Book Launch: 'Birding While Indian' by Tom Gannon

Institute for Ethnic Studies Author

06/30/2023 Added

209 Plays

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The book launch for the new book, "Birding While Indian," by Tom Gannon (English, Ethnic Studies).

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[00:00:10.140]Thank you so much for coming out tonight.
[00:00:11.730]I'm Leslie, we're here at Francie & Finch Bookshop.
[00:00:14.910]Megan is here with us also.
[00:00:16.950]And again, welcome to the shop
[00:00:18.450]and for this event this evening.
[00:00:21.090]First off, I need to make a little announcement.
[00:00:23.310]It's kind of a, well, it's actually, it's a good news thing,
[00:00:26.010]but we are all out of books.
[00:00:28.860]The publisher is going into a new print run,
[00:00:32.070]which is wonderful for the author,
[00:00:33.840]so we're really excited for him.
[00:00:36.427]And we have a shipment coming in the next week or so,
[00:00:38.700]and the author has also offered to come in
[00:00:40.920]and sign all those copies.
[00:00:42.240]So if you don't already have your own copy,
[00:00:44.850]please see Megan at the counter before you leave
[00:00:47.370]so she can take your order,
[00:00:48.600]and we'll make sure that you get a signed copy
[00:00:50.460]as soon as they arrive.
[00:00:51.960]So, again, good news, good news story,
[00:00:55.020]but let me go ahead and get started.
[00:00:56.340]We have a couple of people here that I need to introduce,
[00:00:58.710]and then I'll be turning over the microphone to them.
[00:01:01.500]As I mentioned, we are live streaming this,
[00:01:03.720]so Mike is filming.
[00:01:04.950]We have some people that have joined online,
[00:01:06.750]so I'll be monitoring some questions,
[00:01:09.210]and there'll be time here for Q&A after the talk also.
[00:01:13.290]So kind of think about what you wanna chat about,
[00:01:15.450]which I think will probably be a lot.
[00:01:17.760]So but without further ado,
[00:01:21.960]I wanna introduce Joy Castro, who is here tonight,
[00:01:25.410]who's gonna be in conversation with Thomas Gannon.
[00:01:28.740]And Joy, as I think you all know,
[00:01:30.170]is an award-winning author of seven books.
[00:01:33.030]She's the professor of English studies
[00:01:34.710]at the University of Nebraska here in Lincoln,
[00:01:37.710]and she directs the Institute for Ethnic Studies.
[00:01:41.490]Joy is gonna be speaking with Thomas Gannon.
[00:01:44.190]Tom is an associate professor of English and ethnic studies
[00:01:47.490]at the University of Nebraska here in Lincoln.
[00:01:50.430]He's a lifelong birder.
[00:01:51.870]You'll see his amazing photographs
[00:01:53.790]on the wall up there and in the book.
[00:01:55.950]He's an inhabitant of the Great Plains.
[00:01:58.290]He's an enrolled member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe,
[00:02:01.500]and he hails from the Black Mountain Hills of South Dakota.
[00:02:04.980]So with that, we're gonna turn it over
[00:02:06.450]to Joy and Tom, thank you.
[00:02:08.704](audience applauding)
[00:02:14.970]Thank you all so much for coming out.
[00:02:17.070]I'm gonna introduce Tom and his book.
[00:02:19.140]We're gonna have some conversation,
[00:02:22.170]and then we'll have questions and answers.
[00:02:24.480]Can everybody hear okay? Does it need to be louder?
[00:02:27.210]Is it, ah, there we go.
[00:02:29.190]Okay, yeah, wonderful, okay.
[00:02:33.960]So especially because Tom is a brilliant Lakota author,
[00:02:39.480]it's especially important for us to say
[00:02:41.970]that we're currently on the homelands of the Lakota people,
[00:02:45.630]along with the Pawnee, Ponka, Oto-Missouria, Omaha,
[00:02:50.100]Dakota, Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Kaw Peoples,
[00:02:53.340]as well as the forcibly relocated Ho-Chunk,
[00:02:56.520]Iowa and Sac and Fox Peoples.
[00:03:01.080]Land acknowledgements are not sufficient,
[00:03:03.810]but they are a start, so.
[00:03:08.160]So is there a little bit of buzz with the mic?
[00:03:12.060]It's okay? Okay.
[00:03:13.500]I love this book.
[00:03:14.400]I was completely thrilled to read this book.
[00:03:17.160]It's brilliant, it's stunning, it's brainy,
[00:03:20.430]it's emotionally wrenching, and it's hilarious, it's funny.
[00:03:25.064](audience laughs)
[00:03:26.430]It's just so super smart.
[00:03:28.170]I loved it from the minute I started reading it,
[00:03:30.510]and I'm thrilled that we were able
[00:03:32.610]to acquire it for "Machete,"
[00:03:35.040]a line in innovative creative nonfiction
[00:03:38.100]at the Ohio State University Press.
[00:03:40.830]And the associate editor is with us today, Rachel Cochran,
[00:03:44.580]and she had a hand in helping to shape this book,
[00:03:48.990]so I'm really grateful that she's here.
[00:03:51.150]But so this is a really fascinating text.
[00:03:54.180]It's a text about cultural hybridity,
[00:03:57.090]and it's a multimodal text.
[00:03:59.520]So it includes prose, it includes a lot of facts.
[00:04:04.080]It includes poetry and photographs,
[00:04:07.140]some beautiful photographs of birds that Tom took,
[00:04:10.620]and then also family photographs as well.
[00:04:13.920]So it's a really interesting blend of text and image
[00:04:18.750]and different kinds of writing.
[00:04:21.510]Tom, as Leslie mentioned, is also a fantastic professor.
[00:04:25.080]He's an award-winning teacher at the University of Nebraska,
[00:04:28.320]a wonderful colleague.
[00:04:29.520]He's the associate director
[00:04:30.960]of the Institute for Ethnic Studies,
[00:04:32.790]and he's the head of the Indigenous studies program,
[00:04:36.810]which is a very small program
[00:04:38.700]at the University of Nebraska but getting larger.
[00:04:41.906]But I'm the head.
[00:04:42.739]But he's the head. (laughs)
[00:04:44.000](audience laughs)
[00:04:46.380]So the book also hit me on a really personal level.
[00:04:50.580]We have a lot- I'm sorry.
[00:04:51.690]Yeah, we have a lot of really painful things in common,
[00:04:55.440]and some of them are wrenching and unfortunate,
[00:04:58.800]including things like domestic violence,
[00:05:01.470]growing up impoverished,
[00:05:03.690]dealing with the impact of racism upon our families,
[00:05:07.350]and some other really tough things.
[00:05:10.020]And so the book hit me at a gut level
[00:05:12.540]that not all of the "Machete" books have,
[00:05:14.640]and so thank you for surviving to write it.
[00:05:18.780]I just really appreciate that.
[00:05:20.580]I couldn't respect a colleague more, so.
[00:05:24.150]I wanna start by asking about structure.
[00:05:27.000]So the book is multi-layered,
[00:05:29.730]and Tom has talked about it elsewhere
[00:05:31.950]as being composed of I think four strata,
[00:05:36.810]one of which is fairly traditional memoir elements,
[00:05:42.210]so personal narrative, autobiographical material,
[00:05:46.110]things about family,
[00:05:47.100]some beautiful work about your daughter, Emma,
[00:05:50.490]really lovely, so there's that layer.
[00:05:52.350]There's the layer of birding.
[00:05:53.880]So it's a record of life looks of,
[00:05:56.880]and there is the editor of the Ohio State University Press.
[00:06:00.180]Wanted to shout you out earlier. Thank you, Kristen.
[00:06:08.070]What was I saying?
[00:06:09.540](audience laughs)
[00:06:10.860]You were talking about my four strata.
[00:06:13.800]Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, and so then the life looks
[00:06:16.020]of all these birds that Tom has seen
[00:06:18.750]starting in 1965 going all the way to 2018,
[00:06:22.740]just these gorgeous spots of time, as you quote Wordsworth.
[00:06:26.258]So you're saying I'm old, yeah.
[00:06:28.490]Also that, super old, and then an element
[00:06:32.280]that you call Christo,
[00:06:34.140]a critique of Christo-Custer colonialism,
[00:06:37.320]which is the imperialist ideology that still dominates
[00:06:42.420]the Great Plains, the Northern Great Plains,
[00:06:44.460]and then another stratum as well.
[00:06:46.230]So I just wonder if you could talk about that structure
[00:06:48.390]and how you organized all those things to work together.
[00:06:53.310]Yeah, so let me just back up and reiterate the four,
[00:06:57.570]the four levels, four sandstone layers, let's call them.
[00:07:01.260]And so there is that ostensible plot line
[00:07:04.560]of the book, just birding.
[00:07:06.510]I'm out there birding, writing it down, writing about it.
[00:07:09.570]The second level though, is, you know,
[00:07:11.190]I grew up, you know, poor part-Indian boy
[00:07:14.700]in the Black Mountain Hills, Dakota, doing that birding.
[00:07:18.390]Third level, I grew up in the Great Plains
[00:07:21.570]in which the 19th century history is the Indian Wars.
[00:07:26.130]And so that's another level
[00:07:27.600]that subsumes the actual nice little birding hobby
[00:07:32.460]I got going on the top.
[00:07:33.990]Below that is the land itself, you know,
[00:07:35.880]the ecological concerns, the very reality of the place,
[00:07:39.870]the land, the birds, the other species,
[00:07:42.990]which takes us back at the first level with birds.
[00:07:46.050]But when we're talking about
[00:07:47.040]what I call Christo-Custer colonialism,
[00:07:48.900]that begins with that third level of history and politics,
[00:07:53.490]19th century Indian Wars,
[00:07:55.830]and it conflicts with the first level,
[00:07:58.800]which should be this nice little avocation.
[00:08:02.077]"Oh, I'm gonna list the birds I see.
[00:08:03.780]I'm gonna go to the state park,"
[00:08:06.030]but it turns out it's called Custer State Park.
[00:08:09.030]Turns out it's called Indian Cave State Park.
[00:08:13.770]That complicates things.
[00:08:15.870]So that third level and first level of the book,
[00:08:18.330]they create this ironic tension
[00:08:20.970]that runs throughout the various sections of the book.
[00:08:26.130]And I mean, you get to just Lincoln.
[00:08:32.100]I wake up in Lincoln, Nebraska,
[00:08:33.300]and say, "I'm gonna go birding."
[00:08:35.070]Where do I go? I go to Pawnee Lake.
[00:08:39.660]I go to Stagecoach Lake.
[00:08:42.716]I go to Conestoga Lake. I go-
[00:08:47.670]Pioneers Park.
[00:08:48.803]Pioneers Park, good one.
[00:08:51.810]I'm at Conestoga, and I keep waiting for Hoss Cartwright
[00:08:56.130]to show up and say, "Ya from around here, boy?"
[00:09:00.154]And, you know, sometimes I feel like I'm not.
[00:09:02.790]And so that's where the colonial discourse stuff
[00:09:07.500]gets intermixed with the bare-level plot line
[00:09:12.752]of the birding narrative.
[00:09:14.940]And as far as for the Christo part, of course,
[00:09:16.980]the third chapter is the central chapter
[00:09:18.590]of the book, I think.
[00:09:19.500]It's my year in the Catholic Indian boarding school
[00:09:22.200]outside of Pine Ridge, South Dakota.
[00:09:24.720]And I mean, the Christo-Custer colonialism was,
[00:09:30.247]"Let's talk about Jesus and love at the end of a gun,
[00:09:34.830]at the end of a march onto the reservation."
[00:09:38.340]And so that's the political tension.
[00:09:41.220]I apologize for all of that.
[00:09:42.330]I'll take it all back if you want me to.
[00:09:45.690]That underlies the ostensible
[00:09:48.157]"Oh, here's another birder narrative."
[00:09:51.120]Yeah, yeah.
[00:09:51.990]Should I stop doing this? Okay.
[00:09:53.929]It's okay. (laughs)
[00:09:56.130]I don't know if I told you this, but,
[00:09:58.350]so I've had the privilege to teach that third chapter
[00:10:01.470]at the graduate level at the University of Nebraska twice.
[00:10:04.860]And this most recent time,
[00:10:08.490]students wanted to spend a whole day just breaking it down,
[00:10:13.320]charting it on the board, all the different levels,
[00:10:15.630]all the different things.
[00:10:16.620]I think we had like six different colors to try to organize
[00:10:21.180]what all was going on in that chapter.
[00:10:23.670]It's just so brilliantly put together.
[00:10:26.190]Structuralist view.
[00:10:27.090]Yeah, yeah, structuralist fun.
[00:10:30.450]But the book is also a really passionate love letter
[00:10:33.960]to the Northern Great Plains, to the land, to the birds,
[00:10:38.400]and I wonder if you could read a little bit
[00:10:41.280]that exemplifies that.
[00:10:43.020]I think it's like page 127 starts there.
[00:10:46.500]Oh, that's where you want me to go, okay.
[00:10:48.627]Yeah, yeah. (audience laughs)
[00:10:50.910]Well, I seem to have that marked.
[00:10:53.850](audience laughs)
[00:10:56.010]Yeah, this is a short little snippet about a place
[00:10:58.890]called the lake beside Lakeside, Nebraska,
[00:11:02.070]and Lakeside, Nebraska, Highway 2,
[00:11:04.800]you know, almost to Alliance.
[00:11:06.390]And there's a lake beside Lakeside.
[00:11:07.800]And I always wondered what the name that lake was,
[00:11:09.990]like The Lake Beside,
[00:11:13.440]but it's largely about avocets and black-necked stilts
[00:11:18.390]and this middle bird there in flight with a long bill.
[00:11:26.857]"Nebraska Highway 2 is the most well-known
[00:11:29.040]scenic alternative to driving across Nebraska
[00:11:31.530]if you wanna avoid the soporific experience
[00:11:34.200]of Interstate 80.
[00:11:35.760]In fact, a Google search just informed me
[00:11:38.160]that Highway 2 is now officially called
[00:11:40.080]the Sand Hills Journey Scenic Byway.
[00:11:43.260]Such byways are wonderful for back-road birding.
[00:11:46.500]I've driven 400 miles around North Central Nebraska
[00:11:49.170]without hitting a town with more than 500 people or so.
[00:11:53.280]The best part of Highway 2 for birding
[00:11:55.860]lies between Hyannis, don't blink, and Alliance.
[00:12:01.620]There, the sand dune habitat is pleasantly pock-marked
[00:12:04.830]by numerous small, shallow lakes,
[00:12:07.710]and in the spring, there were also many stretches
[00:12:09.570]of sheet water, temporary standing water from recent rains,
[00:12:13.320]along both sides of the road.
[00:12:16.530]Well, that is, until the drought.
[00:12:20.160]So it's ideal for waterbirds.
[00:12:22.320]I discovered my favorite spot along the Highway 2
[00:12:25.080]pretty much by accident on my first trip through.
[00:12:27.660]One of the larger lakes was right next to a small town.
[00:12:30.420]A convenient back road behind the town accessed the lake.
[00:12:33.690]The town was propitiously named Lakeside.
[00:12:37.450]'This has got to be good,' I thought, and it was.
[00:12:39.990]Of the nine species that I quickly recorded there,
[00:12:42.180]four were lifers.
[00:12:43.680]That is, the first time I'd ever seen that species.
[00:12:47.100]There was the willet, a large plain gray sandpiper
[00:12:50.070]best known for it's call, 'pill-will-willet,
[00:12:52.317]pill-will-willet,' well, sort of.
[00:12:56.010]There was the ruddy duck with its fat clownish colored face
[00:12:58.920]and bill and its short spike of a tail.
[00:13:01.680]There were lots of eared grebes
[00:13:02.970]with their golden wisps of ear feathers
[00:13:05.130]that seemed like psychic emanations in the proper sunlight.
[00:13:09.570]And there were black-necked stilts
[00:13:12.960]loudly cavorting along the western shore
[00:13:14.940]with their usual American avocet companions,
[00:13:17.370]their accomplices in raucousness, two of the largest,
[00:13:20.970]most stunning shorebirds of North America.
[00:13:24.090]Tall and thin and black and white,
[00:13:27.090]the stilt is most notable for its extremely long legs,
[00:13:30.090]thus its name, and the fact that these legs transgress
[00:13:33.300]the laws of human nature, as it were,
[00:13:36.540]by bending the wrong way at the knee.
[00:13:39.153]This joint buckles backwards as if the lower half of the leg
[00:13:42.660]were one long forward-protruding foot.
[00:13:46.890]This lake is now an annual, sometimes bi-annual"
[00:13:50.460]in fact, I was just there two weeks ago, "stop for me.
[00:13:54.600]Several pairs of ruddy ducks remain through the summer,
[00:13:57.030]as do about 40 to 50 eared grebes,
[00:13:59.640]although eBird keeps questioning
[00:14:01.440]my apparently hyperbolic numbers.
[00:14:05.160]But the convocation of stilts and avocets
[00:14:07.290]has always been the highlight.
[00:14:09.690]The last few springs, however,
[00:14:11.730]were missing the black-necked stilts.
[00:14:14.610]I imagined against all human good sense
[00:14:17.490]that their avocet buddies missed them as much as I did."
[00:14:22.590]Yeah, thank you. Thank you.
[00:14:24.990]Nebraska Tourism ought to know about the book,
[00:14:27.480]but they'll be surprised
[00:14:29.550]when they read some other sections of it.
[00:14:32.460]Yes.
[00:14:33.663]Yeah, yeah.
[00:14:34.701](audience laughs)
[00:14:35.534]So you've referred to the book as an anti-memoir,
[00:14:39.240]and in fact, very few memoirs include 110 footnotes
[00:14:44.310]and a list of works cited, so in addition to-
[00:14:48.330]I'm sorry.
[00:14:49.163]Yeah (laughs), in addition to, is there somebody outside?
[00:14:56.880]No, I thought there was someone wanting to come in.
[00:15:00.330]In addition to quoting and citing numerous
[00:15:04.380]Native American authors of literature and theorists,
[00:15:09.030]Gerald Wiesner, Vine Deloria, Linda Hogan,
[00:15:12.630]one of your favorite writers comes up often, Mary Crow Dog.
[00:15:16.230]There are also a number
[00:15:17.910]of what you call whitestream authors.
[00:15:20.100]And I should say that Tom's first book
[00:15:22.110]was a book of literary criticism,
[00:15:24.750]British Romantics and Native American authors on birds.
[00:15:29.880]So it's a scholarly book, but also ecologists,
[00:15:36.120]historians, anthropologists,
[00:15:40.140]and even primary historical documents
[00:15:43.380]like the journals of Lewis and Clark and Custer.
[00:15:46.710]So you go right into the belly of the beast.
[00:15:48.030]My heroes.
[00:15:48.863]Your heroes, yeah, yeah.
[00:15:50.070]So, you know, I'm wondering about the impact
[00:15:52.620]of your day job as a professor and a scholar.
[00:15:57.030]Like, how did that affect
[00:15:58.440]the way you constructed this memoir?
[00:16:02.430]Not a bit, no, no.
[00:16:05.700]So I've spent 20 years teaching Native American literature
[00:16:08.550]at UNL, and the authors have,
[00:16:12.450]teaching Native lit has completely colored this book.
[00:16:16.334]You know, as Joy says, I quote them often.
[00:16:18.870]And I can't teach Native American lit
[00:16:21.090]without making the courses also courses in ecology,
[00:16:26.070]you know, courses in the studies of other species
[00:16:28.530]because the great Native writers
[00:16:32.640]are like this with the natural realm,
[00:16:35.040]I don't wanna romanticize it and everything,
[00:16:37.380]with other animals, and especially with the birds.
[00:16:41.670]I mean, it begins with the classic of Native American lit,
[00:16:44.227]"Black Elk Speaks."
[00:16:45.390]You know, to me, the greatest character in there
[00:16:46.710]is the spotted eagle, which in case you don't know,
[00:16:50.460]is an immature golden eagle.
[00:16:52.080]It took some years of research for me
[00:16:53.730]to figure that out, but finally did.
[00:16:57.600]Ah, Jim Loney's, "Death of,"
[00:17:00.360]James Welch's "Death of Jim Loney,"
[00:17:02.100]there's this hallucinatory dark bird
[00:17:03.870]that runs throughout the book as this symbol, ick.
[00:17:08.080]But that always fascinated me,
[00:17:10.830]and of course it shows up in this book
[00:17:12.600]about birding for some reason.
[00:17:14.130]You get Leslie Silko saying things like,
[00:17:17.587]"How can you write about birds without being political?"
[00:17:21.090]And to me, that should be the motto
[00:17:22.560]of this entire book, because you can't.
[00:17:26.550]I tried, well, for like two minutes.
[00:17:30.158](audience laughs)
[00:17:32.398]Yeah, yeah.
[00:17:33.231]But finally, my day job, Native lit,
[00:17:38.580]taught me that you can write a book
[00:17:41.760]that isn't just a monolithic genre.
[00:17:44.838]I mean, I have the example
[00:17:45.671]of N. Scott Momaday's "Way to Rainy Mountain."
[00:17:47.640]I mean, it's part myth, Kiowa mythology.
[00:17:50.820]It's part history, and it's part memoir
[00:17:54.600]of N. Scott Momaday himself,
[00:17:55.920]and so that's kind of a model for me.
[00:17:58.230]But then Silko has, her fiction is overrun with poetry.
[00:18:04.597]"Storyteller," one of the greatest
[00:18:06.510]mixed genre books of all time.
[00:18:08.310]I mean, it's shaped like this,
[00:18:09.420]so it's already god-awful Frankenstein of a book.
[00:18:14.010]And it's poetry, it's fiction, nonfiction,
[00:18:19.770]and lots of photographs.
[00:18:22.260]And you know, I imagine an online version
[00:18:25.740]of my book having lots of photographs.
[00:18:28.230]You know, this is the University Press,
[00:18:30.900]so I was confined to a few black and whites.
[00:18:32.550]But I want this book to be much more multimedial,
[00:18:37.560]but as it is, it's a mixed genre book,
[00:18:40.410]which is fitting for mixed-blood writers
[00:18:43.110]like Momaday, Silko, James Welch, and me.
[00:18:49.080]And you, yeah, yeah.
[00:18:52.380]So even with all of the scholarly apparatus
[00:18:55.860]that's in the book, it still manages
[00:18:57.810]to be incredibly moving emotionally.
[00:19:01.260]I mentioned the domestic violence.
[00:19:02.850]You mentioned the residential school,
[00:19:07.320]and then there was physical abuse that you and your brother
[00:19:10.560]endured there at the hands of the Catholic staff.
[00:19:13.350]And then the runaway attempt,
[00:19:16.050]and then you even write about a suicide attempt.
[00:19:20.340]And one of my favorite emotionally moving parts
[00:19:23.700]is about your mother.
[00:19:25.230]Like, every time you write about your mother,
[00:19:27.450]it's really beautiful.
[00:19:28.800]Thank you.
[00:19:29.633]Yeah, would you be willing to read the section,
[00:19:33.480]the longer section about your mother?
[00:19:35.760]I may have that marked.
[00:19:45.637]"Marie is my mom's name, or rather, it's Genevieve,
[00:19:49.590]but no one ever called her that as far as I know.
[00:19:52.410]Marie is her middle name.
[00:19:54.180]A divorcee who entered the workforce
[00:19:56.280]by the time I was in fourth grade
[00:19:58.050]in order to get us off welfare,
[00:20:00.210]she worked at Job Service of South Dakota until retirement,
[00:20:03.660]while pretty much raising us four
[00:20:04.980]devil's spawn sons on her own.
[00:20:08.220]In September 1985,
[00:20:10.140]she was named Indian Employee of the Month
[00:20:12.660]by an entity called the Indian-White Relations Committee.
[00:20:18.630]And the certificate states the award
[00:20:21.270]is for 'serving as a role model
[00:20:23.190]for both Indian and white communities.'
[00:20:25.530]I kidded her at the time
[00:20:27.180]that she probably didn't have a lot of competition."
[00:20:29.828]Jesus, oh, God, I'm rotten kid.
[00:20:34.987]"But I guess it's really not that funny.
[00:20:38.280]One might ask why they even needed
[00:20:40.200]an Indian-White Relations Committee.
[00:20:42.660]Well, Western South Dakota was,
[00:20:44.700]and still is, a pretty racist place,
[00:20:47.970]and with historically very few Black or Latinx folks
[00:20:51.510]to be racist towards, it's all about the Indian here
[00:20:55.020]as the sons and daughters of Scandinavian,
[00:20:56.850]German, and Irish rancher settlers
[00:20:58.860]moved to the nearest urban center, Rapid City,
[00:21:02.310]and maintained much of their traditional deep enmity
[00:21:04.770]towards the local Natives, an ethnic culture war
[00:21:07.920]that may have peaked with Custer versus Crazy Horse
[00:21:10.710]but that continues to this day.
[00:21:13.470]Speaking about the very decades of my mom's racial travails,
[00:21:17.220]Mary Crow Dog has testified,
[00:21:19.410]'In South Dakota, white kids learn to be racist
[00:21:21.300]almost before they learn to walk.'
[00:21:24.390]Likewise, in Susan Power's 'Roofwalker,'
[00:21:26.490]a great collection of fiction,
[00:21:28.500]one of her Native characters says,
[00:21:30.570]'Whites in Rapid City feel about Indians
[00:21:33.030]the way the KKK and Mississippi feels about Blacks.'
[00:21:38.460]So in an official Rapid City press release
[00:21:41.220]about the award, Mom's supervisor is quoted,
[00:21:45.420]'Gannon is an extremely conscientious
[00:21:47.700]and dedicated employee.
[00:21:50.550]Furthermore, she's totally dependable and reliable.'
[00:21:56.400]Ouch, you know, of course any comparable
[00:21:58.770]White Man of the Month would need no such emphasis
[00:22:01.080]on dependability and reliability.
[00:22:04.530]You know, translation, 'We found an Indian
[00:22:06.630]who shows up for work.'
[00:22:09.810]Their supervisor continued,
[00:22:11.760]'Gannon is a single parent raised by four boys.'"
[00:22:16.274]Raised by four boys.
[00:22:18.706]"'And raised four boys.'"
[00:22:19.680]Yeah, that would've been strange.
[00:22:22.387]"'While no easy task, this has given her a work ethic
[00:22:26.280]we could all use,'" Jesus.
[00:22:30.157]"The subtle condensation still rankles."
[00:22:35.940]Condescension, I mean.
[00:22:37.417]"Mom herself put on a brave face about it.
[00:22:39.840]In her own words, quoted in the release,
[00:22:42.003]'You can't be a quitter,
[00:22:43.890]otherwise you're always running away from yourself.
[00:22:46.170]20 years ago, there weren't the opportunities
[00:22:47.910]for Indians that we have today.'
[00:22:50.970]And yet, I remember several times my mom coming home sobbing
[00:22:54.510]because her workmates, including supervisors,
[00:22:57.240]had called her squaw.
[00:22:59.640]Up there with the N-word, it's probably the worst word
[00:23:01.800]one can call a Native.
[00:23:03.780]It roughly means, 'You no-good savage, animalistic,
[00:23:06.180]horrible woman of color.'
[00:23:09.360]So yes, my mom used to come home from work bawling.
[00:23:13.920]There are no tears heavier than that.
[00:23:16.980]This racist job harassment happened well into the 1980s,
[00:23:20.430]and it was done by good old white males
[00:23:22.620]who I know actually considered Marie to be their friend
[00:23:27.120]and whom she considered her friend, which is crazy.
[00:23:31.230]She couldn't even tell them
[00:23:32.280]how much that awful wretched name hurt,
[00:23:34.980]and so she held her tears until she got home.
[00:23:38.790]Indian-White Relations Committee, indeed.
[00:23:43.920]Worst of all, I remember my own white dad
[00:23:45.990]calling my mom squaw many times
[00:23:47.820]during the few preschool years
[00:23:49.740]I was lucky enough to have them both together.e
[00:23:53.040]For better or worse, I've repressed most of the specifics
[00:23:55.440]of these dreaded racist, primal scenes," geez.
[00:24:00.570]Yeah, thank you, thanks.
[00:24:02.880]And you include a really beautiful photograph
[00:24:06.240]of your mother, she's quite lovely.
[00:24:08.431]Thank you. Thank you, yeah, yeah.
[00:24:10.410]So in addition to being wrenching,
[00:24:13.140]the book is also, as we've seen tonight,
[00:24:16.770]like, you're witty, you're funny, you're wry.
[00:24:19.740]Can you talk about deploying humor
[00:24:23.640]as a way of talking about painful things as a writer?
[00:24:28.650]No, I can't.
[00:24:31.627](laughs) Yeah?
[00:24:34.560]I mean, I don't know how much more to say
[00:24:35.880]than, okay, you know, there's personal trauma
[00:24:40.590]and historical trauma and what's a compensation for that?
[00:24:44.610]Humor, you know, but it's a defense mechanism.
[00:24:48.570]It's a coping mechanism that's for,
[00:24:50.670]it's largely unconscious for me.
[00:24:51.737]And so I don't look around and say,
[00:24:53.437]"Oh, I'm doing it again."
[00:24:55.320]It's just who I am, and I can't help it.
[00:24:58.410]I can take it to Native lit again.
[00:25:01.200]I'll take it to my day job and talk about Sherman Alexie.
[00:25:05.550]He's by far the funniest Native author,
[00:25:10.680]you know, probably ever, and I love him for it.
[00:25:15.060]But what's he making people laugh about?
[00:25:17.430]What are these people in his books laughing about?
[00:25:19.650]A reservation life that he describes
[00:25:21.690]as completely dysfunctional, you know, alcoholism, poverty.
[00:25:26.460]But we have to laugh. Alexie has to laugh.
[00:25:31.860]And that's very much, I mean, he's almost,
[00:25:33.900]it's almost his authorial nervous tic.
[00:25:39.256]And so that's kind of what I am in real life.
[00:25:42.570]I mean, my workmates know that.
[00:25:44.580]I'm always forcing just bad puns upon them constantly,
[00:25:50.430]and it's not even a, you know,
[00:25:53.707]I'm not, you know, acting out or anything.
[00:25:58.740]It's just I have to deal with this trauma
[00:26:01.500]that I can, all the time.
[00:26:04.800]The irony is, though, my mom wasn't funny at all.
[00:26:10.980]It's my Irish dad, who doesn't come off
[00:26:13.380]too well in this book, as you may have had intimations of,
[00:26:20.160]but it was he who was the guy
[00:26:24.030]who had to come make jokes all the time.
[00:26:27.000]That's where I got the need to try to be funny,
[00:26:31.620]whether I was funny or not, whether he was funny or not.
[00:26:33.820]And I just thank you for the question
[00:26:35.490]because it just makes me think, I've never asked myself
[00:26:41.586]what was the pain and trauma
[00:26:43.140]that my dad was covering up for being that way?
[00:26:49.230]Yeah, yeah, thank you.
[00:26:50.790]Well, you've brought me up again, thank you.
[00:26:53.730]Yeah, I have a question about courage,
[00:26:59.700]'cause this book exhibits a lot of courage.
[00:27:02.370]And one of the interesting aspects of courage
[00:27:05.520]that I noted is the way that you're willing
[00:27:08.010]to critique not only the larger environment
[00:27:12.120]that we're in in the Northern Great Plains,
[00:27:14.340]but also some things about the institution
[00:27:17.520]where you've worked.
[00:27:19.230]The University of Nebraska, after all,
[00:27:21.030]is the home of pretty significant archival operations
[00:27:25.650]focusing on authors like Willa Cather and Walt Whitman
[00:27:29.610]who come in for some critique in your book,
[00:27:32.730]settler colonialism, and then also, for example,
[00:27:37.830]the Center for Great Plain Studies,
[00:27:39.840]which is just a few blocks from here,
[00:27:42.180]in many ways a wonderful institution,
[00:27:44.340]but you critique some elements of it in your book.
[00:27:48.090]And I was wondering- Oh.
[00:27:50.130]I was wondering if you would-
[00:27:51.167]Where's that?
[00:27:52.000]Just (laughs) read a super brief passage
[00:27:55.050]as an illustrative example
[00:27:57.090]and then talk a little bit for the writers in the audience,
[00:28:00.120]of whom I believe there are several,
[00:28:02.130]about the courage that it takes to write critically
[00:28:05.790]about a place where you still work and live, yeah.
[00:28:13.335]"So outside the Great Plains Art Museum
[00:28:17.220]in Lincoln, Nebraska," in case you don't know,
[00:28:21.240]I wrote it for a general audience, (chuckles)
[00:28:23.797]"is yet another tribute to Lewis and Clark,
[00:28:26.160]a set of statues representing the expedition
[00:28:28.110]that I often have to walk on my way to teach Native lit.
[00:28:32.430]'Yes,' as I told my fellow board members
[00:28:35.040]when I was on the museum's board of directors,
[00:28:37.620]'It's therefore also another tribute
[00:28:39.180]to Euro-American colonialism
[00:28:40.560]and to all the tragedy that ensued.
[00:28:42.720]So what are we gonna do about it?'
[00:28:46.279]I actually didn't say that.
[00:28:47.610]I didn't have the guts.
[00:28:50.460]It wasn't as if I was saying,
[00:28:52.040]'Hey, that 1916 statue's quaint and all,
[00:28:56.490]but are you sure it's the message you wanna send
[00:28:59.370]in this multicultural 21st century?'
[00:29:01.770]No, the set of statues was created in 2004.
[00:29:08.070]It's called 'On the Trail of Discovery'
[00:29:11.370]or 'Pioneering New Frontiers' or whatever you want to go.
[00:29:15.420]Besides the statues of Lewis and Clark
[00:29:17.370]is a Native man extending his arm into the distance
[00:29:20.340]as if to say, I like to tell people seeing it
[00:29:23.100]for the first time, 'See this land?
[00:29:26.430]Take it. It's all yours.'
[00:29:31.830]Standing apart from the main figures
[00:29:33.420]is a little Indian boy proudly spreading a US flag
[00:29:36.930]in a celebratory mood, apparently.
[00:29:39.570]It especially angers me that it's a child,
[00:29:42.330]such a blatant iconographic act
[00:29:44.370]of colonialist will to power wishful thinking
[00:29:46.650]of coercive cooptation that this is.
[00:29:49.710]Such a sad, presumptive emblem of a conquered people,
[00:29:53.190]of cultural assimilation and interpolation and deicide.
[00:29:59.970]Planted as a part of the statue display,
[00:30:02.070]if most of you know, are some tall natural grasses
[00:30:06.810]around the corner there.
[00:30:08.250]This is actually the only part of the project
[00:30:09.930]for which I have some affection.
[00:30:11.790]But I've overheard a patron complain
[00:30:13.710]as she came out of the museum,
[00:30:16.980]'You'd think they care more about grass than art.'
[00:30:21.660]This attitude, too, is part of a settler colonial worldview.
[00:30:27.240]When I shared my story about the statues,
[00:30:29.040]my interpretation thereof with visiting Dakota poet
[00:30:32.370]and activist John Trudell, he begged to differ
[00:30:35.400]with my reading of the boy with a flag.
[00:30:38.640]Trudell says, 'I'd like to think it's a captured flag.
[00:30:42.510]They forgot to add the dead American soldier
[00:30:44.520]lying at his feet.'"
[00:30:47.250]See, if you think I was bad, John Trudell.
[00:30:52.230]Thank you.
[00:30:55.110]Can you talk then a little bit about any moments in the book
[00:30:58.860]that you hesitated over or you felt nervous about,
[00:31:01.470]where you really had to summon your courage,
[00:31:03.330]or did it come very easily to you?
[00:31:06.090]All of it.
[00:31:07.110]All of it?
[00:31:09.493]I mean, speaking more generally
[00:31:11.010]about having the courage to write against the grain,
[00:31:15.180]for most of my academic career, I've been a failure.
[00:31:18.690]I couldn't do it.
[00:31:20.610]I mean, my first few years at UNL,
[00:31:22.020]I'd come home crying from teaching my Native course
[00:31:23.667]and just, I'd just cry, 'cause the mean things
[00:31:28.080]the students said about my point of view
[00:31:32.280]and my author's point of views.
[00:31:35.310]I mean, these are whites kids whose,
[00:31:39.120]who are within the dominant ideology.
[00:31:43.560]I mean, they're the ones with the real power
[00:31:45.450]in spite of the fact I was teacher and they were students.
[00:31:50.190]And I listened to conservative talk radio.
[00:31:52.020]We were talking, I was talking to somebody else here
[00:31:53.520]about that before this started.
[00:31:55.440]And I know, you know, what the dominant ideology
[00:31:58.410]of the state is.
[00:31:59.243]I know I'm very much in the minority thereof,
[00:32:02.730]but I can't help but listen to those voices,
[00:32:05.760]those conservative voices over and over again
[00:32:09.060]and know what I'm up against.
[00:32:10.590]And so, I don't know, I think it was when my mother died
[00:32:15.630]when things started to change,
[00:32:17.340]and about five years ago
[00:32:20.880]during the process of starting this book,
[00:32:23.220]first in earnest, and I finally said,
[00:32:27.427]"My father went through shit in terms of racism,
[00:32:30.780]and she needs a voice, and dammit, Tom,
[00:32:34.350]are you gonna be weakling all your life,
[00:32:35.580]or are you gonna give your mother a voice
[00:32:38.130]and give yourself a voice, give the birds a voice,
[00:32:41.430]give the Lakota a voice?"
[00:32:43.590]Well, I don't, I hate to speak of myself
[00:32:45.270]as a spokesperson for that kind of thing.
[00:32:47.340]I don't, but, and second of all,
[00:32:52.260]it turns out I've suddenly become an old man somehow.
[00:32:56.430]I don't know how that happened,
[00:32:57.510]but, you know, what's my big worry?
[00:32:59.700]An imminent death. Do I care what other people think now?
[00:33:02.340]Not so much as I used to,
[00:33:05.141]you know. (audience laughs)
[00:33:06.120]So I mean, it comes down to that.
[00:33:11.880]But finally, I mean, the best answer is,
[00:33:15.390]the title of the book is not "Christo-Custer Colonialism."
[00:33:19.500]I don't think I can still write that book.
[00:33:21.600]That'd be too hard.
[00:33:22.980]It's a book about birding, okay.
[00:33:25.897]"So here I am at Custer State Park recording little birds.
[00:33:28.740]Oh, maybe we'll write a sentence or two about Custer.
[00:33:31.680]Maybe a little paragraph or two, maybe three or four."
[00:33:35.130]Oh, most of the essay turns out to be about Custer
[00:33:37.854](audience laughs)
[00:33:38.687]and me bitching and moaning
[00:33:39.570]about the 19th century and early 20th century, so.
[00:33:43.170]But it was easier in this book
[00:33:45.420]because I had that first layer
[00:33:48.330]as kind of a working barrier that, you know,
[00:33:52.020]gave me some peace and space, so.
[00:33:55.124]Thank you.
[00:33:56.036]Thank you.
[00:33:57.600]Last question from me,
[00:33:59.040]and then we'll open it up for audience questions,
[00:34:01.200]'cause I'm sure there'll be a lot.
[00:34:03.570]Thinking both as an author and as a professor
[00:34:08.790]of Indigenous literature here at the University of Nebraska,
[00:34:14.220]if you could have your ideal dream
[00:34:16.260]of what kinds of resources and support and focus
[00:34:21.362]on education about Indigenous literature,
[00:34:24.540]history, culture, politics,
[00:34:26.670]if it were ideal, what would it look like
[00:34:29.040]from your point of view?
[00:34:33.210]Well, it'd be a separate Indigenous studies department,
[00:34:37.590]you know, not within, you know, some ghettoized umbrella
[00:34:41.550]called ethnic studies, and it'd have a lot more resources.
[00:34:45.960]But I mean, that's not even the right answer.
[00:34:50.790]That's not a good answer.
[00:34:53.610]More, we need more Native American instructors.
[00:34:56.850]We need more resources for Indigenous studies.
[00:35:04.380]I don't think that would solve a thing.
[00:35:07.063]I mean, they also asked me as a recruiter to,
[00:35:09.127]"We need more Native American students here."
[00:35:11.880]You know, half of me says, "No, we don't.
[00:35:14.880]We're not ready for it."
[00:35:17.010]I mean, they say, "Go get kids from the res."
[00:35:18.990]I said, "No, they're better off
[00:35:20.250]going to community colleges on the reservation
[00:35:22.170]than they are coming here right now
[00:35:24.570]and being confronted with Lewis and freaking Clark."
[00:35:29.100]And so my idea, my answer is,
[00:35:30.900]ideally there'd be this overnight change of consciousness
[00:35:35.370]at UNL, you know, that could look at Lewis and Clark
[00:35:39.360]and say, "Well, we might have a problem here,"
[00:35:42.720]that kind of looks at the settler colonial ideology
[00:35:46.620]that underlies the university still
[00:35:49.290]on this rah-rah mentality involving, you know,
[00:35:51.630]homesteading, pioneering new frontiers.
[00:35:56.970]That was our motto.
[00:35:58.460]I think it, I don't remember them ever ending it, actually.
[00:36:04.470]It's this need for, you know, an attitude adjustment,
[00:36:09.000]you know, a major one.
[00:36:10.890]And I don't, and I couldn't tell you
[00:36:12.420]how that's supposed to happen except for you buying my book.
[00:36:17.897](audience laughing)
[00:36:22.902](audience applauding)
[00:36:27.720]It's the only way, people.
[00:36:30.125](audience laughs)
[00:36:32.820]Don't fail me now.
[00:36:35.609]At least you're honest.
[00:36:36.970]Well- Thank you.
[00:36:38.070]Or my people.
[00:36:40.024](audience laughs)
[00:36:42.360]Okay, are there questions from you?
[00:36:45.480]And I think that Megan is gonna walk a microphone to you
[00:36:49.110]so that the people on the Zoom webinar can hear you.
[00:36:51.990]And I think also Leslie might share any questions
[00:36:55.080]that came in online.
[00:36:56.280]Yep. Yeah, beautiful.
[00:37:04.980]Well, thank you.
[00:37:06.416](audience laughs)
[00:37:14.730]Thank you, Tom.
[00:37:16.380]Can you speak a little bit about the genre itself
[00:37:20.280]of the memoir and how you thought about it
[00:37:24.540]as a literary historian, a scholar, and a theorist also,
[00:37:31.140]life writing, the tendency of memoirs
[00:37:34.410]to be often quite about the individual individualizing,
[00:37:39.450]and you're approaching it from a, well,
[00:37:45.540]where life is already something other than human life,
[00:37:47.940]first of all, because it's very much about birding,
[00:37:49.890]but also culturally speaking,
[00:37:53.460]a culture that is less predicated on Western individualism
[00:37:59.130]and where sort of certain kind of notions
[00:38:01.710]of the memoir come from
[00:38:02.850]and how you potentially thought about maybe pushing back.
[00:38:05.460]Because I think you do,
[00:38:06.293]if I think about your, the lists, right,
[00:38:09.030]like that come out of your practice as a birder,
[00:38:11.100]but they do also something, I think,
[00:38:13.950]within the genre and formally,
[00:38:15.540]so I'm wondering if you had any thoughts on that.
[00:38:20.820]Yeah, in the preface, I talk about it
[00:38:22.800]being an anti-memoir because first of all,
[00:38:25.140]I don't know how to write a memoir,
[00:38:26.280]so it's easier write an anti one.
[00:38:28.050]But above all, I've always rankled against the fact
[00:38:33.390]that memoirs are about the self, you know,
[00:38:36.030]which me, I come from the psychoanalysis
[00:38:38.160]or Jungian analysis and that there is no coherent self.
[00:38:43.920]I mean, we're just, we're a body of different
[00:38:47.400]or psyche of battling complexes,
[00:38:52.110]and so to speak for oneself,
[00:38:54.270]I mean, that's an egoism that is,
[00:38:55.770]that Freud put an end to
[00:38:58.200]in terms of believing that bullshit.
[00:39:00.480]And so, you know, and then you combine psychoanalysis
[00:39:05.520]with post-structuralism, and of course,
[00:39:08.130]there's no coherent Self with a capital S,
[00:39:13.530]just a multitude of fragments,
[00:39:15.360]of utterances for that matter.
[00:39:19.273]But Marko, you know, puts it in a much better, wider scope.
[00:39:24.990]That's all a Western notion
[00:39:26.970]that the self is so damn important.
[00:39:28.830]You know, since the Renaissance on, you know,
[00:39:30.450]Foucault says, you know, the self is basically an invention,
[00:39:34.440]you know, a construct.
[00:39:36.960]And so here I am arguing against that construct
[00:39:39.390]from my experience and vast reading
[00:39:45.720]in Native American literature, Native American studies
[00:39:50.550]and the notion that individualism is largely,
[00:39:54.870]is much more absent from Native American writers.
[00:39:58.470]I mean, look at "Black Elk Speaks."
[00:39:59.880]It begins, Neihardt saying,
[00:40:02.887]"Tell us the story of your life, Black Elk."
[00:40:04.710]And Black Elk says, "Well, I can't tell you
[00:40:07.620]the story of my life without telling you
[00:40:08.760]the story of my people."
[00:40:10.777]"So tell us the story of your life, Tom Gannon."
[00:40:13.650]I can't tell you the story of my life
[00:40:16.560]until I tell you the story of my birds.
[00:40:19.440]Yeah, well, that was a weak analogy, but.
[00:40:23.123](audience laughs)
[00:40:26.790]You know, it's especially interesting, though,
[00:40:28.380]because a lot of the studies of the genre of memoir
[00:40:32.490]began with Augustine's confessions, right,
[00:40:35.640]so a father of the church,
[00:40:38.490]was kind of interesting in that regard, yeah, yeah.
[00:40:42.120]But there was another hand up right there.
[00:40:45.420]Is this on, or can you hear me?
[00:40:47.160]Yeah.
[00:40:47.993]Okay, cool, to me, birding in many ways
[00:40:52.410]is a very solitary experience, because if you do in a group,
[00:40:58.380]you're just gonna push those birds away and-
[00:41:01.260]I hate it.
[00:41:02.093]Yeah, and so, you know,
[00:41:04.140]you're by yourself wherever you are,
[00:41:06.477]and you kind of melt into that land.
[00:41:10.650]And do you ever talk to the birds when you see them?
[00:41:15.870]And do they ever talk back to you?
[00:41:24.540]I'm not gonna answer that question
[00:41:25.710]on the grounds that the university expects me
[00:41:28.110]to be a semi-sane individual next semester.
[00:41:30.691](audience laughs)
[00:41:32.277]Huh-uh, I mean, oh, god.
[00:41:36.960]Well, I'll tell you a story about my PhD defense.
[00:41:43.440]You know, my whole defense,
[00:41:44.670]I'd finished my dissertation, and I have to defend it,
[00:41:49.020]and it, too, is about freaking birds.
[00:41:51.390]I mean, it's the original draft of this.
[00:41:54.660]And I end this book by saying, you know,
[00:41:59.040]the ultimate answer to the ecological problem
[00:42:01.350]is to actually listen to birds
[00:42:05.580]as this language that transcends humankind,
[00:42:08.910]that speaks kind of the Christavan semiotique or whatever.
[00:42:13.290]I mean, it was a tenuous theory that.
[00:42:16.827]But, and so I'm outside.
[00:42:18.690]I still smoked at the time.
[00:42:19.650]I was chain smoking a pack of cigarettes before the defense,
[00:42:21.717]and I'm looking up a tree.
[00:42:23.610]This cardinal shows up and starts going,
[00:42:26.440](Tom imitates cardinal whistling).
[00:42:28.410]He's looking right at me, and he's telling me,
[00:42:30.457]"Tom, it's gonna be all right."
[00:42:34.950]And so I ended up dedicating this book to that cardinal
[00:42:39.870]who sang me down and said, "Tom, it's gonna be all right."
[00:42:43.860]Of course I was institutionalized soon thereafter, but.
[00:42:46.958](audience laughs)
[00:42:48.630]I'm just kidding. Great question.
[00:42:53.470]Had a question, I won't say.
[00:42:56.370]Wait, wait for the mic.
[00:42:57.810]Loud enough.
[00:42:59.190]No. The online folks.
[00:43:00.330]So we can (speaking faintly), here you go, thank you.
[00:43:04.260]Okay, I won't pretend
[00:43:05.850]to have read the book, 'cause I only found out
[00:43:07.710]about the talk a few days ago.
[00:43:10.590]But I was wondering, in the book,
[00:43:12.330]do you speak about the difference
[00:43:14.310]between kind of the Western culture and the Native culture
[00:43:18.750]as how they view birds in their spirit
[00:43:22.050]and how the Native culture has a more, to me,
[00:43:27.300]a more reverence for animals in general
[00:43:30.450]as well as birds as our culture
[00:43:33.090]and how that kind of reflects where we're coming from
[00:43:36.720]and how you're gonna solve this issue,
[00:43:40.200]which you basically said we can't solve it
[00:43:43.560]until the culture changes.
[00:43:45.420]And to me, that is a major part,
[00:43:48.180]but I didn't know if the book
[00:43:50.160]intertwined with that anywhere.
[00:43:53.040]Yeah, ultimately the answer, and I mean,
[00:43:55.980]this is what my Native lit courses are about ultimately.
[00:43:58.710]The ultimate answer is that, I mean,
[00:44:02.490]we're all not just gonna become 19th century tribal peoples.
[00:44:06.510]You can't go home again.
[00:44:08.550]But the ultimate salvation, I think,
[00:44:12.000]and a lot of Native writers believe this,
[00:44:14.100]is that the Western zeitgeist, you know,
[00:44:18.510]Western society in general has to become more Indigenous
[00:44:23.070]in terms of its attitude, approach to the land
[00:44:26.670]and to other species, and in that way,
[00:44:29.730]birding in this more holy, quote, unquote, sense
[00:44:36.120]does an important job in that regard.
[00:44:39.300]There are many places in the book
[00:44:40.320]where I point out this difference
[00:44:42.690]in terms of the traditional Lakota view of birds.
[00:44:45.300]I mean, the meadowlark, western meadowlark
[00:44:46.740]was the birdie that spoke Lakota.
[00:44:48.690]I mean, how close is that to another species?
[00:44:50.520]Yeah, and in the last chapter,
[00:44:55.350]I questioned whether birding as this Western
[00:45:00.060]let's-make-checklists enterprise
[00:45:02.250]is something that somebody from a Native worldview
[00:45:06.210]would even wanna do.
[00:45:07.110]I mean, it's so left brain, so objectifying in one sense.
[00:45:11.370]So let's say there are two different ways to bird,
[00:45:15.600]and I'm trying to move from one to the other a little bit.
[00:45:21.000]It's hard. I'm such a good list-maker.
[00:45:24.542](audience laughs)
[00:45:33.300]Thank you.
[00:45:35.250]I had one question that I knew I was gonna ask you
[00:45:38.520]before we got started and then another question
[00:45:40.950]that just comes to mind based on some of this discussion.
[00:45:43.950]So the prepared question I had was,
[00:45:47.640]what's your favorite bird and why?
[00:45:50.550]And then in hearing you talk
[00:45:53.040]about needing to listen to birds,
[00:45:58.110]and what I hear in that
[00:46:01.680]is to then take some course of action.
[00:46:04.800]I wondered if you could talk about the effort
[00:46:07.950]to balance personal, reflective,
[00:46:13.230]insightful narrative and metaphor.
[00:46:30.360]I'm still thinking about the first question.
[00:46:32.495](audience laughs)
[00:46:44.370]It changes every day.
[00:46:47.160]I just took a trip to the Panhandle, so I'm going to say,
[00:46:55.147]I'm gonna go with the oldie but goodie western meadowlark.
[00:46:58.380]The song is just, it's just the fusion.
[00:47:02.310]It's the sonic landscape of the Great Plains.
[00:47:07.560]They're slowly, they're kind of disappearing
[00:47:09.060]from Lancaster County, though.
[00:47:11.970]I don't know if it's the drought or what. It makes me sad.
[00:47:16.140]But for the second question,
[00:47:17.340]I'm not sure what you mean by metaphor.
[00:47:18.870]Could you rephrase the question?
[00:47:22.950]I guess I'm hearing a conversation
[00:47:26.730]about disappearance, and with the 19th century context,
[00:47:32.100]there was a simultaneous hope
[00:47:35.550]for the disappearance of Native people
[00:47:37.740]and then a rhetoric about the need to save Native people.
[00:47:41.820]So when I think about birds disappearing
[00:47:44.580]in your 21st century narrative,
[00:47:46.680]I wonder if there are other types of echoes and metaphors
[00:47:51.900]that you are sometimes intentionally playing with
[00:47:55.080]and then sometimes running into.
[00:47:59.610]Yeah, well, speaking of metaphors, and I mean,
[00:48:04.080]that trope is the dominant trope
[00:48:07.290]of my entire publishing career.
[00:48:12.150]What's struck me over and over again in my research
[00:48:14.610]and writing is how other species, especially birds,
[00:48:21.000]and other ethnicities, especially Indians,
[00:48:25.680]are similarly othered as nature
[00:48:32.100]by whitestream society.
[00:48:35.070]And so we have the wild animals.
[00:48:37.650]We have the wild people, the wild Indians.
[00:48:41.220]And you know what?
[00:48:42.090]At one point in US policy,
[00:48:43.980]both of them were better off extinct, eradication.
[00:48:50.340]I mean, the genocide
[00:48:56.848]of many Native tribes was actually accomplished
[00:48:58.830]in the 19th century, are no longer here.
[00:49:02.100]The genocide of the passenger pigeon happened.
[00:49:08.220]And of course, and then there's nostalgia for the fact,
[00:49:11.197]"Oh, the poor Indian, and we wanna get back to that."
[00:49:15.270]And they kept seeing passenger pigeons for like 50 years
[00:49:18.270]after the last passenger pigeon was gone
[00:49:19.770]because there was this new recuperative hope
[00:49:22.650]for, "Oh, we want that origin back.
[00:49:26.700]We wanna live in nostalgia."
[00:49:28.680]I mean, my god, but yeah, that whole general trope
[00:49:33.780]of extinction, nostalgia, et cetera, that applied to,
[00:49:39.357]and for the same reasons by the white patriarchal self
[00:49:46.740]towards other species, birds, other ethnicities, Indians.
[00:49:52.920]It's the same colonial gesture, ultimately, I think.
[00:49:57.450]You talk about the parallelism between reserves,
[00:50:01.440]like wildlife reserves and reservations in the book, yeah.
[00:50:06.450]Yeah, reserves, reservations, oh, excellent.
[00:50:10.874]Do you know, with that,
[00:50:12.600]maybe this is the last question?
[00:50:15.060]I'm sorry.
[00:50:15.893]No, no, it was great, it's nice.
[00:50:17.760]So earlier you mentioned
[00:50:21.270]those names of the places that you go birding
[00:50:25.230]as having an impact, you know,
[00:50:27.390]and inspiring in part the book.
[00:50:30.119]There's a, you know, as you might know,
[00:50:31.962]there's this big conversation in the birding world
[00:50:34.290]about the names of birds being assigned by white settlers,
[00:50:37.980]often assigned people's names, which are almost uniformly,
[00:50:41.310]I think, exclusively white people's names, some,
[00:50:46.950]and yeah, just had, I was curious
[00:50:50.460]if you've had experiences as a lister and a birder
[00:50:56.070]coming upon birds with names that really struck you
[00:51:00.930]or impacted you in those kinds of ways, you know, that-
[00:51:05.100]Well, you're probably referring to McCown's longspur,
[00:51:08.220]which has changed. Yeah, and Scott's oriole,
[00:51:10.307]like, you know, Civil War general, yeah.
[00:51:12.930]Civil War generals, they're all racists.
[00:51:15.420]We shouldn't be naming birds after that.
[00:51:17.285]My big example- Or even Audubon.
[00:51:18.150]My best example is from the book,
[00:51:20.956]it's this prose poem basically called,
[00:51:23.670]it's about the long-tailed duck,
[00:51:26.550]and the refrain that runs through this prose poem is,
[00:51:29.917]"The long-tailed duck used to be called the oldsquaw."
[00:51:34.582]And of course, this comes back,
[00:51:35.987]I take it back to my mother, et cetera.
[00:51:37.350]And so it's my favorite little chapter
[00:51:39.690]in the book, actually.
[00:51:40.530]So what a wonderful question to end with, yeah.
[00:51:46.577]Thank you, okay.
[00:51:51.690]From page 55, "Some days, it's a good day to die,
[00:51:56.460]but more often, it's just a good day to go birding."
[00:51:59.465](audience laughs)
[00:52:01.020]Thank you, Tom.
[00:52:01.853]I wrote that?
[00:52:02.686]Yeah.
[00:52:03.955](audience applauding)

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Book Launch: 'Birding While Indian' by Tom Gannon

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