00:00:53.240and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them.
00:00:58.760I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are The Survivor Files.
00:01:02.380Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable, abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced.
00:01:09.920These are stories about what it takes to make it out alive.
00:01:13.740Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:01:21.360If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home.
00:01:27.080Pro Society is a weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse.
00:01:35.740Each week, we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and pop culture with your favorite writers, book talk creators, and plenty of overthought opinions.
00:05:29.800you know and i mean like things that you're going to hear that indians are drunks and losers and0.97
00:05:34.820all this stuff but you know you know your your aunts and uncles have gone to college you know0.84
00:05:39.340that these things are not true you know that uh you know it's sort of you're you're prepped before
00:05:44.580you go and then you're also told i was told at that age at five uh the history of the taking of
00:05:51.040the land and it's it's sort of i described it in one of the pieces i wrote it sort of it takes the
00:05:56.420wind out of you is even as a five-year-old and puts you immediately sort of at odds with America
00:06:04.020because you feel enraged even as a small child, you know, and you feel like you want to correct
00:06:10.580that wrong. And so I think being raised in a Native family really articulates that for you.
00:06:18.340Yeah, that kind of foundational grounding of this is who you are. This is who you come from. This is
00:06:24.180this is our culture you don't have to you might hear things that you that aren't true but you
00:06:29.540still have that grounding i feel like family can really be the thing that gives you that
00:06:33.120and also this is who they are jimmy this is who they really are right and i think that's uh that
00:06:40.340makes you um you know that outsider perspective makes you cautious makes you skeptical uh you
00:06:46.280know i makes even as a five-year-old it makes you go huh okay my mom uh when i was like in first
00:06:52.700grade she was she was like don't sing land of the pilgrims pride sing land of the indians pride
00:06:58.220yeah that's something you're like when you're a little kid you're going you know to your music
00:07:03.260class and and you have to suddenly sing something different than what all the other kids are singing
00:07:07.940and you know you have to because your mom told you to do it you know what i mean and uh and it's
00:07:13.500like so i'm saying it really softly but i wasn't going to you know disobey my mother on that line
00:07:18.880And so I was just like, but, you know, it's one thing to have these internal family discussions and it's another thing to act on them when you're the minority, when you're like the only Indian kid in your school and you're learning and being taught things.
00:07:35.940In a sense, you almost feel like even as a small child, you're being sent in there as a spy, like as someone who is going to collect information, who is existing in this other place and coming back.
00:07:49.460And someday you and your family are going to do something with all that information.
00:07:53.460Jacqueline went to college at Dartmouth in New Hampshire, which, according to its charter, was originally started as a school to educate Native students in the ways of English life.
00:08:03.320Today, the school's unofficial mascot may be Keggy the Keg, but back when she was going there, they were called the Indians.
00:08:10.860So when was the first time the issue of mascots really hit home for you?
00:08:14.220So it wasn't until I went to college that the mascot issue really came on my radar.
00:08:18.060And that was, I went to Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.
00:08:21.500And we actually, the Native students who were incoming freshmen, were freshman week, were given like extra classes on meeting with other Native alumni, older alumni.
00:08:32.840And, and basically given the story about the Indian mascot, Dartmouth used to be the Dartmouth Indians. And they had this, you know, warrior mascot, more of a sort of a Eastern Woodlands looking mascot. And, and Dartmouth was originally founded as, as an Indian school, right.
00:08:54.880And actually, my husband's ancestor, Chief Joseph Bratt, and his other grandfather, William Johnson, they both were young Mohawk boys who attended Dartmouth before the Revolutionary War.
00:09:07.660It was actually, Darmouth is located in New Hampshire because the founder, Eliezer Wheelock, wanted to place it in a place where it would be accessible to the Iroquois Confederacy in upstate New York, where they could come and bring their children to be educated.
00:09:24.540And he wasn't interested in the Indians in Connecticut, who actually one of his students was a minister and he was the one who raised the, I think about 2000 pounds of silver to start the college.
00:09:39.580He went on a speaking tour in Scotland and but he didn't want to he didn't want his white mentor did not want to help the Indians in Connecticut because he thought they were not real Indians enough for him.
00:09:51.860But they were becoming too, you know, Christian to, you know, he wanted to go for the more sexy, wild, you know, and powerful Iroquois Confederacy.
00:10:02.820So that's why Dartmouth is even in New Hampshire.
00:10:06.100Back when Jacqueline was in college, the issue kind of came down to Native students feeling really uncomfortable by the mascot and white students just really not getting it.
00:10:15.280One of the things they did with the support of the alumni was to basically drive up in a truck freshman week and just throw out free T-shirts, Dartmouth T-shirts with the Dartmouth Indian on them to the freshman class.
00:10:28.260and my roommate wore hers she was a white uh a white uh woman from uh massachusetts uh irish
00:10:38.240american and it was that was when i first realized how hard this issue was like to me it was obvious
00:10:43.040it was wrong you know right and and then she with her actually uh um the just by circumstance two0.94
00:10:51.320navajo students were on either side of our our shared dorm room they had singles and and so uh0.98
00:10:58.240So she was surrounded by basically three Navajos and we were all trying to tell her like, you know, this is not great.1.00
00:11:04.460And she just literally could not comprehend. Like it was impossible for her to comprehend the issue.1.00
00:11:10.540And I was all like, and she says, well, it's just a free Dartmouth T-shirt. That's all, you know, and you know how expensive they are, you know, and stuff.
00:11:17.920And I'm all like, oh, God, you know, this is like nothing I've encountered before.
00:11:22.540Like the level, their inability to comprehend the issue was profound, you know.
00:11:27.380and uh and it's at moments like that where you realize your own experiences and where you're
00:11:33.120coming from is so different you know so different and uh you just never realized until that moment
00:11:39.540okay so flash forward to 2013 how did the not your mascot hashtag come to be yeah so uh eradicating
00:11:47.100offensive native mascotry which uh we say uh we created the hashtag not your mascot and trended
00:11:53.040in 2014 during the Super Bowl. And it was started by native parents from across the country. And
00:12:00.120we met online on Twitter, mostly. And we found it hard to sort of organize via Twitter. So we
00:12:07.280set up a Facebook group. And so EONM, you can see, is still a Facebook group. It's sort of a
00:12:13.540private Facebook group because we found that we kept getting sort of trolled by white mascot
00:12:19.760supporters so we had to make it private um but uh but yeah we organized through that and we started
00:12:27.220creating um doing what we call twitter storms this was in the fall of 2013 and we were primarily
00:12:34.260using the hashtag change the mascot right or change the name and um suddenly right we we uh
00:12:41.220we found that uh that our the mascot had been sort of i don't know it was being used and this
00:12:47.480sounds really strange but it was being used by uh uh by twitter accounts selling land real estate
00:12:55.320in india in the country of india what yeah so all our tweets were getting buried by these thousands
00:13:00.780of tweets advertising real estate in india yeah and we really were very suspicious we thought it
00:13:07.980was um we thought it was dad sider the owner of the washington nfl team oh i mean i wouldn't put
00:13:14.860Yeah. Hiring all, you know, these sorts of troll farms and stuff. Pretty early, you know, usage of it. I think at that time they were still being called, what was it? I can't remember. But yeah, so we were very suspicious. So we realized we were going into the Super Bowl without a hashtag, right? Without a usable one.
00:13:34.000And so, I mean, even with all of us, like, putting together, organizing the Native community, both in the United States and Canada, to really tweet our hearts out to try to get this notice to this issue, you know, it really wasn't, we were still getting buried, right?
00:13:54.060and so um so we've thought about it and uh she was my friend she's Cherokee uh um she came up
00:14:01.840with uh uh she came up with the uh name um not the hat not your mascot right which has been used
00:14:09.220before I think you can find signs people using that you know back in the 60s and 70s but we uh
00:14:15.600we were the first ones to really create a hashtag and we checked we did the whole like we yeah
00:14:20.800because people later tried to claim, you know, the kind of infighting that happens when there's
00:14:24.480this successful hashtag, you know. And, uh, so we had to do the research, but we, uh, we kept it
00:14:30.880secret. And so we, uh, we just felt like we liked it. I like it better than change the name,
00:14:36.740change the mascot, because what appealed to me was that it was a taking back. Right. And we are
00:14:42.420taking this back and we are taking back who we are and owning it. Right. And, uh, and so, uh,
00:14:49.360We kept it pretty secret. We basically, we, we all looked at who our most high profile Twitter followers were at that time. I mean, for some reason, Chuck D was following me. And so we just, we made a list of them all, you know, and, and we basically contacted them personally.
00:15:07.180and we told them that we were going to be launching this hashtag
00:15:10.760and we were going to do a test run Saturday before the night before the Super Bowl
00:15:18.360and would they help us and share it with their followers.
00:15:21.180I think in January 2014, I think Twitter was a more innocent place in some ways.
00:15:35.240And it was really just not a necessity that we created that hashtag.
00:15:38.800But I've been really happy with how it's grown and been used.
00:15:41.900I can imagine social media was probably pretty helpful for having this all come together.
00:15:46.120We were able to utilize Native people on the ground.
00:15:49.000And the amazing thing about social media was that it really allowed us to organize
00:15:53.640at a level that we had not been able to do before.1.00
00:15:56.720The Native community is very dispersed.
00:15:59.480The majority of the Native people live off the reservation
00:16:02.660and they are like live as minorities amongst minorities, like sometimes the only like me,0.72
00:16:08.060the only Native kid in your school. So we live quite isolated from each other. And so social0.97
00:16:14.620media was a great and amazing boon to helping us organize more effectively and more rapidly.
00:16:22.620And so when Dad Snyder started that foundation, the Original Americans Foundation, and I was
00:16:28.580going around giving money to tribes to try to buy support for his mascot. He was flying all over the
00:16:33.280country in his private plane. And he was doing it very secretively. And so we, because we were
00:16:39.500connected with Native people across the country, we were able to get people sending us tips and
00:16:44.520sending us all kinds of things. And we actually used that to, you know, I had some contacts in
00:16:51.280the media. And we used that to put stories out about what he was doing. And we basically made
00:16:57.300him the story. I think if you watch the 2014, he made all these missteps and was saying the issue
00:17:02.280around his mascot started to become more of a referendum on him personally.
00:17:07.780Forbes' Monty Burke noted that the name change issue was made much worse by the fact that people
00:17:12.760just really did not like Dan Snyder. The original America's Foundation, Snyder's paid PR effort to
00:17:19.340stop conversations about the name change, was pretty embarrassing. He famously refused to
00:17:24.480meet with Native activists about the name change, and he told USA Today, we'll never change the name.
00:17:29.740It's that simple. Never. You can use all caps. But after the protests surrounding the deaths of
00:17:35.720unarmed Black people this summer, Dan Snyder pretty much could not ignore the fact that the
00:17:39.980climate was changing. And for the first time, the team faced significant financial pressure1.00
00:17:44.480in addition to protests from activists. A group of investors asked major sponsors like Pepsi and
00:17:50.100FedEx to pressure him to change the name. Then FedEx Field, the stadium right outside of D.C.
00:17:56.180in Maryland, where the Washington football team plays, joined the chorus too. Nike pulled Washington
00:18:02.100football team swag from their website. And in July, the team finally announced they'd be reviewing the
00:18:07.920name. So how does it feel to know that they're finally dropping this slur from this team name?
00:18:13.360You know, does it feel like a win for your community? How are you feeling about it?
00:18:16.200I didn't feel like we had won. I felt like we had not won the issue. Once again, the lack of understanding, lack of ability, I felt like we did not actually win the issue. The issue was tabled, right?
00:18:28.800and what won the issue was black lives matter and that's what i write about uh basically and you
00:18:36.140know this is this has been true before i would say i remember asking uh my uncle vine deloria
00:18:42.300jr he's a well-known um native uh historian uh he wrote custer died for your sins and god is red
00:18:50.240and um i remember asking was like what started the red power movement jimmy in the 70s and he
00:18:56.160was like he looked at me like i was like what's wrong with you and he's like well it was a civil0.50
00:19:00.440rights movement like how can you not know this you know the you know uh you know the black power
00:19:07.360movement you know spawned the red power movement you know and and and i think that's you know what
00:19:12.000my mother always told me was like the way she it sounds kind of weird but the way she described it
00:19:17.180was like that the black community were like our our um our older brothers do you mean that they
00:19:22.380that they helped us and looked out for us and that they were more familiar and more knowledgeable
00:19:27.340about white society and how to maneuver in it. And so they were often really helpful. Do you know
00:19:33.000what I mean? Yeah, I love that. Yeah, that was her way of understanding it. With the Not Your
00:19:38.920Mascot thing, I really feel like it was Black Lives Matter. And, you know, of course, you know,0.66
00:19:46.660the price paid by the black community and, you know, folks like Breonna Taylor and George Floyd,0.92
00:19:55.180all of those things that made it possible.1.00
00:19:57.040I mean, it made, created an atmosphere that made this no longer acceptable, you know,
00:20:00.640starting with the Confederate statues and then questioning other folks.
00:20:04.320And suddenly it made, the arguments we are making made them undeniable.
00:21:42.940Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable.
00:21:47.480I knew if he woke up, without a doubt, he was going to hurt me.
00:21:52.040I started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed, and I just started screaming.
00:21:59.480They are abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced.
00:22:03.440But these aren't stories about what's taken from them.
00:22:06.880They're stories about what it takes to make it out alive.
00:22:10.020Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:22:18.980If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home.
00:22:24.900This is Prose Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse.
00:22:37.380I'm Eli Rallo, and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having.
00:22:44.500I'm going to have to look up this story. I'm obsessed. So obsessed.
00:22:48.080From best-selling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest pop culture moments, nothing is off the table.
00:22:54.020It's like if you can hide some real messages inside compelling characters, then that is a Trojan horse.
00:23:01.500Whether you're looking for literary deep dives, smart pop culture conversations, or a community of readers who love to think a little too much, you're in the right place.
00:23:11.100Listen to Pro Society on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:23:24.140Our country has a fascination with pretending to be Native and appropriating Native culture without really giving it much thought.
00:23:31.500And even worse, when Native culture is presumed to be up for the taking, some will take it a step further and just pretend to be Native themselves.
00:23:39.700This summer, science researcher Beth Ann McLaughlin admitted to being behind the Twitter account of a bisexual Hopi professor who didn't really exist.
00:23:48.780Long-time listeners of Tangodi might remember that we mentioned McLaughlin briefly in the episode featuring Ottawa Mboya and MIT.
00:23:55.500as the recipient of MIT's Disobedience Award.
00:23:59.300McLaughlin used this Native persona for years,
00:24:02.060building up legit influence on social media.
00:25:09.520I would have to say, and this is my theory and I, I go into this in my, I did the podcast0.92
00:25:14.980on structural fixes to pretendianism because there are so many pretendians.0.68
00:25:19.000It's like whack-a-mole. I would say as high as one in three people in some official capacity, whether as heads of Native American studies departments or, you know, you know, artists or, you know, writers, authors are frauds.0.97
00:25:37.620They're fake Indians. It's really that high. You know, it's I mean, I as a journalist, I really kept stumbling upon this.0.96
00:25:44.980You know, I'd be interviewing someone and then I then later find out that they were a fake.
00:25:52.520It's it makes our it makes our identity or reality like a hall of mirrors.
00:25:58.320You know, it's so I mean, it's it's everything gaslighting, you know, colonialism, taking all of that stuff, all white privilege, you know, all rolled up into one.
00:26:11.040Right. And so it's it's very frustrating.
00:26:14.480And of course, we have, you know, folks who are, you know, who are people of color, but they are, they choose, they would prefer to be Native, do you know what I mean?
00:26:23.760And so we have a lot, I think Adam Beach recently, he's a Native actor, First Nations actor from Canada.
00:26:29.940He's been in a lot of Hollywood roles.
00:26:33.200You know, he recently called out an actress who is Chinese and white.
00:26:37.300In addition to actors pretending to be Native, non-Native writers and directors try to tell Native stories on TV.
00:26:43.760And it just comes off as really inauthentic.0.64
00:26:46.060When you see when someone is obviously a fraud, you know, and the way it's being presented
00:26:51.960is kind of like, oh, that's not how we, it's like very stereotypical.
00:26:56.880You know, you hear the flute music, ooh, you know, it's all this kind of stuff.
00:28:58.000And a bunch of Cherokee scholars got together
00:29:00.320and wrote a group letter and published it
00:29:02.300in Indian country today and demanding that she stop, you know, and, um, she hasn't, she's still
00:29:09.800doing it. So did she own up to it or was she just like, I am Cherokee. I don't care what y'all say.
00:29:15.500She sort of, you know, the thing is that they don't have to answer to us. They have to,0.92
00:29:19.340the only people they answer to are white people who don't know anything, right. Who, and who are0.96
00:29:23.860afraid to enter the, the, the issue, right. Because, but they're taking advantage of genocide
00:29:28.980and yet they get their, they build space through genocide. Right. And, and so basically, you know,
00:29:35.600saying, well, you know, there's no paperwork because, you know, my ancestors hid out and
00:29:39.960everything. And, and, and they, they have all these arguments, but, you know, she actually
00:29:44.720hired the leading, the Cherokee Nation's official genealogist, David Kornselk, to do her genealogy
00:29:51.520in the 19, early 1990, or I think in the 1990s, she, she hired him to do her, her mother's side,
00:29:58.100I couldn't find anything, any links to the Cherokee Nation at all, who are, by the way, one of the most documented people in the world.
00:30:05.860Like Cherokee people always tell me that historians and genealogists tell me they're the most documented people, second only to royalty.
00:30:13.240So if you can't find a tie, there is none, basically.
00:30:15.880And I think the L.A. Times has done a really good series of articles, one in, I guess, December of last year, which looked at fake tribes in California.
00:30:27.860That's another place, of course, you know, with the gold rush and everything, those tribes were decimated.
00:31:08.920When we turn already traditionally underrepresented people into mascots, it doesn't just end at the sports arena.
00:31:15.760Offensive representations of Native people rooted in harmful stereotypes are dehumanizing.
00:31:21.640And actual Native people are left to deal with the consequences.
00:31:24.460There was a study done by the Kellogg Foundation in 2018. I think it came out. And what they found, they'd done a bunch of focus groups. It was started in 2017, 2019. And they found that the issue of masketry was very hard.
00:31:42.340uh i came up with the term mascotry to sort of take it away from the mascot which can be sort
00:31:47.740of prosaic and handsome and to mascotry which which describes all the things they do with that
00:31:52.960right all the red face and and all that you know uh wearing the pocahottie outfits and and the uh0.95
00:32:00.260the you know the headdresses and and you know debasing our culture right for their own enjoyment
00:32:05.600And what they found was that only 30 percent of people they had in these focus groups understood the issue of mascots.
00:32:15.920And so they and they found that with Standing Rock, you know, they had also that's over 70 percent understood and agreed with the issue of sovereignty and the importance of Standing Rock.
00:32:28.540so you can see that standing rock was an issue that white people could understand right and have
00:32:34.900compassion for but mascots they can't understand you know and uh and also they found they uh they
00:32:42.000found that whether uh white folks they were focus grouping uh only um thought that native people
00:32:47.620were 60 percent human like that we were yeah that we weren't fully human like 40 animalistic
00:32:54.560And so all of these stereotypes feed into that. But my solution is actually, I think, I see this as a structural problem. And I actually think it has to do with the fuzziness of our political identity, which is purposeful. It's a purposeful result of U.S. policy for hundreds of years.
00:33:18.240I often tell people, you know, if you don't speak your language or, you know, you can't enroll, it's probably not your it's not your fault.
00:33:25.120It's you know, this is the result of of policy, official U.S. policy by the most powerful country in the world, basically.
00:35:55.960Especially when you see the way that they attack actual Native people to hold their space, right?
00:36:00.280and uh so like with this andrea smith uh you know after she was really publicly revealed in the
00:36:07.540native community in 2015 you know just a couple in 2018 all year long her students kept messaging me
00:36:15.300and native students mostly navajo women and they were like you know we're sitting in this classroom
00:36:21.460we can't say anything we know she's a fake you know she tries to talk to us and buddy up to us0.98
00:36:26.980And we're just like, but I need her recommendation to get into this graduate program.0.86
00:36:31.700Do you mean it's just – and then there's suddenly all these things that you can't talk about because you have to get the okay of the pretendian who is protecting their space.0.87
00:36:42.620And so it's very corrosive and also it's a taking.0.83
00:36:46.800I mean we are, I think, the poorest group in the United States.
00:36:52.920We have the lowest income levels. And to take jobs from us that could support a Native family, even folks, because people send money home to the reservation, you know, it's a big taking from really the most impoverished people in the country.
00:37:11.040White privilege means that white people pretending to be us is is far more attractive to white people who are in power decision making places to it because it feeds all their ideas about us.
00:37:24.900They know how to perform the idea in a way that appeals to white people.
00:41:34.780Where's your helmet with the horns on it?
00:41:37.060You know, because this is your assumption.
00:41:39.680I would say you never saw a white man, you know, running for president.
00:41:44.540You never saw a white man, you know, on TV anchoring the news.
00:41:48.340You never saw a white man saving the world in a Hollywood movie.0.53
00:41:52.740You never saw a white family on TV, just, you know, in a sitcom.
00:41:57.120You know, you walk into a bookstore and maybe two of the books are written from the perspective of a contemporary white man, Jamie, out of the thousands of books, you know, then it would be the same thing.
00:42:12.060But, see, they don't live in that world, you know, where they're marginalized to that extent.
00:42:16.340Uh, and so, so, so it's, so, you know, I try to put people in a different perspective of where they stand.
00:42:24.280Cause I think that, you know, uh, that's the only way they can grasp the issue with the main thing is what it, how it impacts native youth.