Transcript

Bridget Todd (00:04):

There Are No Girls On The Internet is a production of iHeart Radio and Unbossed Creative. I'm Bridget Todd and this is There Are No Girls On The Internet. This week marks Indigenous People's Day, a day to honor and commemorate Native people and an opportunity to re-examine having a national holiday celebrating Christopher Columbus, a murderer. It's catching on with seven states official celebrating Indigenous People's Day, and more commemorating the day via proclamations. And it's really representative of how a shift in cultural attitudes can lead to meaningful, widespread cultural shit. Which brings me to my city's football team name. For as long as I can remember, Washington DC's professional football team has been a slur, and Native activists have been trying to do something about it for years. Dan Snyder, the owner of Washington DC's professional football team announced the team would be changing their name earlier this summer. But don't give Snyder too much credit for doing the right thing.

Bridget Todd (01:08):

It was only after pressure from corporate and political interests fanned by years of work by activists that he did anything at all. We can't talk about the name change without also talking about those Native activists. Their brilliance, their labor and their ability to imagine that things could be different. In 2014, Jacqueline Keeler created the Not Your Mascot movement on social media to take action against what she calls Native mascotry in sports and all Indigenous cultural mis-appropriations.

Jacqueline Keeler (01:36):

My name is Jacqueline Keeler and I am a journalist based out of Portland Oregon.

Bridget Todd (01:41):

What was your upbringing like?

Jacqueline Keeler (01:43):

Well, I am Native American and both of my parents are enrolled in different tribes. My father is Yankton Sioux from South Dakota, and my mother is Navajo from Arizona. They actually met in Cleveland Ohio through relocation. Cleveland Ohio was a relocation center, and there were a number of these around the country. They established starting in the 1950s and going into the 1970s. There was a Congress passed a Bill called termination, which was to terminate tribes politically, and then to relocate the population to these relocation centers. It sounds quite Orwellian. But they did create a lot of activism. The relocation program was for young people between the ages of 18 and 30, and it basically created this large populations of Native young people and they got busy organizing. I know in Cleveland that's where the whole fight against Chief Wahoo started, and also the fight about Columbus Day as well with that. That's the community I was born into. An urban, young, Native community that was really starting organize and address issues and was also multi-tribal.

Bridget Todd (03:01):

What kind of impact did that have on you?

Jacqueline Keeler (03:03):

When you're part of a family that's an outsider family that has a different history, a different perspective to accepted history, you're constantly as a child being challenged and constantly being fed or taught a critique of society. I think I describe how I did a piece about Thanksgiving a number of years back, and about how my mother before she even sent me to kindergarten, sat down and told me, "You're going to hear things about Indian people that aren't true. You know your own family, you know who they are. Things you're going to hear that Indians are drunks and losers and all that stuff. But you know your aunts and uncles are going to college. You know that these things are not true." You're prepped before you go. Then also I was told at that age, at five, the history of the taking of the land.

Jacqueline Keeler (04:02):

I described it in one of the pieces I wrote, it takes the wind out of you even as a five year old, and puts you immediately at odds with America because you feel enraged even as a small child. You feel like you want to correct that wrong. I think being raised in Native family really articulates that for you.

Bridget Todd (04:26):

Yeah, that foundational grounding of this is who you are, this who you come from, this is our culture. You might hear things that aren't true but you still have that grounding. I feel like family can really be the thing that gives you that.

Jacqueline Keeler (04:42):

And also, this is who they are. This is who they really are. I think that outsider perspective makes you cautious, makes you skeptical and even as a five year old, it makes you go, "Huh, okay." My mom, when I was in first grade, she was like, "Don't sing land of the pilgrims pride, sing land of the Indian's pride." That's something that you're a little kid, you're going to your own music class and you have to suddenly sing something different than what all the other kids are singing. You know you have to because your mom taught you to. I sang it really softly but I wasn't going to disobey my mother on that line. It was one thing to have these internal family discussions and it's another thing to act on them when you're the minority, when you're the only Indian kid in your school. You're learning and being taught things.

Jacqueline Keeler (05:45):

In a sense you almost feel like even as a small child you're being sent in there as a spy, as someone who is going to collect information, who is existing in this other place and coming back. At Sunday, you and your family are going to do something with all that information.

Bridget Todd (06:02):

Jacqueline went to college at Dartmouth in New Hampshire, which according to its Charter was originally started as a school to educate Native students in the ways of English life. Today, this school unofficial mascot may be Keggy the Keg, but back when she was going there, they were called the Indians. What was the first time the issue of mascots really hit home for you?

Jacqueline Keeler (06:22):

It wasn't until I went to college that the mascot issue really came on my radar. I went to Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, and we actually the Native students who were incoming freshmen, where freshman week we're given extra classes on meeting with other Native alumni, older alumni and basically given the story about the Indian mascot. Dartmouth used to be the Dartmouth Indians and they had this warrior mascot. More of an eastern woodlands-looking mascot. Dartmouth was originally founded as an Indian school. Actually, my husband's ancestor Chief Joseph Brant and his other grandfather William Johnson, they both were young Mohawk boys who attended Dartmouth before the revolutionary war. It was actually Dartmouth is located in New Hampshire because the founder, Eleazar Wheelock wanted to place it in a place where it would be accessible to the Ericway confederacy in Upstate New York, where they could come and bring their children to be educated.

Jacqueline Keeler (07:33):

He wasn't interested in the Indians in Connecticut, who actually one of his students was Samson Occom, was a minister and he was the one who raised about £2,000 of silver to start the college. He went on a speaking tour in Scotland. His white mentor did not want to help the Indians in Connecticut because he thought they were not real Indians enough for him, that they were becoming too Christian. He wanted to go for the more sexy, wild and powerful Ericway confederacy. That's why Dartmouth is even in New Hampshire.

Bridget Todd (08:14):

Back when Jacqueline was in college, the issue came down to Native students feeling really uncomfortable by the mascot, and white students just really not getting it.

Jacqueline Keeler (08:24):

One of the things they did with the support of the alumni was to basically drive up in a truck on freshman week, and just throw free Dartmouth T-shirts with the Dartmouth Indian on them to the freshman class. My roommate wore hers. She was a white woman from Massachusetts, Irish American. That was when I first realized how hard this issue was. To me it was obvious it was wrong.

Bridget Todd (08:53):

Right.

Jacqueline Keeler (08:58):

Just by circumstance, two Navajo students were on either side of our shared dorm room. They had singles and so she was surrounded by basically three Navajos. We were all trying to tell her like, "This is not great." She just literally could not comprehend. It was impossible for her to comprehend the issue. She says, "Well, it's just a free Dartmouth T-shirt, that's all. You know how expensive they are." I'm all like, "Oh, God." This is like nothing I've encountered before. Their inability to comprehend the issue was profound. It's in moments like that when you realize your own experiences or where you're coming from is so different, so different. You just never realized until that moment.

Bridget Todd (09:48):

Okay, so flash forward to 2013. How did the Not Your Mascot hashtag come to be?

Jacqueline Keeler (09:54):

Eradicating offensive Native mascotry, which we created the hashtag Not Your Mascot and trended it in 2014 during the Superbowl. It was started by Native parents from across the country and we met online on Twitter mostly. We found it hard to organize via Twitter so we set up a Facebook group. EONM you can see is still a Facebook group. It's a private Facebook group because we found out we kept getting trolled by white mascot supporters, so we had to make it private. But organized through that. We started doing what we called Twitter storms. This was in the fall of 2013, and we were primarily using the hashtag Change The Mascot, or Change The Name. Suddenly, we found that the mascot had been... I don't know, it was being used... This sounds really strange but it was being used by Twitter accounts selling land, real estate in India. In the country of India.

Bridget Todd (11:05):

What?

Jacqueline Keeler (11:06):

Yeah, so all our tweets were getting buried by these thousands of tweets advertising real estate in India. We really were very suspicious. We thought it was Dan Snyder, the owner of the Washington NFL team.

Bridget Todd (11:22):

Ugh, I wouldn't put that passed him.

Jacqueline Keeler (11:23):

Yeah, hiring this troll farms and stuff. Pretty early usage of it. I think at that time they were still being called, what was is it. I can't remember. But yeah, so were very suspicious. We realized we were going into the Superbowl without a hashtag. Without a usable one. Even with all of us organizing the Native community both in the United States and Canada to really tweet our hearts out, to try to get this noticed to this issue. We were still getting buried. So we thought about it. Actually it was my friend, she's Cherokee. She came up with the name Not Your Mascot. Which has been used before, I think you could find signs people using that back in the '60s and '70s. We were the first ones to really create a hashtag. We checked. We did the whole... Because people later trying to claim. You know the kind of in fighting that happens when there is this successful hashtag.

Jacqueline Keeler (12:36):

We had to do the research. But we kept it secret. We just felt like we liked it... I liked it better than Change The Name, Change The Mascot because what appealed to me was it was a taking back. We are taking this back, and we are taking back who we are, and owning it. We kept it pretty secret. Basically we all looked at who our most high profile Twitter followers were at that time. For some reason Chuck D was following me. We made a list of them all and we basically contacted them personally, and we told them that were going to be launching this hashtag, and were going to do a test run Saturday before, the night before the Superbowl, and would they help us and share it with their followers. I think in January 2014, I think Twitter was a more innocent place in some ways than it is now, seven years later. Then we'd do it again on Sunday. So, that was how we started that. It was really just out of necessity that we created that hashtag. I've been really happy with how it's grown and been used.

Bridget Todd (13:50):

I can imagine social media was probably pretty helpful for having this all come together.

Jacqueline Keeler (13:54):

We were able to utilize Native people on the ground. The amazing thing about social media was that it really allowed us to organize on a level that we had not been able to do before. The Native community was very dispersed. The majority of the Native people live off the reservation and they live as minorities amongst minorities. Like me, the only Native kid in your school type of thing. We lived quite isolated from each other. Social media was a great, an amazing boon to helping us organize more effectively and more rapidly. When Dan Snyder started that foundation, The Original Americans Foundation, and was going around giving money to tribes, trying to buy support for his mascot. He was flying all over the country in his private plane, and he was doing it very secretively. Because we were connected with Native people across the country, we were able to get people sending us tips and sending us all kinds of things. We actually used that to add some to context to the media. We used that to put stories out about what he was doing.

Jacqueline Keeler (15:05):

We basically made him the story. I think if you watch 2014, he made all these missteps. The issue around his mascot started to become more about a referendum on him personally.

Bridget Todd (15:16):

Forbes' Monte Burke noted that the name change issue was made much worse by the fact that people just really did not like Dan Snyder. The Original Americans Foundation, Snyder's paid PR effort to stop conversations about the name change was pretty embarrassing. He famously refused to meet with Native activists about the name change, and he told the USA Today, "We'll never change the name. It's that simple. Never. You can use all caps." But, after the protests surrounding the deaths of unarmed Black people this summer, Dan Snyder pretty much could not ignore the fact that the climate was changing. For the first time, the team faced significant financial pressure, in addition to protests from activists. A group of investors asked major sponsors like Pepsi and FedEx to pressure him to change the name.

Bridget Todd (16:01):

Then FedExField, the stadium right outside DC in Maryland where the Washington football team plays joined the chorus too. Nike pulled Washington football team swag from their website, and in July, the team finally announced they'd be reviewing the name. How does it feel to know that they're finally dropping this slur from this team name? Does it feel like a win for your community? How are you feeling about it?

Jacqueline Keeler (16:25):

I didn't feel like we had won. I felt like we had not won the issue. Once again, the lack of understanding, the lack of ability. I felt like we did not actually win the issue. The issue is tabled. What won the issue was Black Lives Matter, and that's what I write about basically. This is been true before, I would say. I remember asking my uncle Vine Deloria Jr, he's a well known Native historian, he wrote Custer Died For Your Sins and God Is Red. I remember asking, what started the Red Power movement in the '70s? He looked at me like I was like, "What's wrong with you?" He was like, "Well, it was the Civil Rights Movement. How did you not know this? The Black Power movement spawned the Red Power movement." I think that's what my mother always told me.

Jacqueline Keeler (17:21):

It sounds weird but the way she described it was that the Black community were like our older brothers, that they helped us and looked out for us, and they were more familiar and more knowledgeable about white society and how to maneuver in it. They were often really helpful. Do you know what I mean?

Bridget Todd (17:42):

Yeah, I love that.

Jacqueline Keeler (17:44):

Yeah, that was her way of understanding it. With the Not Your Mascot thing, I really feel like it was Black Lives Matter and, of course the price paid by the Black community. Folks like Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, all of those things that made it possible. It created an atmosphere that made this no longer acceptable. Starting with the confederate statues and then questioning other folks, and suddenly it made the arguments we were making made them undeniable. That's what forced his hand.

Bridget Todd (18:20):

Let's take a quick break. And we're back. Our country has a fascination with pretending to be Native and appropriating Native culture without giving it much thought. Even worse, when Native culture is presumed to be up for the taking, some will take it a step further and just pretend to be Native themselves. This summer, science researcher BethAnn McLaughlin admitted to being behind the Twitter account of a bisexual Hopi professor who didn't really exist. Long time listeners of TANGOTI might remember that we mentioned McLaughlin briefly in the episode featuring Arwa Mboya at MIT, as the recipient of MIT's Disobedience Award. McLaughlin used this Native persona for years, building up legit influence on social media. In 2015, Andrea Smith, a prominent academic at the University of California in Riverside, was accused of misrepresenting herself as Cherokee. All of this happens while actual Native women and their work and contributions go overlooked.

Jacqueline Keeler (19:27):

I did a whole series of podcasts at Pollen Nation Magazine, you can see them on our Facebook page, that goes through the Pretendian issue. Pretend is, I guess I don't know if I invented this term, but I do have to explain it. But pretend Indian, pretendindian. I think my parents' generation called them Wannabes. The Wannabe tribe, the want to be tribe.

Bridget Todd (19:51):

I just got that.

Jacqueline Keeler (19:58):

I think it's a real issue. Of course, a lot of people know about the issue of Cherokees, what they go through with fraud. I think the Cherokee Nation at one point tried to count the number of fake Cherokee tribes and they got to over 400. It's quite extensive. It's astounding. I would have to say, and this is my theory and I go into this in I did a podcast on structural fixes to Pretendianism, because there are so many Pretendians it's like whack-a-mole. I would say as high as one in three people in some official capacity, whether as head of Native American studies departments or artists, or writers, authors, are frauds. They're fake Indians. It's really that high. As a journalist, I really kept stumbling upon this. I'd be interviewing someone and then later find out that they were a fake.

Bridget Todd (20:58):

What's that like for you?

Jacqueline Keeler (21:01):

It makes our identity or our reality like a hall of mirrors. It's everything. Gas-lighting, colonialism, taking, all of that stuff. All white privilege, all rolled op into one. It's very frustrating. Of course, we have folks who are people of color, but they would prefer to be Native. I think Adam Beach recently, he's a Native actor, First Nations actor from Canada, he's been in a lot of Hollywood roles. He recently called out an actress who is Chinese and white.

Bridget Todd (21:45):

In addition to actors pretending to be Native, non-Native writers and directors try to tell Native stories on TV and it just comes off as really inauthentic.

Jacqueline Keeler (21:53):

When someone is obviously a fraud. The way it's been presented as like, "Oh, that's not how we..." It's very stereotypical. You hear the flute music. It's all those kind of stuff. It's super annoying and we need Native American showrunners and writers who are in control of everything. Bringing actors or directors in at the last minute when everything is said and done is not enough of a fix.

Bridget Todd (22:24):

It does speak to this larger issue of people who pretend to be Native, which is so common that it's almost a cliché at this point.

Jacqueline Keeler (22:30):

I cover several cases of Pretendianism and I get contacted almost every day by Native people. What really clued me into it was when I would call a Native academic for a quote or a comment on a story completely unrelated to ethnic fraud, and they would, after we've had the interview, they'd be like, "By the way, I was wondering if you could cover this story. We're having a problem. My university is hiring a Pretendian, somebody who has no Native ancestry at all who just claims to be Native and he's going to be my boss." Once they become your boss or your thesis advisor, what can you do? You're basically being babysat by a white fraudster over what you can say about Native issues.

Bridget Todd (23:23):

Yeah, what can you do? It's like you can't really be like, "Listen, I know you're a fraud." You have so few avenues to sort it out.

Jacqueline Keeler (23:30):

Yeah, I mean in 2015 it really came out in the Native community that this woman named Andrea Smith who was a Native American Studies professor at the University of California Riverside, I think she runs the department there. She was probably the most famous Native woman at the time in the oughts for a book she wrote called Conquest, which was all about colonization and the violence Indigenous women. It turned out she was a complete fraud. She was not Cherokee at all. A bunch of Cherokee scholars got together and wrote a group letter and published it in Indian Country Today, demanding that she stop. She hasn't. She's still doing it.

Bridget Todd (24:18):

Did she own up to it? Or was she just like, "I am Cherokee, I don't care what you all say."

Jacqueline Keeler (24:24):

The thing is, they don't have to answer to us. The only people they answer to are white people who don't know anything, and who are afraid to enter the issue. They're taking advantage of genocide and yet they get their built space through genocide. Basically saying, "Well, you know there's no paperwork because my ancestors hid out and everything." They have all these arguments but she actually hired the Cherokee Nation's official genealogist, David Cornsilk, to do her genealogy in the early 1990s... Or I think in the 1990s she hired him to do her mother's side, couldn't find anything, any links to the Cherokee nation at all. Who are, by the way, one of the most documented people in the world. Cherokee people always tell me the historians and genealogists tell me they're the most documented people second only to royalty. If you can't find a tie, there is none basically.

Jacqueline Keeler (25:23):

I think the LA Times has done a really good series of articles. One in I guess December of last year, which looked at fake tribes in California. That's another place, of course, with the gold rush and everything. Those tribes were decimated. The genocide was quite extensive. Now there's all these fake Chumash tribes popping up. Then also they did a study before that. They did a article where they found out there was fake Cherokee tribes taking over $350 million in federal set asides. Even after it was revealed they were fake, they still were receiving that money.

Bridget Todd (26:04):

That's so harmful.

Jacqueline Keeler (26:07):

Where there's money people will do this. The issue is mascotry I see as on the spectrum of Pretendianism. It's all of a piece.

Bridget Todd (26:16):

When we turn already traditionally under-represented people into mascots, it doesn't just end at the sports arena. Offensive representations of Native people rooted in harmful stereotypes are dehumanizing and actual Native people are left to deal with the consequences.

Jacqueline Keeler (26:32):

There was a study done by the Kellog Foundation in 2018 I think it came out. They'd done a bunch of focus groups. Maybe it was started in 2017, and they found that the issue of mascotry was very hard. I came up with the term mascotry to take it away from the mascot, which can be prosaic and handsome, and to mascotry which describes all the things they do with that. All the red-face and all the wearing the Pocahati outfits, and the headdresses and debasing our culture for their own enjoyment. What they found was that only 30% of people they had in these focus groups understood the issue of mascots. They found that with Standing Rock, they had also that over 70% understood and agreed with the issue of sovereignty and the importance of Standing Rock. You can see that Standing Rock was an issue that white people could understand and have compassion for. But mascots, they can't understand. Also, they found that the white folks they were focus grouping only thought that Native people were 60% human.

Bridget Todd (27:56):

What?

Jacqueline Keeler (27:58):

Yeah, that we weren't fully human. 40% animalistic. All of these stereotypes feed into that. But my solution is actually... I see this a structural problem. I actually think it has to do with the fuzziness of our political identity, which is purposeful. It's a purposeful result of US policy for hundreds of years. I often tell people if you don't speak your language or you can't roll, it's probably not your fault. This is the result of policy, official US policy by the most powerful country in the world basically. Which is to make us disappear, and of course it's political because it's tied to our claims to the land as nations, as pre-existing nations to the United States. It's these claims to the land that are the threat that we represent as a people. I think that the solution is really strengthening our political reality. We have tribes now that are recognized by the federal government. We have tribes that are not recognized. We have a lot of fake tribes.

Jacqueline Keeler (29:18):

But what I suggest is actually creating a federal Indigenous government that could be counter to the US government, and would represent all the tribes. It would then be the body that would recognize tribes, that would allow them to join Indigenous peoples. Not only in the United States but Canada and contiguous land areas as well. I think that by doing that we will be politically much more visible, which makes us more and more real, more and more present in the moment. When you are colonized these are the things that go. These are the things that you can't protect. Language, your children, your everything. Your land base, all these things, because your borders are... What I see as our identity is incredibly fuzzy around the edges. It's very permeable, so it's very easy for them to take it, for them to claim it, to take it. This is why I feel that a much stronger, strengthened political is the answer. Because once we are politically real, then it's much harder for them to work in these fuzzy spaces created by colonization.

Bridget Todd (30:35):

Part of creating a reality where Native people are more politically real is also creating a world where people don't feel like Native culture is just up for the taking as identities or as offensive mascots. It's not a tribute or a compliment to use someone else's culture in this way, especially when actual Native people are so often under funded, under represented and unsupported.

Jacqueline Keeler (30:56):

It's not complimentary, it's even benign. It's aggressive, especially when you see the way that they attack actual Native people to hold their space. Like with this Andrea Smith, after she was really publicly revealed in the Native community in 2015. I think 2018, all year long her students kept messaging me, Native students, mostly Navajo women, and they were like, "We're sitting in this classroom and we can't say anything. We know she's a fake. She tries to talk to us and buddy up to us, and we're just like but I need her recommendation to get into this graduate program." Then there's suddenly all these things that you can't talk about because you have to get the okay of the Pretendian who is protecting their space. It's very corrosive and it also it's a taking. We are, I think, the poorest ethnic group in the United States. We have the lowest income levels, and to take jobs from us that could support a Native family, even folks because people send money home to the reservation. It's a big taking from really the most impoverished people in the country.

Jacqueline Keeler (32:19):

White privilege means that white people pretending to be us is far more attractive to white people who are in power decision making places because it feeds all their ideas about us. They know how to perform the identity in a way that appeals to white people.

Bridget Todd (32:36):

More after this quick break. Let's get right back into it. I live in DC where so many of us are embarrassed by the fact that this slur was associated with our city. But what do you say to people that are like, "Oh, it's just a mascot, what is the bog deal?" Or worse, say, "It's actually trying to honor your heritage." What do you say to these people?

Jacqueline Keeler (33:06):

I think that for white people, often they will bring up the viking mascot, and what I tell them is that it's not as pervasive. It's not the only way that white men are seen, which is true for Native people. I tell them like, "Imagine that you live in a world where the only time you see a white man is as a Viking and as a mascot. What would you say the first time you meet a white man? You'd be like, 'Where's your long bow. Where's your helmet with the horns on it?' Because this is your assumption." I would say, "You'd never saw a white man running for president. You never saw a white man on TV anchoring the news. You never saw a white man saving the world in a Hollywood movie. You never saw a white family on TV just in a sitcom. You walk into a bookstore and maybe two of the books are written from the perspective of a contemporary white man out of the thousands of books." Then it would it be the same thing. But see, they don't live in that world where they're marginalized to that extent.

Jacqueline Keeler (34:27):

I try to put people on a different perspective of where they stand because I think that that's the only way they can grasp the issue. The main thing is how it impacts Native youth. I think that's the very real measure. The research done particularly by a Tulalip tribal member, she did a lot of research. Oh, what's her name? Stephanie. I'm forgetting her name right now. But she did a lot of research obviously out of Stanford on the mascot issue. What she did was she basically tested Native youth. She tested their self esteem, their ability to imagine what they wanted to do, whether they thought they could achieve it. There's a term for that, I can't remember it now. Stephanie Fryberg, that's her name. Then she exposed them to the mascot, and what she found in this was that it overwhelmingly reduced the self-esteem of Native youth once they were exposed to a Native mascot. Strikingly enough, the Native youth who claimed to be okay with Native mascots, their self-esteem plummeted the most. And also what plummeted was their anility to imagine themselves being able to achieve their dreams.

Jacqueline Keeler (35:48):

I think the realization that you're not regarded as fully human by society, it makes you less engaged. You no longer believe you can achieve certain things. Native youth are, by every measure, the most vulnerable. The price the American dream is paid by people of color and by Native youth. To engage in this thing just for entertainment value, and that Native youth should have to pay the price is pretty horrific.

Bridget Todd (36:27):

In one of the pieces that I read about Not Your Mascot, you said that you and the other Native parents who were behind this campaign were really doing it because you wanted to leave a better life for your children. My question is, what are your hopes for the next generation of Native little ones like your own?

Jacqueline Keeler (36:44):

It's interesting. My son wants to be a filmmaker. He's actually not that interested in doing things that are about Native things. He just want to write as a writer. He wants to just be a filmmaker and just make films without having to think too much about or having to... See, one of the things is, I don't want us to have to perform our identity either. I think a lot of times people will meet Native people and be like, "Well, you don't seem Indian enough to me." A random white person. "You're not the kind of Indian I think an Indian should be." There's this sense that everyone's an authority on being Indian and they can tell an Indian when they see one. This notion that then does impact Native people. I think the seeking out of our culture is really important, and that it needs to be something that we have access to. But I think it needs to happen on a structural level, it needs to flow naturally. Like our language acquisition. When you're colonized, it's disrupted.

Jacqueline Keeler (37:49):

But when you have strong political boundaries, then it grows. I think a lot of times us being able to perform our culture is treated as a litmus test to our authenticity, and that is very harmful to Native people. Of course, these are, "If they don't speak their own language..." It's not through our fault. It's systemic colonial policies, hundreds of years of policies that brought that about. What I really fight for is not only the elimination of the eradication of these negative stereotypes, but also the need to have to perform our identity to other people's desires. I just want Native people to just be able to be themselves. I just want us to be free of all of that, and for people to be free to be themselves and to focus on things that are meaningful to them. I want the culture, the language, everything to flow of its own accord. Not to have to be something forced or performative. That's what I'm fighting for for my kids.

Bridget Todd (39:06):

Jacqueline fights for a world where Native kids like hers feel secure in their culture and their identities, a world where they don't feel like they need to perform their Native-ness in order to feel whole, and a world where they don't have to watch non-Native people perform it either. Got a story about an interesting thing in tech? Or just want to say hi? You can reach us at hellotangoti dot com. You can also find transcripts for today's episode at tangoti dot com. There Are No Girls On The Internet was created by me, Bridget Todd. It's a production of iHeart Radio and Unbossed Creative. Jonathan Strickland is our executive producer, Tari Harrison is our producer and sound engineer. Michael Amato is our contributing producer. I'm your host, Bridget Todd. If you want to help us grow, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, check out the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.