University of Oregon Ethnic Studies Commencement Speech, June 17, 2018

 I have not blogged for years.  Once I got on Facebook, my blogging was over and my FB posts long-winded. 

 I was surprised to have been asked to be the speaker or a speaker at the University of Oregon Ethnic Studies Commencement, 2018, Sunday, June 17.  I was more than surprised.  I couldn't really take in the emailed request because I could not understand why they would ask me.  But got over that. Commencement speeches are about sharing what you have learned in your life with the graduating youth, and I figure, now that I'm 72, I'd better have something to share by now.   Here it is.  Lessons learned.

I'm very happy to be here to share in your Commencement today.  In my humble opinion, you are more prepared with an Ethnic Studies degree than others are when they leave campus for the next phase of their life.  When I was graduating from college in 1967, I never dreamed of a major called Ethnic Studies.  In Caldwell, Idaho, a farm community, where I grew up and attended the College of Idaho, we were far from the movements that culminated in the San Francisco State Strike, November 1968, led by

students who called themselves the Third World Liberation Front with their demands for Ethnic Studies, and Black professors.  A lot of young people got arrested, and hurt.  SI Hayakawa, President and an embarrassment to his race took the tough stance, but by March 20, with the Black Panthers involved and community people and churches showing up, the movement prevailed and the student demands met.  This spread throughout the country. Your degree was dreamed of and fought hard for by another generation like yours.

In 1970 here in Eugene, after the San Francisco State  Strike, LCC offered a class called the Black Experience taught by Jay Jones, College counselor, a Black educator teaching this class for free, in the cafeteria, after hours.   We hungrily devoured books of documents, histories, poetry, novels and plays.  These were the stories of Black voices, narratives put down by those kidnapped, brought in chains over the Middle Passage and enslaved, their children born into slavery -- babies enslaved -- treated as chattel and yet, each rising to that moment in resistance, through insurrections, certainly by risking lives to reach freedom, then returning to free others, risking their lives to learn to read, and write books to inspire a long fight for freedom.  Their descendants are still the first to raise their voices and stand up for justice, even today.  Reading is an act of resistance and so it was in those days we sat with Jay Jones in a deserted cafeteria listening and learning about the underpinnings of this country and the inhuman source of its wealth.  In these weekly conversations began the emergence of our Black Consciousness. 

As a descendant of these first immigrants brought to America as the exploited labor force in the 19th and early 20th centuries, it made such a difference in my life that I acquired Black Consciousness because through its lens, I was able to make sense of my own life as a child of railroads builders and farmworkers, criminalized, and forcibly removed into WW2 concentration camps.

We are the sansei generation who were considered too noisy by our Nisei parents but appreciated by our Issei grandparents for forcing our elders to break the silence and tell their stories about the concentration camps forging a Reparation Redress Movement so this would never happen again.  Yet, here we are as elders ourselves witnessing great inhumanities.  We stand by our Muslim brothers and Sisters! We speak up for our immigrant, undocumented and Dreamer families, our brothers and sisters whose exploitation followed ours, criminalized, labeled as "Illegal" as we were labeled  "Enemy Aliens."  Their deportation has devolved into something more inhuman than the desert camps and barbed wire built for my ancestors because it separates babies from their mothers.   Here, locally, we are needed to show up at the Springfield City Council meeting, June 25,  7 pm, wearing red to demand Springfield police end their contract providing jail space to ICE!

As immigrants, my family was also part of the design to steal Indian Lands through reclamation projects for dams in the 1950's.  We too share in the other Foundation Block on which this country rests to make its wealth. "We are all on stolen land."   For us it was the damming of the great Snake River that cut farms out of the original land of the Bruneau Band of the Paiutes in southwestern Idaho. The Alien Land Law forbidding our American Born Second Generation parents to own land was lifted after World War 2, and many Nikkei left southeast Idaho concentration camps to settle and farm their own fields.

For settlers, there is a responsibility we carry to learn about the history of the original peoples of the land we grow from.  There is a responsibility to hear indigenous voices and take to heart the perspective of those who have been here from the beginning of time and who have resisted generation after generation, the legacy of genocide.  They are not invisible. Their perspective of how this Earth should be taken care of is not irrelevant. For me, listening to these voices of Black consciousness and Indigenous resistance, the stories from the exploited labor forces and my own ancestors have been a saving grace. 

Mine has been long journey that begins on this campus in the 1970's. The roots of the Ethnic Studies Department come directly from the activism of young students and the community people who joined them.  I taught some Asian American Experience classes back then while attending school for my Fifth Year certification.  It was guerilla style.  You find an empty classroom, not scheduled that term, advertise it, charge nothing and Asians will show up, twice a week for no credit.  We had long conversations about what were the issues of the times.  Read books and sociological insights written by Asians.  Wrote our own stories and histories.  We named ourselves, not Oriental, Gook, Jap, Chink.  We were Asian Americans.   And this happened for every ethnic student group on campus.  That's how we learned about each other and helped support one another's struggle.

There was no social media.  We stayed connected by traveling, or for me, also by hosting travelers from Vancouver BC to LA in my home on this artery of our community called I-5.  My ethnic studies experience through the 70's were the conferences we put on together and the performances we brought through, the hitchhiking booksellers we housed, the activist movement leaders we showcased and then got into our cars to show up when they called, -- it was exciting.  

You can also look around this campus and see the fruit of our young activism and the ongoing activism and struggles with the administration of young people of every decade after.  It has not stopped.  Everything here for students of color was fought for and envisioned by students of color and their allies.   

In 1978, I returned to teaching with what I had gained -- Black Consciousness, Solidarity experience, Safe Place Making skills, and from an immigrant background, listening and learning from Indigenous Peoples of this land, a way of life that is so different from the settler nation that it changed me.  For one it made me a better teacher.  Respect became the curriculum.  Yes I taught literature, writing, US History.  All of these were my passions.  But I also taught respect. If a safe place is created, and the student is invited to bring their whole self in, their family upbringing, their name pronounced right, their style, their identity, their tastes, their opinions safely, they will share and talk and everyone gains.  Middle school students demand fairness. They want to be respected. And they will talk to us, if we listen.  

For example, I learned how it is to be Black Brown Indigenous and male at twelve and be in danger from the police from my students.  I learned there were definitely more than just five genders from a student. I learned how homework is one of the causes of the "Achievement Gap" which is really an Opportunity gap.  Native students go to Feasts to bring in the season of sacred foods that last several days including travel time to the reservation.  No one should have to choose to be Indigenous or pass a class.  Many of our youth have jobs or take care of their younger siblings after school.  A student should not have to choose safety of family or earning enough money for the family to make ends meet or pass a class.  I unlearned many lies and myths, unpacked attitudes, found a better life by going to the doings that my students and their families were involved in outside of school and learned that they were leaders, that they were gifted and carried important responsibilities in their communities that I never would have known if my teaching stopped at the school door.

I look back on my 72 years and I realize I have learned just as much by unlearning.  When I was a student, I learned about water in sixth grade, about trees in seventh grade, about fish in eighth grade.  How different my life becomes when I learn the roots of the giant trees draw up the underground water closer to the surface so we can access it, or that salmon in going out to the ocean to live and coming back to the rivers to spawn bring minerals on their way out, and on their way back which helps the ocean life and river waters.  Or that there is salmon DNA in the leaves of trees.

When the elder Chief who taught me so much and who took my daughter and me under her wing when we went to her for help thirty years ago was ready to retire, she asked her niece, Chief Caleen Sisk to take care of us, and Chief Sisk offered us tribal membership.  At that time, she did not say, "Winnemem only spoken here."   That was very different from when I was six years old and spoke Japanese asking my teacher if I could go to the bathroom.   Chief Sisk would not have put me in the closet and left me there most of the day like Mrs. Finney did.  When Chief Sisk offered me tribal membership, I just walked my whole self in.  My ancestors with me, my history.  And when I walked in, there was work to do that I believe in and inspires me.  The work as a tribal member is to resist the genocide of this federally unrecognized tribe.  Federally unrecognized tribes have no rights, and no visibility.  They are criminalized for burying their people on lands given to them.  They are criminalized for holding ceremonies.  They have no access to programs. Chief Sisk faces that and says, "we're recognized by Creator who made us, and that's all the recognition we need."  When the federal entities say to her, you are federally unrecognized so you can't have your ceremonies by the river on Forest Service Land, Chief Sisk says, "you might have the papers, and hold the key to this gate.  You may have made the laws and regulations that try to keep us out.  But Creator made this land for US.  And we're going to keep on carrying on."

Often I hear people call wars, slavery, greed -- human nature.  I reject that.  Humans may do all these things, but it is not their nature.  To say otherwise is rationalizing and normalizing human weakness, human depravity.  I believe that the human being is a part of nature, and the Winnemem affirm this belief.  In fact they say our job as human beings in the natural order of things is to Tend to Life.  Take care of life.  The elders say that the plants and the earth itself, the water, the animals they all miss our human hands.  They miss our voices.  They miss our prayers.  Our human nature also is to take care of each other.   A home, doctoring, food are not things that must be earned, and a privilege for a select few. 

My "unlearning" has brought me to this place, to stand with a federally unrecognized tribe fixed on our responsibilities to take care of water, sacred lands and bring back the Chinook salmon runs.  The work for the rest of my life will be to tend to these things following the Chief, leaving settler values behind.

Where there was no Ethnic Studies, fifty years ago I was part of a movement to do it anyway.  Where there is no justice, I have been led to keep justice in sight by Black Freedom Fighters throughout the history of this country even now.  Where Asian presence is not noticed, I am part of the continuing Asian American movement to stand up, speak up and show up anyway.  And as for the stolen land I've always lived on?  I hope when my journey is done, that all that I leave behind will only sustain indigenous resistance. 

I can hear Yuri Kochiyama's voice in my ear, quoting in her own way Franz Fanon, "It is for the youth of every generation to determine what is their mission.  And then for the rest of their life, for each person to fulfill it or betray it."   

I wish all of you well on your journey, taking with you a degree that has a proud hard-won history.  I wish for you a consciousness from the Root that reveals the truth of things and wipes out all fear and a life of listening and learning well in how to Tend to this good Life you have been given in your own chosen way and to be happy.  Congratulations, Graduates, from the bottom of my heart.

Hee Chalu Beskin!

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