Museums are Not Neutral with Movement Co-Founders La Tanya S. Autry and Mike Murawski

Paul Farber:

You are listening to Monument Lab Future Memory where we discuss the future of monuments and the state of public memory in the US and across the globe. You can support the work of Monument Lab by visiting monumentlab.com, following us on social @Monument_Lab, or subscribing to this podcast anywhere you listen to podcasts.

Li Sumpter:

Our guest today on Future Memory is artist, scholar, and composer, Nathan Young. Young is a member of the Delaware Tribe of Indians and a direct descendant of the Pawnee Nation and Kiowa Tribe, currently living in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. His work incorporates sound, video, documentary, animation, installation, socially-engaged art, and experimental and improvised music. Young is also a founding member of the artist collective, Postcommodity. He holds an MFA in Music/Sound from Bard College's Milton Avery School of the Arts and is currently pursuing a PhD in the University of Oklahoma's innovative Native American art history doctoral program. His scholarship focuses on Indigenous Sonic Agency. Today we discuss his art and practice and a recently opened public art project at Historic site Pennsbury Manor entitled nkwiluntàmën, funded by the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage and curated by Ryan Strand Greenberg and Theo Loftis. Let's listen.

Welcome to another episode of Future Memory. I'm your co-host, Li Sumpter. Today my guest is Nathan Young. Welcome, Nathan.

Nathan Young:

Hello. Thank you. It's nice to be here with you today.
 

Li:

Future Memory is the name of Monument Lab's podcast. In the context of your own work, when you hear the words "future memory," what does that mean to you? Do any images or sounds come to mind?
 

Nathan:

They really do. There's one. It was a website of a sound artist, a writer, an educator, Jace Clayton, DJ/Rupture, had a mixed CD called "Gold Teeth Thief". I remember it was kind of a game changer in the late '90s. I got that mixed CD from a website called History of the Future.
 

Li:

That's very close. It was very close.

Nathan:

It's always stuck with me. I'm fortunate enough to be able to grapple with a lot of these kind of ideas. I'm not really quite sure how I feel about some of the history of the future because in some ways I work within many different archives so I am dealing with people's future or thinking about or reimagining or just imagining their future.

But future monuments are something that I grapple with and deeply consider in my artwork. I think it's one of the more challenging subjects today in art. I think we see that with the taking down of monuments that were so controversial or are so controversial. But I find it fascinating the idea of finding new forms to make monuments to remember and the idea of working with different communities of memory. It's key to my work. It's just a lot of listening and a lot of pondering. Actually, it's a very productive space for me because it's a place to think about form. Also, it opens doors for me just to think about the future. I will say this, that one problem that often arises as a Lenape Delaware Pawnee Kiowa person is we're often talking about the past, and I really like to talk about the future and to work with organizations that are thinking about the future.

Li:

I can relate to that.

Nathan:

I think it's a misunderstanding. We always really are talking about the future. I've had the great fortune to be around some people. Actually, I grew up in the capital of the Cherokee Nation, Oklahoma. A lot of people know that Oklahoma is the home to 39 federally recognized tribes. I was fortunate enough to grow up in Tahlequah, which is the capital of the Cherokee Nation, and was able to be around a well-known and respected medicine man named Crosslin Smith, also an author. I remember being a part of an interview with Crosslin. I grew up, he was a family friend.

He said, "I'm often asked about the old or ancient ways and the new ways." What Crosland said was, and I'll try my best to articulate this idea, is that there is no difference between the ancient ways and today. These things still exist. It might be an illusion or we might not be able to comprehend or understand it, but there is no difference between the ancient, when we're thinking of things in the sense of the sublime, I think. There is no understanding the ancient and what is contemporary. That was really an important moment for me as an adult. To hear him articulate that was really important. So I think about that. I'm not really sure about a lot of things, but I really like to think about that when I'm working.
 

Li:

It kind of runs through your mind as you're working and creating. It's a deep thought, that's for sure, connecting those things. Even thinking back on your own personal history with sound, when did you first connect your relationship to place and homeland to sound and music?

Nathan:

Well, my earliest remembrances of music, honestly, are my dad driving me around in his truck, picking me up after school, and singing peyote songs, Native American Church songs, peyote songs. The members of the Native American Church call that medicine. My father was an active member of a chapter of the Native American Church at that time. I was fortunate enough to receive my Lenape Delaware name in a peyote meeting. But the first things I remember are the music he played in the car, but really the singing in the car, the singing in the truck that he would do of those peyote songs. Even after he quit going to meetings or he wasn't active in the Native American Church anymore, he still would sing these peyote songs, and I would ask him about the peyote songs, because they're different for every tribe. The forms, they still have their kind of conventions, but they're very tribally specific.

Everything in what we call legally Indian Country here in the United States is super hyper local. So just down the road, that's really the beautiful thing about living in Oklahoma, is you have people whose ancestors are from northeast, southeast, southwest. There's only one tribe here from California. So it's a really rich place for sound and song. Both of my parents are Indigenous American Indian. My mother is Pawnee and Kiowa. My father is Lenape Delaware. I also grew up around the Big Drum, what we call the Big Drum at powwows. I never became a powwow singer or anything like that. Never learned anything around the Big Drum. But I did eventually learn Pawnee songs, Native American Church Pawnee songs.

But really, I was just a kid in a small town in Oklahoma. When skateboarding hit and you become kind of an adolescent, you start to discover punk rock and things like that. Those to me were the way that the culture was imported to me. I didn't realize that I was already surrounded by all this beautiful culture, all of the tribes and my parents' tribes and my grandparents'. But then it was like a transmitter. Even these tapes were just transmitters to me. So those were really important also. I have a lot of thoughts about sound. Other thing I remember is my father often would get onto us or make fun of us for being so loud and saying we would be horrible scouts or hunters.

Li:

Making too much noise.

Nathan:

The Native Americans, yeah, yeah. We weren't stealth. You'd hear us coming a mile away. So he would always say, "You wouldn't be a very good one," just to try to get us quiet down.

Li:

No one wants to be a bad hunter, right? Can you break down the concept of Indigenous Sonic Agency? is this based on ancestral traditions, your artistic practice, academic scholarship, or a bit of all the above?

Nathan:

Well, Indigenous Sonic Agency is really one piece of a larger subject sonic agency, which I encountered in a book titled Sonic Agency by Brandon LaBelle. I was a former member of this collective, Postcommodity, and I'm reading this book. When we were first starting the collective, we had the opportunity to work with this Czech poet named Magor, Ivan Jirous Magor. It means blockhead, I believe. It's a nickname. He was kind of described as the Andy Warhol of the Plastic People of the Universe. He was an art historian. He spent most of his life in prison just for being an artist, an art historian. He was an actual musician. He didn't play with the Plastic People of the Universe, to my knowledge, but he did to write the lyrics, to my knowledge. We had the opportunity to record with Magor. So I'm reading this book about sonic agency, and here I find somebody that I'd actually had an experience with sonic agency with in my early days and as a young man and an artist.

But ultimately Indigenous Sonic Agency is, in some sense, similar but different to tribal sovereignty. So when you think of agency or sovereignty, it's something that they sometimes get mixed up. I'm really trying to parse the differences between this, what we understand so well as political sovereignty as federally recognized tribes and what agency means, say, as an artist. But in my research, in the subject of sonic agency and Indigenous Sonic Agency, it encompasses pretty much everything. That's what I love about sound. Everything has a sound, whether we can hear it or not. Everything is in vibration. There are sounds that are inaudible to us, that are too high or too low. Then there's what we hear in the world and the importance of silence with John Cage. I think that they're just super productive.

I was introduced really to sound studies through this book called Sonic Warfare by Steve Goodman. It was really about how the study of sound was, in a sense, still emerging because it had mostly been used for military purposes and for proprietary purposes such as commercials and things like that. As I stated earlier, I felt like music was my connection to a larger world that I couldn't access living in a small town. So even everything that came with it, the album covers, all that, they really made an impression on me as a young person, and it continues to this day, and I've been focusing deeply on it.

My studies in sonic agency -- Indigenous Sonic Agency -- encompass everything from social song, sacred song, voice, just political speech and language, political language. There's so much work to be done in the emerging sound studies field. I felt that Indigenous Sonic Agency, there was a gap there in writing and knowledge on it. Now though, I acknowledge that there has been great study on the subject such as Dylan Robinson's book, Hungry Listening. I am fortunate enough to be around a lot of other Indigenous experimental artists who work in all the sonic fields. So it's an all-encompassing thing. I think about the sacred, I think about the political, I think about the nature of how we use it to organize things and how language works. Silence is a part of it. Also, listening is very important. It's something that I was taught at a very young age. You always have to continue to hone that practice to become a better and better listener.
 

Li:

That's the truth.
 

Nathan:

My grandmother was very quiet, but whenever she did talk, everybody loved it.

Li:

That's right. That's right. Let's talk about the Pennsbury Manor project. Can you share how you, Ryan Strand Greenberg, and Theo Loftis met and how nkwiluntàmën came to be?

Nathan:

Well, to my recollection, I try to keep busy around here, and oftentimes it means traveling to some of the other towns in the area such as Pawnee or Bartlesville or Dewey or Tahlequah. I wasn't able to do a studio visit with Ryan, but I wanted to see his artist talk that he was giving at the Tulsa Artist Fellowship, which I was a fellow at at that time. I remember seeing these large public art projects that were being imagined by Ryan. We had worked on some other projects that, for one reason or another, we weren't unable to get off the ground. Eventually, Pennsbury Manor was willing to be this space where we could all work together. I remember rushing back and being able to catch Ryan's artist talk. Then right before he left town, we had a studio visit and found out how much we had in common concerning the legacy of the Lenape in the Philadelphia area, what we used to call Lenapehoking. So it was a really a moment of good fortune, I believe.
 

Li:

Monument Lab defines monument as a statement of power and presence in public. The nkwiluntàmën project guide describes Pennsbury Manor as a space to attune public memory. It goes on to say that sites like these are not endpoints in history, but touchstones between generations. I really love that statement. Do you think Pennsbury Manor and the land it stands on, do you consider it a monument in your eyes? Why or, maybe even, why not?

Nathan:

Well, yeah, I would definitely consider Pennsbury Manor, in a sense, a monument. I think that we could make an argument for that. If we were talking about the nature of it being William Penn's home and it being reconstructed in the 20th century, you could make a very strong argument that it is a monument to William Penn and also as William Penn as this ideal friend to the Indian. Some people don't like that word. Here in Oklahoma, some of us use it. Technically, it was Indian Country legally. But I use all terms: Native American, Indigenous, Indian. But I'd mostly like to just be called a Lenape Delaware Pawnee Kiowa.

I definitely would say that you could make an argument that is a monument to William Penn especially as part of that, as this ideal colonist who could be set as a standard as for how he worked with the Lenape and then other tribes in the area at the time. I think that's kind of the narrative that I run into mostly in my research, literally. However, I would not say that it was established or had been any type of monument to my Lenape legacy. I did not feel that... I mean, there was always mention of that. It was, like I said, as this ideal figure of how to cooperate with the tribes in the area. But I would definitely say it's not a monument to the Lenape or the Delaware or Munsee.

Li:

Can you share a bit more about the project itself in terms of nkwiluntàmën and what exactly you did there at Pennsbury Manor to shift and really inform that history from a different perspective?

Nathan:

Well, first of all, at Pennsbury Manor, I was given a lot of agency. I was given a lot of freedom to what I needed to as an artist. I was really fortunate to be able to work with Doug and Ryan and Theo in that manner where I could really think about these things and think deeply about them. I started to consider these living history sites. My understanding is that they're anachronisms. There's a lot of labor put into creating a kind of façade or an appearance of the past, and specifically this time, this four years that William Penn was on this continent. So this idea that nothing is here that is not supposed to be here became really important to me. What I mean by that is, say, if you threw in a television set, it kind of throws everything off. Everybody's walking around in clothing that reflects that era and that time. If you throw some strange electronics in the space, it kind of is disruptive. I didn't feel the need to do anything like that.

I felt that one of the great things about working in sound and one of the most powerful things about sound is that sound can also be stealth. You can't see sound. We can sonify things or we can visualize it or quantify it in different ways. But to me, this challenge of letting the place be, but using sound as this kind of stealth element where I could express this very, very difficult subject and something that really nobody has any answers to or is sure about... I was trained as an art historian, and I know that we're only making guesses and approximations just like any doctors. We are just trying to do these things.

But sound gave me the ability at Pennsbury Manor and nkwiluntàmën to work stealthy and quiet, to not disturb the space too much because there's important work that's done there, and I want to respect people's labor. As a member of the Delaware tribe of Indians of Lenape, I felt that it was a great opportunity to be the person who's able to talk about this very difficult subject, and that is not lost on me. That's a very, very heavy, very serious task.

Li:

Yeah, big responsibility.

Nathan:

Yes. It is not lost on me at all how serious it is, and I feel very fortunate. I think without such a great support system in place, it wouldn't have been possible. nkwiluntàmën means lonesome, such as the sound of a drum. We have a thing called the Lenape Talking Dictionary, 
 

Li:

I've seen it. I've seen it.

Nathan:

I'm often listening. I'm listening to Nora Dean Thompson who gave me my Delaware name, my Lenape name, Unami Lenape name in a peyote ceremony. So I often go there to access Delaware thought and ideas and to hear Delaware voices and Delaware language being spoken. I know that some people have different views on it, but let's say, I think artists and people have used the Unami Lenape before and art exhibitions as a lost or an endangered languages. I know that in the entire state that I live in, and in most of Indian country, there's a great language revitalization movement that I was fortunate to be a part of and contribute to.

Really, that's where I discovered that that's really where through language, there's nothing more Lenape, there's nothing more Delaware, Unami Lenape than to be able to talk and express yourself in that manner or, say, as a Pawnee or a Kiowa to be able to talk and express. Embedded in those words are much more than just how we think of language. They're really the key to our worldviews. Our languages are the keys to our worldview and really our thought patterns and how we see the world and how we should treat each other or how we choose to live in the world or our ancestors did. So I'm fascinated by the language. I was fortunate enough to be around many, many different native languages growing up. But ours was one because of the nature of us being a northeastern tribe that was very much in danger of being lost. Some would say that at one point it was a very, very, very endangered language to the point to where nobody was being born in what we call a first language household, where everybody could speak conversationally in Unami Lenape.

So these things, we all think about this, by the way, all of my community, the Delaware Tribe of Indians. I was fortunate enough to serve on the Tribal Council as an elected member for four years. We think about these things definitely all the time, and people do hard work to try to revitalize the language. I know at this time that the Delaware Tribe of Indians is actively working to revitalize our language.

Li:

That's a part of that preservation and remembrance because your work, really does explore this idea of ancestral remembrance and is rooted in that. Then again, you're also engaging with these historic sites, like Pennsbury Manor, that tap into public memory. So in your thoughts, how are ancestral remembrance and public memory connected? Are there any similar ways that they resonate?

Nathan:

Well, I think of different communities of remembrance. Within this idea of memory there are just different communities. I don't want to want to create a dichotomy, but it's easily understood by those who focus on the legacy of William Penn and those who focus on the legacy of the Lenape or the Pawnee. But ancestral memory is key to my culture, I believe, and I really don't know any way to express it other than explaining it in a contemporary sense. If you're deeply involved in your tribal nation, one of the one things that people will ask you is they'll say, "Who are your folks?" Literally, people will say, "Who are your folks?"

Li:

Who are your peoples?
 

Nathan:

"What family do you come from?" I didn't start to realize this until I was an adult, of course. It's not something you think you would ever think of as a child or anything. It started to become really apparent to me that we're families that make up communities that have stayed together in our case for hundreds of years across thousands of miles. It's a point to where we got down to very small numbers. We still stuck together. Then there was also a diaspora of Lenape that went to Canada, the Munsee and the Stockbridge. There was the Delaware Nation who has actually lived more near the Kiowa. My grandmother was Kiowa. But we still had the same family names. For instance, there are people and members of the Delaware Nation that are actually blood related to the Delaware Tribe. So that is really our connection to each other is our ancestors. That's purely what binds us to together is that our ancestors were together, and we just continue that bond.
 

Li:

Thank you. A part of Monument Lab's mission is to illuminate how symbols are connected to systems of power and public memory. What are the recurring or even the most vital symbols illuminated in your work?

Nathan:

Oh, that's a really tough question because my work is all over the place. I work across a lot of different mediums, although I've trained as an art historian, so I came into this as a visual artist. I just happened to be a musician and then discovered installation art and how sound works in art. But for me, the story I feel that I'm trying to tell cannot be held by any number of symbols or signs. I want to give myself the freedom and agency to use whatever is needed, actually, whatever is needed to get across the idea that is important to me. So going back to nkwiluntàmën, lonesome, such as the sounds, these colors, we use these white post-Colonial benches, and there's four large ones, placed across the grounds of Pennsbury Manor. You'll see that, if one were to visit, they would see a black bench, a yellow bench, a white bench, and a red bench.
 

Nathan:

If you're from my community, a Delaware Tribe of Indian member and you know that you're a Lenape, you understand that those colors have meaning to our tribe, and you'll know that those colors have sacred meaning. So in some sense, I will use whatever I think is the most appropriate way to use it also. I want to give myself the freedom to use any type of symbolism. I loved growing up with my mother and my grandmother being able to go to powwows. My mom would say, "Well, here comes the Shawnee women. Here comes the Delaware women. They dress like this. Here comes..."

Li:

You can recognize from their dress.
 

Nathan:

My mother and my grandmother taught me that iconography of our clothing, what we now call regalia.
 

Li:

I was curious if perhaps the drum or even the idea of homeland show up in your work?
 

Nathan:

Oh, they definitely show up in my work when appropriate. But rather than a drum, I would say sound or song or music. We do have these iconographies and symbols that are deeply meaningful to us, and I often use those in my artwork. But really the question for me is how to use them appropriately and, also at the same time, expand the use of these things appropriately. It's just being accountable to your legacy and your community in a sense and not crossing these boundaries, but still at the same time pushing form, pushing the edge.

I'm a contemporary person. We're all contemporary people. We want to add something. We want to contribute. We want to be useful. So I'm searching for symbols and forms all the time, different ones. Whether it be a mound, whether it'd be a swimming pool inside an art gallery or a singing park bench or a post-Colonial bench in Pennsbury Manor, in some ways you could say I would be indigenizing and musicalizing those benches. But I consciously work to have a very broad palette. I want my work to be expansive and be able to encompass any subject or idea, because that's why I got into art is because you can talk about anything.

Li:

Yeah, it's boundless. It's boundless. Then also thinking about the connections and the symbols that you mentioned, the colors that you mentioned, the iconography, what systems of power might they be connected to?
 

Nathan:

Well, ultimately, I think that most of the power that is embedded in these symbols comes from the sublime, that come from the sacred. It's complicated. The sacred means to not be touched. That's my understanding, it's to not be touched. However, it's been the source of inspiration for artists of any continent of any time is, if you want to call it, a spiritual, sublime, religious connection, inspiration, whatever, but ultimately, that is my understanding. From my research, even as a young person studying Pawnee mythologies at the University of Oklahoma and special collection and learning stories, our origin stories and what color meant and how the world was seen by my ancestors from other tribes as well as Lenape stories, it's something that's hard to grasp and to hold onto, but that's how we've come to identify each other. It's as simple as we have car tags here that represent our tribes. We have a compact with the state. So everybody's looking around at all these different car tags.

Li:

Wow.
 

Nathan:

You see a regular Oklahoma one, and then you'll see... A very common one is a Cherokee because they're one of the biggest tribes. You'll see a blue one, it's Pawnee. Now you'll see a red one, and it's Delaware or Lenape. It says Unami Lenape on it, and it has our seal. So we play this kind of game all of us. I mean, it's not a game, but we're always looking at license plates to see... It might be your mom's car you're driving that has, say, a Kickapoo license plate or something, and it's a Cherokee driving it or a non-Indian or something, a relative, say. It's not for me to say where these came from. It's something that I actually just really explore and that fascinates me. It's very rich growing up and being a member of my tribal communities. I learn something new almost daily.
 

Li:

I can imagine like you said, the learning experience that you have as a child growing up in your community. You mentioned mythologies earlier. I study mythology. One of the purposes I've come to understand is education, educating through these stories. I recently interviewed Jesse Hagopian from the Zinn Education Project and the movement for anti-racist education. The struggles for education reform and reckoning with Eurocentric understandings of history seem to be deeply connected efforts. So on nkwiluntàmën, I understand an educational curriculum has been developed for younger audiences. What do you hope that people take away from this project that they might not find in a textbook or a classroom?

Nathan:

Well, I would hope that when people visit the large-scale sound installation and visual elements of it that they would understand... my greatest hope that people would learn what I learned while creating the work was that I really don't know what it felt like. I just came across, I was looking for the words in the Delaware Talking Dictionary for feelings, and I found a sentence or a way of saying feeling that said, "It did not penetrate me. I did not feel it." It made me realize that I don't know. I've never had this happen to me. The history of the Delaware Lenape is of constant removal, of constant pushing. Most people know the Cherokee Nation and the Trail of Tears. Actually, there were many movements of the Cherokee. It's very complex. All tribes are very complex. You always have to qualify. But the Trail of Tears is what most people know about. It was this very long, two-year complex journey. It was fraught.
 

Li:

That's one of the stories that we learned in school, if at all.

Nathan:

So our story is of nine of those and, to my understanding and research, was about once every 30 years. So it seemed to me that most Lenape, who came to be known as the Delaware Tribe, who I grew up with as, had ancestors that had experienced a removal. It's something that we still live and deal with today. We came to Oklahoma from what is now Lawrence, Kansas, when this was called Indian Territory. We had been living before that north of Kansas and had adapted our way of life as we changed across this territory and through time to survive.

So as we moved into the Plains, we started to hunt buffalo, and then we get kind of crosswise with some other tribes. I think when the federal government was constituting Indian Country, they were concerned with the relationships between other tribes and how they felt. My understanding is we had upset some... By Buffalo hunting and adopting that way of survival and life, there was some trepidation about us. They wanted our reservation. The railroad wanted our reservation, and Lawrence, Kansas, to run directly through our reservation. They were forcing us to move off that reservation, and they couldn't find a place. That was kind of my understanding of the situation. So we ended up in the northernmost part of the Cherokee Nation. This made us a landless tribe for a very, very long time. Technically, we didn't have a reservation. We were living in the Cherokee's reservation because we had this very ancient but kind of tangential connection to the Cherokees. So that's a very long and complicated story as well.
 

Li:

That's actually a beautiful setup for one of my last questions actually. This idea of documentation and stewardship are key for Indigenous communities, as you just mentioned, that continue to contend with stolen land, forest displacements, cultural erasure, and lost languages. Monument Lab thinks a lot about the future archives that can hold the dynamic nature of public memory in all its forms. What would a future archive of ancestral memory look, feel, or even sound like for you?
 

Nathan Young:

I love that question because we do work with future archives of our ancestors, all of us do today. So I think it's really a question of form. I've encountered this in my studies of Sonic Agency and Indigenous Sonic Agency. The invention of the phonograph and the wax cylinder are very important. It didn't look like anything. It looked like sound or that archive. I think that unknowingly, we're all living in an archive. We're archiving moments now as things speed up constantly. Paul Virilio, the theorist, was very, very important to my thinking because he theorized about speed and the speed of, say, how a camera shutter and a gun are very similar in their repeatingness. I think about repetition a lot. But today, we live in this hyper surveillance society that any moment could be archived, any moment could be filmed, and also these things will be lost. So that is a fascinating thought to think about what may survive and become the archive and what may not, even with all of this effort to constantly surveil and document everything.

But it's my hope that archives are important just because they give us a deeper understanding of a connection to something we will never be able to experience. So I think that a future archive is something that we cannot imagine. We don't know what it's going to look like, and it's up to us to find out and to explore form and explore possibilities so that we're not stuck in this mindset that has to be in steel and monumentalized as a figure or a person or something like that. So in my mind, it's just to be revealed to us. We'll know later, but I would hope that were to make...

I know this is what people still do today that make monuments. They want to make something beautiful, but that means something different to Lenape or a Pawnee or Kiowa, so that seems very different to us. And so we do that. We do memorialize things in different ways. But I think that we think of them as more ethereal, whether we think of them as things that we know that aren't going to really last forever. I feel that way, at least. I don't speak for all of my culture. But I know that some of us are trying to find new forms to really memorialize our past and unite our community of memory and our tribes, our experiences.

Li:

Like you said, time, everything's moving so fast and everything's evolving. Everything's constantly changing. So who knows what the forms will take. This has been such a wonderful conversation. I really appreciate your time. I just wanted to see if you had any final words or even gems of ancestral wisdom you might want to leave with us before we finish.

Nathan:

No, I can't share any ancestral wisdom, not knowingly or very well. I just appreciate the opportunity to create the piece. I appreciate the opportunity to expand upon the piece by talking with you about this because I'm just trying to figure this out. I don't have all the answers.

Li:

Right, that is part of  being a life learner and walking this path. Everyone's on their journey. We are constantly learning at every turn. I'm with you, Nathan. I often admit that I do not have all the answers. That is for sure. I really enjoyed learning about your work and your practice. I definitely plan on getting down to Pennsbury Manor and look forward to the curriculum for the youth when it comes out.
 

Nathan:

Well, thank you. I hope you enjoy it. I hope that it's a meaningful experience for you. I'm a very fortunate person to be able to work on such a project and very grateful to the entire team and everybody that supported the process.

Li:

Thank you, and thank you again to Ryan Strand Greenberg, who is also the producer of this podcast and worked with you on the project for nkwiluntàmën. Thank you to Nathan Young, our guest today on Future Memory. This is another one for the Future Memory archives.

Monument Lab Future Memory is produced by Monument Lab Studio, Paul Farber, Li Sumpter, Ryan Strand Greenberg, Aubree Penney, and Nico Rodriguez. Our producing partner for Future Memory is RADIOKISMET, with special thanks to Justin Berger and the Christopher Plant. This season was supported with generous funding by the Stuart Weitzman School of Design and the University of Pennsylvania.

Li:

Welcome Jon Kaufman and El Sawyer to Future Memory.

Jon:

Thank you for having us.

El:

Thank you, cool name.

Li:

So what's your origin story? How did Jon and El become Ming Media?

Jon:

It's an interesting story and there's not really one particular magical spark, but it definitely was an organic process from my perspective, right? El his own journey and perspective with it, but I never really considered filmmaking as a career at all when I was younger, I never wanted to be like a Hollywood person, never wanted to direct or anything like that, but I was always interested in storytelling and especially advocacy and just trying to combat the narratives that I knew were false. I didn't know how to do that. And then it wasn't until I went to Temple and took a class, which was, I forget the name of, it's something around community media, which was a film class. I wasn't a film major at all, didn't study a film at Temple, but this class took me to the Village of Arts and Humanities in North Philly where El was teaching video production to neighborhood youth.

And that was my first real exposure to filmmaking was this model that was completely outside of the traditional structure of what we consider to be like mass media and filmmaking in Hollywood storytelling, and just kind of fell in love with it. The idea that it was probably 2007 and cameras were just starting to get a little more accessible. Editing software was just starting to get a little bit more accessible to people. And so it was really this moment where I felt like, "Oh wow, this is something I could do." And I saw the power of it with what El was doing with kids in the neighborhood and just to be able to tell their own stories. Then I graduated Temple, El hired me to take over his position, actually The Village as the video instructor there and started teaching there, and I taught there for many, many years.

And then we started doing our different projects together. At the time, I was just hustling music videos and whatever I could do to pay the bills with video. And I think our work really kind of solidified around 2010 or so when we started working with the Department of Justice in the US Attorney's office here in Philly to make Pull of Gravity. And that's what really kind of solidified our work and sort of joined us as a partnership and took our work to the next level. And we started Ming shortly after that. But that's a short version of it, and El has a different story for sure of how he got to The Village.

Li:

Right? There's always two sides to first encounter.

El:

There's three sides actually. Yeah, that's a good rendition. I think from that perspective, from my perspective, as you would see in "Pull of Gravity", I was introduced to film while I was in prison, and I had never wanted to be a filmmaker either. I was stabbed while I was in prison, and I didn't think I was going to go home. And there was an internal video crew inside the institution, and my plan was to kind of work my way onto the video crew in an event I didn't go home to basically make videos to send home to my son at the time.

Not to be dramatic about it, but just like-

Li:

Like the archive of, yeah.

El:

... or a suicide note. I mean, it could be a lot of different things that way in event that I wasn't going to be there, it was something I would leave to him and I would sneak it out of the prison. And I did. I did about 10 videos. In that process, I was on the video crew just to get access to the cameras, and I had a chance meeting with Glenn Holsten, who was a Philadelphia filmmaker that came into the institution. And at no point, like I said, I was only on the video crew for that access to the cameras. And then he was accompanying Lily Yeh, who's the founder of the Village of Arts and Humanities into the institution, and he was documenting her work. She started a program at Graterford Prison, and in that he was allowed to come document her and her work there, but he wasn't allowed to bring camera crew or equipment.

So they asked the camera crew internally, did anybody want to assist with him and nobody wanted to, and I volunteered to do that and it changed my life. So that was my sort of coming into film and even knowing that that was even an alternative that way. And in the process of doing that, I felt like there's this interesting quote, John Hendrick Clark, this author, and he said this quote, he says, "It's your duty to fashion your lived experience as a tool for liberation." And I feel like that's ... My elders used to say [inaudible 00:04:21] used to say that all the time to me. And I felt like in a lot of ways when I came home, that was my thought is how can I use my lived experience and who I am and my skillset to actually give other people the opportunity that I didn't have?

So coming home, doing film with Glenn was really just like interning and trying to figure it out, navigate like that. And I had a job at the Village, and Lily Yeh gave me the opportunity to basically provide training and support to youth there at the organization and folks in the community teaching them what I knew about film. And I was kind of learning it as I go. And I did, so for a number of years and then in comes Jon, and this partnership I had with Temple and the professor at the time, Jon's professor, to bring that class. They had to learn along with the class that I was teaching at the Village. And it was love at first sight. I love him like a little brother or like a brother, honestly. And that's been our relationship ever since.

Li:

Well, that's a perfect segue to this next question about your relationship as working collaborators. What's your collaborative style like and would you say you've developed any kind of shorthand or secret language to get more effective with your process?

El:

Yes, and yes in every way, but I'll let Jon jump in on that. What you got, Jon?

Jon:

Yeah, there's a lot to that honestly, because I think neither one of us is really trained in any sort of traditional way. El, like he said, his first exposure was in Graterford, in prison using equipment that was probably way outdated and with very limited sort of technical training. But obviously Glenn was super helpful to him. And then for myself, I didn't study film in any traditional way. At the time I probably couldn't have named one director in the world besides Spielberg or whatever. I didn't know anything about that film world. I think just the fact that we don't come from the traditional filmmaking world has always been our thing where we're humans first. We just engage with people as humans and want to always take that approach where it's not about extracting a story or like, "Oh, how can we make the most exciting or dramatic stuff?"

It's more about connecting with folks on a really human level and less about telling their stories, but really giving them a platform to tell their own stories and assisting people telling their own stories. We sort of see ourselves as a vehicle and as a tool for folks to leverage their own storytelling. So our process is super collaborative and sometimes to our detriment, it can be hard. It's not linear. None of this stuff is linear. And I think traditional production is like, oh, you write a script, you shoot it, you edit it. But we work with real people with real stories and a lot of our stuff, most of it is around trauma and very traumatic stuff and very heavy stuff and dealing with equity and violence and poverty and racism and it's really, really heavy stuff. So it's really important for us to connect with people on a really natural level first before doing any filming.

We come from different backgrounds. I grew up in Germantown in the 90s, but I didn't grow up in poverty, but I experienced a lot of violence in my neighborhood and violence in the home and all kinds of stuff. And in college I tried to look at that experience through lens of urban studies and sociology, and I was like, "This is bullshit, putting people into categories, just labeling people." I was like, "This is bullshit." The academic approach to looking at what I was trying to understand about my experience growing up was not working for me. And then I think the sort of community filmmaking was just a way of like, "Oh wow, this is it. This is a way for real people to tell their own stories with some assistance from their own perspective," I think. So it was really just powerful to realize the power and the gap that community storytelling and community media could fill, not just in my own understanding of the world, but I feel just missing from the conversations that are happening in the newspapers and in mainstream media, so yeah.

Li:

Exactly. And are there additional folks that are working with you? Do you have an expanded team?

Jon:

We used to have a larger team. Covid kind of had us downsize a bit, but our main producer is Gabe Wiener. He's an amazing producer, filmmaker. He's been in Philly for about 15 years now, so he's our primary producer. But we work with a lot of folks all over Philadelphia and around the country and around the world too. But yeah, mostly we staff up as needed for different projects, but we could run down a huge list of names that are Philadelphia folks. But no, it's a collaborative effort, right? We work with so many different people and we're super grateful. It's not a solo sport. There's so many people. We've been talking about our film Music Vets, which we'll get to later, but when the credits roll in one of our films, there's like a hundred names or something of people. So yeah, that's the short answer.

El:

And to the point of just like you're saying secret language or how we operate together, a lot of it's nonverbal, like I say when I say Jon and I are like brothers, that's not an exaggeration at all. A lot of times it's so nonverbal. And then to bridge that to our team, a lot of our team either learned from us or learned with us, and I always look at it as like a Philly style. I don't know why. I associate it as a Philadelphia style. Philadelphia style has been for us as a sort of Guerilla style. We do it all. If somebody calls us to do, "Yep, we can do it," whatever, and we'll figure it out. And we're super resourceful and nothing is beyond us in the sense of we're not too good for a thing. If I'm a director, if we're directors, we go to a scene, I'll be cleaning up the block.

It's like nothing's beyond you to do. But with that said, with respect to the team that we're working with, again, like Jon said, we staff up accordingly because sometimes we document in sometimes very compromising or very complex environments. So we're super conscious of the human there in their environment and everything. And our crew has to make sense and comprehend in which the environment we're going to be filming in. And we take that very serious and we're really honored when people give us interviews and just basically allow us into their world and we really caretake that. And again, like Jon said earlier too, our detriment a lot of times because we're just uber sensitive, because we uber understand how media can be hurtful and has been weaponized, and we control that in that way on behalf of the people that we work with.

Jon:

And our crews are really small. Like I was saying, we're filming super sensitive situations a lot of the times. We'll be in a city that we've never been to in the Deep South on a block that has an active situation going on. And we've been granted access to film there in the middle of the night and it's very active. And it's just El and myself, and we're trusting our host and they're trusting us and it is what it is, but we can't come in there with lights and boom mics and big crew. And sometimes we have to bring in a crew from New York and it's like they show up with a truck and lights and 15 dudes, and it's like, that's not our approach at all. We just can't operate like that at all.

Li:

You have to shape-shift to your environment and the communities you're in.

Jon:

Yeah, and I think we kind of start from that shape, right? Our shape is the sort of that community aspect and we scale up when we have to. But I think our style and what makes our work, you know, gives us so much of that access and that power is that we try to do it with as little as possible and just meet people where they are and not try to be invasive at all. And that can be in a lot of ways through the questions we ask or don't ask, but also how we come into someone's home or how we come into someone's neighborhood.

El:

And represent those things too. Very conscious that we're not going to ask certain questions. And again, our team and our staff has to understand that as well. And we can't have folks on our team just randomly, you know what I mean? So we do a lot of pre-prep and a lot of pre-production and around even information, around the topics that we're working on. If it's foreign to us, we source folks that know or we engage that particular community. We recognize that we're not of that community in a lot of times, so we respect that and we operate accordingly and empower from there and staff from there and everything like that. Again, that's why it's difficult to just say, "Oh, we're a production company. We just kind of write the script and just go do it." It's not the case at all. Our process is as important as the product that we create.

Li:

Now you mentioned "Pull of Gravity" as your breakout project and probably the first film where you got to flex your muscles as a team working together. Now in hindsight, almost a decade later, how has "Pull of Gravity" impacted MING's trajectory in the industry and where you are today as a team?

Jon:

That's a great question.

El:

I mean, it impacted us like crazy, and I can speak just personally. "Pull of Gravity" was never meant to be, ultimately what it was or have, even the reach that it had, that was never even on the forefront of that thought. It was originally seated in a thought I had years ago when I was in prison, when I first was introduced to film is I knew that once I started to be introduced to that world and started to think now, "Wow, I may go home and then how am I going to be successful going home?" I seen from the position I had being in prison that I seen people that were smarter than me, older than me. I went to prison at 17.

I had just did two years in juvenile prior to that, hadn't graduated high school, never had a job. I had no source of foundation to come home and actually activate and become anything that I was imagining at the time. So I was conscious of that. So I was scared that if I go home, what do I have in my access that shows me where I'm coming home to so I can then tool up or position myself at least mentally to actually be effective and come home in an appropriate way? So that's what "Pull of Gravity" was sort of rooted in, is in that. How do we show people inside institution, how do we show lawmakers and whatever this world, there was a gap in the communications right across the board. That's how we seen it. So documenting "Pull of gravity" originally was meant to be what it was, but also it caught on fire that way. It really-

Li:

It did. I mean, as a witness, someone who got to see you all working on the film when you were in production and some of the folks that you interviewed and then to see it. I remember you had a screening, where was it? It was like-

Jon:

Constitution Center.

Li:

The Constitution Center.

Jon:

Yeah, I think that was our very first screening. Yeah.

Li:

Yeah. Oh my gosh. It was powerful because there were some special people in the room, powerful people I think it was on everyone's minds that, "Oh wow, this film is making an impact, and this is just the beginning." We could tell the film was going to go places and that you were going with it.

El:

Yeah, there was buses of folks that got turned away that there was just not a capacity for it. So that was important, and then in that, that was shock to us. And then it just spoke to the need of the disconnection that existed, and it taught us a lot. I mean, that exposure of traveling around to areas that I just would never, and Jon either I'm speaking for Jon, but we would've never thought that that was going to take off like that, and that need existed there, but it did, and it still does. And like you say, 10 years later, I don't know another film that's come out that matches in that genuine state that it was created in at all.

Jon:

Yeah, and the conversation around reentries and returning citizens, and it's huge now. There's so many programs, there's so many ways in the organizations. 10, 12 years ago, it was not the same situation. So at the time it was the film was made under a mandate from Eric Holder, the Attorney General at the time, and it was to ask local US attorney's offices to start thinking of different ways to do community engagement, but specifically talking about reentry, and that's the power of film. There's a way for people to come together in a room that would normally never have a conversation, never be in the same room at the same time. And the film provided a way that people are going to come see a film for entertainment, for education, for an experience. And that's just the power of what it can do is it can bring, you know, we had federal prosecutors in the room, we had former incarcerated people, we had community members. Mayor Nutter requested tickets [inaudible 00:16:29] was like, "I have to be there." It was a huge thing.

Li:

It was a huge thing.

Jon:

Yeah. And at the time there was very little resources in this space, especially resources created by someone who had been in prison that told the experience from an authentic way. And we toured the film around the country for probably three or four years. And like I was saying earlier, we thought we would have a little bit of interest in, oh, New York, la, Chicago. We found ourselves in Pensacola, Florida, Minnesota, Western Pennsylvania, Upstate New York, all over the country. California screening in federal probation in Northern California, we're like, "Wow, we had no idea," because there was such a lack of resources and education and knowledge in this space at that time.

Li:

Here’s a clip from the trailer of “Pull of Gravity”. [ clip plays ]

Jon:

At the time we were comparing our film to reentry programs in prison, and the contrast is just absurd. The stuff they were making that was meant to prepare people to come home was probably still in use. It's literally a joke. And maybe El could speak to more to it, but once we found out about what was actually being used in prison at the time to prepare people to come home, we're like, "Oh, wow, this is not going to work."

Li:

This is not going to work.

Jon:

This is not going to work. And this film is not just a supplement, but almost an antidote to those terrible programs. And the film is used as a training program, not just for correctional officers, for social workers, for probation, parole officers, it's also used for people in prison all over the country as a tool to prepare them to come home. So it's really manifested in the vision that El had for it at the very beginning to help people prepare themselves because it's real out there.

Li:

Well, yeah, and as an educator too, one of the things that I recognized from the film when I saw it was how much I learned not just about reentry, but about this big word recidivism, which I didn't know much about. And understanding that it's not just about preparing folks for reentry into their community, but also preparing them to make sure they don't return to prison.

Jon:

I think also it's about preparing society to better accept people and know what to do, right? Because I think that was the biggest thing. It's like everybody is like, "How do we prepare people to return home? How do we help people succeed?" It's about the individual and their success or their failure or their path. But one of our goals was just educating society about back to trauma, the trauma, the lack of resources, and just how hard it is. So it's about helping people return, but also helping society better prepare itself and prepare all of us to better understand these experiences.

Li:

And even more intimately the families. Because one of the things I remembered so clearly is that even the families of these individuals had to make adjustments, had to have a deeper understanding of what these individuals were going through and how to be ready to accept them and make sure that they had the tools for themselves to deal because it wasn't an easy road for anyone.

El:

That's a really good point, and I would add to that too is like you were saying about the education of the recidivism rate in which people go back to prison. I think one is that what struck me the most and which is probably still at the cornerstone of why I need to exist, is the fact of, it was like an introduction to people, to real conditions in which people live in, the environment. We look at it as three what we call subjects, in this case, myself as one or folks that we documented in the film that were sort of main subjects in the film. And the fourth was the community, the built environment. And that built environment is as toxic and quartered off from grander society as one could imagine. And again, even the most well-meaning folks just have no earthly idea how toxic it can be when you're quartered off.

And these [inaudible 00:22:00], and again, this is literally happening in a vacuum, but the decisions that are being made or even the thought around gun violence and all these different things, they're not made with the comprehension of cause and effect. They're not made with respect to understanding the true conditions in which people are under. So I can go on and on, but I'm just saying it's like that was the main sort of meat of it, was looking and how do we inform people? One thing is about the programs, other is like where's people coming back home to and those conditions and how do you expect them to actually survive and/or thrive based off of this information?

Li:

So what's your lifeline? Where do you find hope and what keeps you doing this work?

Jon:

Context. One of the things we've learned a lot in the past two years with “Pull of Gravity” and a lot of our other work, our work has always been around trauma in a lot of ways, but we didn't have the language and the vocabulary and the full understanding to have a full understanding of all that, right? In the past few years, we've learned this word vicarious trauma, and we've both experienced firsthand traumas in different ways, but then our work has been this collective experience of receiving so many other people's stories of trauma. And that takes a toll in itself, and especially hear stories of the first responders, therapists, all kinds of people have that do this work that is sort of parallel. It's a lot to take in these stories over years and years and years and years. All that to say, I would never take it back.

It's an honor and a privilege to do this work. We've sat with people in just the most trying situations in some of the hardest moments and the hardest situations. And it's an honor and a privilege to be trusted to do this work and to tell these stories and tell stories with people. I think like a lifeline, I think it's just the resilience of folks. And we've talked a lot about this word resilience, and it's a lot of times it's framed as this magical thing and it's like this positive thing, but resilience is a response to survival. Resilience is a response to horrible conditions. Resilience is a necessity. So yeah, resilience is great, but it's not really by choice. It's because you're placed into a situation, you have to adapt to it. So I think a lot of our work now, especially with Music Vets, is moving this direction of just breaking down these labels like that. And you can talk to the Bruce Perry analogy, but I'll pass it over to El for a minute and then we'll come back to maybe Music Vets, if that works.

El:

That's interesting. I think, yeah, definitely agree with Jon. I think it has been traumatic, and I always talk about how it's actually in a lot of ways as for me, has been a sort of, it kind of kept me out of my own internalizing my own traumas too, or dealing with my own personal stuff until just recently. So yeah, so I feel like for a lot of times we looked at it as, and we see it as a sort of calling in a lot of ways and artistry that way, and just being with people and feeling like we're being a service. And I think that's whatever, but lifeline personally is my family, my babies. And I think that's huge. And that is a grounding, very regulating element in my life.

So like it or not, they're present and you can't get away from that. So it's like at the end of the day, and there's this doctor, Sandy Bloom, says trauma is the inability to be in the present. And I think as much as my mind wanders and I get into a zone, my daughter's looking at me and just putting this sticker on my forehead and just like I'm like, "That happened." So it really is grounding at a time and I feel like it's being with, so being with my family and getting healthy I think is the sort of lifeline that I find myself in now. And I think Covid had its own effects and the work on top of that, but I feel like that's my personal sort of lifeline that way.

Jon:

Yeah. For me, it's similar. My daughter especially is just my life and just being with her and just seeing her grow and seeing her learn about the world and having her challenge me and push me and check me all the time is just, it's the most beautiful thing in the world and it's extremely grounding. And I think aside from that, we're going to talk about Music Vets eventually, but music has been a huge lifeline for me. Music and nature and somatic work, working with my body and just getting trauma out through physical stuff has been a huge lifeline for me.

Li:
And here’s a clip from “Music Vets”. [ clip plays ]

Li:

I want to talk about Music Vets. Can you share a little bit about that project and any connections that you might have seen or felt that you made with this community of survivors that might have connected to say, the communities in Pull of Gravity or other projects that you've done?

Jon:

It's really interesting. We were approached by the board chair of a music school in Westchester, New York, the Music Conservatory of Westchester, who had heard of "Pull of Gravity", maybe I think had seen it. And he immediately saw the connection of people returning home from prison and people returning home from war. And they had a music therapy program and he was like, "Wow." Rodd Berro is his name, amazing, amazing guy, executive producer of our film Music Vets. And he said, "Wow, could we make a film that follows veterans coming back to society like Pull of Gravity through the lens of music and music therapy as their treatment?" Obviously different because in Pull of gravity, it wasn't really about treatment or recovery in that way or healing, it was more about stating the problem and getting a really interesting deep firsthand exposure to the environment and the human stories.

But with Music Vets, it was really interesting because we had this sort of solutions based avenue as well, this solutions based lens, which is, here's an issue, but here's how people are using music to deal with this issue and to heal. So the parallels were really interesting. For me, I was immediately drawn to the music aspect. I think El was more drawn to the veterans aspect, but together it's been a magical experience to just dive into the world of neither one of us are veterans, and that's very different from Pull of Gravity, obviously, because that was about El's own personal experience. Neither one of us are vets, so we just take a few steps back and humble ourselves and really do a lot of listening, a lot of learning, a lot of unlearning and reading and just spending time with people. We spent about a year, maybe a year and a half just meeting with people and getting to know them before we did any kind of filming, a lot of research before we started filming that project. And we started in 2017, and it's 2023, and it's just starting to have light. It's a hell of a process.

Li:

Quite a process, right?

Jon:

Yeah.

Li:

You have to have stamina to be a filmmaker, right?

El:

I mean, yeah, stamina and a lot of other things I think. And then especially something like that. And again, we always emphasize the point of just in these days, anyone with a camera is a filmmaker apparently. And that's cool and empowering for people to tell their story and all about that. At the same time, just understanding media and understanding unbridled approaches is really hurtful, could be hurtful and damaging to individuals. And again, our approach, and again, up until the point of doing Music Vets, we've done a lot of work. We do work all over the world all the time, and we've made mistakes and we learn from mistakes. And again, we do our best to learn and grow and be iterative in our process. So that's why we took that time during that. I mean, just for common sense, we don't know much about that topic as much at the time, so we just took that time to actually learn and grow.

And this is part of our process overall. And a lot of people may not necessarily do that. And I think even with that, just to be respectful to where someone is and the sort of knee-jerk reaction in creating content is the sensational whatever kind of approach. And our work is the opposite of that. And not necessarily intentionally anti-sensational, maybe it is, but just telling the human story is again, understanding media and understanding that how hurtful it could be. This is a permanent record. When people are documented, their kids are going to see this, forever. So you get somebody to talk about certain things that's really super personal, maybe that's not necessarily something that you want to live forever. And we try to encourage against or try to use our human approach to actually make sure people are aware of what we're doing and the impact. So not just from us, in the future, if somebody comes up and films them, like, understand the power of that too.

Jon:

You see all these films and media and stories around veterans and PTSD, and it's usually there's this sort of style where it's like hyper-masculine, in your face showing explosions or people with injuries on camera. And we really try to take a different approach. And really, one thing about Pull of Gravity, we never asked or focused on in the film what led people to go to prison in the first place, because that was like the knee-jerk reaction. And with Music Vets, we never asked people, how did you get injured or how did you get PTSD or whatever. But things came out in the film in the process, but that was never the intention of creating this linear story of this happened and then this happened and this happened.

Because it's not like that. Healing is not linear. Healing is very non-linear in a lot of different ways. And it was just very important for us to not take that sort of knee-jerk approach, if you look at a lot of veterans films or issues around military, there's a style to it, and it's like the combat footage and things like that. And we had chose to use animations in the film instead of really showing any sort of footage like that. And it was a very intentional process. And then the music in the film too is also follows a very sort of soothing pathway, right?

Li:

I saw a clip. It does come across that way, very much so, yeah.

Jon:

Cool, cool, and so it was important for us to take the music that was played in the film by the veterans, and our composer Jesse Koolhaas from Amsterdam took the music and was able to integrate a score that basically blended their music with natural music that he was creating, so it flows, right? And it's intentionally not really any in your face, shocking stuff. There's some serious moments for sure. But we didn't want to have the film sort of lean into that direction of that sort of dramatic, overly dramatized sort of military culture kind of vibe at all.

Li:

No, you're right. There is kind of a standard way of dealing with that material. And it's great to see that you have found a way, again, bringing it back to that, just trying to have a human connection with the folks and the stories that you're telling. So with the work that MING does, how do you decide you want to tell a particular story? What kind of things have to be in place for you to pursue a project?

Jon:

That's an ever evolving thing?. I think there's a project we've done years ago that we wouldn't do now for sure because our standards have changed and our experiences have led us to not want to do certain sort of work that we've done a lot of work with philanthropy and foundations, and there's certain types of that work that we would not do anymore just because of the ethics involved and the power dynamic.

Li:

That's growth, right?

Jon:

It is, it is.

Li:

Learning and growth.

Jon:

Yeah, yeah, and it's not easy. It's like people think filmmaking can be lucrative and the way we do it, it's not always the case, right? It's very, very hard. It's like a six-year project, right? Music Vets. So we've turned down a lot of projects in the past few years that would've been maybe financially lucrative, but it didn't fit with our morals. There was a project last summer involving a big network that approached us about doing a project around juveniles in the system in Philly. And we turned it down because we've seen their work, it's a large network that everybody knows. I'm not going to state the name. And we knew that it was going to be sensational no matter what we did if we're handing off footage to a large network and it's about juveniles, we don't trust that relationship. So we turned that down.

And there's a lot of other examples like that where we just feel, you know, we've learned the hard way. And years ago, we would probably do things that we wouldn't do now, but we've definitely grown. It makes it hard sometimes. It's hard to sustain in this sort of pocket of filmmaking. We don't really do a lot of commercial stuff. There's not really any big checks for commercials at all, which are kind of quick and shorter term projects.

El:

We do stuff for work in the sense of just, there's stuff that was just like, all right, it's a paycheck and it's a way to sort of pay some bills, but it's still ethical. And from our perspective, it's not hurtful. And if we're involved, we're just going to insist that certain things are done that way either way and push that boundary. And we feel like we can be a sort of [inaudible 00:35:12] that way. But I think even outside of that, despite the project and the contract kind of basis is it's standing the gap for the subjects and who would be documented or the people that in the subject matter and generally speaking.

So it's really negotiating and making sure that we have creative decision a lot of times and making sure that we have that sort of, so a lot of times it's less about just doing the work. A lot of times we've at a place where people bring us in as a partner on a project. So as opposed to just being a sort of point and shoot kind of situation. [inaudible 00:35:46] I think if we can look at this as this, as a partnership. That way, it gives us enough leeway to push back and say, "We're not going to," you know what I mean? We're going to have some curatorial sort of control that way.

Jon:

And is it going to help? Is it push the needle? Is it going to help individuals? Is it going to benefit people in some way? Especially people that have maybe not had the opportunity to tell their story in this way. So, with Music Vets, I think one of the biggest successes for us is that the three main subjects of the film all love the film and embrace it.

Li:

That's important.

Jon:

And their families, that's the most important right thing for us because they've given us their stories, not just given their service to us in this country, but given their stories, which is, that's priceless. So I think that most importantly is do our subjects see a benefit for themselves or for a cause that they believe in? That's most important to us.

El:

And building that relationship and maintaining those relationships even at all costs too, right? Sometimes there's a huge success in that too. I think those relationships are really important to us and our clients are important too. A lot of times we're really, to me, it speaks a lot of a partnership with a client that sees our value of what we bring and even our being standing firm on the side of the topic and the subjects or subject matter that they're willing to work with us and understand that we may have a position that be a better vantage point or a different vantage point than what they have too, to have the better outcome and can support or amplify, help amplify the voices of the subject.

Li:

And what was it about Monument Lab projects that appealed to you? What were the ideas and the intentions that aligned between MING and Monument Lab that made that collaboration possible?

Jon:

Yeah, great question. I think that's like El was just saying. I think when the values are there and they're aligned, we've been following their work for a number of years and paying attention and we loved what we saw and the opportunity came up to start working with them, I believe maybe end of 2020 on a small project with the state of New Jersey. And it was just very clear from the beginning that our values are aligned. We all know we're living a big lie in this country. A lot of big lies. There's a lot of myths and a lot of histories that have just been created and set in stone. And we know that those aren't true. There's so many different sides to this story of this country and the histories here that are just forgotten and intentionally not recorded in history. So I think a lot of our work is already naturally aligned with flipping this script and trying to tell real truths and alternative histories that are actually the real histories.

So I guess it was 2020, we started working daily. We had a small project and it involved three groups of artists in New Jersey that were retelling stories of the American Revolution through the lens of people of color. And there were three artists of color that did these short projects. And we made three short films with them. And right away, Monument Lab was just super receptive to our approach, and we were able to step outside the box. We were able to have creative freedom and it was just really impactful. And this felt like a natural connection, but when the values are aligned, it's very, very clear.

And then we've been doing some great work since on the Regeneration project and now Beyond Granite in the National Mall in Washington DC. So, I think it's just about knowing that the accepted mainstream history that we're all living and being told is not true, or there's a lot of forgotten or intentionally left out stories and that's why we're here. That's why we've been doing what we're doing, and it's great to just be aligned like that. Yeah, their work is incredible. It's amazing to see where it's come from and where it's at now and where it's going.

Li:

If you could document any project or tell any story, what would it be? And think a little bit outside the box, maybe a departure from some of the projects that you've done in the past. This could be absolutely anything.

Jon:

It's a hard question. I think for years I've been wanting to do something that doesn't involve something traumatic, right? Something that's just happy and fun-

Li:

I can imagine that might be where you're leaning.

Jon:

No, but I don't see that happening anytime soon, honestly. Just that I would love to be able to, you know, I think art and music and healing, healing through art and music and creative arts therapies. "Music Vets" opened up all these avenues for us of just getting to be on military bases and see veterans using music and getting to go to places where people were making masks and painting and all these different creative therapies and dance therapy and different sorts of alternative therapies. And it's just opened up all these doors of there's a million ways to heal. And in Western medicine, we really only look at a few as being legitimate.

But the truth is, society and all around the world, we've been using these ancient traditions to heal forever, right? And it's only in the past a hundred or 200 years we've been like, "Oh, take this pill or talk to this therapist or do this," and this is how you get better through this Western medicine framework. So I think personally, I'm really interested in looking at just different models of healing that are outside of the traditional Western medicine framework, but especially through music and dance and sound, I think. So really, really interested in doing more stories in that.

Li:

In the arts.

Jon:

Yeah.
 

Li:

How about you, El?

El:

Yeah, I don't know about a specific project. I think it's more about different processes. I think again, just the process of filmmaking sometimes can be really patriarchal and just very boiled down almost too much for my liking. And I feel like I really love telling a whole story or hearing a whole story as opposed to making a one-minute clip out of a one-hour conversation. And it's like the many people that we've documented over the years that's just not here anymore. I mean, just in "Pull of Gravity" alone, I think there's shame on me for not knowing, but I think there's 11 people I think maybe that we've documented in "Pull of Gravity" alone that's not here anymore, all to my knowledge by gun violence. And those were very personal relationships and very, very, very personal. So, seeing a short clip of something to me is just like, "Ugh."

I think figuring out a way to document or work on something that is more well-rounded. I think there's a power and actually story arc narrative of filmmaking, but actually encompassing more sort of experimental aspects of installations or something that actually helps tell a bigger story and engulf someone in a reality for a time to give justice to the story. But specifically, there was this interesting story I seen recently, Glenn Holsten, who came in and taught me film in prison. He worked on this film called "Wyeth" about Andrew Wyeth, the painter, and I live now in the Westchester area and out that way.

And I went to the museum finally the other day as a Brandywine River Museum. Very fascinating. And long story short, in the exhibition, they have this one thing about this artist who is also local named Horace Pippin. And it just blew me away to hear the story about Horace Pippin in the sense that Horace Pippin was just really quick not to bastardize his story or edit his story, but was in the self-taught artist, was in the army, was injured in the army, lost use of his right arm, which he was right armed.

Li:

I didn't know that.

El:

And he painted. How did he paint with his right arm? He learned painting as a therapy and he used his left arm to move his right arm to paint all the paintings that he painted.

Li:

Wow.
 

Jon:

Never knew that.

Li:

Me neither.

El:

I didn't know that either and he lived not far from where I live. And I'm just blown away by stories like that. And again, we're talking about resilience, but you're also talking about experiences and we're talking about in the 30s or 40s we're talking about folks that did it on that level, given all of the odds against them in that context of time and all of the dynamics that was happening then. So, I think that's a very fascinating story. Stories like that, that basically emphasize people's, again, resilience, but adding social sort of context to give another perspective of the environment in which they actually had to evolve and in a way they used art to do that. I think there's something fascinating in that for me.

Li:

That is a fascinating story. And like I said, I work in the arts, I didn't know that about Horace Pippin, so thank you for educating me on that bit there. So, what's next for MING Media?

El:

Evolution. No, it is always evolving. I think post Covid, a lot of things changed for everybody, and they gave us a lot of reasons to change and evolve, and that's where we are now. Even to work with Monument Lab, I think a lot of that is rooted in some of the evolution too, looking at, and it gives us the opportunity to spend time with stories from everybody, from indigenous experiences on a lot of levels, to being omnipresent with things that we've been bombarded with every day without knowing. So, all of our work basically evolves us in a way that would just, it gives us a moment to sort of pause and then decide and determine where we can apply that. So we have a number of cool projects on the horizon for clients coming to us now and stuff. So we're just growing and evolving. That's how I would say it. What'd you say, Jon?

Jon:

Yeah, and just seeing how it's all so connected too. The more and more we grow and the work with Monument Lab has been just so beautiful and an amazing experience. Just for talking about some overlap, so I had the opportunity to travel to South Dakota in October for a Monument Lab project with Re:Gen and got to work with an amazing group there, the Rapid City Indian Boarding School project with Amy Sazue and her team. And I was welcomed with open arms as an outsider, and they told me right away, "We don't really trust people with cameras too much." And by the time I left, we were family and getting hugs and hanging out with people's families and kids and-

Li:

Oh, that's beautiful.

Jon:

... It was beautiful. And just, it's such an honor and a privilege to be in that position, and it's humbling. It's really humbling. But one beautiful experience there, I went to the Black Hills pow wow when I was there, and the first 30 minutes of the entire pow wow, 30 minutes straight, maybe even an hour, the opening ceremony was honoring Native American veterans with music and dance. And then the connections just, wow, between "Music Vets" and Monument Lab and the work we've been doing and the amount, oh man, just the amount of connections.

Li:

So many connections.

Jon:

The statistics around Native American folks and indigenous folks in terms of incarceration. The numbers are out of control and they're high representation, the armed forces too. So, there's a lot of interesting connections and it's all starting to connect for us, all this different work. And there's an amazing story there, another one real quick is around this elder I met, Faith Spotted Eagle. She's incredible. She was one of the leaders of the Standing Rock protest in the Dakota Access Pipeline, and she was the first and only indigenous person to receive an electoral vote for president. And it's a whole story to look up. She's incredible.

She works with veterans at the VA in South Dakota and uses traditional ceremony music to work with native vets within the VA.

Li:

Incredible.

Jon:

And so just the overlap here of just the work we're doing is just, it's monumental.

Li:

It's monumental.

Jon:

And it's beautiful. And again, it's an honor and a privilege and just so we're excited to see how these connections keep growing and the work keeps evolving between our personal experiences and our work history and where the future has taken us.

Li:

Well, it has definitely been an honor and a privilege to sit here with you all. I just want to thank you for the awareness that you're bringing to all of these issues. It's super important, and I can't wait to see what comes next for MING Media. Thank you, Jon Kaufman and El Sawyer. It's been a pleasure.

Jon:

Thank you.

El:

Thank you, Li.

​​Li Sumpter:

So welcome back to another episode of Future Memory. My guest today is Jesse Hagopian. He is a Seattle-based educator and the author of the upcoming Teach Truth: The Attack on Critical Race Theory and the Struggle for Antiracist Education. Hagopian is an organizer with the Zinn Education Project and co-editor of the books Black Lives Matter at School: An Uprising for Educational Justice and Teaching for Black Lives. Welcome, Jesse.

Jesse Hagopian:

Oh, thanks so much for having me. Good to be with you.

Li:

Thank you for joining us. Well, I want to get started with some questions about your own education and how you got started. I was curious about what your own early education and high school experiences were like. As a youth, what ways did you relate to or even resist to your own classroom curricula?

Jesse:

I was very alienated from school growing up. I felt like it didn't really speak to me. I didn't feel like I was intelligent. I can remember very clearly a parent-teacher conference in third grade where the teacher brought us out into the hallway with me and my mom, and she took out my standardized testing scores and there was a blue line that ran through the middle that was the average, and then there was the dot far below that line that represented my reading scores.

And I knew from that day forward until about halfway through college, I knew that I was not smart, and I had the test scores to prove it to you. And school just felt like a place that reinforced over and over again that I was not worthy, that I was not intelligent. And there was very little that we studied that was about helping me understand myself, my identity, my place in the world as a Black, mixed-race kid.

And really, it was just a fraught experience, and I took quite a bit to get over that. I was sure I was going to fail out of college, that I wasn't smart enough to go to college. And I think that it was finally the experience of a couple of professors in college that showed that education could be more than just eliminating wrong answer choices at faster rates than other children, that it could be about understanding the problems in our world and how we can collectively solve those problems.

And then I realized I did have something to contribute. Then I realized that I did have some perspectives on what oppression looks like and how it feels and what we might need to do to get out of it, and I was hungry to learn about the systems that are set up in our society to reproduce inequality. And that was a real change for me. But growing up, my mom would tell me, "You're good with kids. I think you're going to be a teacher." And I said, "That's the last thing I'm going to be."

Li:

Oh, really?

Jesse:

School is just so arduous, and why would I want to come back? And then she was right. I came back to my own high school. I came back to Garfield High School, where I graduated, and I taught there for over a decade now.

Li:

I think that's an amazing story, coming full circle to teach back where you got your first experiences in the classroom. And going back to that, I was wondering if you had any standout memories, like I did, with the actual content. You were saying you didn't relate to it so much, but I remember very clearly a moment with my mother coming to the school when I had a moment in the classroom around Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, things like that. Do you have any standout memories of content that really either made you feel excluded or exploited or any of these things that really stuck with you?

Jesse:

For sure. I mean, there are many experiences that I think shaped my approach to education throughout the years. I mean, one of my firsts is from kindergarten. I remember very clearly one of the boys called me the N-word. And I didn't really know what it meant, but I knew it was directed at me and not the other kids. So I went and told the teacher, but there was parent-teacher conferences going on and parents were coming through, prospective parents, to look at the school, and the teacher got just beet red in front of the parents and was very embarrassed that I had said this, and said, "Oh, yeah. We'll deal with that," and just sort of pushed it aside and never came back to it.

And the message that I got was that I had done something wrong, like I had disrupted the education process and that it was wrong for me to have done that because nothing was taken care of. And that's something that still sits with me and I think guides a lot of my approach to how to handle situations in the classroom. And I can remember the first time I had a Black teacher and that I began to learn about Black history in sixth grade, an incredible educator named Faith Davis, taught us about ancient Egypt. And it was the first thing I really got excited about learning, and I was amazed by all these accomplishments that Black people had done.

And then after that class, it just sort of disappeared for a long time, and I never learned about anything else that Black people had done, and it made me wonder, "Is that why I score so poorly on these tests? Because I'm Black? Because I don't see other people like me in the advanced classes? And maybe those aren't for us. Maybe it has something to do innately with my race." And that's such a disempowering feeling, and I wanted to ensure that no other kids had to go through that kind of humiliation.
 

Li:

No, that's a great point that you bring up because I think we had similar experiences. I was actually recently going through some old photos at my mom's house, and I came across my elementary school class photo, the classic one, everyone's lined up, shortest to tallest kind of thing. And there I was, the only Black child in a class of 25 white students. And I think at that young, innocent age, I didn't really understand what I was up against, and today's youth and teachers are facing so many challenges in the classroom today, things that I don't think either of us could have really imagined.

And so, as I was exploring the amazing tools and campaigns that you've been authoring and spearheading, like Teaching for Black Lives, Black Lives Matter at School, and the Zinn Education platform of so many resources, I think, "What would my early school experience have been like if these tools were available?" Right?

And I'm wondering, would you have thought the same thing? Because when I think about these amazing tools that are being offered, I just imagine, and we're not even talking about the digital stuff. I'm just talking about the things around critical race theory, these ideas, just about things that are showing a representation of Black folks. Like you said, even just having a Black teacher and what that meant for you. So even thinking about, what if the tools that you are all creating today were actually in your classroom back at Garfield when you were youth?

Jesse:

Oh, wow. That would've been incredible. I mean, at the Zinn Education Project, we have scores of free downloadable people's history lessons that center Black history and struggles against structural racism. And these lessons tell history from the perspective of people who have been marginalized, who have been pushed out of the centers of power. We look at the founding of America from the perspective of those who have been enslaved, not those who were doing the enslaving. We look at American history through the eyes of those who are organizing multiracial struggles for racial and social justice, not the ones that are trying to maintain segregation and hoarding wealth in the hands of the few.

And I would've just lit up to be able to have a teacher say that your family's history matters, that struggles that your family went through shaped this country, and whatever semblance of democracy that we're able to hold onto in this country is the result of the Black freedom struggle and the result of multiracial struggles for social justice. Instead, we got the message in American government class that democracy is something that's handed down from those in power and those on high.

I can remember, at Garfield High School, my American government teacher assigned a research project, and I did a project about J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI director. And it was the only paper I think I ever really tried on in high school. I was very disengaged from school and didn't see any point in it, but this research project captured my imagination because I learned about some really despicable things that someone in power had done.

I couldn't believe that J. Edgar Hoover had led a campaign against the Black freedom movement, had targeted Martin Luther King, someone who we're all supposed to revere, and yet our government was wiretapping and even trying to get him to commit suicide and some pretty despicable things. And I poured myself into the research and I wrote the best paper I had done up until that point, and she gave me a C with the notes that the claims I was making were unsubstantiated.

Li:

Wow.

Jesse:

And it's clear that she just didn't agree, that she didn't want to hear that a white man in power had misused it. And that was a strong message I got that some ideas are off-limits, and it doesn't matter how hard you work. If you go against what makes a white teacher comfortable, then there are consequences for that.

And after that, I really didn't want to try anymore. I didn't feel like my opinions mattered, and I would've loved to have a teacher help me understand how we can live in a society that calls itself the freest nation on earth, and yet was based on enslavement of Black people and genocide of Native people, continued with Jim Crow segregation to where up through my dad's generation couldn't vote if you were Black.

And then in our own generation, we have mass incarceration. And how is it that racism continues to change in focus and character, but is a constant in American society? And I wasn't able to learn that until much later, and I would've loved to have some of the resources that the Zinn Education Project provides today.

Li:

Yes, you and me both.

Jesse:

Yeah.

Li:

And that brings me to my next question about one of your ongoing campaigns is Black Lives Matter at School. And this year, the 2023 Creative Writing Challenge prompt was, "How can a school community support you in being unapologetically Black?" How might the young Jesse have answered that same question?

Jesse:

Wow. Well, the young Jesse would've been scared to answer that question.

Li:

Really? Say more.

Jesse:

I think that because I was so worried about what it meant to be Black and what that meant about my intelligence, that being unapologetically Black was very foreign for me for far too long. It was hard to come to loving my blackness, and it was a long road to get there. And I'm just so glad that the Black Lives Matter at School movement exists, because so many children like me who are scared to embrace their blackness because they're afraid that it could make them labeled as lesser, not as beautiful, not as deserving of love, not as deserving of care, and everything that all of our kids deserve.

Now, these students are celebrated in our Week of Action that happens the first week of February every year, and also on our Year of Purpose. So every month, we're revisiting the principles of the Black Lives Matter Global Network and we're highlighting different aspects of the Black freedom struggle. And this would've been transformative in my life, helped me come to love my blackness much earlier. And I hope that for many thousands of kids across this country, they are having that experience.

Li:

I love that answer. Thank you. So Garfield High School in Seattle is where you actually attended school as a youth and were also a teacher for over a decade. It's the place where your role as an activist also took root. So history was made here, not just for you as an individual, but really locally and then nationally. So why do you think this was happening at Garfield? Why Garfield High School? And what's the culture and social climate of this school that made it such fertile ground to spark local protests and now national change?

Jesse:

Yeah. I love that question because I bleed purple and I'm a Bulldog to the core. Garfield is a special place to me, and I think the history of the school is a lot of the reason why it was a fertile ground recently for social change. Garfield High School is the school that the founder of the Seattle chapter of the Black Panther Party graduated from in 1968, Aaron Dixon.

Li:

Wow.
 

Jesse:

It's the site where Stokely Carmichael came to speak as the Black Power movement was rising. And before that, Martin Luther King came and spoke at Garfield High School in his only visit to Seattle. It's the heart of the Central District, which was the Black neighborhood in Seattle that was redlined so that Black people could only live in that area. And for that reason, it developed a culture of resistance, and it's an important part of the Black freedom struggle throughout Seattle's history.

And I think that in recent years, we've been able to revive some of that legacy in some of the struggles we've participated in. In 2013, we had a historic boycott of the MAP test, the Measures of Academic Progress test. And this was one of the myriad of high-stakes standardized tests that the kids had to take, and studies show that the average student in K-12 education now take 113 standardized tests. We used to take one in elementary, one in middle school, maybe a couple in high school, and now they're taking standardized tests just constantly.

And this was a particularly egregious test that wasn't aligned to our standards. And finally, one educator at Garfield, Mallory Clarke, said she wasn't going to administer this test anymore, and she contacted me and wanted to know if I could help, and we began organizing the entire faculty at Garfield. And we called a meeting in the library and we asked everybody, "Is anybody getting useful information out of this test that's helping them with creating their curriculum?" And nobody found this test useful.

And then Mallory said she wasn't going to give the test anymore, and who would join her? And we took a vote, and it was unanimous. Everybody said they were going to refuse to administer the test. And so, we organized a press conference in Mr. Gish's room, and we invited the media to come learn why we were going to refuse to give the standardized test, and one of the reasons is because of the legacy of standardized testing based in eugenics. Right?

Li:

Mm-hmm.

Jesse:

Standardized testing was created by open white supremacists. A man named Carl Brigham created the SAT exam out of Princeton University, and he was also the author of a book called The Study in American Intelligence, which was one of the Bibles of the eugenics movement. And the book concludes by lamenting that American intelligence is on the decline because we have more Black people than Europe does, and he fears that intermixing of the races will degrade the intelligence of Americans. And so, he created the SAT exam as a gatekeeper.

And lo and behold, these tests prove that white native-born men were smarter than everybody else. Right? Well, they designed the test to show that, and then they get the feedback that they were looking for, and that's why people like W.E.B. Du Bois, Horace Mann Bond were some of the first opponents of these bogus IQ standardized testings that started to be grafted onto the public schools at the behest of the eugenics movement.

And we knew this history. I'd read Wayne Au's book, Unequal By Design, that explained the racist history of standardized testing, and then we saw it playing out in our own school. We saw how English language learners would get low scores and it would make them feel deficient and unintelligent. But it wasn't measuring their intelligence. It was just measuring their proximity to white dominant culture, the English language, and not their intelligence. And we had so many examples of the way these tests were abusing kids, and we refused to do it. And the school district threatened the faculty of Garfield High School with a 10-day suspension without pay for the tested subject teachers in reading and math, and even our testing coordinator refused to administer the test.

Jesse:

Kris McBride was an amazing advocate for the MAP test boycott. And even the first-year teachers, who didn't have any tenure protections, none of them backed down. And at the end of the school year, not only did they not suspend any of the teachers because of the overwhelming solidarity we received from thousands of educators and parents and students, not only around the country but around the world, who had heard about our boycott, at the end of the year, they actually suspended the test instead and got rid of the MAP test for all of Seattle's high schools, and it was just a resounding victory.

Li:

Yeah. That's a triumph. That's a triumph for sure.

Jesse:

Yeah. Right?

Li:

And I was watching some of the news coverage, and it was just, like you said, quite a victory to have that test obliterated, really, just removed completely from the system, and also then making way for this idea of multiple literacies and ways of learning that are more just and equitable for all students. And I love to see that, like you said, it begins just with one person. Shout out to Mallory and everyone who followed that one teacher. And like you said, that's all it takes, but then just to see the students really take lead in their own way was a beautiful thing.

Jesse:

Yeah. Yeah. It was cool that the students, when they knew we weren't going to administer the test, they sent administrators in to try to get the students to march them off to the computer labs to take the test, and some of them just staged to sit in in their own classroom, refused to get up and leave, and then the ones that went just clicked the button on the computer through very quickly so the score was invalidated.

So the BSU supported us and the student government supported us, and it was an incredible solidarity that emerged in this struggle. And it wasn't about not wanting assessment. I think as you said, we wanted more authentic forms of assessment, ones that could actually help us understand what our students knew. And we started doing much more performance-based assessments.

Li:

Right.
 

Jesse:

When you get your PhD, they don't want you to eliminate wrong answer choices at faster rates. They want to know, can you think? Can you create?

Li:

Right. Are you a critical thinker?

Jesse:

Right. Yeah. Can you critically think? Can you make a thesis and back it up with evidence? And so, that's what we began doing. We wanted to have kids develop a thesis. And it might not be at the PhD level, but it'll be at a developmentally appropriate level for them, and then back it up with evidence and then present that evidence to the class or to other teachers and administrators and defend their position, and that, I think, was a real victory for all of our students for authentic assessment.

Li:

And went down at Garfield.

Jesse:

Yeah. No doubt. No doubt.

Li:

So another question I got for you. Part of the work of Monument Lab is to engage community in the current state of monuments and public memory in this country and beyond. Have you made any connections to this parallel movement to take down monuments that stand as symbols that continue to uphold oppressive systems and then honor the same false histories that you and your comrades are fighting in the classroom?
 

Jesse:

Yeah. Definitely. I think one of my favorite assignments I ever gave my students at Garfield was to research the debate over monuments around the country and think about, "How do we decide as a society who to honor, and who should be honored, and who shouldn't be?" And all the students got a big chunk of clay and they created their own monument to replace one that they thought was inappropriate. And so, many chose Confederate monuments or monuments to any slaveholders, including the hallowed Founding Fathers, that many of my students didn't hold in reverence given that they could have been owned by George Washington.

And so, at the University of Washington, we have that statue of George Washington. Some people wanted to replace that with a statue of Aaron Dixon, who graduated from Garfield High School, founded the Black Panther Party, went to the University of Washington, and they felt far better represented our community as somebody who started the Free Breakfast Program in Seattle and who founded a free medical clinic that's still open to this day, just a few blocks away from Garfield High School, where many of our students receive free medical care to this day.

Li:

Oh, that's amazing.

Jesse:

So creating themselves some beautiful monuments to really honor the people that have made their lives better rather than just powerful people who imposed their will on our society. And I just think it was such an incredible moment in the 2020 uprising when all across the country, people said, "We are no longer going to honor slaveholders and perpetrators of genocide." It was incredible to see them dump the statue of Columbus into the Bay in Baltimore and teach the whole country a lesson, a history lesson about the genocidal attack of Columbus on Native people and how we need to find better heroes.

Li:

I like that. Find better heroes. You've dedicated a bunch of your recent efforts to resisting House Bills 1807 and 1886 introduced by state Republican Representative Jim Walsh. As you put it in your article that I read, these bills are designed to mandate educators lie to Washington students about structural racism and sexism, essentially forcing educators to teach a false, alternative history of the United States. Can you break down the basic proposals of these bills and their connection to, say, recent book bans, critical race theory, and resources like The 1619 Project?

Jesse:

For sure. Many people imagine that the attack on critical race theory is mostly in red states or it's just a product of the South. But instead, people should know that actually the attack on critical race theory originated from Christopher Rufo, who ran for city council in Seattle, and he is still a resident in Washington state, and that every state in the nation, except for California, has had a proposed bill that would require educators to lie to students about structural racism or sexism or heterosexism.

And even in California, the one state that hasn't had a proposed bill, they have many local school districts that have one of these educational gag order policies in place that seek to coerce educators to lie to students about American history, about Black history, about queer history. And Washington state is one of the many states that has had proposed bills by Republican legislators that are trying to deceive students. They were so frightened of the 2020 uprising and all the questions that young people were asking about our deeply unequitable society that instead of working to try to eliminate that inequality, they just want to ban people from understanding where it comes from.

So in my state, last year, they proposed House Bill 1886 that would make it illegal to teach about structural racism. And I found it deeply ironic that the House bill was numbered 1886, because that was the same year as a mob of white people in Seattle rounded up hundreds of Chinese people and forced them into wagons and hauled them to Seattle docks where they were placed on ships and illegally deported. And the chief of police helped this riotous white mob illegally, Police Chief William Murphy, and he never had faced any penalty for it. He was acquitted, even though this racist attack on Chinese people was carried out. Right?

And our students have the right to learn about this. They should know that this happened in our city, and too many don't grow up learning the reality of that anti-Chinese attack. And then when hate crimes skyrocketed in our own era in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, you saw hate crimes increase by several hundred percent against Asian Americans, and people wonder why. There's a long history of this Yellow Peril narrative in American society that has labeled Asian Americans and Chinese Americans as the other, as dangerous, as dirty, and our students need to learn about that if they're going to overcome those racial divisions today.

Li:

And what would the passing of these bills mean for the next generation of youth and their futures, and their education? What's the status of these bills now?

Jesse:

Well, thankfully, the bill in Washington state did not pass, but they are proliferating around the country. 18 states have already passed bills that seek to coerce educators into lying about structural racism, denying the fact that our country was built on structural racism, of enslavement of Black people, and genocide of Native people, and the exploitation of labor of immigrants, hyper-exploitation of Chinese labor on the railroads and Latinx labor in farms, and they want to hide this history.

And you saw it in Florida when they banned the AP African American Studies course. In Virginia, they're trying to rework the state standards to hide the legacy of structural racism and the contributions of Black people, and they are trying to send us back to the era of the 1940s and '50s during the second Red Scare known as the McCarthy era. In the McCarthy era, hundreds of teachers, thousands of teachers around the country were fired after having been labeled communist.

And then the Red Scare had the overlapping Lavender Scare, which was the attack on LGBTQ people, and that was especially intense against educators, and Florida had a particularly pernicious attack on queer educators. They had the Johns Committee there that would interrogate teachers about their sex lives and then fire them, remove their teaching certificate so they could never teach again. And this is what people like Governor Ron DeSantis in Florida are trying to revive with the Don't Say Gay bill that has outlawed any discussions of LGBTQ people for the younger grades, and also his so-called Stop W.O.K.E. Act that imposes anti-truth laws on Black history.

And in Florida now, it is a third-degree felony for an educator to be caught with the wrong book about Black people or about queer people in their classroom. You can get five years in jail and a $5,000 fine for having the wrong book. Thousands of books are being banned all over the country, and they are rapidly trying to bring us back to that Red Scare, Lavender Scare era where they could just label you a communist or today label you a critical race theorist and push you out of the classroom.

So we're at a crossroads right now, where everybody has to decide, "Are we going to build a multiracial struggle to create a true democracy? Or are we going to submit to this fearmongering and this racial hatred and allow them to turn back the clock?" And I hope that people will value social justice enough to join our struggle.

Li:

I'm just blown away by all the things you're saying, and it's really powerful because I come from a family of educators. Both my father and my mother are educators. My brother and myself are both educators. So I see it not as a job, but like a vocation. And it really sounds like you and the folks that you're in community with, in solidarity with in Seattle and beyond are really making amazing strides and asking such critical questions that could determine the future of our country.

Jesse:

No doubt.

Li:

For me and so many other educators, Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed and bell hooks' Teaching to Transgress were defining transformative works that greatly impacted my trajectory in the world. And I wanted to know, can you share what books or even creative works that inspired the path that got you where you are today?

Jesse:

Yeah. I love that question. Definitely those two books are at the top.

Li:

Oh, you like those books? Aren't they at the top?

Jesse:

I love those books. Yes.

Li:

I love them.

Jesse:

Yes.

Li:

I mean, and I'm sure you reread them because I'm always rereading those books.

Jesse:

Sure. Yes. I'm quoting them in the book I'm writing right now. So much of what I'm doing would not be possible without the theoretical framework that bell hooks gave us and that Paulo Freire gave us to understand how to use dialogic pedagogy to engage your students in a conversation, and educating isn't about filling their heads with what you know, the banking model of education, as Paulo Freire put it, right?

Li:

Right.

Jesse:

It's about learning from your students.

Li:

Right. That relationship between this... I learned so much from my students, especially now that I'm getting older.

Jesse:

Yeah. No doubt.
 

Li:

You got to stay in the know with the youth.

Jesse:

Hey, the students created the greatest lesson plan of my lifetime when they organized the uprising of 2020. That was mostly young BIPOC folks that organized that uprising and taught the nation what structural racism is and taught many of their teachers that they needed to learn something about it and they needed to begin teaching about it. Right? That's where this whole backlash to critical race theory started.

And I think that all of us in the struggle would do well to join in study groups around books that can help deepen our understanding of history and theory that will help us in these struggles to come. There are so many books that I could cite that have been pivotal to my understanding of the struggle. I mean, working at the Zinn Education Project, Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States has been really important.

Li:

Yes.

Jesse:

So I think reframing who the subjects of history are and...

Li:

And the authors of history, right?

Jesse:

Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. I think that Jarvis Givens book, Fugitive Pedagogy, should be read by all educators.

Li:

Yes. I'm familiar, very familiar with that project, and it is super inspiring. Yes.

Jesse:

Yeah. I mean, that book is just a key that unlocks the truth about why we're in the situation we're in right now, where they're trying to outlaw education.

Li:

And all the overlapping systems, because you talked about that, like these intersecting oppressions and overlapping systems of oppression that are really creating something that it feels like it's impenetrable, but people are making strides.

Jesse:

Yeah. No doubt. And I would just say that the book, Fugitive Pedagogy, just gives you that history of how Black education has always been a fugitive project. It's always been a challenge to the power structure. It's always been verboten. And starting in 1740 were the first anti-literacy laws in South Carolina banning Black people from learning to read and write.

Li:

How about that? Right.

Jesse:

Why was that? Because in 1739, the Stono Rebellion happened. A man named Jemmy helped lead an uprising of enslaved people, and he marched with a banner that read "Liberty" as they collected more enslaved people along the way during their uprising, and this terrified the enslavers. And they not only wanted to kill all the people that were trying to get their freedom, they wanted to kill the idea of freedom. They wanted to kill the ability of Black people to ever write the word liberty again.

And so, they imposed these laws to ban Black people from learning to read and write. And today's racists aren't so bold as to ban the ability for people to learn to read and write, but they do want to ban the ability to read the world, as Paulo Freire put it. They don't want us to be racially literate. They don't want us to understand how systems of power and oppression are maintained. And so, they're banning ideas now in the classroom. And once you understand the long history of the attacks on Black education, you can understand why it's happening again today.

Li:

And even through the digital divide, right? This idea of being disconnected from these resources that are so much a part of education today that Black and brown communities don't always have really makes a difference in the education that they receive and how they learn as well.

Jesse:

No doubt. I mean, that was emphasized during the pandemic, right?

Li:

Exactly. So much was amplified during the pandemic, especially that digital divide.

Jesse:

No doubt. No doubt.

Li:

So, Jesse, I want to think about the future and speculate. In the best-case scenario, maybe a utopian future for education in the United States. Teachers often have to draft a wish list for what they want, the resources, the needs they have for their classrooms as the academic year comes around. So thinking about what you would want, the three essentials that would be on your wish list for the classroom of the future.

Jesse:

Yeah. I love this question, because too often, images of the future are all about dystopias. Those are the movies and books we get, and there's not enough freedom dreaming about what's possible.
 

Li:

I love that. Shout out to Robin D. Kelley.

Jesse:

No doubt. Another essential book to read.

Li:

Yes.

Jesse:

So I think in the classroom of the future that provides a liberatory education for our youth, the first thing I think we might see is the breakdown of subjects and getting rid of these artificial divisions between the different academic disciplines. And so, school would look very different. Instead of going to math class in the first period and then language arts and then social studies, you might have a class called Should Coal Trains be Used in Seattle? Right? They were just debating whether we should allow coal trains to come through our city.

So it would be based on a real problem that exists in your society, and then you would use math and science and language arts and social studies to attack this problem. You would want to learn about the science of climate change and the math that helps you understand the changing climate. Right? We would want to learn the history of coal extraction in this country, the toll it's taken on working people who are minors and the toll it's taken on the environment.

We would want to use language arts to write speeches, to deliver your opinion to the city council about this. So we would have problem-posing pedagogy, as Paulo Freire put it, where the courses would be organized around things that the kids care about that impact their lives, and then we would use the academic disciplines in service of that.

I think in addition to that, my second requirement for this liberatory classroom would be about wraparound services, so that when kids come to school, they also get healthcare. They also get tutoring services, dental care, mental health care, food for their families. And schools could be really the hubs of community where people have their needs taken care of and are invested in to support not just the students, but their families as well.

And lastly, I think schools would be flooded with resources, so that instead of wasting trillions of dollars on the Pentagon so that the United States can go bomb countries all over the world and kill children and their families, we would take that money and flood it into the school system so that kids have all the state-of-the-art resources they need, from the digital equipment, recording equipment, music, art supplies, to funding the school nurse, to the auditoriums, and the music halls. I mean, you can imagine that the richest country on earth could have incredible resources for their kids if we valued education, if we valued our young people.

Instead, so many schools in America today are falling apart. The first school I ever taught in in Washington, D.C., an elementary school, I had a hole in the ceiling of my classroom, and it just rained into my classroom and destroyed the first project that I ever assigned the students, their research project, and they never even got to present the projects.

Li:

No way.
 

Jesse:

And our kids deserve better than that.

Li:

Oh, they definitely deserve better than that. Right? Oh my gosh.

Jesse:

We're in a society where 81 billionaires have the same amount of wealth as the bottom half of humanity, and that wealth divide means that our kids go to schools that are falling apart, and we would transform that in a future society that's worthy of our kids.

Li:

Most definitely. And if I can, I wanted to add a fourth thing, because I remember something you said about performance-based assessment.

Jesse:

Oh, yeah.

Li:

And I think that would-

Jesse:

I should put that in.

Li:

... definitely be essential, right? Make sure you get that one in. But last but not least, my final question to you is, what's next for Zinn Education? And more specifically, what is next for Jesse Hagopian?

Jesse:

Oh, thank you. Well, I'm really excited about the June 10th National Day of Action. The Zinn Education Project has partnered with Black Lives Matter at School and the African American Policy Forum to organize the Teach Truth Day of Action on June 10th, and I hope everybody will join us on that day of action in organizing an event in your community. This is the third annual Teach Truth Day of Action, and the past ones have been incredible.

People have organized historical walking tours in their community to highlight examples of the Black freedom struggle and sites that were important in the Black freedom struggle in their own communities or sites of oppression and racial injustice that students have the right to learn about in their own communities. Some people went to sites where Japanese people were rounded up and incarcerated during World War II. Some people in Memphis, Tennessee went to a site right on their school grounds where there was a race riot and many Black people were killed.

In Seattle, we went by the clinic that the Black Panther Party started and gave that history and highlighted how, if the bill passed to deny teachers the right to teach about structural racism, we couldn't even teach about the origins of the health clinic in our own community. And so, there'll be many creative protests that happen on June 10th, 2023, and I'm excited to say we have more cosponsors than ever before.

The National Education Association is supporting now, and many other grassroots organizations from across the country. So I expect hundreds of teachers and educators will turn out to protest these anti-truth laws, and I'll be right there with them all helping to organize it and learning from the educators and organizers, who are putting these events on, and hopefully helping to tell their story in the new book that I hope to be finishing very soon about this-

Li:

You're going to finish it. You're going to finish. This month, man.
 

Jesse:

Thank you.

Li:

This is your month.

Jesse:

I need that encouragement.

Li:

You got this.

Jesse:

I hope I finish it on this month.

Li:

Believe me. When I was so close to finishing my dissertation, everyone kept asking me, "Are you done yet? Are you done yet?" So I know, because I could see you cringe when I asked you that in the beginning. All I can say is, look, I mean, I'm just so grateful to have this conversation with you today. Thank you for joining me. And I also got to say, I'm sorry to say, Jesse, your mother was right. I think this was your calling. I think this might have been what you were set on this planet to do.

Jesse:

It feels that way now. Thank you so much.

Li:

Yes, indeed. So this is Monument Lab, Future Memory. Thank you to my guest, Jesse Hagopian.

Jesse:

Hey, I really appreciate you having me on. I just felt your warm spirit come across and brighten my day. Really great to be with you.
 

Li:

My pleasure.

Concluding the Plot of Land series, we look at the work being done across the United States to repair our relationship with the land, from the Tongva conservancy in Los Angeles to the Sea Islands of South Carolina. What will it take to imagine a radically different future? With the stakes rising along with the temperature, what is the scale of change we need to shift power and build a more just world?

• Reporters: Jameela Hammond @JameelaHammond, Katherine Nagasawa @Kat_Nagasawa, Anya Groner @anyagroner
• Interviewees:
  • Kavon Ward; Twitter:@JusiceforBruc1
  • Liz Ogbu; Twitter: @lizogbu
  • Doug Kiel Twitter: @Doug_Kiel *seems deactivated. @’s fail on twitter.
  • John Echohawk, JD  Org tag: @NDNrights
  • Kimberly Morales Johnson MPH, P.h.D 
  • William Horne, Ph.D. @wihorne
  • Ashleigh Lawrence-Sanders @AshleighWrites
  • Nikil Saval; Twitter: @SenatorSaval
  • Desiree Fields, Ph.D.;Twitter: @fieldsdesiree 
  • Daniel Aldana Cohen, Ph.D.; Twitter: @aldatweets
  • Tara Raghuveer ​​@taraghuveer
  • Luke Melonakos-Harrison @l_melo_h

We return to Louisiana and the Joneses, where in recent decades family members have moved away for work and to escape the increasingly toxic air and water leaking from the neighboring chemical plants of Cancer Alley. As stronger hurricanes and vanishing wetlands reconfigure Louisiana’s topography, new industries continue old patterns of environmental harm. What will this mean for the future of Jonesland? What can their story on the front-lines of climate change teach us as the nation faces the dire consequences of extractive economies?

• Reporters: Jameela Hammond @JameelaHammond, Anya Groner @anyagroner
• Interviewees: 
  • Jazmin “Jazzy” Miller
  • Family: 
    • Laverne Jones
    • Reverend Samuel “Papa” Jones
    • Reverend Joseph Jones
    • Sharon Lavigne
    • Wjuankeil Jones
    • Cora Jones Ross
    • Claudette Jones
  • Imani Brown
  • Joy Banner, Ph.D; Twitter: @drjoy08
  • Jo Banner
  • Anne Rolfes; @annerolfes, Organization’s Twitter: @labucketbrigade
  • Sheila Tahir @labucketbrigade

We learn the incredible story of Sedonia Dennis, a woman once enslaved in Louisiana, who came to own a piece of the plantation that had once claimed ownership of her family. And we explore how, over time, the plantation economy gave way to the petrochemical industry. Join us as we spend time with Sedonia Dennis’s descendant, Jazzy Miller who is documenting her family’s fight to exist at the intersection of each of these forms of extraction.

• Reporters: Jameela Hammond @JameelaHammond, Anya Groner @anyagroner
• Interviewees: 
  • Jazmin “Jazzy” Miller
    • Family: 
      • Reverend Joseph Jones
      • Reverend Samuel “Papa” Jones
      • Wjuankeil Jones
      • Cora Jones Ross
      • Anissa Jones
      • Laverne Jones
  • Joy Banner, Ph.D.; Twitter: @drjoy08
  • Jo Banner
  • Anne Rolfes; @annerolfes Twitter: @labucketbrigade
  • Sheila Tahir @labucketbrigade

We’re looking at what happened after subsidized affordable housing programs expired in the 2000s on New York’s Roosevelt Island. Some residents managed to buy in, build equity and stability. Others experienced precarious tenancy or displacement while an ongoing influx of wealthier residents is changing the face of the island. We ask the question, can Roosevelt Island’s past guide state and federal investments in multi-racial, multi-income neighborhoods for the future? 

• Reporters: Jameela Hammond @JameelaHammond, Melissa Fundira @MFundira
• Interviewees:
  • Ted Liebman FAIA ; Twitter: @liebman_t
  • Yonah Freemark, Ph.D.; Twitter: @yfreemark
  • Rosemary Ndubuizu, Ph.D.
  • Kim Phillips-Fein, Ph.D., kimphillipsfein.com
  • Dorothy Davis @diasporantouch
  • Marion Ntiru @marionntiru
  • Residents past and present
    • Sasha Ross *Note: resident
    • Lionel Fundira *Note: resident
    • Courtney Francis *Note: previous resident
    • Barbara Spiegel *Note: resident
    • Rita Ombele *Note:previous resident
    • Nikki Leopold *Note: resident
    • Eneaqua Lewis *Note: resident
    • Ludi Nsimba *Note: resident
    • Morgan Elinson *Note: former resident
    • Judith Berdy *Note: resident
    • Marie Orraca *Note: resident

New York’s Roosevelt Island was imagined as an idyllic, multi-racial, multi-income community, developed as part of the social housing movement in the 60s and 70s. But by the 1980s, socially-minded investments in housing were overtaken by neoliberal policy. We talk to current-day and displaced residents to see how this change affected them, while looking back from the point of divergence to find the decisions that created and dismantled housing as a human right. 

• Reporters: Jameela Hammond @JameelaHammond, Melissa Fundira @MFundira
• Interviewees:
  • Ted Liebman, FAIA; Twitter: @liebman_t
  • Yonah Freemark, Ph.D.; Twitter: @yfreemark
  • Rosemary Ndubuizu, Ph.D. Affiliate Twitter: @GU_AFAM
  • Kim Phillips-Fein, Ph.D.; Affiliate Twitter:  @CUHistoryDept
  • Marion Ntiru @marionntiru
  • Residents past and present
    • Sasha Ross *Note: resident
    • Lionel Fundira *Note: resident
    • Courtney Francis *Note: previous resident
    • Barbara Spiegel *Note: resident
    • Rita Ombele *Note:previous resident
    • Nikki Leopold *Note: resident
    • Marie Orraca *Note: resident
    • Eneaqua Lewis *Note: resident
    • Ludi Nsimba *Note: resident
    • Morgan Elinson *Note: former resident
    • Judith Berdy *Note: resident
    • Andrew Kerr *Note: former resident

• Reporters: Jameela Hammond @JameelaHammond, Katherine Nagasawa @Kat_Nagasawa, Anya Groner @anyagroner
• Interviewees:
  • Residents
    • Nate Bradford, Sr.
    • Nate Bradford, Jr.; Instagram: @gline_ranch
    • Theola Cudjoe Jones
    • Fannie Washington
    • Patricia Harris
    • Amanda Bradford
    • Henrietta Hicks
    • Damien McCormick
  • Dr. Willard Tillman
  • Kendra Field Ph.D.; Twitter: @TuftsRCD
  • Melissa Stuckey Ph.D.; Twitter: @melissanstuckey
  • Russell Cobb Ph.D.; Twitter: @RussellSCobb

• Reporters: Jameela Hammond @JameelaHammond, Katherine Nagasawa @Kat_Nagasawa, Anya Groner @anyagroner
• Interviewees:
  • Residents
    • Nate Bradford, Sr.
    • Nate Bradford, Jr. ; Instagram: @gline_ranch
    • Theola Cudjoe Jones
    • Fannie Washington
    • Lucy Ellis
    • Patricia Harris
    • Henrietta Hicks
    • Dr. Francis Marzett Shelton, Ed.D. (Mayor)
    • Damien McCormick
  • Claudio Saunt, Ph.D.Twitter: @ClaudioSaunt
  • Kendra Field, Ph.D.; Affiliate Twitter: @TuftsRCD
  • Melissa Stuckey, Ph.D.Twitter: @melissanstuckey
  • Russell Cobb Ph.D.; Twitter : @RussellSCobb