Tom Hatley

Partial Transcript: Well, I am Tom Hatley. I am from Charlotte—grew up in Charlotte, and have worked on lots of stuff, mainly environmental, but also historical—in the Appalachians generally, and mainly in the Southern Appalachians. I've worked very closely with the Cherokees community and the Eastern Band, and also the Oklahoma Cherokee while I was the Sequoyah professor in Cherokee studies at Western Carolina, which was a—kind of community-driven sort of professorship in a lot of ways, so the—so, I've spent lots of time since I was a kid in the mountains. My maternal grandparents were both Dutch engineers who came to build the American anchor plant as part of a multinational effort, and thought they would leave, but didn’t, so—and I don’t belong anywhere (laughs)—if you know that how I feel, like—?

Partial Transcript: Well, how would the Cherokees approach natural resources—they—in various ways today, they have a natural resources program within a new department of agriculture, so they approach it. They're very much as we would though they are ahead of us, and they've always traditionally been—their knowledge and actions in the landscape have been connected to a tradition that grew out of 10,000 years of residence—ancestral residence at this place. So it's very compelling for them to frame things that way—kind of a cultural natural resources perspective. Natural resources, for instance, USDA programs in Cherokee are very undersubscribed because they tend not to—first of all, they're geared toward larger land owners—and like a lot of federal programs. They were hard for Indian farmers to break into—the tobacco was a big crop with the Cherokees, but Ray Kinsland who was the Ag agent there and president of the Cherokee Boys Club for years told me that he felt that the Cherokees were discriminated against in the tobacco market with USDA.

So, they've had a—in the last 200 years, they've had a difficult relationship with natural resources, and they really didn’t had any left. They bought their land back, and a kind of—they went to court probably a 100 times in very inventive ways. And so they were focused mainly on holding on to what they had regained, and again, the target to generalize about any group, but there is a—I think the fundamental difference is—Tom Bell, my friend would say—and he probably has on film that we're not from here, we're off here, but they do mean that from the religious and cultural side really is of fundamentally what they're about. They shaped many of the natural resources that we've seen. They engineered fish weirs into the rivers; there was a sort of soft technology adopted quickly by settlers. They had their own scientific kind of knowledge system, traditional knowledge about fish species for instance. They're taste-orient toward very small fish; minnows as we would call them, and not large fish though. They did harvest apparently larger fish such as the Sicklefin Redhorse, which was only recently identified and honored with a Linnaean scientific name even though the Cherokee word for Sicklefin Redhorse is still in use.

So, the Cherokee language encodes much of as does any language, much of the natural resource perspective, but they're part of us, and we are part of them and—but there is a big variation in the track thereon and where they want to be, they want to remain, where they are from whereas we're new. I mean, we speaking of my people since on my father's side at least—folks who arrived in the early 1700s or earlier, and went west and got poor and poor as they went, so—but yeah, I mean, that’s a—natural resources is probably a word that they—that’s a term that’s more derived from the Gifford Pinchot Forest Service and soil them all the federal utilitarian agencies from the late Victorian era. I mean—I think they would call it land or place or identified in other ways though. They do manage their forests, but in doing their new forest plan, I know is—I don’t know if you have interviewed Tommy Cave, but he—Cave is a young forester who just as was in-charge of redoing their forest management plan for the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

And there's a big cultural component—a big community component part of the culture in Cherokee as in a lot of communities—it is highly participatory, so there's a lot of community input and discussion to an extent that almost it's just unfamiliar in mainstream American culture. I mean, town halls, open up and—but this is more of an ongoing circular dialogue often, and so this plan is very interesting. Their relationship to natural resources and to everything has been kind of interrupted—their tradition not just by this cultural difference with the folks who ended up around, and then took their land, but also the fact that even when they bought their land back, they could not really manage it on their own. I mean, they were in a trust relationship derived from this early legal decision of how we've handled their status' sovereignty as sovereign nations as domestic dependents—so, in a perpetual childhood or adolescence state. So that the Bureau of Indian Affairs has a division of forestry that control all of their forest lands, and made decisions just as the Indian health service control their health care. Only if maybe thirty or forty out of the 500 tribes in the country have achieved the sort of resource tribe status jargon, but just means they have casino revenues that have enabled them to do some bureaucratic maneuvering that allows them to take over the provision of services directly.

So they've been—it's all been very second-hand for them—health, very few tribal foresters, people with academic degrees and environmental management just as a very few—and it's changing very slowly, but there're more tribal Indian indigenous doctors. So that’s—there have been so many facets to this situation they are in. They have differences that are pretty conspicuous. For instance, they own, I believe around 95,000 acres of land at Qualla Boundary, which was purchased by self-organizing finance really within the tribe from removal on, and in some cases they'll tell you how to be bought twice because they lost it due to essentially kind of under-the-table taking of their land in the 19th century, and then they bought it again, but—anyhow, in that reserve, they have—I mean, in that tribal land at Qualla Boundary, there is a—about a third of the land is in a so-called reserve. The rest is allocated largely to individuals with ninety-nine-year leases, but there is sort of this cultural twist on land planning. Even though their next is a park, they reserved a third of that property as—essentially land for gathering and communal activities. So it has come under a lot of pressure. That’s something you could talk to Tommy about, but it's little—something it would never happen in a different community. So there is that instinct for common properties still there, and it's strong. So—anyhow—

Partial Transcript: Well, the waterways were kind of the connective tissue of everything from commerce to trade—the tribal politics to—so that—the French Broad itself is a tributary river that’s—so that presence isn't is inconspicuous possibly with the French Broad as it is in the Savannah River—if you see, the Cherokee towns were in three areas or communities essentially ancestrally or for—depending on how you cut it in the mountains—on the west of the mountains and the Tennessee Valley proper, and then in the headwaters of the Savannah River, so that the interconnection between the Savannah River and the Mississippi drainages as in the connections to the Alabama River system on the south and the Mississippi drainage tended to be points that were very important in cultural terms of boundary zones.

There were also interface zones and zones of activity and interconnection, and there was—so that’s—in the Savannah River, there were plenty of records, and some preserve—of—the trading canoes that were used just as in the Mississippi Valley and into the upper—the—so called over hill towns around Knoxville and Chattanooga. I mean, very large—I don’t know if you've seen William. I mean there're plenty of descriptions of those—very tended to be very large like, fifty or sixty feet long, often poplar basswood trading canoes that were used. And so there were different variations on that as they got further into the hinterlands in a sense—and French Broad here is a hinterland, but there was sort of very intermodal transportation—probably is a way to put it—from the main stems of the rivers. And also land, but if you look at some of the deerskin maps made by the—that are—we have from the 1720s mainly from the creek in Alabama, Indians and Catawbas, but—you will see essentially geometric depictions of this sort of inter—spider webs or interconnected network of trade—trading pads, but very often those included rivers, and the larger trails were long rivers, so that you should look at a couple of those.

I mean, I can show—I can tell you where to find them. In fact, there may be one in there. I can’t remember in the illustration, but there're several of them. And another book I did has them all in it and with a friend of mine, and a couple of friends, but they would be great graphically because they do illustrate that the Cherokee were not an isolation. They weren’t even called Cherokee, of course, they were—they probably told you that. I mean, they—they're the people of the place that they—their mother town place in the mountains here, and in the little Tennessee kind of area, and then perhaps into this area as well though it’s less clear—Gaduwa, which is their mother town was—they're the people of Gaduwa. So, there's a deep connection, and I really can’t speak to it in-depth because I don’t know it, but all cultures have deep connections to water and to springs, and sacred water. We could visit the Catholic Church to check that out, I think if we wanted to know—it’s—so there was this sort of interconnection of this religious spirit of baptism and purification between their neighbors and the Cherokees, and there was no absolute boundary.

There was a—but—between the Cherokees and their other tribal neighbors and their—there were human interconnections and ways of maintaining stable boundaries and a core of identity. And that’s sort of continued. I mean, there're plenty of old families in the Little Tennessee Valley, in fact, all of them who are essentially bi-cultural in origin. I mean, they had Cherokees—and intermarriage was very important in Tennessee as well. So it’s—just—but I am wandering around—water is a big subject, but I think the commercial and the—and I talked about the fish. There's a great book on—and a lot of images of Cherokee fishing that Heidi Altman wrote her dissertation. She teaches at Georgia Southern—wrote a book called Cherokee Fishing, just pretty anthropological, but I think it—but she would be very helpful to talk to I think. And then the tribe with the help of the Fish and Wildlife Service put together a guide to Cherokee fish using interviews and traditional knowledge about twelve years ago or so. You could talk to Mark Cantrell with the Fishing and Wildlife Service in here, and he could talk to you about that process or to people in Cherokee though.

And the Cherokee language program; Hartwell Francis said that immersion school would be good—sort of I think it would be really visually interesting to have this Cherokee, Sequoyan syllabary and images of these fish and other things. So they also played—I mean, this is another—I'm just jumping around—they have a game—a little gambling game called—I've forgotten. I think it's—what it’s called—but I think it’s—basically there's a specially kind of basket they make, and they carve—maybe you've seen this in fish—and they pop them up and down, and it's kind of bed on it to see where it goes from a kids game on up to an adult game. It’s almost gone. In fact, one of the—Jerry Wolf—a lot of people knew made them, and when I taught a westerner, we got him to come and play the game in one of my classes. So it’s pretty neat really, and Heidi's book has a lot of stuff like that in it. She's great—I mean—and—

Partial Transcript: Well, I'm not totally—I really—I'm not—I don’t exactly know how to be honest. I mean, I know that—my impression is that they—that they were—I really don’t know, but there are descript—but—maybe Roger does—but—Heidi would—they did make very large baskets, which—and there's a lot of—there's a great one at the Western Carolina archive there that was actually made by the Catawbas for use in the Catawba river. So basically, I think they would just create constrictions where they drove fish down them—because they pointed like funnels downstream. And I think ,they used large—these very large baskets—and in the case of this basket of the Catawba, which is like six feet tall and this wide, and has stakes pointing down it. It’s really needles connected by—I mean, collected by Frank Speck who was a famous kind of cranky anthropologist who studied a lot of southern tribes at the University of Pennsylvania like up to the thirties or so, but there, it’s interesting because there is a—there it’s pretty obvious that there was an exchange of basket re-patterns with African-Americans that contributed that basket. So they reengineered the rivers with these. That much is clear to me with these stone weirs, and in doing that, they enabled more efficient capture. And I'm not sure—I think the Sicklefin Redhorse is an example of the fish—check me on this—that moves—its palms kind of like salmon, but not from the ocean. It's one of these that just does it internally within a river system, but in droves mass movement, and they're very large fish.

So, probably the protein—river-based protein is role of that, and they died of—and pre-colonization people in this—in the entire south is grossly underestimated. I knew a guy who was an ichthyologist who taught at Maryville College in Maryville, Tennessee, and he had actually found the bones of a fish archaeologically, and a big chub that was then described as a new species just from faunal remains along the Tennessee River. So, we really don’t have a tremendous picture of everything that potentially was there and how it was used. Heidi’s book would be pretty helpful. I mean, the thing is when you're talking about the Cherokees, the Cherokees today live in the most confined of their environmental contacts. The Cherokees who lived on the Tennessee River lived in the main stem of a big river, and the same thing is true in South Carolina, at least with the upper Savannah tributaries, and even down toward Alabama. So, that’s partly potentially why they may have the tastes they have and techniques they had in the deeper mountains where they were essentially confined. Anyhow, is that helpful? I don’t know.

David Weintraub
00:25:25 Yes, go ahead, absolutely.

Tom Hatley
Yeah, I mean, so there's a lot on that, but it’s—something popped up in my head, I can’t remember what but—now, the other thing is it's—in there—I mean, the Cherokees—essentially, we know, we think of—I mean, people tend to think of subsistence ecologies or economies as sustainable and even and plentiful, but—at least in the temperate zone and certainly for the tribal groups in the south, and everywhere really, they depended on total tuning of environmental pulses like fish migrations—the birthing of—or congregation of large mammals around mineral-rich soil lakes, which was in the mountains—very important. And one of the reasons that Cherokees were—there was this—the lower—high valley was often labeled as hunting grounds in the 18th century by the first people who came through, but in essence, they weren't born equal, they were equal grounds—these are all nodes of salt lakes like Big Bone Lick in Kentucky, and all of the others—those big—the Bluegrass region are really important, and then the same thing in middle Tennessee, so they would move their capture congregations of protein.

And there's a really interesting story that connects to hydropower because it’s—there is clear documentation that the Cherokees would move to the Great Falls of the Catawba, which is south of Charlotte for a period of time, and set up a brief encampment because that was a pinch point for spawning fish. It's actually—and also it's the first place that Southern Power Company or the—William Lee's first effort, hydropower was there—and dam—this incredible pinch point. There was another one on the Yadkin River—the narrows of the Yadkin, and apparently the—sort of tribal territory rules must have been somewhat suspended that’s speculative, but in order for everybody to access that abundance because the Catawba were right there, but the Cherokee people were—some of them going there to—I don’t know whether they were using nets or big baskets or whatever, but—so there's dams—all of them is really struck at the heart of the logic of harvesting fish from the river just as—it’s a simple thing, and it has been said because it’s pretty obvious when you think about—but it’s not so obvious now because you can’t see any of those places, they are all under water.

So, there's pretty thin documentation, but thin was always good enough for me. (Laughs) I mean, in the colonial period, you wish is as long as the national period—the amount of historical documentation is very limited. And so, it is being greatly enriched by the kind of revitalization and kind of community-led knowledge efforts in the—around Cherokee language and other kinds of oral histories and community histories, and rediscovery of those which is going on in Cherokee and worldwide, I mean, with indigenous people. So, as a reaction to their situation today in kind of a globalized world, which is—so anyway that’s working to enable people to write better histories, but the colonial paper trail is valuable because it does remind people that there was sort of a geopolitical centrality to the Cherokees that was much more obvious before the revolutionary war than after, and they were aware of it. They were mountain people who tended to be—it’s a little bit of a stereotype, but also true, very good whether you tell me about the Nepalese or any mountain community that's surrounded with great powers on either side. They tended to be great negotiators in the true sense of great—not the current sense, but anyway, they were good at it.

And they played this intermediary role between the watersheds between the western Ohio tribes and the southern tribes, and they had the ability to kind of be a stable base like the Swiss—like everywhere—same phenomena—and so, that meant that they were the kind of—the colonial governor in South Carolina kept writing to the colonial office that they were the key to Carolina. I mean, the key to the west for Carolina because the Carolina colonies—South Carolina essentially was the only big player in the game up to the revolution—Georgia barely existed. North Carolina didn’t count—didn’t have enough people or economy, but—so the expansion of South Carolinians were from the beginning from 1680 on or whatever—around the 1680s on very aware of the Cherokee presence, so they loomed large geopolitically, and people are aware that all the rivers led to there so anyhow—sorry—yeah.

Partial Transcript: Well, yeah, I mean, I—there really wasn’t one—I mean, in the colonial period in the national—after the revolution. There was—I don’t know much about this at all. There was this sort of navigability and all the laws about that or shad fishing—big fisheries management systems—before that where—and I only really know about the revolution back. So, I don’t know a lot about—I think the concept of stewardship would resonate, and at the same time, I would feel very natural to the Cherokees and kind of foreign to have that as a separate value from a set of embedded kind of rules of conduct including—their political system was very diffuse and community-based. They have stories of overthrowing hierarchical governments and cultures in their past, so there is the big political tradition, and I think the landscape management—really talking about Cherokee agriculture and economies. You're talking about the rivers and you're talking about essentially low elevation forest largely, and even with fire people tend to overestimate, I think just the impact beyond the lower elevation—still very extensive areas and balds, but there're large areas of mountain forest that really weren’t exploited in any way.

David Weintraub
00:35:37 Some of the things that I was looking to tease out were—I think there were certain rules about not dumping in the waterways—and what I've read Cherokee never suffered from typhoid or dysentery, which are diseases that are connected to poor water sanitation, and of course, any elsewhere where very much—

Tom Hatley
Yeah, I don’t know about that. I mean, I really—I wish I should but I'm not sure when those diseases appeared here or—I mean, this is sort of probably not anything that important, but it's very unclear how many people lived here pre-contact in spite of 1492—I mean, it's very uncertain, and it's kind of anomalous—really the archeological evidences pretty slim. I mean, there're people here but the population density is same somewhat low, and I'm sure that’s just the fact that we haven’t asked the right questions or done enough archeology or seeing the big picture, so the—I've always expected in the Amazon—Anna Roosevelt who was an archeologist for the American Museum and Natural History, and like a hereditary figure there for years. I mean, was ridicule for saying that there were large human populations in the Amazon rain forest, and now it's obvious.

So, there may be things we just don’t know, and have underestimated, but that has a lot to do with pressures and how much you need rules to survive. I'm sure there were also rules in Cherokee about things that we were talking about as climate resilience today. They are encoded in the language or settlement patterns that we really haven’t discovered or they haven’t talked about or thought about recently. And so those are sort of passive—I mean, they're sources of traditional knowledge that may have application to the present. There's no doubt that people—their ancestral Cherokee people have been here for eight or nine or postglacially anyway, and the world changed dramatically over that period of time so that they're—when people were asking about how do they do this or that, I mean, we're really talking about our current epic that they were writing kind of a rollercoaster for thousands of years, and we probably still are without knowing they were on it. So there's a lot of—as the elder presence on the land—there's a lot of traditional knowledge in language, and kind of things that we could—that could be discovered by collaborations with the tribe or led by the Cherokee people that could be very useful, looking at mountain environments and risk for instance. Settlement—where to settle, how to move—what kind of settlement to have.

Partial Transcript: I think—I mean, you would get a lot of item. I mean, I can’t think of one particular example. I mean, they follow to keep their place on the land, and there were plenty of heroes there, but within—I think it's fair to say within Cherokee culture, it's somewhat egalitarian. It's not cool to be the leader and—so little bit oddly enough like, Dutch society, which is very egalitarian. It’s almost—so it's—really there's no culture kind of standing out there. It's discouraged because everybody has to be ready to stick their finger in the dike, no matter what. And for the Cherokees, I think it's somewhat similar maybe—I mean, that sort of as opposed to a hierarchical society. I don’t know where—I forgot the way—so I would think that the main example would be I had phrased in terms of community resilience and leadership, which could involve traditional kind of cultural leaders or—but from a Cherokee point of view, I think they're indistinguishable.

There are all kinds of heroes, I think, and their community summer, the people who kind of look more like their neighbors, and were able to create effect of buffer for traditional people to live. There's a long tradition of that. They tend to be the people who end up in the paper records. That’s why I think the snail darter thing would be kind of interesting. I mean, even though it's different because it was for most of the Cherokee community. They were really detached from that world and that river. I mean, they're detached from the—they were excluded so long—they're detached from the little Tennessee, and certainly from the French Broad. They're more connected to the rivers that they're currently able to be on like the Tuckasegee, and the Valley River, and Hiwassee—but—yeah, so I phrased in terms of community leadership more. I mean, I think that that's—it's interesting the most famous Cherokee is William Holland Thomas. He was working for them, and he has lots of descendants in Cherokee, but that’s a good example of how they would view leadership, I think.

Partial Transcript: Yeah, I mean, I think that worldwide there is traditional—really the term I guess would be traditional knowledge about how to manage the land. I do have a friend, Lisa Lefler, and I don’t know if you've run into her who started the Center for Cherokee Health. She's a medical anthropologist at Western, and her family is Appalachian. They're very connected with the Cherokees. She sees lots of overlaps and sort of the traditional mountain—and traditional were this tricky. I mean, cultures—let's say really and more accurate word might be peasant cultures from Europe. My own family, my grandfather who was in Uwharrie Mountains in Central North Carolina would probably qualify as Appalachian in its perspective, but they did have a value of, I believe of the worth of not pushing things to the breaking point.

I remember when I was working for the nature conservancy one time, and I was telling about protecting—actually, I bought a piece of land before—way back in '73 with some people for Davidson College that was a bluff on the Rocky River, and I said, "We doesn’t have to use." I explained it to my grandfather who was about ninety. He said, "Oh yeah, I understand." It was just—holds the world together. That’s the phrase that represents sort of a stream of thinking about maintaining the integrity of fabric of the world that came from someone who sold hardware, and was a part-time farmer. I think the sort of they got on the land worn out and moved west. Description of people is probably a description of something they didn’t want to do, and maybe knew how not to, if they had not been so constrained by a lack of political and economic power, and of real markets. I think it's more of the institutional world that they inherited, and then you see that—I mean, there is—I think a rediscovery of—an example would be the use of fire. I mean, the indigenous people worldwide including in Europe used fire extensively and/or intensively or carefully, and whatever way they were using for what purpose.

Let's say in chestnut cultivation just in Spain, just as the way, or just as the way the Cherokees would have used fire in their own manner to manage essentially domesticated Cherokee groves, which were introduced several thousand—a couple of 3000 years ago by moving seed stock along the eastern spine of the Appalachians and up into the valley. So, they were creating a cultivated landscape near the villages, a lot of genetic modification that was slowly done, and fire was then used universally by early scientific foresters who came out of kind of this first colonial and second utilitarian way of thinking about natural resources. There was a famous article about the fire in Pinion Groves in the American Journal of Forestry that talked about Pie Forestry. It was on the cover of it in 1902 of the American Journal of Forestry or something. I mean, as a pejorative, and in southern Africa—and certainly here worldwide, the use of traditional fire management by indigenous people was—as part of colonization was turned and approved. They only knew how to burn up their world instead of make it more productive and manageable, and they lacked anything with the ability to strike a match, forest arson, and so that reputation also stuck to small European settlers who used fires well when they came here.

So there is—I think you have to be very careful—I would—just my own bias would be to look first to the possibilities of life on whatever land they were owning here. And as I've said, it's—the Appalachians are not just mountains, but that have limited—flat cultivated land, but ninety-eight percent of that cultivatable land that was flat was owned by 2% over 1% of the population, ninety-eight or ninety-nine percent of the population was pushed up in places just by destiny in a way that was unsustainable. So, I don’t think I have anything to do with their traditions or abilities or intelligence, but—who are then turned into mountaineers who were ignorant and stupid, and had left to move to Arkansas. So it's a lot of that—kind of decolonizing has to happen, and the natural resource business—it's only happening in this business very much now. I mean, really—I mean, we're—the United States is pretty far behind. I mean—I mentioned southern Africa—I mean this—we're not—I don’t believe we're signatories to the convention of biodiversity—we finally did. I'm not sure which, but under those indigenous people have well evolved international rights to be part of the management of their landscapes—and national parks certainly happens in Southern Africa, not perfectly it happens other places, but it only is just beginning here. I mean, this is the first—gathering rule that enables the Cherokees to, and any tribe next to a national park in the US was developed under the Obama administration, and it's being implemented in the Smokies with the eastern band on a couple of plants and a couple of other places in the country. So these are the prototypes.

So it's very difficult and very limited there. Their innocence being asked, and are doing research on how their traditional method of gathering ramps, which is to cut it above the roots or their traditional management of the Yellow Coneflower or Sochan affects growth, and in order to be able to gather plants in the park. It's sort of like the salmon debates in the North West, but this is with national parks with our protected areas. So that’s—this is their landscape, and they have traditional plots just like the native Hawaiians do for growing plants in their landscape, and a lot of those are inside the park. People were arrested going to those places for trespassing and poaching as recently as five or six years ago in Cherokee. So that’s changing. We're just way behind in terms of—and so the question is what is sustainability. I mean, this has involved a right way to recognize patterns and knowledge that shaped what we have, and allow it to sort of be visible like honored again.

So that’s a global—that’s recovery from where we've been—let's hope—So I'm very—I've worked a lot in that arena, and it’s very—it’s really backward. I went one time to the Institute of Peace. I mean, this is irrelevant, but just trying to do some seminars on kind of collaborative conversations between tribes and the US Institute of Peace in D.C. that was established by basically the Hawaiian delegation to try to—because of their experience of World War II, they were kind of—they were anti-war as a counterweight to the defense department. It's a small thing. I met this guy there, and I was talking to him about doing some seminars about a lot of this stuff related to the land, and we were going to—essentially kind of conflict resolution—trying to develop some conflict resolution protocols around this. And he eventually came back to me and said, "We can’t do it because my lawyers say that we can’t work with federally recognized Indian tribes because to do so, would—in their eyes, throw into some slight shadow the sovereignty of the United States Government." So, this is so deep—that’s a lawyer’s perspective, but that’s—like knowledge is power, sovereignty, but whose is it—that sort of—and in what order? So, you are on the right track way back anyway. (Laughs)

Partial Transcript: Well, I think that the chief lesson is not that we could—I think that the chief lesson, the knowledge that we could take from how to become better stewards of the land is fundamentally become better stewards of our relationships with other people and other kinds of knowledge, and understanding how social and economic equity really control what we think of is the natural world today. So these are people who live forty miles from Asheville or from the French Broad Valley, but their language isn't spoken here. People are largely ignorant of them. People innocently do offensive things such as name grocery stores after their most sacred site.

And so, I think being able to think more clearly about who we are and how we act in relationship to the first people of this landscape is sort of the first thing that we first need that we have, and I'm sure—I think the lessons are there for us, if we—but there're sort of shared. I think in order to get out of the box we're both in—they are in a box of this isolation that works for them, but only up to a point. We're on a box of careening through into the future, and not knowing where we're going is, to have some sort of dialogue opened up. And here's one in our backyard that has never really been opened up as you're discovering. (Laughs)

Partial Transcript: Yeah, I really—I didn’t know her that. I only met her a few times, and I got her to give a talk at a meeting I had one time. I find her work on civil rights as inspirational and interconnected to as her environmental work as important as anything she did. So, I don’t think that environmental—maybe you don’t either have a real solution that doesn’t deal with people. So, I think she was very good at dealing with people in being open, and in a way she does represent an elder tradition of civility and listening and honoring, and being able to make bolder statements while maintaining good manners. Now, this is sort of missing in most people today.