Strong Oak, it is so lovely to have you on the NSVRC podcast. Could you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself? 

Well, I'm a survivor of both domestic and sexual violence and childhood sexual assault. And I've been plunged into this work for over 50 years, I started out as a journal as a major, but the universe decided that seeking the prevention of violence towards children and families has apparently been my calling. And through that time, finding ways for indigenous people to have services and interventions and prevention initiatives that were specific to our community was a long journey and didn't really come into fruition until the birth of the Visioning BEAR Circle Intertribal Coalition in 2015, that's when we got our 501c3. It was a pregnancy, 'cause in October of 2014 we submitted it to the IRS.

Sally: Okay.

 [chuckle] Or decided to actually go that route after we actually incorporated with the State of Massachusetts, and then in October is when we submitted it. That was a nine-month process because we didn't know what we would do with a hierarchy if we didn't wanna have to form one, so we found a way to truly be true to circle practices and still be a 501c3.

Sally: Yeah, well, you've been able, I think, to share a lot of information about walking in balance with all our relations over the years as it's been developing, and we'll share in the show notes information from previous presentations and meetings, and there's also this case study that you worked with the NSVRC around. So we'll put those links in our show notes, but I am wondering, before we jump into talking a little bit more about how your evaluation process has evolved, could you just share a little bit more about the program? 

Well, one of the things I'll say is this prevention initiative was itself a long process of birthing, we realized that we really couldn't deal effectively in our community around prevention or intervention with the mainstream organizations so, and we wondered what was wrong with this picture, and then we decided that what's wrong with the picture is we needed to go back before the colonists or settlers came here, and look at what the values were. In order to reclaim our culture and have ways of intervening that were based on our practices. So we'd always been involved in Circle Practice. So now in hindsight, I wonder, "Why didn't we start with that to begin with?" [chuckle] But we didn't, we were in a mainstream agency, we were really impacted by mainstream ways of doing things, then we finally realized we really need to go back, so the first thing we did is what in the dominant culture would be referred to as a literature review.

So what we did is we really tried to get as much information as we possibly could on what were the values before the colonists came. And we came... And we read a lot about the original instructions, that were given to us and actually inform all ceremonial practices, these original instructions are really important, and it really was... The original instructions are about relating to the world as though everything in it is equitable, that human beings and plants and animals, to elementals, water, everything is completely equitable and had a reason to be here, infused by spirit with its own...

Developmental path for realizing full potential, and for that to happen, even if you think about what it would take for a green bean to grow to its full potential, it would need adequate water, it would need adequate soil, it would be interdependently involved with its environment. So we began to look at us as all interdependently involved and equitable, which the Circle really shows. So then we decided that we needed to have a way of doing our prevention work in Circle using these values, so the first thing we did, was we took all the values and we synthesized them down in an intertribal way, 'cause in our community we're intertribal, and we whittled it down to 12 different values. And it turns out what we did is extraordinary because just in the last year or two I learned that the seven grandfather teachings are completely involved in our curriculum values.

And I was astounded by that, and it's cosmologically related because the seven values also make a seven-pointed star. And when the Mide lodges are the Eastern ceremonial lodges that I'm involved with now in and because I'm involved now, my whole community will be involved. And then also I am a sun dancer, so I have sun danced in South Dakota, so there is a linkage now between the sun dance of the West, which those ceremonies existed and existed for thousands of years, and then the Mide lodges, were just the Midewiwin Anishinaabe, so look those two practices, are coming together East and West. So where I go for my Mide lodge teachings, they also have a lodge for the sun dance as well.

Okay.

So the two lodges are in the same div, side by side. So I guess really what I'm saying is for indigenous people, ceremonial practices are really critical for healing, and we think that really they're critical for other people's healing as well. So we do teach multi-culturally, because there's an intersectionality about the approach of our work that's knit into these values, because these values, they're not like... Like when you hear the word respect you think of sharing time or hearing people and... But you don't really go into the depth of respect the way we do in our curriculum and normal discourse, we go into the inequity in housing, the inequity in... And where people can live, we go into the health disparities, we go into reproductive rights, we go into treating every single person like they have the same rights, and so therefore the discrimination is dealt with.

And not to mention the historical context, like we go into all these things in a very deep way. And when we talk about balance, we talk about how it's not really possible to be balanced in this world when people own your time. We have sorted out, in a very big way, the impact of ownership, and the objectification of nature, 'cause now all of a sudden, it could be bought and sold, and even trees have different values assigned to them based on, actually, the first ones who did this were my white male property owners. And they were the only ones who could buy land, own land, they're the only ones who were educated, they were the only ones who were taught to read, they were the only ones who could vote. I don't even have to say what implications are going on for today.

Sally:  Right.

: Because... And it's interesting talking to, or talking to folks from Pennsylvania because in Lancaster was where a lot of this structure was laid down. And when I visited Lancaster, when I was on the Advisory Board, I had a lot of feelings come up.

Yeah, and I'm...

Because of the... So much happened there.

And I'm sitting currently on that land. I'm in Lancaster County.

Wow.

I'm feeling everything that you're sharing and really understanding, I think in new ways how the putting at the center, indigenous values, and ceremony, and history is so critical, for work and for those of us sitting in mainstream organizations to understand how that is built, how that is talked about. And the interconnectedness piece really is standing out to me, and I'm wondering how does focusing and being consistent with indigenous values then become part of and support this evaluation work that I know you've been working on with your team since the beginning of your work, but I'd love to hear how that is flowing.

Well, I think what I'm gonna say is probably true for a lot of people, especially people of color. Initially, I was not a proponent of evaluation because I felt like, "Oh, this is the way that the government just figured out ways to not support people's work." That's what I thought at the beginning. And then when I looked at traditional evaluation and it's beanie counting, and its productivity... Impetus, I was thinking. Really, this is really the stuff that the dominant culture thrives upon, and I felt like it was a lot about white privilege and didn't speak much to me. But actually what I found is what I needed is as a new language in which to talk about evaluation, because there is something about a  historical context that's important around evaluation. I think it needs to be rooted in a history, and for us, that's definitely for sure. And I think it's true for other communities of color, because our experience here in the United States is different, and our evaluation processes need to reflect that. So we needed a Circle process, we needed a non-hierarchical model of story-telling in which to capture the work.

And we needed to also address the impact that the dominant culture has had on our communities and the damages done, and even for us to even forget some of our own things that we were really great at. And I would give you just an example of indigenous knowledge, it acknowledges that there is nothing that's truly objective. When you look at something with your set of eyes and with your set of measurements, there's an element of subjectivity in that that can't be taken away. And I've heard other philosophers say that like Bertrand Russell or people who are mathematicians say, "You really can't measure anything completely accurately. There's some subjectivity in it." And then when you think about the transformation that you're looking for in behavior, it's the same thing. It's like in our curriculum, we really focus on listening without interrupting or judging, and really fully listening and not thinking about what you're gonna say before you go to speak. And we found that that encourages a lot of change, because in that process, someone hears somebody's heart, and then you... And even if you don't agree with them, if they're speaking from their heart, and then you speak with your heart, the two people talking to each other can make a third thing go on. And if you understand that a third thing is always going on, you can really open up to the highest amount of transformation possible, simply by listening.

So we found that we can capture the changes that people experience our curriculum, they experience a change in their life on profound levels. And when we... Just to give you... It took us a long time to come up with this. We came up with a question of reflecting on what has gone on in your life since the last time we met in Circle? What is it that you would like to share? And in there, we would get all this information about how our curriculum changed, how they looked at the world. So we wanted a transformation of cultural involvement, relationships in the world itself, where in the end, you feel completely accountable to every single person you meet, that if you don't... If you see a harm and there's nothing you do about it, that that's gonna impact on your humanity, it's gonna impact on your life. And we talk even when people are planning their gardens, if you look at all plants and animals as equal to yourself when you're moving a weed out, is it a weed or is it really a wild form of medicine? And people began to garden differently and people began to spend more time with their children.

In the process of evaluation, we found out by trial and error most of it which is the order of our curriculum, because we found that if you really want for empathy and you want conflict resolution, you can't start with that. First we start out with our first session where we introduce people to the process, and we ask them to draw where they're from and who their people are. And that access is a different part of the brain, and also really incredible drawings, and information comes forward. But you're already addressing culture, you're already addressing the ancestry, and you're beginning to get a historical way of putting yourself into here, into the United States. And then we also ask people, and this is not through drawing, how they got their names. And a lot of rich information comes out from that. Incredible stories. And what we're doing is building a background... We're building trust in a deeper way, and we don't ask for agreement until we've gone through that process. And then we do agreements and those are put on a pie plate, written in a circle. And it's amazing what kind of things come up in the agreements based on going through that process of identifying your name, where you're from and who your people are.

Very different things come up. Then the next thing we do is peace and justice, where we talk about a historical analysis of where the problems, the violence came, which we addressed as having come from the structure that got set in whereby everything I owned, the plants, the animals, the waters and people. People got owned, African people got owned, native peoples got removed or owned, and then women were owned and their children were owned. There was an objectification that set in. There's no way... It used to be that a woman couldn't even say no in a marriage to sexual activity because it wasn't acknowledged in the law, which is a form of ownership. And the fact that women couldn't own any property really, until the 1970s, I think fully...

It used to be that if a woman bought a car, it had to be registered in her husband's name or a man's name. So anyway when you look at this, a lot of young people don't know this today, but it's important that that's how owned we were and the currency they used is money, in order to put it all in place, so we see capitalism as a big piece of this. And so when we talk about the  Doctrine of Discovery, which few people know about, we address the fact that that's still in the Constitution, which means that indigenous people really can't have full sovereignty rights, if in fact in the Constitution it says that whatever was in place when England had... Owned the land here is now transferred, and it's really in the Constitution, so it's... And Ruth Bader Ginsburg had to rule based on what was in the Constitution and deny land to the Tlingit people who were looking to reclaim it.

And it's a way of making sure that the treaties never get enforced, to have that in there, 'cause it's like, it said that all people who were not Christian were barbarous, savage people from whom you could take the land. And then the Inter Caetera bull from, I think it's Pope Nicholas V or somebody, who said it... Who backed it up and said that this was... Only Christians could own the land. It entitled people to take everything from all people of color. So those bills are still in place, as is the Doctrine of Discovery which tells you where we are now, where they're crying... When they did the insurrection on the Capitol, some people were saying, "1776." So with all this in place, so we set the table for, "Here's the analysis. This is how it happened. And this is how even the land was colonized." Because not only did they colonize us, they also brought in their own plants from home, deforested the United States, and then brought in their own plants, so there's a lot of beautiful food out here in the wild that, if you know what you're doing, you will never starve. So then we go into respect from there, which again, we talk about, we deepen and repeat a lot, but it's different when you ask it in a different...

Or through a different value. Some of the respect goes in the egalitarian belief that are all things are equal, everything is sacred, and all the different rights that have been taken away from people, and we talk about how we relate with each other through these means. Do you pay attention more to someone 'cause they got more money? Or because of their race or we talk about... There's always about equity and respect. And then we move to balance, and that's where we look at how our time is owned. You get up in the morning, your time is owned, because now you have to buy your shelter and food, it's not just there.

Right.

You have to... And in order to get that, you have to get this money, this third-party or this paper and coinage, and that person owns your time. And not only that, they impact how honest you can be, because you could lose your access to all of these important things, if the person in power doesn't like what you're saying, they could take away your home and everything, they could take away your children, so we go there when we talk about this, and then we go into courage and with courage, it... We talk about how it's important to do that, to intervene when you see harm without being attached to the result. What's important is that it needed to be said, and we talk about all the ways in which the culture doesn't really make that as possible as we'd like. And then we move to, from courage, we go into humility, and what we mean by that is that we're interdependent. Human beings are not more important than anyone else.

All the races are equal. Everything is equitable. The Circle itself is equitable, everyone in the Circle has the same voice. And then we say because of the world we live in, that we will only know if we get to be in a good place where we live in harmony and peace would be and with humility, is if the minority voice is the one we most need to listen to, 'cause there's... If they feel equitable, then we can have peace. And then we go into compassion; they're in this order, building up. And compassion is based on the fact that it needs to be equitable, otherwise, it's sympathy, pity, they can't have a power-over dynamic. To be truly compassionate with someone, you have to see it as completely equal to yourself, and if you were in that position, what would you need, what would you be feeling and how would you like to be heard. And then we move into empathy.

Okay.

Because empathy, by the time we get there, we're acknowledging that all of us have done harm, all of us have been harmed. And this makes a big difference, and people begin to get through that, and then after that, we get into wisdom where we have a responsibility to share all the gifts that we have, all the knowledge we have with others without competition, because it's a responsibility we have. That these gifts came to us through the spirit that lives in all things and therefore we're here to be of service to each other. And so, it's not like you hoard things so that you can have an edge. It's not that you would sabotage somebody else in order to get ahead. So we go into all those things. And then from wisdom, we move into the connection to the land. 'Cause when we go into the connection to the land, we recognize that it's a being fully in its own right, and that all the plants and animals have the same psychology that we have. And in fact, many people begin to share their extraordinary experiences they've had in nature. That the dominant culture doesn't really give you much room to speak about without making a reservation for you and one of its mental health centers. It's like, because spirits talk to you through the land. And that's the biggest source of trouble, is that we can't be enjoying being in the world as much as we would like because we're owing our time to someone.

And to begin to neutralize that in your heart, to make good choices based on love and connection rather and building community, and beginning to neutralize all this, like beginning to form collective, involvement, and solidarity economies, and beginning to do it.  You can begin to do it, you don't have to wait for the whole government to change. Your community can develop its own currency to trade with each other. It's like changing hearts, that's really what we're doing, and trying to reclaim how we once lived, 'cause that's how we lived before the colonists came. And then we go into the sacredness and vision and prayer as a means of ceremony, how important ceremonies are. It's really powerful for people if they come back from wartime to be able to have a place in ceremony to debrief from all that, to reclaim being able to be in the civilian world with just breathe... Just getting all that you had to do that was hard to do, murdering people, being shot at, doing all these things with people you don't really know, all that PTSD, to have a place to ceremonially work through that.

Sun dance is an amazing experience for doing something like that, but I've heard really astounding ways of dealing with... If you've been raped, that you could reclaim yourself through ceremony. I've heard of people using being in the rivers to do that and reclaiming their whole virginity even, with grandmother involvement, sweat lodges, and all these things. I know myself, I sun dance because I have early childhood trauma that I've never... No matter how much therapy I've ever had, that would always come up. And I realized that spiritually, that would have to be taken away because it's in my cells and I couldn't just do that myself. And I have to say, it took me a couple of sun dances, but I'm pretty close to really doing that.

And then sun dancing for all the children not to be impacted for the rest of their life about trauma that's set in their cells. Or for the ancestral traumas that we're carrying in our cells. It's really, really healing yourself with everyone else intentionally. What I love about ceremony is the prayers aren't only for you, they're for everyone. And I learned a lot about the power of the land to speak to me through ceremony. My first vision quest I ever did is how I ended up getting my name. I vision quested by a large oak tree. It was so big, it took six people to put their arms around it and it spoke to me. The second day, I woke up in the morning and I felt some love from that tree that was astounding, and it was across species.

There's conversations we used to be able to have across species until all the nonsense of the structures got set in, and all that objectification got set in. We all were able to have those kind of conversations with the animals. And we could still get that back, but we have to work hard to get it by getting all the clutter out, but it's like, the prevention in there is just so immense. I can't... The first time I went to sun dance, I didn't have... I have to do my vision quest before I go. I did not have any of the things I really needed on the land on which I live. I didn't have chokecherries. I didn't have some things. After I sun danced one year, the next year I had full-grown plants with chokecherries, I had wild grapes with the seeds and I had wild apples. They were all grown up. It wasn't possible under normal circumstances to have that present in a year. But that's what land can do and people don't realize that. Or even when they chop it down, they don't realize that they have trauma and it's a murder. If you don't sit down and have a conversation... You need to look at why is that tree coming down.

It provides your air, it holds the roots in the ground, they collaborate under the ground, they communicate beautifully, all the root systems. And it really takes four years after you cut a tree down for the wood to... The energy is still in there for four years, so that's why it's better to wait to burn wood until after the four years is up, it burns better if the energy has been resolved. So I hope this is helping with this, 'cause then when we go into generosity, we're not talking about, "Oh, all I gave, blah, blah, blah," or, "I donated da da da." No, we're talking about bartering, equitable systems, we're talking about a whole culture based on generosity, where the receiver has to not feel diminished in it, that you also see the gift back, it's a mutual exchange done with generosity and it needs to have no attachment to it, like when you give it, it's gone now. There's no manipulation, there's no expectation, it's just giving, and then the last thing we do is gratitude.

Okay.

And when we do gratitude, we look at, again, it's all about community building, it's all about responsibility to each other, the whole curriculum, it includes all the intersections. And we did this, a group of survivors over a long period of time, and then to evaluate this beautiful process, we went through figuring out how we were going to get the data. So what we do is we record the reflection round. We record the question, the initial response to the question, and then we record the... The very last question is, "What have you heard that surprises you, transforms you and moved you if anything?" So we ask that, these three things. And then we transcribe them so there's no name attached anymore, and then they go through this now prism of this... We use Michael Quinn Patton's , Principle-Based Evaluation, which fits because we're working with values. And so when the Principle-Based... And Morgan J. Curtis told us about that, and Patrick Lemmon, he's been invaluable as well, they work very well as a team, when we met, which have been a lot of meetings over more than five years now. We meet in Circle, all the community trainers that have been using the model, the curriculum, are at the table, and we actually go in a circle and they love it. Morgan and Patrick love being part of the Circle.

It's great. Yes.

And we go around and we share what we've experienced teaching it? What do we think needed to be tweaked? How would we do the questions? How can we evaluate this? So, everyone would have input into that process over these last five years. Then we tried out using the data using Michael Quinn Patton's stuff, which took a long time for us to get it. And then it took a while to come up with the questions. Then it took actually going to see someone else give a presentation on it at the National Sexual Assault Conference. When we went there, we had been struggling for a while and everything just clicked.

Oh that's...

Then we went from there, [chuckle] it's like we went... We just went from there, and now we have this  beautiful graphic. Which I'll share that you'll be able to have to show some place. But Morgan came up with it, we struggled mightily, all of them,  like the evaluators were struggling too, 'cause we were like, "Oh my God," you know, "There's a lot of change happening here, how can we document this?" Of course, the qualitative it would say what was that. But to have percentages and quantitative data, that was the biggest part of the struggle, and they said, "That's our job, that's our job." But we all mightily went into it, and sure enough though they did come up with it and we just love it. And we're about to really put it into practice now, but I mean really lets see, we've only been in existence like six years, I guess that's still quite an accomplishment.

It is.

To come up with a whole different model. A whole, our own curriculum, based on indigenous values and our own evaluation tool. That we're developing to share with other people, especially folks of color, I really think this can really work. And I'm really happy for all the resources, I gotta say, the National Sexual Violence Resource Center was really instrumental in all of our work actually. So we're a big village all across the country trying to come up with these things, and there were all these research, I was fortunate to be part of, like research development going on. And I saw the trial and error in that too. I remember having to scrap one whole thing and then going to a whole another model.
And the leadership development coming out of being able to teach the curriculum to then others who then teach the curriculum has been really an amazing process. And yet, it's copyrighted, and actually, we feel bad about that. But the dominant culture stuff is not something that you can easily just get rid of with that. Because there are people who would take your curriculum and sell it... And then they wouldn't necessarily be in keeping with how it's supposed to go, fidelity to it. And so I think we're working on that pretty well too, [chuckle] coming up with a means to have some... I hate to use the word control over the... How it's used, but to make sure that it isn't appropriated in that ways.

I guess appropriated would be the word to use. And people have asked a lot at the conferences about appropriation of this curriculum, and I said, "No, I... If we don't appropriate... If it's... If people of color are learning about dominant culture, it's called assimilation, but when it's our culture that we're sharing, all of a sudden it's appropriation." I said, "All you need to do is acknowledge where you got it from, and that you were trained by the people whose work you're using, and that they would be happy that you were doing it." And I remember saying that at one of the conferences when someone asked about appropriation. I said, "I want you to use Circles. I really want you to take these materials and use them." I said, "You just have to acknowledge where you got it from." And this native woman stood up, I'm like, "Uh-oh. What is she gonna say to me?" [chuckle] And she came and put a purple shawl around me and said that she was just happy to hear that. And a lot of the indigenous elders, by the way, the way we really see it, is that we need to be equitable across all races.

And then the thing is, if you're not gonna have racism, then all the races have to be equitable with each other, which means that those of us who've been harmed need to acknowledge that harm, but be in a place to form another way of being and teach our children some different things. And then the same, if people have been born with privilege and advantages, they need to acknowledge that and then to not operate from that place, so that everyone is equitable. So it's all about equity. And the only way I could see that we'll all be there is if, in fact, all cultures are intentionally forming communities where we're actually equitable.

Yeah, and I think... I think talking about being intentional is really critical. And the principles-focused evaluation approach has really resonated with a lot of people doing sexual assault, sexual harassment, sexual violence prevention work. And that community care that you've talked so much about, that is grounded in wanting to support healing at the individual level, but also at that community level, because we're experiencing community violence as well as individual violence. You've provided some wonderful examples and a lot of tips and permission for folks to take a look at what you've done, but do you have any other tips for people that are developing culturally-specific evaluations in their own communities, and for the folks that may be supporting culturally-specific programs and their evaluations, but might not be part of that community? 

Well, the first thing that came to mind when you asked me that question was, involve your community in the evaluation. People who are using the tools that you're evaluating, involve them in that. Look first as to whether it's giving you the information you need. And I found that people began to be excited about evaluation, and that was a major thing, to have people... And people feel really respected when they're involved in developing evaluation tools. And have the tool reflect the work you're trying to measure, which turns out, this model works really, really well because it's based on, duh, a common sense thing, that everything that we do comes out of our values and principles. Translating that into behavior, just learning about... The behaviors reflect the value. What you see is a reflective... And making that little connection, I really think that was a deep...

Knowing that, "Oh yeah, there's a seamlessness about that, and if you're gonna make changes then there's the place you need... The change needs to happen, because the behavior will reflect it, reflect what's going on, and then you'll know that you really were effective when those begin to really shift and you get to see it. So yeah. So I just think involving people as much as possible, let it expand before you contract it.

That's a good tip.

Yeah, what the ideas really... 'Cause that actually is probably defining everything that happened for us and what worked and what didn't work. And not to get discouraged, a process is important. And it was kind of exciting. People struggle through together. And that's really an important piece of Michael Quinn Patton's work, 'cause if it's involved all around in everything that you do then you change too. That's the other thing, we all change by teaching the curriculum. And we decided that's an important part of the evaluation, to reflect our own change and then to what we don't capture in the recordings when we debrief, when we have a debrief session as close to when the session ended as possible. 
Yeah, both your program and the way you're using data collection for participants to share their stories, but for your program to have a story and your facilitators to have a story, all of how that's building on through, all of the different layers of the curriculum, it really is a growth mindset, and that people are growing individually, but also growing together as that community, doing that community work together.

So that's really powerful.

People forget that each of us has a responsibility on this particular content that we have to personalize and talk about. So when people teach it, one of our new teachers who was like, "Oh, my God. I don't know how I'm gonna do this." [chuckle] But she's doing really well, but it's like, "Yes, I'm... This is the content, and we don't want you to just read it off a piece of paper." And the other beautiful thing about our curriculum, and it's true, a lot of indigenous people will tell you for us, it's not about facts per se, we don't care if it was a muskrat or a little squirrel that went down to the bottom of the ocean to go and bring up some Earth to form the turtle, to get the land on the turtle for the Sky Woman to land upon. What counts is that a little tiny animal went down and gave its life doing it, and came up with the... And when bigger, more powerful animals weren't successful, what counted was that value, that the heart and the intent got that little one down there to bring up what was needed for the community It's the story that's important, the value is what's, lives through time.

So I guess I'm going a long way to tell you that our curriculum, simply by changing the question, you have a whole different conversation, like it's different if I say, "How does peace and justice affect safety of children in the community?" If you say, "How does peace and justice affect transgender people in the community?" The whole conversation is gonna revolve around that, same question. It's the same... The content of the curriculum is good for whatever you're talking about. So you could talk about elders, you could talk about... And that's another fascinating piece. So lately we've been doing, adding racial equity to our conversation, through a racial justice lens, how can we keep children safe in the community? 

How does respect impact safety for children in the community from a racial justice lens? This way then we bring in all those intersections and disparate experience that people have. So that's the other, and that's an important piece of our evaluation process too. To see how those questions are differently answered when you add racial justice to it. Like two different kinds of... And actually, people are more comfortable when you don't add racial justice to it, 'cause I actually think... Some of the White people in the group wouldn't be having as much of a struggle if you didn't add the racial justice piece. Because the conversation brings in all the inequities, and if you were talking about safety of children and didn't add that to it, it's a different conversation.

It is, and I am hearing from different folks around the country that are building their curriculums to be more centered on those discussions of racial equity. And they're actually seeing some of their outcomes, the behavior changes, attitude changes around equity are having... They're really seeing a difference, even though there may be some slowness to the conversations or it may be more challenging, they're actually seeing that their groups are changing more quickly when that opportunity is centered, so that's really interesting that how you all are bringing in and able to shift and grow your curriculum.

The work that you're doing gives me hope. It helps with me reframing thinking about things in different ways, and I'm just... I feel really lucky that you've continued to share about your process with us.

I just wish I was younger, because... I'm a study in the... Really, it's only in my late years that I'm really beginning to find my voice in this community. I'm gonna be 75 this year. That's three quarters of a century, my God. It's like... But I'm at my best right now, at a time that the dominant culture would be following me out.

Right.

But in my community, it's true, that though, when you're older, that's when you are... You have the most impact is when you are my age. It's like kind of a reverse from the dominant culture. But yeah, in some of my dealings with the dominant culture, though, I think they think that... Actually, none of the people that I know, 'cause in my state, I talk about survivorship, the organizations, and we're building in a lot of survivorship through practices. But it's like... If I feel comfortable that if something happened to me tomorrow, that the kind of data management system we have and the involvement we have, that people would be able to go on without me. They'd really miss me a lot, and I probably... If I was on the other side, I probably wouldn't be missing anyone anymore. I'd be going back to my ancestral village.
Well, you definitely have unique knowledge to share, and I value the opportunity to hear from you. But you're right, maybe we need to be organizing some podcasts to specifically talk about that, because I think we've seen where young people's voices aren't heard and where our elders voices are often pushed out.

 I did too. Thank you so much, Strong Oak. This was fabulous. I really appreciate you, and thank you for your time.

I really appreciate you too. So I'm hoping to see you at some point in the future.