this lesson
[00:53:32.760]and apply it at this moment to what's going on here immediately within the city.
[00:53:37.960]Yeah. Thanks, Julia, so much for that question.
[00:53:41.960]And if if there are people in the audience
[00:53:44.120]who aren't aware what Julia's talking about,
[00:53:47.520]I'll just briefly summarize it that
[00:53:50.960]there is a long time
[00:53:55.880]a sweat lodge, which is a religious ceremony that has been going on
[00:54:02.560]on the outskirts of the western edge of Wilderness Park,
[00:54:07.560]where the dirt road, first Avenue goes by.
[00:54:10.240]And they've been having these sweat lodges since the 1970s,
[00:54:14.440]and they are on private land, but they are threatened by a new development
[00:54:20.400]that's called Wilderness Crossing.
[00:54:22.320]That would be right across this dirt road and set up,
[00:54:26.160]you know, hundreds of residences.
[00:54:29.920]And so the native community, but also the environmental community
[00:54:33.520]here in Lincoln, has protested this and tried to get it stopped.
[00:54:37.200]And it's been a real mess
[00:54:41.080]because I think the primary.
[00:54:45.120]World of this is just this refusal
[00:54:49.600]to listen to Native people about this.
[00:54:53.840]When I Kevin is very involved in this, he's been one of the leaders
[00:54:57.560]of the protests.
[00:54:58.960]And when I hear him
[00:55:02.080]and Aaron Core and Renaissance City and other leaders of this movement talk,
[00:55:08.120]I never hear them say, you must not do this.
[00:55:12.240]Under no circumstance will we allow this to occur.
[00:55:15.440]It's more How come you're not listening to us?
[00:55:18.560]How come you don't even allow us to talk?
[00:55:20.720]How come you don't even allow it?
[00:55:22.240]You don't hear us.
[00:55:23.160]You don't provide a forum
[00:55:25.760]to have a discussion about why this is so much concern to us.
[00:55:30.200]Why do you just run roughshod over our concerns?
[00:55:34.400]And so I think this is a really important issue
[00:55:37.760]because a lot of people pointed out, well,
[00:55:39.560]isn't it weird that the mayor, on the one hand, is supporting this development,
[00:55:43.360]but on the other, she's willing to issue this proclamation.
[00:55:47.840]So I think there's a whole bunch of things going on there. And.
[00:55:50.400]And one you inadvertently Julia brought up
[00:55:54.280]one of those five principles for healing and it's
[00:55:58.640]called the easy way to think about it is never again promises
[00:56:05.720]that this will not that there's a more formal way of putting it.
[00:56:10.760]I can't remember, but never again.
[00:56:12.080]You get that to promise we will never again engage in this.
[00:56:17.240]And that's the real sticking point that I've seen in Canada and Australia.
[00:56:23.160]They're willing to do all these things, make compensation.
[00:56:26.680]They're willing to put money into healing and rehabilitation.
[00:56:31.000]They're willing to have, you know,
[00:56:34.680]these apologies and big, huge truth and reconciliation commissions,
[00:56:38.480]but they're not willing to commit to never again.
[00:56:41.800]And so it's one of the things that I think is a really good idea, is
[00:56:47.120]if we are working together on something like this in our own city,
[00:56:51.960]is trying to bring that up constantly.
[00:56:56.200]And the other thing that I think is a lesson from this,
[00:57:00.840]and I think you're really right on there, Julia,
[00:57:03.040]is that a lot of people, settlers
[00:57:06.400]as a first step, they're willing to do something very symbolic.
[00:57:11.040]So, you know, you've heard a million land
[00:57:13.320]acknowledgments and the mayor's willing to make a proclamation.
[00:57:19.600]And you know, part of me, the cynical part of me is like,
[00:57:24.080]you know, like that's not enough.
[00:57:26.800]And, you know, and and almost to, like, throw up my hands and say,
[00:57:31.040]nothing's ever going to come of this.
[00:57:32.720]But the less cynical part of me says that's a really important first step.
[00:57:37.480]And if you can get settlers there,
[00:57:40.360]maybe we can eventually move them to the next step
[00:57:44.120]where they're willing to consider doing something
[00:57:47.640]action oriented or they're willing to make a commitment to never again.
[00:57:53.840]And that was I guess that's another thing that really surprised me in this work, is
[00:57:57.640]I started out thinking that those symbolic things were useless and futile.
[00:58:03.000]But now I don't think that at all. I think that they're part of.
[00:58:08.480]Part of all the things that we need to do to bring healing,
[00:58:11.360]because if you do reparations without apologies, they don't mean a whole lot.
[00:58:16.920]And if you do apologies
[00:58:20.600]without never again, they don't mean a whole lot. So.
[00:58:25.280]I can just go on and on about all this stuff.
[00:58:27.480]I just love it. And I just I just find it so
[00:58:32.000]fascinating to really think about
[00:58:35.800]how we can work together to bring healing and justice to indigenous peoples.
[00:58:41.720]But are there are there other questions?
[00:58:46.240]Of course there are.
[00:58:49.360]Yeah. I was just wondering, since you and El is a land grant institution,
[00:58:53.800]so wouldn't it be great if you and El would be
[00:58:57.040]part of the giving land back?
[00:59:01.000]Is there anything in the works that you were aware of?
[00:59:06.120]There are many of us who are working on that.
[00:59:10.160]There's nothing I wouldn't go so far to say.
[00:59:14.120]There's something in the works, but there are people working on it.
[00:59:18.800]So when the otro Missouri came,
[00:59:22.120]we had to meet with university folks and a lot of what they spoke
[00:59:27.040]with the university folks about was wanting to create more of a
[00:59:32.080]bridge between their community and the university
[00:59:35.920]so that more Missouri kids could come here and especially come here
[00:59:40.920]with free tuition and with a full ride.
[00:59:45.920]But once they were here, people started talking.
[00:59:49.880]Well, as you know,
[00:59:51.280]the university owns a lot of public land or the university owns a lot of land.
[00:59:55.880]Could it give back some land to the Missouri or other tribal nations and
[01:00:04.360]somebody in the community?
[01:00:05.520]Mike Farrell made the suggestion that we should return
[01:00:08.920]a nine mile prairie autonomous area.
[01:00:12.000]And when he he just sent this in an email to me and some other people,
[01:00:15.640]and I thought, oh, that's they're not going to take that seriously.
[01:00:19.440]I thought my time, you know, that.
[01:00:21.760]But I was surprised
[01:00:24.120]because several administrators wrote back to him and said, you know,
[01:00:28.160]we should consider this, we should really think about this.
[01:00:31.520]Maybe not nine mile prairie, but maybe something else.
[01:00:34.960]So in our work in trying to return some land to the OTU Missouri,
[01:00:39.800]we're trying to pursue lots of different options.
[01:00:43.000]So we're working with the Watch the Audubon Society
[01:00:45.680]about possibly purchasing land and then returning it or we're
[01:00:50.400]trying to push the university on this as well.
[01:00:54.120]We're trying to think if there's some way to
[01:00:58.440]at the same time as we protest what's going on at any state prayer camp.
[01:01:03.000]We're also trying to think, is this a way that we could
[01:01:05.600]eventually return land to the Missouri?
[01:01:09.200]So there's a lot of different avenues,
[01:01:12.360]but nothing is that far along yet. So.
[01:01:20.680]Thank you. This picks up.
[01:01:22.480]Excuse me. This picks up on the previous question.
[01:01:25.880]And I wonder if you could sort of just dream outloud with us, Margaret,
[01:01:30.480]about how you could imagine
[01:01:33.920]indigent izing the education
[01:01:37.160]that we offer here at this land grant institution.
[01:01:41.360]I know that you know this, but we have one tenure line
[01:01:47.480]professor currently.
[01:01:50.320]There's teaching and research active in Indigenous studies.
[01:01:54.400]He's also a boarding school survivor
[01:01:57.120]and we're hiring now for two additional tenure track people.
[01:02:01.360]You're helping with that in Indigenous studies.
[01:02:04.120]But when we think about like transforming
[01:02:07.960]the campus so that it's an actively
[01:02:11.240]welcoming place for Indigenous students,
[01:02:15.800]Indigenous faculty, members of the Indigenous community.
[01:02:19.520]Like what are some things that we could all be working towards here
[01:02:24.880]at UC now, in addition to the effort to restore actual land?
[01:02:29.800]How could we transform the education that we provide and what would that entail?
[01:02:36.400]Well, I love. I love that question.
[01:02:40.080]And it's funny, Joy, because you're one of my favorite people to dream big.
[01:02:46.280]We've had some great conversations and you call it big skying, right?
[01:02:50.600]Blue sky. I love that.
[01:02:54.440]So the first thing that comes to my mind is something they've done in Canada,
[01:03:00.080]which is they recognize that
[01:03:03.600]because of a history of colonization, there are a lot, not a lot of indigenous
[01:03:08.600]people out there with PhDs who can be hired
[01:03:12.280]in ten year line roles.
[01:03:15.480]But there are a lot of indigenous people out there who have incredible knowledge
[01:03:20.440]of their own cultures or their languages, of their histories,
[01:03:25.920]who are incredible resources and have a lot to teach
[01:03:32.080]you and our students.
[01:03:33.200]You went out faculty, you and our staff.
[01:03:35.480]So in Canada they've created these appointments of indigenous
[01:03:41.280]knowledge keepers and compensating them properly,
[01:03:47.000]and they have appointments at the university so that they're brought in
[01:03:50.400]to help educate the students, help educate the institution as a whole.
[01:03:56.360]But that's one thing I think of.
[01:03:59.240]And then you and I got to meet with a wonderful Canadian.
[01:04:03.840]Well, she's actually American.
[01:04:05.840]She's Anishinaabe.
[01:04:07.160]But she works and teaches at the University of British Columbia,
[01:04:11.320]Cheryl Lightfoot.
[01:04:13.080]And we got to meet with her team in September.
[01:04:16.360]And she has gotten her university
[01:04:19.680]to adopt the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples,
[01:04:23.520]as well as the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Action Plan.
[01:04:29.960]And that has led that university
[01:04:34.040]to hire lots and lots more Indigenous people,
[01:04:38.840]really indigenous eyes, that institution.
[01:04:42.720]So there are a lot of like things we really could be doing at UNL as,
[01:04:48.160]as she said it beyond the idea
[01:04:49.960]of giving land back, but also thinking about ways to.
[01:04:56.080]Make the university a more welcoming place for indigenous people.
[01:04:59.800]I'm just I marvel at somebody like Ted Hubler,
[01:05:03.520]who's the tribal extension coordinator who was recently hired.
[01:05:08.480]Already, he's transformed the university.
[01:05:11.280]He's set up a garden on East Campus
[01:05:15.320]where he's growing food with K-through-12 native students in the community.
[01:05:19.880]He comes in every Saturday morning
[01:05:23.400]and leads a class with them
[01:05:26.760]and has them doing work
[01:05:28.880]in the garden and then harvesting it and making food from it.
[01:05:32.360]I mean, that's a remarkable thing when we invite indigenous
[01:05:35.640]people to come to the university in that capacity.
[01:05:38.680]It's going to transform us and it's going to benefit all of us.
[01:05:43.320]So thank you so much for that question.
[01:05:48.680]Thanks so much, Dr.
[01:05:50.600]Jacobs, for this wonderful talk and for getting us all to dream
[01:05:55.120]about ways forward for reconciliation and finding common ground.
[01:05:59.120]And thank you all so much for coming, and I hope to see you next month,
[01:06:02.680]March 28, at the panel discussion.
[01:06:06.160]Thank you. Have a good evening.

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In Search of Reconciliation on America's Stolen Lands

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