Rematriate

Everybody knows what the violence against Native women is. It's the profound disrespect for us and for the land. It's not only the profound disrespect for our bodies, but for us as peoples and our relations with the land. So that's what the real deal about remontriation is, is it's these ways of knowing that people have, they can be gendered any way they want, but for them to live again is remontriation. today we are discussing remontriation and what it means for our communities to help us understand how this concept has developed and the stakes involved we spoke with Dr. Diane Millian, professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Washington, whom you just heard. We also spoke with remontriation activists Michelle Shenandoah and Markel Musgrave, who works for the National Indigenous Women's Resource Center. Yeah, remontriation is a term that's been taken up a lot in recent organizing and advocacy and we wanted to get us all on the same page as to how we're thinking about what it actually means. And I wanted to start the conversation by sharing a quote from Agusasni Mohawk Seedkeeper, Rowan White, who says, "the indigenous concept of remontriation refers to the reclaiming of ancestral remains, spirituality, culture, knowledge, and resources instead of the more patriarchally associated repatriation. It simply means back to Mother Earth, a return to our origins, to life and co-creation rather than the patriarchal destruction and colonization, a reclamation of germination of the life-giving force of the divine female." Wow. Rowan is so amazing. I'm trying to get that life-giving force of the divine female in my life. I mean, so Matika, when you're hearing that definition and you're thinking about your own life and your babies and your community, why is remontriation something that we think is important for us to talk about? Why is it important to you? Oh my god. Well, first of all, it's everything. Remontriation is everything. For me, it's just as much about the return to water as it is about the return to our Mother Earth. You know, here in the Pacific Northwest, we still have all of these core important ceremonies that tie to our original agreements that tell us who and how we're supposed to be, right? We still have our salmon ceremonies. You can still go to our longhouse and experience the power of our songs and dances. You can still hear Lyshutsi being spoken. And, you know, while we've moved really far away from what was once a matrilineal society, our women are still actively in powerholding roles, centering our ethics and our Indigenous intelligence, both in birth and child raising, and also in our tribal governments. But for me personally, it's been critically important to be mindful in the decisions that I make as a new mom. You know, how do I raise my baby to experience life in a gentle and good way? How do I help her to develop a relationship with land and with water and with her ancestors? You know, and one of the things that we do every day is we greet the Sun in the moon. You know, so it's really cute. Like, I'm gonna be every time we go outside, you know, she'll be like, "Hi, Grandma Moon!" And every single time she sees it, she never fails to, like, to greet the moon. And that, to me, is like really beautiful and profound that she's developed that relationship. You know, we're getting ready to plant. It's that time of year. And spring is here, so we've been preparing for salmon ceremony. We've been weaving. We've been waking up our seeds. We're getting ready again for, like, this transition in our lives, which I just am so excited about. Like, I need spring. And, like, hearing the birds outside is making me feel like I can go on. You know, like, winter's been way too long here. But, you know, the truth is, is Alma hasn't known any other way of life. You know, like, she's been to salmon ceremony every year. She has had her birthing-way ceremonies. She has had this intimate connection to our traditional homelands because of these tiny little decisions that we make on a daily basis. I think that that takes conscious decision-making. I don't think that it just kind of falls into our lap. You know, it's, there's work involved and, and I like that. That's who I want her to be. And then in my personal work, you know, as a storyteller, I've also made very deliberate decisions to photograph our matriarchs, to tell feminist stories, you know, to connect with our sisters and amplify their voices. In fact, my next project is about this exactly. And, you know, I feel really proud of the work that we've done here in the podcast with all of the incredible native women that we've spoken to. I feel really good about all of the matriarchs that we've celebrated here, not just in this episode where we talk about rematriation, but like all of the incredible women whose voices have contributed to our collective consciousness. And that gives me like this great hope. So Adrienne, how do you think about rematriation? No, I think that's so powerful to think about that rematriation really is those daily small decisions. It's raising Alma B in a different way than we were able to be raised. And that is so incredibly powerful. And for me, of course, I am the nerdy academic. So I have a couple of like kind of academic deep ways that I think about this. And there's two things that I kind of wanted to highlight. The first is that when I'm thinking about rematriation, rematriation is really a response to colonial destruction. So we would not need rematriation if we hadn't experienced colonization. So to me, rematriation is not some like separate process from the big and messy work of decolonization. It is decolonization. You can't have decolonization without rematriation. So to me, land back is rematriation. Language revitalization is rematriation. Bringing traditional lifeways into the future is rematriation. The work that we're all doing to center a relationship with the land like that work that you're doing with Alma B, that's rematriation. So you can't have decolonization without the return, the rematriation of indigenous land and lifeways. So to me, we can think about it as rematriation is kind of the action steps of decolonization, if that makes sense. And then the second thing that I think about is that I see rematriation as tied deeply to my values as an indigenous feminist. And I think about it kind of as this revitalization and return to matriarchal values. So for me, like on my journey as an indigenous feminist, it's been about learning that as indigenous feminists, we aren't just fighting against some like nebulous capital P patriarchy that like exists out there, we know as our communities like the moment that patriarchy was brought into our communities and that moment was colonization. So baked into the structure of our current colonial world are these like patriarchal values like greed and capitalism and all of that. And so to me rematriation is a reversal of all of that. Our communities, like we knew a life before patriarchy and we can imagine a life after because of that. So I can't separate these ideas of like my own indigenous feminism of decolonization. All of that is rematriation to me. So we want to just jump right into our conversation with Michelle Shenandoah. She is a rematriation activist, a media maker and an inspirational speaker. She belongs to the Oneida Nation and she's Wolf Clan. Michelle is the founder of the nonprofit rematriation, an organization dedicated to uplifting the indigenous woman led movement of rematriation. Good afternoon Michelle. Oh, Seguli, I'm so grateful to be here. Thank you so much Metica and Adrienne for having me here. I'd like to introduce myself. Seguli Sugeg, Goluhianues, Niogetsu, Onyoteaka, Ni'i. Michelle Shenandoah, my Unguahue indigenous name is Goluhianues. It means that she's fond of the sky. I am a mother and grandmother and I'm calling in today from within the traditional homelands of Arhod Nishoni Confederacy and on the lands of the Onondaga Nation, I myself am Oneida. So our sister nation is about 30 minutes east of here and I'm just really super grateful to be here today. Thank you. Michelle, could you please define rematriation for us and tell us the story of how you came to that definition? I myself come from a traditional family. My grandmother was a clan mother for our Wolf Clan. My mom is a faith-keeper for us and my husband also comes from a family of traditional leadership of chiefs and faith-keeper and you know it's just it's how I live my life and so it's kind of the world in which I'm I'm living and orientated in and so for me you know I'm trained within you know our culture and traditional laws and protocols but I also have a Western legal education and also in business and you know at this point it's like how do we just kind of bring this together in a way that really truly honors our people and so mama bear who's a Bear Clan mother from Aquasasini she you know does a lot of work with the women and children of our community and kind of really helping to strengthen that voice of our women to stand firmly in our cultural ways and for our people and she was using this word in a lot of context and it was still really very new and and being used and you know I said let's get this word known it's not in the dictionary many people don't know what it is and you're using it in many different contexts from governance to cultural matters to you know returning our objects to our people talking about food and so we spent an evening on the phone and I said tell me you know everything that rematriation means to you we spent about a good 45 minutes you know I was listening to her and just really fully explaining this you know this worldview that's very centered around our women and life-giving elements and how this really is the way that our people think and how we orientate ourselves in the world and how we have to come back to that because colonization pulled us so far away from it and also you know reminding people that the the origins of rematriation really come from within the traditional birthing practices where we return the elements that the baby you know is brought to this world and connects to the mother is returned back into the earth and so you know putting that into a new context of thinking in the way of our governance and food and seeds it's actually it's not really new it's it's how we have always been but being able to verbalize it so that we can actually use it in practice so I said all right let me let me spend some time with this and I'm gonna call you back so you know I looked at everything she said I felt my way through it and you know then I like contrasted that to repatriation and looking at you know what that stands for and it's returning a person or an object back to its original owner back to its country and this is really about returning back to the mother right returning back to life and so with that I created this definition of returning the sacred to the mother so here we are so I said let's get this in the dictionary let's get this wherever we can and that's really become the mission of what we do now at rematriation is to help to get people to understand that process so yeah that's the story such a good story especially the part of having to like go back and be like how do I sit and digest all of this and to get all of that complexity down into this like simple statement of returning to the mother is so powerful yes you're right returning the sacred to the mother is so powerful and you know I want to just take a moment to break that down because it's not giving something sacred to mommy right it's not what we're talking about here and you know it's this is a slippery slope to define sacred because I don't think I'm qualified to define what is sacred and what is not sacred but I know I always revert back to what Anishinaabe people have taught me about their language which is that in their language instead of their language being gendered it's defined by what has a spirit and what doesn't have a spirit and I like to think about how in our languages we also had ways just of describing on a daily basis things that were spirited or not spirited so we had like this ongoing relationship with the spirit world and I think that our traditional teachings root us in having a relationship with the sacred and when I think of the mother I think of you know like the ephemeral mother the mother earth the divine life force the feminine returning to like the natural order of natural law and that's what I think of when when they say when they say that returning the sacred to the mother and I think the powerful thing is that that can be interpreted through every different indigenous community's lens and understanding and that everyone's going to have a different relationship between what is sacred and what does it mean to return to the mother and I also like in these definitions I think it's important for us to understand why this work is necessary why is it that we're having to do this work of rematriation and so we wanted to bring in Dr. Diane Million here to give some context on how colonization specifically targeted women and families and implemented patriarchal power the way in which we have been dismantled as nations is known right it's known all of us know it except for the ones who do not want to see it or hear it what had been targeted was women's roles what had been targeted were families and the families of course through our all the relations that we make in a place particularly here in Coast Salish country where families are very tightly bound by their familial relations with other families okay one of the first things that is targeted is those relations you know by making people choose what reservation that they enroll in you know you're gonna go live up here and you're gonna go live down there telling Nooksack for instance they have to go have to live with Lummies of course they're gonna say no exactly you got it okay so we have all that we know those kinds of things but we don't recognize them sometimes of the way in which very specifically of course different governments are put into place and those governments are just like the governments of the patriarchy they are the patriarchal governments they're the colonial governments the government's governments of settler colonialism which were hierarchical puts white males at the very top of that hierarchy over everything else that's living all of our governing systems that went down to really lateral the power wasn't in being power over it was the power that was given from the spirits of the land and people sought to be in right relation with them because they could take it all away the fish would not come if you're and if you're not in right relation with those fish they won't come so Michelle you talked a little bit about this notion in Haudenosaunee understanding of the balance between genders and how that works traditionally could you talk to us a little bit more about kind of these some of these core beliefs and understandings in the Haudenosaunee Confederacy in terms of like governance and gender and all of these ideas and the way they've sort of influenced the world in a lot of ways and how that's kind of related to all of these conversations around rematuration as well yeah that's a really big topic that I talk about frequently because in the United States and really kind of an influence around the world is the gift of democracy and the modern democracy that the world has come to know and that the United States has come to know is really rooted in the the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and and you know our our way of life and our great law of peace and so the very early founders of the United States the founding fathers specifically spent time with our people they studied us they made treaties with us like that you know pre United States you know in the colonial times there was so much treaty-making going on there's a great article I like to refer people to it's on longreads.com which talks about Washington living in a very native life but you know his biography has been erased and it really talks about how he was like constantly like trading and making wampum belts and you know having relationships you know with this nation and that nation and you know calling for for all these treaties to be made right and so Benjamin Franklin you know he's noted in the forming of the Declaration of Independence and ultimately the formation of the the US Constitution is talking about creating a great Confederacy in the likeness of the Haudenosaunee people but that has just disappeared from the history books conveniently right and in addition to that Thomas Jefferson he actually studied our languages and you think oh wow that's so great you know he spent all this time studying the language but really what it was was an intent to destroy us to understand you know what nations are related to each other so in their attacks they would know who's speaking to who so they would be able to have their armies prepared right but really ultimately they were just studying our way of life so when you look at the different branches of government that exists within the Haudenosaunee Confederacy the way that our clan mothers and with our chiefs and the way they operate is really very much like the state and the federal level that influence is just completely erased and you know I went to law school in constitutional law I brought this up to my professor and he looked at me like I had three heads he was just like didn't believe me and it was so infuriating because I was one voice you know in this whole law school that was like trying to bring this to their attention it was it was really frustrating but in addition to that you know when we talk about the founding mothers the suffragists who sought you know women's rights and the right to vote that movement actually came out of upstate New York well what's now called upstate New York right because these suffragists they were living among in spaces being influenced by our Haudenosaunee women and the the lives that white Christian women lived was very very restricted they were property right and then they saw Haudenosaunee women who lived very free and they're like I want that that's what I want right so you know we have and still have full autonomy over our minds over our bodies over our thoughts and our property over our children and over the land right so this is another really big influence that has come to to shape the world that we live in because these you know movements are global right democracy and the push for democracy has also been global and really you know what was left out though when you think about it right when you look at the US Constitution it was created for white males who are landowners but in addition to that all people of color were left out you know women were left out but also life right mother earth water the plants all of the animals right all of life was completely left out of that and in the Haudenosaunee way of thinking that is so important and critical to who we are and how we make decisions so when we look at gender gender was not even you know considered in that as well right it was just for men and additionally that kind of strict gender binary that's laid out in these founding documents wasn't even the way our communities understood gender at all yeah so let's go back to Dr. Millian who helps us understand how indigenous communities had a different relationship to gender prior to colonization many of the indigenous languages had no gender they didn't gender words because they actually went by the roles and so you you were born into your body you know in a particular spirit and habits your your body and so they watch for what that spirit is the spirit expresses itself and becomes what it is rather than this fixed thing in a hierarchy you are a female and this is what you do okay so that's how also in some places you know there were more than one gender right because you had different kinds of roles that were expressed and had to be thought about not every group of people that had those many genders though so there's a lots of ways in which that's all people were asking for they were asking for the freedom for those roles to be expressed again for women to freely be part of governing so the outcome of that was of course is that they had for many years been subjugated by an Indian Act that did really egregious things in terms of the women's roles but everybody knows what the violence against native women is it's the profound disrespect for us and for the land not only the profound disrespect for our bodies but for us as peoples and our relations with the land so that's to me what the real deal about rematriation is is it's these ways of knowing that people have they can be gendered any way they want but for them to live again is rematriation welcome back from the break relatives we're here with Michelle and let's hear what she has to say about the moccasins on the ground work of rematriation and how her organization really does this work on a daily basis yeah well one of the things that we recognize very early on in creating the spaces that we had whether they were in person or digital was the recognition that we kind of really have two spaces in which we have conversation one which is among our women you know among our own sisters and one which is to the public you know because as an indigenous person and I know you feel this you're always in a space of where you have to educate right and it's almost a responsibility that we have to be able to help to educate you know non-native people about who we are and what the issues are but as indigenous peoples as indigenous women one of the things that we had you know noticed in particular here in Haudenosaunee territories is that there really were not a lot of spaces in which our indigenous women could gather and it was exclusively just for us and it was for us to be able to have open candid conversations to be able to be in spaces of healing together and now what's really you know you flash forward today and you kind of see that a lot everywhere but if you like look back 10 years ago 15 years ago I'm not really sure how it was in your community but for us that really was not something that was you know on the forefront and there was a lot of hushed conversations about issues that are women-based and so you know knowing that we have you know experienced very high levels of violence sexual violence and knowing that these things needed to be expressed right because you know we've been carrying so many traumas for years whether they're current or they're inherited intergenerational traumas and they needed to find some way out they we couldn't just hold on to them anymore because you know the world was changing evolving there was so much going on with healing Mother Earth was calling for us to heal so and in that connection with her you know naturally it just happened that the women needed to find space to gather and so what we also recognize is that when we're together as women that's our medicine right as indigenous women that is our medicine being together it's not going to the spa or you know zen out in meditation those are great things you know they help us to become centered but in all reality like you know we gain strength from each other from hearing each other's stories to be able to be there and support somebody else and wipe their tears away or wipe their grief away or have yours wiped away right so that's how we started to really find that place of healing. Michelle in listening to you talk I'm really curious when you're thinking about rematriation how do you see it as different than the goals of mainstream or white feminism? What I see is within the understanding of who we are we haven't had to fight for the right to be seen or to be protected or to be heard or the right to you know have to have say over our children or our homes or our land or our property you know we are protected in Haudenosaunee way of life we hold an elevated status there's a very big misunderstanding you know people like to say oh yeah among you know the Haudenosaunee you know women were equal to men and that statement is so problematic because it comes from a Western context that just makes this assumption that men hold the standard and in our way of life which actually begins with the worldview of a woman you know you know just falling from the sky some other place in the universe and comes here to the earth and brings life here and is the starting point for human life and how we came to be here our worldview is just so centered around women and around the life-giving gift and quality that we have and so that is protected and that is the role of our men and even of our people right like even of our women like we have to protect that life-giving that life-bearing element and that is also our connection to Mother Earth right so we don't have to fight for this place of being equal it's only in this colonized world in which you know we've had to fight for our voice because you know again it goes back to what I was saying earlier when the suffragists went on to fight for what Haudenosaunee women had there were so many of the rights of indigenous women being taken away and so we've had to fight for our children we've had to fight for our voice to be heard we've had to fight against violence and that's all what colonization brought here to us and brought to our doorstep and within our families and to me it's like we can't center the conversation you know looking at white feminism and looking at rematriation I personally believe we can't center those in the same space we have to look at them in a very different context and if anyone you know has read Robin Wall Kimmerer's book Braiding Sweetgrass she starts it out very clearly by talking about you know the story of Sky Woman and the story of Eve and how you know they have very very very different journeys and for all of the people who descend from from Sky Woman and those who you know descend from from Eve that the the way in which you see yourself and walk in the world is very different they're very different for the listeners maybe Michelle can you can you talk a bit about Sky Woman and give the brief explanation of the difference yeah so Sky Woman is the creation story of the Haudenosaunee and I just heard a really really beautiful expression whenever you're trying to find an answer always go back to the creation story and the creation story for us is that there was another world that that exists called Sky World Sky Woman came here in fulfilling a dream and she was either pushed or she fell from this hole that was where a tree of life you know was uprooted and so she fell through that hole and on her journey here she had an interaction with with a comet some people will even call him a lacrosse player and so when she came here you know she was like in full term pregnancy and all that existed here was the water and water animals and they could see this bright light falling from the sky and this was her and they all knew that you know she would die if you know she just came through and hit the water and so they all got together and they formed a council and they were trying to figure out how are we going to help her and they decided that they needed to break her fall and they needed to have a place for her to land and so it was decided that the geese would come up and they caught her and then they brought her down and it was also then decided that she would be placed on the turtle's back and that she would also need some of the earth and so with that it was decided that the muskrat would swim down to the the bottom of the ocean and bring dirt up onto the turtles back for her so when Sky Woman came down she took that earth and she put it onto the turtles back and she began to do a dance she danced on the turtles back and the turtles back began to grow so she gave birth to a daughter and the two of them began to you know name the different animals and and when Sky Woman came when she fell from Sky World she had grabbed she tried to catch herself and when she did she had some of the dirt and the seeds from Sky World and so from that you know we have different plants and medicine plants that she brought with her and she planted those here but soon her daughter became pregnant and there's a couple of different stories in terms of you know whether it was like the West Wind was the father of her her babies or whether it was Turtle Man and so she gave birth to twin boys and one of the twins was born you know through the normal way of giving birth and then the other twin came out of her left side out of her armpit and in that process it killed her so her body went back into the earth and from that there was more foods and tobacco that came from her body that grew from her body and so the grandmother Sky Woman raised those two boys one was a right-handed twin one was a left-handed twin and they began to create the world around us with this with this earth right because it's magical it's life-giving right it's in so they began to create everything that we see and the right-handed twin would create something like roses and the left-handed twin would put thorns on it and the right-handed twin would make this you know beautiful stream where you could be in a boat and it would take you one direction and then it would bring you right back the other direction and so the left-handed twin would like throw rocks in it and make it all crooked and it would only go one direction and so they just had different ways of creating and different ways of existing and so that's the world that we know now but when you think about it the story itself begins with a woman and that's the important thing and that's what we always remember so that is a very short version of Sky Woman I love the way that Robin describes it in her book Breeding Sweetgrass and the way that Thomas King writes about it in the truth about stories where he says if you believe in this in the story of Eve where she comes from a man's rib bone and that sin and is rooted in it and that we're inherently sinful people that it sets us up for this framework in the society where we are already devaluing women from the very beginning from the very beginning of creation and there's a lot of people that talk about creation stories being our foundation for the way that we create our society and that that goes on to make all of the policies and laws and the critical thinking and the collective consciousness that impacts everything that we do and so ascribing to believing in reaffirming and upholding our original agreements and our original stories is a huge part of rematriation absolutely absolutely it absolutely is mm-hmm I want to be sure that we take a moment to talk about your interactions with the Pope last year and how that ties into the doctrine of discovery and even Ruth Bader Ginsburg it's quite a big question this is not a light reading here it is not light reading at all yeah well that's you know it's a great question you know just to kind of get to the point last year I traveled with the Assembly of First Nations and served in the capacity of a female spiritual advisor to address the Pope so we were in closed audiences with the Pope and this you know request to serve this actually originally went to our clan mother Mama Bear and she was unable to go so she started looking out in our community to see who can go in my place and it came to me to myself and to Gadji Juni Fox and we decided that I would speak and so therefore that was the role that that I was given and I only had ten days to plan for this which was probably a good thing because it really forced me to get into the place of like what needs to be said and I just allowed for it to just really like come through and it was almost like in one night during the middle of the night just all the words just you know made their way onto the page but what really came through was you know the doctrine of discovery and you know looking at the papal bulls that you know really support this theory and have existed you know since the time of Columbus and him you know setting sail to the Americas and and for all of the European explorers who came to claim the land and claim the resources you know in the names of you know the the crowns of Europe and in the name of of God right that it's somehow their divine right to be able to take this but also to do away with the people to do away with whatever they wanted with all of our indigenous relatives and basically the basis of it was that because of the fact that we were not Christians we were not deemed people and therefore they could rape kill enslave remove you know our peoples from the lands and that's exactly what happened and so bringing this up to the Pope it became really very critical for so many of the indigenous delegates who went there you know the the Vatican and as a whole has basically held this position that you know they rescinded you know this particular papal bull and therefore they really you know are trying to stay hands off from this issue but what they're not recognizing is what they set forth into the world was adopted and codified into law in the United States in Canada and used throughout all the Americas to commit genocide and it's still active law to this day right so this brings me to the Oneida nation you know to our land claims and when I was a kid I grew up in a space where our land claims were really ripe and my great-grandmother was also really very instrumental to getting our case heard before the Supreme Court and her lifetime and I mean our land claims went on for like you know over decades and the Supreme Court said yes you know New York State you took Oneida Nation lands now you got to go work it out with them and that took a really long time and throughout the course of time eventually the small city called the city of Cheryl decided to sue the Oneida Nation because we decided to buy back our land and rather than paying the taxes on the land we gave a gift to the city a financial gift probably about the same as the taxes but that wasn't enough for them they said no you have to pay it as a tax you can't pay it as a gift but the land had already been determined to be illegally taken and so it went back up to the Supreme Court again and the case which was then written by Ruth Bader Ginsburg cited the doctrine of discovery right off the bat right on page one of the case and this was one of the first times that you see the doctrine of discovery used in the court cases and prior to that it had been the early 1800s and the doctrine of discovery has been used in the United States to basically claim all the territory within the bounds of the United States and to extinguish indigenous title to the lands right so you flash forward and now you have it in 2005 and so it's like to me Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the court like breathe life back into this doctrine and this was my very first year of law school right I went to actually go work on our land claims and I was like wow now what do I do because in that case it closed the door for all Haudenosaunee land claims in New York right and it has had impact on other indigenous nations as well but this is what happens right this is how it has been happening and this doctrine of discovery is used as as the theory as the the the foundation for genocide for land-taking for taking our children for violence committed against our women and people don't really understand the impacts of it right but it's right at the bedrock of the creation of the United States of America and so when people begin to understand that this is the law and it's still active law to this day law creates policy and policy informs education and education informs people on how to treat one another and with that indigenous peoples have been invisibilized for generations our lands have been taken for generations in policies we are called the Indian problem and the government at the federal and state level have been trying to figure out what do we do you know how do we get rid of these Indians and how do we get rid of this problem that we have and it all goes back to this thinking that is really centered around these papal bulls and the doctrine discovery that tells non-indigenous peoples I have the right to take this I have the right to own this and I have the right to tell these people who've lived here since time immemorial this isn't your land anymore this is not your way of life anymore you know you can't exist in this way and so you know that's what I addressed to the pope thank you so much for that explanation and for making all of those connections for me and for the listeners and the way that you just articulated that I just want to acknowledge I mean I knew about like the RBG stuff like I knew about the cases but when you hear it articulated that way and think about like how she's held up as just this like icon for like Democrats and the that's the foundation of yeah no what you're saying is she's like the OG of feminism yeah people think of her as like this this woman that sat in her robes for a long time doing things for women's rights in women's liberation but when in fact you know she had had this massive deciding case that continues to impact Indian law and indigenous peoples and results in the dispossession of indigenous lands and therefore because land informs who we are land holds all of our teachings therefore continues to impact like our ability to be healthy and whole and who we are meant to be and all of those things are connected one is not separate from the other right absolutely it's so yeah it's dope yeah and I think also you know you know there's there's a greater connection to as well when you think about the doctrine of discovery and the very big issue of missing and murdered indigenous women and peoples because again going back to those times of the founding fathers and them interacting you know with with the Haudenosaunee and the development of their their own government who stood in the way of that expansion who stood in the way of taking the land is the women because the women were the ones and you know continue to be the ones who have the say over the land and so when you think about it right like what is the goal of the doctrine of discovery it's to take the land and so who's in the way it's the women and so there's been this you know like silent you know decimation of our women in the space of colonization that is directly tied and linked to this doctrine that continues to exist as valid law on the books to this day right so when we talk about rematriation and we talk about women being so tied to the land and understanding who we are when we rematriate right we have to undo that right so when we talk about allies and what can they do change your laws take this you know insidious doctrine off of the books figure it out right who cares if it's been there for hundreds of years figure it out right there's so many smart people in the world figure it out you can do it without having this doctrine of discovery at play I'm just so so I could say and listen to you talk for hours this is so enlightening and helpful and empowering and I'm just so excited that we get to share this conversation with our listeners and thank you for all the work that you do and are doing and have done it's just incredible oh I'm so grateful to be here thank you so much for inviting me to be a part of this conversation it's a real honor it's a real honor to you know also be in conversation with you know other sisters who are doing this work who are elevating our people and to talk about rematriation because it really is growing everywhere but I think it's so important for non-indigenous people to understand and to always center indigenous women at the core of what's happening in rematriation it's for everybody it really is everybody can rematriate in their lives but always remember that this movement is centered and grown from and continues to move because of indigenous women so really that's where the claim to this movement comes from is among our sisters and among our women that's really I think very important we wanted to close this episode by bringing in the voice of Markel Musgrave who is a tribal citizen of Nambay Owinge this entire episode on rematriation began with our conversation with Markel during our first ever live podcast recording in Santa Fe and unfortunately the sound from that event wasn't the best but we love Markel and are so so grateful she took the time to talk with us in front of our audience yeah she really has incredible things to say and she's doing such important work in community so we really wanted to make sure we included her voice here she shares with us how she sees this work of rematriation as tied to her values as a TWA woman for me it's really about how we how we think how we feel how we act how we respond how we make decisions how we govern how we love how we parent it's all of those things and essentially for me as a TWA person it comes down to a return to our Nongochukwio or Mother Earth and those inherent responsibilities and kinship practices that that are given to us by way of reciprocal relationship with the land absolutely rematriation is all the things it's rooting our self and our inherent responsibilities our original agreements our reciprocal relationship with land I love how beautifully she said that Markel said that and I love how Michelle and Dr. Millian all spoke with this with incredible eloquence and power and I look I also like to think of rematriation as a form of power within ourselves as women you know as like liberating this like divine feminine within ourselves and trusting that is I think incredibly powerful absolutely and I'm just so grateful that we got to you have this conversation and really it's a start of a conversation like so many of our episodes rematriation and the activists and organizers who are doing work in this area we just barely scratched the surface I'm thinking about all of the folks who are doing incredible work in rematriation around seeds and planting and farming or the folks in the Bay Area who are doing rematriation directly related to land back for communities up there there's just so much amazing work happening and I feel grateful that we got to start this conversation and hopefully folks can explore what rematriation means for them and what it it looks like in their own backyards right and actually since we recorded this with Michelle there has been a big update on the doctrine of discovery yeah amazingly on March 30th the Vatican released a statement repudiating the doctrine of discovery and basically this was pretty big news this is not something that I think anybody ever expected from the church so they released a long statement and what it basically says is that the papal bulls that were do you even know what a papal bull is Matica no what is a papal bull is it like the pope riding around on a bull like who I see I'm not joking I ask because it is kind of ridiculous and and I think we throw around these terms a lot without actually like stopping I don't even think we actually define what the doctrine of discovery is in our conversation with Michelle so I'm gonna back up and again I'm not like an expert on law or Catholicism or any of these things but basically a papal bull is like a type of public decree issued by the pope of the Catholic Church so the pope has the power to issue a papal bull and that public decree is something that then becomes the basis for what Catholics and anyone who is following the order of the Catholic Church does and the doctrine of discovery is something that is a principle that is not like written down from the Catholic Church it's the way that people interpreted these papal bulls and decided that under public international law which when a nation a Christian nation quote-unquote discovers land it directly acquires the rights to that land so a that's the whole like all of the conquistadors and the colonists and Columbus discovering quote-unquote these places it's the the concept that really underlies all of colonization in the Americas is that when you as a European Christian nation come to a land that you haven't seen before you are discovering it and under the laws of the church under these papal bulls therefore you have the rights to that land and right that is what Michelle was talking about is the basis for so much of US law up until like 2005 when Ruth Bader Ginsburg cited the doctrine of discovery in that Oneida land rights case and in that case she directly says under the doctrine of discovery the land occupied by Indians I'm reading the quote when the colonists arrived became vested in the sovereign first the discovering nation and later the original states and the United States so basically under the doctrine of discovery in 2005 so the fact that the church came out and repudiated and then we also need to talk about there's so much here to unpack we could do an entire new episode about this but repudiate is a very different verb than rescind so repudiate just means like I refuse to be associated with this I refuse to accept this I think it's bad it does not mean that the doctrine of discovery has been rescinded it does not mean that the papal bulls that were the basis for the doctrine of discovery was rescinded it just means basically the Vatican is saying we had these papal bulls there were concepts in them that were bad toward indigenous people and we repudiate the fact that those concepts were taken up to create this thing called the doctrine of discovery so right and they so basically and they also say like these documents were manipulated you know so they're sort of just kind of apologizing acknowledging like what they did was bad without like any sort of like real ownership or right repercussions or restitution like you know they're like basically trying to hail marry themselves out of this I mean I want to we actually can quote Michelle here directly so Michelle was interviewed from by PBS news hour to her response to this Vatican statement and she called the statement quote another step in the right direction but she pointed out that it didn't mean rescinding the bulls themselves she said quote I think what this does is it really puts the responsibility on nation states such as the United States to look at its use of the doctrine of discovery this goes beyond land it has really created generation upon generation of genocidal policies directed toward indigenous people and I think that it's time for these governments to take full accountability for their actions mm-hmm yeah it's kind of like oh you know we know we did what we did was really bad but you know then United States is really responsible for that you know and I'm just yeah I mean it's just pushing the responsibility back to the nation states that have taken up the doctrine of discovery rather than saying that it was something that came directly from the church right I think the bottom line is that it's important that the Vatican release this statement it's important that they repudiated the doctrine of discovery that they said that these values that these concepts are bad that they resulted in harm towards indigenous people but the bottom line is that it doesn't really mean that much in the grand scheme of things because now what that statement does is it throws it back to all these countries that have taken up the doctrine of discovery as part of their founding principles and says now it's up to you to kind of figure out how to do that work to undo it and knowing the track record of what's currently known as the United States the fact that we have cited the doctrine of discovery as recently as 2005 in a Supreme Court decision means that I don't hold out a lot of hope that the United States is actually gonna do anything about this but is it good that the Vatican said that the doctrine of discovery is bad absolutely does it really change anything no I don't think it really does no it's actually really good timing though maybe people in the church can take time to think about this I mean this weekend is Easter you know everybody's gonna go to the church for maybe the second time this year cuz you know like most churchgoers go on like Christmas and Easter and maybe every one of these Catholic churches across the nation can take time you know to talk about these sort of things on Easter Sunday that would be cool this would be a this is a good time to talk about it that's actually a very good point that now that it is something that has come down officially from the church that gives permission for all churches to talk about it and they should so hopefully it starts some real conversations but we also should point out that this statement truly would not have happened without Michelle and the other indigenous folks who directly confronted the Pope to talk about these harms so the fact that this came is only due to the activism of indigenous people the voices of indigenous people speaking directly to power it's so true you're right it's exactly that and that's so cool I mean how what an honor and a privilege to get to talk to people like Michelle who are actively doing the work you know like this work of liberation she's a freedom fighter I love her you know I just want to say that much and with that we'd like to give huge thank yous to the AMR team Jonathan Stein, Max Levin, Teo Shantz, and Lindsay Hightower thank you to our guests Dr. Diane Million, Michelle Shenandoah, and Markel Musgrave special thanks to all the folks who made our Santa Fe recording possible the team at Foreman Concept Gallery, AMR team members Darian Camarillo, Hayden Harvey, and Jamie Marquez Bratcher and our live musicians of the event Laura Ortman and KP of Black Belt Eagle Scout finally thank you to Sierra Sana for the gorgeous episode art and a reminder that you can always support the podcast on Patreon and that Matika's book Project 562 changing the way we see Native America is available for pre-order now anywhere where you buy your books , or my relations.