Authors join peers, scholars, and friends in conversation. Topics include environment, humanities, race, social justice, cultural studies, art, literature and literary criticism, media studies, sociology, anthropology, grief and loss, mental health, and more.
How do you begin things, and how do you start something where it seems like there's actually a break, a rupture, where there isn't necessarily something to go off of.
Sarah Biscarra Dilley:What we're doing right now will also someday be a story. And that there will be a time that what is happening now is one of those old stories.
Narrator:Land privatization has been a long standing and ongoing settler colonial process separating Indigenous peoples from their traditional homelands with devastating consequences. Allotment Stories is a volume that collects more than two dozen chronicles of white imperialism and indigenous resistance. Volume contributors, Sarah Biscara Dilley and Joseph Pierce are here to talk about their pieces of this history.
Sarah Biscarra Dilley:Yaqui Sissime, Yaqui Tanaasmo, while University of California Davis, me and Native American studies. I'm letting you know first, I'm thanking the people, the Allelo speaking people, and I'm recognizing that I'm returning to their beautiful homelands, to our beautiful homelands. I'm letting you know that my name is Sarah Biscardelli. I'm speaking the language of the people of Tahini, also known as San Luis Obispo, California. And I'm letting you know that I come from good villages, from good people, from good villages throughout the region of the Central Coast Of California, from Sipahala, which is near Cayucas, California, Sitokawayu, which is near Cambria, California, Etzmal, which is near Lucia, California, Sitokaya near Bryson, California, Sitokaca near San Marcos Creek, El Owej in Paso Robles, California, Assaram, which is in Blocking, Sweden.
Sarah Biscarra Dilley:That's why I'm a foot taller than everyone else in my family. Casas Grandes, which is in Chihuahua, Mexico. Xenapequero, which is in Michoacan, Mexico. Santa Catarina, which is in Baja, California. Sicpats near California Valley, California.
Sarah Biscarra Dilley:Silcochoio near the Cuesta grade. Waimea, which is on the Big Island Of Hawaii, and Sitokawa, which is, near Morro Bay, California. I'm letting you know that my home is in the of Maku'u on the Big Island Of Hawaii in the land of the Lualalo speaking people. And I'm letting you know that I listen, learn, and know in my homelands, through our family, through our kinships, our language, and I'm currently a PhD candidate in Native American studies at UC Davis.
Joseph M. Pierce:That was wonderful. Oh, oh, oh. So Joseph, Corpus Christi, Hello, everyone. My name is Joseph Pierce. I'm a citizen of Cherokee Nation, and I'm telling you that I'm a language learner.
Joseph M. Pierce:So please forgive me if I make any mistakes, But that I grew up in a town called Corpus Christi, and I currently live in Brooklyn on the, homelands of the Lenape people. And I work at Stony Brook University in the department of Hispanic languages and literature where I'm a professor of Latin American studies.
Sarah Biscarra Dilley:Oh, thank you for your word. I love that, you know, in the the lead up and not necessarily knowing how we wanted this conversation to be structured, that this just got to be a really beautiful opening for the conversation to give context for ourselves and our families and the places that we have relationship to through language. Thank you for sharing that context.
Joseph M. Pierce:I have a I have a question that maybe maybe we could use to start off with, which is a question that I often ask myself, but it has to do with the beauty of the beginning and how in many of our ways of telling stories, there are poetic elements or they are themselves poetry or song or storytelling is all of those together, and that seems to contrast the loss or the trauma that often comes with a topic like allotment. And then in my case, allotment and adoption, which I write about in in the piece that we can talk about later. But I I wondered if if maybe we could start off talking about why why talk about beauty at the same time, or how do we talk about beauty and and the poetic at the same time as we talk about these challenging, histories?
Sarah Biscarra Dilley:I really appreciate that question. Something I've been thinking about quite a bit for the last handful of years, especially as I've had the privilege of really immersing myself in some of our family stories, not only through, you know, developing cartographies or doing the kinds of research that I've that I've been able to do, but also through the work and the responsibilities that I fulfill in my community. A lot of the work that we do, whether that's working language, whether that is being part of our social or ceremonial singers, is about keeping our worlds in motion. That's how a lot of our you know, the timing of certain ceremonies or community gatherings is really aligned with this idea that I guess I always turn to language to express it. It's like world world place.
Sarah Biscarra Dilley:It is in continuous motion. Our word for land or earth literally means land, world, mountain, year. So it's already marking this kind of passage of time. How it's been explained to me is that when we stop doing those things, that has direct impact on the worlds around us. That has direct impact on our homelands.
Sarah Biscarra Dilley:That has direct impact on our families. When I make a decision to, like, include poetry or like as you offered in the beginning and then as, like, a kind of formal beginning and ending of your piece, it's this way of even if we're using different language or if we have different points of access to certain kinds of cultural knowledge or, you know, right now I'm having this experience of, you know, my family has connections to this place, but it feels very new in many ways, like our family was separated from our from our relatives here, That there is this process of of learning how to engage more clearly with the place, right? My prayer is definitely informed by the places that I that I live and move through. So the inclusion of poetry or the inclusion of kind of creative forms of marking time in our work is a way to practice that with the tools that we have. I'm I'm curious about hearing more about, like, how the way you structured your piece is very clearly laid out.
Sarah Biscarra Dilley:Like, you have these different highlighted segments. And to me, I see that as an extension of the poetics that you're that you're putting into the piece and also as a visual artist. I really appreciate having this kind of visual marker of, like, a transition into discussing a new discussing a new topic?
Joseph M. Pierce:I mean, I'm a literary scholar originally, and and so I try to be very attuned to language. And sometimes, I'll be reading something, and all of a sudden, it just gets stuck in your head. And this Linda Hogan line, at the beginning, there was nothing, and something came from it, is so simple, and yet, because of its economy, is able to really condense a really big idea, which is about origins, and it's a cosmological beginning that she's describing. And I had been turning that over in my head for a number of years. When it came time for me to really sit down and think about my relationships with allotment, I started thinking about how do you begin things, and how do you start something where it seems like there's actually a break, a rupture where there isn't necessarily something to go off of?
Joseph M. Pierce:And I try to narrate this in the piece, but I we have to turn to our stories, because encoded within that language and encoded within our stories are the answers to how do you start something, or how does something begin, how do you relate to something in spite of difference or in spite of the breaking apart of kinship, the breaking apart of relationship to land. I thought for a long time that I had to kind of make it up myself, that there was no map or no guide. With time and a little bit of talking it out with other people, I realized that, no, it's it's actually there from the beginning. Right? Like, the original stories are also lessons about how to negotiate these challenging issues.
Joseph M. Pierce:In my article, I I tried to talk about how my own family has a relationship with allotment and that that is a juridical, a legal relationship, but it's also a spiritual relationship. And that that is very much tied to the legal and the spiritual maneuvers, the legal maneuvers that were also connected to my father's adoption. So my father being adopted away from Cherokee community and is is, in a sense, just an extension of the rupture of allotment. And so when confronted with these challenges, I think it makes a lot of sense to me to turn to poetic language that can bring together disparate elements or that can combine unexpected images in ways that allow us to make connections beyond a narrative framework or across a narrative framework. And so that's something that the poetic allowed me to do.
Joseph M. Pierce:Thinking of it now, it's also this is how we do. Like, I don't need an excuse. I don't need an excuse to turn to the poetic. That I think that's the thing that I learned also.
Sarah Biscarra Dilley:Mhmm. Something that is feeling very resonant with me is when you talk about this kind of rupture or disconnect that you're right responding to, like, what is the story beyond allotment? Looking at that as a beginning, right, that, like, a rupture is also an opening, but thinking about how intentional that divide is. You know, when I think about how like, I I was very fortunate to grow up very close with my my great grandmother. She was a part of my life into my twenties because, like, being the one of the queer kids, right, I, like, broke a family record by not having kids at 24.
Sarah Biscarra Dilley:And everyone is our generations are quite close for some time. The my relationship with her and her stories is the only entry point that I had to kind of deepening this documented history of our family. But something I always noticed is that she would, you know, she would refer to us as Chumash. She would name this the towns that where some of our key villages are, like, repeat them over and over and over again. She had lots of stories about the I Love Lucy esque hijinks that our family tended to get into.
Sarah Biscarra Dilley:Right? Like, multiple people were in parades and had their wardrobe malfunction that led to public nudity. When she was speaking to people from outside of our family and our community, she would use the term Mission Indian because it was legible in this context. And one of the things that that I really tussled with was this idea that and even when we're working language, right, it's it's referred to in documents as old Espanol. It's named after the mission that incarcerated us or some of our families.
Sarah Biscarra Dilley:My family was was mostly relocated to missions further north, because we're kind of part of the northern kinship of our area. But what the kind of repetition of these kinds of names does to I I I refer to it as trying to create a new creation story. I think for a lot of us, that pain that is associated with those stories can become a barrier. And for many of us, it also galvanizes us to kind of move through that passage, right, and to see what's beyond it. I just think it's very strange, like, in the sense that settler time and space is very fixated on this, like, linear, very tidy division of things.
Sarah Biscarra Dilley:But one of my grandmothers, Crispina, was nine years old when the Portola expedition came through our village. Like, we were in a village where we we tried to give them a bear. Like, we really could have changed the course of California colonization if they had taken the damn bear, but they didn't. When I think about, like, this is within our memory. Right?
Sarah Biscarra Dilley:We remember when you wandered through sick, no idea where you were, and we fed you because that is what our cultural protocol is. Right? We're not gonna let you just, like, struggle out there. If you're coming through our area, we're gonna, like, give you acorn mush and share fish with you and do what we would want to have happen with us if we were to pass through another person's territory. It's also grounded in this idea that we are trying to build good relations every step of the way.
Sarah Biscarra Dilley:But I think about the things that she witnessed just in her lifetime and how recent that story is. So how can this be our beginning when that was only two fifty three years ago? Archaeologists like to say that we've been in our area for a minimum of fifteen thousand. Our stories tell us we've been here forever. And like most indigenous people, we're waiting for scientists to come because they're the last ones to the party.
Sarah Biscarra Dilley:If there could be a panel of antis and researchers alongside one another, it would just be a a symphony of what I tell you. We've been telling you. We've been telling you where our beginning is, and I I really appreciate the directness of the the line that you included from Linda Hogan, because it mirrors how a lot of our stories start. When I think about how indigenous people exchange with one another, oftentimes, that's like, okay, I don't want to jump into a story halfway. I want to start when the world was darkness.
Sarah Biscarra Dilley:Like, we need to go back to the very beginning, and then we'll work our way back from there. Right?
Joseph M. Pierce:I I had a conversation one time with Cannupa Hanska Luger, the artist, and Cannupa was saying he likes to ask people to tell the origin story of their people as a way of getting to know each other better. We were having this conversation, and I and I told him a little bit about the story of the water beetle, which I tell in the article. And, the thing about the water beetle story for me is that it's a story of emergence. The water beetle dives to the bottom of this primordial ocean and emerges again with land that then becomes Turtle Island, but it's also a story that's predicated on the liminal space, the traversing of the water beetle. So, like, the water beetle is a very queer figure.
Joseph M. Pierce:It's a figure that Daniel Keith Justice would call an anomalous being Mhmm. Who can exist in multiple worlds and, in fact, creates the world. And that also was really important to me. I don't know that I really describe it as such in the article, but the fact that that Eunice, water beetle, is also a queer figure, or I can imagine that they're a kind of queer figure, they're a non binary figure, or they're a liminal figure, or they're transiting across dimensions, worlds. For me, as a queer indigenous person who grew up kind of disconnected in many ways because of this structural violence, because of allotment, because of adoption.
Joseph M. Pierce:That actually allows me a point of entry into repairing that harm or that that structural harm, based on the lessons that Dionysus is giving us because they are a figure. They are a a a relative, an ancestor who is, in a sense, was unassuming, like a little tiny water beetle, and at the same time, isn't only of one world, is definitively, like, constitutionally of multiple worlds. I've been thinking about that again for years now, and I feel like there's not just a lesson there. There's permission there.
Sarah Biscarra Dilley:Mhmm.
Joseph M. Pierce:There's permission for you to transit in ways that are grounded, but which are also speculative in some sense or, like, or about crossing in some sense. And in my mind, it's an origin story that's not exclusively about being grounded in place, but talks about relationships with place that are about being in movement. I don't know if everyone would agree with that, but for me, like, the my my, like, queer indigenous self really identifies with that. And I think that there's also a poetic gesture in that story that is about making kinship not exclusively as biological reproduction, but as relationship building, and that's the thing that has really allowed me to situate allotment and adoption as, yes, these are colonially imposed structures meant to displace indigenous people from our kinship networks, and yet Mhmm. Our origin story actually also provides for connections across gaps that seem incommensurable, land, water, sky, all of these things.
Joseph M. Pierce:Like, it's it's there. You just have to kind of key into how to listen to it.
Sarah Biscarra Dilley:Yes. I really appreciate what you're offering here. There's so many, like, threads that I wanna pick up on in what you were saying. I guess something that that I've been thinking about and having conversation with, relatives, particularly those of us who work within, like like, our our cultural practices and work with language. I'm very lucky to have a cousin, an older cousin who's more like an auntie, but she's cousin.
Sarah Biscarra Dilley:I got she's my cousin. You know, I was having a conversation with her recently about just the moment we're in and how overwhelming it feels to be in in the world in this time. Something that I've been doing to kind of make sure I have from footing is turning to our stories. Because, like you're saying, those provide us the road maps on how we as, like, whole people, as good people with, like, distinct relationships to place are inherently mobile because we carry them in our bodies. How we can approach the challenges that are happening here.
Sarah Biscarra Dilley:One of the things that I've been kind of puzzling through in my writing is how to acknowledge that just like those old stories were told so intentionally, and continue to be told so intentionally to provide us that guidance, that what we're doing right now will also someday be a story, and that there will be a time that what is happening now is one of those old stories. What kind of guidance or instruction or advice do we wanna cultivate right now? There are people who were consultants, in the various, So, like, the Chumash areas in the Central Coast Of California, oftentimes, they get looked at as these distinct areas, but we are we function more like a confederacy. There were at 1.12 different language groups. We are of a language isolate, so there are, like, no other languages in the world relation related to our languages.
Sarah Biscarra Dilley:But a lot of our languages within that confederacy are very closely related. So when I have been given permission from people in some of the other areas, from family to look at the notes that their relatives, had transcribed for them, which is really how I look at that anthropological exchange was like, thank you for being a secretary, JB Harrington. There, I mean, there are just philosophers in every corner of those narratives, and the people who chose to come forward and do that work. But there's a gentleman whose work who's no longer with us, who I refer to often, named Fernando Liberado. He was born on Limu, Santa Cruz Island and was, removed to the Ventura area.
Sarah Biscarra Dilley:So he's, in relationship with, like, meets Kanaka'an people in that area. Shared this quote that, my cousin shared with me when I was starting to travel more, and going to the other side of the ocean and was feeling very nervous about moving through those spaces. The line that she was sharing was from, mister Liberado. The world is like a great winnowing tray. There are grains and chaff mixed all in with it.
Sarah Biscarra Dilley:Some people move up and down the basket, and some people move all around. And she was sharing that with me to to just affirm, like, you don't need to worry. Like, you were just one of those people who is moving all around. Some people, their work is to to move in very close relationships in our territory. For some people, it will be to kind of suture kinships between different areas.
Sarah Biscarra Dilley:And for other people, their their work is to is to roam and to build relationships all over and for us to have those exchanges that happen in that area. And just being able to hear that, it took away all of the anxiety that I was feeling about the kind of newness of this movement. Just like, oh, just like what my great grandma used to say, there's nothing new under the sun. In two months, you're not even gonna remember what you were so upset about, which was often true. But I appreciate the weight of those stories and that that, you know, this is not necessarily one of our old old stories.
Sarah Biscarra Dilley:This is what a gentleman shared, you know, around the turn of the last century. But that is how it kind of comes to step in and start to move in that way. Getting back to what I was sharing about the movement of these stories and how understanding the work that we're doing as an extension of those knowledge systems that will be those old stories down the line, what kind of guidance are you trying to provide in the, like, generosity of the story that you're sharing about your family? We always generosity of the story that you're sharing about your family?
Joseph M. Pierce:We always knew that my father had been adopted. That was always part of his story. He was raised by a white family in East Texas, and my dad's very dark, and it was always very clear, and they were always very open with that. But we never knew, like, who his people were. And we went through the process of opening the sealed adoption records, and I say we because my father didn't really want to do it.
Joseph M. Pierce:He he he took some encouragement because for him, he was already in his fifties. He didn't need to go through all that, but he did. And he had to go to a judge and get a judge to open the sealed adoption records, and it was a whole big bureaucratic process. And I was in my first year of graduate school, so I was maybe 21, 20 two when this all happened. I didn't know what to do.
Joseph M. Pierce:What do you do with that? You know, how do you start to retell the story of who you are in a moment where you're still trying to figure all of this out. I didn't have the language really back then, but we were able to go to meet his mother, Ada. And when we got to meet Ada, it was in a hotel lobby in Amarillo, Texas. Like, so in the middle of nowhere, and it's this hotel lobby, and in walks this kind of petite Cherokee woman with a big perm and and her her daughter.
Joseph M. Pierce:So my dad, we learned that he had a a half sister at this time. And what do you do? What conversation do you have in that moment where you're trying to say, I care about you or I want I want to extend myself towards you, but I don't know how to do it. And it was slow, and it was quiet, and it was unassuming, this meeting. It was there were no fireworks.
Joseph M. Pierce:It was just it was very small. And then another opportunity happened, and we all went up to Oklahoma. And so we went to Oklahoma, and we met all the rest of the, you know, the relatives. And slowly, it became part of our lives to talk about my dad's mother, my grandmother, to talk about our Cherokee relatives. And then there was this sort of the legal procedure of, like, becoming enrolled.
Joseph M. Pierce:It's curious because becoming a citizen of Cherokee Nation was really important to me, but I also recognize that that's not the same as being involved in community. Mhmm. And so the being involved in community was the hard part. That was what we didn't have. So Yeah.
Joseph M. Pierce:Allotment, adoption created this kind of structure, and these are, again, legal maneuvers that then were followed by another legal maneuver of citizenship, but it wasn't actually surrounded by a way of engaging in community except for having to have conversations with these relatives that were now your relatives and reaching out to other Cherokee people and trying to build community in ways that you could because I never lived in Oklahoma. I never lived in that place, and I doubt I ever will. Mhmm. This is a long way of saying that I thought I was the only one. I thought I was the only one who grew up not knowing about this relationship.
Joseph M. Pierce:And come to find out, allotment created a whole generation or more of people separated from their communities, and adoption created yet another whole generation of people, of children separated from their communities. And I realized, in fact, that in certain communities, it's actually the norm for you to be separated from your community, that that is the statistical norm. And so when I was able to realize that that it is a quintessentially Cherokee story, the one that I'm telling, it may not be a traditional kind of grew up on the rez stereotype, if if we wanna call it that, or or reality. Right? Like, I don't wanna say that that's a stereotype.
Joseph M. Pierce:It is a reality. It wasn't my reality. But my reality is also a Cherokee reality is what I'm trying to say. And when I realized that, I had what I felt like a responsibility to try to figure out language to describe how we put these pieces together. That's my place.
Joseph M. Pierce:That's my role. That's how I see myself as an academic, as a writer, as a queer person, as a Cherokee person. Those are the tools that I have. That's the life that I've had. And me using those tools to help find new ways or find language to describe not just the rupture, but also the way back or the way to I'm gesturing with my arms.
Joseph M. Pierce:It's it's like a weaving gesture that I'm making to to bring ourselves back together, to put ourselves back together. That's what I hope. That's me using my abilities and my story in a way that I hope makes sense to other people. And it is by sharing that story that I think I'm also doing, enacting the lessons that we're supposed to learn and that I did learn, but that I also had to very conscientiously learn.
Sarah Biscarra Dilley:I think what you're sharing about just recognizing the story of your family as, like, a quintessentially cultural experience, a quintessentially Cherokee experience is such a critical offering. You know, I actually wrote Daniel and Jean when I was responding, you know, to seeing the whole manuscript of the book, and just having this moment of appreciation for the way that it allowed me to really trouble through some of the ways that I was trying to write this part of our family story and, like, really interrupt this language that had been so passive but so insidious in how our family spoke about things. So our relatives, it's a very unusual story. We did not get land through the Allotment Act. All of our land was secured through cash sale entries that was bought by our Kanaka grandmother, Luisa, who was recognizing her responsibility.
Sarah Biscarra Dilley:And, you know, she was removed from her homeland on the Big Island and Maui when she was around 10 and brought to California. And then married into her oldest son married into into our California native family, into our Yatitu family. You see her observation of our protocols through how land was purchased. So the first parcels of land are bought for my grandmother Leonora and her husband Dionysio. And those parcels are on opposite sides of the mountain, which speaks to not only how, you know, our community views, like, partnership.
Sarah Biscarra Dilley:Right? Like, I look to our relatives for my models on, you know, how I wanna be in more expansive relation through, like, polyamory. Like, our word for marriage just means to live with someone. And most of the women in my family had four or five different people that they were in partnership with, and it wasn't because they passed that they moved to another partnership. Right?
Sarah Biscarra Dilley:They were just done with that relationship, and they were moving to a different space. But she's buying parcels of land, my grandmother Luisa, for first the mother of my grandmother Mary, who her son married, and then her father, and then all of our kind of extended relatives. And so at one point, we had thousands of acres of titled land all over the county. And a lot of those parcels were purchased at the juncture of streams or along river systems that are very important to our families and to our foodways. You know, within twenty years, those lands were gone.
Sarah Biscarra Dilley:Some of them were flooded through the building of a dam. Some of them were seized through imminent domain to build a national guard outpost, which was then used to support military incursion in places like Hawaii and The Philippines. The way that this story had been kind of spoken about in my family was, first of all, very quiet. And then when people would talk about it, they would say things like we lost our land, which is such a painful way to internalize what happens. One of the things that that I shared with Daniel and Jean was just thanking them for the opportunity to really interrupt that way of speaking about things.
Sarah Biscarra Dilley:It's not without acknowledging the responsibility that we have that I hear you reflect in your response to my last question. Right? It's like we do have a responsibility to figure out how we want to move through these stories, how we want to engage the stories we want to see move forward in the world, but just in a space to interrupt the ways that we have internalized the violence that was committed against us as if it was somehow our fault.
Joseph M. Pierce:There's something about that passive voice, you know, like, this thing happened, and then this thing happened. Right? Like, that narration of history as if it were inevitable. No. Like, people did that.
Joseph M. Pierce:White people passed laws specifically in order to take away this land from our people, and then we did these other things in order to try to survive. I think that's one of the the sinister aspects of linear historical storytelling. It it almost makes it seem as if it were inevitable that allotment happened, and then poverty happened, and then removals and all kinds of things. Right? Like, no.
Joseph M. Pierce:No. No. That's not a passive voice situation. That's a white people did this situation, and, like, we need to name that. I was gonna ask if you wanted to read some of your work.
Sarah Biscarra Dilley:Sure. Yeah. Thank you. I'll start from the beginning. I feel like it it speaks most directly to some of the things that we've talked about thus far.
Sarah Biscarra Dilley:Where are you from, and where are you going? Strange weaving of wood, cattle, iron, oil, fat, or fur imagined a world in pieces. Fat. Ranches, missions, candles, cattle. Where we dipped candles for forced prayer, they gave us new names.
Sarah Biscarra Dilley:Often referred to as Obis Benio Chumash, we are baptized with words again and again, an attempted transfiguration of the complex and layered relationships that make up Yakti Chukchi Chukchi, the people, into the perimeter of a mission, an assistant, or a ranch. Mission documents used as legible forms of verification for recognition, but also as the source of an unstable identity, decide our presence or absence in the eyes of the settler state without accounting for the complexity of our experiences or the inherent contradiction of requiring existence to be verified by the same mechanisms that dispersed, dismembered, displaced us. Written into words and maps that remain fixed despite the life and all things, the systemic disordering of our worlds has been suspended across generations, attempting to make such violence a new creation story. But our self determined identities have the exponential capacity to exist beyond the codified, grounded within our realities as indigenous peoples and speaking from our respective centers of the world. While settlers imagine their possession, indigenous peoples simultaneously deepen our connections, navigating narrative and physical confinement by maintaining longstanding relationships and challenging generational tensions to maintain survival.
Sarah Biscarra Dilley:This includes relationships with other than human beings, places, and waterways, each of which contributes to a living sense of place making, of movement, and of alliances. Though plot maps display the world in flat, quantified dimension, it is our stories and relations that awaken the images and texts that imagine the disparate, a world in pieces. Our world is one of expansive whole, citing rivers and places with perspective in a language of family, a cultural protocol of inspired determination. Elizabeth, Louise, Marie, Martha, Ignacio, Lizzie, Mary, Maria Luisa, Lorenza, Leonora, Jacinta, Crespina. Our cascade of names has always held multiple meaning, marking relation and continuum in place, a recipe, a middle name, the margin of a certificate of birth, an argument between new parents.
Sarah Biscarra Dilley:Like our continuance, our titled land came to be through relationship, only possible through my grandmother Luisa, the Kanaka Oivi daughter of Joaquin, son of an unbaptized Indio from Veracruz, born at Mission San Diego and coming of age at San Carlos Borromeo near Monterrey. Like many other displaced, dispossessed, or diasporic peoples bound up in the mission system and its subsequent enclosure of the land, Joaquin became a renowned horseman working in the eighteen thirties and early eighteen forties for Kawi Keauli, Kamehameha the third, herding feral longhorns into makeshift corrals along the slopes of holy mountains and valleys of Hawaii or coastlines of West Maui. Her father, as imbricated in colonial industry as he was, represents the bridging of indigenous practices and many emergent paniolo traditions, a quickening movement between California and Hawaii, a symbol of both innovation and fracture. This moment of imperial expansion is ongoing and iterative, manifesting as shifting colonial occupations in California, land grants and land loss traced on yellow and paper, while continuing to be echoed in United States military violence across the one ocean. Deepening further dispossession needs to teach you through use of eminent domain to build military bases, extract oil, flood valleys, or enact armed training.
Sarah Biscarra Dilley:It reflects connections between peoples of saltwater and archipelagos existing long before colonial imposition, but also the dire choices indigenous peoples have had to make to ensure our survival, including those that further distance us from who we are, our responsibilities to our own land, water, protocols, and lifeways, as well as respect for those of other indigenous people. What do you call a moment that never stopped? An endless stretch of changing realities. Place is in each of us. Each scene is unending.
Sarah Biscarra Dilley:A point of occurrence implied but unsuccessful. Of Camille O'Fayal, the royal road, an imminent domain.
Joseph M. Pierce:There was something when you talk about a moment that never stopped. What do you call a moment that never stopped? And I think in my chapter, I ask a similar question. How do you claim land that is underwater? These are some of the questions that we're forced to confront.
Joseph M. Pierce:You know? Like, how do you not stem a tide, but how do you engage with the ongoingness of settler colonial occupation because it hasn't ended and do so in ways that are responsive to our communities?
Sarah Biscarra Dilley:I would love to hear you read some of your work, especially if there are points of connection that you're seeing. I always love hearing the writer read their own work. It does something different than seeing it on the page.
Joseph M. Pierce:What I'm gonna do is read from the second section that starts with allotment. So this is allotment speculations, the emergence of land memory. Allotment. Allotment aimed to assimilate Indians into American society by isolating individual landowners, promoting patriarchal domesticity, and encouraging cash crop farming. In the case of the Cherokee Nation of the original 7,000,000 acres held before allotment in Indian Territory, individual Cherokee citizens retained only a 46,598 acres in 1971.
Joseph M. Pierce:Through coercive deals or outright fraud, Indian land was drastically reduced. Families were dispersed, forced to relocate, to start over again and again. This loss is both a point of departure and a requirement for existence within settler colonialism. Let me provide an example. Lot 5 In Section 6, Township 11 North Range 18 East, was allotted to John Rock in nineteen o three after the completion of the Dawes Commission's enrollment of Cherokees in Indian Territory.
Joseph M. Pierce:In the years following the Dawes Commission, many native families, such as the Rocs, found themselves unable to retain the lands they had been allotted and either sold or were forced to abandon them. In March 1952, in fact, the state of Oklahoma served notice to Rock's family that their claim to this land was to be legally quieted forever in court. The notice reads, quote, to the unknown heirs, executors, administrators, devisees, trustees, and assigns, known and unknown, immediate and remote of John Rock, Cherokee roll number 16.933, deceased, and Jeanne Rock, Dan Rock, and Lee Rock, if living and if deceased, then the unknown heirs, executors, administrators, devisees, trustees, and assigns, immediate and remote, of any such deceased person or persons. Defendants, greeting. End quote.
Joseph M. Pierce:The public notice stipulates that if no heir defends the allotment in court, all rights to it will be permanently eliminated. Here is the connection. I am one of those unknown remote relatives, though I did not know this until somewhat recently. Because as I noted earlier, my Cherokee father was adopted by a white family as a newborn. In fact, my father was born and adopted in January 1952, only two months before this notice was published.
Joseph M. Pierce:Allotment and adoption are two interlocking techniques of settler colonial dispossession that converge in the body of my grandmother, my father, and me in our shared flesh and in the land that is our kin. How does one claim unclaimable land? My great aunt Carolyn told me that the family left that land because it was about to be flooded. An infrastructure project that dammed the Canadian River would create Oklahoma's largest man made body of water, Lake Eufaula. The Eufaula Dam turned Indian allotments into recreational facilities and profitable lakefront housing developments as it provided hydroelectric power and irrigation for industrial cotton farming.
Joseph M. Pierce:It provided capital for white businesses at the expense of native life, but the Rocks had left their allotment land and moved to the Oklahoma Panhandle in 1951, a year before the lawsuit. Carolyn's father, my great grandfather, told her once, the place where I was born is under the water. How does one claim land that is underwater? And that is the question that I was wrestling with in this piece, and it all crystallized when I was talking with Adrian Keane, another Cherokee person, about the creation story. How do you claim land that is underwater?
Joseph M. Pierce:And in fact, the Earth, the world, is created from land that is brought from under the water. It's not inconceivable. In fact, that is the original way that Earth was made, and so I don't know if this chapter can be a kind of testament to that, but I imagine that part of what I'm trying to do is describe the possibilities of claiming land even if it is underwater, because that's also part of the way that we imagine cosmic belonging.
Sarah Biscarra Dilley:This question about the water and how you're relating it to not only, you know, the submersion of family allotment, but also as this connection to our, like, long history, right, our long stories, this memory that we have. Because this is something I see echoed in a lot of our communities. Right? I can't, tell our story right now. It's not the right time of year.
Sarah Biscarra Dilley:But, you know, there's lots of echoes in in how we we understand these different cycles of the of the world. Something that I that I think about is this understanding of time that I learned from our stories and that I learned from the prayer work that I do and is also connected to the intention that I have with the research that I'm doing. Like, I hope that this can kind of present a connection or an opening into this deeper understanding and hopefully a point of resonance for other people who have lived a very similar Cherokee story. I believe that and this was taught to me, so it's not just my singular belief. Right?
Sarah Biscarra Dilley:That until things get kind of fixed, that story is happening somewhere else simultaneously. That also means that the good and the beauty that we bring into the world has an impact on those other places in our in our time and in our places. That is the work that I think a lot of our peoples try to do with prayer is this recognition that the healing or the change or the doctoring that happens in this world has an impact on all of the worlds. And when I hear you talk about how this, like, moment of devastation also provides this insight into some very original instructions that, like, make you and your people who you are. I think about something that my cousin shared with me about, like, our one of our rivers.
Sarah Biscarra Dilley:Right? So we're Steelhead people. And in a lot of our areas, though, steelhead doesn't run anymore because their rivers have been diverted from monoculture farming or they've been dammed or things like that. You know, I was taught to go to those places and still interact with those beings because somewhere, they're still there. Somewhere, they're still swimming those rivers.
Sarah Biscarra Dilley:Somewhere, they're still at that point where the Spaniards that came through wrote about the river being so thick with fish that it just looked like rainbows. Somewhere that's still happening, and that means that somewhere it can still happen again. I think about that water also potentially as a protection of that place, that it's being held in that place. And then through that water, that movement still gets to happen in a way that might not be as as possible in the the kind of settler conditions that you're talking about.
Joseph M. Pierce:I think about that too is, water beetle, when Dionysi emerges from the water, they have to have created these waves, right, like ripples. And is it not also possible, if not likely, if not has to be true, that the waves that we see today are still those waves? Right? Like, that movement is cosmic and physical at the same time, and so we still have a relationship with that story. Like, those waves, I can still imagine.
Joseph M. Pierce:Right? Those waves are are still happening, and maybe those waves are also interacting with the river when it flows to the ocean. And maybe that's how they communicate, and maybe their stories that they're sharing there. You know? I've been thinking about that too because I live in New York, and, you know, the East River is a a mess, but it's also a sacred waterway.
Joseph M. Pierce:And there's lots of sacred waterways in this part of the country that are kind of covered up by streets or covered up by developments and stone, and and it takes a little bit of work to think below your feet in a big city. But it's worth doing, right, to to ground yourself not just to the cement, but below the cement, to the earth itself, and to the rivers that are flowing underneath. That's something I learned from my friend Devon Emery, who's a Lenape, artist and choreographer, And I think that that's also a way of being a good relative to this place is responding to the lessons learned from Lenape people about how we relate to these to these relatives, these ancestors that are all around us.
Sarah Biscarra Dilley:I think about that kind of embodied protocol that you're sharing as an extension or a really incredible practice. Something that I experience a lot with when I speak with other indigenous people is that there's almost a lack of recognition of how much knowledge we do have. I think there's a part of it that comes from, like, deeply embodied cultural practices of humility and, like, a recognition of the work that that many people have done before us to hold that kind of knowledge with responsibility. And I also think that there is, like, a part of it that is this action of distancing where it can have that that potential. The conversations I've had with my ipo, my nam tayupa, my my love, you know, I would hear them often mention that, you know, oh, they didn't know how to do this thing or they didn't know how to engage in this way.
Sarah Biscarra Dilley:But when we go out and pray together every morning, we're both speaking language. Right? We're both speaking language into the world. And sometimes when that language isn't there or that that knowledge or that exchange that has been handed down directly from other people in our lineage or other people in our community, that what you just described, that desire to listen to and acknowledge the places where we are, is, like, such a foundational part of how we are taught to live as indigenous people. And so that knowledge is there, and it is in practice and that the practice of that protocol, kind of like what I was talking about in my chapter, like this is something that when we fail to do this, this is something that further distances us from who we are.
Sarah Biscarra Dilley:But when we engage in this with intention, even if our methods are haphazard, that we're reaching for this this understanding of the world that is, like, inherently grounded in our cultural practices.
Joseph M. Pierce:I've thought about this a lot. The difference between having a memory of what my great grandparents look like, which I don't have because I never met them, and the opportunity or the reality of me having to imagine what they look like. That's one of the things about, you know, my case is I don't I never met them in person. And as far as I know, there aren't photographs of them, and so I don't know what they look like. But I want to, and I can try to invoke them.
Joseph M. Pierce:I can try to create them. I can try to pray and imagine them. That's also, I think, repair work. That's living in the rupture of settler colonialism. That's living in in that violence while also not letting that violence be the determining factor in how you exist in this place.
Joseph M. Pierce:So listening to the ground or grounding yourself is one way, and I think for me also is trying to imagine back into the past as I'm trying to do some of this work that I'm grateful for the reminder too also is echoing or is projecting into the future. Right? Like, it's doing both of these at the same time. We gotta we gotta always operate on these multiple temporalities. You know?
Joseph M. Pierce:It's like like Right.
Sarah Biscarra Dilley:I really appreciate the space of generosity that this that this conversation has really allowed. Yeah. It's giving me a lot to to think about and reflect on and, yeah, just really appreciate what you've been sharing. Oh, no. And my invitation to share.
Joseph M. Pierce:Yeah. I learned so much. I the gratitude that I have is is, I think, I would like to express that gratitude for the way that you're approaching language and memory and history and care. I think there's so much of what we do as indigenous people that if it is not grounded in care, can distance us from our kin and from our from our people and from our ways and from what matters. So I always try to think about, like, not just how am I a good relative or how am I trying to be a good relative, but how am I centering care as part of my everyday practice?
Joseph M. Pierce:If I can do that, then the rest of it is gonna be okay. It's a kind of embodiment and enactment of the lessons of care that make our lives expansive. And I see that in your writing, and I wanna highlight that because it's really it's really great.
Sarah Biscarra Dilley:Oh, oh, for that reflection. I really appreciate that. Yeah. It's definitely a characteristic that I'm grateful to have had nurtured in many relationships in my in my life and also, you know, can feel like a bit of a vulnerability in in a world that, yeah, it really goes off on some care for yourself and no one else kind of understandings of the world. And it's something that even when it feels painful or it is experienced as that vulnerability, that it's something that I, like, I see mirrored in our old stories that this is, like, such a fundamental characteristic of who our people have always been and that survival has made it so we felt like we had to hide those parts of ourselves.
Sarah Biscarra Dilley:You know, I really recognize that the generation that I'm in and the generations that are coming after, like, I have two younger cousins, one of whom I got to work with and support as she was writing her undergraduate thesis, the capstone project at II, Naomi Whitehorse, which is getting such a strong feeling of excitement for all of the softness that, like, gets to come now, that so many so many of our relatives did not have the privilege to be able to be in that place. It gives me a lot of hope to see that experience of connection and softness as, like, such a deep strength that, like, gets to shine again feels really important, you know, because we're very good at being prickly.
Joseph M. Pierce:No. It's it's I think that one of the beautiful opportunities that Daniel and and Jeanne are providing us is a space in which we can be vulnerable telling our own stories. Just as a note, for all of the people, Joseph's computer crashed as we were trying to sum up and and talk about tenderness and care. Daniel and Jeannie, like, made it possible for us to be vulnerable because we could tell our own stories. And then my computer crashed, and maybe that is my computer saying, don't tell him everything.
Joseph M. Pierce:So things we can we can tell to the people and some things we don't have to tell to the people. But I'm really grateful for this opportunity to be in dialogue, and I really wanna thank Daniel and Genie for allowing us to to have this conversation. Sarah, I wanna thank you for being vulnerable and for, like, reminding me of where that comes from, that there's an ancestral strength to that vulnerability, and there's a future that that vulnerability is calling into being. Like, that vulnerability is also endures and is part of our survivance or is part of our thriveance or, you know, whatever the kids are saying these days. It's part of our fabulosity.
Joseph M. Pierce:Yeah. Too.
Sarah Biscarra Dilley:Thank you for your words. They're they're strong. And our word for means beautiful. It means balanced. It means good.
Sarah Biscarra Dilley:And I really appreciate the space of exchange and and connection through, what has been a very strange section of years where a lot of us have been very separate, and it feels really lovely to to really get to experience what Daniel and Jean were doing with bringing all of us together in this really beautiful text.