00:00:01.000 - 00:00:33.000

Isabella Bourtin: Okay, the recording is rolling. So my name's Isabella Bourtin. I'm a junior at Rice University and I'm a researcher on this project. Alika Jimenez: My name is Alika Jimenez. I'm a sophomore at Rice University and I'm also a researcher on this project. Doug Martin: Osiyo, Dvgi Tlutlu daquado, tsi Tsalagi. My name is Doug Martin and I'm a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. In Cherokee: ᎣᏏᏲ, ᏛᎩ ᏡᏡ ᏓᏆᏙᎠ, ᏥᏣᎳᎩ. Hello my name is Doug Martin and I'm a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. Isabella Bourtin: Wonderful. Doug, would you mind right off the bat telling us where you were born, kind of where you grew up, what you consider home?

00:00:33.000 - 00:03:06.000

Doug Martin: Yeah. I'm originally from California, the Bay Area, so I lived there for most of my adult, well, most of my life. And then we moved to Indiana, and now I'm down here in Austin, Texas. So that's where I'm from, but then a lot of my family has moved, is returning to Oklahoma. So my Cherokee family was originally from Webbers Falls, Oklahoma before they left in the Dust Bowl and went to California. So my mom is back in Oklahoma. She lives in Tahlequah, and a lot of people are looking that way. Isabella Bourtin: So what did your life growing up look like? Did you move around mostly when you were young or was that mostly when you're older? And then what was that like and how did it influence you growing up? Doug Martin: Yeah, I grew up, I’ve moved a bunch. We lived in the Bay Area for a pretty long time. I didn't leave there until I was an adult. But yeah, it was a real interesting place because there's intertribal stuff, but we really hadn't enrolled when I was living out there. My mom wasn't sure how to enroll and there wasn't a lot of connection to the Cherokee Nation out there. So we did that later. I did that as an adult and now I've got my son enrolled down here, so he's enrolled as a Texan. But yeah, it's a real interesting place because there's lots of cultures in California. People come from all over and people like me, I have a lot of other ethnicities in my background, so I'm Cherokee, but I'm also Portuguese. I've got other things. So you have a lot of mixing of cultures and people and you see things from a lot of different aspects, little different points of views and other things that kind of color that. Doug Martin: But the other one thing that's interesting about where I grew up is I grew up in, there's valleys, there's mountains, there's hills, there's trees. So it was really when I left there and went to Indiana when I came down here, down here and Austin was kind, there was that flatter land. There was some hills, there were mountains. But when I went to Tahlequah for the first time, I went with the Cherokee Leadership Conference, Cherokee Nation Leadership Conference. It was weird how home I'd never been there. I'd never lived there before in my life. We didn't really have stories about living in Oklahoma, but how much it felt like, oh yeah, this is my home. I belong there, it's my spot. So it was very strange to be moving around the country and to find a place that you'd never been and be like, oh, this feels so much like home.

00:03:06.000 - 00:06:01.000

Doug Martin: So that was a interesting idea. But yeah, we had Intertribal folks, so we had people from all of the tribes. There was a big, in the fifties and sixties, there was a lot of removal from different reservations to the Bay Area. My family didn't come in that way. We came in the Dust Bowl with a lot of other Cherokee and Choctaw and five tribes: Cherokee, Chickasaw, Seminole, Muskogee Creek. So there's a big set of five tribes descendants out there who either have enrolled or don't know they can enroll because they haven't done the research or don't know a lot of those sorts of stuff. But out in California, there's seven Cherokee groups. I neglect to mention earlier that I'm actually on the board here of the Central Texas Cherokee Township, and those are official at large groups the Cherokee Nation sets around or it kind of maintains around the country. Doug Martin: So there's five here in Texas and then there's seven, I think another one's forming over there in California. So there's a good section of folks that are Cherokee in California. Texas actually surpassed them this year or last year. So there's actually more Cherokees in Texas than there are in California. And we're the second largest population outside of Oklahoma. I mean, we are the second largest population that large, outside of Oklahoma, we're the largest population of any state except for Oklahoma. So we're number two on that thing. But there's at large, you have to live actually on the res, which is that little portion of northeast Oklahoma to be considered in district. So there's a bunch of people that live at large, they live in Oklahoma. So it's not exactly, it's kind of a weird way to phrase it, but we are the second largest state of Cherokee citizens here in Texas. Doug Martin: I believe it's somewhere at 29,000 and some more. In Travis County where I live, there's, gosh, there's they estimate between 1000 and 5,000 registered Cherokees. And that's kind of a telling number because where I lived in California, a lot of my cousins and my aunts, they didn't register right away. So when I got registered and when my mom got registered, there were other people that were eligible for enrollment that hadn't done it. So when you see that number of a thousand or 500, you can expect that maybe there's aunts, uncles, new kids, all these people that can also register on the periphery. So the population's bigger than even that in my experience. So Isabella Bourtin: Very interesting. I never knew all of that history. So you said that you grew up not enrolled, your family didn't really know how to do that. What did that process like for you kind of rediscovering that and reclaiming that?

00:06:01.000 - 00:10:07.000

Doug Martin: Well, when I left, we had to drive through Cherokee Nation and we ended up talking to people at Cherokee Nation. They said, oh no, you have to get enrolled. You know, Get enrolled. Actually, one of the things that really got my mom into the idea to do it was that because she'd always known we were Cherokee and she raised us saying, oh, you're Cherokee. She showed me my great grandma's Roll number on the Dawes roll, and she'd talk about where she lived in Oklahoma because her grandma told her about that and some other stuff. So we knew it, but we didn't have any cultural connections. We didn't have language, we didn't have, there was no YouTube back then. There was none of these things you could look up and pick up right away, some sort of cultural understanding. And so when we drove to the Cherokee Nation and actually saw it, they were, so, you figure there's a lot of reconnection stories out there, and you'll see it, and maybe if you interview other tribal folks that they're not always positive. Doug Martin: It's not always like you reconnect to a tribe, you reconnect to a nation and they're very happy. And I've heard all the sides of stories on that. But when we went to the Cherokee Nation, we said, they said, are you citizens? We said, no, but my great grandma or my mom would say, my grandma's on the Dawes roll, you need this register. They were adamant, they were throwing papers at us, they were throwing things like, if that's true, you need to get that in. And so how that kind of was really welcoming. My mom was like, we got to do this. We got to get this done. And so when my son was born, it was a real big deal for me to make sure that he got enrolled right away. So he never really, he's not going to be having to reconnect in that same way that me and my mom had to where we're like, okay's, find the culture, make some contacts, and let's do some stuff. Doug Martin: He's always going to have, from the earliest point, he has a citizenship. And with, like I said, with YouTube and these other things, you've got a lot of resources for at large folks who may not have, you can't go live in the Cherokee Nation every day, but can have Cherokee contact and Cherokee language and Cherokee traditions that are available for them to pick up and remember. So it's one of those things where a lot of folks I know down in here, Texas, talking about the Tribal Buffalo project and there Lipan Apache folks, and a lot of them we have that, oh, I know this story, but how do I access it? And that kind of goes to, it's a little tricky in other groups, and it varies by experience varies all across the board. So with our experience, it was so positive. So it's kind of like, I hope the people can get those more positive experiences than the negative ones. Doug Martin: And down here, there's so many tribes that aren't recognized depending on the statuses. So you kind of have to navigate that aspect of it, trying to find the heritage without a tribal nation that can kind of walk you through things and do stuff. So it, it's kind of, it's all, yeah, like I said, just about every Native person I've talked to, every experience has been different. It's never like, “oh yeah, this will go this way, this will go this way, this will go this way." It's always something like, well, this, well, this, well this. And so I try to make sure that people understand it's not a one size kind of thing because a lot of people try to lump Native cultures into one thing, and it's very much by tribe, by statuses, by recognition, and by the people that are involved in the groups that propagate the culture. So we're trying to be a really good group that propagates culture and make sure we're a community building group that keeps our Cherokee values above all else. And that's kind of where we're at here in Texas.

00:10:07.000 - 00:12:49.000

Isabella Bourtin: That's super interesting. We've heard from a lot of people who are having to reconnect, and I feel like the stories are so different from everyone. Some people are really frustrated, some people are like you. They're really loving the experience. And some people are just kind of like, I don't know where to start. And so this has been so interesting hearing your experience also. Doug Martin: And that's part of what we try to do when people come to us and say that they're Cherokee or five tribes, we try to be able to, okay, well, let's help you find, do you know your Dawes Roll number? Do you know this? Do you know this? And if they don't know, then, okay, well, how would we help you find it? How would we help you find that ancestor? How do we help you find it? And then you get a lot of the people who maybe you found those stuff for 'em, but they're like, well, I didn't grow up in the culture, so I don't feel like I should be part of it. I don't feel like I should do that. Or there's people that don't have the Roll numbers, but they're so drawn to it and they have a story, or they have a legitimate ancestor that's there, but we can't get 'em on the rolls left the Rolls for some reason . Doug Martin: You had to be in Indian territory during the Rolls. So if you're left during the Gold Rush or you're still living in Texas, you're not going to be on those Rolls. Even though you have a legitimate ancestor, you may not be in those spaces where you can get enrolled, where you can now enroll in the modern tribe. So that's one of those things where there's a lot of visceral stuff on the internet. There's a lot of talking points and a lot of politics that are involved. But one of those things is what we try to do is make sure you understand, hey, there's all different experiences, a lot of different things, and we're trying to be more, try to make sure that we're a place where we'll help you find your family history, whether you're Cherokee or not. We'll try to help you find it. Doug Martin: Our records and resources are generally Oklahoma, so we try to help people find their ancestors. We try to help people of other tribes to try to find their ancestors if we can find them. We try to help people navigate the ancestry and the family search and these genealogies to try and find it. And it's one of those things where if you, again, we wade into politics, once you find that ancestor, then it's like, okay, now what do I do with it? Do I join something? Do I say something? Do I put it on – Do I change my Facebook handle to a different language word? And those are all things people have to make choices of and things that are going to get criticized back and forth from those circles. So it's one of those things where it's like we have to be kind of concerned with the people to say, Hey, at least this part of it, we can help you to this point.

00:12:49.000 - 00:15:54.000

Doug Martin: And then you have to find how you want to engage with that. And it's one of those weird things too, where it's like you find those ancestors and then people will tell you one way or another, it's like, like I said, I'm Portuguese, I'm Scottish. Nobody gets mad at me for going to a Scottish fair. I don't have any documentation to say I'm Scottish or not Scottish. I know my grandma's story and stuff like that. But it's one of those things where if you're a Native person, it's very much the documents have to be ordered, the i's have to be kind of dotted. All this stuff has to be, I almost showed up to this scrapbooking event one time, and I had all this stuff in the chart. He's like, “you're the most well-documented person I ’ve ever met.” Because I have to be! I had to prove all this to get enrolled, I didn't have to prove any of this when I say I'm something else. Doug Martin: So this one though, people will ask you very questions about how much are you and what's your thing and how you grew up there and all these other things. And so I could say, I'm Portuguese all day long and nobody will bat, and I don't speak very much Portuguese, so they'll probably get mad at that. But like I said, if I say I'm Cherokee, it's like, wait, wait, wait, wait. How much? There's lots of different questions. And I feel like, again, that's a thing that a lot of Native folks that I deal with down here in Texas, they have that same thing. And then another layers of, again, that recognition and the different stuff. So it's like a landmines, lots of landmine, lots of navigation. So we try to make sure that our group is cognizant of that to the extent that we can still help people and still be part of the overall Native community in a good way, not in a detrimental way where people don't want to hang out with us and be around us. Isabella Bourtin: Yeah, I feel like we've heard that from a lot of people, especially people who are part of state recognized tribes. They feel like, oh, we're not taken as seriously, or we're not, people say that we're Pretendians and things like that. So that's really interesting that you bring that up and that you guys are so kind about that Doug Martin: We're trying, not all of us are. I know some of you said the Pretendian word, there's a lot of Pretendian hunting groups out there, and most of them are run by Cherokee citizens, and that's just that fact of it. So I know both sides of those coins. There's certain political things I have to be cognizant of because we are funded by the Cherokee Nation, what they say or what they believe, and make sure I'm on the right end of those things. But again, yeah, it's one of those things where there's opinions on all sides, and I'm not going to sit here and try to blast opinions of what things are, but legally, the state tribes don't have recognition onto the federal level. And then people that don't have even that state tribe recognition have no recognition under any level.

00:15:54.000 - 00:18:47.000

Doug Martin: That doesn't mean that they don't have Native ancestry. We find that we do genealogy, we help people find that, or people tell us about it, and we see it. We see that that's true. So it's one of those things where in our particular thing, we're a culture group and it's Cherokee culture. We're not intertribal. We do Cherokee culture. So we just make sure that we're trying to do our stuff the best we can and make sure that we have room for when the Texas Tribal Buffalo Project is doing an event or there we can help support 'em or try to help 'em in some way, because I think they're doing a great job. And other groups too that have different things, we try to make sure that we're there. But we do have to also be on some of the other lines of things when there's certain legalities or laws that are in play. But yeah, I think down here, when I first came here in 2014, the groups were very much not cohesive. And a lot of that federal, state, unrecognized politics were involved in a lot of that stuff. So I try to stay out of the politics as much as I can. I'm here for culture, and if you have culture and I have culture and you want to share culture, then I think we're on a better level than trying to argue over which government likes which person more really where it boils down to. Isabella Bourtin: Yeah, that's really interesting to hear. I feel like there's so much discussion about this topic, and so it's really interesting to hear someone else's perspective on it. Doug Martin: A lot of it goes to the sovereignty of it because it's like we have the federally recognized tribes and their sovereignty, but then the state tribes and the other one and the unrecognized folks that are usually in groups, they don't have that level of protected sovereignty. So you have to, I think again, in here, if you're going to try to build an intertribal community, they have in other places, you have to see the people and see what they're doing and go by that, not go exclusively on the statuses as much as you can. Isabella Bourtin: Yeah. Thanks for sharing all of that. Like I said, it's always interesting to hear a new perspective or an echo of another perspective. So thank you. So jumping back toward talking about your childhood, do you have any particular memories from your childhood that stand out or do you have any family traditions that stand out? They can be indigenous or not, just whatever you can think of.

00:18:47.000 - 00:21:27.000

Doug Martin: Of. Well, one of the things, when we went to Oklahoma and saw the folks, a lot of the stuff was like that stuff we did as a kid, we canned, we kept our own chickens. I used to grow corn, we used to grow vegetables and stuff a lot. So it's just something we thought we did. And then you go there and a lot of them do that. So right now I'm involved in the group's corn, the Three Sisters program. So yeah, it's like I remember doing those things as a child and kind being like, oh, yeah, that's the stuff that do. But also the same thing is I grew up in a city where nobody else had these big gardens or did these other things, so that was kind of an interesting other stuff. But like I said, I grew up mostly in the city and some other things, so we didn't have a lot of connection to the line of Cherokee culture like we do today. Doug Martin: So there's just kind of echoes of it. It's weird. You'll do something in Oklahoma and you're like, I used to do this as a kid, but again, there's no direct tie. But it again, feels so familiar, the idea that I used to hang out with my friends and we'd make, on Labor Day, my friend's family would do carnitas and this big pot and the boiled things. And then you go to Oklahoma and they're doing hog fries, which is basically the same. There's a big kettle they bring out. You're doing the exact same thing, and you're like, this is very similar. But again, no direct ties between those two things. Those are things that just remind me of home when I'm in Oklahoma. Then I'm like, oh yeah, these are stuff, we're growing our gardens, we're having our chickens, we're making hog fry, we're doing this sorts of stuff. Yeah, it's just a strange happenstance of culture. I think. Alika Jimenez: Moving on to the culture section, actually, that fits really well. It was really interesting to hear how you had that happenstance or that parallel between Oklahoma and your upbringing, but just in general, whether this is having to do with your indigenous or non-indigenous culture. You mentioned that you're also Portuguese, you're Scottish and you're Cherokee. What are your favorite things about your culture? Do you have any specific stories that you feel like capture your culture, whether that's from your upbringing or from when you started reconnecting and you were able to enroll? Doug Martin: Well, stories, lemme think here. I got lots of stories, but they're all crazy stories. They're all the old stories.

00:21:27.000 - 00:24:27.000

Isabella Bourtin: We'd love to hear. Doug Martin: Yeah. But I think once I moved here and kind of researched some of the Cherokee stuff here, there were Cherokee settlements up here in Texas. They're up in north Texas. And it was one of those things where I came down, I'm like, oh, I've got a degree in history. So I do a lot of history stuff. So I studied a lot in California history, and one of the big things that struck me when I got connected with Cherokee back in the Cherokee stuff was that so many Cherokees had done stuff in California, and then you come here and oh, there's so many Cherokees that are in the Texas mix too. One of the things when I was younger, we did missions and we did those, the different between the California period and the American period, and there was a character called Joaquin Murrieta, and I don't know if you've all heard of Joaquin Murrieta out here. Doug Martin: He's very well known in California, and he's the basis for this character of Zorro. So that's where they base Zorro, and they also based Batman on Zorro. So it's kind of the basis of that mass crusader kind of fell on. But what he was, he was kinda like a Robinhood fellow. He would rob the stage coaches to the point that it was kind, the rubbing between the Californias had been into their land and the Anglos had come and take them. And so basically it came like a legend where, he'd rob a stage coach in Sacramento, he'd rob a bank in LA, he'd rob a stage coach in the morning, he'd rob a bank by noon and he'd be in Sacramento for dinner. Well, he couldn't do that on a horse back then. That was impossible. So they're just saying every crime was supposed to be him. Doug Martin: But one of the stories that when I got into with the folks in Oklahoma is that that story, there was a book called The Life and Adventures Joaquin Murieta, and I'd grown up with that story. We all knew about it, but the person that wrote that was actually John Rollin Ridge, who was the son of a Cherokee in Oklahoma. He left for California during the Gulf Field. He was a Cherokee. I'd never known that. And they said, oh yeah, he wrote this book, but the book's not really about Joaquin Murieta. If you read the book, it's not like Zorro. It's not very fanciful and adventurous. It's a terrible story of how his family was killed and the things he had to do and all these other stuff. And he's talking about what happened to him in Oklahoma. So it was one of those weird things where it's like you grow up with a story that you think is so Californian, you think it's such a California story, it's a Mexican, or the Californians were kind of, I don't know how they didn't always see themselves as Mexican because they were only Mexico for 10 years, but hold the California Hispanic story against the California gold miners, you're like, this is California.

00:24:27.000 - 00:26:45.000

Doug Martin: And then here it's like, oh, that's a Cherokee story. It's a Cherokee and themed story. And that's like it is here. When I first moved here and I kind of researched it and found out that Sam Houston was a citizen of Cherokee Nation, and I tell that to people, and nobody knows that. Nobody has that understanding that there were Cherokee settlements here and the Mirabeau Lamar, the second president, he hated Sam Houston and he hated the Cherokees because he was originally from Georgia and they removed the Cherokees. And so he attacked the Natives because he hated Sam Houston, the Cherokees. And the first war they did was the Cherokee War, and the Chief Bowls dies. But a lot of the Cherokees that are here end up in Oklahoma. They're forced into Oklahoma. So again, where my family would've been at that time, and Chief Bowls dies with a sword. Doug Martin: They don't bury him, but they recover his sword. And the sword says “To my friend, Chief Bowls,” from Sam Houston, it's a sword that Sam Houston had given him. So it's one of those things where you kind of blend the surface and you're like, oh, this is kind of a cultural area. Well, not, it is a cultural area just as much as California and the Joaquin Murieta and all the Cherokees that come out of there, even though Cherokees are not from this area or from that area, there's so much Cherokee culture that's kind of entwined in the mythos that people don't always see. So it's a very strange, it's strange to go somewhere to be places diverse to California and Texas and still find that there's these threads that will bring you back to that culture, that culture that I was trying to be more part of. And you're like, oh, I didn't ever know Sam Houston was Cherokee. I didn't understand Joaquin Murrieta was actually a parable for a story that happened in northeastern Oklahoma. So it's one of those weird kind of things. That's an interesting story I have where I found these kind of connections. Doug Martin: What's another good story? Who knows? Maybe another prompt. Alika Jimenez: That's wild. I passed by that Sam Houston statue every day, and I also had no idea that he was a citizen of the Cherokee Nation.

00:26:45.000 - 00:30:14.000

Doug Martin: Yeah, I tell that to people. It's one of those things too, because when we come up to places, a lot of Cherokees don't look like, people say, well, you don't look like Indians. Some of us are lighter, some of us are darker. There's some of us that are Freedman descendants, that they say, oh, you're just black and well, but they're Cherokee citizens through these different things. And that's why I kind of say, Sam Houston was Cherokee, and they go, oh, Sam Houston was Native American. I said, I didn't say he was Native American. I said, he was Cherokee. He had actually, as a child, his mother remarried and he didn't like the new stepfather, so he ran away. And about 16, he ran away to a small town in Tennessee in my family before removal was from Tennessee. And he'd followed, I don't think it was the same brand, but same area. Doug Martin: And he had actually ended up on a Cherokee settlement or Cherokee Village that was run by a fellow named Spring Frog, and he became his adopted father. Well, later on in life, spring Frog removed to Arkansas, which was the Cherokee Nation at the time before they folded it all into Oklahoma. And after his failed being the governor of Tennessee, he left and joined Sp ring Frog for several years. And in 1827, he was made a citizen of Cherokee Nation. He spoke Cherokee, he did Cherokee Dances. He lived in Cherokee Nation for a number of years. He had a Cherokee wife at one time. He had several wives. One of his wives at one time was a Cherokee. So the Cherokees and him had a very good rapport. And that was one of the reasons that here in Texas, when Sam Houston was the president, he actually signed a treaty with all the Native American groups that he could get. Doug Martin: So the Comanche, the Caddo, the Cherokee, the Delaware, the Kickapoo, almost all the north northern Texas tribes. And basically, if his treaty had gone through the Red River War wouldn't have happened. A lot of the Comancheria violence wouldn't have happened. The Texas Rangers wouldn't be nearly as prominent. The Texas Rangers always rode with the tribe called the Tonkawa. They were always together, usually in their endeavors. So if they had ratified that treaty would be, the Cherokees would have a reservation in North Texas. The Comanches would've a reservation in Texas. These other groups would all have lands in Texas. But again, Mirabeau Lamar had another idea of how he wanted Texas to run. He wanted it to be a, he didn't want to join the United States. He wanted kind of a Texas, he wanted a middle state between Mexico and America that was kind of run differently. Doug Martin: And so he wanted to clear it out of Native folks, so they never ratified those treaties. And then of course, we've had, there was a lot of the situations with the Comancheria and some of the other situations that came part of it. Obviously the Cherokee War comes out of that. But yeah, Texas would be a very different place. And where I go to presentations, kind of have to tell people why Cherokees are important to Texas history and that there were Cherokee citizens that lived here. If those things that got different way, I wouldn't have to, they'd be right next to the Alabama and then the Cherokees would be right next to 'em. So they'd have a spot here. So nobody would question that thing. But now I have to tell people, Cherokees aren't from here , how’d t hey get here ? Well, they were here, they did this, and then they were attacked and removed to either north or south.

00:30:14.000 - 00:33:37.000

Doug Martin: And some of them did go to Mexico too. Our founding father, or not founding father, but kind of who we think of as our preeminent Cherokee is Sequoyah who did the syllabary. And he actually dies in Mexico. They're not totally sure if it's Mexico or Texas, but he was down there looking for a relative of his, and they said they have his grave in Zaragoza, so a lot of Cherokee citizens don't even know that Sequoyah's final resting place was in Mexico, and then he had to travel through Texas. He was looking for his relatives who had gone Kickapoo down into Mexico. And so people don't realize, even people in Oklahoma don't know that there's a Cherokee-Texas-Mexico connection in a lot of ways. So it's a lot of education. When I do my presentations of the Cherokees, we're not just here now as a group. Doug Martin: Our group here, the Cherokees are a big part of removal era, removal era tribes in the Texas. So that includes the Alabama-Coushatta, Kickapoo, the Delaware, the Cherokee, the Chickasaw. A lot of folks came into Texas during their removal period trying to flee what was happening out there. And some of them ended up staying here. So the Kickapoo and the Alabama-Coushatta are both removal era tribes that are here in Texas today as federal recognized tribes. And then of course, the Delaware and the Black Seminole and West Texas and some of these other groups were all kind of in Texas at that same time too. So it's a very interesting, Texas is really, when you look at, it's a very interesting place for Natives. Doug Martin: It's always been kind of a place where Natives come in and make their mark and do things and become part of the culture of the area. And so that's one of those things where it's very interesting to see how the group dynamics were then and all the fighting and all the politics and all the troubles, and to see them now where the same thing is, we're kind of hopefully trying to diffuse a lot of that. But the same idea of all the kind of infighting that can occur when you have all these groups that come in and who's got the rights to this, who's got the thought for that? Who can be at this panel? Who can be at that thing? Who's got this part? And so, yeah, it's a good analogy for how we're trying to hopefully make a coalition today, but how it was before where the Apache come in and the Comanches come in and kind of push the Apache out. And then there's movement from that side. The removal era tribes come in and they have taken over. They kind of take spots in different places. Then of course, the Mexico - US divisions and the tribes that moved back and forth during that time. So it's a super dynamic thing to talk about. It's a super dynamic thing to study. But again, it's one of those things where most average Texans have no clue. Doug Martin: They don't know Apacheria from Comancheria and why those two areas are on the map are nearly the same area because of these changes and these different fights and movements of people.

00:33:37.000 - 00:36:33.000

Alika Jimenez: I really wish that I had learned any of that in my Texas history class. I took two years of that. And there's just so much that we didn't cover. But in your daily life, do you have any culture-based traditions or practices that you'd like to share with us that you feel comfort able sharing with us? Doug Martin: Yeah. Well, when I started going to leadership conference and stuff like that, it was kind of encouraged that we pick up a skill or pick up a craft. So I ended up becoming a finger weaver. I going on seven years of finger weaving. So I'm a Cherokee Nation TERO certified finger weaver right now, or artisan. But through finger weaving and with the group here going through those different trainings and things, I became like the spokesperson. So when I come up, we tell stories. I do demos, we do blow guns. My son's a very good blow gunner. We do a lot of the demonstrations and the cultural stuff. But yeah, finger weaving's a really interesting thing because there's no loom. So it's not like some of the ones folks that have the looms. It's all done with just some sticks and some things to prop it up. Doug Martin: And it's all loom less where your wharfs, if you think about weaving, if you know any weaving terms, you have your wharfs that come down and your wefts, I can't remember exactly how I said that, but one of 'em comes down and one of 'em goes across. And on traditional looms, they're all set up on the loom, and then you bring stuff in and go back and forth and make the thing. But on finger weaving, you just set up all the ones going down and you start turning them into each other. So your wharfs and your wefts are the same thing. They become their own thing. So you can make repeating patterns. It's one of the things that any tribe can do. And most, a lot of tribes did them. So I do a Cherokee, but all the five tribes did it. Most other tribes had some form of it for strap making or strips or some other things that they couldn't do on, they didn't have time for on looms. Doug Martin: So that's one of the things I do. But yeah, we do storytelling. We try to do a lot of history. So my daily life and here in Texas, because we do, I'm involved in this group is way more Cherokee. So like I said, in California, I hung out with my Portuguese relatives a lot more. But here, because we're so close to Cherokee Nation and because I'm involved in this group, most of my cultural stuff is Cherokee here. And so that's really good. That's really good for me in the sense that it kind of weaves me into the tapestry of here. And I can kind of be in with, when we talk about tribes and people are like, oh, well, what tribes are here? And I can, well, I know the Comanche, the Apache, the Kiowa, these groups that are here. And people will ask me, what's this?

00:36:33.000 - 00:40:12.000

Doug Martin: What's this? What's that? So I can kind of try to remember all those things. But also then there's those cultural kind of contacts like, well, we're trying to grow corn. The Three Sisters here. Well, the tribes in the area didn't grow the three sisters, the historic tribes, they did in the mission period when they went into the missions, the missions would grow corn, but usually people were either semi nomadic or nomadic in the area here where they were seasonally doing things or they were actual nomadics then going with the buffalos coming back and not usually producing, not that they didn't have certain agricultures. There was ones that had take it and leave it, or they were there for three months and they'd have some agricultural products, but not on the same scale as the Caddo up in north Texas. The Caddo were actually part of a complex called the Mississippian and the Mound builder cultures, which the Cherokees were also a part of. Doug Martin: So when the Cherokees come in here, when they move in, they move into the Caddo areas. They're not really strangers to one each other. They're all doing the same thing. They have the same cultural context, they have the same kind of cultural stories. They're growing the same things. So in my daily life, I try to be like when we do stuff or we do things for the schools, or I try to put Texas tribes into tell you why Cherokees are here, what the Cherokee history of the places are, but also, well, what other tribes and what other things and how did they all get along? How did they did not get along? Because you think about the Cherokees coming with the Caddo, and it should have been this big problem. But when the Cherokees, during the Cherokee War, they recruited the Caddo, the Delaware, various other tribes all joined with the Cherokees to fight the Texans and the Tonkawa. Doug Martin: And so there's this history of people coming in and integrating and getting along. So remember, I try to put that out to people. We can get along and we can be intertribal. And so that's what I try to do a lot of times around here is just try to build a coalition of people that can help us. Because that's the thing is if there's not people saying, this is the tribes that were here, even though if I'm not that tribe, I'm not Tonkawa . If I don't tell people that the Tonkawa are here in Austin, they don't know it. There's no, schools aren't telling them. There's no universities that are telling them. And so the Tonkawa show up, they just came back from Oklahoma where they were removed into the Cherokee strip. They came and have a thing in the city of Austin, and there was a Tonkawa village where Republic Square is in Austin. Doug Martin: And so it was a square called Republic Square, and that was their village. That was the village that they set up to protect Austin from the Comanche raids. And so people don't know that there was a Tonkawa village in the middle of downtown Austin. And so people will say, a lot of people know the Comanches from different areas, because that's one of the tribes that people, that schools do seem to talk about, but they don't realize the story of the Tonkawa. They don't realize the story of the Kiowa of these other tribes that were also kind of in the same mix and either not getting along or getting along depending on the time period. So we try to make sure that everybody hears those stories, whether there are our tribal stories or not. We try to make sure that there's an accurate picture of the folks that were here in Texas, because it seems like that helps us all out because when they have a thing about, well, what should we do for Native American Day?

00:40:12.000 - 00:43:08.000

Doug Martin: And they'll bring someone in from out of area, or they'll consult tribes that aren't part of the tribal mix here in Texas. They'll do other things. So it's like, well, there was other stuff you could have done. You could have called, there's four groups that I know have tribal members in them. There's, like I said, with the stuff that the tribal Buffalo project does, they do a lot of stuff with the food and the buffalo. And a lot of people, I'll tell kids that bison used to run here. There used to be buffalo and bison running right through here, and they're like, there's no way they were here. They were for sure here. So it's kind of a culture shock to them. But off topic, that's what I do daily. I'm mainly a figure weaver, and then I'm getting more into presentations and storytelling. So I'm not to the point where I call myself a storyteller yet. But obviously this interview is full of grandiose ranting. So close, I'm sure. Alika Jimenez: Yeah, you've definitely been storytelling for this interview. So good practice. And then you mentioned the finger weaving and art, and I wanted to ask if you have any specific pieces of artwork that are the most meaningful to you that you've made, whether that's storytelling or the finger weaving? Doug Martin: No. Well, I make things that match other people's stuff usually so that we'll match ribbon skirts and hair dresses. Obviously right now we're into corn, so this is the four colors of corn in a belt. And I've been wearing that different places. So I'll make 'em in the Cherokee four directions. I'll make 'em in different color schemes that are kind of mound builder schemes, like red, white, and black. I'll make 'em for other things. A lot of people want 'em for a certain thing, and I'll make them that way, so I'm not attached to them to the point where I think that I have to have one or wouldn't be okay. I can always remake them. I can make the colors again. Doug Martin: I see. And because I think of them, they call me an artist in that thing, but I think of myself more as an artisan in the sense that I'm making things that people should use, these are for stomp dances. These are for people to wear at powwows. These are for people to take to, up to Oklahoma. If they're going to go to the stomp grounds and they've got their ribbon skirts and belts, and they can kind of get 'em near the fire, not too near the fire, they go up, but get 'em around the fire, get 'em smoky, get 'em dirty, get 'em dusty, and be okay with that and be able to use them and wear them. I make hat bands. I wear hat bands just about every day to make sure people, one of those things that people say, oh, what's a hat band about?

00:43:08.000 - 00:46:22.000

Doug Martin: And I can talk about what finger weaving is. I can talk about that tradition because finger weaving is, you can go to Walmart or Ross or any of these places and get a belt maybe that's even got these same patterns or get a scarf for 20, 30 bucks, maybe less. And it takes me two days, two or three days to make these, and they're like 150 bucks, and I'm pretty reasonable on price. So there's even higher prices of those sort of things. And so for someone to sit down and be like, spend two or three days of their time to try and make something that you can go purchase, and that's kind of the whole thing about all the Native arts and crafts is that you can buy bead work from overseas that's much cheaper. You can go to home goods and get baskets. You don't need to make your own baskets. Doug Martin: But my mom makes baskets. So you're getting into the culture and you're getting that thing, and you're getting that mindset of how they used to do stuff and how you're doing it now. You're still doing the things that you're making your own belts or you're making your own baskets, so you're trading. I trade with a lot of people, so I don't make bead work, but I have beadwork. I don't make ribbon shirts, but I have ribbon shirts that I've traded for. And getting back in that culture of you have something to value, I have something to value. We both value each other. Doug Martin: Let's trade it. And a lot of the artisans I trade with much rather would trade than, not because t hey can't make a belt, but because they want one. And it's like, well, you value my stuff. It's like I'm always like, well, my stuff's not so good, but your stuff's so good. It's like, no, I want that. So it's one of those weird things where even though you're not getting any money, your self-esteem goes up because it's like, oh, I can make a basket, or I can make a gorget, or I can make a bandolier belt that people want and are willing to trade into the good things that they have. So it's a very good, I think I'm not really artistically inclined. I can't paint, I can't keep rhythm, so I'm not much of a musician or any of those things. But I think if people can get into some of the traditional things and then it brings it back. Doug Martin: And that's one of those things too, when we do our groups, it's like we're not presenting artifacts. We're not saying, oh, this is how they used to live. This is what I made last week. This is a basket that my mom made this time. This is a pottery that this person made this year. The culture is still alive. We're not a group of museums where things are there. We're still making this stuff, and we're still using it in daily life here for whatever reason, for fashion or for ceremonies or for whatever things. So it kind of makes it that it kind of says, well, these people aren't gone because when you go to a museum and you see artwork or the shell gorgets and go, oh, that's what they used to wear. That's what they used to do. That's what they used to have.

00:46:22.000 - 00:48:44.000

Doug Martin: And when you see it still being represented and people wearing them daily life and people showing off their corn beads or their other things like, oh, well, this culture is still here, this Cherokee culture, this Apache culture, this Comanche culture, these cultures are still around because they're still making these things the way that it's been done. Or they're making them more modern with acrylic yarn instead of wool yarn or with commercial reed baskets instead of going to get honeysuckle, which you can do any of those things, but it's one of those things when we like to point out, when you bring up, you just say, Hey, we put out this stuff and go, Hey, we're here. The Cherokees are here. We've got me and my group. We all may come to different things, and so we'll put stuff out and go, okay, so it's not a dead culture. Doug Martin: And I think a lot of people have to fight to fight that idea that, oh, well, this culture is extinct, and you're just in the modern era now. So how do you visually do that? How do you show up with collared shirts and stuff and still say, Hey, by the way, this is how we live now and we're still making things that we would've made before and we're still making our own spins on things, and we still have a culture that is very much a Native culture. And so I feel like everyone has to figure out how to do that. But that's one of those things with reconnecting is that a lot of times people will reconnect and go way into the traditional culture, be like, oh, I need to have all this stuff. I need to have beads, this. And not really step back and go, well, what are we doing? What's the culture doing now? And what's the response? How much – it's that divide between the modern and the traditional of, how much do you jump into it to be considered, oh, I have to be legitimate if I have these right earrings. Well, it's nice to have earrings, but your connection and your heritage is your legitimacy. Not so much everything else, but then again, also trying to keep the things alive. So there's this little dance. Everything's a dance, always down the line with things. Isabella Bourtin: Well, that is so wonderful to hear. I feel like I've learned so much so fast. Doug Martin: I've got the quickness. You come to my events, you'll be overloaded. Well, I'll teach you how to grow corn in two hours. You'll be ready to go.

00:48:44.000 - 00:51:25.000

Isabella Bourtin: Let's do it. Okay, so next we're going to move on to our questions about food. But before we get started with that, I know that you mentioned a little bit about bison and buffalo. Would you mind telling us a little bit more anything just so that we can start thinking a little bit about that? Doug Martin: Well, so a lot of people don't think that the Cherokees knew anything about bison because they're out in the east, but there actually was a species of bison out there called the Woods Bison. And there's a Woods Bison species alive today, which is much larger than the Plains Bison, but the Woods Bison, that was the species that was alive back, that was in the woods back then was actually smaller. It was a smaller bison. So we have a word for bison. It's actually a borrowed word from the Muskogee language. Yanase– it's not a Cherokee anchored word, it's a borrowed word from the other tribes. But yeah, I know a little bit about bison. I don't know how to ranch them. I'm not a rancher. I don't know anything about keeping them. But I do know that the bison herds the planes, there were more than one herd. Doug Martin: There was Plains Bisons, there were the Woods Bison, and the Cherokees would use bison hair to make finger weaving. They would collect it and use it for various different things. Obviously as they move, as they're removed west, they have more contact with the bison. So in the Plains, obviously there's lots of bison in Indian territory. And then of course, then the ones that settled here in Texas would've seen bison in east Texas a bit as they were going. But then the Red River War and the bison hunts kind of ended the Plains Bison migrations. And so a lot of people don't realize that a lot of these tribes from the east would've known what bisons were. There's actually a whiskey called Buffalo Trace, and it's out of Kentucky, and trace means trail in the old way. So if you see something that says something trace, because there was a buffalo trail that ran through in Kentucky, obviously that bison, they say that last Woods Bison was killed in 1890, that the last one they know of. But like I said, there is another species of wood bison, but it's much larger. So I can't imagine they could reintroduce that into Tennessee or anything like that. It would be too big, but Isabella Bourtin: Wonderful. That is such an interesting story. I feel like I haven't heard from anybody much about buffalo so far. So that is…

00:51:25.000 - 00:53:00.000

Doug Martin: Odd that this is a Buffalo project. Isabella Bourtin: Yeah, that's why when you said Buffalo, I was like, whoa, what was that? Doug Martin: Well, actually, the Cherokees have a social dance called the Buffalo Dance, and I've done it with the kids. They like doing it because you have it go, I think it's a drum dance. So you drum drum and then you sing the song, and then at certain points they hit the drum harder and the kids have to take their bison horns and kind of attack each other. It's mating season, and they fight each other, and then you put 'em back on the thing and they had to go around and do it. I was told that a lot of times, whenever they had bison for dinner or they had bison kill or meat, they would do that dance. So I was at one place and they said, oh, we had bison the other night. We didn't do the dance, so we're doing the dance today. So they had us all do the bison dance and get out there and kind of ruckus each other. But yeah, it's one of those things where you wouldn't think that a tribe from the East would've a bison tradition. But we do have a bison tradition. There's a lot of booger masks that have bison horns on their masks. So again, when the Cherokees move west, they're not shocked to see bison. They know what bisons are. They're not put off by the fact that they were present before the Red River War and the buffalo hunts kind of took 'em all away. Isabella Bourtin: Very cool. Like I said, this is brand new for us, so I'm trying to take note of everything you're saying. Good thing we're also recording it.

00:53:00.000 - 00:53:30.000

Doug Martin: I know you have to hear me ramble forever. Someone will have to watch all this. Isabella Bourtin: Okay, so now we're going to move a little further into food. So do you have any memories? I know you mentioned, what'd you call it? Hog fries. Doug Martin: Oh yeah, the hog fries. Yeah. And so like I said, we did carnitas in California, and when I first saw my first hog fries, I was like, we're just making carnitas. That's all we're doing here. Isabella Bourtin: Yeah. Do you have any other memories surrounding food?

00:53:30.000 - 00:56:26.000

Doug Martin: So like I said, right now I'm into the, I'm trying to bring back the three sisters as a cultural kind of touchpoint for the different tribes that are in the area and the different groups that have come in that grew a corn. But like I said, when I was a kid, we grew a lot of stuff, and so it was very odd to me when I'd moved to more rural places, but I was in places where you couldn't grow things. So I lived in a city, but we grew stuff. We grew, we had orange trees and fig trees, and kale was growing all over the place. We had kale, and so we had all this stuff, and later in life, I started just growing corn. I'd get corn from the farmer's market and just grow it. And in California, everything grows, so it's not like here where you have to really work at it, but over there it was just like, oh, I'll put corn, put it in, make corn. Doug Martin: And it was a real interesting process. And so yeah, that's the memory of being able to can stuff and keep stuff and be kind of sufficient in your food stuff. And then I came to this role and some of the stuff and all this stuff is a lot of things are geared around food sovereignty and food security, food sovereignty, taking back your traditions. And so it's something that it kind of rings really well with me because I was like, well, I think we were doing this before and we didn't buy peaches. We had our own peaches, but now it's like, okay, well I got to buy peaches at the store if I want a peach. And so it's kind of come full circle. The idea that I would understand that that was the way to do things before, and now it's like, oh, this is going to help your tribe if you can take heirloom seeds. Doug Martin: We have a program here in Texas that we get seeds from the Seed Bank in Oklahoma, and we grow 'em here in Texas. It's our Three Sisters program, and the seed bank is its own program, and the one we have here in Texas, is the central Texas Cherokee Township Three Sisters program. But that's basically what we're doing. We're just trying to give people the ability to grow corn, beans and squash or one of those things, and then traditional things that go along with it. So different traditional plants like tobacco or echinacea or various greens that would go with those that would be kind of in the same vein of those things, and then telling them how to process it, how to do nixtamalization and get the nutrition out of their corn. The corn won't kill'em, it’ll keep'em alive. That'll probably be my next thing. I'm going to ask you, do you know what nixtamalization is? And then I will be on a tangent, and then you'll never be able to shut me up. Isabella Bourtin: That is so interesting, everything you're saying. I just can't stop listening.

00:56:26.000 - 00:58:26.000

Doug Martin: Do you know what nixtamalization is? Do you know the difference between nixtamalized corn and non-nixtamalized corn? Isabella Bourtin: No, I do not. Well, I'd love if you told me. Doug Martin: Yeah. Well, do you know? No. Okay. Well, here's the story. Now we're in real story time. Before it was all before, but now we are in actual story time. So corn will kill you, corn will kill you. If you eat sweet corn and you can corn and you eat corn flakes that are unenriched or you grind up straight up corn out of the field and grind it into grits and flour, you will get a disease called pellagra. Pellagra will strip your body, niacin will strip your body of vitamin B. There's a lot of vitamin B in corn, but it's not soluble. It's not digested by a human body. So we have a thing that can kill you. And a Mesoamerican gift to the rest of the Americas because corn comes from the highlands of Mexico. And so does this process, they decided that they figured out a way that if they could boil their corn or cook the corn in a caustic calcium solution, this would fix that problem. Doug Martin: And what they did is they used either limestone that you burnt and become powder. And we call that today pickling lime. In English, it's called cal in Spanish, you can find it in most of the Spanish Mexican markets, you find it at some canning stores. It's called calcium hydroxide chemically. Or if you take your wood ash, your wood ash is also calcium and caustic. And you put that in with your corn. Gives it a nice smoky flavor. Or if you make lime, sorry, lye, if you make lye, you can put that in. Lye is very dangerous. I don't suggest you use lye. But what happens is if you do this process and what it does is that the caustic solution will eat that outer coating of a corn kernel off. So if you've ever eaten corn and the next day you saw it again in other places, it's because there's a hard outer coating on there that you cannot digest.

00:58:26.000 - 01:01:54.000

Doug Martin: So you've digested everything but that coating and it looks, it's untouched. And so that coating is dissolved off and then the calcium that's in the whatever solution you use attaches the niacin and unlocks it. So now it becomes a super food. You can eat corn for months and months and with some vitamins you would survive. You'd want some vitamins, but you can eat corn for about a month as a survival food and you'll survive. And so it turns the corn into what they call hominy or pozole. It takes that coating off and it swells it up to two to three times aside and creates the larger thing that's got no coating on it. So it's slimy or it's chewy and it has no coating on it. That product can either be put just pozole the soup or made into mush or what the Mesoamericans used to do, and this is where it got the name is they had grind it up and make tamales. Doug Martin: So Nix-tamal-ization, you're making tamales, you're making the tamal part of it. So tortillas and tamales are a super food. Sweet corn will kill you. So how they thought to put two things that will kill you: because you can't drink that liquid either. You get to pour that off and strain it and wash it off. So you can't drink the caustic solution that'll kill you. And if you eat corn just straight up corn that'll kill you, but put them together and you make the most perfect food on earth that can create entire civilizations. And so that's what created our civilization up here in North America was the mound buildings of civilizations. The Mississippians were all corn cultures and they had large pyramidal architectures that were made out of mounds of earth, not stones, but they looked very similar to the Mesoamerican ones. So a lot of that knowledge was supposed to come up and a lot of that culture, or at least the idea of those cultures came with it. Doug Martin: So these large populations are living off of this nixtamalized corn. If you have a time for another story that's not about Ntive people, well it is, but it's fun for all is that there's a story how the Spanish created vampires. Because the symptoms of nixtamalization are that, or sorry, the symptoms of pellagra, which it's easy you get if you keep uncolonized, corn in large quantities becomes a big part of your diet. You're stripping your body of niacin. And what happens is, is you get pale skin because you're out of niacin, you become anemic, you can become adverse to light. So you don't go out in the daytime and you're craving iron, which means you're craving almost raw blood y meats. So you go out and kill your neighbor's dogs and you are eating them. And so what happened was, is that the Spanish saw that the Mesoamericans were nixtamalizing, that they were making these corn and tamales and they ate the tamales, they ate the tortillas, they were fine. Doug Martin: So they took that corn, they took it to Europe. Well, the Spanish also ruled areas in Eastern Europe, in Romania at times it was the Habsburgs. They had Spain and they had other places. So what they did is they did a lot of colonial powers did. They said, we're going to take your wheat, you have this new grain, we have our Mesoamericans in America eat it, you can eat it too. And they gave them corn to eat, but they took their wheat for Spain to have bread and cakes and various things. And so the people in Romania or the people in Eastern Europe was Romanian other places, Hungary and Transylvania perhaps in the zone. What they did was that they would eat the corn and they would get pellagra. And that's when the common ideas of what vampirism starts the idea that you're pale and you're not going out in the sunlight and you're attacking things and you die with anemia and you're craving almost bloodied meat.

01:01:54.000 - 01:05:03.000

Doug Martin: And so because they took the Native product and not the Native knowledge, they created this problem for Europe. So that's one of those things where I tell people when I talk about it's not that that I want you to learn to do finger weaving because I want you to make nice products. We're learning finger weaving so that we can keep the culture alive and how it works and that the stories that come with it are more important than actually it. Now you want to make nice things, but having a basket is not as important as what goes along with baskets. When you make baskets, you sit around. When my mom does it up in Tahlequah, they sit around with their friends in the lake and they tell stories and they gossip and they tell things and they have this thing. So the culture is the basket's not just this thing that sits on a desk, it's the culture of the people that surround it. Doug Martin: And so that's what I like to tell people. You can eat, in our example here, our buffalo. We can eat our buffalo and treat it like meat and treat it like steers and cows and other things. But when we do that, we're also kind of losing the culture. We're taking the product and not the culture. So if you don't have a group that will actually teach you what the buffalo means, how the buffalo is used for tents and weapons and tools and various things around us, we just say, oh, I could just switch my beef to buffalo and I'll have a more nutritious, lower leaner meat and everything will be fine. Well, that's true, but you're missing the point. Doug Martin: You're not understanding the full story of: what does the buffalo mean? That the skin is where you live and the tendons become the twine that sews up your clothes and keeps your kids in their baskets and it becomes these things that are inseparable from the culture. But we as a modern society want to, oh, it worked that way. The prairie willow is a plant that grows wild and the Cherokees used to use it from that root, they extract aspirin. But now, so prairie willow and the other willows that have aspirin grow everywhere, but when you need, you have a headache, you don't go look for an aspirin because you know what it looks like. You don't know what a willow looks like. It's free. There's no money for it, there's no charge for it. Doug Martin: We have lost the knowledge to go find those things. So we go to store and buy a bottle of aspirin even though we've, we've taken that product and lost our knowledge. And so that's one of the dangers when I try to do my presentations is try to tell people, make sure that if someone who's telling you a Native thing or telling you a traditional thing has a story, listen to the story more than any instructions. If someone's teaching how to grow corn, I don't even tell people how to grow corn. I tell three, four corn stories and you'll figure how this work. This is how we grow corn because the stories will tell you how to grow corn better than me just sitting down and rallying off a list of things. And the stories are almost more important than knowing how to grow corn because corn will grow eventually if you fail enough.

01:05:03.000 - 01:08:41.000

Doug Martin: So you'll get it. I want you to know about the culture. I want you to know about the stories. I want you to know about what the Corn Mother means and how Selu is viewed and these different aspects of our food system. In Cherokee, we have the first woman who is Selu, who's corn, and the first man is Kanati, who is the hunter. So in that creation story, that story of the first two humans, we have our food system, we have the protein, and we have the vegetable. And so we respect the idea that hunting bison and bear and deer is equal to growing corn, beans and squash. That there's not one that's better than the other. They're needed for both. And we have to recognize that that's how people thought. That the food was a balance. And then Cherokee thought most of the things are balances. Doug Martin: Everything is some sort of a balance. So you have dichotomies, but it's not that we can do without one. It's not like good and evil and we should get rid of evil and we'll all be fine. It's negative and plus and positive aspects, but we need'em both to be full people, to be full culture, to be a full thing. And we need to make sure that there's room for all of it in the same sense. So in the food ways, when we do the food ways, it's very much the sense of a balanced diet and a balanced thing. And no, just eating echinacea, nature is not going to keep you alive forever, even though we have medicines. No, we'd have to talk about tobacco. Tobacco is our first medicine. And I talked about tobacco and I talk about positive things about tobacco. When you see this crowd go “Ahh”, like I'm trying to get their kids hooked on drugs or something. Doug Martin: And I say, well, tobacco for us is a medicine, tobacco for a lot of traditional peoples as a medicine, it's our first medicine. We see it as that way. And the same thing is if you have a headache and you take a Tylenol, that's fine, that's medicine. But if you take Tylenol to feel better and you take a bottle a day, you might hurt your kidneys, you might hurt your internal organs, you can harm yourself with that medicine. And the same thing with tobacco. If you use tobacco in a responsible way or use it in a way that your tradition dictates, not every tradition dictates the same way and you use it the way it is intended. Usually you're not smoking a pack a day, you're not smoking 20 cigarettes a day. In that tradition, you're doing something intentional or you're doing it at a certain time or you're doing it for a certain reason and you're not always smoking, maybe you're chewing, maybe you're just sitting with it, maybe you're doing other things. Doug Martin: So in that sense that something like tobacco, which is such demonized, so it's so bad, so negative, so negative in our thought would be, well, there's positive things and if you abuse it, there's negative things and you have to live in balance. And so that's I think a lot of the food stuff, when we do our food stories and talk about food and talk about those connections, that will be the idea that's balanced. It's not like you can just eat all the meat you want and you'll be fine. It's not that you want to sit here and only ever eat corn, even though I'm obsessed with growing corn, I want different substances. And so that first woman, that first man, there's lots of stories that come from that, lots of moral tales and things like that. But what I boil it down to is it's the food, the idea that this is what sustains us. We put those two, the hunter and the grower as equal partners in taking care of society and taking care of people.

01:08:41.000 - 01:10:01.000

Isabella Bourtin: Wow. You covered everything I was going to ask about. Doug Martin: You were going to ask me about pellagra in Romania. I didn't know. Isabella Bourtin: Not in those specific terms, but we were going to ask about some more natural remedies and things. And I feel like you've just already handled that for us. Doug Martin: And there's a lot of good natural remedies down here. Obviously the juniper trees are real important to the cultures down here. There's various traditions, obviously the peyote tradition down south that's kind of also up here. It's all the way in Oklahoma, obviously with Native American Church and other folks that follow that tradition. So yeah, there's lots of stuff that's very Texas, that other tribes are taken up or other tribes are in tune with. One of the big ones here I think is the funniest story is Yaupon Holly. You all know what Yaupon Holly is? You ever seen those? So Yaupon Holly is part of something we call, or is traditionally called, the Black Drink. And it kind of grew all the way on the Gulf Coast. The Cherokees did grow. It doesn't grow too far north, but it did grow in Cherokee areas and it's a holly, one of the only plants in North America that has caffeine in it.

01:10:01.000 - 01:13:54.000

Doug Martin: And so it's a cousin to yerba mate. There's another one from Central America, which I can't remember the name of, but those two are actually commodified and canned and they're in beverages. So you can buy yerba mate. And out here in Austin, folks are trendy out here drinking $4 cans of yerba mate while they pass these huge bushes of Yaupon that people grow 'em everywhere. They're a holly that's used for landscaping. So they're all over the place and they grow wild all over here really well. So it's free, you can take it, you can clean the leaves, you can roast it, and you put it in your oven for a little bit, get the color you want for whatever tea you want to make, and you brew it. And it tastes, to me, tastes nearly exactly like yerba mate. And so it's a dichotomy of the fact that people would rather pay for a four to $5 drink that's trendy from Uruguay rather than and pass by it's North American cousin that's been used for centuries by the Native folks for the same purpose for that caffeine jolt. Doug Martin: So yeah, it's a funny one when I tell people you can make your own yerba mate at home and it grows here. People are talking about the coffee exports being endangered, like, well, I know a place that you can go. But the yerba mate story is kind of an interesting one because its Latin name is Ilex Vomitoria and it got that name according to which story you heard. I've heard different because when the Natives would use it, they would use it in conjunction with ceremonies. They'd fast and fast and not eat, and to make sure that you fast and not eat. It would be a purging agent where they would give you a lot of this stuff and you'd smoke a lot of rustica, which is high nicotine tobacco, and that would expel anything you had. So if you hadn't fasted, they'd find out or they've had to ritually purge then that would help them do that. Doug Martin: But in small doses, in regular cups, that's if you drink two pots of coffee in three hours, you're going to have an issue with your stomach. And the same thing with this. If you drink a lot of it in a certain period you'll have issues, but normally it wouldn't. The other reason that I've heard that it's called Ilex Vomitoria is because they knew about these purging things that the Natives had done, and they wanted to kind of demonize it because tea and coffee and importers were bringing in tea and coffee, so tea at first and then after the revolution coffee. And they didn't want to compete with a thing that grew natural all over the south that anyone could have. So instead of saying, well, this thing's good and you can just drink your own tea, it's like, no, no, buy our tea. We bring in from China, buy our coffee, we bring in from Africa, don't buy that, don't bother with that. Doug Martin: That's Vomitoria. That's a dangerous thing. So it got this bad rap, but again, in Uruguay and South America mate became the national drink. So it went a whole different way down there. They didn't demonize it as something terrible, but here because of commerce, it was like, no, you can't drink that, that that'll wreck your stomach. You got to drink our coffee and our tea and don't use that free thing. So that's a fun one. But it grows really well down here. And there's lots of people down here that there's a couple companies that are getting into selling it, so it's kind of a new frontier. But also in the Native knowledge, there's a lot of people take that use that plant for the stomp grounds and are very protective of its ceremonial use. And the idea that in some of stomp grounds in Oklahoma, it doesn't grow as well. So they're very like, don't tell people how to use it, don't deal people how to view it, don't commodify it, don't sell it. And then there's of course there's groups down here. There's companies down here that are selling it to get onto the mate trend. So there's again, different sides of that coin of how they interpret its use.

01:13:54.000 - 01:14:10.000

Doug Martin: I think if you live down here in Texas, it grows everywhere you can have as much as you want. It's everywhere. So. Isabella Bourtin: That's so interesting. I didn't know that history. I just kind of knew a little bit about yerba mate. Doug Martin: Yeah, Isabella Bourtin: Yeah, that's it.

01:14:10.000 - 01:17:04.000

Doug Martin: Well, it was funny, when was it, what's the fellow Vasco de? Gama, the one that came and lived on the Karankawa? Is that him? Is that the one? No, sorry, my bad. Cabeza de Vaca! He shipwrecked them all on the Texas coast and he's taken by the Karankawa and they go, they do their seasonal migration from the coast up inland and back. And he recounts that some of them didn't eat any food at all. They just drank gallons and gallons of mate. It was their energy drink. So it's a very Texas plant and a very Texas tradition, but most people in Texas have no clue that there's a beverage plant that just is running out growing out there. Isabella Bourtin: Very cool. So you're speaking a lot about nature. I have a few questions. Sure. Do you have any particular ways that you like to either get in nature or get with your community in nature or just the community in general? Are there any specific ways that you deal with nature and community? Doug Martin: Yeah. Well, I like to go hiking a lot. So me and my son go out in the woods and there's various city parks here in Austin that you can kind of go and there're green belt parks where you can kind of go in a green belt and be looking at talks and waterbirds and ducks and various things. And the Cherokee thing, a lot of the Native games, we run a lot of Native games here for the kids. So we do blow gun and stickball and that's all outside. We try to get them outside to play that. It's hard here in Texas because the summer's so hot to do things in the outdoors. So there's like three months out of the year where we can kind of like, Hey, let's all go play stickball. Let's all go blow gun or do something outside. So yeah, up in Oklahoma, the weather's not so much better, but there's less heat and still some humidity and such. Doug Martin: And up there we do some of the other stuff. The stomp grounds are always outside. So if you ever go to a Cherokee stomp ground or one of the Five Tribe Stomp grounds, those are all going to be outside and usually a really wooded place. So if you ever do one of those or are invited to one of those, those will be outdoors. So a lot of the Cherokee ceremonial stuff is outdoors. So there's various things that you do outdoors. You do things in different places outdoors. But here a lot of the stuff is we're trying to do more cultural stuff. We're not doing so much ceremonial stuff, but getting people out to the forge for wild onions right now, once this cold spell goes away, it's going to probably be good wild onions. So there's a creek over here called Onion Creek, taking people out there to get 'em out to forage for wild onions.

01:17:04.000 - 01:21:31.000

Doug Martin: We try to go find places that have those things and show them that there is food around. You don't have to buy everything and get that forage mentality of, there's some of things. Now, obviously this is not Oklahoma, so some of the stuff that we've got references for and resources for don't exist here. But then like I said, I have a lot of friends who are in the tribals communities or in the Native communities, and I say, well, what are you looking at for right now? What are you after right now? What's a good thing that you would bring for like a tea or this? And we kind of go look for it and do stuff. Yeah, most of our outdoor stuff is going to be games though. We do a lot of stickball. We're trying to get a lot of people in the stickball. We're doing atlatl throws, so we go to places that have archery ranges and throw the atlatl , which was the weapon that was used before the bow here in Texas and in all North America. Doug Martin: The atlatl, it's funny because people think the bow is, if you think of an Indian or a Native, you think of the bow, bow and arrow, but the bow and arrow is actually really late to North and South America. They come in around the 500 AD. So if you think about the time span of Natives, if you use the evidence wise about 20 to 30,000 years depending on which evidence you want to use, and for that time, so for 20,000 till about 1,500 years ago, the main weapon was the atlatl. It's a spear on a stick. The stick has a little prong on it and you throw it at the beast. And with bison, it's really good with the larger game that was here before the Younger Dryas, it's very good. So you can hunt camels and horses and what's it called, the giant sloths and the larger elephants that were here, the different mastodons and such that were here in Texas and it's very good for those things. Doug Martin: But when they die off and it's left with just the biggest animal that's left is the bison. That's still very effective against the bison, especially since the horse went extinct here. So there were no horses, the horse was extinct. But there's no horses until the Spanish reintroduced them. And so you have to kind of get close to a bison and hit it with something much more powerful. So these allies are really good for that. They're not so good for fast deer. So when the bow does come, people really adopt it really quick. It seems like it takes over right away cause it's seen as a better tool for those smaller animals. But yeah, so we do atlatl throws, try to teach people about that weapon and its history and where, think about places here in Texas, like the Gault site and Spring Lake and various places where they found artifacts. Doug Martin: Everyone calls'em arrowheads, but they're not arrowheads, they're atlatl points. The arrowheads are very, very small. They call'em bird points. They're about the size of a quarter and less, you see an actual point, like a Clovis point or the Fredonian points or the Travis points or all those points that are all fitted to spears, projectile points for those atlatls, they're not for arrows because arrows didn't exist. There were no arrows. So therefore these larger, longer spears that would go into bison and hopefully slower moving gear. So we try to do a lot of stuff for the kids outside games. And stickball is a big one. The two modern games, the kind of stickball, are lacrosse and hockey. Stickball is played here in Texas by the Alabama-Coushatta, and it was played by the Caddo before they were removed. It was played by most of the removal area tribe. So the Kickapoo, I don't think they played here anymore. I haven't heard of them playing it, but I know that Alabama Coushatta have a tournament at their powwow in Livingston. So we're trying to get people more into it and see how it works. And we played it at the Bullock Museum for their days to show them what the mound builder people used to play. So that's kind of our outdoor stuff, but then we kind shift to indoors because it's hot. So yeah, we have to kind of meter it or go out really early.

01:21:31.000 - 01:22:45.000

Alika Jimenez: Yeah, that makes sense. I've lived in Houston my whole life and I know how hot the Houston and the Texas summer are. Doug Martin: Up there too, is off the charts. Alika Jimenez: Oh yeah. Even just in spring, I'm sweating. Woohoo. But Right. So we have our last question. Woohoo. I know we made it through and I wanted to ask if you consider yourself a spiritual person, it's a different section we're on now, and what role that plays in your life, if it has any role. Doug Martin: Well, I like to think of spirituality as going to be individual stuff. It's one of the things that I participate in, some of the things that Cherokees do, but I don't talk about it so much. I don't like to, because the problem with Native groups and Native peoples is that there's somehow this idea of them being inherently spiritual. Somehow you are a thing. And because I'm on leadership in this group, people ask us to do ceremonies and things, or they'll say, oh, we want someone to come in and bless this or bless that. And it's one of those things where it's like, well, I'm not a pastor in a church.

01:22:45.000 - 01:26:25.000

Doug Martin: This is not a religious organization. We're a cultural organization. And so it's one of those things where, and in Cherokee spirituality, the people don't like to be considered, there's kind of a thing about being considered someone that's holy, or there's people that are traditionalists and they know the medicines and they're may be called healers, they might be called medicine men by the people, but they would never have those titles for themselves and certainly don't address themselves that way. So it's one of those things where there's certain spirituality that's kind of access for everybody, and then there's not, it's a very, because again, it's like, and the other thing is again, talking about the Pan-Indian situation where they expect, if somebody says, Hey, you're a Cherokee group, come bless our thing. And it's like, what do you want us to do? It's like, well, the last guy did this. Doug Martin: And I'm like, well, that sounds like it's a tribe. That's a different tribe. That sounds like something that a different tribe did. It's like, yeah, can you do that? It's like, we're not that tribe. That's not our tribal tradition. We're not going to do that because that's not our tribal tradition. That sounds like you want to call a tribal member for that tribe if you want that thing. So yeah, I feel like, again, in the Cherokee kind of things, we're all spiritual beings, three worlds. There's the upper world, there's the middle world, and there's the lower world and humans and all the people, all the animals that are here are the spiritual beings of this middle world just as much as the birds, the beings of the higher world, just as much as snakes and alligators and the water panther are the beings of the lower world. Doug Martin: So it's one of those things where in monoculture it's like, well, it's who you are, and then you're spiritual and it's these two lives you can live. You can go to a church or something on Sunday and then have your regular nine to five, and then you're spiritual. When you're spiritual. And in Cherokees, it's against that balance. You're constantly, you're both as you are. And so it's one of those things where I, I don't want to play, we don't do ceremonies. So if people ask us for ceremonies, we don't do ceremonies. But in that same sense, it's like just because we're Native people, we're regular people. Just because you picked a Native person off the street, it's like, well, that person can't just lead your ceremony just as much as you could say, Hey, you're, you're from Spain, you're Catholic, right, lead our mass. Well, that's not just because someone is from Spain and they might be Catholic doesn't mean they can lead a mass. Doug Martin: And in the same sense, in culture and everything, it's like that every Native person is somehow a holy man that can, or a holy woman that can run a ceremony or do a thing or have those things. So we try to downplay that. But again, it's like the idea that the spirituality and a lot of the Cherokee stuff, the spirituality is very much accessible. There's certain things that every Cherokee can do at any time, and that's considered the most important thing to do. So I know another thing is other traditions have different other things. If you want to hear a fun story, another random story, there's a story of the Ani-kutani. The Ani-kutani were the Cherokee's ancient priesthood. So in the old days, starting the whole thing, there was these priesthoods. So the Cherokees used to live on the mounds.

01:26:25.000 - 01:29:56.000

Doug Martin: So they lived in these big cities and there was these mounds. People found the mounds and said, well, why don't you guys live in the mounds anymore? And they said, well, they used to be the Ani-kutani. And these folks were a priesthood class. It was the eighth clan. And so these people were endowed with the creator, with these powers that they could heal people, they could see the future, they could produce divination, they could do these very spiritual things that people today, like shaman or new age folks, they say that they can do. They have these powers to read things and know things and cure things. And so this folks, after a while, they kept going and they became corrupt. They became evil, they became bad to the folks. They said, instead of us all living on the bottom of the mounds going to the top, we live on the top of the mountains, we're better, we're higher, we're better. Doug Martin: And the Cherokee people didn't understand that. They said, we're all equal. You have your gifts, we have our gifts and nest. Now the creator gave us all gifts. Why do you live on the mountains? Like, no, we're better. We have these special gifts, we have these powers. And as the time went on, they started making demands. They demanded sacrifices. They demanded people. They demanded food. They demanded these things from the regular people that other people were like, well, why? Well, because we're powerful because of this power. And so one day a hunter came back from his huntings and he found that his wife had been taken and that she had been taken by the priesthood and been taken to the mountains and presumably sacrificed or what have you. And so he decided that he wasn't going to take any more of this. He led up a rebellion. Doug Martin: He got the other hunters and the other warriors, and he said, we're getting rid of the m. We're getting rid of the Ani-kutani, sorry, I'm tripping over that word, Ani-kutani. We're going to get rid of these folks. These guys are going to go. And so they formed a rebellion and they killed the Ani-kutani and they killed the priesthood and they killed off every member who had ever claimed to be a priest and ever claimed to be part of this clan to this very day. The Cherokees askew hierarchy and heretical kingship. They won't have it. So that's one of the stories I tell, because when I talk about Cherokee spirituality in a lot of ways, it's very muted. Nobody's going to sit there and say, oh, I can do this, I can do that. Because there was always this fear that if you said you could do something that wasn't from the creator, if you said you could do something that wasn't from nature, if you could cure somebody because your power. You’d say oh no it was the plant, the plant could cure the person. Doug Martin: But if you said, oh, well the plant did it, but really my spirituality and my essence did it that they'd kill you, you'd be considered that enemy. You'd be considered that ancient enemy that they'd have that they would never accept it. And so even today, the Cherokees have that kind of thing where people call some of our traditional medicine mans. I would never call somebody a medicine man to their face and they would never say it, but I might know that somebody can heal, has the ability to be a doctor, not in the medical sense, but in the traditional sense. So that would be something I would know or I would ask about. So yeah, it's spirituality. Like I said, we have our own spirituality. I think everybody's entitled to having their own spirituality. The Cherokees are very Baptist. They converted to Christianity and became Baptist. So a lot of Cherokees are very into the Baptist church or other churches.

01:29:56.000 - 01:34:11.000

Doug Martin: And then also sometimes they're into the traditional stuff. It used to be that if you're a traditionalist, you didn't become a Baptist or a Christian. And if you're a Christian, you didn’t become traditionalist. Now those barriers are kind of less troublesome. So people can go stomp grounds on Saturday and then go to church on Sunday, and it's not considered a big problem. So yeah, I like the egalitarian approach to spirituality. I feel like I don't sit and tell people their spirituality, and I like to make sure that people know that. And another part of our group is that we are a group for all Cherokees. So if you're whatever denomination or religion or whatever, our culture is for everyone. So there's Cherokees that are Muslim, the Cherokees that are Jewish, the Cherokees are Christians, there are Cherokees that are traditional. There's Cherokees that have millions of other faiths or not have a faith of their choosing. So we try to make sure that we're not trying to put too much on people. But in the same sense, when you go to the Cherokee Nation, most of the stuff is open with a prayer. Doug Martin: Whereas we try to be more, even if you go to Cherokee Nation or you go to Cherokee, Cherokee cultural things, you're going to get usually a Baptist prayer. You're going to get a Baptist minister. You might get some Baptist ministry in Cherokee, which is always fun. That's always a good time to listen to because it goes quick. But yeah, that's kind of where I'm at in spirituality. Like I said, I try, when I do the groups stuff, I try to down, you're like, we're not, we don't do that. And not to say that we don't sing songs when we do our corn, we like to sing a corn song. We like to sing, do the corn dance. If we got people available to do it. This one event said we were going to do a corn blessing. I'm like, well, when I get there, I'll tell them that we're not really doing a blessing. Doug Martin: And that's another thing about the Cherokee concept of things is that it's not that you can bless things, things bless you. So when we go to water, we have a ceremony to go to water, the water takes away your troubles. So really the water's blessing. You don't go in the water and leaving an offering and being like, I bless this water, or this water will flow or anything like that. The water is a bigger being than you are spiritually. The water has more spirituality than you do. And so you cannot bestow blessings on a thing that's got more spirituality than you. And so that kind of concept goes with other stuff too, is like we're blessed by the corn. The corn, the corn doesn't need a blessing. If anything we need, we need the corn to grow for us. So we're asking it to grow. Doug Martin: We're hoping it grows. We might leave. In the old days, they would kill a deer and leave it for or bury it in the corn field to kind of feed the corn. But it's not going that way. We're not blessing the corn. The corn is a blessing to us, and we have to be grateful in the sense that these higher things, these spiritual things, bless us. So that's the kind of concept. I know I probably spun it all around and you probably get some better answers. But yeah, like I said, we try to, I don't know if we're fighting against it, but we're definitely trying to counteract the idea that not every Native person is a pastor. Not every Native person is someone who can come up and do a blessing or a benediction or a prayer. And that's some of the prevailing things. It's like, oh, we'll have you do an opening blessing. I'm like, I don't do blessings. I don't know. And the other thing would be is like, well, if I had somebody who could do blessings, they'd probably be a member of a church. So you'd get a Christian blessing and they'd go, well, how come the guy didn't come up and go right to the four directions and say in the voice and do the things? I was like, well, he was a Christian. You asked for a Cherokee blessing. That's what I sent you. I sent you a Cherokee to bless you. So it's just one of those things it are cognizant of,

01:34:11.000 - 01:36:37.000

Isabella Bourtin: I've definitely heard that sentiment before from a few different people about not every Native person is a pastor. So it's really just always interesting to hear people say it again because it's true. Doug Martin: The idea that they're going to show up with a hat, I have a hat, but I can show up with a hat and wave your hand and speak really soft and real deep and talk about how this person… and when I get those calls, I'm like, what is it you really want? Because really that's what they want. They want somebody to come and have some copal or some sage and purify everybody. I'm like, well, what did they have that your community doesn't have? We're just a community of people. Don’t you have someone in your community that goes to a church or is part of a mosque or has a, what do we have? We're not a religious institution. So such a, oh, we'll bring you in and you can purify it, can't you? Purify? Can't your community purify yourselves? But that's the thing is they have that concept that, oh, well, the Natives are in tune with the world. And I don't know. It's one of those things we just get you needed to deal with. Isabella Bourtin: Yeah, absolutely. So like we mentioned, that was our last official question, but before I end the recording, do you have any last few words that you want to import upon anyone listening to this? Doug Martin: Hopefully I didn't make too many mistakes. Hopefully I didn't offend anybody. Hopefully I didn't get any other groups riled up. And hopefully I don't get any calls from the Cherokee Nation. Those are always my concerns that somebody is, I get a phone call or one of my, like, I heard you say this, I heard you say that, or I was trying to be nice. But I think the biggest thing we do, that we're trying to do here and what we're trying to accomplish and making sure we're available to folks like the Texas Buffalo Tribe, Buffalo Project and other groups in the area that we are trying to, we're trying to create what in Cherokee we call Gadugi. And it's kind of roughly translated into community, but it's really everybody working together for something.

01:36:37.000 - 01:39:55.000

Doug Martin: There's always going to be people at different things. But if we're good neighbors and we're good community members, our stuff will grow too. We've been doing this corn program and we've had tons of community partnerships, tons of community outreach. And so people grow our corn that aren't associated help us grow the corn that aren't associated with our group other than growing corn. And so this one cultural thing that we think is a very cultural thing has created these community ties and made us a better community member. So people hopefully when we show up to the Tribal Buffalo project or we show up to various organizations or we show up to a intertribal or we show up to a powwow, we want to make sure that people, when the Cherokees show up and they're wearing their Cherokee gear and they're wearing Cherokee hats, that it's like, oh, good, the Cherokees are here. Doug Martin: The community members that are good community members are here, the people that help us to grow corn or want to help get food sovereignty. Well, explaining the part about hunting and the bison, but also explaining about corn in the three sisters and making sure that they're spoken in the same way, in the same, in similar ways. I hope that people think that as a Cherokee community, and hopefully all the Cherokee communities all over the country would be good partners of Gadugi. Would be good ambassadors of that concept. And if you are meeting Cherokees and they're not ambassadors of that concept, maybe what values are they running? Are they doing Cherokee values? Are they doing Cherokee traditional values? Are they keeping those values or they have a different kind of set of values? And so I want people to come from whenever, like I said, we make ourselves available for interviews, make ourselves available for projects, make ourselves available for children, and education for culture, because we want people to see Gadugi in us. Doug Martin: We want people to see that our group and our folks know how to be good community members and know how to take care of each other even if we're not Cherokee. One of another story off tangents here, but one of the big stories, have you ever heard, seen the Cherokee word for water? The story of Wilma Mankiller? Well, Wilma Man Killer was the first chief of the Cherokee Nation. First female principal chief of Cherokee Nation, she has a quarter named in her honor in the series. And one of those things was that in this movie, which was actually had a lot of the Native stars that are in various things now, like Reservation Dogs, all these other things that before they were famous, so Z McLaren's in it. But this movie showed the story of Bell. So she had just come back from the Bay Area where I'm from. Doug Martin: She had just come back from the Bay Area and went to the Cherokee Nation. And basically they were trying to get people enrolled. And one of the ways they did this is they basically had this program where they were going to give water to the Bell community, a small community in rural Oklahoma, but had a lot of Cherokee families. And so the Cherokees, they said, okay, if you enroll, we can get money from the BIA. We can put this water in. You'll all have running water. You want to go to the, well, you want to do this. You can have plumbing in your houses. And so they started this program and the Cherokees said, oh, they would sign up houses. And they said, oh, well why’d you skip that house? Like, well, they're not Cherokee, they're white, or they're not registered Cherokee members. They can't register.

01:39:55.000 - 01:41:47.000

Doug Martin: It's like, yeah, but they're in our community. Why aren't we going to run the pipes to them? And they go, well, they're not Cherokee. The BIA, the Bureau of Indian Affairs only says we can run it to the Indian houses. And they said, well, we're a community. It doesn't matter if we're enrolled Cherokee, it doesn't matter. This is a community. And they had that concept of Gadugi to the point that they raised money through bake sales and raised money through this to make sure that those other places, the other families in their community, even if they weren't Cherokee, got the water. And so that illustrates what we're trying to, what we want our groups to be. We want people that we, for the benefit of everybody. And that shows you how well we can hold the Cherokee values if we're making sure that we're for the benefit of all the community, not just a segment of it. There's one Cherokee value, which I can't remember the Cherokee word for it, but basically it's what the value is: include everybody, no matter how many, all of mankind. So it doesn't say which groups are not to include. It doesn't say which groups we're supposed to leave out. It says everybody, all of mankind. And that's what we kind of try to have in the back of our minds when we do our programs and our different things. So hopefully we're good ambassadors of Gadugi to sum that up. Isabella Bourtin: Well, I appreciate you sharing that so much. This has really just been such an amazing interview and you've taught me so much, and I'm sure anyone listening will also have learned so much. But yeah, thank you so much. I'll stop the recording and then we can… Doug Martin: Fact check me and leave the, what's it called, the angry comments in the comment sections, I'm sure. Isabella Bourtin: Sounds good. Okay. I will end the recording now.