PROTECTING THE LAND
“I think, sometimes, conversations don’t happen because people are afraid of revealing how little they know, and that’s ultimately really damaging to everyone. So, find a way to engage with that curiosity. There are lots of resources out there to be found more and more,” says Sinclair, an oral historian of Cree-Ojibwa and German-Jewish ancestry, a Columbia University professor and editor of the book How We Go Home: Voices from Indigenous North America.
“I think, sometimes, conversations don’t happen because people are afraid of revealing how little they know, and that’s ultimately really damaging to everyone.” As for Lozano, she is a tribal liaison for the Wisconsin Department of Children and Families, which works with 11 federally recognized tribes located within the state to provide child welfare support for families and other critical services. She is part of the Ho-Chunk Nation. Recently, Sinclair and Lozano shared their insights with NRPA and Parks & Recreation magazine about the tribal nations in North America, how they define equity as it applies to Indigenous people, and why land acknowledgement should be important to everyone. Parks & Recreation: Could you tell us a little bit about who you are and the work that you’re currently doing? Sara Sinclair: I was invited to be part of the [TEDxCollegePark] conference [in March] to speak…about a book that I’ve been working on for the last few years. It came out in October [2020 and] it’s called How 48 Parks & Recreation
We Go Home: Voices from Indigenous North America. The project actually began as my thesis work; I came to New York City to study oral history at Columbia University. And while I was in the program, I started interviewing other Native students that I was meeting in the Columbia community, and then…people specifically from Native American reservations, who left their homes to come and study at these elite academic institutions and then moved home again to work for their nations. But in the context of doing that work, I quickly envisioned putting these interviews together in a book, because the people that I was interviewing were such incredible narrators, storytellers and educators. I felt like they were able to narrate North American history — not Native American history — in a way that was really lacking from most North Americans’ experiences. There’s a lot of research being done recently, in particular, an organization called IllumiNative (illuminatives.org). They’ve done some research that shows that 87 percent of state-level history standards fail to cover Native people after 1900. That’s crazy! We’re in 2021 and 87 percent of people are not learning anything about what happens to Native Americans after 1900. So, I was really motivated by what I thought was a real gap in the educational experiences across the continent. Ultimately, I went to Voice of Witness and said, “I want to do this book. Do you want to do it with me?” Voice of Witness is [a nonprofit] organization that works to amplify the voices of people impacted by and fighting against injustice. They said, “Yes.” So, I was able to travel far and wide across North America, speaking to people about some of the most universal issues that are impacting Na-
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tive life today. These are issues that include environmental injustices, the legacy of the Indian residential school system, the high prevalence of kids in foster care today, extraction, treaty violations, barriers to healthcare and education, and on and on. Stephanie Lozano: Before I came to the Wisconsin Department of Children and Families, I worked for my tribe [Ho-Chunk Nation] for several years doing child welfare work, focusing on Indian child welfare. And as a part of that experience, I got to learn not only my language, my culture, my kinship system and how we’re all interrelated, but I [also] started learning a lot about the history and how children were coming into foster care as a result of these federal Indian policies that were impacting tribes back in the 1800s, and, in particular, how they impacted my tribe, our children and our families — some of that historic trauma that we carried with us. One of the things that I do for the department…is provide a lot of training to them on tribal history and how that impacts the programs and services that we’re providing out there. In particular, [we’ve] been focusing a lot on…land acknowledgements, making sure that folks [know] the importance of why we need to start understanding the history of the land and how we’re connected to it, who was there before us and why that changed. It’s been really incredible to see other departments look at establishing their own land acknowledgements…[and] being able to provide them with the resources to do that and do it with a level of accuracy. P&R: Sara, at this writing, you’ll be speaking at TEDxCollegePark’s ‘An Equal Future.’ One of the things that will be discussed is
