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 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 .