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!
https://www.facebook.com/will.doolittle.58/videos/10155625214061824
