I always say welcome to the Black Academy and
Curtis King's dining room table.
How many people this is the first time coming
to a writer's breakfast round table, your first time?
You don't be afraid, I'm not going to give you
an award or anything like that, but let me see
your hands again.
Oh good, great. Well let me just give you just
a little bit of history about the writer's
breakfast round table.
Just so you know, we'll go right into our
dialogue, thank you. We'll go right into the dialogue.
About, well I'm going to say several years ago,
I was in New York City visiting an actual
writer by the name of John Oliver Killings.
And Killings was a very well-known, prolific
writer, thinker, scholar.
And I was actually there because of an
invitation that Margaret Walker, who was my
former professor at Jackson State University,
passed away a few years ago.
She had written ten books before she died.
Jubilee was her most popular work, and of
course For My People.
And when I was living with Killings for the
three weeks, he had a writer's breakfast.
And Sonia Sanchez, Emma Baraka, Toni Morrison,
of course Killings, another writer, I can't
think of her name.
But they were all there. And what they talked
about the state of African-American writers
getting published in some of the works and so forth.
I was a student, and it was just so fascinating
to me for them to have a dialogue and to talk
about works and then do it in a social
breakfast type of setting.
And so then I said, okay, this is a great idea.
I like the idea.
And so what we started to do, I went back to
Mississippi and talked to Dr. Alexander about
the idea and the concept.
And a few, about five years ago, we decided to
do the same thing.
Those of us who are from the Deep South, they
always say Texas is South, but let me say Deep
South in Mississippi.
There was one thing that you had to do in black
family is that if no other time of day you had
to go to the dining room or the breakfast table
on a Sunday morning,
you had to have prayer and you had to have
breakfast together.
And my father used to always say, we may not
always agree upon the right thing, but what
we're going to do is be respectful of each
other's opinions.
And so what I decided to do is to, the part of
our program is put something like this together.
This particular year, we wanted to put
something together called Building Toward a
More Perfect Union.
And you know we're here with the preamble all
the time, but when President Obama became
elected and a part of his race speech was
Building Toward a More Perfect Union piece,
we said, okay, let's do a piece, a five-part
series, Building Toward a More Perfect Union
discussion between African-Americans, Native
American, African-American, and Jewish
community, African-American, Anglo community.
And this is actually the third of the series.
Last record, the first one we had this season,
Doan Cox, who's from Turkey, and I went to
Turkey this past summer,
and found a whole lot of relationship between
African-Americans and the Turkish community.
He did a brilliant, brilliant job slide
presentation about the relationship between
African-American and Turkish.
So then I said, okay, well who else should we
do with African-Americans and with Native Americans?
I said, Bob Ray Sanders and Peggy Larnie.
You know, we got two powerful firehouses.
And so this is the second part of the piece.
We actually had about 50 people that had the
RSVP for this particular breakfast,
but the idea is for people to have dialogue, to
have conversation, figure out things that are
similar, things that are different.
We've had some extremely heated dialogues.
We started off with one breakfast, then the
second season we did two, this season we're
doing six.
And so they are definitely working.
And what we found in doing the breakfast, we
have a very diverse group of people depending
upon the conversation.
The next one we're having is between
African-American and Anglo-Americans,
the mayor of Dallas and Royce Weston we're
doing the next one.
So we thought about that.
Then we got another exciting one that's coming
up, and that's one when the big conversation was
when Eric Holder talked about America and being
a coward.
And so I said, well, we'll do a dialogue about
America being a coward.
And we asked Craig Watkins to come and be
responsible, I mean, moderate that one.
So we got a lot of response to the breakfast.
And last thing before we start the speakers,
when I was in New York this past week with Ruby
Dee and Melvin Van People,
and they were looking at our brochure, and they
said, what can we do in New York City to have
the same kind of dialogue around the table?
They said, this is absolutely amazing.
And the Melvin Van People look and say, you
mean y'all got this kind of shit going on in Dallas?
If you know Melvin Van People now, you know I do.
So he said, we need to come up here and do some
shit like this in New York City.
Maybe some of these had to get better up here.
So the reality is, I said, well, we're doing
this here.
He said, well, you ain't got to say nothing, Mr.
King, it's all right.
So I just want us to give a really great
welcome to Bob Ray Sanders, who's a great journalist,
and Peggy, who's a thinker and a scholar, for
accepting our invitation this season to lead
this dialogue.
Very open. I know we'll get a lot of information.
We'll ask Peggy to talk about the piece from
the Native American perspective,
then Bob Ray talk about the African American perspective,
and then we'll see what our differences are,
our similarities, things like that.
So let's give it up for Bob Ray Sanders and
Peggy Morgan.
Thank you.
I'm Peggy Lorne, and I'm a full-blood American
Indian, and I'm a citizen of the Choctaw Nation,
and I'm a retired educator from the Dallas
Independent School District,
and I've been in charge of the American Indian
Education Program.
I've been very active in the American Indian community.
I am part of the American Indian community.
I live where the American Indian people are.
I'm not one of these that lives out and comes
in to represent,
and I don't try to represent the American Indians.
I'm just part of that, but I happen to be one
that is able to represent the community in an
official way.
And I'm also involved with several of the
Interfaith organizations, City Dallas,
with some college organizations, do a lot of presentations,
because American Indians is the most researched
but the least understood ethnic in the United States.
And as we talk, well, you're going to find out
that there's a lot of information that I'm
going to share with you,
hopefully that it will increase your knowledge
about American Indians.
And I use the word American Indian because that
was the terminology I was raised with.
It has legal definition when we start talking
from sovereign nation to the United States nations.
And then today terminology is Native American
that's more popular,
but if you had five American Indians here and
you asked them which do you prefer to be called,
you'd probably get five different answers.
And so it's interchangeable.
A lot of times I'll be using the word Indian.
I'll be using American Indian, most likely.
And then, of course, a lot of us know Native American,
but many people say, well, I'm Native American
too because I'm born in Americas.
That's North and South America.
So, you know, I would say, well, we were
misnamed when Columbus invaded what is now
United States,
and we still have gone through many names.
We'll still be going through many names till
kingdom comes.
So right now Native American is very popular in
different areas of the country,
but so is First American, Natives, Indigenous people.
And so I'll let Bob Ray give a little
introduction himself and we'll start.
Well, I mean, the same thing is true, of
course, in terms of the black community.
Those of us who've gone through the various
stages of colored and Negro and Afro and
African American and black,
you know, there was a time when if you called a
black person black, you had to fight on your hands.
That has changed.
But I want to not so much talk about our experience.
I mean, when you think about what both peoples
have gone through, I'm talking about black
people and Native people,
we should be the most angry people on the face
of the earth.
And had we been, America would not be what it
is today.
I'd like you to think as we go through this
discussion, what would North America look like
had the Spanish come to North America and the
English had gone to South America?
What would we be? Would we be what we are today?
I mean, that's just a philosophical thing I'll
throw out.
But I want to start us thinking this way
because we're so misinformed about ourselves.
Y'all remember Flip Wilson, right?
And I know you remember Geraldine, but I don't
want to talk about Geraldine.
But Flip in his very first album, his comic
album, this is many years ago, at least 30, 35
years ago.
And he talks about his classic routine was
Columbus coming to discover America
because he had convinced Isabella in Spain that
Ray Charles was here.
And of course, and was greeted pretty fiercely
by the Native Americans.
But on that same album, he had this fictional
conversation that he had with an American
Indian outside of a cigar store.
You know, the classic symbol of, and Flip goes
up to him and says,
hey, man, you ought to get, this is stereotypical.
You're dressed up out here outside of a cigar store.
You guys got to get it together.
By the way, what's your name?
And the American Indian says, my name is Henry.
And Flip says, wait a minute, Henry, that's
wrong name.
First of all, you got to change your name.
Go get your American Indian name.
And plus, you guys got to start getting like us
colored people.
You know, we got NAACP.
We got CORE.
We got SNCC.
We're marching on Washington.
We're doing everything.
And you Native Americans, you're just sitting
back there not doing anything.
And Henry, the American Indian says, I may all
be true,
but I never heard of anybody playing cowboys in
colored people.
The point of that, I think, speaks to where we
are still today
in terms of the stereotypes for both of our people
and where do they come from and how were they reinforced.
And I'm going to suggest to you that what we
know about each other
and what we know about ourselves, we got from Hollywood.
And until we get rid of that, we can't go forward
as two people trying to understand each other.
Back to you, Ma'am.
Well, when Columbus invaded the United States
at that time,
I think the American Indians had a very unique personality.
We were, as people think, as savages, but we
weren't savages.
We also believed in God, but we used the word creator.
So when we talk about spirituality, when we
talk about creation,
that is very important for us.
But when people came, the European people came,
they didn't realize that we also were very
developed societies
and had called us savages, uneducated,
because we didn't speak their languages.
And sometimes we, I say we because we have
different ethnics
and different nations in our country, is understanding.
And one of the organizations I belong to is
Disbalanced Antiracism.
And we're all guilty of that in one way or the other,
but institutional racism is what American Indians
has had to go through, still going through,
and will have to go through in the future.
There's a phrase that we have been using lately,
which is very, very appropriate, we shall remain.
We've been here, we have survived over 500 years
of institutional racism from the United States government,
from the indigenous perspective.
We feel like that we have been very, very quiet.
We have been very laid back.
But we've been late in the situation of dealing
with our problems.
And I want to share just a little bit with the
history part.
Of course, when you have over, right now we
have over
564 federally recognized tribes.
But just imagine how many more tribes were represented
at the beginning of United States history.
And many of those do not exist today.
Many of them have been into marriages, into
other ethnics,
into different nationalities, to where they
don't claim to be
American Indians, but there's interest now
where people begin
to say, well, I have a little Indian blood in me.
We have entities that want to be recognized as
federally recognized tribes.
But going back to the African-American,
when I was teaching in the Dallas Independent
School District,
I would have so many students come to me.
Of course, first thing they're going to say,
well, I'm Indian.
And I always ask, well, what tribe?
They say, Blackfoot.
And I don't know whether that's a stereotypical
remark when
sometimes a Black person wants to identify
being with American Indians.
But we also know that Blackfoot, and of course,
a lot of them showed me their feet, proving
that they got Black feet.
And I don't know whether that was appropriate
for them,
whether they were trying to be funny.
But I just told them, well, if you think you're Indian,
you really need to go back and talk to your grandparents,
to your elders, and get some information
because you have
two beautiful nations on both sides of your ancestry,
and you need to learn about it and be proud of that.
But also we had teachers that would come
afterwards after hearing
the presentation saying that they had learned
so much
from the American Indian perspective.
I have the privilege because I am a
full-blooded American Indian
from the education field and have where I can speak
knowledgeably, intelligently about American Indian.
And so I always say I'm a full-blooded American Indian
because we have so many people that may have
just that much Indian
in them because they have a degree, they have
done research
that makes them expert on American Indian.
And so we have American Indians that are just
as intelligent,
but a lot of us are laid-back, low-key, and
don't speak as much.
The younger generation now are better educated,
are more vocal,
but that is late in coming.
With the African Americans, a lot of the Indian,
the association with the five civilized tribes,
I told you I'm full-blooded American Indian,
I'm a citizen Choctaw Nation.
Choctaw is one of the five civilized tribes
that the runaway slaves
or our slaves are very closely akin to.
So let me tell you the other five civilized tribes.
Seminole, my husband Larry is a full-blooded Seminole.
We have the Cherokees, Chickasaws, and the Creeks.
That makes up the five tribes that were
normally located
in the southern part of the United States
and where the runaway slaves would go into the communities
when they were running away from their masters.
The Indians would put them into their communities,
and they became friends.
In many situations, there wasn't that much interaction
as far as we think marriages, of course, or
later on it begins to be,
but at the early beginning, the Indians would
take them in as friends
because I want to say because we were more
close in colors
and understanding the plight of what was
happening at that period of time
that the Indians became friends of the black.
And so we have, especially in the Florida area,
we have what is known as the black Seminoles
that lived around the Seminoles.
And of course Seminole was not a tribe until
later on.
Seminole was remnants of different tribes that
came into the Florida area
running away from their tribal people, from the warfare,
and from the United States, and then these
tribes became a confederation.
And after a while, the Spanish gave them a word,
and Semiron in Spanish means runaway,
as well as from the Creek language mean runaway
or renegades.
And so that's how the word Seminole became to be.
And the black Seminole is very, very important
in the Seminole history
because many of them had villages, had
communities around the Seminoles,
but they were allies.
A lot of them became friends, became very
fluent in the Seminole languages,
and many times were also leaders as far as when
they had to work
with the American Indians and talking with the government.
But on the other hand, the United States government
looked at both the Indians and the black as not
even being a citizen.
And of course, at that time, we didn't have the
word citizenship.
And so they looked at us being second, third
class, not even being anything.
Of course, you know, the Indians were savages
for so long,
and the Constitution refers to the black as
three-fifths of a person,
which was, you know, today that is very unacceptable.
With the American Indians, the five civilized tribes,
the Cherokee had a lot of individuals what we
call white Indians.
These were white people that were married into
the Indians.
Most of those were the slaveholders.
Most of the Cherokees had many slaves.
And so when we start talking about Indians
being slave owners,
it was usually the mixed bloods of the white
and the Indians that had the mixed blood,
second generation that was still into the
slavery holding.
I would like to thank the other four civilized tribes.
Of course, there were some white that married
into the other tribes,
so most likely those were the slaveholders.
But most of us, average Indians, full-blood Indians,
we took the runaway slaves as friends.
And so when history begins with Civil War,
and many people don't realize the Civil War was
for the American Indians,
it was because the Indians did not want to give
up their friends.
The white plantation owners wanted the slaves
to come back.
They would come to the Indians.
In fact, you know, they used to have bandies
where if you bring back a slave,
you get so much money.
And after a while, if you bring back an ear, a
black ear, you would get bandies.
A lot of the Indians wouldn't do that.
There were treaties that says if you do this,
give up your black slaves,
we would give you so much money, we would give
some more land.
Most of the Indians didn't do that.
But also we got to realize there were some tribes,
and record has indications that even though the
Cherokees were the biggest slave holders,
they also did not integrate with the blacks.
And because the Cherokees were so aligned with
the white Europeans,
that they were against abolishing slavery,
but they were the biggest holders of slave owners.
And a period of time when Civil War started,
the Southern tribes, the Five Civilized Tribes,
were about this time,
they were into the Indian Cherokee, which is
now known as Oklahoma,
because of the Trail of Tears, the Indian
Removal Act.
And everything bases is land for the Indians, L-A-N-D.
Everybody wants the land that the Indians were
sitting on.
The racism from the United States was, if we
can do away with the Indians.
And where did the black people come?
You all were included right along with us.
And with the removal of Indians from their
lands, from the southern tips to the Oklahoma,
the Indians brought their friends, the slaves also.
You don't see very many of the blacks in the pictures,
as we see the Trail of Tears, but many of the
slaves came over.
But the bad thing was that at the end of the
Civil War,
the United States government came to the Five
Civilized Tribes.
And it depends on how you read.
History is his story. It's not our story. It's
his story.
And a lot of the history is biased.
And so the United States and many articles will
say, I agree.
But you've got to realize the United States
didn't negotiate.
They mandated for the Indians.
And they told the Indians, the blacks that you
have in your family,
you're going to have to recognize them as part
of your tribal people.
Unless you do that, we're not going to give you
a treaty.
We're not going to recognize you. We're not
going to give you land.
And so with the Five Civilized Tribes, there's
a special category
that's called Freedmen, the Indians.
And at that time, you didn't have to be in
black with Indian blood,
but you were put under a special category
called Freedmen.
And at that time, the United States said you
shall give them full citizenship.
But it didn't specify what that meant.
And why didn't the United States take care of
the black?
Because they already put the Indians as a ward
of the United States,
depending upon the United States.
If there was a war for the black people,
why didn't the United States maybe do the same
thing for the black?
Why did they make y'all part of the Indians?
And of course, that wasn't all the blacks,
but those are some questions that we need to
think about.
I don't know why, but of course, you don't see
enough documentation to tell us that.
And it hasn't been until lately that there's
been more written materials
about the relationship of the American Indians
and the African Americans.
But the Indians had, in 1966, a peace treaty
had to be signed
for the United States again to recognize the
Five Civilized Tribes
back into the United States, because during the
Civil War,
we were part of the Confederate States of America,
which meant we had been disenfranchised from
the United States.
So the punishment for the Indians was also to
take away the land
that the United States had made available for
the Indians in Oklahoma territory,
which is now Oklahoma.
And so they said because you had fought for the
Civil War,
we're taking all this land, and of course, we
know about the Sooner Boomers
and all the land that had been made available,
especially in Oklahoma.
But what is very important is the treatment part.
And then not knowing the full recognition of
what that meant,
the Cherokee Nation and the United States
government from the Black Caucus
is in a situation where the Black Caucus is
wanting the funding to be stopped
for the Cherokee Nation until the Cherokee
Nation recognizes the freedmen
as a full citizenship.
And that's something that you really need to
read, you need to analyze
and understand at that time what it meant, what
it means today,
when so many Black people don't understand that
the Indian people
have had to give up their ancestry.
Many of our people died along the way coming to Oklahoma.
And so have your people.
And then why is today racism still strong where
we have Black County
pitting against American Indians when we should
be working together?
But then that's today's personality.
But what I wanted you to know is that with the
five civilized tribes
we've had so many treaties until 1866.
And then finally there were no more treaties
because after then
the tribes were given sovereignty, limited
sovereignty status.
That is what United American Indian nations are.
And so when I said a few minutes ago, I'm a
full-bust citizen of the Choctaw Nation,
when my chief deals with anything with the
government, it's nation to nation.
And so that gives us a little bit different status,
especially when the Civil Rights Act came into play.
The Indians were still so busy fighting for
their limited sovereignty status
with the fight with the United States government.
When many people think the civil rights, Martin
Luther King,
that the Indians benefited from that.
We really didn't benefit from that.
In fact, it hurt us in many situations.
But here again, do your researching.
And so Bob Ray, this is some of the part of the
Indian history
that I wanted to kind of share with the group.
Many people don't know that and some of y'all do,
but there's still a lot of questions.
There's so much that we could discuss that we
don't have time,
so just kind of hit and miss.
And this is supposed to be conversation,
and so I'm going to let you talk with me now.
Yeah, we're going to talk and we're going to
open it up to you guys,
so if you got questions and comments, join in.
But I want to pick up on a couple of things
that she said in relation to the African-American,
I mean, dilemma in a way.
Because when you think back on our relationships,
she mentioned Columbus invading America,
and people are offended by that term.
Some people are.
I mean, I understand it.
I am not offended because that's exactly what happened.
But when Columbus invaded America,
it's estimated there were four million Native
Americans in North America at that time.
By 1900, there were less than 200,000.
So when I say they did a number, I mean, that's
a number.
Ironically, by the time Lincoln signed the
Emancipation Proclamation,
there were four million black people in slavery.
So when we start talking about, we're talking
about millions of folks destroyed,
wiped away, minds messed up.
I mean, you name it.
And that's what I said.
I mean, think back if we had been invaded in
North America by the Spaniards,
not that the Spaniards didn't do terrible
things to the indigenous people.
I guarantee you they did.
They did tend to mix more with the people,
which is why you have what we have in Mexico
and South America today.
But here's the interesting thing.
I, as a black man, proud of what my people are,
what they've done.
And yes, indeed, as slaves began to make their way,
runaway slaves began to make their way west,
they did that because most Native Americans
were more hospitable to their plight
than certainly the Southerners and even the Westerners,
who were not in the United States at that time,
even into Texas,
because Texas was under Spanish control,
and slavery had been abolished by the Spaniards
long before even England,
and certainly decades before the United States
abolished slavery.
So the black people coming into Texas, as my
ancestors did back then,
came because there was some freedom here,
and that's why you now understand why there was
a lot of people
wanting Texas to become part of the United States.
So when you talk about the whole Texas
Revolution thing with Mexico,
there was an underlying premise there, too, is
that, hey,
eventually this would be a state of the United States,
and the Southerners knew it would be a
slave-holding state.
And sadly enough, it was not like that under
the Spanish.
But as I said, the dilemma, when you talk about
Indians being savages,
because, you know, except for Tonto, everybody
else was the enemy.
I mean, how many of you played cowboys and
Indians when you were growing up?
What were you? Were you the cowboy or the Indian?
I was the cowboy. Yeah.
Don't be afraid to say you were dumb.
No, no, no, no.
No, because you had the long-range of costumes
at Christmas and all that.
But my older brother will tell you to this day,
he'll tell you to this day,
he said, you were always the strangest person.
You always wanted to be the Indian.
And I did.
Man, I burned our preacher's son at the stake.
I mean, I'm serious.
I tied him to a tree, put an old leader, and
set it afire, and ran away.
I mean, and I think about it, he's my closest friend.
You were going to be a problem.
But then, okay, black people, what do you think
about the Buffalo Soldiers?
What do you think about the Buffalo Soldiers?
I mean, I have the artwork of Burl Washington
in my house,
specialized in Buffalo Soldiers, great
paintings, great story.
What about the Buffalo Soldiers going out to exterminate?
I often wondered about that, and I really did.
I wondered about that.
You see, because I raised that question because
when she brought up all the treaties,
I mean, we're talking about thousands of treaties,
I mean, signed by presidents of the United States.
Every last one of them violated.
When the land was set aside, of course, I mean,
every promise made to black people, too, you
know, for the last 300 years were broken, too.
But when you look at every treaty, we had a
story in our paper this week.
The Alabama Cachado, a federal judge seven
years ago said,
hey, what Texas did to that tribe by allowing
those companies to come in and rape the land,
take all the minerals, take all the timber over
a hundred-year period,
what you did was wrong, and you owe them $105 million.
That was seven years ago.
Do you think Congress has moved?
Have you seen the suits against the Bureau of
Indian Affairs,
where there are billions, hundreds of billions
of dollars owed to Native American nations
and no attempt whatsoever has been made to repay?
And even when they designated land, once a
mineral was discovered on it,
God forbid a precious mineral, I said, oh,
never mind, we're coming back, y'all.
Have some blankets.
I think that we, as anybody caring about
people, period,
and certainly those of us who have been in the
fight for justice over the years,
you cannot fight for your own justice without
fighting for somebody else's.
And I think that's where black people have
really let down.
If we talk about, yeah, we have to be focused
to a degree on our situation,
but you cannot declare yourself free when other
people are enslaved.
I mean, that was Martin's teachings.
I mean, if somebody's enslaved, we're all slaves.
So I say that we've had a checkered past, even
though there were those great things.
And yeah, we can look back on those tribes that
did have slaves.
Of course, they had white people in slavery,
too, once they got them.
But we have to be careful at how we process the
information that we have.
When we have so little information, the whole
land thing.
I had brought a copy of my book, Buried My
Heart at Wounded Knee,
which is one of my favorite books of all time,
which gave me an understanding, at least into
part of Indian culture.
But most Indian tribes didn't believe you could
own land.
So when you think about, you know, we talked
about the Manhattan thing.
Oh, man, they sold Manhattan for some beads.
Well, you know, the Indians who did that went
off laughing,
because they said, fools, these white fools
coming in here,
thinking they can own the land?
Yeah, that's like you going and saying, hey,
somebody say,
hey, I'm going to sell you the Rocky Mountains.
They can't sell you the Rocky Mountains,
but if you're fool enough to say you want to
buy the Rocky Mountains,
then take it.
It was that kind of a thing.
But the land, the land was precious.
And then you look at how we destroy it now,
and now we're going back trying to reclaim it,
after we've already torn it up and ripped it off.
And then you talk about sandwiches.
I mean, when you had many Native American tribes
worshipping nature as part of the creation,
total creation,
and we suddenly adopt this thing where we are,
you know,
worshipping Jesus and whoever else
and allowing the things that we allow happen to
other people in the world
and not just inside the boundaries of the
United States,
I'm talking about all over the world.
And we can sit comfortably in our complacency
and go on about our business as long as we, you
know, got that job
and as long as we, you know, have a little title,
as long as we are feeling like we are part of a community
that's accepting us, even when half the time
they don't anyway,
we forget, we forget.
And so I think what Peggy and I are asking you
today is,
yeah, let's get to know each other better,
not based on what Hollywood said.
You see, not based on what Hollywood said,
but based on the truth.
And there are a lot of truths out there, you know,
and we can debate them,
but there are some injustices going on today
against both peoples
that we all ought to be fighting together to right.
So with that, I'll pause and...
I want to say something that I think is a
fascinating confession.
You know, the information that you've given is
very, very revealing, actually.
And it may be a starting point, I know for me,
as director for an institution, is to have
people with information,
because information is very powerful.
Sometimes we don't know from the humanities side
what it is that we're supposed to be doing
if we don't have the right kind of information,
like the whole thing about the slave owners,
you know,
and how Native Americans, when the slave, you
know, took a certain route
and then the Native Americans embraced them,
and then how the Europeans came in and cut them.
It's the same kind of information that Dawn
shared with us on last week.
The thing that we have to do is we have to
figure out ways.
Everything in the center of this table is the humanity.
That's where it is. And you're right, Bob Ray.
Unless we deal with humanity sitting at the table,
it doesn't matter at what color we are,
doesn't matter what part of the world we're
living in,
it's how to be able to connect the historical dots.
None of us are going to get anywhere, and
what's going to happen
is all is going to end up falling prey to death.
You know, and that's what I think is fascinating.
So I'm saying, for me, the information that
you've already given
is the starting point for a connection of
another dot, you know,
for me in terms of the history.
So it makes my relationship with Native
Americans, Indians, whatever.
People say, like he's saying, colored black, African-American,
and all these different things.
That's another starting point for me.
So maybe next year we should do is have a bill
toward a more perfect union conference in a
much broader sense
to put all these pieces together. It's fantastic.
And let me add this because, you know, Barack
Obama, you know,
that most black people are very proud of,
some of them haven't embraced him yet,
but he met with Native American leaders about
two weeks ago,
I guess it was, two or three weeks ago.
Again, renew the promise.
Okay, we're going to do right.
You know, we're going to straighten up the
Bureau of Indian Affairs.
And I don't know how many of you in Dallas remember,
Peggy and I were talking about this on the
phone this week.
Back in the middle of the late 70s,
Bureau of Indian Affairs had a relocation program.
They were relocating Native Americans from the
reservation to urban areas.
And Dallas was one of those location sites.
They brought a man on a bus, dropped him off
over there,
just east of downtown, and say, okay, bye, y'all.
I mean, basically that's what I mean.
No services, I mean, they started the American
Indian Center
that provided services and things like that.
But I did several documentaries for Channel 13
on this issue
because the unemployment rate, the alcoholism rate,
I mean, every kind of, I mean, all the medical
issues that came about,
people were, and we looked around and said,
and actually, I mean, it was really ironic
because they were being
discriminated against by a lot of the local
shop owners and things like that
and some of the people, residential owners,
but not because they were American Indian.
Once they found out they were American Indian,
they sort of liked them.
But most of them looked Hispanic.
So they were being discriminated because they
looked Hispanic.
But at the same time, the majority of the
people of Dallas
allowed that to go on and happen.
And the rest of the country, they've stopped
their program now, you know,
in trying to get more resources back into the reservation
because being unemployed on the reservation
versus being unemployed in downtown Dallas,
I'm not sure which would be worse.
So that's what we have to do.
What I was about to say, and I didn't mean to
cut you off a minute ago,
but we have to hold Barack Obama accountable, too.
I mean, if he says, okay, we're going to do
this, a year from now,
we ought to look back and say, what did he do?
What changed?
And now you can't correct, you know, 300 or 400
years of history overnight,
which is what we're expecting him to do for us
right now on various fronts.
But what was the start?
You know, all that money to which all those
banks in New York,
and they can't get $105 million down here to
the Alabama Cachata,
we ought to be marching in the streets on that
one, you know.
And, yeah, I mean, everybody you run into now
want to be half Indian
because they've got those casinos up there.
That's what that is.
Oh, they've got money now.
Well, some of them do.
A lot of them still don't.
Yes, Ma'am.
Well, my name is Yolanda Davis, and I work for
the Maryland Protection Agency
and work with Native American tribes when it
comes to grant funding.
And, yes, we listen to President Obama's speech.
And just recently, just last week, this week,
Monday through Friday,
there was a tribal summit in Santa Ana, New Mexico.
So based on my relationship with the Native
Americans that we service,
I believe they're going to hold the President's
feet to the fire.
You know, that's easy to say, excuse me.
But that's easy to say, but you have so much
layer of hierarchy. Yes.
And so many times that talk is cheap. Yes.
When you have to walk, it's different.
Everybody in Washington has got so much agenda.
And there's a period of time that nobody wanted
to be American Indian.
And that still exists in many minds.
And so Us Indians, we're glad that he's been
able to appoint Indians at mid-level,
but we're wondering how much power do they have.
It's this where we just show that we're doing something.
And I really hope that he can do it.
But knowing Washington, I just really hope it happens.
Well, we're hopeful, too.
Well, he appointed Lisa Jackson as EPA's administrator.
And she's very conscientious and concerned
about environmental justice.
And we believe at EPA that we're going to see
some improvement.
As you say, poverty, he cannot save the world.
You know, that's really our responsibility.
But we are hopeful that we will see some improvement.
John Paul?
Yeah, I would pose a question.
It's nice to think about Mr. Obama.
But I think the question really comes down to
how comfortable are we with
and courageous are we in holding ourselves accountable,
not only for what we do, but for what we
believe, and to go deeper into knowing.
The information that you have provided, both of
you, is just stunning.
It is absolutely awesome, the information.
But you also proved, provided that it is
available, it is not that it can't be found.
The question is, we can really move toward
holding, talking about Mr. Obama,
or whomever it is, how many presidents have had,
and how many treaties did you tell me have been
authored and broken?
You know what I'm saying?
Every one of them.
Thank you for all of the quote unquote promises
that goes up in there.
And guess who continuously elect the same people?
Yes, absolutely.
All of us.
So the question, I think, has to do with our
ability also,
and I really think this is a wonderful
accountability session, Mr. King.
Congratulations again.
But I think it's really important that we begin
to look more deeply
and more thoughtfully at what we do and how we
hold ourselves accountable
for what we do when we leave these meetings and
these rooms
and how we behave, how we respond to what we've learned.
I mean, I totally agree with John Ball.
It's up to us to make the calls to the
Congress, to our representatives.
We don't do it.
We send the emails, send the letters, and it's
about us taking the time
and saying, well, I'm going to talk about this.
I want to make sure that it's always on it, and
then we reach out.
And without a doubt, what Eric Holder said
about America being a nation of coward
to really talk about race and issues, I think
without a doubt,
we will all go to school together, go to church together.
But when you look deeper down, and if you
really start talking about issues,
no matter how integrated a session may be, like
Curtis mentioned,
some of the sessions, there was one session
that was just really hot
because of the issues.
And I will say that black people in Australia
have a very close affinity
to Native American people.
There's always been a very close relationship
because when you look at
the historical set of circumstances about land
being taken, health issues,
so on and so on, it's right on the same level.
A friend of mine, who I recently met, was born
on the Navajo Res in New Mexico.
And she was born just like any other child on
the reservation.
She came up raising her little sheep, her lamb.
She speaks fluent Navajo.
And when she was, I don't know what age, but
anyway, she won the title
Miss Navajo Nation.
And she was scorned by many and loved by many
at the same time.
Why? Because her father was African American
and her mother was Navajo.
So even as a child growing up, she had some problems,
but you see how this problem exists in acceptance.
There were two other unique things that I just
want to throw out
and maybe I'll respond to it, other people
respond to it too.
But I thought it was just phenomenal.
When you say that there, when I wrote this
down, 564 registered tribes,
what it means is how many languages do they speak?
So when you say the word Indian, what are you
talking about?
And who are you talking about?
Do they all speak the same languages?
I mean, do they all come from the same wellspring
other than the fact that there's a genetic similarity?
But 564 tribes and then...
And there were thousands before Columbus got here.
There were thousands before Columbus got here.
But again, still even today, if you say there
are 564,
what comes in mind is not only the number of
languages that are
rather than being spoken, but what also are the
belief systems?
And you really alluded to it when you talked
about the notion of
how the land is looked upon.
I know that there's much, many beliefs that the
land is the mother.
There's some people who believe that they came
here from the bad.
And these are real, very, sacredly held beliefs.
So I think we have so much to learn and so much
that we can grow with
to try to improve our understanding.
But here's the third little thing I just want
to throw in.
It's all in the same vein.
But you really thoughtfully wove this into the conversation,
specifically when you spoke of the Cherokees
and the, I guess,
higher quantity of malady, that is, not malady,
but the lack of malady
in the European connection in terms of the blood.
And that there seems to be also within the
community itself
some question about the notion of color and
some cast rating
and ranking that also seems to be active within
the community of tribes.
So let me just expand a little bit more.
With the 564 federally recognized tribes,
these are tribes recognized by the Bureau of
Indian Affairs.
Many of them include the villages in Alaska,
then all the little ranches, rancheros in California.
We also have at least 150 state recognized tribes
that are not federally recognized tribes.
We probably have at least 100 applications of entities
that want to be recognized as Indians, tribal nations.
Here in Texas, within the past 20 years,
there's been different organizations, different entities
that have given themselves very appropriate sounding,
like the North Texas Cherokee of maybe, whatever.
And that sounds very legitimate,
especially those of you who don't know of the
Indian heritage.
And these are scams.
Not recently, probably within the past 4 or 5 years,
there's been an organization that has reached
out to the illegals,
saying, and here again they have appropriate names,
like American Indian, survival maybe.
And if you pay us $4,000 or $5,000 to be a
member of our nation,
you don't have to prove anything to come into
the United States.
And so we have so many scams that we have to
fight against.
And then we have so many people that want to be Indians.
The latest situation we read about was the Sedona,
where we have the sweat watches.
We have people that go into Indian traditions, religions,
learn, and then they're out there selling it,
not knowing.
And of course we always say, be careful.
God doesn't want you to be doing things that
don't belong to you,
that you don't know anything about.
And sometimes it comes to fruitation.
And there's one situation that happened here in Dallas
that I wanted to uplift and see what would you
have done.
And if you knew about it, what did you do about it?
There's a local number one morning show,
probably about six, seven years ago,
that said, what would your Indian name be at
your most embarrassing moment?
And the number one DJ said,
his would be caught by his mother-in-law being
behind the barn.
And that used to be my favorite show.
And that morning I didn't listen. I went to work.
I started getting phone calls about ten.
And these were Indian people.
Because when you have Indian names given to you,
many tribes have different ways of doing this.
And just before then, my tribe, the Chalk Toss,
when missionaries came over, they said,
my people practiced the spirituality was heathen.
And so my people quickly gave that away,
adopted the white man way of Christianity.
So I was raised going to church singing gospel songs,
giving up my tradition.
Whereas Larry, his people had to go underground
with the stomped ancient spiritual type
and have finally risen again.
But they had to use that under the guise of churches.
The Plains Indians, they didn't give up their traditions.
So we know the Pound Wives, we know the Sweat Lodge,
different things that we read about, especially Lakotas.
But here in Texas, we have so many people that
want to be Indians
that just grabs into everything.
But going back to the radio program,
when we give names, Indian names,
many tribes have spiritual ceremonies.
They ask elders to give the name.
And then some of Us Indians, we don't have nicknames.
We don't have the Indian names.
But in this situation, they said the names,
as calling came in, got a little bit raunchier
and raunchier.
So we quickly put a grassroots community together.
And at that time, white people were at D.I.C.
They allowed me to use grinding mill school.
And we had invited to have a dialogue
with the radio program that evening.
Because many people don't know anything about Indians,
so we wanted to let them know that this was
offending, educate them.
Well, they called us about 5:00,
said, well, we've been blindsided by you.
Somehow word had gone out and said the radio,
TV show,
TV station were going to be there, and they
didn't like this.
Now how about a number one show that reaches,
what, at least half of Texas,
that was reaching to the influential white people
was going to eventually be hiring my people,
that their mothers and fathers were already
hiring my people.
And if they hear this, you know, the education,
the racism,
stereotyping is already affecting even the
young ones
if nothing has been taught in their family.
But it took a while for Gary Reeve for a whole week
for he to approach this D.J.
He got what I would call a left-handed compliment,
not a compliment, apology.
My neighbors said maybe 30 minutes before,
10:00 Friday night.
But it was an apology to the Indians.
It was an apology to the Indian community.
It was saying, well, it was something I
shouldn't have done.
But in the meantime, we had found out that he
has a friend in San Diego
that ran a contest, same time, with the same theme.
Some of y'all probably heard about it.
What would you have done?
Nobody came to our offense because they said,
money talks.
Our Indian people were so small in numbers,
were so small in power, money power, political power.
So when I'm ever at a presentation like this, I
always say,
if you say you're a part American Indian,
if you had to stand with me, would you?
Even if you're not a part American Indian, I
need your help.
When it's at a point where you need to speak up
for American Indians,
remember me, because we have so small numbers,
we are so small in power that we have to reach
out to you.
So this is going back to where we really need
to work together.
But our Indian people have gone through,
the United States government have wanted to
assimilate us into mainstream so bad.
You've heard from boarding schools,
to where the Indian kids were immediately taken
away from their family,
adopted into a non-Indian family, lost their culture,
to today where we have so many sick people.
We have reservations.
We have poor quality of health and education.
And here again, many people had thought Indians
had died.
When John Wayne shot one bullet and then moved,
as you see,
a hundred Indians died immediately.
So turn a century, we were called Vanishing
American for a while,
because people didn't know that Indians still
live today.
That's why when I started, I always tell people
I'm full-blooded American Indian,
because I'm representing my people that had to die,
or representing an organization like AIM.
Many people don't like AIM,
but it was because of their way of drawing
attention to the plight of American Indians
that things had started changing for American Indians.
And so those are some things I want to share
with you.
We have seven different regional Indian
cultures and traditions,
very similar but very different in different
areas that you go in the United States.
When we're in a metropolitan area like today,
many of our Indian people are so assimilated
into the white stream
that they're Indians and don't even know their
Indian tradition.
And this goes into the mascot logo situation.
And you worked in DISD on that.
I worked on DISD about eight to ten years ago.
We quietly, peacefully did it.
Within two years, we were moving ten schools
that had American Indian and mascot names.
And at that time, a lot of our Indians didn't
even know what was going on.
But the right people, right time, and a lot of prayers,
and a lot of us working together.
Peggy, are there any acceptable mascot that,
would any Indian name be acceptable as a mascot?
We say no, unless it's an Indian institution or
Indian organization that's doing it.
But we also see Florida State that has the Seminoles.
That's where they've had to negotiate.
Yeah, and the Seminoles gave them permission in
that case.
Right, in that situation.
Let me see, I still want to, I'm sorry.
Go on, go on, and I'll come back.
Okay, I had a couple of questions.
I do recall, Ms. Larny, I thought I heard you
say that the Civil Rights Movement
had a negative impact on the plight of the
American Indian.
Am I correct in that?
Yes, you're right.
Because our Indian people, even though we
support it,
we were so busy fighting for our sovereignty status.
Because at that time, we had so much white
people that wanted to do away
with the recognition of sovereignty.
Once the sovereignty, and every year in Washington,
some of our people have to watch the bills.
If there's ever a rider that goes through
attachment with a bill
to do away with the sovereignty status of
American Indians,
then we're just, we'll give up all the lands,
and we know that big land,
big companies, and our reservation system, vast resources.
People don't understand that that's a very
sacred to our Indian people.
And so the different philosophies on that.
But yes, that's right, because we're so busy
fighting for this,
the sovereignty status for our Indian rights.
And at that time, Indians weren't getting the
support that they needed.
And so as the civil rights was going on,
we were getting backlashes from that.
So in a way, it didn't have our plight at all.
Okay. All right.
And I've heard you use a term that is
interesting to me.
I believe you said there are five tribes that
are recognized as civilized tribes.
What exactly does that mean?
Well, here again, it's a stereotype, and we get labeled.
And so civilized because, as I said, we already
had our government in place
before we were invaded.
We had our religion.
And so when the white people came,
our people quickly adapted to the way of thinking,
because I would like to think that we're living
more progressive.
But also we got labeled because they quickly
wanted to civilize us.
Here again, this is the institutional racism.
If we could get the Indians to start thinking
like white people,
living like white people, and the five
civilized tribes
were the closest tribes that the government's
really targeting.
And so we got this labeled five civilized tribe.
And again, keep in mind that,
and something back to what John Paul was saying
in terms of language,
and the same thing we had with black people too,
because we were more of an oral tradition than
a written tradition,
many of the languages weren't written languages.
So in the minds of Europeans, if something
wasn't written,
it wasn't civilized, obviously.
But there were governments in place.
In fact, I think there are people who say that
our Constitution
comes from the Iroquois, statutes that they had
in place,
which was certainly civilized.
But we are the ones who want to put civilized ignorance.
To this day, when they say Phyllis Wheatley was
the first black American poet,
no, we've had poets for centuries,
but she was the first one who got published
because it was written.
So we have to be careful with how we label that.
And that's why I question the wisdom of even
using that terminology
when you know it's used to subjugate people.
So that's kind of why it was interesting to me
that even you used it,
because I would think we would want to break
away from things
that are used to subjugate us.
That's been historic.
It's also used to, there's a five-tribe museum
up in Oklahoma,
if you want to see it.
Again, it's used as a way, if you want to be
hooked onto the benefits,
you want to not be wiped out.
The five civilized tribes probably survived
more than some of the other tribes
as far as, and the way they got to survive is
they had to register.
It's like a cat system.
And what not.
So it's like, well, here's your choice in 1860,
and Peggy can speak much better than I can,
but it was in 1865 or whenever they started
registering Indians
before they pushed us out to Oklahoma to Indian territory.
Either you come out and hide and get registered.
Now who knows what's going to happen to that?
What's registering?
I live here, there's a lot of people that live here.
Why do I have to register?
What is registering, you know, basically?
A lot of folks didn't do that.
But that's how you can claim now that you are a
part of that tribe.
Some tribes do by blood quenching,
some do by tribal roles and things.
All this was done by others.
It was not done by the Indian people as far as
their tracking.
They didn't need any of this stuff.
But as far as survival goes,
the five civilized tribes were the ones that
worked the most with the governments
and the ones that were moved out to Oklahoma,
they still exist there.
Parts in Oklahoma and parts still back in the homelands,
back in the east.