Rise Vol. 1 Issue No. 12

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-Carolyn

Virginia Beavert

Nothing defines a people as much as their language, and nothing signals the end of a civilization more than the demise of its native tongue. Yakama Nation elder Virginia Beavert feels this deeply in her mission to teach the language and literature of her people to younger generations.

Beavert, who is something of a legend herself, remembers riding with her grandmother on horseback over the plains of Zillah early in the twentieth century, hunting for herbs and roots. She learned the traditions of the Waashat religion from her great-grandmother and her mother, who she describes as a phenomenal woman who lived to be 103 years old. She learned the medicinal properties of herbs from her great-great-grandmother, who also imparted tribal legends along with herbal lore. Her great-great- grandmother lived to be 120 years old.

Beavert didn’t find her academic calling immediately. During the 1940s, she served in the war effort for four years with the US Army Air Forces. After the war, she attended four years of college, worked for the Atomic Energy Commission, and later became a medical transcriptionist, working in hospitals throughout central Washington for many years.

In the 1970s, her stepfather, Alexander Saluskin, or Chief Wi-ya-wikt, citing his poor health, prevailed upon her to return to school to help him complete his life’s work, The Sahaptin Practical Dictionary for Yakama. She entered Central when she was in her forties, in an era when college life wasn’t geared to non-traditional students.“It was hard,” she remembers. “There was no counseling [for students like me].”

Dr. James Brooks, then Central’s president, became a source of encouragement, providing resources to help her complete her degree. She received a Bachelor of Science in anthropology in 1986 and went on to earn her master’s degree from the University of Arizona. She not only completed her stepfather’s dictionary, but also published two more, as well as a book of Yakama legends.

As a member of the Yakama Nation, Beavert has served on the General Tribal Council, and received numerous fellowships, among them from the Smithsonian Institute, The Newberry Library, Dartmouth College, and the University of New Mexico. She has also been honored with many awards, including the Washington Governor’s Heritage Award. Beavert continues to teach at Heritage University in Toppenish and at the Native Indian Language Institute, which is held every summer at the University of Oregon. Beavert received CWU’s Distinguished Alumna–College of Sciences Award in 2007. In 2009, she received an honorary Doctor in Humane Letters degree from the University of Washington.

https://www.cwu.edu/virginia-beavert-keeps-legends-and-language-alive

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is a renowned Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer and artist, who has been widely recognized as one of the most compelling Indigenous voices of her generation. Her work breaks open the intersections between politics, story and song—bringing audiences into a rich and layered world of sound, light, and sovereign creativity.

Working for over a decade an independent scholar using Nishnaabeg intellectual practices, Leanne has lectured and taught extensively at universities across Canada and has twenty years experience with Indigenous land based education. She holds a PhD from the University of Manitoba, and teaches at the Dechinta Centre for Research & Learning in Denendeh. Leanne’s books are regularly used in courses across Canada and the United States including Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back, The Gift Is in the Making, Lighting the Eighth Fire (editor), This Is An Honour Song (editor with Kiera Ladner) and The Winter We Danced (Kino-nda-niimi editorial collective). Her latest book, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance was published by the University of Minnesota Press in the fall of 2017, and was awarded Best Subsequent Book by the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association.

As a writer, Leanne was named the inaugural RBC Charles Taylor Emerging writer by Thomas King in 2014 and in 2017/18 she was a finalist in the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Trillium Book Award. She has published extensive fiction and poetry in both book and magazine form. Her second book of short stories and poetry, This Accident of Being Lost is a follow up to the acclaimed Islands of Decolonial Love and was published by the House of Anansi Press in Spring 2017.

Leanne is also a musician combining poetry, storytelling, song writing and performance in collaboration with musicians to create unique spoken songs and soundscapes. Leanne’s second record f(l)light produced by Jonas Bonnetta (Evening Hymns), was released in the fall of 2016. She was awarded the inaugural Outstanding Indigenous Artist at the Peterborough Arts Awards in 2018.

Leanne is Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg and a member of Alderville First Nation.

https://www.leannesimpson.ca/about

Chrystos Smith is a writer, poet and activist who prefers the pronoun “they” and identifies as a lesbian. They were born in San Francisco, California to a father of Menominee ancestry and a Lithuanian heritage mother. Chrystos did not experience growing up on a reservation and they instead grew up around Latino, Asian, Black and White people. They distinguish themselves as an Urban Indian and have been residing on Bainbridge Island, Washington for the last 37 years.

Chrystos is a self taught writer whose work as an activist is well known. Their work is mainly focused around politics, Native rights and themes of feminism. Their personal life experiences are interwoven into their poetry which reflects on their difficult upbringing with their severely depressed mother and a father who was so ashamed of his Native American heritage that he refused to speak his language.

Chrystos identifies with survivors of violence. A large part of their efforts are towards fighting for Indigenous people, equality for lesbians and prisoners. Chrystos has a passion to end oppression, violence hunger and theft of land across the world. Their work ranges from a variety of areas from abortion to wife battering to Palestinian rights.

https://wmst.fandom.com/wiki/Chrystos

Mishuana Goeman

Dr. Mishuana Goeman, Tonawanda Band of Seneca, is an Associate Professor of Gender Studies, Chair of American Indian Studies Interdepartmental Program, Associate Director of American Indian Studies Research Center, and the Special Advisor to the Chancellor on Native American and Indigenous Affairs at the University of California, Los Angeles. She grew up all over the east coast, with home bases in Maine and Upper-state Ny as they travelled the paths of her ironworking father. She began to do Native American studies in her first year at Dartmouth College after taking a Native American Literature class that would eventually lead her to Stanford University’s interdisciplinary program Modern Thought and Literature where she received her PhD in 2003. She went on to be a UC President’s Postdoctoral scholar UC Berkeley, which would eventually bring her back to California.

Dr. Goeman is the author of Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) and the forthcoming Settler Aesthetics and the Spectacle of Originary Moments: Terrence Malick’s the New World, in progress with the Indigenous Film Series, Eds. Randolph Lewis and David Shorter at University of Nebraska Press. She is a Co-PI on a community based digital project grant, Mapping Indigenous L.A., a digital humanities and social science project launched in 2015 that maps the stories of multiple communities in Indigenous LA. She has a forthcoming co-authored chapter, “Community Resilience, “Contested” Spaces, and Indigenous Geographies” in Esri Resiliency Maps, eds. S. Steinberg & S. Steinberg outlining the process and work with LA’s Indigenous communities. Dr. Goeman’s most recent collaborative project with Dr. Wendy Teeter, Carrying Our Ancestors Home (2019), looks to digital media in order to develop better practices in working with tribal communities as well as improve the flow of information back and forth, particularly on repatriation and NAGPRA issues. She has also published in peer-reviewed journals such as American Quarterly, Critical Ethnic Studies, Settler Colonial Studies, Wicazo Sa, International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies, Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies, Funambulist: Politics of Space and Body, Transmotion, and American Indian Cultures and Research Journal, including guest edited journal volumes on Native Feminisms and Indigenous Performances. Book chapters include essays in Theorizing Native Studies, eds. Audra Simpson and Andrea Smith, (Duke University Press, 2014), Sources and Methods in Indigenous Studies (Routledge 2016), Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks: Gender: Sources, Perspectives, and Methodologies (2016), Critically Sovereign: Indigenous Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies (ed. Joanne Barker, Duke University Press, 2017) and a forthcoming chapter in Biopolitics – Geopolitics – Life: Settler-colonialism and Indigenous Presences (Duke University Press).

https://mtl.stanford.edu/people/mishuana-goeman

Director Sydney Freeland: We Need Diverse Voices Telling All Kinds of Stories—Not Just Their Own

“I am female, Native American and transgender.

On top of all that, I’m a film and TV director in Hollywood. That’s challenging even if you don’t come into this industry as a minority.

I strongly believe that diverse voices make stories better. The difference between a story told by someone who is removed from the place, the people and the community, and one that is told by someone who has seen it first hand—who has an intimate knowledge of the place and the people—is evident in even the smallest details. Those moments of viewers recognizing themselves in the characters are crucial, and it’s made possible when minorities aren’t just in front of the camera, but when they are behind the scenes too.

And yet, I want to be clear that we can also tell stories besides our own. I’m obsessed with sci-fi and comic books—yes, I am a transgender Navajo woman who loves Star Wars and Marvel movies. We don’t want to be pigenholed. As much as we want to tell our own stories, our unique experiences help us to imbue other people’s stories with additional perspective and flourishes that add depth and breadth. We come to mainstream stories with views that expand and enrich the stories we all love. Shows like Transparent and the upcoming series Pose feature trans talent both in front of and behind the camera. For me it’s also inspiring to see Taika Waititi, an indigenous Maori man from New Zealand, directing a blockbuster like Thor: Ragnarok.

started in film because I love telling stories. And although everyone has a story to tell, empowering individuals from underrepresented communities to tell all kinds of stories—to afford them the opportunity to show what they have lived and bared witness to—is vital to a deeper understanding. It’s essential to our collective human story.”

https://time.com/5179714/sydney-freeland-diversity-hollywood-representation/