University Place

Indigenous Ways of Knowing

[gentle music]

Heather Hanlon:Hi, I am Heather Hanlon with the Sheboygan County Museum. Thank you all so much for being here today. I know a lot of you and a lot of you are members, and it means a lot to have you here for the Badger Talk about Wisconsin’s tribal nations with Annie Jones today. I’m just gonna intro the museum for a moment, and then I’ll give you some background on Annie. The Sheboygan County Museum has been collecting, preserving, and educating about Sheboygan County history for over 100 years. The campus includes four historic buildings and a modern museum with over 20 exhibits in total. And each school year, we welcome elementary school students here at the museum for full day education programs, and we also go out to middle schools to do that. And all year ’round, we offer public programs like the one that we have this weekend, the Plank Road Rendezvous, which we are having Annie Jones as a special addition to that this year. She’ll be giving background on the first peoples of our area who played pivotal roles during the fur trade, which is what the Rendezvous is about. And who played pivotal roles long before that and continuing today. Professor Annie Jones is an organization, development, and tribal nations specialist. She works through UW-Madison’s Department of Community and Environmental Sociology. Her hometowns are Oconto Falls, Wisconsin, and Kenosha, and she works with UW– She has been working with UW-Madison for 25 years, serving in a variety of capacities, including Associate Dean, Special Assistant to the Dean for Strategic Directions, and a county-based community development educator. Her areas of research include Indigenous method– Indigenous methodologies, like the use of Native American medicine wheel and cultural teachings to enhance planning and evaluation. She specializes in participatory and community-based action research, and we’re very excited to have her here doing that with us today. So please join me in welcoming Annie Jones. [audience applauds]

Annie Jones:Thank you.

Heather:Thank you.

Annie:Posoh mawaw new weyak! An Manie Jones mokiman newihswan. Kaehkenohamowekow Awaesaeh Omaeqnemenew newihswan. Omaeqnomenew netawem. Netomaeqnomeneweqnesan maenawac. Awaehsaeh netotaem. Nekiah Joan Lord, Kesiqnah eneq s’kew wekeyan. Hello, everyone. You’ll be delighted to learn that I’m not going to try to give the entire presentation in Menominee, because that would take a really long time, and I would make a ton of mistakes. I said that my name, English name, is Annie Jones. That’s short for Anna Marie. And my Menominee name is Kaehkenohamowekow Awaesaeh. Really easy to say. And that means “bear who teaches.” And I’m an enrolled member of the Menominee Nation. And in our way, we introduce our family members. And my mother’s name is Joan Lord, and she lives in Keshena, Wisconsin, and she just had her 90th birthday in July. And I’m also delighted to be joined today by my sister, who is in the audience, and many of her friends. So, really looking forward to talking with you today. Today, we’re gonna be talking about Indigenous ways of knowing and a little bit of background and introduction to Wisconsin’s tribes. So, that’s pretty much what we’re doing. You may have noticed already that I’ve started to use some words seemingly interchangeably. And the reason I put this slide up here is because often, there’s some confusion about what to call Native Americans. And so, you’ll hear me refer to sometimes clans or bands. And we also refer to Native Americans here in the United States, I think, is typically the most commonly used. And in Canada, they may say Indigenous or First Nations. In Australia, they’ll say Aboriginal. Here in the United States, you will often hear Native Americans refer to themselves as American Indians. That’s actually how we designate ourselves on the census when we’re filling out the census form. That’s our designation, American Indian. So you’ll hear Native Americans refer to “Indian country.” We even have a newsletter calledIndian Country News. So, I think, if you hear us refer to ourselves as Indians, that’s okay, too. But the purpose for putting this slide here is to let you know that you are absolutely safe to ask me anything. We’ll save the questions for the end. But one of the most commonly asked questions that I get is, “What should we refer to all of you as?” So that’s my reason for putting this slide there.Annie: I like to dedicate all of my presentations to survivors of boarding schools. Here, you’ll see a picture of a large boarding school class. This is the Carlisle Indian School. This is dated around 1890. And this was in Pennsylvania. They called them Carlisle Indian Industrial Schools because they were supposedly going to teach industrial arts to Native American children. So we’ll talk a little bit more about these, but basically, Pratt is the person who said that, if these worked in Canada, if the United States would allow him to build 180 boarding schools, he could solve the Indian problem. And the Indian problem meant ways to be able to remove Indians or Native Americans from their land and through a boarding school process. This was heartbreaking and devastating. Here we have a plains boarding school, and you’ll see the teepees and tents out front. Families were so devastated by their removal, children’s removal to boarding schools, that they would often camp outside of the boarding schools, which kind of made them sitting targets, if you will. And there were about 12 boarding schools here in the state of Wisconsin. And I am old enough to have gone to a boarding school. They didn’t stop here in the United States until the 1970s. Fortunately, I did not go to a boarding school, but my family members did, including my mom.

I believe this photograph is from somewhere in Wisconsin, in Lac du Flambeau. And these are tiny handcuffs. So this is to illustrate that children were not taken willingly. In fact, you can still see hiding areas in and around the Lac du Flambeau Reservation, where children were instructed to go hide if they saw people from boarding schools or from the churches or neighboring farm families coming around to look for them. So not only were– I think many of you will have heard stories of how clothing was taken from them and their hair was cut, their language was taken, but even their names were taken. So, here in Wisconsin, there are instances where people would have had their names taken from them and assigned a letter and a number instead of their actual name. So, really devastating. It’s just horrific to see these tiny handcuffs. So, that dedication over, it won’t all be sad stories today. We’re a resilient and thriving people. But I did wanna provide some framework of some of the policies that systematically sought to exterminate the Native American population, or at very least, its culture.

Annie:And the story of Native Americans here in the United States is, of course, one of land dispossession. In the areas in blue, you see areas that were around the time that the United States was becoming the United States. These were Native American-held lands. And the areas in red are the reservation and trust lands that we have in the United States here today. So you can see, in Wisconsin, we have a bit of a substantial area. In fact, Wisconsin has the most Native nations east of the Mississippi. So, those removal policies kept moving them further and further west, with Oklahoma as an obvious standout and other places in the west where tribes were sent to. These removal policies, treaty policies, boarding school policies had a devastating impact on population. So this is a simplified illustration of population, Native American population, here in the United States. So it’s estimated that, in 1491, a year before Columbus sailed the ocean blue, that the Native American population here was about six million. And you can see, at the height of the boarding school era, from the late, mid to late 1800s to the mid 20th century, that that population was estimated at about 237,000. Now, we have a resurgence. AndThe New York Timeslast year published an article with some research that confirmed what Native Americans had been speculating for a long time, and that is that these numbers may not be wholly accurate. So, in that middle era where the population declined to about 237,000, the safest thing for people to do was to not claim their Native American heritage. Especially if they had children that they didn’t want to have to go to boarding schools. When the census taker came along, if they could pass as white, they would try to pass as white. And now, I mean, I know many Native American families, and they’re not producing children at a remarkably higher rate than the rest of the population. So, this 4.3 million number can be attributed to a couple of different causes as well. So, Ancestry DNA test, 23andMe have revealed that, “Oh, I do have some Native American heritage here.” So, on the census, they may be reporting that they are Native American. Or they may have heard stories, family stories of grandparents who were Native American. And maybe they just weren’t claimed. Again, for safety purposes, they weren’t claiming that they were Native American at the time. So, these numbers are very general, but provide a good picture of population and the impact that these removal and termination policies had on Native Americans in the United States.

Here in Wisconsin, we have 11 federally-recognized tribes, and one tribe that is still fighting for federal recognition to be restored. And that’s the Brothertown tribe in the Fond du Lac area. And I always like to ask, which county do you suppose has the highest number of Native Americans living in it? And a lot of people will guess Menominee County because of the geographic area. It seems like it would be a large percentage. Actually, it’s Milwaukee County, followed by Brown County and Dane County and some other urban areas of the state. And again, that’s because of some policies that restricted economic activity on reservations or on trust lands where people were forced to move to other areas of the state to be able to find work. So, about half of Native Americans in Wisconsin live on the reservation or on trust lands, and the other half lives off of the reservation, and a substantial portion of the population living off of the reservation lives within about 50 miles or so of the reservation.

So here we have the tribes listed, and you can see Brothertown there in the Fond du Lac region. And we have these 12 Native nations. We have six Indigenous languages from three different Indigenous language groups. So we have the Brothertown and Stockbridge-Munsee and Oneida, who came from out east. So that Brothertown tribe that I mentioned is still fighting for its federal recognition. They had their federal recognition taken from them because they refused to move for a sixth time. And they said, “Every time we move, we lose people.” And they said, “If we’re going to die, we’re going to die right here.” And happily, they lived to tell the tale of refusing to move. But in return, the federal government took their federal recognition from them. So they’re still fighting for that. And the other tribes in Wisconsin, the 11 federally-recognized tribes, are working with them almost at a yearly basis to fight for that restoration. So, they’re the Iroquoian language group. And then, we have the Ojibwe tribes and the Menominee tribes, Menominee tribe that speaks the Algonquian language. The Menominee and the Ho-Chunk are the two tribes that have their origin stories here in Wisconsin. So, when you talk to Menominee and Ho-Chunk people, they will say that they have known no other place that they have lived. And the Menominee have their origin story around Marinette, where the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and Wisconsin meet, and the Ho-Chunk have their origin story really close by at the mouth of Green Bay, or what they called Red Cliffs. So, two different language groups, however. The Ho-Chunk speak a Siouan kind of language, and that is more associated with plains and a little bit west of the Mississippi.

I always like to point out that the University of Wisconsin-Madison teaches all of these languages, and in fact, they are the reason that I’m able to introduce myself in the Menominee language. I was able to audit three different semesters of the Menominee language. And I’ve also taken classes with Menomini yoU, a wonderful nonprofit organization on the reservation who offers online and in-person classes too. And I also like to point out some of the seals here, and you’ll probably have a tough time seeing them. But sometimes I think that seals can tell the story of value systems and value sets. So, in our seals from the Native nations here in Wisconsin, you’ll see lots of references to the environment, to clan animals. I see some medicine wheels up there, and also feathers. And feathers are important to our culture for a variety of reasons. And one of those reasons is the use of carrying prayers up to the Creator. So, as they’re burning sage and tobacco and other medicines, they’re using that feather to carry the prayers, the smoke of the prayers up. Think of that very related to incense in a Catholic church. That smoke is carrying the prayers up. So, lots of different images here and value systems. And then, I compare that, as Wisconsin moves through its history, and you can think about the different flags and images in our Wisconsin state seal that convey images of economy and mining and forestry and that kind of thing, farming, agriculture.

Earlier I mentioned that we have 11 federally-recognized tribes, and I would like to talk a little bit about why federal recognition is so important to tribes here in Wisconsin and throughout the United States. There are about 565 federally-recognized tribes here in the United States. And tribal sovereignty. So, if you’re federally recognized, you have sovereignty, and sovereignty, very simply put, means the absolute right and authority to govern oneself. So, we have three branches of government, very similar to the United States government and state government. In fact, you may know from your history or your civics classes that much of the United States Constitution is modeled after some Native American ways of governing, including the separation of powers and different branches of government. So, our three branches, again, very much the same. We have an executive branch, and that’s an elected person. Here in Wisconsin, we can either refer to that person as a president or a chief. And in the southwest, they’ll even refer to that person as a governor. So, different names depending on the tribe. And we also have an elected legislative branch to make laws and create policy. And then, we have the judicial branch. And the judicial branch includes our own court systems and our own tribal police. So, once in a while in the news, you’ll hear stories about struggles over jurisdiction and who controls the roads, who can arrest people, and that kind of thing. You may also be familiar with, especially in the 1980s, various different treaty wars where the, you know, back in the boarding school days, they would say, “Kill the Indian, save the man.” During those protests, during spearfishing, the protest signs would say things like, “Kill the Indian, save a walleye,” for instance.

Annie: This is an image of my tribe, Menominee. During the Eisenhower administration, the tribe was terminated. And they were selected for termination because it was felt that they had enough economic activity on their reservation to be able to survive termination. They were selected with another tribe out in California. So, during the Eisenhower administration then, the tribe is terminated, and in order to survive, they have to sell a lot of their land off. And this is how Legend Lake is created. Through the work of an organization called Determination Rights Unity for Menominee Sovereignty, which had branches on the reservation, in Milwaukee, and in other parts of the state, and the work of Ada Deer, for instance, you may have heard of Ada Deer, another Menominee woman who is a contemporary of my mother’s, they worked very hard to have the tribal restored to reservation status. So, she actually was able to make some inroads with Nixon. And, basically, as his parting gesture, literally at the last moment of his presidency, restored the Menominee tribe to reservation status so that they would again have federal recognition and tribal sovereignty.

Annie:So, we’ve been talking about all of these ways, you know, of policies and removal policies here in Wisconsin and in the United States. I would like if you would shout out a couple of different responses. I’ll repeat them. When you think about Wisconsin and Wisconsin culture, what kinds of words or phrases spring to mind for you? When you think about Wisconsin culture, what do you think about? Cheese, I heard cheese out there. That’s one of the big three. Beer, cheese, beer, and…

Audience:Green Bay Packers.

Annie:[laughs] Green Bay Packers. Put brats up there also on the list. And we can think about our culture really lovingly. I think about beautiful lakes and streams and clean air and rolling farmlands and barns and these beautiful ways of being here in Wisconsin. How about some negative things related to Wisconsin culture? Can you think of anything? Closely related to beer. I would say, if you follow social media at all, you’ll see from time to time these maps of the 12 drunkest counties in the United States, and 10 of them are here in Wisconsin. So, we have a strong Tavern League here with, I guess, comparatively fewer consequences for drunk driving, so… And also, the Annie E. Casey Foundation has called Wisconsin the worst place to be African American here in the United States. And that is because of the amount of segregation and disparities, criminal justice disparities, health disparities. At one time, we had the highest African American infant mortality rate. I will tell you that Native Americans are incarcerated at a higher rate per population than any other population. By numbers, of course, African Americans are incarcerated at a higher rate. We’ve also been adopted out at higher rates. And Menominee County, my own county, has a really devastating poverty rate, not just here in Wisconsin, but if we’re looking at the United States as a whole.

Annie:So when we think about these ways of knowing about Wisconsin, we have to keep in mind that these are relatively new ways of knowing about Wisconsin. We know that humans have been in Wisconsin for about 14,000 years. And we know that because of my hometown, Kenosha, Wisconsin, where a farmer was out farming and came across this mammoth-sized bone, and indeed, when they researched, it was a nearly fully intact woolly mammoth, and it had tool markings on it. And they were able to date those tool markings to about 14,000 years ago. So that’s how long people have thought this place was special and a good place to live. In fact, some of the meanings ascribed to Wisconsin involve the definition that this is a good place to live, abundant wildlife and water, and access to resources here. But when you think about our timeline here in Wisconsin, Wisconsin became a state about 176 years ago. We recently celebrated our demi-semi-sesquicentennial, and, yes, I have been practicing that. [all laugh]

Annie:About the same time that my institution, UW-Madison, became a school. And that arrow is way at the very end here. So when you think about Wisconsin and humankind in Wisconsin, those of us sitting in this room are a really brief snapshot in history. My campus, UW-Madison, is considered to be the most archaeologically significant campus in the United States, and that is because of the number of effigy mounds still found on campus. Those who have been built over and dug over. But you can see from the map here, the greater number of dots that we see or the higher concentration of effigy mounds and conical and linear mounds. So, there are three types of mounds. We have conical and we have linear. And those are about 3,000 years old typically. And we have effigy mounds. And those are about 1,200 years old. And I do this because many of them are in the shape of birds. So, we have water animals, sky animals, earth animals, and some sea serpent kind of mythical creatures as well. These maps always give me a little bit of pause. You can see up in the northeast there Menominee County. And I don’t think that my relatives were saying, “Oh, many thousand years from now, we’re going to have “this piece of land here that looks like a rectangle with a piece of it notched out.” I think there were mounds all over Wisconsin. It’s just that those remaining or still prominent enough to be able to see are concentrated in that Madison southwest area. So mounds were built on typically hills overlooking water and built for the spirit world to be able to see.

Annie:So, these are the ones that I see commonly on campus. That’s actually my building. I work in Ag Hall. So I have an office now that I am proud to say overlooks two mounds. We have the Thunderbird Mound out behind my office and also the two-tailed water spirit. You can see the images in the upper right there. We also have a Bent Goose Mound, and that’s in the lower left. And our first state historian, Charles Brown, did a lot to protect the mounds and excavated some mounds, and unfortunately put the wings on backwards. And so, that’s how it became the Bent Winged Mound. And we were, in that area of the state at least, beautiful oak savanna. So, you can think of these oak trees overhead, and savanna means grasslands. And we had large grazing animals. How are grasslands maintained? How are savannas maintained? By controlled burns. So we often think of controlled burns and other practices like that as being introduced by the Europeans. But Native Americans were using them in this landscape for quite a long time. So, through controlled burns, we had bison kicking up the soil. And we have carrier pigeons who were so thick in the sky that people described it as looking like night when they were in migration, and they were hunted, they frightened people, so they were hunted to extinction. And, but it worked together as an ecosystem, ensuring that the pigeons are dropping what they’re gonna drop, the bison are kicking up what they’re going to kick up. And it’s a fertile, rich place for people or for animals to come feed and for people to be able to hunt and fish.

Annie:You may have heard of the story of our dugout canoes, which were commonly, at first, jokingly referred to as our Wisconsin’s first shipwreck. But these, an archaeologist was out diving in Lake Mendota and came across what she believed to be a dugout canoe. And they brought it up out of the water. And they were hoping that it would be about, you know, maybe a couple of hundred years old. And they dated it to about 1,200 years old. And the following year, they were out diving again and discovered another canoe and brought it up out of the water. And there are rich stories that go along with this. You know, it’s a spongy substance that’s floating around the water and eagles flying overhead. And they thought, “Well, wouldn’t it be great if this was also about 1,200 years old?” And it was 3,000 years old. Since then, they have found more canoes that they’re not going to bring up out of the water. But judging by the types of trees that were used for the canoes, they can estimate that some of those canoes are perhaps around 5,000 years old. Now, the speculation is that the area where they’re finding the canoes may have served almost like a park and ride, or a place where you could, you know, rent bicycles, but they would need to portage over land so they would drop off a canoe, they would portage over land, and then pick up new canoes over on Lake Monona. Very interesting.

Annie:What I find most touching to me personally when I think about these canoes is that the people who built the 1,200-year canoe are the same people who were building the effigy mounds, and they are closer in time to us right now than the people who– than they were to the people who built the 3,000-year-old canoes and the conical and linear mounds. And when I get a little overwhelmed in life, sometimes it’s really helpful to think about that. We think of ourselves in these 75, 80-year kind of lifespans. And if we’re lucky, we’ll know our great-grandchildren. And if we’re lucky, we knew our great-grandparents. And there we are in the middle. But really, Native Americans were thinking about not only their seven generations that would follow them and making sure that they had the landscape and the sustenance to be able to live and thrive on for centuries. They were also learning from the teachings of the seven generations before them. So, a much larger outlook on the human lifespan. And that shows in some of their practices.

Annie:I like to think of Native Americans here in Wisconsin as our first longitudinal researchers. Sometimes, people will say that Native Americans were really good at observation research, and I’m not faulting observation research at all. But here, we have evidence of test plots like an agricultural research station of old times. This is the Hulbert Creek Garden Bed, and it’s a garden bed that is in Sauk County. And all roads led to it. It was about 200 acres, and they were successful at agriculture in these forested environments. Menominee too. This one just happens to be one that you’re able to go visit and see in Sauk County. They have found artifacts in that garden from as far away as South America. So we know that people were moving around this continent, both continents. And perhaps there were people from South America here, but certainly they had earthenworks and other artifacts that made their way up here. And they were using, like, mounded garden beds and, again, different test plots. And you may have read recently that there have been some Menominee gardens that have extended much farther north into the Upper Peninsula of Michigan than originally thought. And they’re using char from burns to help fertilize the soil and create conditions that you wouldn’t think would have been amenable to agriculture in a wooded or forested environment.

Annie:You’ve probably heard of the Three Sisters, and not only are these a delicious combination– corn, beans, and squash. I just had a really good salad the other day, Three Sisters salad. But these are companion plants. So, a lot of thought went into how they could make their plants thrive in these wintry conditions here in Wisconsin. So, we know that corn needs a lot of water, and the shade of the squash would help with water retention beneath the plant and help get enough water to the corn. And then, the beans would crawl up the pole or the corn. So, indeed, very much companion plants. We have two ingredients here, common in Wisconsin, that have found their way into modern medicines and modern pharmaceuticals. In Menominee, our word for tea is the same as it is for medicine, maskihkiwapoh. So we have bergamot, or often referred to as number six. Numbered as the sixth most important plant. And where do you commonly find bergamot today? Does anybody know? Pardon?

Attendee:In our gardens.

Annie:In our gardens, yes, certainly. It also grows wild, but it’s in Earl Grey tea. So, if you drink Earl Grey tea at all, you’re drinking bergamot. In fact, if you– You can very easily make your own Earl Grey tea by picking bergamot, hanging it upside down, drying the leaves, and along with raspberries, strawberries, other great fruits and herbs that you can use in teas. Another one is mullein. We call this the grandfather plant, and many people think that this is an invasive species. It grows about as tall as me, perhaps a little bit taller. And it has, like, almost a golden rod on top to the end. And there are leafy, leathery leafs on it that can be used for medicines as well. And again, we find these in some of our modern pharmaceuticals. So there was once a pharmaceutical garden at UW-Madison that looked at indigenous plants and began to use those in modern pharmaceuticals. So, I think, my theory of the case is that, if we had worked to understand and learned from the people who knew this land best, who had been caretakers of it for 14,000 years, wouldn’t our life be richer? And it’s not too late. Rather than having removed that knowledge to again invite that knowledge back into a learning space to complement university learning and Indigenous ways of knowing, community ways of knowing. And I think that we can do that with a few subtle shifts in thinking.

Annie:So here’s a map of a region we know very well. It’s the Great Lakes. And we are so used to orienting ourselves with a northern compass. You know, we refer to “up north.” And where is up north in Wisconsin? But ancient peoples would have oriented themselves to the east. Why? Because that’s where the Sun rises. So, home openings, windows were oriented towards the east so the Sun rises, and they can make the most use of the sunlight during the day. Even cemeteries still today are often oriented towards the east. And that is because, when the Resurrection happens, it will happen from the east and people will rise from the dead and be able to see the Savior coming. So this is something that was common practice throughout the world. So it’s this subtle shift in orientation, just a little invitation to think a little bit differently, that we can begin to incorporate Indigenous ways of knowing into our daily lives and into our work.

Annie:And I won’t read all of these to you, but I think there are two important things that I try to incorporate in my work. And that is, rather than to adapt materials to be culturally relevant, that we look at inviting people to bring their own culture into their learning and into their work, to lead from culture rather than adapting to be culturally relevant. It’s that mind shift that makes us think that Western ways of knowing are the best ways of knowing. But really, if we’re to learn from one another and grow, I think we incorporate many other ways of knowing as well, including community ways of knowing. I think one of the criticisms of the university is often that, you know, it’s an elite institution that thinks it knows everything, when there are people out and about in the state of Wisconsin who have a lot to contribute. And that’s the beauty of why I love working for UW-Extension, because it’s truly where the university and towns come together. The other thing I would like to impart is my favorite quote that I’ve been using, even before I started working for the university, when I was a high school teacher, and that is that “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” And this is especially true when learning about other people. When people offer you invitations or ask you to dinner or to ask you to come to an event, do everything in your power to go and learn because they’re asking you because they would really like for you to be there. So, in this way, you can show up without an agenda and really begin to understand who other people are and where they’re coming from.

Annie:So, I have told you some, you know, some sad stories about termination and boarding schools, but I want you to know that Native Americans in Wisconsin and throughout the United States are thriving and resilient, and they’re working on really important issues like food sovereignty. Food sovereignty is actually one of my favorite topics to think about because, as we removed Native Americans further west and from their original food sources, they became more reliant on government commodities and federally-provided food. So you can think of the peanut butters and the lards and, you know, even our own relatives here in Wisconsin would have been used to those coming out of the wars, for instance, where things were rationed and we became more reliant on more mass-produced food. So, fry bread is delicious, and you may associate fry bread with Native Americans if you’ve ever been to a powwow. And it is good. I like it, I like it a lot. It’s not really the original bread that Native Americans would have been eating, though. It came about because they made do with what they were given: lard and other flours. And so, that’s what they would use then to make bread. But that led to a lot of health disparities where we have heart disease and diabetes because we’re not eating our original food sources. Of course, language revitalization is also important. Because without language, we’re not a people. So, we need to do everything that we can to retain our language. Climate resilience. Of course, many Native Americans think that it is Native Americans who will help people come out of this climate crisis. And youth development, of course. And the way that people are resilient is through that leading by culture and incorporating culture into their ways of thinking and knowing.

Annie:Another favorite quote of mine is from Black Elk. This is a handy little book that you can read, and it is wonderful and full of leadership kinds of wisdom. And in it, he says that “Everything an Indian does “is in a circle, and that is because the world tries to be round.” And when you think about it, anything with a Fibonacci sequence, bird’s nest, seashells, spiral galaxy, it’s all trying to be round. So there’s strength in a circle. And if you’ve ever tried to break out of an unhealthy pattern, you know how strong that circle is, right? It just keeps bringing you back in. But there’s also strength in it. We begin to lose hierarchy in a circle. We begin to believe that everyone in that circle has something to contribute. And I think that, ever since the beginning of humans’ ability to make fire, we have been sitting together in a circle, learning from one another and solving important problems.

Annie:Another teaching are the Seven Grandfather Teachings or the Seven Grandparent Teachings. Actually, the Ojibwe referred to this as the Seven Grandfather Teachings, but I learned so much from both of my grandmothers that I like to call it the Seven Grandparent Teachings. And here are some universal values that I think really resonate. When you think about the people who cared most about you in the world and what they wanted to impart on you, whether that’s your parents, grandparents, teachers, friends, mentors, they were teaching you things like honesty and truth and generosity and love, and some of these words that we see up here to help that guide us as we’re out in the world and imparting our own wisdom to the people that we care about and love.

Annie:Medicine wheels. I use medicine wheels quite a lot in my work. This is a Menominee medicine wheel. Medicine wheels look different depending on tribes. Tribes ascribe their own meaning to different medicine wheels. They have different colors. They have different clan animals and different medicines. But this is a Menominee medicine wheel with our five Menominee clan animals in it, with awaehsaeh and truth at the center. That’s the bear. And in my work, I use a medicine wheel that’s a little bit simplified. It’s spirit, heart, mind, and body. And when I think about how we can help people lead through change or difficult situations or if they just want to create a plan, we think about spirit or purpose and how our relationships are going to be impacted. Our mind, what should we do? And then, body, how do we go about doing it? So, again, some lessons to impart with you. I think about Indigenous ways of knowing and community ways of knowing and how we can bring those into our own work is to remember that everything is interconnected. You know, we try to simplify things, but what we do in our own families or neighborhoods impacts the communities around as well. And whomever is in the circle belongs in the circle. The most important message of the medicine wheel that I’ll leave you with is that all gifts must be utilized in order for us to make some positive change. So, think about how you can incorporate spirit, heart, mind, and body into your own lives. And then, I would like to leave you with a video that is performed by a student at UW-Madison, and I think really brings home this way of thinking in her performance.

Joy Harjo:“For Calling the Spirit Back from Wandering the Earth in Its Human Feet” by Joy Harjo. Put down that bag of potato chips, that white bread, that bottle of pop. Turn off that cell phone, computer, and remote control. Open the door, then close it behind you. Take a breath offered by friendly winds. They travel the Earth gathering essences of plants to clean. Give it back with gratitude. If you sing, it will give your spirit lift to fly to the stars’ ears and back. Acknowledge this Earth who has cared for you since you were a dream, planting itself precisely within your parents’ desire. Let your moccasin feet take you to the encampment of the guardians who have known you before time, who will be there after time. They sit before the fire that has been there without time. Let the earth stabilize your postcolonial insecure jitters. Be respectful of the small insects, birds, and animal people who accompany you. Ask their forgiveness for the harm we humans have brought down upon them. Don’t worry. The heart knows the way, though there may be high-rises, interstates, checkpoints, armed soldiers, massacres, wars, and those who will despise you because they despise themselves. The journey might take you a few hours, a day, a year, a few years, a hundred, a thousand, or even more. Watch your mind. Without training it, it might run away and leave your heart for the immense human feast set by the thieves of time. Do not hold regrets. When you find your way to the circle, to the fire kept burning by the keepers of your soul, you will be welcomed. You must clean yourself with cedar, sage, or other healing plant. Cut the ties you have to failure and shame. Let go the pain you are holding in your mind, your shoulders, your heart, all the way to your feet. Let go the pain of your ancestors to make way for those who are heading in our direction. Ask for forgiveness. Call upon the help of those who love you. These helpers take many forms: animal, element, bird, angel, saint, stone, or ancestor. Call your spirit back. It may be caught in corners and creases of shame, judgment, and human abuse. You must call in a way that your spirit will want to return. Speak to it as you would to a beloved child. Welcome your spirit back from its wandering. It may return in pieces, in tatters. Gather them together. They will be happy to be found after being lost for so long. Your spirit will need to sleep a while after it is bathed and given clean clothes. Now you can have a party. Invite everyone you know who loves and supports you. Keep room for those who have no place else to go. Make a giveaway. And remember, keep the speeches short. Then you must do this. Help the next person find their way through the dark.

Annie:I’ll keep my speeches short. And I want to thank all of you for joining me today. [audience applauds]