about indian voices in how they viewed their life around them. it's about 45 minutes. >> thank you very much, i'm gary japson, president of the history museum, and with us is alison owings, i understand van voices, listening to native americans. we meet a wide array of people and hear them discussing their own lives. alison, please begin the conversation. >> thank you very much, gary, and also thank you to the chicago lit fest. i'm very happy to be here. i think that i wrote this book

initially because i was apolled by the ignorance of non-native people about native people, including myself so i therefore set out to find what i could to destereo type what i find as a bad problem for centuries and it continues today, and initially, my idea was well, i will just talk to a few native people and find out what they had to say about their own lives, and then the book became stronger and stronger really, far reaching, and i ended up interviewing the indians of maine to the last chapters of the hawaii yap chanter. my object was to destereo type people thinking this would be helpful because native americans in my opinion are still harmed by the steer your tines --

stereotypes about them, but on the other hand, the book also became sort of an extended family reunion for native people who sometimes might live in one part of the country like here in chicago and maybe not know about native people in another part of the country. that was kind of a trick actually in the writing to write for people who knew nothing about native people and then write for four native people who already certainly knew a lot, and about themselves. >> well, yeah, you talk about different individuals. we want to hear from those individuals. why don't we start with someone who lives right here in chicago, ansil deon, working at america's indian center. >> owing. the reason i interviewed ansil because in my early research, i say research loosely.

i learned two-thirds to three quarters of native people live off reservationing reservation including a group of people termed urban i understand yaps. that quest led me to the chicago american indian center to this really wonderful guy, ansil, who is a cultural coordinator there, a volunteer there at this point, and i'm going to read you a little about what he said to some 2nd graders he was introducing to native culture because they didn't know anything about native people either. he said wops -- once your teacher told you you were coming here, how many of you expected to see a old man with braided hair? how many expected to see that? be truthful. a few hands rose slowly.

for those who raised their hand and the ones that haven't, are you disappointed me for seeing me the way i am now? no child move. this is who we are, okay? order -- ordinary people wearing ordinary clothing, not the people you see in movies or read about or what people say about us. we are not these people. indians, we go to school, work. you might have met an indian teacher in your school, indian cop, judge, lawyer. this is who we are, and that's who we want to be, okay? receiving enough nods to satisfy himself, ansil pecked up his -- picked up the hand drum and stopped. what does the beat remind you of? one child said heart beat. he asked who knows what a pow

wow is. everyone had good guesses, and then answered the question himself. it's a celebration where some of us sing and we dance. we also make new friends and renew old friendships. it is made up of four circles. the first circle is the drum representing the heart beat. the heart beat of the pow wow and mother earth and the heart beat of her children, all of us in in room and outside the room. without this heart beat, there will be no pow wow. >> there we are right away, an individual who lives in this very city who if you saw on the street, it may not occur to you you're seeing innative american -- native american, but when you scratch the surface, talk to the individual, you learn about his culturement we're not in the world of either/or. this book is not about either/or, but with regard to ansil deon, let me ask you about

something else. win of the reasons he wore ordinary clothing in that museum center setting because was of certain individuals who came who might have a secret. >> well, that's part of it. he never said -- and some of you might be an i indian child too. he was the only native child in his high school, and he was discriminated against a lot. kids made fun of him. this is the story of many native people who live in a non-native setting, so he tried very hard to not put any children on the spot in case they were indian and maybe wanted to come up to him privately afterwards and tell him, and that happened often, but he said also the reason he wore ordinary clothing was just to show that this is how people dress. this is how native people dress

generally, they dress like everybody else. i made a joke in the book saying they don't usually wear feathers, especially not on casual fridays. [laughter] >> well, we're laughing now, and i have to say that one of the most striking poits in the book is made beginning with the very cover. when you look at the cover of the book, you see a whole group of people with some of the biggest smiles you'll ever see, and it may not be a stereotype to think of native americans as laughing and smiling, but the fact is humor is something that is shot right through almost every chapter of the book. >> i -- i didn't reels when i started the -- realize when i started the book how funny they are and how many jokes they make on themselves and other people. including, for instance, what

are the ten things you say when you meet a white person? one is -- the last one is may i touch your hair. [laughter] they are very, very funny. ansil himself is funny. i met him in november, which is native american awareness month, and he refers to it as rent an i i indian month. [laughter] >> who referred to the definition as a native american family? >> how many people are in a type call native american family? the answer is five. a father, mother, two children, and an an -- anthropologist. >> there's a lot of humor, lot

unexpected, but when you stand back and say why am i surprised there's so much humor, the reason why someone not part of that culture might ask is you don't think of it on the outside as a culture that has much to laugh about. we focus on the difficulties that native americans have, so is this humor no spice of difficulties or woven into the culture itself? >> i think it's both. native americans are not the only ones to have humor about the situation. part of it, i could be off here, but native americans are american americans too. america in general, i think, is a humorous country often. that's what people say is the reputation of americans and other countries that we're funny. why wouldn't native americans be funny too? some are just hysterical. this one woman i interviewed,

oh, she's so follow-upny. every time i tell a joke, she's already heard it. she asked, have you lived on the reservation your whole life? she says, well, not yet. [laughter] it's a take off of other jokes, but in general i found that native people laugh at each other, certainly at non-native people, and at some of the assumptions, and zimbs they just -- sometimes they just get outraged at the rudeness of non-native people towards them and make that into a joke. i interviewed an osage woman, a lawyer, who is very sophisticated working in washington dc with her own law firm there, goes home, oklahoma to the reservation, but she said sometimes people come up to her and say you don't look like a real indian, and her mother's non-native, and she said, well,

you don't look rude, but you are. [laughter] there's lots and lots and lots of comebacks, and i think it was one of the most wonderful surprises in the almost ten years it took me to write this book that i laughed so much. >> wait a minute. let me pause there. ten years to write this book? >> yeah. >> when you read the book chapter to chapter, it has a freshness and very contemporary feeling. it doesn't seem like the product of ten years, but what were those ten years like for you? >> well, i'm really slow. that's part of the reason, and also i'm a freelance editor so i was doing work on the side too to help fund this. i'm a terrible fundraiser. i refer to myself as de facto nonprofit, but i also started from zero. i mean, i really knew very, very little, and when i began this

book, i knew, you know, i knew all the cliches. i knew indians use all the parts of the buffalo. well, that's not even necessarily true. i knew cliches, but i also knew in my heart these are individual human beings with stories and i wanted to help destereotype them, but i knew so little i really had to read and read and read so i just read nonstop. i read a lot of tony hillerman's. red everything i could, and then i started doing the interviews, and finding the people to be interviewed was a whole process itself. virtually everybody was more willing than i expected, although it was hard nut to crack to get under some of the nations in upstate new york because this one woman said they don't trust white journalists

because they get everything wrong, and my background is journalism. it took me four years to convince her i'm an okay person. i made a lot of compromises along the way, but by then i knew a lot more too. i always try to say more or less i'm just an empathetic ear. just say what you want, and i'll listen, and virtually everyone talked and talked and talked, and i have to say it was ironic because if there's anything one knows about native traditions is they have a great oral history, and for me to be in a way the oral historian to some people, it was kind of strange. it was also -- i felt very hop norred that they would -- honored that they would talk to me. >> you mentioned the nation in new york. that struck me as a very interesting story of a tribe because this is a tribe that's

near big east coast population centers, but work hard at staying off the grid when it comes to official involvement with the united states government and the administration. maybe you'd like to tell us about that. >> sure. well, and i think it was 1934. there was an act that essentially the federal government took over tribes, and the idea was meant to be helpful, but it wasn't in all cases. it included a tribal chairman or woman and vote and have a counsel so that literally when someone from washington said take me to your leader. that's now how they functioned at all. different nations had different systems in place, and it worked for them, but this is another

overlay of the federal government saying do it this way, it's better for you. many tribal nations did this, and some in the tribe they took up this tribal chairman system and some didn't, and among those who didn't are the tonawonda outside. they don't even use u.s. passports if possible. they don't vote. they don't let census workers on their lands. this is where i did my interviews. they consider themselves a separate country, and one that predated this upstart in the united states of america and canada so they're -- >> which is correct, of course.

>> yeah. others are the same way, two or three others the same way. they are simply in their way self-supporting, and they don't take social security. now, if somebody needed food stamps individually, some people do that, and some people on the reservation, i think half of them do go to churches and the others go to traditional long houses so this is their decision, and it's fascinating to me. they absolutely don't vote, don't take any federal money for anything. they are just -- and they don't have a lot of money. these are the controversial people who sell cigarettes to get some money, and i did notice that everyone in the -- all the leaders of the tribal reservation, of them, none of them smoke, but they do get their money from cigarettes, and they fight for the tooth and

nail to keep it because it's their only source of income. >> another surprising group, one i had never heard of in a way wants recognition, the lumbe's of north carolina, the largest unrecognized tribe. they are reaching out in a different direction. >> uh-huh. they are so unknown to most people who are not in north carolina. there are an estimated 56,000l 56,000 lumbe indians. they don't have federal recognition they say because the eastern band of cherokees in north carolina don't want them too because then they have a split the federal ply for funding, but they are thought to be the descendents of the lost colony at ronoke.

they are interesting because they are part native, part anglo, and part african-american. you see the strands in this group when you meet them, and they are very christian. they don't have any native religion left because that was lost along with their language so they are very een thews yays tick -- enthusiastic southern baptists and trying to get recognition, but they don't have it yet. other than california, almost nobody i met have heard of lumbes. 56,000 is quite a few. >> when we talk about tribes, there's a word, sort of the operative word for legal and other purposes which is enrollment in tribes, and that becomes sort of a choice. i mean, i don't enroll as a nor

norweigan american who is this and that. i think on st. patrick's day the whole city enrolls as irish, but there's noel formal about it. he's this operative word that has legal significance. >> it does, and it varies tribe to tribe to tribe. i think it's almost impossible to say anything in general about native americans because there's so many differences and so many tribal nations. there are 565 tribal nations federally recognized tribal nations in this country now, and this excludes, of course, the lumbes, and every tribe basically gets to say whether or not how they want to manage their own affairs and who can be enrolled in the tribe and who not, and the advantages of being enrolled often have to do with just basic rights like being able to collect firewood on

reservation land or sometimes it gets to be more financially important, especially if a tribe has a casino, and then people might get casino per capitas, income from the casinos, and then they can vote in tribal elections, but every tribal nation has its own distinctions, and it's also very controversial when people disenroll members if there are questions about whether they should be or should not be in the tribe, and it's controversial across the board. it's controversial. the tribes themselves. some native people are upset that tribes are disenrolling people, and this often has to do with money. >> now, in terms of another steer cro type --

stereotype, i think americans as a whole understand that there's many native americans who live outside the reservation, and i understand the word that's used in the community is usually the res, not the reservation, but if you look at people who do live on the res, they are not 100% enrolled members of a particular tribe. there's more diversity there than people expect. >> yeah, yeah. this is true. i should say, gary, i never say res because i'm non-native, and i think that's innative word to use. i say reservation even though it's more -- it seems more appropriate to me. >> i'll follow your lead. >> but what happens sometimes too is i didn't realize that so many notary public --

nonnative people lived on reservations and mostly nonnative white people because they bought their property in the homestead act and other policies that decimated native lands or there's situations where a nonnative person of any ethnic background marries innative person, and they live together and have children, and so you have a non-native person on the land. there's lots -- things are more complex i think i could say in roughly every aspect of native american life, but that's one of them. that's one of many things i didn't know either. >> well, let's get back to particular individuals. let me start with darrell newel who is in a sentence someone who manages the blueberry

harvest, but low and behold is not necessarily an organic harvest. >> oh, i know. i was disappointed. i had this stereotypes of ceremonies and the tribal chairman would pick the first blueberry, and there'd be prayers and maybe a dropple circle, and he said, no, we just basically pick them when they are ripe. [laughter] that was it, and then he said -- then i thought, of course, they are organic because they are native people. well, that's wrong. he said no, they're commercial. they probably go into pistol -- pillsbury cake mix. it was interesting. this was a man like many i interviewed were sort of abused of the questions from the naive outsider that things have to be organic and close to nature.

that's just ridiculous. >> and he also, as i understand, had difficulties he needed to overcome in his life with abandonment in his family. this is a scene running through many faps, but it especially runs through the native american families you portray. >> he had a horrible time. well, his mother essentially not exactly abandoned him, but gave him to her parents to raise up and he considers them his parents, and to me in a poignant moment, he was trying to find his father because his mother was an alcoholic, and she didn't know who the father was, and so he did dna testing, and he went to one man and he said, you know, you could be my dad. you were with my mom before i was born, and the guy said,

well, yeah, sure i'll do the testing, i'll tell you what, if it's positive, i'll take you fishing. [laughter] it wasn't positive, so he never did find out who his father was, but the abandonment issue is part of a larger story, and part of that story is the efforts by the federal government to send native children off to boarding schools when they were young and sometimes thousands of miles away, sometimes for years with the idea to civilize them, you know? make them nonnative people, and this is where the expression came from, the infamous expression kill the indian to save the man, and these children would come back home, and they could no longer speak the language that their family spoke, and there was huge disruption. it was just an awful, awful

program. it's again one of these things that again the federal government didn't necessarily mean to do something awful. it is called today cultural genocide, but it wasn't -- it wasn't concentration camps per se and gas chambers, but a lot of people did die and the whole culture really came apart at the seams in many instances. >> again, when you hear that history as a generality, it's one thing, but hearing the story of individuals and how it plays out in their lives, it's shocking, and you see how overtime it continues to play out in individual lives. >> uh-huh. >> but then, you know, a surprise, you find that another trait that is shot through the

native american community is a kind of superpatriotism and a dedication to, for example, military service and you ask yourself with all the things that have been done to those communities by the official government in the united states, how does it happen? >> it's often talked about. it puzzles me to some extent although i've heard many, many explanations. what gary is referring to in part is that there is a larger percentage of native enrollment in the military than in any other ethnic group in the country. i think this is true, but i'm not sure. it's what i've been told. the question is why do you want to support this country that messed up your own country so much. there are many given explanations, and the main one

is that native people are very patriotic about their own country. this is now their country, and they're fighting to defend it. i mean, all kinds of ironies come into play. they -- native men fought in world war i and were not allowed to vote until they came back from world war i #. i think native people were not allowed to vote in federal elections until 1924, so -- >> and certain states longer. >> in certain states, longer. in maine, people couldn't vote in state elections until the 1960s. i mean, it's staggering. now, sometimes people say native people joined the military because it's the last chance to be a warrior. i don't know if that's true. i talked to a woman who runs a woman shelter on pine ridge, and she said something that could be

controversial in the book, and that is she thinks that native people joining the military in such number is an aspect of the stolkholm effect, meaning you identify with your oppressor. that's what she thinks it is. >> another story in a number of places, and maybe you want to talk about some of them is struggling against the abuse the woman suffer in certain settings. >> uh-huh. there's a statistic that i think is true that one in three native women will be abused in her lifetime, sexually abused, physically abused, and the woman i interviewed thinks that's low. she thinks it's higher, maybe two this three, and some alaskan native villages it's thought to be 100%. i did an interview in alaska

with a woman and much later after, by the way, after i've been hearing about this 100%, did your husband abuse you? she said yes. that could be true, and often it's linked to alcohol, often linked to meth. there's more meth now than alcohol on some reservations i'm told, and it's, i think it's linked to whatever makes men abuse women in other societies too. it's dispair, rage, alcoholism, whatever the reasons arings it just seemed to be intransigent in some native communities. in pine ridge, for example, unemployment is at least 75% now, and alcoholism is 85%, and alcohol is not allowed on the reservation, but there's some crummy places in nebraska that

sell it, and there's all kinds of attempts to monitor it and ban it again, but nobody seems to do that. another problem beside alcohol and meth is gangs so there's a lot of gang activity in a number of reservations, but i should say, actually, gary, i sometimes think of native america as being at a fulcrum that all these awful things have been happening are happening, displacement, dispair, all kinds of problems, poverty is awful. many places don't have running water and electricity too, and on the other hand, some people feel that this is a renaissance what's beginning on in native american today that because of casinos for instance that people

now are able to -- reservations, tribal governments are able to buy new fire engines and new help centers and help people and have language emersion problems, bringing back the languages that were basically stripped from people decades and decades and decades ago, so some people think it's an extremely exciting time. if you go on the, powwows.com, they list hundreds and hundreds. there's a cultural renaissance on the one hand, but i never know which side is winning because the problems are so intractable. one woman i met in northern minnesota told me that she thinks two and a half generations of people have. lost through federal policies such as the boarding schools. >> well, there's a number of very successful role model

assertive women. for example, there's the lawyer in washington what you mentioned before, but i'd also like to bring up another one who goes under the name the former president in one of your chapter titles. this is someone who actually suffered an impeachment in her job. why don't you tell us about her. >> her name is claudia, and she had been president at the hickory apache in northern new mexico, and she was very troubled, very intense, and very difficult to interview because i couldn't find out what she was impeached for. i met her at a women gathering called we win, women empowering women of indian nations. this woman was upset.

you can't say all women are great base women kicked me out of my job. she was very, very upset. i went to see her years later and said, well, what happened? and what she said was that, well, there were srb she just spoke in generality. she wouldn't say what was the matterment finally i had to go to the journal website to find the story. i guess she thought i knew maybe, but the story is that the tribal police on the hickory reservation were raping inmates, and they were raping them frequently, and this was a big, big problem, and it was reported to her, and she tried to get help for it. she wrote to then vice president cheney to say we need help. she tried to get the fbi in, and

the reaction was pretty much what happens in other communities i think when your own is attacked. they attack back. she got a public service officer to testify it was going on, but instead of solving the problem, they got rid of her. that's why she was impeached. she's very bitter, and oddly enough, maybe not so oddly, but when this is your whole home and you live on a reservation and this is your entire place of identity, there's nowhere else really you can go unless you make a clean break so she has to live with these people who impeached her, and it's very difficult. she's an unhappy person. this is one of those tribal governments that the federal government put in place itself in the 20th century, and had it been another century, they wouldn't have this same kind of

government they have now that allowed all of this so she, yeah, it's an unhappy story. that's for sure. >> well, why don't i -- before we begin to take questions, why don't i ask about one other individual, a med sip man in -- medicine man who two senses of the word. a traditional medicine man involved in the health care industry in a wider sense. >> this is a man named, he's navajo, he lives in phoenix, and he is a systems operator for indian health service, and one of the sad parts of his job is he has to wyden doorways in the hospital so that more and more obese people can get through with bigger and bigger and wider

wheelchairs. this is another big problem in inped -- indian country is diabetes with people who are obese. he was in different religions for awhile. sometimes he was -- he was a mormon for a little while or sent to a mormon school for training, and then he was back and forth. many people sort of back and forth with different -- different religions until they find, they come back to their own, their native religion, and he learned to be a medicine man through a woman which is pretty unusual, and he is very sought after. he never advertises. medicine people do not advertise what they do. i mean, they are not supposed he

said, and people come to him, and he invited me to a three-day blessing ceremony which is really one of the high points of the last decade of work, and i was the only person there who did not speak navajo, an i found that what was so wonderful about it in part was it was so casual. they are very specific, very specific steps he took to help a young man who was emotionally troubled, and at the same time people saying hand me a coke over there. that kind of thing. it's just part of life. it was terrific, and i asked the young man who was being cured whether or not he felt any different, and he did, and he said he felt more grounded and really een joyed the -- enjoyeded the ceremony, and one

other thing about the ceremony is i found that i didn't know this about him until i read the patient's myspace page or facebook page, and found out that he's homosexual. he said he liked hanging out with friends and dating men. this was such a nonconcern to navajo people and mostly in my experience too, virtually every tribe, homosexuality is not a big teal and what happens is sometimes the people are honored. i know a woman who said she has a lesbian friend and when she goes to her reservation, new mothers want her to hold the baby for good luck. that's pretty unoral in main -- unusual in mainstream society. >> any questions? i think we have time for one or two. if you'd go to the microphone right there so we can pick it up

for the television audience. >> you said that you didn't have any problems per se interviewing people, but i'm wondering your being noniindian if that was a problem at all getting published? maybe you didn't have problems, but i guess what i'm asking if you were native american would you have an easier time in the interview process and getting the book acceptedded? >> well, that's a really good question. i always have trouble getting published, so i don't know. i think -- i think maybe had i been native maybe i'd have an easier time because maybe people would have thought that i had more of an inside track. i hasn't really thought of that because being native i vice president thought what if.

i think i had an advantage not being native because i would ask stupid questions. i was always very respectful, and i think people picked up on that. i wasn't trying to be dumb or talk about myself, but i found that sometimes the, just the very fact i was nonnative maybe asked questions like about the blueberry festival and harvest, and also there seemed to be quite a wonderful per pencety among native people to explain things. it's called indian 101 because they are so sick of talking to federal officials and other officials and so forth explaning this happened, this happened. the osage lawyer says we have to stat at 1492 and bring them up

to speed, and they are used to doing that, but i think in my case, they may have just told me more because they were assuming correctly there was so much i didn't know. >> another question, go to the microphone. yes, thanks. >> hi, i was just wondering with there being so many tribes, how you went about the process deciding which tribes you wanted to interview people at. >> i decided to try to find the greatest variety i could in terms of many criteria. for instance, i wanted to go to maps because those are called people of the dawn. it took me awhile to fibbed -- find the event i wanted to go to. it wasn't always vice president, but just to see the person. i wanted to represent the country as much as i could so i

really wept to areas of the country because they had an interesting tribe there. i'm there's no tribe that's not interesting, but i wanted to be in new england and be in upstate new york, and i had to go to oklahoma of course, go to the northwest, interview innative alaskan, and i ended with a hawaiian and ended up with some people in california where i live, but they are all actually from other places, not from my immediate neighborhood, and i want to go to the southwest to the navajo because those are well-known, but i wanted known and unknown tribes, and men and women and different ages so it went from 26 to 84 years of age, and i wanted as much variety as i could. people who lived on