Why We Need Ancestor-Led Research Justice | Amrah Salomon | TEDxOjai
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTmL9KMKBxo Video ID: MTmL9KMKBxo ============================================================ Thank you. I have a learning disability. Some memorization is not something this brain can do. Hence the index cards. But I can still hear the clinking of shot glasses as my grandfather sipped tequila and drilled me to repeat the words sabado domingo s relo and explained to me over and over again how to make a soft tea, how to roll an r, and how much my English speaking tongue just wasn't getting it right. But when we practice Spanish, he would also tell me stories about our culture, our family, and his life on the US Mexico border. And I thought he was doing it to make me a better Mexican. So to make him proud, I joined a CHO student club. I started community organizing. I started raising my voice for immigrant rights. And he was proud. But he also started telling me that college was making me lose my damn mind. So our calling response drill changed. What am I? He would ask. A puma. I would have to respond. Because he was old and he still used the old Spanish terms puma and papago instead of aam that we use today. And what are you? He would ask. A puma. I would have to respond. That's right. You're a puma because I'm a puma and you are mine. He would tell me. And then he would go off about how I was losing my damn mind. Don't listen to those chos. You are not an Aztec. And then he would tell me how it was my responsibility to make sure none of my cousins went off to college and tried to become an Aztec either. My grandfather was already 10 years old in 1924 when the US Border Patrol was created. He referred to Arizona as the territory and he had a natural fluidity between being a Mexican because our people are on both sides of that imaginary line dividing our homelands. But being Mexican in a way that made indigenity a past tense or co-opted another people's culture was a no. Like most mixed race folks, I have a lot of discomfort with being forced to put myself in one box and choose. And that discomfort, like the way my tongue feels moving from English to Spanish, but longing for my indigenous language, has caused me to ask difficult questions about history and the stories we hear at home. how we decide what is truth and what is fiction and whether or not we have the critical skills to analyze the work these stories do. I wanted to know why my AAM ancestors on the border were not put on the reservation. I wanted to know why my grandparents spoke Spanish instead of Aam and why in many situations they were ashamed to be native. I wanted to know when we went from a tribal community to Mexican-American and how and why and what that meant for me. How could I unpack all of the historical and intergenerational trauma that I have inherited? How could I decolonize? How could I heal? And what I learned was sometimes the things we think are evidence of a truth are actually works of fiction. For example, genealogy websites. You know, you know where I'm going with this. They give us access to government records, religious documents, and DNA tests that produce an ever evolving, constantly changing racial math that divides a person into a percentage of a pedigree like a show dog. But both sets of information are fiction. Historical records are always produced under biased conditions and race and ethnicity is not a biological fact. So why does so many of us pay $50 to receive this truth about ourselves? Right? I turn to poetry for the answer. Queer Chumash and SLN poet Deborah Miranda calls this problem the lies my ancestors told for me. And that's the title of her poem where she talks about how people in her tribal community had to lie about their indigenous identity to survive genocide. And when I heard that poem and I thought about the way she phrased it that the shape of this lie often took the form of passing as Mexican, I finally started to understand my grandfather's contradictions. As an English professor, I look at how stories are constructed and I question historical sources with the same set of tools I question works of fiction. I'm looking at the work that they do. Right? And that has led me to a practice I call ancestralled research justice. Now research in its traditional forms is the practice through which domination and violence has been justified and carried out by producing knowledge that legitimizes the accumulation of power through investigation. And when we think about early research history, right, the people who were researchers on those military and corporate expeditions to conquer indigenous lands, that definition makes sense. But many of us don't realize that research today is still done largely for the benefit of corporations and those in power, often using the same tools as those early colonizers. So for those of us who want to do research for social justice, we need different methods. Research justice critiques and reveals how power works through the things we study in order to further movements for social change. I add ancestral lead to my research. justice practice to ground us in the lessons of the ancestors so that we can imagine futures where what feels impossible now like healing and liberation can become real. We must question how historical evidence is produced so we can see the biases and errors in those records. We need to look at other sources in unexpected places so we can also critique those too. And we need to ask what story does this evidence tell? And what is the work that story is doing in the world? When I began to research my family's history, I came across a federal Indian census of Aam and Yuma from 1915. And I could have just looked at that record like many people looking at their family histories do as either proof or not of indigenous ancestry and left it at that. But of course, I asked more questions and only then did I find the story that I had been looking for. And it's a story that has never been told until now. Now, indigenous peoples, Katsang, Kokapa, Pipash, Kamiya, Aam, and Y have been at the confluence of the Colorado and Hila rivers since time immemorial. But in 1912, Arizona becomes a state and the river banks become desirable to settlers. So the government decides to relocate the AAM community 100 miles north to the Colorado River Tribes Reservation. But the census they made of our community had a lot of errors. Errors that were only obvious to someone like me, a descendant who was steeped in the oral history of our community. The census didn't include all of the families in our community. It didn't include all the members of each family. And it listed people as mixed race who we know as descendants were not. So I asked why I got a PhD. I went to historical archives across the country. I interviewed our elders. I talked to our sister tribes. I read as many books as I could find. And only by putting all of those unlikely sources together could I figure it out. Now, our elders had a story about why we did not move to that reservation, why the relocation failed, why we were not federally recognized to this day. And that story was that it was just too confusing. The government really didn't explain how to move and they didn't know what to do. But there were a few elders like my grandfather who said actually it was because the people were afraid their children would be taken away to Indian boarding school and they didn't want to go to the reservation because of that. In the national archives I looked at all of the government documents to see what I could find of their side of the story. Now the government records refer to us officially as an Indian menace. These government records are largely letters from government agents complaining back and forth to each other that we use the US Mexico border to evade them, that we pretended to be Mexican to get away from their repression, and worst of all, we would not let our children be taken away from us. I found a letter in the archive from the man hired to take the census and he witnessed the local Indian agent and a armed posi arrest the children from the people he was trying to interview and shoot parents who resisted. And he told the government, I cannot take an accurate census under these conditions. And now I finally understood the lies my ancestors told for me and the unspeakable violence that was so horrific many of them chose not to pass it down to us. Now my grandfather was of the generation where he would have been one of those children had his parents relocated. And he knew because his cousins went to boarding school what horrors he escaped by not going. And he never let me forget that. And so I may not have the best Spanish accent and my son hates language drills as much as I did. But with or without federal recognition, I am proud to be an Indian menace. And I will carry that story forward so that my son learns how to be one, too. And I think my grandfather would approve of that. Thank you. [Applause]