I think we are ready for art and celebration. Good afternoon. Hello everyone, welcome. My name is Joseph and I'm a Youth Librarian for San Francisco Public Library. This is our second program with our amazing partners at the Museum of African Diaspora or MOAD. Thank you MOAD. For today's workshop, you will need a few supplies that you can easily find in your home. My friends and colleagues behind the scene that makes our presentation today happen will share the supply list in the chat. We are so happy you are here with us to continue more than a month, which is how we celebrate Black History Month at San Francisco Public Library. We call our celebration more than a month in an effort to emphasize the reflection, open dialogue, interdisciplinary education and shared advocacy needs to take place in our communities during Black History Month as well as all year round. Check out the more than a month webpage of San Francisco Public Library to see our upcoming events, our amazing book list and much, much more. And speaking of upcoming events, we hope that you can join us next week when acclaimed author Jason Reynolds speaks as this year's the Effie Lee Morris Lecture Series offered in partnership among SFPL's Main Children's Center, SFPL's African American Center, Friends of the San Francisco Public Library and the San Francisco Human Rights Commission. Wiener of the Coretta Scott King John Steptoe Award for New Talent, 2017 NAACP Image Award and multiple other honors, author Jason Reynolds spent last year, 2020, serving as the National Ambassador for Young People's Literature, sharing his transformative journey as a writer and a reader with youth during a year previously unimaginable transformation. Join us for a landmark lecture and a creative exploration of the theme of transformation. And be prepared to be transformed. Before we start, a huge thanks to the Friends of SFPL for their generous support of this special Make-Do Series. We can't do this without them. And without further ado, let me welcome Sadeg Ubreyes, Education Program Manager. Sadeg born in Ethiopia is a multidisciplinary artist, educator and beekeeping enthusiast. Her creative work and teaching style are greatly influenced by the wonderful visual artists, theater performers and storytellers of our childhood community. And please let's give a warm welcome to Sadeg. Thank you, Joseph. Thank you so much. I think you do such an amazing job of introducing this program. And thank you for, and introducing me. And thank you for San Francisco Public Library for inviting Moad to do this workshop with you. I'm pretty excited. And I will share my screen in just a second. Oops, that might not my email. Sorry, I'll be right here. And we'll start in just a second. Joseph, are you able to see my screen just fine? Yes. Okay, perfect. Welcome everyone. My name is Sadeg Ubreyes and I am the Education Program Manager at Museum of the African Diaspora. And I'm just thrilled to lead this activity with you. I have a couple of things that I have to, we need to do before we start our workshop. This is mainly an image transfer workshop with a male art twist. So we'll get to that in just a minute. Before that, I would like to ask, I would like to invite everyone to just take a deep breath and stand in solidarity with me with Black Lives Matter. Thank you. As many of us are settler, immigrants or descendants of those forcefully brought to this continent, our institutions were founded upon exclusions and erasures of the Indigenous peoples whose land we are located. With deep respect, my life knowledge is that even in virtual space, our people, our work and our network servers are our native lands. And thank the Indigenous people of the Bay Area who have sorted this land throughout the generations. Thank you, everyone.  And I would say this workshop is mostly about image transfer, but then it will give us enough materials to do male art after we leave this workshop. And I'll show you, I'll give examples and we have plenty of time to do the workshop. Oh, by the way, you know, I was so happy to find this image of James Baldwin. This is a letter that he sent to his family. My love to all of you, see soon, Jamie. And I have never seen his name as Jamie. So it was really nice to see it here. And he's a prominent writer, civil rights activist. And in so many things that he has done and we also can thank him for helping the success of other writers such as Maya Angel. Now, if we talk about James Baldwin, we can go on forever. But I know we are with San Francisco Public Library. You can find books and a bunch of resources about him. And as a background of this schedule, you see his letter as well that was written to his sister. But today we'll have an introduction which we're halfway through. We'll show some examples of letters and we will start, this is not a drawing project. It's a transfer project. So my mistake on that one will do Q&A and closing. But what we have to decide it also is that if you have any questions at any point during the workshop, you can just let us know in, Joseph will help me get the questions. And it's Joseph. How many of you, I can't see anyone. So if you raise your hands, I will not know. How many of you have written a letter in the last six months or sent a postcard? All right, I can see you raised hands. Oh, nice. Oh wow, okay. That's fantastic. Wow, that's really great. Some of us have deemed that art kind of gone, but I'm so glad that we're keeping it going. This image that you see in front of you is an addressed envelope from James Baldwin to his sister, Paula Baldwin. The envelope was set from Robert College and it's a private high school located in Istanbul in Turkey. So he's sending this to his sister and we can see how it was when it was dated and when it was the stamp there. And you can also see the date stamp. So it's important to save these envelopes as well. And we know that where it says para avión, it means air mail. It's by airplane, it's air mail. So it probably took a while, but not as long as it would have taken had it been sent by ship. And we see other letters also that James Baldwin had written. And it's just, I just wanted to share this important person in American history, this important writer, how nice it is to see his name and his handwriting to a letter. Most of the time letters are intimate and important. And sometimes we even write our secrets in letters. So yeah, so I'm going to point that out. All right, before I go on too much, I talked too much about James Baldwin. We're going to do image transfer today. We're going to get messy. So if you have tablecloths or other things, I just know that it's going to be a bit messy, a bit wet. So just to keep that in mind. And just to talk about types of image transfer techniques, how many of you worked with Mod Podge? I love Mod Podge and they're not paying me to say this, but I love Mod Podge. And there are other ways of transferring. We use glue and other ways. I see Nicky, yep, Joseph. I see folks that have used Moshposh for image transfer. Other ways of transferring images is as early 19th century, you can see how they were transferring images is by pressing two, one plain surface on top of image on a plain surface and pressing it on and then peeling it off. And you can see that on the transfer tablet image. And then you can see over here cyanotype, which is a blueprint essentially, is as a photographic printing process that produces cyan blueprint and it uses light. So this is an algae or algae. I don't know how, depends on how you say it. And engineers used to process this process into the 20th century and it's a low cost process. And oftentimes we see this also they sell them in packets, you can take them outside and you put something on top like your car key or something and the image is transferred. Today, the transfer we're going to do is not gonna require any of these things. We're just gonna use water, soap, clear tape and then the brown paper is for our letter. So that has nothing, not much to do with the transfer. Pages from magazines, newspapers and other printing media, which are also products of image transfers. Printing is just an act of image transfer. Although it's a bit complicated in a way of technology. Scissors, paper towel, I realized that I don't have my paper towel, but I'll go, I'll get it. Yep, there it is, okay. And then liquid soap, if you don't have it, that's also not necessarily, it's not the most important ingredient in this list of materials. Cutting board, that's optional. If you have a table that can hold water, that's fine. And or water will not destroy, that's fine. And tablespoon, that's also optional. Great. These are some of my transfers, transfer, sorry, not yet. We're not ready to start yet, it just jumped. So these are some of my transfer images and these are images that I've cut out of a magazine, put on tape, wash the paper pulp from the back of them, have dried them, while they maintain their adhesive nature, I transform into another object like cups or vase, but now we're going to do mail art. Great, I'm gonna set up my workspace. And while I do that, I will post the material list. So you can go and grab those. We'll be about two minutes. Does anyone have any questions? Yay, I hear Sherman elementaries in the house. Awesome. Great, okay, thank you, Justice. Oh, sideways, but we'll be able to see. Yeah, hi, Sidney. So we have two questions. One question is, is this similar to deco-podge, right? It is very similar to deco-podge without actually using any of the other, any mosh-podge or any other things, we just use water. So it's very similar to deco-podge, yes. And then second question, does Matt Gel work as well as Mod-podge, Mod-podge? Yes, it does. It does, mosh-podge is basically a brand name. And so you could use Matt Gel for transfer as well. It really depends, you might want to use, you might want to use inkjet printed surfaces. This one, the easiest thing is that any image that has been printed on paper could work for this one. But for mosh-podge, I prefer something that's been printed on inkjet paper. See, it's still sideways. So let's see if we can turn this out, let's see there. So I've got, if you don't have packing tape, sorry, my camera is kind of turning all over the place. Yeah, that's perfect. So if you don't have the big packaging tape, as I do here, you can use the small tape. And you can layer it to make it to cover a large surface. And I'll show you what I mean by that. The first thing we're going to do is we're gonna grab our magazines. I have an old Essence Magazine here. I have read and reread. So it's time to go, for it, it's time to go into other creative uses. My screen is a little blurry, but I'll get there. There we go. So this is some old magazine. If you can select images out of it, I really like this one. This person looks really happy. And start cutting images. If you've already cut images, you can add more or you can wait for us to catch up to you. I'm just gonna cut. And it doesn't have to be cut to shape in such a way. Hi, Siday. Yes. Everybody's wondering about that gray rectangle shape. Is that something, is that a zoom thing? It is, it's my camera. Oh, it's your camera. Yeah, it's my camera. I am so sorry. It's, I'm sharing my workspace with a camera. So it's from my iPad. Oh, right. It's for your privacy. The yellow, yeah. Okay. Yeah, sorry. Thank you for noticing though. I hope it's not getting in the way of folks seeing. How is it? I think it's disappeared now. So I, let me keep this one. And what I do and what I suggest to other people to do is for collaging in any type of work that you do with magazine images or newspapers to have a Ziploc bag or a plastic bag like this where you keep all the images. So you can go back to them and you can choose whichever ones you want to use. I also teach a workshop on collaging without glue. So that helps for that. There's one image transfer that I have done as an example. If you already have images cut out, we'll jump to the next. We've got some letters. This is an envelope that is, you know, the old school. It is an envelope and it is a letter and it's all in one. And this is a letter from my father. I don't know when was this sent? Probably, you know, 10 years ago or so. But anyway, this is a letter that was sent to me. So I'm just, I'm also gonna incorporate some of the letters that I have received from my father in this one. You can see some of the stamps from my letters that you can remove these stamps and use them for these, just letter art. You can just lift some of them up or soak them in soap water and use them. So there's so much you can do. So for the images, how many images to cut out? It's really up to you. If you have small images, I would say about four or five. But remember, the point of this activity is not to finish. It's merely to get started. And so if you don't finish, if you don't transfer all of your images, you'll do it later. It's not a problem. If you are the kind of person that likes to watch first and then do later, that is also absolutely fine. So I would say five small images. If you have one large image, you can also just work with that. And is tearing the images okay? Oh, that is actually perfect. And that reminds me, one of the things that I use to tear is I use a strategy ruler. And you can tear just like that, just with your hands. No problem. I also like to do this. So you can get that kind of jagged edge at the end. It's not perfect. So you can use that. So there's so many ways of doing this. It does not have to be perfect. It only has to be perfect for you. And does it make a difference if you cut out the images from matte paper versus glossy paper? You know what? Glossy paper works really well, but I would also like you to try matte paper as well. You might actually find that it has such an interesting effect. Some of the words might show, but maybe not the images, but maybe part of the images in this has that sort of ambiguous look to it. So you might actually like that. I want to also share with folks that the 2020 catalog had voices of the Harlem Renaissance catalog for the postal office had the voice of Harlem Renaissance. And out of that, I cut out these stamps. You see the Snow Day right here. It was written by a black writer. You can see so many important images, important historical figures in black history. So I cut those out and I transfer them. So speaking of male art, this is US postal office. Also, it doesn't necessarily have to be faces or animals or anything like that. So it could just be patterns like this, just lines and it could just be just words as well. So I'm going to start the transfer process. The most exciting part is toward the end, but now I'm going to take my tape and the tape has to be overlapped. So the tape has to overlap just a little bit if you want one sheet of transfer. And you can do it from top to bottom or left to right. So it's not any set rules about that. So you see how I'm going to overlap it just a little bit. Like that, I'm covering my smiley face. One of your images, you can go ahead and cover the image with tape. Make sure that the tape overlaps. Be ready for the most exciting part of this activity. Another question is how big should the brown paper be? Not big at all. It is actually while we soak our art is I'm going to show you. I'm just going to cut it to the size of the letter that I showed you. And it's just going to be cut out to this size. So probably, let me say about four inches. I'm five inches by three inches. Yeah, just about, yeah. Five inches by three inches or not a whole lot. All right, thank you. You're welcome. Brown my paper towel because I got a little messy with most artists. And this is my bowl, my glass bowl. I chose a glass bowl because I would like you to see it. You do not have to have a glass bowl. Any kind of bowl would work. A large bowl is preferable, but this could also work. I'm going to pour, I have some soap in there. Just two drops of soap, not a lot, two drops of soap. And I'm going to add water. I'm going to use a little bit smaller. I'll use this as my cell phone cover on cups. And I'll show you some samples as well of how you can do that. This is the image. It's covered in, sorry, the brightness of my cameras. All right, I don't know if you can see. You can see that it's overlapped. The tape is overlapped. I'll put it into the soap. And I'm going to submerge it into the water. Is it possible if you move it to the left a little bit? Absolutely. Thank you so that we can see it. Thank you. You're welcome. So it's, while it's soaking, what we can do is get your paper bag, and the brown paper bag goes through that. I'm just cutting it from left to right just because this is the thinner part of it. And I can save the bottom part for my trash bin or my scraps. I can save the lower part. So I can just cut the top part, save the bottom part. Questions regarding the soaking part? Yeah. How do you soak it? And do you soak the outsides of the paper? Just one side, if you immerse it totally, that's a great question. If you immerse it totally, just one side is enough. The tape side up, facing you, or facing up would be better. And as the time really depends, it really depends how you can test it is by rubbing kind of like this. And if that image comes off, if the pulp of the paper comes off easily, then it's ready. I like to soak it for about five minutes. I've had some ready in just a minute. It's really interesting. I see two in there. Oops, that one's a bit delayed because we need where this is going, right? And someone requests to slow down a little bit. You got it. Thank you. Yep, no problem. And I remember the soap in the water was two drops, approximately two drops. There's two small drops. If you don't have soap, this soap just speeds up the process because it makes the paper softer. Otherwise, if you don't have soap, it's absolutely fine. You can do it with just water. It's just water. And thank you for that. And while you're busy cutting your paper, someone wants to share that there is a SEP Correspondence Co-op, is a male art and a Correspondence Group that meets monthly through the SEPL. Oh, that's great. I did not know about that thing. So thank you so much. Make a note. How's everyone doing? Hopefully, creating wonderful things. You might do one more in this book. Folks are working on their transcripts. A lot of landscape. And this is what we're not going to try to do this week. This time, I will use the smaller tape. So if you have smaller tape, this is... I don't know what you guys are doing. I always think that we have Sherman Ohman through Jonas today. Today? Yes. Do you mind moving it to the left side again? Sure. We can't see. I think you're just taping the images, right? Yes. Are you not able to see? Yeah. I think it's that rectangle. But I think you're just... This is your second image with the tape. Yeah. Thank you. You're welcome. I wish I could do it horizontally. I can try. And we have questions also about the brown paper. Yeah. Someone wants to know what we will be doing with the paper. The brown paper? Yeah. The brown paper is the base for after we make our transfers. And I'll show you quickly with my already made transfer work on the paper. I'll show you how I will be taping it on. So it's already... The adhesive is on it. So I don't need to tape it again. So I will use it just like this. You can decorate it with a letter and then we fold it and make it an envelope on its own. And if there's images, this is from a grocery shop that prints on their bags. If you have images, you can also work with those images and put a stamp, put adverse here, and your adverse here, the person's adverse here, and you can send it to them. You can just take it right here. And this is a complete letter. And then this is inspired by a letter that came from Ethiopia, which is in East Africa, from my father, which is on the back. It's a letter. And when you fold it, it's an envelope. It's an envelope and a letter at the same time. That's right. It's so cool. Yeah. Yeah. And most things, it's already comes with a paid stamp. It's something that you buy from a post office. Since we're not going to do that right now, we're going to make our own. The top is for your... The top is for your address. The bottom, the bottom right is for the address of the person you're going to send it to. So that's what we're doing. And I wonder who you're going to send this to. Family, friends. I remember back when I was younger, we had penthouse. I remember when you were going to send this letter to your teacher, friend, your sweetheart. Yeah. So is it possible to work on the left side of, so that people can fully see the, what's going on? The left side? The left side or wherever you're working. So it's away from... That's perfect right there actually. Okay. I can convene it for you. Yeah, it works. I can make it work. Yeah. Awesome. Thank you. You're welcome. So this is my second image. I'll use the same water. I'll use the same water. Just a little bit. You can use the same bowl. Hopefully we have a larger bowl than mine. This is just to show you. I'm going to get this one out because I think it's just been in the house. So while I'm there, right over the bowl, I'm just going to roll my fingers. I'm going to roll the paper. You see how the paper just comes off? Just comes off. Just like that. And the image stays. That's what we call transfer. Because the image gets transferred onto the plastic. Onto the tape. And the paper just comes right off. It's very satisfying to watch. I think it's very exciting here. I'm going to go ahead and put it on the tape. And sometimes you can just rub it in this way. Mine has soap. So that's why it's easier to just slide right off. And this is my trash. I recycle it. So there you have it. And it's transparent. Perhaps you can see my hand. You can put it on the tape. You can put it on the tape. You can put it on the tape. You can put it underneath. You can put it on the window. But for the purpose of this activity, we're going to put it on our letter. What I would do is I would let it dry. First. Before. Before I put it on. My brown paper letter. The brown paper is a thicker. It's a thicker paper. That's a great question. I love these questions. For that, what I would advise is to let the image dry on the cutting board that I suggested. So if you have a cutting board, let the image dry face down the adhesive side. Excuse me. On the cutting board and have it dry. And then when you realize that it's dry and it sticks through the paper, you can put it on the paper. You can peel it off and put it on the paper. This one is. So it can handle the wetness of the paper. And there's my first image. My second one is soaking. Any other questions at all? One minute. Finish this. While you're doing that, I can make the announcement because people were very interested about the correspondence. So if you'd like more information, please contact the book arts at SFPL. At book arts at SFPL.org. Yeah. Thank you for sharing it. This one is not soaked all the way through yet. So it's, it's taking. Rushing it just a little bit, you know, one way I can find out is by doing this. And if paper, if the paper doesn't come off, then it needs to be soaked a little bit longer. Another tip is a little bit of the water is a little warmer. It works even better. It's a little cold in San Francisco today. I mean, I can't complain. There you go. Start to see that the paper starts to come off. It's like that. So when you're drying on the cutting board, yes, is it, is it the sticky side image down on the cutting board? Yes. The sticky side down on the cutting board. Okay. Thank you. So while that continues to soak. You can start writing your letter. You basically have made a postcard. It's made an envelope. And a letter. All at once. And you can, you know, Dear Joseph. And you could write a letter here and. Hold it. Hold it this way. You can start writing your letter. You can start writing your letter. You basically have made a postcard. You can start writing your letter. Hold it this way. You can tape it. Make sure you get a stamp for it. In the person's address. It doesn't make it to them. Return address. That's what we called it. That's why we put our address on top. Put the address here. On top. And voila, you mail it. That's the letter. And it's stuck to share. And come back and see. Oh, everyone is doing. One more question. How long should we soak the transfer? It really, it really depends five to 10 minutes. You can, you can soak it as long as, you know, you can just put it in water and a couple of hours later, and you can come back and check on it. Still work. But if you're in a hurry, like I was, you can rub the back of the paper back of the adhesive to see if the paper comes off. Comes out. And that's when it tells you it's ready. The longer you wait, the most, the more vibrant the image would be. Any other questions? Any other questions, everybody. Great. One thing I would say is that I would love to see your, your creations and things that you have created. So if you can, please send us a photo of your creation at education at Mollard SF.org. You can email us at education at Mollard SF.org. Last time we had, and I don't know if I sent it to you, Joseph is, is we had images of the drawings that people did. And it was amazing. It was so nice to see it. So folks can take a photo of their letters and send them to us. I would highly, highly appreciate it. And we have one more question. Yes. Does the mat medium work the same way if you let it drive first before soaking? The mat medium, the paper or. The medium, I'd like that much, much part. That's, uh, Well, let's see. If it's, we're not using much parts today at all. And so I wouldn't get much. Okay. I, I, we're not using much parts today. I wish we were. It's a lot of fun. But for that, for, um, I don't soak, um, I don't soak much part. I would love to know what your process is, but I don't use any water on when I do much part. Except a clean. All right. I think, um, if you have any more question, please let us know. Uh, again, thank you. So Dave for sharing your amazing skill. And I really do. I really thank you, Nora. I really like your inspiration that you use your father's letter to, for this art. Um, thank you and thank you all for joining us today. We'd love to see your creation by tagging us at, as a public library and using the hashtag hashtag more than a month. And be sure to check our calendar for future virtual more than a month programs. And don't forget to save the date for next program with authors. And that's all for today. And I'm going to end this story in Maldonado on February 24th at 2pm and Jason Reynolds on February 25th at 5pm. Today's workshop will be available to replay any parts you need to view again on YouTube and share with your friends. And that's all today folks. Take good care of yourself. Thank you. And everybody said it's so funny creative. Thank you today.


Hello, my beautiful internet friends. You are looking particularly lovely today. Thank you for joining me here today for a few minutes out of your afternoon or your morning or your evening. I have noticed a trend since I have become a person with a visible disability that I wanted to chat about today, and it's something that I think comes from an incredibly kind, compassionate, loving, giving place, but I think it is something that's also worthy of discussion. Now, before we dive into the subject and the subject is perceived self-esteem, I would love it if you would consider, don't have to do it, I'm not going to tell you what to do, but if you consider subscribing to this channel at the end of this video because I am trying to beat my friend Aaron from Life of Paulos to 200,000 subscribers before he gets to 250,000 subscribers. Do you want to help me out with that? That'd be fantastic. Let's dive into the subject though. So I have noticed that people often make assumptions about what I must feel about myself as an amputee, as a person with a visible disability, and that assumption is usually that I don't like myself or that I must think I am less of a person or less worthy, and they're not the ones telling me that. They're the ones reassuring me that that is not the case, that I shouldn't feel bad about myself, that I'm worth just as much as any other person. And these conversations are often unprovoked. They aren't me expressing that I'm having a hard time and someone trying to reassure me. Oftentimes they're out of the blue, and I think it's so kind that people want to encourage me and like reassure me, but it's also kind of interesting. I think it speaks to something deeper going on, and let me explain what I mean. So there are a couple situations where this has happened. Most recently I've noticed really heavily on TikTok. Now, TikTok has a younger demographic from my understanding. I joined about two months ago. It's been so much fun to just like make silly videos. I just make silly videos. I've not made a single serious thing there.  And it's just fun, right?  Don't worry about the fact that you're missing a leg. Or they'll say, girl, don't don't worry about it.   Don't worry about it. And then I also had a beautiful encounter with someone in real life where I walked into a store. I was on crushes at the time. They could very clearly see that I was an amputee and they actually talked to me for about 20 minutes and it was such a kind emotional, passionate conversation where they so desperately wanted to convey to me, you are absolutely worthy as much as you were before you lost a leg. And to be clear, I wasn't like having a hard time this day. I wasn't, you know, in tears or whatever. I wasn't a good place, but they saw me looking visibly different and wanted to tell me, you're still beautiful. You're still worth something. And I so appreciated that they took time out of their day to give me that message. And it felt like it was really important for them to say to me. And I loved that. But all of these situations are fascinating to me because that's honestly not what I think about myself. If you've watched my channel for a while, you know that I have hard days. I have bad days. I've had moments of insecurity for sure. I've dealt with more insecurity over this past year of being an amputee than I actually thought I would. However, I've not questioned my worth or my value as a human being. And a lot of people seem to think that I do. It's like there's this assumption that you must kind of hate yourself if you're not society's definition of normal. I still haven't figured out what normal is actually supposed to mean, but I think we all kind of, or at least most of us feel like we should be normal. Like there's a pull towards a normal. I definitely felt, I don't know if you have comment down below to let me know. It seems to me as a person with a visible disability over the past year that people assume that I don't like myself because I look different. And that isn't the case, which I think is really interesting that that assumption is always made. Like so, so what is that really saying? I think it's worth thinking about. I think it's worth examining in ourselves. I have no doubt that I've thought that about other people in my life. I've no doubt that I've thought that about people who I looked at and saw as different than myself and thought they must, you know, not feel great about themselves. While that wasn't the case, we make these assumptions. And I think it's so kind to want to encourage people based on that. But also it's not necessarily true. It's not necessarily reality. And what do we do with that? So if I'm not saying that, if I'm not putting that into the world, if I'm not asking for reassurance on that, where is that coming from? And that's what I think is really interesting, specifically from like the younger audience on TikTok. I'm going to make some pure speculation here and say that I feel like it comes from a place of fear, of what someone feels like they might feel like if they were in my position. I also think that perhaps on a slightly darker end of things, which is entirely subconscious for most people, I think people do have some negative assumptions about disabilities or visible differences. And that maybe to some extent, you aren't worth as much in society. I think that that perception was definitely more true years ago than it is now, which is truly heartbreaking. No one should have ever had to have dealt with that. But unfortunately they did. People with disabilities were kind of seen as second-class citizens. And I think bits of that still remain today, but it is definitely getting better. And I would like to continue to be a part of that change. But I feel like there's so much fear when it comes to this sort of thing. There's so much fear around being different, looking different. And actually it is pretty scary. I get that. Your value and your worth is not tied to what you look like.  They're not tied to how other people perceive you.  I feel like in the society I exist in, we often assign value and worth so heavily to other things, like looking perfect, whatever that actually means, to looking a certain standard. And I feel like people see me and they're like, oh, she's even further away from that standard than most people, even though no one actually meets that like perfect, you know, Photoshop model standard, right? And in all honesty, I don't feel that way. Like I said, I absolutely have had moments of real insecurity more than I thought I would. But I know that I'm worth just as much as a person as I ever have been. And if you are a person who is dealing with a disability, visible or invisible, if you're a person who's dealing with anything or you're questioning your worth because of external circumstances, please know that your worth is not ever determined or impacted by those things. You're here, you're alive, you are worth everything. You get to make choices every day. And that is everything, especially to the generation that's behind me to teenagers and younger people. I feel like there needs to perhaps be better understanding of this because sometimes things happen because sometimes people lose limbs because sometimes disabilities happen that we don't predict because sometimes you don't look the way you feel like you should and that can have such a crushing suffocating effect on how you view yourself, on how you feel like your worth as a person is. But that's not it. If you're dealing with some situation right now or you're afraid, then the future you could where something could happen and you look different and your worth is suddenly impacted. Know that that is never the case. It can feel that way. It can be something to work through. It can be something you need support to figure out how to find a path to get out of. But your value as a human being is not impacted by how you look. Your beauty as a human being is not impacted by how you look.  You listening to me right now. I sincerely love and my heart is warmed by people who want to reassure me, hey, you have value still, but I do know that and I will continue to appreciate the encouragement that they give me. But I also wanted to let you guys know that I am aware of that and that I hope that you're aware of that too for yourself. I don't want to sound like some cheesy motivational speaker or some, you know, easy cheesy post on Instagram, but you have value just the way you are and no external circumstance is going to change that.  I would love to hear your thoughts on this. Is this something that you've dealt with? Whether or not you're a person who deals with a disability, whether it be visible or invisible, is this a struggle that you've had? Do you have this perception? Do you assume that people with disabilities must think less of themselves? And it's totally fine if you do have that perception. I'm just curious because I don't think it's a perception that needs to persist in our society, though I do realize that it's out there. I'd love to hear your thoughts. Like I said, please comment down below. I will be reading all comments as I always do on my videos. A quick and yet deep and thorough thank you to all of my patrons over on Patreon. Patreon has supported me so much over this past year. There's been so much that has happened and gone on and you guys have been an incredible emotional and financial support. I cannot thank you enough if you're interested in being a part of my Patreon family. The link is right here. Check it out. If you don't know what Patreon is, there is a thorough explanation of it right there that you can check out and I'd love to see you over there. Thank you so much for listening guys. Thank you for spending a few minutes out of your day here with me today. I truly appreciate it. You could be anywhere in the world doing anything and you chose to spend it with me so thank you. I love you guys. I'm thinking of you. Remember, you are worth everything and I'll see you in the next video. Bye guys.


We live in a place that looks like this, like this, suburbs, like this, tree-lined roads, like this. Everywhere in the world, people separated by poverty, by wealth. In South Africa also separated by history, most of us still separated by geography. Remember this bin, I'm coming back. I dream of the neglected impossible spaces. Hilbrough, the most densely populated place in the whole of Africa. We ask permission from the authorities to change our city's skyline so that it looks like a future to look forward to. Usually in response to these proposals, they say, sorry, do you want it or please will you fill in this form or please give us three years of audited financial statements. A lot of the time they talk, there's a recession. Well, the recession, it drives by. Sometimes they actually do say yes to us. They say yes a month before the Soccer World Cup when they're in a big hurry and we have to make everything look like we're always cooking here. Then we do beautiful work. Here's Mary Sabande, Joberg-based artist's beautiful exhibition Long Live the Dead Queen on 10,000 square metres of outdoor advertising space that is normally reserved for alcohol advertising. I kid you not. Straight on from the Merva's beautiful land art project at the Galulis Interchange welcomed thousands of people to Johannesburg. Sometimes they don't say yes, we get up to mischief. This is a project called the Tree Tribunal in which I collaborated with my friend, my neighbour, Philippa Yardavilius, who's a brilliant poet and I. We wrote this statement in support of freedom of expression in South Africa. Black people are not cars. They can't be herded, not unless there's a sail on. Needless to say it blew away in the wind three hours after we put it up. Some dreams are like that. I believe, I really believe in the power of imagination to change our atmosphere. I believe in the power of action to make people who feel powerless all over the world increasing numbers of us feel a sense of power. I believe that public space belongs to the public. Ish, but the public. The public, they drive past. They drive past rat-infested rubble. Children coming too big at your window. What do you drive past that you think is normal? It's not normal. I drove past this pile of rubble every single day for over a year taking my child to school because it's in this park which is next to the main road going into Joburg, a big park where there's lots of homeless people that live here and I never ever saw this until one day I noticed it. I saw this pile of rubble. That was the beginning of neighbourhood target practice. I immediately just became initiative. I acted, I phoned my friend who's also an artist. His name is Johanna Strayer. He's got these luminous eyes and I said to him would you like to reinvent this? And I had this bit of money burning a hole in my pocket that I got from the aforementioned 24 hour emergency public art services for the World Cup and so he said yes and I said well what do you want to do? He said I want to make a concrete bed, a double bed in the park with creases, with a duvet, with pillows in the park and he brought me this amazing drawing and I said yes. Nobody in their right mind sort of said yes. Would have said yes. I said yes. Well not in my right mind. So we didn't ask anybody because we knew if we asked the authorities ush we're going to get a pile of forms. So the only thing we did was we knew we couldn't actually do it on our own so we asked Damien, the guy on the right for you. He's a brilliant, brilliant technical concrete form worker and we knew he'd be able to help us so we got on with it and here's Johanna's with Charles who was not long ago nearly deported to Lindela because she's from the DRC but that's what happens in a lot of our countries and we started to plan. We found this beautiful plush padded headboard in Germiston, a neighbouring suburb for 450 rand and we used my old duvet and then all the neighbours started to help and they came with suggestions and they gave us water and they gave us power and I started to blog about the project and people started sending messages from all over the world so the Troval bedtime story was happening on the corner of Besaidenhoutan Folion Street in Jovuk but it was also happening online. There was a community, a neighbourhood and another community of kindred spirits and then things went wrong. The waste mould was in danger of cracking. We got this absolutely charming message just after we had plastered the base from these twerps and we had a little discussion with them. Actually Johanna stood in the morning committed to doing yoga in the Troval Park but it was difficult. We had lots of problems. We had so many problems. We got broken hearts. Things went pear shaped. The waste mould was a problem. One night we were so lonely. We all ate cookies. We had tea. Nobody shouted because it was raining and we were missing the deadline. We worked hard. We started getting weird messages. The bed started to come alive. I started, I couldn't resist it. I took my clothes off and I read a book in it and we started to blog about it and then we had a pajama party to celebrate and we asked the city authorities, please come, please come to our pajama party and after this you must come to the bed. Please come to our pajama party but the city authorities said, sorry you couldn't because he doesn't have pajamas. But the truth is that that would have been appropriate in our neighbourhood. Many people have come. Many people have come at a time. They come and have their pictures taken at the bed. We know all the children. The children know what best to do with a bed on Sunday morning. The project is about romance. It's about innocence. It's about whatever you want it to be about. That's the seam that our housekeeper Martha sewed in my duvet when it was broken. Now it's in concrete. Beautiful people come. They leave messages and the most important dog in the suburb came. That's Papalap. She's a Tibetan singing dog. Again for freedom of expression we covered the bed in black cloth. Speaking of which, back to the bin. It took about four months to make the bed. It took a day. Nobody in the preceding argument bothered to clean the dustbin. What are you driving past? What are you not noticing? At the entrance to the Miyagi Centre we came here doing a Reiki sing where we're going. We found this. I'm taking photographs of it. I hear out of the corner of my ear a voice saying I need a job and I'm thinking yes you know about it. I also need a job. And then I turn and there's this man. Turns out his name is Major. He needs a job. Neighbourhood target practice just took off right here on the corner in Imputi Street. A whole bunch of volunteers have made a beautiful entrance and they're still busy with it with found objects and some plants from our gardens. You see the guy in the middle, the one who's looking like he's not sure. That's Major and he's here and the whole Imputi neighbourhood collective got into this room today.


I'm Betsy Peck-Learned, Dean of University Libraries here at Roger Williams, and I'd like to welcome you to our first Talking in the Library event for this fall. In person, yay, there's something to be said for Zoom, but in person is much better. All of our Talking in the Library events are generously supported by an endowment to the university, to the library specifically, by an alumna of the university, Mary Teft-White, whose donation also made this program space this room possible. This evening, we're delighted to welcome Washington Post columnists and around-the-horned panelists, Kevin Blackestown. He will speak on the topic of imagining the Indian, the fight against Native American mascotting, in conversation with Roger Williams, Professor of Writing, Brian Hendrickson. Professor Adam Braver, our Library Program Director and Professor of Creative Writing, will be introducing them both in just a moment. I'd like to briefly mention our next Talking in the Library event this fall. On Tuesday, October 4th, which is next week, a little close, we welcome the novelist Steve Yarbrough. And we are co-sponsoring this event with our neighbors at the Rogers Free Library in Bristol as part of their Jane Bodell Endowment. The event will take place at Rogers Free at 7 p.m. Their address is 525 Hope Street, and I hope you all join us there. And now, Professor Braver will introduce our speakers. Thank you. I will be brief and spare you my usual long introduction. Only to say, to give you a little background in really how this came to be is that I was watching the PBS News Hour one night, and the issue of Brian Flores, the football coach who had been fired and turned out to be the only black football coach in the NFL, was hot in the news, and Kevin was the guest to speak about it. And I watched it, and then Betsy, it turned out Betsy was watching, and she texted me and said, you see, I said, yeah, and I said, he's someone I'd like to know. And Betsy said, me too. Once we have this, let's invite him here to speak. He's not going to speak on that. That's what we originally had thought he would speak on. And as you can imagine, there have been numerous potential topics over the last year that we could have had Kevin come to address over and over. But as it turned out, this documentary film, which he's been working on since 2014, imagining the Indian had just come out, and it seemed like a good topic. It seemed like an appropriate topic for here, especially based on where we're situated, but also just what is in the air and something very present and important to Kevin. And as Betsy mentioned, Kevin is among many things, also a professor of journalism at the University of Maryland, but is a columnist for The Washington Post on sports, and very much so on cultural issues around sports. And so this certainly ties in well. And again, our interlocutor would be Brian Hendrickson, who is again a professor here in writing studies, and also quite an accomplished poet for those of you interested in the world of poetry as well. So they'll speak for a while, and then there'll be some Q&A. I'll have a microphone to pass through the crowd if you have questions. And then we'll come when we get to that point. So I'll leave it to you. Yeah, I was going to say, I'm going to try to speak less than our guest here. I thought maybe we just start off with a clip from the documentary so that we're all a little familiar with it. And then the way we'll do this is I have some questions prepared. We'll hopefully keep this a lively dialogue, but I encourage anybody else here in the audience who would like to ask a question of our guest to please feel free to raise a hand and let us know. And we'll leave some time at the end regardless for you all to participate in Q&A, all right? Sounds good, and one thing I've become very conscious of in doing this work the last eight years is a land acknowledgement. And I'm sure there's a land acknowledgement for this campus on this land. I don't know if anyone would like to offer it. I'd be happy to. So we recognize the unique and enduring relationship that exists between indigenous people and their traditional territories. We acknowledge that Roger Williams University's Bristol campus is located within the homelands of the Poconochit. Let this acknowledgement serve as a reminder of our ongoing efforts to reconcile and partner with the Poconochit and all indigenous peoples whose lands and waters we benefit from today. So thanks for sharing that with us, Kristen Foremost. I thought maybe for our audience here who might not be familiar with your work, but certainly might not know much about this project or where it came from. I'm wondering if you could maybe say a little bit about how this project began and how it arose out of your own career as a sports journalist. Sure, thank you very much. Thank you for the invite. That was a five-minute clip from a 95-minute full-length documentary, which I'm proud to say last week at the Human Rights Film Festival in Atlanta, won Best Full-length Documentary Award, which was the first time that we had outside of Washington, D.C. It had played in a city with a professional sports team that uses a Native American iconography and names to sell itself. I'll start. I won't give you a whole bio of me, but I'm from Washington, D.C. I grew up in a family that had season tickets to the Washington football team. My parents took me to see those games before I could walk. I grew up inculcated as a Washington football fan. I live, breathe with this team every day of the year. And never once, even though I came up in a very progressive household, never once thought about the name of the team. Not until the mid-1990s when I was a sports columnist at the Dallas Morning News, and I was writing a column about an NAACP fight in Midland, Texas, which is in the Panhandle of Texas. And if you know anything about George W. Bush's rise to fame, that's where he started in an oil company after he moved from up this way. And the NAACP fight was against Midland Lee High School, Lee coming from General Lee, the Confederacy. And the school draped itself in all forms of Confederate imagery. And the NAACP was upset that their sons were scoring touchdowns and points on the basketball team. While the song Dixie might play in the background of the Confederate flag, might flap in the wind in the stands. And they were upset about that, and rightfully so. And it was easy for me to identify with that. And that was about the time when I first experienced or heard that native folk might be upset with the name of the team that I grew up rooting for. And it was the first time that I started to make a connection between how I would support the NAACP in their fight against Midland Lee and why I should also support and understand native folks disagreement with the name of the football team I grew up rooting for. So that was really the that was really the seed and into the late 1990s. I started to talk to more people about it. I started to come to an understanding. I started to try not to say the name myself. I kind of cleanse my wardrobe of of any merchandise with that name on it. I tried to remove it from my writing when I was covering a Dallas, Washington game. And I'd have to remind copy editors to leave it out that I purposefully was not using it. And when I moved back to Washington, D.C. in the late early 2000s, I actually got to know Suzanne Shown Harjo, who has been at the forefront of this movement. She lives in Washington, D.C. has been there since since the early 1970s. She grew up in in Indian country in Oklahoma and began to talk to her about it. And in 2014, there was a case before the Patent and Trademark Office, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, which canceled the trademark for the Washington football team. And I thought at that point that the name was going to fall into the ocean and be washed away. And I talked to a friend of mine, who's a filmmaker by the name of Sam Bartley. If any of you ever saw the ESPN 30 for 30 documentary on Lynn Bias called Without Bias, he did that.  And I said, we need to document this fight that this woman and native folk have won against the multi-billion dollar industry of the NFL. This is really interesting. And it happened right in our backyard and we should do it. So that's how I got involved in trying to make a film. So it seems like this was both something that you had maybe a deeper history and connection to, but also that there was some amount of a learning process that might have come through the engaging in the process of making the documentary. And I'd just be curious to know about that. What are the things that you learned through doing this that you didn't know before you went into the process? That would be an entire class. That's about filmmaking, which I knew nothing of other than being a fan of film and in particularly documentary film. There was so much to learn. First of all, had to figure out what it was we were going to try and do. We're going to make a documentary film. Okay, what's it about? What's our purpose? What do we want to get out of it? And why do we want to do it? To two brothers from Washington, D.C., we're not native. I wasn't drawn to this in the beginning because of the native community. I was drawn to it because I felt I should have a sensitivity to it given that I'm a black man in America.  So once we figured that out, then we had to figure out, well, how do we tell this story? And we had both gotten to know Suzanne Shonharjo and so we thought that given her stature in the Indian community, as well as her stature in the civil rights community within this country, she had been awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Obama for her work with her work in the indigenous community that we would tell the story of this fight using her as a vessel, a narrative. But then we realized there was even more to tell. We had to figure out the context for this. And the context was historical, what has been the history of native people on this land since Europeans first arrived. And it is a genocidal history, one that's not told in full enough. So we had to figure out how to do that. And then we had to figure out where we are today and where we're trying to go. This is gonna be a protest film, where we are protesting for these names to come down. And these are the reasons why. The difficulty was, and you mentioned it, and Adam mentioned it, started working on this in 2014. Well, we wound up chasing news, which we didn't really anticipate. Things were changing all the time on this particular issue. There was a Supreme Court case that came out involving a rock band, an Asian rock band, up in the Pacific Northwest called the Slants, which sued for the right to use their name, even though it was considered, is considered a disparaging remark about Asian folks. And when they won their case, that had a direct impact on the Washington football team and a decision it championed to hold on to their name. If the Slants could do it, then we could do it. Even though that was an uncomplicated way to talk about it. And then we realized that we needed to have, as we expanded this, that we needed to have some native representation. And so fortunately, we were introduced to Ben West, who also is from Washington, D.C., who is Cheyenne, who graduated from USC, studying film and being a script writer and all of that. And he was very much interested in doing this film. And we were introduced to him through Aviva Kempner, who's the other co-director on this. And Aviva Kempner is an award-winning documentarian in Washington, D.C., who for 40 years has made documentary films about Jewish heroes and heroines. Most recently, I think her most recent movie was, I think it was Mo Berg, who was a baseball player, a catcher in the 40s and the 50s, who became a spy for the U.S. government on Japan in the run-up to World War II. She also did a great piece on Hank Greenberg, the great Jewish slugger in the 30s and the 40s. And she quickly glammed on to this idea, so it then became a great team effort. Yeah, so that makes me think of tooth-connected things. And you've kind of pointed out that there's the learning curve involving and taking on a whole new medium, which I find really impressive. And then there's the learning curve in taking on this particular subject matter. And I'm wondering if you could just say a little bit more possibly about how did your understanding of the subject matter itself perhaps evolved through the process of making the film? Did you come out thinking about it differently or more deeply by engaging in this process than when you began? Sure, no question more deeply. Our approach in the beginning, I think, in my thought process in the beginning was very much on the surface. It was what I had seen, what I had heard, but it wasn't what I had delved into. And we started really to take a deep dive into native history, native culture, and the native struggle. And so what I knew about native American history, I'm not a student of it, but what I knew was they were here first, Europeans arrived, shoved them off their land, murdered them, stuck them in reservations, tried to separate them from their culture. And there weren't many around, but I didn't know the impact that all of that had on not only their community, but the rest of us. And I think when we were speaking earlier, I talked about the interview with Amanda Blackhorse, who was the woman talking about in the clip who talked about growing up and thinking of her skin color as being making her less than. And what you don't see in that interview, or maybe you can pick up a little bit of it from the glossiness of her eyes, is that in the course of that interview, she broke down. She was telling me about losing her job by taking up this fight. And she talked about losing her hair by taking up this fight. And when she mentioned her hair, she was just, she was overcome and we had to stop filming.  And one thing you have to know about native culture is hair is a very important symbol of their being. And I was reminded of this, I don't know if anybody's watched any of Ken Burns' latest documentary, The U.S. and the Holocaust, but there's a bit in there where they're talking to a woman who, a survivor who was in Poland, and I can't remember what city it was, but she talked about how she saw the Nazis drag the rabbi of the community synagogue out and then sheared off his beard.  And so it made me think about Amanda talking about losing her hair. So as, you know, we talk about this in a very disconnected way, right? We watch it, we see it. We hear people complain about it, but then to get that emotional reaction, that visceral reaction, that wasn't something I was prepared for. You know, you had said something I thought was pretty striking a minute ago and you mentioned the effect that that history has on all of us. And I wonder, you know, one of the things I found really compelling about this clip was not that you have to always have empirical research to show that something has a negative impact on a person or on a people, but just the laying out the sort of research-based argument for the negative impacts that mascots have on native peoples. And I wonder, are there negative impacts you think mascots, the sort of mascotting of indigenous peoples has on all of us? Absolutely. I mean, one of the things I thought about in doing this and one of the things I've always thought about anyway, being a person of color in this country, is like, how did this whole racism thing start, right? Like, why are we still battling this? And, you know, one of the reasons is exactly what happened to native people when Europeans first came ashore. And how they were treated, which was horrifically, that their culture was almost was almost removed from our national palette, that they were denigrated. And that if that could happen to them, then certainly you could do that to other people of color in this country. Because after that happened to them, then, that's 1492, then fast forward to 1619, and it begins to happen to Africans who were dragged here across the Atlantic Ocean and enslaved. And so I think there is a connection and some of the research has shown that it has made it easier or more acceptable for the rest of us to denigrate others or to otherize others. And it begins with that relationship. And I hadn't really thought about that. I wasn't aware of that research until we delved deeper into this film. One of my personal connections to this, and I mentioned this to you before, is I grew up in Florida and I did my undergraduate degree at Florida State. And I would say that I was pretty uncritical growing up in terms of race and racism. I was probably your typical Southern white, middle class kid. And if you had asked me as long as 10 years ago, well, how do I feel about the Florida State football team using the name of Seminoles? And I would tell you the party line on that, right? That, well, Florida State has a good relationship with the Seminole Tribal Council. I have to admit, I'm still a little perplexed by this whole thing. And I think it sort of speaks a little bit to maybe some of the complexities of allyship and the kinds of decisions we make when we are not indigenous ourselves. How do we make sort of decisions about who gets to decide what or whether or not we should have an opinion at all? And I think unfortunately, sometimes the complexity of the situation maybe prevents us from doing anything sometimes, even when maybe the choice is clearer than others. So this leads me to two questions. One of them, of course, I wanna know how do you feel about the Florida State sort of situation? And then two, I'm just wondering, just through all this process, has it shaped your sort of understanding of allyship or how to navigate the complexities of this or sort of what does that mean for us to have to step into complicated issues that sometimes demand we make decisions even when it's difficult to do that sometimes? Sure, well, what you didn't see was a part of the film where we discuss Florida State. And I'll just point this out. We have a clip of the mascot for Florida State being prepared to be the mascot to ride out as Chief Asiola that they call him.  And when I first saw that, I thought to myself, man, that's blackface, it's just red and yellow. I wouldn't stand for that. And then I thought back to some of the fans that I would see at Washington football games who would paint their faces red. In fact, a self-appointed mascot of the Washington football team when I was growing up was a black gentleman who painted his face and wore a headdress, which by the way is sacred, and these fall Indian clothes and made these fall Indian sounds or what he thought were Indian sounds and paraded around the stadium. His name was, he went by the name of Chief Z. So what I'm seeing at Florida State when I look at that film and I watch someone ride out on a horse and throw a burning stake into the ground at the 50 yard line is minstrelsy. So that's my orientation towards that and those who participate in it. The Florida State situation is complex or I shouldn't say that. The Florida State situation has been made to be complex and it's been made to be complex because Florida State has cut a monetary deal with part of the Seminole Nation that they've been able to negotiate with within that part of Florida. And so they have a contract in which a few things are meted out but it needs to be pointed out that the Seminole Nation is very large. It stretches beyond the state of Florida and there are for every Seminole who you might find in the state of Florida who's comfortable with that relationship with the university which is theater. There are plenty who are not upset, I mean who are upset and would prefer that that performance not be a part of Florida State. So like anything and we're seeing this now we saw it with the Washington football team where the new owner has tried to buy by the goodwill of native folks, by parading them around the stadium from time to time and giving them awards or jackets or something like that to give this impression that all of Native America is comfortable with the name, it's just not true. But that's why I say it's not, it's been complicated by money, it's been complicated by a strategy of pro football teams or in this case Florida State University just so they can hold on to the name and hold on to that image and those histrionics before and after enduring games. So what would you say to somebody who just feels like all of this politics and all this talk about race, all that's just like a big distraction from the game and loving the game and can't we just get back to loving the game for the game and keep the politics and the conversations about taking knees and other things like this and racial represent, can't we just love the game for the game and not have to think about this kind of stuff? Isn't that a conversation for somewhere else as my grandfather liked to say, you don't talk politics and religion at the dinner table. Maybe he was partly right sometimes but what would you say to somebody like that? Well, first of all, I invite them to audit my class which is called sports protest in the media which is a part, a historical look at the relationship between sports and politics or serious issues. Which go back to the beginning of sport. You know, the first team sports or the first huge sporting events that were held were held to honor gods. You know, the marathon which is probably the most iconic event of the Olympics was a political event, you know? It was a messenger running back to Athens to deliver information about a victory by the Athenian army. You know, the whole reason that Colin Kaepernick can use the national anthem as a mixtape to his protest is because Woodrow Wilson decreed that a military band in public play this thing called the Star Spangled Banner and it just happened to be a military band at the 1917 World Series and they played the Star Spangled Banner, right? So sports and politics have always been together and people who argue that that's not the case or they don't belong together know neither the history of sport nor the history of politics. They've always gone together, they're perfect bedfellows for any number of reasons and you can enjoy the game but you are hard pressed to ignore all the things that go around it unless you absolutely refuse to acknowledge them. Like how many people here have seen military aircraft in the air? How many people have only seen that at a game during a flyover, right? Or are familiar with a flyover? You know, that's been, other than going to one air show, which I didn't enjoy because it included tragedy. You know, that's where I've seen it. You know, how many people in their regular work life start their day by singing the Star Spangled Banner? How many people have been to a movie and had to sing the Star Spangled Banner? How many people have served in office and started your day singing the Star Spangled Banner? But go to a sporting event, you start that sporting event by singing the Star Spangled Banner. Why? Why has that continued? I'm not sure. But I do know that if you go to some schools, I think Quaker schools do not play the Star Spangled Banner before games. I think that's right. Quakers are rebels, huh? There you go, so what are your thoughts? I do want to open things up to our audience in case they have any questions, but I want to maybe close with one that I'm sure our audience also wants to ask you if in case you started Googling around trying to find which streaming platform you can watch the full link documentary on right now, you might come up short. So, I mean, any word on when and how we might be able to see this thing? Yeah, right now we're on the, right now since the movie debuted in April, we're on the Film Festival Tour. And one of the reasons you get on the Film Festival Tour is you're fortunate to be selected by the ones you apply to. But the other reason is to attract distributors. And that's where we're at right now. We're trying to get distributors for a theatrical release and a distributor for an educational package because we want to get this out to school. So, at this particular moment, the full length is only available to places where we've been selected to screen. One of which a few weeks ago was actually the Rhode Island International Film Festival. It was selected there and it streamed there. I think that in November, and I can tell you all later, when we play at the, we're being screened at a program at the American Indian Museum in Washington D.C. was part of the Smithsonian Institute. And I think that they're going to allow for several days, or we're going to allow them for several days to stream us on their projects platform. But I'm not exactly sure with dates that that's gonna take place. So right now, yeah, we're just, we're only being shown at film festivals and some limited screenings. But we got a lot of them. We're in Calgary this weekend. If you want to get up to Calgary, you can catch us. Let's see what else we got coming up. And we're in Dallas, the second weekend of October. We're in Santa Fe. I forget what that date is. We're back out in California for a date. So we got dates. Oh, and we're in Toronto at Imaginative, which is the largest indigenous film festival on the planet. And that's in the third week of October. So if you want to get up to Toronto. Well, New Mexico is really lovely this time of year. So you might run like this. You might choose Santa Fe instead. Well, thank you so much for sharing the clip with us for being willing to share the story behind the documentary. And of course, your own sort of scottily insights into sporting and politics. I really appreciate you talking with me. And with that, I might turn things over to the audience in case anybody has any thoughts or questions they'd like to share. Just don't ask me anything about fantasy football because my team's 0-3 right now. And I'm not happy about our drafts. This is pretty mundane. I think in the opening of the clip you showed, Oprah Winfrey, a shot at her in the show, and she used two phrases and kind of wondering which of the two is accurate. And the Indian woman or one of the nations responded that neither is correct. What would be and what is the correct reference into a terminology? It's a good question because the museum is called the American Indian Museum. And being out in Indian country now and working with Ben West, I've found that that's acceptable to some, but not to all. We are about to come up on what you know as Columbus Day. And as you know, there's been a movement in this country that is slowly getting more and more successful to either reclaim that or rename that or add to that name Indigenous Peoples Day. So for me, I've tried to use the word indigenous because to me it's a more global term. There are indigenous people here. There are indigenous people in the other Americas. There are indigenous people almost everywhere we go. And so for me, I'm more comfortable with that. I've also heard Native Peoples, which I also think is global and more inclusive. Calling people Americans is really problematic because they were here before Americas. And so that's really kind of inaccurate and kind of speaks to their being colonized. We were at a, this blew me away. We were at Sue St. Marie, Michigan. Anybody ever been there? Anybody here from Michigan? You know, they do the hand thing. We're up here. So it's the Upper Peninsula, right? The point of the top of the Upper Peninsula. And we're up there for their film festival. And I just heard today we won Audience Award for there. But the nearest big university, I think, is Eastern Michigan. And I think they go by the name of Chippewa. Everybody's heard Chippewa. And they still haven't changed that. Well, while I was there, and half of, basically half of Sue St. Marie is reservation. And we were staying on the reservation side. And we were being, our host was a guy named Aaron Payment, who is a longtime Native American official at various levels, at the national level. And he explained to us while we were there that Chippewa is not a real thing. That actually Native folk in that part of the country, the nation is obituary. But Europeans mispronounced it as Chippewa, somehow someway. And so that name just stuck. And so we've been calling obituary, I think that's how it's pronounced, which is not to be confused, I don't think with the nation out of, right, right. Which is in Minnesota, T.J. Ochi of the Washington Capitals is of that nation. So it just stuck. So we have been misnaming Native folk, Indigenous people forever. And being so disrespectful that we haven't asked them, as you did, maybe how we should refer to you. And one of the reasons that Suzanne Schoenhardt just said all are inaccurate is because Native people don't really refer to themselves that way. They refer to themselves by what nation they're a part of, right? Cheyenne, they refer to themselves as Cheyenne and Muscogee. They don't refer to themselves as Seminole, but we have turned them into a monolith by just making them Native Americans, Indigenous people, American Indians, or whatever. Thank you. I'll see you there. So any discovery more about the fight against Indigenous imagery? How did you kind of process or grapple with your childhood memories or childhood identities associated with being a big fan of it? It wasn't easy.  It makes you irrational, right? Like I said, I lived and died with this team. In 1992, which is the last time this team was in the Super Bowl, I went just as a fan with some friends. And as we were walking into the stadium, and I tell this story in the film, I saw a commotion off to the side. And so I went over to investigate the commotion. And the commotion was a protest against the name of the team.  I mean, I'm decked out. And that was really the first time I had witnessed any blowback to the name of the team. And I really didn't pay much attention to it until that trip to Midland, Texas. So, you know, this is a part of my identity, right? You go away to college, and people want to know where you're from. Where are you from? You're from New Hampshire. So people may ask you if you were a fan of who you grew up as a fan of, maybe the Boston Red Sox, right? So maybe you kind of identify with that. So you go away from home, and that's part of your identity. That's who you are. So I go away to college. I'm from DC. I'm a fan of this team. My team is better than your team. I can't wait until we play each other, right? I mean, I breathed that oxygen, and I exhaled that oxygen. So, and as a progressive person, that really troubled me. And I slowly but surely, as the owner of the team became more and more entrenched and more and more obstinate over this issue, I really had to check myself. I pride myself on being consistent. And my argument and my feelings were no longer consistent with what I was supporting. And so it was hard. We have, we display that in the film. There's a former Washington DC city councilman who grew up a big fan, and he and his brother would go to games. That's what you did. And then he talks about how he became more conscious about the impact that this was having, how it was wrong. And he finally told his brother, his brother, I can't go to, we can't go into games anymore together. I can't do this. So that was a fracture in a family. We have somebody like, we have Jamie Raskin who grew up in Washington DC. Jamie Raskin is, he's really rising in the political frontier right now, right? And really a smart guy and very sensitive and very conscious. And it's not until really now that he has reached a point where he can't, the team that he grew up rooting for, he just can't, he can't embrace them anymore. It's hard. It's hard. Sports are so, it's so much a part of our bloodstream. It's really, really hard to go through the transfusion of getting that out of you. It's interesting that this has really touched on emotion on both sides, identity in terms of affiliation with a team. And then there's also the heritage aspect. I live in a neighboring town that originally had a high school team named after the R word. And that was luckily dropped because of regionalization within other schools. So they had to come up with a new name. But the men who were the athletes at the high school and some women too, are now very entrenched in keeping that logo and image alive of a war on it to become an American. There's even a cigar store version that was created as the mascot. And there's a museum showing items from the past. So there's been some reinterpretation. There's other little hidden things of the recreation department still uses that logo, which it really, I mean, and I'm sure it's because of their loyalty to the past and that people identify with it. So we haven't really had a tough conversation that needs to be held. But it's simmering in the background. And it's another way that this has trickled down into our culture. And it's become very local, not just a national or regional situation, because we do now have more activity and more attention to a local tribe. Yeah, and I think that's really important. And to your point, when we started doing this film, I may have mentioned this earlier, I can't remember, but there are over 2,000 secondary schools across the country that use the R word or some variation thereof. And now they're less than 2,000. So we've been tracking this, and we know that this fight is going on in communities all across the country. Most are being successful in finding a new moniker. But we do know that there are some where it's been a knockdown, drag out, and changes haven't been made for any number of reasons. And that's one of the reasons why we want to do educational outreach with this film, put together a study guide, and get it out to schools so that people can understand the history that they're involved in. We have one last question there. Well, I'll just speak up. So since you're from DC, I wonder if you see parallels between the lack of representation and federal government for DC citizens and indigenous as well It seems to me that there's sort of this erasure of representation. And I wonder if you have talked about that. Man, taxation without representation. I grew up with that in Washington, DC. I live now living, since I've moved back, I now live in Maryland. I had not made that connection, but you're absolutely right. It is similar if not the same.  This is one of the amazing things I did learn about Native history that I probably should have known. We know about the treaties. We've all heard about the treaties. But the amazing thing about the treaties is how many of them have just been completely disregarded. Everybody signed on the dotted line, certain agreements, and almost none of them have been upheld. And so there's a story out right now about a treaty that the Cherokee signed. Did anybody hear about this? With back in 18, I can't remember what year it was, but it was to have a representative in Congress for the Cherokee people. And right now, and it's been signed and ratified and everything whenever it was. And so right now, someone has resurrected it to try and get Cherokee people represented as a nation on Capitol Hill. So much of this has to do with lack of representation, either codified or just respectfully. And so that is not a connection that we've made, but thank you for pointing that out. I had not thought about that. Unfortunately, the Washington football team has played anywhere but Washington for ever since about 19, I forget what year, they moved to the state of Maryland out of D.C., but sometime in the early 1990s. And they're looking for a new location now, and chances are, I think, even though some things have happened to suggest otherwise, I think they'll wind up in Virginia, which is where their headquarters are anyway. But that's a great through line. Lack of representation for Native folks and lack of representation for what until the next census comes out will still be an unrepresented majority black city in this country. Well, I think we have to close out, but thank you so much. Thank you. You've given us so much to think about, and I can't wait to see your film. I hope I get an opportunity to. I hope you do too, very soon. And Brian, your questions were right on. They were really great. Thank you so much. Thank you all for coming.