Well, I think even among indigenous scholars, I'm somewhat unique in that I actually grew up on the reservation. Really, I mean, I grew up in a house that was developed by the housing department when really back in a time there was no running water, no running sewer. It was a rough time on the reservation. So when I think about what motivates me today, it really stems from seeing both where my family and community has come over the years, but also recognizing the ways in which inequalities have shaped how my community is viewed, how we understand ourselves, what kids see as possible for themselves. If you hang out with my research team, when we get to points where we're struggling, it's often the case that I will remind them that you know native kids are dying every day in this country and we can't let our little hang-ups be the thing that keeps the work from getting out or that stops us from changing the narrative in this country which really omits and erases indigenous people. I think my cultural background by going up on the reservation I really had, I grew up on a beach community where every house was my relative. I didn't grow up with friends, I grew up with cousins. My cousins were my siblings. I also have siblings, but it turns out in our language, the word for sibling and for cousin is the same word. And so I grew up with a generation of kids and we played on the beaches in the summer. We didn't even know we were poor at that time because our parents and grandparents would come down at the end of the day in the summer, and my grandpa would pull out the crab traps and we have this big, huge part we kept down at the beach and we'd make crab and we'd all sit around and eat. I mean, it just seemed like we had so much. Our families very involved culturally as well as in the leadership of the tribe and so I've seen the ways in which members of my family have made a big difference in how our tribe has done over the years. It's something that keeps me centered, I really care about my community, my family. I'm deeply passionate about the issues that we're working on at the center, but also in the work I've done over the years. That's a great start. That's a nice start. I have a hunch that Earl as you say some words about yourself, there's some things in here that might resonate with you too. Maybe, I'm not sure, but how about you Earl? I'm often say I'm a product of the segregated South. I was born in the segregated South in 1955, went to state-sanctioned segregated schools until I was in the tenth grade. Then the word integration was used but I actually think that's an inappropriate word to describe what I experienced in the tenth grade in the early '70 s in Virginia. Really, it was desegregation. Integration required a sharing of power. What we came to realize in the school settings in particular, there was no sharing of power. This was my tenth grade geometry teacher one day somehow went on a riff about the good old days on the plantation. It drilled into my consciousness that this was a particular story and it was her story. And it was her story that recentered the power relationships in the class. So the class is 50 percent black and 50 percent white. But this was an attempt on her part to put us back in our place. And so when I think about the work that I would undertake over the next 30-35 years after finishing graduate school, it had a lot to do with the subtle understandings that I came to internalize and interpret, coming out, that transition from a segregated world to a desegregated world. The interesting part was, is that in a segregated world, I never used the word minority because it had no context, it had no meaning. It was only in a desegregated world, the world where minority and the majority came into play. I can remember seeing after the publication of my first book, and it was about Norfolk and I'm a native of Norfolk, Virginia, that I had no understanding of that word minority and one of my mom's church members was telling me not to go on a path and I kept saying, I'm sorry, but you can't understand the present if you're actually not connect it to the past. I hear you, I respect you, but I'm going to ignore you and go forward and do what I think needs to be done to change the world as we move forward. That's motivating and shaping of the trajectory of my career and as you noted, bury the outset. I have run many things from schools to universities, to foundations over the last 20 years. It's oftentimes with this particular framing that we have not achieved but integrated world, and hence, we need to figure out ways to really activate desegregated world. That's great. Thank you. Stephanie, do you see anything in what Earl said that you want to comment on or extent? I do. I was really struck by really there's so many similarities and yet differences. I similarly went to school on the reservation and where I grew up, the world was very much native on white. We went to school on the reservation, and then at six grade, transition to school off the reservation in the nearby town and my life was very much influenced by my first year off the reservation. Up until that point, was a good student, very active and cultural activities, very involved in the community. But in sixth grade, my homeroom teacher turned out to be an extremely racist individual and we had there's a moment that happens. There are six native kids in the class and she takes us and put us in her cubicle and she looks at us and she says, I want to know which one of you stole my money, and it turns out it was 5 dollars. But we're 11 years old and we're looking at one another and nobody has any idea what she's talking about, and we're all quieted. She says, we're not leaving here until I get my money back. Finally one of my peers says, why do you think it was us, and she looks at us with the most disgusted face and says, who else would it be? It's a moment where I realize that other people don't think about us the way that I grew up thinking about us. They don't see the beauty in our community and our culture and our connection that to her we were just these brown kids from the reservation and she had all stereotypes that included that we would be the people who would steal. We went on, that year in her class I got straight C's despite getting A's on everything. I think it was one of those things will also learn I had to keep my schoolwork. I learned that there was a power inequality. I learned that the world that I had understood up until that point, living within the confines of my community was not the world outside of my community and I think these are those moments that I think about my grandma's experience, and there's a real connection like my grandmother was the generation that was taken away and put into federally run boarding schools. When I was a child, she told me 100 times about the day they came to her community and took her away. I grew up in a Tulalip community, the Tulalip reservation, my grandmother was Quinault, which is over on the ocean side, and my Tulalip is where most of the kids in Washington State were taken, there was a boarding school that was made here. She was brought over here, but she was seven years old when she was taken by the government to the boarding school. She used to tell the story about the day these men showed up and her dad was out fishing, her mom was out doing work, and she was home with her grandmother, and there was a translator who basically said she has to go. She talks about this moment where she is holding onto her grandmother's skirt and they start to pull her from her grandmother. In each of these moments, I think about that moment from my grandmother, and then I think about all these other moments where someone is really pulling from who we are as a people. This teacher took away my sense of wholeness, of connection. My sense that who I was as a young person, who I understood my world to be was not beautiful. My grandmother's taken to this school where she was left-handed. She was beaten for being left-handed. She wasn't allowed to see her family again until she was an adult. I think about how many ways in which we have created these social structures that are undermining the well-being, and my community continues to feel the effects of those boarding schools. A lot of physical and sexual abuse happened in those schools that has continued to be something that we as a community are trying to heal from. This is literally what gets me up every day as I think about Earl's story, I can connect to that story. It isn't the same story but it's a similar history. I've always been fascinated by the ways in which the American story with Black Americans versus native Americans has been so similar and yet in some ways the opposite and in some ways the same. If we think about the one drop rule versus for native people, it was about getting rid of our our blood level so we've had these very different ideas but always with the idea that we're either going to get rid of these people or we're going to figure out how to use them. But it's always to the advantage of someone else and not us. I mean, the center is very much a combination of everything that has motivated me to get where I'm today. So RISE, which stands for research for indigenous social action and equity, we have really a threefold mission. So one, we want to train generations of native scholars across the humanities and social sciences to really address the ways in which these larger ideas held in society about indigenous people are actually driving discrimination and inequality. We both want to build that pipeline as well as to work with the university and really in many ways with leaders across the country to take this movement that I think has been going on and that we've had the good fortune to be a part of with other native organizations to really push back. As the academic center for this, our hope is really to work in partnership with native tribes, communities, organizations to drive home the idea that you can no longer continue to erase us, that it's time to reclaim the truth about history and to acknowledge the ways in which we continue to oppress and colonized indigenous people and communities in this country. On a second part, we really are about bringing together activists, artists to both think about what it means for what we refer to, our Judith LeBlanc, one of our partners refers to as moccasins on the ground. Connecting with those indigenous people who are out there every day fighting the good fight and really think about what it does for them to have hands on the research, to work in partnership with research, to have data that they can use in their battle and then artists who are about creating these new representations. It's really thinking in this dynamic way, how do we have a big look at what it means to change culture? I think there's this sort of social action piece, there's a pipeline piece and then ultimately there's a big research piece, like we want to be and we really are the academic hub for doing research looking at how discrimination, prejudice and oppression are impacting indigenous people today. I mean, it doesn't exist anywhere else, of course, there are indigenous scholars who do the work. But for us, it's really about creating a space where we can bring those scholars together, we can work together. We have partners at Harvard, Brown, Stanford, Washington, Berkeley and we're coming together and creating these little teams to really think seriously in a long-term way what needs to be done now, what's the data we need? We want to get to a point where people can no longer say there's a lack of data with native people. There's both this excuse for why we don't have data like there's not enough native people, yet there are other groups that are small like us that have data. Also, the 2020 Census is showing that we're growing at a tremendous rate. We had 85 percent growth in our population from 2010-2020. We're not going away, we're here right now and our communities have been thriving and people have not been paying attention and I think we've gotten to a point where we want to leverage that change and start to work together to really see what we can do. And going back to Stephanie narrative about her grandmother and realizing that in large part, the story of America is the story of these individuals narratives that began to help us understand the complexities or the ways in which we have interacted in the interrelationship between both individual experience in public policy. When I came back and note, this is my second spent at the University of Michigan. I was here for 15 years from 1989-2004, went away for 14 years. Provost and Emory and president of the Mellon Foundation in New York City, and then came back and created the Center for Social Solutions. That center has four areas of focus. The first has to do with diversity, democracy, and we publish a book series and have a series of other enterprise related to it called our compelling interests with Princeton University Press. The second area is slavery and its aftermath where we actually try to connect historical slavery to contemporary examples and expressions of force and involuntary servitude in today's world. The third area has to do with water insecurity. The fourth is the dignity of labor in an automated world as we think through the implications of increased automation on the abilities of not only Americans but humans across the planet to claim some legitimate answer to the most important question, what do you do? If you talk about the social dislocation then we can anticipate If you can't answer in this global context what you can do, the psychological effects, but the sociological and familial and other impact we're trying to get it and understand and address that issue. The project that came from Mellon when Mellon called for us to think about the new inequalities lead us to actually then turn to the question of reparations. I've been teaching a course in public policy, I have a new appointment in School of Public Policy on reparations looking at indigenous people both in the US and in Canada, African Americans in the United States, Asian Americans, particularly the Japanese case, but also globally in Germany, South Africa, and parts of Latin America and trying to understand the context under which states, governments come up with reparations schemes and what designs them. We'd assign it for this project that what we would do is that colleges and universities are anchor institutions. What does that mean? That means they're not going to pick up and move. A corporation may pick up and move, but a college and university, by and large, once it's in the community it's there. It's not only there, but it's also typically one of the largest employers in their region. They provide both entertainment and health care if you're a university. They're all encompassing as institutions and this goes back to the idea of institution building. We turn to colleges and universities around the country to began to think what if they worked in partnership with their communities and with community leaders and activists? To begin, they asked a question, what would racial reparations look like on the ground in different locations. We started on the western edge of Minnesota in Moorhen, Minnesota with Concordia College, which is working with native communities in and around Minnesota and North Dakota to ask and address that question. We're looking here in Southeast Michigan with a triangulated relationship between Flint, Detroit and Dearborn and Ann Arbor [inaudible]. In each of those settings and across the entire span of the institutions, we have community fellows, those individuals who are in the communities who have been working on or thinking about reparations, who are working in partnership with the colleges and universities because we understand that intellectual knowledge is not the purview of just academics. They're are deep thinkers who have intellectual currency that we don't often identify our town that actually can inform in this work. As we move east, our next location is Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University is the anchor institution there. We then go to Connecticut College in New London. Connecticut dropped down to Rutgers University in Newark. Then we head to the south. We have Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina, Wesleyan College, a women's college in Macon, Georgia. Spelman College, another one. It's College in Atlanta, Georgia, and then Emory University. Each has its own store, which is important to understand about what conversation about racial reparations looks like on the ground in those communities and as they think through the whole implications. Then we are working in partnership with WQED, our media partner, the public radio and television station out of Pittsburgh that will produce a documentary at the end of this three-year grant, to began to document at the community level the whole question of reparations. Now I should say that this has two or three antecedents. Where in Evanston, Illinois, there was an attempt by the Evanston's City Council to begin to come up with some attempt at racial reparations in Evanston. That's been taken up by Asheville, North Carolina and they have their own approach to this and then Governor Newsome in California, passed some legislation to begin to have California also look at this. There's a controversy within the reparations community because some believe that reparations only can be achieved through federal means. If my colleagues at Duke and others have added a 10-12 trillion dollar price tag to this. Solidarity among others is saying that the community attempt is I don't know if he would say a waste of time but it comes close to it and believes that we really should force and emphasize the federal government we end up saying, that's true. But if you read the history of the civil rights movement, what you come to understand is that community-based change eventually lead to national change. You needed it from both directions from the federal level, but you needed communities active in trying to see change. We see our effort as two-fold one began to model and we hope that can be both replicated and scale to actually suggest to other communities what they can do if they decide to move in this direction. That the combination of all of this will lead to the actions that Sandy and others have been championing. I think this is really complicated. There are a couple of really big ideas and thoughts that come to mind for me. One is university should reflect where we are going, not where we have been. A socially just university is working towards a better democracy, is working to undo inequality, is working to right wrongs whether that's through a misunderstanding of science or a miswriting of history. You can think about the ways in which this reflects across all aspects. Universities still reflect the educational hierarchy in American society. People of color are greatly underrepresented in academia. We still reflect and reward system where students who have privilege are more likely to be rewarded with access to universities. Similarly, faculty who come out of the right universities. You just see the ways in which academia continues to perpetuate inequality. A socially just university is one that is aware of those systemic structures and works to undo them. Is a space in which different individuals in different communities have the opportunity to both give voice and create voice for their community that reflects their actual experience. Their shared reality. I think as we go forward, I don't know that I've truly been involved with or experienced a socially just university. There's a way in which this reminds me of Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence. He wrote it with the idea of what America should become, not what it was. When we talk about a socially just university, in many ways we're talking about what universities should do. But universities are also part of political like we've become politicized because we are working to create accurate knowledge, to undo systemic inequality. Because there are these factions within universities there are groups out there that are taking aim at universities. A socially just university has to be one that can deflect that and not give into it, that continues to do it because it is the right thing to do. Because when we think about what the future looks like, it's different than what the past looks like. It's a tough road to walk. One of the unique things about Michigan is that Michigan has been at the center of many of these issues over time. Has Michigan always stood when perhaps others sat down? I think these are the history that as academic university we contend with. Did we stand in the right way? Can we take a stand for Indigenous Peoples Day? Can we take a stand against Thanksgiving? Can we take a stand against Native mascots? Can I push my university to demand that we teach a curriculum about indigenous people that actually reflects our true experience. I don't know if you saw it in the newspaper last week or the week before. There were articles about how the Department of Education in South Dakota, basically it's erasing indigenous history. In their state curriculum, there was a decision made to take out all the pieces about the different Sioux tribes and they changed it to other cultural groups. Again, we're erasing, you look at in politics, Santorum made a comment about when settlers got to America, America was a blank slate. There was nothing here. There were Native Americans here, but really no part of native culture as part of American culture. We played no part in the history or who America became. These types of a ratio when we don't acknowledge that he both dehumanized and erased native people in his statement or acknowledged the 500 native organizations that then stood up and reached out to CNN that led to him getting fired. When we don't acknowledge these pieces, what happens is we continue to dehumanize. There were only 36 articles about his statement. How is that? His statement was important. When I think what is the university's role in this, is that we have to lead that change. A socially just university is about creating accurate to academic knowledge. Of course, you can always say, history is in the eye of the beholder. Is it or is it that we only allow some people to write history? I think in the long term my hope is that we will continue to push forward. My hope in picking Michigan as my home institution is that I can count on the administration in my university to take a stand and to be a voice for indigenous issues and to help advocate through space, through bringing in indigenous scholars that we can begin to do for indigenous people what in many respects, Michigan has done for black scholars. I want to be part of this history. I won't be at Michigan forever. I know this. I'm going to retire and I'm going to live in my tribal community and retire and work from there. I see myself as having a time. I'm not in the same place where we're all talked about. I'm sitting right there in the middle. But I also know that I want to be part of my tribal community as I get older and being able to go back and forth has been really powerful. When I was at my last university, I was able to live in my tribal community. I gave that up for Michigan. But I gave it up because I saw an opportunity and so far I think we're making good on that opportunity. I see my time at Michigan, maybe 10, maybe 15 years, but I definitely see this limited because I want to be able to spend the last part of my life with my family, with my cousins. I want to have that connection to who I am and to be able to work from that space. I think Michigan is doing a pretty good job, but we still have work to do. I think that's a good place if we move toward closing on this. Well, do we have any final comments or thoughts that you'd like to add at this point? No, I'll piggyback on something that Stephanie said. Which is that in some ways, if we think about where constitution socially just university, that we're guarded by where we want to go rather than where we've been. Because where we've been maybe touchstone points for shaping a path forward. But we have to look to the future. This country and this world is predicated on the notion that there will be a future, hopefully a shared future. I think, where sometimes we find ourselves on a fault line is that not everyone believes in the importance of a shared future. But as we deal with the calamities of climate change in a whole range of other things, if we can't figure out a shared future, then we're all doomed. I think universities need to be square and center in actually playing a role in shaping that perspective. We only get so much time and in a world where we are challenged by a whole lot of information and a whole lot of misinformation. It means then we also need to teach people how to be discerning consumers of what it is they think they know and that in itself is a full challenge.
