HEAR FIRST: FULL TRANSCRIPT
LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
OONA: Hello, and welcome to HEAR FIRST. I’m Oona,
LUCAS: and I’m Lucas,
OONA: and we are the artistic directors of Davis Repertory Theatre.
LUCAS: Before we begin, we should take a moment to acknowledge the land on which this story walk was created.
OONA: For thousands of years, this land has been the home of Patwin people.
LUCAS: Today, there are three federally recognized Patwin tribes:
OONA Cachil DeHe Band of Wintun Indians of the Colusa Indian Community,
LUCAS: Kletsel Dehe Wintun Nation
OONA: and Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation.
LUCAS: The Patwin people have remained committed to the stewardship of this land over many centuries.
OONA: It has been cherished and protected, as elders have instructed the young through generations.
LUCAS: Davis Repertory Theatre is honored and grateful to be creating on their traditional lands.
OONA: Wherever you are, we encourage you to find out more about the peoples native to the land on which you live, work, and play.
Song: Red, White, and Blue, sung in Newe [Western Shoshone]
WELCOME
ANTHONY: Welcome to HEAR FIRST, a Native story walk on Wintun homeland. My name is Anthony Burris and I’m a citizen of the Ione Band of Miwok Indians and a professor of Ethnic Studies at California State University of Sacramento. Today we are sharing with you six pieces. You can think of them as offerings, as teachings, as inspiration for starting or continuing to think about Indigenous history and culture. We will also touch on some contemporary issues of concern to Native people. We encourage you to listen to these teachings outdoors, while walking, if possible.
Song: Red, White, and Blue, sung in Newe [Western Shoshone]
1. THE LIFE AND DEATH OF A CREEK
Sound: Creek water running, birds singing.
DIANA: What do I see about the future of it? Yeah, I'm still seeing it just dying. Yeah, and drying up, cause it has no flow. You know, so it'll just dry—and then there's animals that still live along the creek, like the Patwin Fox that—the new one that they found that they thought was a Red Fox from the East Coast, but it has more gray, has more brown in it. So they tested it and found out it was a completely different fox that was local, a local species. So they named it Patwin. So I'm afraid to think, did they curse it? Because of what they did to our people?
Sound: Cries of a fox.
It's sad, but I know there's local Patwin people that live on that creek. And if you are someone who wants that river and wants to use that river for something else, I know you're the ones that are going to go out and try to kill those fox. But those fox are existing and everyone knows it.
We're losing all our animals, you know, out here we lost all the hare, the local hare. And I'm not talking bunnies or rabbits, I'm talking the hare (laughs). There's still some out there but they killed the creek, out here too. So, sever it completely from the life, cementing it separate. That's the death of the creek. You know, and then it just didn't have any life and then it's just gonna grow invasives and then the algae comes, you know, and it's not gonna have any oxygen, separating a creek and installing a cement framework around it, it’s the worst thing you can do. It can't breathe.
And I know these are phrases that Westerners really can't relate to, when I use them, but I'm speaking of the life of the creek, and it does have life and it needs the same things we do, you know, and it needs to breathe and if you separate it, that's like giving it emphysema.
I've seen every creek in Sacramento die because of that. Every little creek from the American River that flowed through Sacramento--and I'm born and raised in Sacramento, you know—being in my homeland, I've seen every creek severed. Because I used to walk those creeks. I was born in 1960, so there was still existing creeks in 1960. And I used to walk them, and catch fish, and work with the invertebrates that lived along with them, just having fun. Frogs, catching them, growing them. The Western Toad completely disappeared from the area. It's something very obvious to what I grew up with and what I knew, what happened to that creek. I don't know if you've ever heard but, you know, there was a time where even my relatives, aunties and grandpas and great grandpas and great aunties would talk about more birds (sound: birds wings beating), how they could fly really thick in the sky and create shade when they go over, I mean, they were so thick. These are stories that have become stories, but they were a reality. So that's where I come from when I hear about these kinds of things, all these connected thoughts to those changes that cause irreparable damage to environment and local species. I'm just saying there's still a lot of animals dependent on the creek. And it is a living source, for many, and it shouldn't be an experimentation. And I see when non-native plants are put on it, you’re experimenting with them, if they can survive. And to bring your plant over here, bring your fish—like gar is invading rivers and messing ‘em up too, killing all the salmon in some places, eatin’ all the fry. Barracuda too, and barracuda gar and all that. And being a Native American born and raised in your own homeland, this is how I feel. And it's hard not to feel that way. Being looked at and saying, “Oh what are you, you don't look like you're around from here,” and I go, “I look very much like I'm around from here, regardless of whether you know it or not. I am around from here.” That's the kind of message I always got my whole life.
You know, it's time to really get into the history, and the local terrain of California and quit trying to make it where you come from. But enjoy it for the beauty that it is.
2. BASKET SONG
Music: Singing in Numu [Northern Paiute]
3. LAND BACK
Music: Land Back by The Halluci Nation
RITA: One of the main ways that racism manifests against Native people in the US is erasure. You've probably heard at some point in your education or other that all the Natives just disappeared or died or just moved away or something or other. People think that way a lot, unconsciously. There's no attention paid to us in almost every aspect of American life. And in climate activism, especially. It's interesting, because just a few years ago, we had the pipeline protests in the Dakotas, which was one of the largest national scale oil protests in the entire country and in the world. Those protests were the largest gathering of Native Americans in American history. And yet people still forget to include us in conversations about climate change. Native communities suffer disproportionately from climate change because we interact the most intimately with our land and the animals and plants on it. Lots of our traditional ways involve hunting and gathering in ways that we used to. In many different ways, climate change is making that impossible.
Music: Land Back by The Halluci Nation
Land back is a very general idea. It's a movement, but the basic premise is that Native land should be handed back to Native hands to let the people to whom it originally belonged steward it.
The concept of land back scares a lot of people. They're not sure what Native people want to do with it; ironically, it's they don't want to be displaced or shoved out of places that they think they should be in. There's that unfamiliarity with what Native people want. They don't want to be forced to move out of their homes, which is not what Native people want. Native people have been displaced and disenfranchised, to the point where it's, for many people, excruciatingly difficult to live where we're supposed to live. So we have to get our land “back” in as many ways as we can. A lot of the way land back functions, in the legal sense, is that it uses treaties that were established at one point to grant Native tribes certain rights over their land. Around the 1940s mass development began on the entire West coast, but especially in California. There were many, many Native tribes who lived here who live here, sorry, present tense. They live here. Many of them were federally recognized, and around the 1940s the federal government completely gutted most of their federal recognition in order to terminate their rights and say over their land.
I have a job with the California Indian Museum right now where we're researching ways to make cultural gathering, which is the practice of harvesting plants for traditional purposes, more accessible for Native communities in Sonoma County.
Actually, one of the biggest problems that Native community members highlighted was that they interact very negatively with non0Native people while they're trying to do their cultural gathering. They get yelled at, or whatever, by members of the public. So like a less, like strictly legally defined definition of land back would be, you know, just letting Native people do what they've always done without disturbing them.
Music: Land Back by The Halluci Nation
You hear the term “rematriation” a lot in Native communities, and in Native environmentalist movements. It's a play on the word “repatriation.” And the reason it's rematriation instead is because many, many, many Native communities were matriarchal before colonization. A lot of the role that women played was owning property and having a say over how things worked in the natural environment. In the oil pipeline protests there are these women who were called Water Protectors and Water Protector is still a title that's used in and outside of protest contexts. Water Protectors were strictly women. So all of these things are related. Women are believed in many Native cultures to be the caretakers of nature and in charge of how their communities interact with the natural world.
Music: Land Back by The Halluci Nation
The thing that I think deserves the forefront is that we are a contemporary people. Many of us are urban people. We look all kinds of different ways. Just because you think you've never met a Native person doesn't mean that you haven’t. Our identity is not determined by blood, it's determined by our family. Even though we've been displaced and disenfranchised in almost every way you can think of, we're a strong, resilient people and we fight for what matters.
Music, Land Back by The Halluci Nation
4. SOMETHING INSIDE IS BROKEN
Music (singing):
PEHEIPE: He has an army
Soldiers he trained
He has your people
And nothing you do will make him change
He has a Fort
Gateway of the West
He’s just a man
That you can’t best
He’s like a monster
Deflowering the land
His little empire is not so grand
He’s only human
Not like me (I’m special)
He’s only human
But he scares me
Something inside is broken
Something inside ain’t right
Something inside is broken
Something inside ain’t right
SYMYK’AJ: Singing in Nisenan
‘IINE: Singing in Nisenan
SYMYK’AJ: Singing in Nisenan
‘IINE: Singing in Nisenan
PEHEIPE: Something inside is broken
SOLDIER: (spoken) What is your business at the Fort
PEHEIPE: Something inside ain’t right
MAN: (spoken) I come to work. I am from Symyk’aj’s village.
PEHEIPE: Something inside is broken
SOLDIER: (spoken) Open the gates!
PEHEIPE: Something inside ain’t right
‘IINE: Singing in Nisenan
PEHEIPE: (overlapping) He has your child
The man in the Fort
He took your children
His men did extort
Children singing in Nisenan
PEHEIPE: (overlapping) He has your wife
The man in the Fort
He took your wife
His men did extort
SYMYK’AJ: No
Let ‘em go
I failed you all
I failed my people
I failed my son
What can I do
I’ve lost all control
To the man in the Fort
Overlapping with men singing in Nisenan
PEHEIPE: Something inside is broken
Something inside ain’t right
Something inside is broken
Something inside ain’t right
Message: devolve
Message: don’t fight
Message: devolve
Message: don’t fight
SOLDIER: (shouts) FIRE!
Sound: Cannon firing
5. SHE WOULD LAUGH
Music: Recorder playing Red River Valley
YA-NAH: Grandma June was born in Colusa. She said that she guessed she would die there, too, and laughed pleasantly because she had spent her whole life in that little town. She also expected to be buried in the cemetery at her Miwok homeland, where her mother and one of her sisters are buried. The cemetery is for all Miwok people, but the United States stole the land, and then it was bought back from settlers and returned to our people who still lived there then. I think they stayed because the cemetery is there. The land was returned in 1927, and on paper, it became a Rancheria.
Sound: Wind chimes
Grandma’s name was June because she was born on June 1, 1935. She worked in the fields from an early age, along with all of her siblings. She and her older sister, Auntie Bea, were two of four children. Grandma was the youngest. Their sister died as a child, and nobody knows what became of their brother Leonard, except that he probably died in prison. She could remember her mom taking her to the hairdresser through the back door after hours so that no one would see them because they were Indians.
When she was just 15, Grandma married a Nomlaki man. He proposed to her and she thought that he was kidding because he had a famous sense of humor. He was just a few years older than her, but I never met him. They had six children together. My dad was the oldest, and the youngest was just a toddler when my grandpa died in a car accident on All Saints Day. When Grandma talked about his death, she would look down, sigh, and shake her head. She would do that whenever she talked about anyone’s death. Sometimes I would joke and say that she married him even before she knew that he was a Casino Indian, and that would make her laugh.
Sound: Wind chimes
Before Grandma had to quit driving, she made it to one last D-Q University pow-wow. I was sitting at a table and talking to one of my cousins when Grandma walked through the door with her crutch on her arm. Dugan Aguilar was at the pow-wow that day. He was taking pictures of the event, and he agreed to take a portrait of Grandma. From then on, she was always delighted to talk about how she had her portrait taken by a famous California Indian photographer.
Grandma had been a professional nurse, and after she retired, she became a masseuse. When she could no longer live alone, she moved into a nursing home just a block away from the Davis cemetery, and that made it easy for all of us to visit her. Even in the nursing home in Davis, she would pop my back from her wheelchair before I even knew what she was doing!
Sound: Wind chimes
Grandma was born at a time in California history when the Miwok language was still spoken. Her mother spoke Miwok, Maidu, Spanish, some Portuguese, and English. My daughter would count to ten for her in Nomlaki, and she loved to hear that our languages are returning
Grandma wanted me to learn how to dance Miwok style for her funeral, and she also wanted me to learn the Catholic faith. She wanted her funeral to be a Miwok and Catholic fusion. She passed away in Davis, but she wasn’t buried in the Davis cemetery. She wasn’t buried in any cemetery because the Miwok cemetery that she thought she would be buried in had preempted funerals for casino construction.
It takes a lifetime to begin to chart the history of genocide in the Americas. Greed has motivated the oppression of California’s Indigenous cultures over and over again—and it isn’t over yet. Nothing should be built at anyone’s burial grounds; Indian casinos in particular should be built elsewhere or not at all
Grandma fought the United States in the courts before she died. In 2011 she and her sister Bea joined the Friends of Amador County in a fight for their own recognition and to protect our ancestral homeland. She meant to stop the desecration of her Miwok cemetery. When the recognized tribe joined the state and federal defendants and used sovereign immunity against its own elders, the case was dismissed. Less than a month later, Grandma June died on February 12th. As far as I know, she was the first member of our family not to be buried in the family cemetery.
Sound: Wind chimes
We spent Grandma’s last Thanksgiving together. It was also the first day of Hanukkah. We had a small gathering: just my parents, my daughter, and Grandma. That morning, my mom and I cleaned the house. My daughter was drawing butterfly princesses and watching TV. The bird had songs to sing, and my big smelly dog was overjoyed about everything. For Christmas, we did the same thing, and my aunt and uncle joined us, too. Thinking of Grandma June still makes me happy.
Music: Recorder playing Red River Valley
6. IT’S SPECIAL, IT’S SACRED
Sound: School bell
CHRISTINA: What is it like being a Native student here in Davis schools?
JACE: It's pretty good, but it feels not good, because a lot of kids are bullying me.
CHRISTINA: What do the kids bully you about?
JACE: My hair and my culture. They say that they're gonna cut it and they pull it.
CHRISTINA: And how does that make you feel, when they pull your hair or say they're going to cut it, or even calling you a girl sometimes, too? What does that make you feel like?
JACE: Sad.
Sound: Children playing
JACE: What do you wish parents taught their kids?
CHRISTINA: I would like parents to be a little more mindful. I think a lot of times teachers are not telling the parents when a child is bullying another kid for cultural reasons. It's kind of just left as, “your child was being mean to this child,” but doesn't really state why and why that's problematic.
Another thing parents could do is to kind of seek out, you know, Native history in the areas that they live in, because the schools don't do a good job at teaching any Native history or culture. And if parents kind of sought that out-- a lot of tribes have events in communities-- going to some of these events at tribal places or even museums, hosting cultural days, I think that the parents could have a little bit more understanding, and being able to share those kinds of experiences with their children, and not just relying on getting this false narrative of Thanksgiving and Columbus at school.
JACE: Mom, what do you wish that teachers taught Native stuff in schools?
CHRISTINA: I wish the schools in America did a better job at talking about the real history about what happened to Native people, and that we're still here, right? Because sometimes people don't realize that Native people are still here. I wish that the schools had curriculum that taught about Native history of the places that they occupy.
JACE: How does it feel when I come home and I tell you that some kids bullied my culture and about my hair?
CHRISTINA: It's always really hard because I love you so much, and I always want to protect you and I can't do that at school and it really hurts when I see you upset when people say mean things to you about your culture and about your hair. I would like others to know like how much that hurts and how that has affected you.
Sound: Children playing
CHRISTINA: What do you wish that people who bully you knew about your hair? What's special about it?
JACE: It's strong, it’s and it’s special.
CHRISTINA: I'm really proud of you for that, you know, being bullied for several years at school, you've never once said you wanted to cut your hair, and you are proud of who you are, even though people don't understand sometimes differences, but it makes me sad for you. And I just have to keep doing my best to remind you of who you are and where you come from and your culture. But I'm really proud that you're being so strong at school and sticking up for yourself and talking to teachers about that.
Sound: Whistle blowing, tennis shoes on ground
CHRISTINA: So what would you hope that other students and teachers, and even parents, what are some things that you wish that they knew about boys with long hair about Natives?
JACE: That it’s sacred and it connects us to the earth, and it’s special.
CHRISTINA: And those are awesome things.
PARTING QUESTIONS
Song: Red, White, and Blue, sung in Newe [Western Shoshone]
ANTHONY: Thank you for participating in the experience of HEAR FIRST. We hope you continue to learn about local Native history. To that end, we leave you with some questions, inspired by Pam Gonzales.
How many tribes were in California before contact?
What tribes and tribal nations are here today?
Where are they located?
How many treaties were signed between the United States and California tribes?
How many of those treaties were ratified?
What is the difference between Patwin and Wintun?
How has education about local Native history changed in the past twenty-five years?
Who teaches our current students about the culture and history of the Wintun Nation?
How are those teachers trained and by whom?
How many Native students are there in Davis Joint Unified School District?
How many Native teachers?
How do you celebrate Indigenous Peoples’ Day?
Song: Red, White, and Blue, sung in Newe [Western Shoshone]