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Interview with Sandy Interviewer Caylen JansenCaylen Hell.docx
- 1. Interview with Sandy Interviewer: Caylen Jansen Caylen: Hello Sandy. I’d like to thank you for making yourself available to us today for my cultural sovereignty class. I appreciate your friendship and I appreciate the fact that you are willing to let me interview you. Sandy: Thanks, I hope I can do okay. Caylen: You’ll do just fine. You’re beautiful. And we built you a fire in the background. Do you like it? Sandy: Cool. Caylen: Alright, I’m going to read you a couple of definitions of sovereignty. I don’t think it’s fair to assume that any of us may really truly know what sovereignty means, so we’re gonna go into the dictionary and read it, okay? Sovereignty is the quality of having independent authority over a geographic area, such as a territory. It can be found in a power to rule and make laws that rest on a political fact for which no pure legal definition can be provided. I love this. Could you put that in normal terms? In theoretical terms, the idea of sovereignty historically comes from Socrates to Thomas Hawes. It has always been necessitated a moral imperative on the entity exercising it. Now that’s probably a foreign language, cause it is to me. So, let’s look at what is cultural sovereignty. The definition we have is, it’s the right of a culture or tribe or person to assert certain authority over property, rules of conduct (the way we behave), law (what’s lawful and what’s not) and other matters affecting yourself, your family, your Tribe or your community. Okay? So now that you’ve heard the schoolbook and the dictionary and Internet definition of sovereignty, can
- 2. you tell me how you feel about sovereignty? Sandy: Well, I feel that when our elders were alive, our grandparents and great grandparents and the ones that were before us, they probably did recognize sovereignty. But, the farther we go today, the more there and not respecting the word sovereignty as far as I’m concerned. When it comes to property, when it comes to our legal right to fishing and hunting and things to that, I really don’t believe that they’re following the sovereignty that we’re supposed to have. Caylen: Very good. Thank you. So when we’re looking at sovereignty and what it says sovereignty is, the right of our culture and in this case the Muckleshoot Indian Tribe to assert certain authority over property (their land), the way they behave, (the rules of conduct) are matters that affect the people of the Tribe. Do you have any thoughts about the cultural aspects of sovereignty as it applies to yourself personally and the people of your Tribe? Sandy: Well, I really don’t appreciate the fact that we have to go back in our legal papers to prove what our ancestors had given us years ago, in which I’m talking about our land. We shouldn’t have to go back and look for a gift deed, a paper to prove that something belongs to us, when we know that it was given to us and that they should believe our word. Our words should be good enough without having to sit there and feel like you’re put on trial for something that legally belongs to you. Years ago, you know, your word was good. Now it’s like you have to have it in have to have it in…. I don’t know how to word it. You have to have it in letter form signed, sealed and all this other stuff in order for you to prove yourself. Caylen: So absolutely foreign to our cultural ways of the past, perhaps? Sandy: That’s what I believe. And I umm, I believe that umm, we trusted people of other nationalities to come in and work with the tribal people. And now instead of working for us it
- 3. seems like we’re working for them in a lot of sense. Caylen: Umm Hmm. Thank you. Um, you’re on the school board and a quite a few other boards and committees and you’re also the assistant pastor of the Shaker church. But in the area of education, do you have any thoughts about sovereignty as it relates to education in Muckleshoot Tribal classrooms? Sandy: I believe that we’ve been working on the culture area and the language for a long time. It’s like, now we have to have certifications and different things in order to be able to get in to teach our youth what they need to learn and what they should have been learning in the home as well as in the school, for years. And now that we have people in classrooms that are teaching language, some of them have been there for a long time and now we have, we need to get the people certified in order for them to work in our classrooms, which kinda pushes our people back from what they could be moving forward in doing and working with the children that already accepted them in their classrooms. That already believe in them and they know what they’re doing. And I think it’s really important that when we go to meetings and to school board meetings and to different pow-wows and canoe journeys and such things available to properly introduce themselves in their native language. That’s really important. And to put that on hold is umm, not real good in my eyes to keep the children from moving forward and that’s what we’ve been trying to do to get things going with the school board so that our children will be able to speak fluently. Our native language. Caylen: You consider your language an important aspect of the education system of the Muckleshoot tribe? Sandy: Yes I do. And I believe that it should be advancing as well as the children, you know. We can teach them from kindergarten all the way to graduation and by then they should be able to speak it fluently and be able to pray or do a speech or
- 4. introduce themselves properly in front of a big crowd of people. I think that’s important. And also understand the words that are being spoken from elders, because there is several tribes that speak the same. Their language is somewhat the same. Caylen: Thank you so much. Looking back at your childhood and education, we’re going to move into education. How do you see the sovereignty of the Muckleshoot Indian Tribe affecting your childhood in the area of education? Was it prominent or not so? Whose sovereignty was being exercised in your life as a child? Muckleshoot Indian Tribe or a different culture? Sandy: Well, I believe that umm, during my childhood, a lot of my people were on tribal Council, my mother and my grandfather before her Louis Starr and Florence Starr when, and I believe that they tried to bring back a lot of our cultural and traditional beliefs and educational beliefs and things of such that belong to our Tribe. And I don’t feel that I was pushed back in any way except for there weren’t very many people at that time that were willing to step forward and teach the language. And I have a great aunt Alvina Williams the call her Auntie Beena and Bertha McJoe and Alice Hedrick and some other Angus Moses and different ones and Eva Jerry that taught the language. When they met down at White River they all kind of were speaking the language to each other and correcting each other, so that it could be put into a curriculum that could be used to move forward and teach the young as well as the older people. Caylen: Thank you. So you just named a bunch of elders that were very, very aware of preserving things of your culture as well as the importance of education. So, we’re going to move on to the sovereignty issue. Do you believe that in the tribal school, that we should actually have perhaps some type of curriculum that helps our children and our youth understand sovereignty?
- 5. Sandy: Yes I do and I believe we’re working towards that and we’ve been working very hard on the school board to get the proper education for our native language teachers as well as our cultural teachers. That how important it is to work together in culture and language and to work with the seasons so that our curriculum could be taught to children as they go through the school year. What our people did in September, October, November, December and on through the months. How they had different powwows. when they dried the fish, when they went picking huckleberries and different months and what the people done throughout the winter months to keep themselves busy as well as make sure that their young people were learning while they were in the home at the dinner table where our grandfather used to tell us stories about fishing and hunting. Stories about the new Halcomb (?) trail and about the war that took place on this reservation years ago. If you don’t write that down somewhere or sit down and listen and try to put it somewhere where you can remember, then it’s something that can be lost in the future. Caylen: Thank you. I would like to know if we could continue this in the future and perhaps do a conversation where you would like to share some of the stories because if we don’t preserve from then they’re lost. So on the area of sovereignty, when you think about sovereignty, what goes on in your mind, in your heart? Sovereignty. Sandy: Well, I believe that when we signed the treaties that were supposed to be able to live on the land and do our natural and custom things as long as the rivers run. And I don’t believe that a lot of the things that was put in the treaties are still happening at the time. This is just my feelings, because you can’t go up in the mountains freely and go anywhere now and just get your native medicine. Caylen: Without getting a ticket, right? Sandy: Yeah, without getting a ticket. And also, to go hunting umm in our usual and accustomed places without
- 6. buying a, or without being a tribal member or getting a license to hunt like the non-Tribals. Caylen: So is giving a ticket or him enforcing laws that are not traditionally of your people, an infringement or violation of cultural sovereignty? Sandy: I would think was a violation of cultural sovereignty. But then again, (laughter) I have a grandson that’s a game warden, so. I know we have to live by the rules today but I know the rules that were before, you know, years ago. And how they are now is totally different. Caylen: Thank you very much. On that last issue of cultural sovereignty if we do a follow-up video, which I would love to do with you, one of the issues we may want to discuss is a 280 reservation and how 280 reservations are the closest thing to cultural sovereignty in the United States today. They’re called closed reservations. So that may be the topic of our next interview. Hallelujah. Umm, I have a gift for you. I hope you enjoy the other gift that I made for you, your little bookmark. And do you remember the quote? Sandy: Umm, actually no. Caylen: Do you have a favorite quote or saying that you’d like to leave us with? Sandy: Sure, always treat people the way that you would like to be treated. fataBODYFATWEIGHT112.6154.25Description:The dataset provided here is based on a sample of 252 men.26.9173.25Their body fat and weights were recorded.324.6154.00410.9184.75Statement:The doctors office claims that the mean body fat in men is 20%.527.8184.25620.6210.25Source: http://www2.stetson.edu/~jrasp/data.htm719.0181.00812.8176.0 095.1191.001012.0198.25117.5186.25128.5216.001320.5180.50 1420.8205.251521.7187.751620.5162.751728.1195.751822.4209