A wise mentor said to me one day, when I was in my 20s trying to figure out my calling in life, he said to me, George, our calling can only be understood backward, by looking backward. And that mentor has since passed, but that his mentorship and that idea has always stuck with me. So what I think he meant was that a question as big as your life's calling, it's nearly impossible to define it for the future. My calling will be this. My calling is this and therefore this is what I will be for the rest of my life. But instead, when you look back and connect the dots of, oh, notice that these kinds of opportunities came to me. Notice that I always help people with this area of life or work or relationships. Notice that I always seem to think that some things are obvious that other people didn't think so, right, that was surprising to them. So when we start looking back and look at the problems that I've had to overcome in my life and the traumas I've had to overcome and all the projects I've done, when you look back and you go, oh, now it starts to form a picture of what your life purpose is about and what you can therefore bring as strengths and as experiences for helping others, right? And so when there are these giant questions that keep us stuck in our tracks, questions like what's my niche supposed to be, right? If you're being stuck and asking that question, what's my niche supposed to be? Why not ask a smaller question? I'm going to invite you to try this. Instead of what's my niche supposed to be, why not say what's the next niche that I'd like to experiment with? Given my previous experiences, what have I really enjoyed? What have I spent time helping people with? What's the next niche I'd like to experiment with? And then do little tests, you know, offer something to your friends or your audience if you have one and see if people take you up on it and if people take you up on it, do they really benefit from it, right? Then you'll know, wow, this is something maybe I could grow into something bigger. Rather than I'm going to decide on a niche without market research, without understanding whether people would really want to use and without understanding whether I would really enjoy delivering in that niche, I'm going to decide on a niche, I'm going to create an amazing website spending thousands of dollars or spending months to do it.  So that's why I recommend, and not just recommend, I do this in my own business and in my own life is I'm always trying to ask the smaller question to help me move forward with an experimental and playful mindset instead of thinking that anything is a giant decision that must spend lots and lots of time and effort on it without knowing whether it will work or not because if you've learned anything from me, you know that I always talk about this, building an authentic business, a business that truly fulfilling and from the heart is one that requires you to play and to play with others, to play with the world and as we play, we find out what we're really good at playing and what we really, what kinds of games or problems we're good at playing and then that allows us to build that into a business. So another big question people say is who is my ideal audience, George? I've got to figure out my ideal target market and then I will put Facebook ads dollars behind it and market. Okay, all right, that's a really big question and that has a finality to it. Is it not going to change? How do you know? You're just going to figure it out like just by brainstorming or journaling or even market research, yes you might discover, oh this kind of people kind of buy, okay fine, but is that going to be your ideal audience for life? Certainly not and maybe not even for a year or two. Maybe it's only going to be an experiment for a month and you'll discover it, wait a second. I realized I was thinking about serving those people but really it's these people who are responding. I always build business based on responses rather based on I think it should be this way, I think it's like this, so I'm going to force people to believe this. No, what's the response and so therefore how can I build more in that direction? So instead of who's my ideal audience, a smaller question would be, who has recently been responding to my content? What kind of person are they? Are there commonalities if there are more than, hopefully there's more than one person responding to your content in a positive and saying, wow this is helpful, find the commonalities between them and that is a clue to, and here's another small question for you, what group of people should I try advertising to next? Meaning putting your money behind getting this message out to more people. Noticing, remember, our calling can be understood by looking backwards, so noticing who's responding and then spending some more money advertising to those people, time and energy and money so that you can see, okay, am I on the right track? Are they responding well? Okay, so another question, right, what should my product or service be? You know, people who are kind of figuring out what their business is going to be asking, what should I sell? What should my product service be? And again, this is such a scary question because it sounds like my product or service is going to be the thing I am dedicated to for the next 10 years, you know, or even for the next year. I don't remember experimentation and playfulness, so a smaller question would be, okay, what have I already been helping people with? Just take a look, what's one thing that I have been helping multiple people with? Okay, that, you know, fine, then what will I try help, what could I create to help more people with this? What I've already been helping people with? What's one thing? Okay, great. What could I create then? What product or service then? Could I create to help more people as an experiment? As an experiment? Another one, what's my marketing message? How do I, you know, collapse everything that I do, integrate everything that I am, all my interests and passions into one solid message? My goodness. You know what, I don't even have that. If you forced me to say, George, what's your marketing message? I'm like, let's see, I do a lot of things for people. I teach Facebook ads. I also help people create and launch online courses. I also, you know, I'm going to be teaching people how to use Instagram. I have lots of different things. I also love talking about an alternative to sales funnels. I mean, I love talking about lots of things. What do you want me to, I love talking about productivity, and how to be more joyfully productive. That's one of my passionate topics. How do I integrate that into everything into one message? Why give ourselves so much pressure? Seriously, you don't need to. So here's a smaller question. And again, I don't have a marketing message. Hello, you can you can quote me on this. George Cowell says he doesn't have a core marketing message. Now, that is, I do have an online course called create your core message. And I, you know, through that course, I kind of figured out something I could say. But for but it's not something that I feel like I need to put everything around. It's more of a fun exercise. It might be, to me, it's more of a vanity exercise. Oh, it made me feel better to have a core message. But really, in practical settings, I do lots of different things. And to one person, I'm a Facebook ads expert. To another person, I'm a productivity guru. To another person, I teach them how to get their online course out there. I mean, I have, I'm different things with different clients. And I'm different things to each of you watching. And I'm okay with that. I'm okay with that. I don't need a marketing message. If you need my help with this, great, I am that for you. Pitch and hold me all you want all day long. Because then once I help you with this, once I help you with Facebook ads, then I have your attention. And then I could tell you about other things I could help you with. But I just one thing at a time, I don't have to have an integrated marketing message, because plus, even if I told you my core message, it's so long. It's a paragraph. It's like, Oh, my God, it's overwhelming. It's hard to remember all these things, right? So instead, a smaller question would be, instead of what's my marketing message? How about what headline will I like to text? Would I like to test next? So whatever, if I'm writing an email newsletter, what's the headline I'd like to test? It doesn't have to be on my marketing message. But what headline matches this email newsletter that I'd like to try? That's it. Or what's the product name going to be based on the previous question we answered? What's something I can create to help people with something about what's the product name going to be? It doesn't have to be integrating my marketing message. But what's the product name going to be? Right? So it's just something that is always more practical. It's always experimental, knowing that experiments is what allows us to scale. When we do experiments and we see what works, then we could put more money, more time, more thought into making it showing to that to more people. So maybe let go of trying to define yourself so much, trying to figure out what your life is supposed to be about, what your life purpose is supposed to be about going in the next 10 years. So much pressure. And it's really not necessary. I have a very good business today, what I've had for 10 years, without having to like make these final decisions. Okay. I mean, look at my business name. George, what's your business name? I don't know, because I had so many things I couldn't decide on the business name. So I use my own name, George Cow. I'll have that name for a long time. I mean, you know, I got married didn't change my last name, right? So I know some of you may change your last name if you get married and change your brand. But basically your name is your longest lasting brand, right? So I just use my name.com. And that's my business is called George Cow. That's an authentic business coach. I kind of cute. It's a cute name, ABC, authentic business coach. Most people don't even understand what that means. So even my job title, authentic business coach, most of my clients don't understand what that means. Most of you don't understand what that means. I mean, I use it as a cute title. It's just cute. Something that's like, I kind of fun to say, but I don't care if you don't understand what that means. All I want you to know is I'm selling this thing next. And if it matches you, you should buy it. I'm making this video for you right now. If it makes sense for you, you know, make a comment or whatever. But if this doesn't make sense for you, no worries, I'm going to have another video for you next time. So it's always about a practical next thing, next thing, next thing. Not about the foundational message and calling and purpose. I have to align everything to it. It's so much pressure, right? So anyway, I just let it go and just keep experimenting. I have a very, very good full-time business by just D6 and it's more playful. So anyway, I hope this is helpful. Our last thing I'll say is until something becomes obvious, stay flexible. Until your message becomes obvious, stay flexible. You don't have to choose. Until your niche becomes obvious, stay flexible. Until your product becomes obvious, stay flexible. Until your calling becomes obvious, stay flexible. I hope this helps. As always, I love your comments and your questions and I'm going to give you a moment to add that below while I take a look at the Facebook live comments that might be coming through right now. Okay, thanks so much for joining me for this. Carol and Christian, Petra, Sabine, Peter, Patricia, Captain, Ben, thanks for your comments, Captain and Petra and Sabine. Alright, until the next video, I wish you a sense of playfulness, joyful experimentation, and just staying flexible, knowing that you are, your skills and your presence is so valuable to people and just serve kind of one person at a time until the pattern becomes obvious to you so that you can serve more people. Alright, be well, take care.


We now move to Bayelsa State, where a gas pipeline along the Otoke Bayelsa Palm Road belonging to the Nigerian Agip Oil Company has erupted, causing panic among residents of the area. The explosion was heard around 11pm on Monday and has continued to spew raw gas into the atmosphere up to this moment. Our correspondent, Jesse Aceh, has details. This is a spew site and the noise from the pipeline can be heard from afar. Residents and other passengers are affected by the sound and they want a quick response from the appropriate quarters. Yes, we are here in our area in this good new street inside. But I didn't even know what is happening here.  So you should not see what you are seeing. We see. My children was even panic when the explosion was out. In fact, it is very difficult for me to even explain it to my human understanding. And the gas line that has exploded just over 90 is unsafe out for even the people around here to stay around here at this time. So it's better for them to. I don't know the actual company that owns the line, whether it's SPDC or that company, but they should try and reach them to come and switch it off. I advise the government and the company responsible to take good action in order to rescue the situation. You can see for your safety, there are very, very big threats for people living around this environment. As you can see, any light gas, it can cause serious explosion. Neither the state government or IGF has responded to the development, but a closer view of the space I suggest the explosion was man-made. On this agit pipeline, there are giant ant hill on it, of which it might even help those who are operating even in the afternoon to bust the pipeline. As we went there, the signs that it was man-made are very glaring, both from the fresh moths by the sides. And we saw a little battery there with connections running towards the point, meaning they must have detonated some explosives. And this also speaks volume in terms of security, in terms of security of the pipeline. In the wake of this explosion, calls are being made to the federal government to ensure adequate security around oil and gas pipelines in the Niger Delta. Just you see, for Plus TV News.


Amazing. So hello to everyone in this room, and hello to everyone tuning in on HowlRoundTV. I want to start by giving some thanks to some wonderful partners of ours. Thank you to Pro Bono ASL for providing ASL interpreters, Gregory Nieto and Tim Mills, and thanks as well to the National Captioning Institute for providing our wonderful team of live caption writers. We're really excited to have you with us. So I'm going to start by giving a brief self-introduction. So I'm Ronnie Pinoy, she, hers. I am Laguna Pueblo and Cherokee, and I am in a very flowery and bird-covered purple long dress with shoulder-length brown hair, light-skinned face with freckles. So that's me. So this event is part of the Black and Indigenous Futures Convening, which brings together artist, scholars, educators, and practitioners to unearth history, examine fault lines, and imagine new and different futures for Black and Indigenous people. This gathering, produced by Arts Emerson in partnership with HowlRound Theater Commons, is one piece of a larger Arts Emerson initiative that seeks to activate a more liberated future in Boston through the shared experience of art and public dialogue. This convening is supported by the Bar Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. So shout out and thanks to those partners. So this wonderful conversation with the wonderful humans to my rights will explore foundations of Black and Indigenous relationships, co-leadership, solidarity, shared understanding, and movement building. I'm so pleased to be joined today by Scott Alvis Barton, Elizabeth James Perry, and Kyle T. Mays. So I'm going to quickly run through their phenomenal bio so you have a sense of who they are. But I'm going to move quickly so we have plenty of time for a rich conversation. So Scott, immediately to my right, is a cultural anthropologist of African diaspora foodways at University of Notre Dame. And he previously was an executive chef for over 25 years. Scott's research focuses on diasporic women's work and knowledge, intergenerational teaching, learning, cultural heritage, and political resistance in Northeastern Brazil. Scott is a public scholar at Linden Sculpture Garden. He serves as co-chair of the African diaspora religions unit in the American Academy of Religion, is a trustee of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, a board member of the Association for the Study of Food and Society, and the Society for the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition, and an advisory board member to Indigo Arts Alliance, our dear friends. So his forthcoming manuscript, Reckoning with Violence and Black Death, follows his exhibition on anti-Black violence, funerary foods, and ancestrality, buried in the heart. Elizabeth James Perry, who is farthest to my right, practices Wampum jewelry design and restorative gardening in her Aquino Wampanoag Tribal homelands in Massachusetts. She teaches arts and responsible land stewardship to stay grounded and to benefit the next seven generations. And Kyle, in the middle, is an Afro-indigenous, Saginaw Chippewa scholar of urban studies, Afro-indigenous studies, and contemporary popular culture. He is the author of three books, including City of Dispossessions, Indigenous Peoples, African-Americans, and the Creation of Modern Detroit, and an Afro-indigenous history of the United States. OK, wonderful panel. Yeah, I guess please applaud for them. So I'm going to pass the proverbial mic over to Scott to begin with a few words. Thank you, Scott. Good morning. Can you hear me? So I'm going to read something I wrote to help me focus. And this first part is from I heard on NPR this morning around 5.30. The fall of the 16th century Aztec's great floating metropolis, Tetonichelin, which at that time was much more populous than London or Rome, is incorrectly based on the great illusion that the Europeans were more cosmopolitan and culpably advanced than the Aztecs. On the lesson until we read Nahuatl archives, we are bound by Chinoachebe's adage until the lions have their own historians. The history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter." Tulane art historian Barbara Mundi's Nahuatl archival research shows that Cortez soldiers were outnumbered by the Aztecs 20 to 1. The city did fall after 93 days of fighting, but also in large part to communicative diseases, a byproduct of the Columbian exchange. Yet the city's value caused Cortez to rebuild it through an alliance with Aztec elites as a mestiza metropolis, not a Spanish city, that lasted for a decade contrary to the historical record. This leads me to an iconic Ghanaian admonition from the Akhan language, represented by the ideogram Weerefi na wo san kofa a yeke, literally translated, it means it is not taboo to go back and fetch what you forgot, or san kofa. Knowing where you have been before you decide how to move forward. And I quote, oppressive language does more than appreciate violence, it is violence, does more than represent limits of knowledge, it limits knowledge. End quote Toni Morrison in her Nobel Prize lecture. June 1783, the citizens of America placed in the most enviable condition as the sole lords and proprietors of a vast tract of continent, comprehending all the various soils and climates of the world, and abounding with all the necessaries and conveniences of life are now by the late satisfactory pacification acknowledged to be possessed of absolute freedom and independency. They are from this period to be considered as the actors on the most conspicuous theater, which seems to be peculiarly designed by providence for the display of human greatness and felicity, end quote. Future president, slave holder, George Washington. Anishabi cultural theorist, Gerald Visner, I'm almost done, defined survival in his 1999 book, Manifest Manors, Narratives on Post-Indian Survivalence, as survival is an active sense of presence, the continuance of native stories, not a mere reaction or a survivable name. Narrative survival stories are renunciations of dominance, tragedy, and victimry. It is a mandate for those who have been defined as subaltern to strive beyond merely subsisting in the ruins of traditional or tribal cultures to actively inheriting and refashioning those cultures for the post-modern age. In part enslaved Africans have been shown to be keen observers of the hegemon and as such can be also people who participate in survivance. Cherokee descendant, Diane Clancy, that constructs the imprecise compound word, survivance as sur, a survival, outside survival, vivants the vitality of it. In Detroit's King Solomon Baptist Church, April 12th, 1964, I quote, if you black you'd be born in jail in the north as well as the south. Stop talking about the south. As long as you south of the Canadian border, you south. So we're trapped, trapped, double-trapped, triple-trapped. Any way we go, we find that we're trapped and every kind of solution that someone comes up with is just another strap. Ballots to bullets, Malcolm X. The debatability of the past operates in all society, Arjuna Padurai. And finally, I thought about power agency and the chronology of silences that's taken from silencing the past by Michelle Roll-Trio, the Haitian scholar. Human beings participate in history, both as actors and narrators. Vernacularly, history is both the facts of the matter and the narrative of those facts. What happened? And that which is said to have happened, a sociological historical process and our knowledge of that process or on a story about that process, historical narratives are indelibly bound to grabbing and maintaining power, tracking power through various moments simply helps empathize the fundamentally processural character of historical production to insist that what history is matters less than how history works, that power itself works together with history. Here, Foucault's warning helps. And I don't believe that the question of who exercised power can be resolved until the other question, how does it happen, is resolved at that same time. Both Africana Studies and Indigenous Studies were initiated by multicultural and multiracial groups of students and teachers' demands for historical correctives and inclusionary curricula. I wish to live in that place of resilience, solidarity and survivance rather than in victimatology. We both honor ancestral co-presences in our lives, we have reverence for matriarchality, albeit at times with patriarchal and misogynist overtones. Again, a question of power. Foodways and intergenerational and skilled learning epitomized by our shared respect for corn mother, tobacco, beans, fetishes, ritual baths, sacred ingredients, land stewardship, nature's materiality in cowries and wampum, somatic performative expressive cultures in sacred and profane realms are seen in spiritual life worlds and in a depth to something as quotidian, as rock and roll, owes to First Nations cultures as seen in Catherine Brainbridge's documentary Rumble, The Indians Who Rocked the World, which if you haven't seen, you should see it. Lisa Cortez is Lil Richard, I Am Everything, and Dan Lindsey's Tina and Tina Turner. Thank you. Yeah, I wanna take a minute to just have that sink in. Thank you, Scott. What I appreciate about what you offered is that all of us entering in this space today are coming in with a different lens, a different way in, a different history, and gaps in that knowledge and perspective in terms of the history of violence, solidarity, kinship, possibility between black and indigenous people. And there are, and all of us that are alive today sit on the shoulders of those who came before and have been asking these questions who have been living in kinship, who have been struggling with the trauma, both from a shared oppressor and also from violence has enacted on one another. So I wanna just start by saying thank you, Scott, for offering us the constellation of views, of knowledge, of wisdom that is such a foundation of the conversation we're looking to have over the next two days. So we wanted to start with the past, not because black and indigenous people are of the past, but because in order to know where we are going, we first need to understand and hold the narrative of where we are. Thomas King, one of my favorite writers, writes in his book, The Truth About Stories, that stories are dangerous. They are a matter of life and death and they tell us who we are. So in this moment, I'm honored to have Scott, Kyle, and Elizabeth with us to give us some of the grounding for conversation that is gonna be happening in this room over the next two days. And Kyle, I'm gonna start with you. So in your book, An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States, you argue that the foundations of the United States are rooted in anti-blackness and settler colonialism and that black and indigenous people have always fought for and struggled for freedom sometimes separately and sometimes apart. So I'm hoping that you could ground us in a few examples and also share a bit of your why for why black and indigenous solidarity matters to the world at large. So thanks for the question and for the initial thoughts. How y'all doing today? Y'all good?  I'm missing my, I'm pretty sure I left my chapstick at the hotel, so I'm struggling or thinking about that right now. Trying to be present and dealing with the questions, which are important, but a little tired, but y'all bear with me. So let's see. First of all, I wanna say I have like three of my favorite intellectuals and thinkers in the room, Stormy Weber here, Tiffany Letavo King, Amber Starks. So I'm super happy to be in a room with all of these and you all as well, but there's some of my favorite thinkers there. But so before giving history examples and I'll be very brief, a question I've been grappling with for the last couple of years, especially after writing an Afro-Indigenous history is really sitting with the question, why should black and indigenous peoples be in solidarity? Right, like of course I actually believe in all this and I'm assuming most of you all believe in this too, right, y'all with me there? Right, but the question, and I think many of us in a variety of our communities, whether dealing with anti-blackness, indigenous erasure and so forth and the conflict, the real conflicts that have happened historically and even in very contemporary manner too, in our everyday lives and our families as well, right? So again, why should we be in solidarity? And I wanna sit with that question and really think deeply and long about that particular question. Again, it's something I believe in, I'm assuming most of you all believe in that too, but often we might jump the gun and just say, yeah, we should be in solidarity. And y'all remember when the great Issa Rae said at one of the awards show that I'm rooting for everyone black? I am not rooting for everyone black, nor am I rooting for everyone indigenous. Y'all with me there? Yeah, that ain't happening, we ain't doing that, right? And so it's really about being in community, not that you have to agree on every small detail, but like-minded people and really thinking about our particular shared features together. Because, and hopefully, of course, waste of primacy and settler colonialism, it'd be great if they died off today, right? Tomorrow, whenever. But we still have contradictions to work out regardless of, and as we know from history, any post-colonial nation, you figure out one contradiction, you're still figuring out all the other contradictions, socially, politically, and economically. So, a few brief examples. One of my favorite examples is always Kwame Turei or Stokely Carmichael. And he was one of the few people in the 1960s well up into his death in 1998, who was adamant that this was indigenous people's land here, right? Now, he had other notions and ideas of land elsewhere, but he was very adamant about this. And that wasn't to say that black people don't belong here, right? But he was like, we have to be in good relations with these people that, you know, although our answers were stolen from their own indigenous homeland, you still have responsibility to be in good relations. With that, though, I think there's a responsibility, and I was always struck by Leigh Ann Simpson in the aftermath of Ferguson in an essay she wrote that indigenous peoples also have responsibility to amplify black voices and make room for black people on indigenous land. And so that is a question for me. What are indigenous nations and exercising sovereignty doing to be in good relations with black people? Like, there are different examples in a very local space as well, but when we talk about sovereignty, which frankly, I mean, if people don't want to hear, it can be in some ways a neoliberal project, right? I'm thinking of Glenn Coulthard's work rejecting the colonial politics of recognition here. And so how can indigenous sovereignty go to reclaim and connect with like people, also other people of color and being good relations? And I think there are examples of that, but we have a lot of work to do to try to make something like that happen in a very practical and real way that's culturally sensitive, where we can have conversations, think historically. And Amber and I have talked about this, both in the conversation we had recently, but just in general, right? Sit down, have some food, some seasoned food, right?  Even if it's some tofu, you can season the tofu up, it's all good, right? Have, share music, think and talk. And sometimes it doesn't always have to be something very formal either, right? Just being community gatherings and finding ways to connect. And finally, one thing I've been thinking about as well is the meaning of land and black people and belonging. There's this sort of, well, there are many things. So there are folks who believe in Adas. What is it? African descendants of slavery. So I'm gonna probably get slandered at some point, which is fine. Who are, to me, anyways, are also foundational black Americans. I still don't know exactly what that means. But these are real things that exist, and we don't talk about them enough. We just act like it's a fringe thing, but I don't have any evidence of this, but I'd imagine it's not very fringe. Like there's a New York Times article about this, I think in the fall of 2019, people seeking reparations. And I'm not opposed to reparations per se, right? But one, do we want reparations under capitalism? Two, where does land fit into that? And a great example of this is the Agua Caliente Band of Kahia Mission Indians in Palm Springs. And so they had tribal members living there. He also had black and Mexican folks living there as well. And they were removed. Now, the tribe has said nothing about this officially, but I'm a historian, so I went through all the boring congressional records and testimonies from 1953 to 1966. And the Tribal Council, it seems to me, actually wanted those people removed because they wanted it developed. And so those descendants are suing the city of Palm Springs for $2 billion. But I'm like the tribal council at the time, one of the land developed and may have actively, even though they got wrong in the process, may have participated. And I'm just reading the historical records. So this is a great example of contradictions that have to be worked out in the contemporary. And I'll stop there, thank you. I appreciate what you offer about the black and indigenous folks in specific examples. None of it is a monolith, individual tribal nations, tribal councils, individuals, various black notions of futureities. What does reparations look like? What is the path to land back? They're not always commensurate visions of the future and they haven't been, folks haven't been on the same page in the past either. So I appreciate that example. I'm also interested in the ways that, I know Kyle, you come at this from a historian's perspective, there's also ways in which beyond what is in the, or I should say a big part of history is also what's not in the written record. And there's so much, whether it is oral history or culture, that is a big part of us understanding our past and the way it shows up in our present, whether it's food, whether it's jewelry making, whether it's language reclamation, right? So I'm curious, Elizabeth, if you can speak to a little bit of the where we've been through your lens as an artist. Wow, I was about to be off the hook for answering. Just joking. Yeah, thank you for asking me. So I think my lens is a little bit complex. I'm an artist, I'm a marine scientist, I'm a long-time resident, lifelong resident, what am I thinking, here in the Northeast. And I come from a particular linguistic, cultural, philosophical family. So yeah, so there's difficulty in monolithic examples, just Indian, just black, nationwide, North America-wide, Western Hemisphere-wide, is there's distinctions in philosophy of life and what's acceptable and what's not. And norms towards violence, even, that get handed down today. So some things that are not okay for larger, Algonquian, linguistic, cultural, philosophical folks might be okay or entertainable in a different area, et cetera, et cetera. And then you have all the intricate stories of rugged things that happened in different parts of the country at different times, sometimes beginning very early. And I think that the complexity, we're framing this in a historical way, both longer term historical, when you spoke of the Aztecs, which thank you very much, and also more recently, when you spoke of California, which I appreciate as well. The stresses that we face, and I think as someone who's identified very strongly as Native American, I'll use the we for Native people. There's also strong connections in my family and my lineage with African American as well, both directly and through marriage and community. Those stresses didn't just happen, as you all know, in the 17th century or in the 20th century, they happen every day. It's ongoing. There's never been, as far as I can tell, and I've looked, I'm an optimist, I used to be an optimist. There aren't breathers often, or they're so brief, you could miss it so easily. So I think if we think of ourselves as human beings, and we think of human beings as all having dignity and a right to life and a right to safety, and that resources are not for hoarding, they're for sharing, and I think I can't help as a Native person, probably as a Native woman in the Northeast. We have a strong responsibility to the land and to resources and to thinking not only of the community now, but also of our descendants and what kind of legacies we're leaving to them and how to make that wholesome, or as wholesome as we can manage. I can't help but frame it within this longer, very, very long period of climate change that's also causing a really high degree of stress, I feel, in everybody nowadays. There's gonna be frictions as folks try to work together or even as there's divisive things that come up that separate people, but I think taking the long view, I think our ancestors were so brilliant in having that wonderful oral histories short up from stories that just get handed down and handed down, not strictly for entertainment, but there's a lot of knowledge. There's knowledge about how people behave. There's knowledge about, yes, times can get really stressful. Here's what you do so you don't act out against others or you don't harm yourself. Here's what we're gonna build for you. We're gonna make this beautiful community and teach you how to get it running and thriving and happy and rich, and the richness might not be the kind that we think of when we hear the word rich nowadays, right? Or up till now, perhaps I'll say, I think there's a lot more tolerance for alternatives and those alternatives aren't necessarily new. Some of them are so old and they've continued because they work. So I think it's getting back to our respective values, giving people time and space, understanding that stress and conflict are actually finite. Nothing goes on forever, although I began this by saying, we've had stress all this time. It's still kind of in terms of the earth's time and the universe's time, it's still just a moment. And I think we all, I believe in agency, both at the bigger official political governmental level, but I think also at the individual level, agency is so important. And I think showing that agency, taking the initiative, keeping open minds, being respectful, those are so needed. I just feel like the new generation's coming up, they're just gonna need so much from us. I don't think we can waste any time. That's just not what I feel like now. And I feel like also I'm not sure that that's new either. I think our ancestors were very forward-looking and I think they were so careful in kind of laying breadcrumbs for us and making sure certain things got protected or making sure we knew this is why the land's important. It's not, we're not just gonna say that to sound poetic because we're Indians. It can sound like that sometimes, which is lovely, but there's real reasons why people express the affection for place that they do or that they have. And I think hearing those again and again from our various cultures, it just resonates and it has so much to offer us for how to take care of the land, how to take care of ourselves. I think as a native person, I don't really see a separation. So the discussion is gonna be framed a little bit different coming from, I think Wampanoag people or indigenous people strictly depending on if it's a very sort of culturally oriented discussion and if people have the agency and the freedom to be able to speak clearly and freely, which doesn't always translate. I think that anything's possible and in looking at the history here in the Northeast, I can't speak for the country because I don't know. I just don't think that our ancestors here believed in slavery. I don't think they had a concept of hoarding. You hoard and what are you gonna do? Spend your time building a house that's four times the size that you need and it's New England. So then you spend all your time cutting down the trees to heat the house so you can keep your hoarded. What is that? I mean I think your community would say okay, I'm gonna have an intervention here because this is crazy and this is a terrible example and it's not sustainable so you gotta stop now. I think there's always times that you can ground yourself and I think regardless of, it's easy to think because there's been so much disruption and displacement and folks have been moved and places have been developed. It's easy to get really abstract in thinking, well this is a good area, this is a bad area. This one has been ruined, this is perfect. Suburbs are great. Gag. I can barely tolerate the suburbs, I'm sorry. Yeah, it's gross. It's all the earth, it's right there, regardless of our backgrounds. She's right here, she's taking care of me this morning as I wandered the city without a clue. And I just think sometimes those principles are really good to remember, to ground us before we come together to discuss the past, the present, where we're going in the future because we're blessed with some of these constants and I think we can embody some of those things too and therefore instead of treating conflict as a perpetual inevitability, I think our common humanity, I think is the way to go personally. And I'd probably go our time. No, no, no, thank you Elizabeth. Scott, I want to turn to you, thank you for the offering you gave at the beginning and I'm curious if you can expound a little bit about what, for a few of those, what drew you to share that or from your deep and extensive work with food adding to this thread of conversation of where we've been. You know, I'm a hyperverbal. Some people say I have verbal diarrhea at times. So I'm always trying to get some thoughts out and as I was thinking about traveling here and trying to understand my presence and responsibility, it put me to thinking in addition to which I'm teaching a course right now called Two Courses, Race, Food and Justice from the field to the table that alternative is looking in the 20th century between African American, Native American, Asian and Latin, a little less so, realities beginning initially with conquest and then mostly 20th century to question the primacy of European domination and hegemony and also a course on African diaspora religions and media around religious practices across the diaspora that makes me have to look at Native American or First Nations texts and ways of thinking as well as African American. I was stuck in that circle when or before when I heard this new to me, Oya as gender and I had been in this smudging time really focusing on this tree outside and thinking about that it could be a roco or tempo, the tree deity and Oya in a Yoruba sense, the goddess that controls the wind was talking to me through the tree about being present and so I think often and I felt in that circle time since we had meditation about the ancestors I have from Fall River in New Bedford that I've recently learned or Wapanoa that I didn't know, my mother, grandmother, her mother, her mother's mother, my dad, his mother, his father all came to me in that space so I felt like I had a responsibility, I didn't know that was gonna happen to be present in that way. To briefly talk about food I mentioned or you mentioned about me and I guess I did too intergenerational teaching and learning and the easy way I say that anyone has ever made pasta by hand? You take a cup or two of flour and you put it on a table in the most classic way you push your fist in it to make what I call when I used to teach cooking a volcano, you break an egg in it, you might put a little bit of salt or a little oil and then you whisk it if I use the volcano metaphor, the edges of the volcano until you get a dough. Depending on the day, its humidity, its heat, its coolness, you'll get a ring of flour that circles the dough ball that you're gonna create women's knowledge and the economy of thrift understands engineering and chemistry to say I know I need but I'm not sure how much but what I don't need will be left for the next time so I won't waste. And if somebody is near me, younger than me or my age, they will learn this too. You cannot sing, dance, play an instrument or cook without the aid of another human being at some point in the process to help you along the path to knowledge. I'm very concerned in this time we live where and I saw this when I was a chef where the young savant who exists and I believe in genius. I love prints, cannot see the need for their elders is as much a detriment as the climate change that was brought to our attention in terms of hurting Mother Earth. And so intergenerationally for me, I felt the responsibility to try to think about it so I would bring myself more present to this place. Powerful offering Scott, thank you. With the remaining time we have left, I wanna offer a question that I hope you'll pass through the lens of your own lived experience and perspective but as a larger group over the course of the next two days, we are going to be in a space of learning from each other and sharing our experiences of where we've, where we found challenges, where we found successes in coming together and reaffirming why coming together matters. So with the five minutes we have left, what do you feel like needs to be or could be named before entering that conversation? There is, we can't carry the fullness of the past into this moment. So there is, we have these precious two days together to spend but I know I'm firmly of the belief that we can't move forward until we understand where we've been. So if there's anything that you feel that is worth putting into this space as we enter into this time together, please do. Does this work? Yeah, good. I guess I thought I would say whenever we're talking about tribal ancestral presence in regions, I find that the land acknowledgments have complicated that. Because I think we all do that within our tribal communities as a protocol. When we go into a space, if I travel to Oklahoma, for example, I'm sure you know Ronnie, I would say, oh, you know, who's land am I on? I'd like to acknowledge properly, you know, while I'm here, you know, just as a way of respecting and observing the fact that other people have been stewarding, their knowledge has been taken care of the land. It's really good to be really well informed about what's happened over time, but I've noticed among non-native, I think, folks, bringing up loss and genocide and removal. I feel like that grief very quickly gets transformed into, well, maybe we can make a tribe. Maybe the tribe will just come back. Yeah, well, you know, just be careful, I think more broadly, you know, across the country. Be careful what's the difference between forging good relationships, being responsible, thinking about actual sustainable stewardship and really wishful thinking to very quickly move past some really dreadful things that have happened, both in the long past, but also in the 1920s in Massachusetts or, you know, the 1930s or, you know, yeah, it's, there's just a, there's a lot. And I think it sounds nice, you know, to reframe things and everybody's included and everybody's here and everything's great and we're gonna just move together now and fix everything. But it's like, you know, I'm there sitting there thinking like, wait a minute, what just happened? Did I miss something? So that, you know, not to bring the discussion down, but I just wanna be, I wanna understand, I wanna make sure that we understand collectively, very broadly really what we're discussing and how we're gonna frame discussions and work towards things like that. I'm not saying this is something anyone here does, but I'm just, sometimes I'm a little concerned. And what I'll just say about that is, I was so moved yesterday by something someone said about the word reconciliation and language like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which has, you know, been used in Canada with First Peoples, that the challenge of reconciliation, reconciliation assumes harm, or coming together after harm between two equal parties. And to move forward in a good way without acknowledgment of, and without restorative justice is, you know, it feels like an avoidance of discomfort and we need to be able to sit in it, I agree. Scott, I saw you're on the mic. Is this on? Yeah. I really respect what you said and I think it's very difficult to be an active listener and it's much easier for people to wanna inject their thought. And to be an active listener, and for me, we've said it already here, agency really matters and action as well. I, as I mentioned, I've recently had, the last few years, learned that I have native blood, but, you know, it's something that, it's new to me, but when I hear, especially these last, I guess four years, this land acknowledgement, I said, well, isn't it time to be active and not just gestural and really understand what the implications are as well as the fact that for some people, as you mentioned, there's genocide, there's trauma, there's PTSD. I was talking to somebody yesterday, the day before, about fear and literally fear of blackness and it was somebody who was a foreign national and they asked me, my colleague who knew this woman, asked me if I had fear. I said, well, you know, there's places I have fear in this country, but the places I really have fear are the ones that don't seem fearful because they look in quotes normative, but they, I know a black man in their world and so I don't like the fact that I have to feel that and that somebody has to be able to listen to my reality to understand what that existence is that means being a very active listener, not just empathetic and compassionate, but really thinking about change and acting on it and I think that's the harder work that we have to do that continues to make us to redefine, reevaluate and reinvest in ways that maybe we haven't done wholeheartedly to date and need to. Thank you and on that note, I'm going to wrap us up as we are out of time so thank you Scott and Kyle and Elizabeth for your contributions, I so appreciate it. And for those on TV, thank you so much for joining us.


Personal Finance PowerPoint Presentation, Group Health Insurance, prepare to get financially fit by practicing personal finance. Insurance fits into our long-term risk mitigation strategy where we use the adage of measure twice, cut once, having a formal strategy, looking something like this. We're gonna set the goals, we're gonna develop a plan, we're gonna put the plan in action, and then we're gonna review the results and repeat periodically. We're now looking into health insurance. Most of this information can be found at Investopedia, Group Health Insurance, which you can find online. Take a look at the references, resources, continue your research from there. This is by Julia Kagan, updated July 6th, 2021. What is a Group Health Insurance Plan? Group Insurance Health Plans provide coverage to a group of members usually comprised of company employees or members of an organization. So typically, of course, we're talking about groups here, groups typically being from employees of a company or possibly from another organization. The benefit of the group plans would be that you might get a beneficial group right from it. So Group Health members usually receive insurance at a reduced cost because the insurer's risk is spread across a group of policy holders. So the rationale behind this from the insurance perspective would be that if I could get more information, know more about the group or policies holders that I have and I have more people involved, I might be able to lower my potential risk. And as the risk is lowered, then you might be able to get lower premiums involved. That means lower costs, of course, to the purchasers. So there are plans such as these in both the United States, the U.S. and Canada, how Group Health Insurance works. Group Health Insurance Plans are purchased by companies and organizations and then offered to their employees, their members or employees. So clearly we're talking about the group, oftentimes being a company that would then get the group plan and offer it to the employees. Plans can only be purchased by groups, which means individuals cannot purchase the coverage through these plans. So if you, usually when you're looking for insurance, that's one of the reasons that oftentimes your first thought would be, well, can I get it from my employer because they might have other options available, including Group Plans and possibly tax incentives for that to be the first place to go. So plans usually require at least 70% participation in the plan to be valid because of the many differences, insurance insurers, plan types, costs, terms and conditions between plans, no two or ever the same. So clearly they're gonna be different depending on the particular plan for the particular group. So once the organization chooses a plan, group members are given the option to accept or decline coverage. So clearly they're not requiring the members of the corporation, for example, to be part of the group coverage, but they're gonna get the plan in place and see if people want to be participating in it. Many people clearly would because usually if you can get those beneficial rates, it would be favorable to both sides of the transaction, the company, the employee as well as the insurance company. So in certain area plans may come in tiers where insurer parties have the option of taking basic coverage or advanced insurance with add-on. So depending on how complex the coverage you have is, there might be multiple tiers within the group plan. The premiums are split between organization and its members based on the plan. Health insurance coverage may also be extended to the immediate family and or other dependents of group members for an extra cost. So if you're part of a group plan, it's tied through the work. You might be saying, what about the members of my family? And you may be able to get them involved in it as well. The cost of group health insurance is usually much lower than individual plans because the risk is spread across a higher number of people. That's one of the points. If you can get that group policy, it could be beneficial to the insurance provider because they can lower risk, might be able to pass some of that lower risk onto the people purchasing the policy in the terms of the premiums beneficial to the company, the employee and the insurance company. So simply put, this type of insurance is cheaper and more affordable than individual plans available on the market because more people buy into the plan. History of group health insurance. Group health insurance in the United States originated during the 20th century, the idea of collective coverage first entered into public discussion during World War I and the Great Depression. So we had the Great Depression and World War I, which was obviously a tough time at that point. And there were many strategies that were put in place to deal with the problems of the Great Depression, a lot of top-down kind of strategies, most of which didn't really go through, but it seems like they were just kind of throwing a lot of laws out there. And then some of those laws have stuck until this point in time. So soldiers fighting in World War I received coverage through the War Risk Insurance Act, which Congress later extended to cover servicemen's dependence. In the 1920s, healthcare costs increased, healthcare costs increased to the point that they exceeded most consumers' ability to pay. The Great Depression exacerbated this problem dramatically, but resistance from the American Medical Association and the life insurance industry defeated several efforts to establish any form of national health insurance system. So you've got this same kind of arguments that we can see today with regards to healthcare in terms of is it something that we can make run by the government possibly or nationalize it in some way versus having more kind of market conditions within it. And oftentimes when you hear these kind of arguments that meaning we want a more top-down kind of government-organized system as opposed to a market-based system, then it often stems from places of when there's problems, like in the Depression and during wartime, because during those times, you often have the top-down control that's necessary in order to recalibrate people's efforts towards a war effort. In a war, you need a top-down kind of system oftentimes because it's an emergency type of situation. So a lot of the laws that were put in place during that time, people look back on it if they like the government kind of control stuff. They look at it with nostalgia, saying look how everything worked good during those times when we had that, everybody was on the same page and doing the same stuff. But of course, one of the reasons those worked during that time is because we were trying to win the war. So when you have those same policies in a non-war kind of situation, you have the same kind of top-down regulatory control. People behave differently. So it's kind of an interesting dynamic. With regards to the Medicare system, whether we're gonna nationalize it, whether you can come up with some kind of national system, you have the same kind of problems you have with other kinds of industries. It's just that they're more pronounced when in the medical system. So if you have a market-based system, for example, the people that can't afford the appropriate amount of healthcare is very clear and everyone can see, well, that's a tragedy, that's a problem. But if you move it to a completely run by the government system and you remove the market forces on the system, then it's quite likely, as we would see the normal result from an economic standpoint, is that you lose the market forces and the industry becomes less efficient. So you might actually be able to give service to less people as there's kind of a decline or at least not as much of an increase in the advances of the healthcare system. So the more competitive system that we still have in the US, for example, does lead us to be able to come up with vaccines and that kind of stuff, possibly faster than other countries that have more of a top-down kind of system. So the question would be then, how could you still have a market system or use the good things in the market forces so that it will actually drive innovation and be able to service more people like markets do while still being able to provide coverage that would be necessary on a wide scale and obviously those kind of debates continue ever forward. So this opposition would remain strong into the 20th century. So employer-sponsored group health insurance plans first emerged in the 1940s as a way for employers to attract employees when wartime legislation mandated flattening wages. So you can see once again during the war and during depression time, during the 1930s, you had all these laws that were in place. Many economists think that a lot of them were not good in the long run, but some of them kind of stuck around. You could see what the results would be. If you try to flatten someone's wages, you say there's a cap on wages, we can't put more wages in because we need that money going somewhere else or something like that. Then people will still, under normal conditions, try to pay good employees better because they want the good employees. So the good employee is not gonna say, well, I'm just gonna work for anybody because everybody is gonna pay me the same. They're gonna work for the people that treat them better with benefits and other kind of things. So then you got these benefits, these benefits being something like the health insurance, for example, another form of pay, another way to pay someone that's under the regulation. So this was a popular tax-free benefit which employers continue to offer after the war's end, but it failed to address the needs of retirees and other non-working adults. Federal efforts to provide coverage to those groups led to the social security amendments of the 1965, which laid the foundation for Medicare and Medicaid. So you can see how this all kind of builds together from that point in time where there was a lot of issues going on, of course. So benefits of the group health insurance plan, who are the benefits? The primary advantage of a group plan is that it spreads risk across a pool of insured individuals and that risk spreading could lower the risk to the insurance company, lowering the cost of the premiums. This benefits the group members by keeping premiums low and insurers can better manage risk when they have a clearer idea of who they are covering. So insurers can exert even greater control over costs through health maintenance organizations. Those are the HMOs in which providers contract with insurers to provide care to members. So the more control they have in that instance to know who's involved in the medical process and decision-making in their opinion lowers the risk and then possibly they can lower the premiums there. The HMO model tends to keep costs low at the cost of restrictions on the flexibility of care afforded to individuals. Then we have the preferred provider organizations. These are the PPOs in contrast to the HMOs offer the patient a greater choice of doctors and easier access to specialists who tend to charge higher premiums than the HMOs. The vast majority of group health insurance plans are employer-sponsored benefit plans. So that's why typically when we think of health insurance we typically think of the employer first to see if we have coverage there because that might be the most beneficial place we have the capacity to get coverage from. It is possible, however, to purchase group coverage through an association other organization. Examples such as plans include those offered by the American Association of Retired Persons, the AARP. So if you don't have access from an employer you might be saying, well, what other groups can I look into that might give me a group plan? So they got the AARP, the Freelancers Union and the Wholesale Membership Clubs. Insurance options for uninsured individuals. Not everyone is covered by a group health insurance plan for many decades these uninsured people were forced to bear the cost of healthcare on their own but that has changed. Government-sponsored health plans continue to provide care to those left out of employer-sponsored group health insurance plans as national health expenditures have climbed past 17.7% of GDP gross domestic product, the Affordable Care Act of 2010 substituted a nationwide mandate that each taxpayer joined a group plan for this sort of single payer solution that has faced stiff opposition since the 1930s. So this is another way to try to think about well, how can we get some government intervention or some rules and regulations here to try to spread healthcare over a broader range? One of the ideas would be that, and this becomes quite complicated, but one concept would be well, healthcare has a free rider kind of problem which is an economic term which basically says that the people that opt out of healthcare because we still wanna provide a minimum of health services to people. In other words, if you go to the emergency room and you need care and it's an emergency, then you're still gonna get some level of care. Generally, it would be the general idea and if they don't have coverage, then of course no one's paying for that care. There's a free rider problem. So if people decide not to opt into the healthcare system, they still get some level of care in general just the way the system is set up and therefore the people that are paying into the healthcare system are basically picking up that coverage. So the argument would be well, what if we can kind of force everybody to get some minimal level of care or some minimal level of insurance then you would eliminate the free rider problem and because everybody's paying into the system then it could lower the health insurance overall and have more people that would be covered into the system. So you can try to get everybody into one big pool because from an insurance standpoint, if the pool was bigger, you'd lower the risk and then you'd be able to cover more people at a lower cost and you can eliminate the free rider problem. But there's a lot of issues that came up with regards to that one being, is it legal for you to force someone to purchase insurance? Because that seems like something that might be unconstitutional, it was argued possibly and then it seems like a lot of kind of control situation from all the way up on the federal side of things. So there's a lot of complexity that would be involved in that. So there's gonna be, there's some back and forth with that argument, you can see the argument in the pros and cons of it. According to government data, roughly 23 million Americans are taking advantage of health insurance under the ACA according to the most recent set of numbers from the 2019 under the Obama administration. People who remained uninsured under the ACA were required to pay at health insurance mandate. So this was repealed by the Trump administration which stated it penalized people unnecessarily. So in other words, if you're trying to get everyone that's gonna be on the health insurance to pay some form of health insurance so that you don't have the free rider effect, well, how do you do that? First, you got the problem of, well, is it gonna be a government mandated thing that you're required to do because that might be unconstitutional, maybe was the argument. And then two, well, how would you enforce it? Well, you could try to penalize people on their taxes to force them to do that. And then the question, well, is that a tax or is that a penalty? Is that legal with regards to the tax code? And so the argument, you know, the debate continues. Example of group health insurance. UnitedHealthcare, a division of UnitedHealthGroupUHC is one of the nation's largest health insurers. It offers a buffet of group health insurance options for all types of businesses. Include our medical plans and specialty supplemental plans, such as dental, vision, and pharmacy. Small business plans are available in most states for companies with one to 99 employees. In addition to its proprietary plans, UnitedHealthcare offers federally sponsored marketplace options, small business health options. That's the shop SHOP for small businesses. In exchange, some employers qualify for the temporary small business tax credit up to 50%. Mid-sized businesses with between 100 and 2,999 employees have various options available, including bundles. Large businesses with 3,000 or more employees qualify as national accounts, which have more services and healthcare features, including the ability to customize plan offerings. What is a group health plan? Group health plans are employer group sponsored plans that provide healthcare to members of their families. The most common types of group health plan is group health insurance, which is health insurance extended to members, such as employees of a company or members of an organization. What is a group health cooperative? A group health cooperative, also known as Mutual Insurance, is a health insurance plan owned by the insured members. Insurance is offered at a reduced cost and what they collect from members is based on claims paid. The cost of care is spread out across the insured population. How many employees do you need to qualify for group health insurance? Many group health insurers offer plans to companies with one or more employees. The type of plan available, however, may vary according to the size of the business. For example, UnitedHealthcare provides various plans for small businesses with one to 99 employees, mid-sized businesses with 100 to 2,999 and large employers with 3,000 or more employees. What are group health insurance benefits? Group health insurance plans offers medical covers to members of an organization or employees of a company. They may also provide supplemental health plans such as dental, vision and pharmacy separately or as a bundle. Risk is spread across the insured population which allows the insurer to charge low premiums and members enjoy low cost insurance which protects them from unexpected costs arising from medical events. How much does group health insurance cost? The average group health insurance policy costs a little more than $7,400 for an individual annually with employers paying approximately 80% of the employees 80% and the employees paying the difference. Family coverage averaged slightly more than 21,000. Bottom line, group health insurance plans are one of the most affordable types of health insurance plans available because risk is spread among insured persons. Premiums are considerably lower than traditional individual health insurance plans. This is possible because the insurer assumes less risk as more people participate in the plan for employees who ordinarily would not be able to afford individual health insurance. It is an attractive benefit.