David Shane Lowry
Academia's Debt to Native People
Today, we talk about academia and its debt to Native people. Also, we explore how universities can do better and take responsibility. Our guest is David Shane Lowry, PhD, member of the Lumbee Tribe and the Distinguished Fellow in Native American Studies at MIT.
Leah:
Boozhoo, I'm Leah Lemm, citizen of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe.
Daniel:
Hau Mitakuyapi, I'm Daniel Lemm, citizen of Lower Sioux Dakota Oyate.
Leah:
And this is Wisdom Continuum. We are bringing you conversations from awesome Native folks to celebrate Native wisdom for a healthier, thoughtful, more just future. And today we'll be talking about academia and its debt to Native people but also we explore how universities can do better and take responsibility.
Leah:
Our guest today is working in the academic system and having these large conversations with university leadership. David Shane Lowry is the distinguished fellow in Native American studies at MIT, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, my alma mater. And in this role, David is leading a new conversation about the responsibilities of MIT and science technology education in the theft of American Indian land and the dismantling of American Indian health and community.
Leah:
These conversations need to happen and it's really great that he is able to share with us his thoughts and kind of that what's that, I don't want to say battle, but in saying that I just said it, but what is that conflict and that challenge of getting university leadership to even take part in a conversation about taking responsibility. Very excited. I know I have a very physical and emotional response to this sort of conversation because I had my own experience at MIT as a Native woman and it was unexpected I think, for me to have these feelings. There's definitely some residual trauma and some healing that needs to be done, I think, with my relationship with MIT. It's interesting to be able to talk with David Shane Lowry.
Daniel:
That's an interesting perspective that you have there Leah, in when it comes to this conversation and we had a guest on one of our first episodes, Susan Beaulieu, who talked about the wisdom of trauma. Not to push too hard here, though I'm wondering if there's anything that given your experience and what you talked about a little bit there, before we go into talking with David, is there any more that you could share with us? Because I'm not a Native woman. Of course, I didn't go to MIT. And so I cannot identify with this conversation as much as you can. Any insights, anything that you'd share with us before we go into talking with David?
Leah:
I think what I went and through at MIT is probably more common across all universities and not necessarily just me but I know there was very little as far as Native community that I knew about and it was probably partly my own fault for not really seeking it out but at the same time, there was definitely erasure happening. There was a survey being done, it was about technology use and ethnic background or race. And this was at MIT 20 years ago now and nowhere on the survey was their American Indian or anything like that.
Leah:
And it just is one of several examples that just shows how we are othered, even as Indigenous people on Turtle Island, on the land that we're from. Just all of these things that come down to continued erasure of Native people and not acknowledging the price that was paid for MIT to exist. And it's true for many places but MIT has an opportunity to be a leader not just in science and engineering. It can be a leader in taking responsibility and acknowledging and then work towards healing. It's a long road but it's been hundreds of years, so what can we expect?
Daniel:
Yeah. Thanks in part to the Morrill Act, they have the resources to have the conversations and to take the lead, just like what you were talking about there. Also, I can only imagine that your class schedule and the academic demands that were placed on you, would not have made it easy to go out and find a group with the same affinity. And that's something that MIT or any college could have developed a network so that students can find others like them, going through a similar schedule or struggle, similar classes and it's a way for students to be more successful. There's more to an education than exam scores and sometimes those exams scores are reflective of the support system that students have throughout their studies.
Leah:
Yeah. And MIT does have AISES American Indian Science and Engineering Society. I was so lost. I did graduate on time. I did have a fine GPA and did take part in extracurricular activities. I know when we visited MIT a couple summers ago, it just felt so ghosty, like it was haunted or maybe I was haunting it, like I was some sort of ghost walking through it. Feeling present but also detached at the same time. I don't know.
Daniel:
Wow. That's deep.
Leah:
I'm heading back soon. They're having Indigenous Earth Day at MIT.
Daniel:
Oh, cool.
Leah:
On Earth Day, so I'm going to go and leave you and Marvin and Koda to fend for yourselves but I'm going to go and it'll be nice to see an Indigenous presence at MIT out in the open.
Daniel:
That's cool, Leah. We'll just make sure that we stock up on snacks before you leave.
Leah:
You'll be fine.
Daniel:
You think about your experience at and MIT and how it was lonely certainly at times, even though you did some extracurriculars and did at least some socializing with such a demanding academic class load. I think about David Shane Lowry and the work that he's doing in this fellowship and how his work is so personal in ways, as well as so important regarding the history of MIT, of any land grab university and getting faculty to recognize that history, acknowledge it, is a first step. And that's a big step. And then acknowledging it is one thing, what are the actions that any administration or any of us would take when it comes to recognizing historical events or ongoing historical events that how do you write some of those? Or how do you acknowledge them and figure out what's the best relationship that MIT can have with Native students, with Native communities in the role that they serve in as such a prestigious technical institute and how they shape the minds for future generations?
Leah:
Before we hop into our conversation with David Shane Lowry, I'm going to add on a couple other things about him. David has lectured across the United States and he talks a lot about the intersection of race, health, science and popular culture. His first book is called Lumbee Pipelines, which explores American Indian utilization of colonial conditions to create opportunities that are both uplifting and oppressive. And his second book is titled Black Jesus and is an ethnography of Michael Jordan. David is a fellow graduate of MIT, got his bachelor's of science in 07 and went on to do his master's and PhD at UNC Chapel Hill. All right, ready?
Daniel:
Let's do it.
Leah:
David Shane Lowry, and the wisdom of difficult conversations, acknowledging trauma and history to strengthen the academic system which will help Native students and all students in the future.
Daniel:
All right, David. Good to meet you. Good to see you and want to know, would you please introduce yourself?
David Shane Lowry:
Thank you for having me. My name is David Shane Lowry. I am an enrolled member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, which is the, we always like to quantify Native people, we're the ninth largest American Indian community in the United States. We're the largest American Indian community east of the Mississippi River but we're not federally recognized. That's a whole conversation in itself and we can go into that. But I'm from the Lumbee community. My great-great-great grandfather was Henry Berry Lowry, who is a famous, we call him a warrior but he was actually enemy of the state. He had one of the largest federal bounties on his head in the late 1800s. Bigger than, we've heard of Jesse James. He was more infamous than Jesse James but we don't know his story because he was American Indian and we don't tell those stories.
David Shane Lowry:
But I come from Southeastern North Carolina, county called Robeson. I grew up there from the age of 10 until the age of 18. Moved from St. Louis before then, that's where I was born. And again, that's a long conversation but my dad moved there in the 50s to work for an auto manufacturing company that led to us being there as children and then eventually he retired and we moved back to the Lumbee Tribe and to southeastern North Carolina into a whole new world that I wasn't really ready for but I had to learn to adapt to very quickly. But so that's me.
David Shane Lowry:
I did my undergrad at Massachusetts Institute of Technology with Leah. I did my master's and bachelor's and that was in anthropology eventually after I switched majors a couple times. Eventually I did my master's and PhD at UNC Chapel Hill in anthropology. My research was funded by the National Science Foundation and so that's basically me. I've moved around the United States a couple of times, a few times to teach at different places. And this year I'm a distinguished fellow in Native American studies at MIT. That's where we are starting the conversation, I guess now.
Leah:
Can you tell us a bit about the role that you have at MIT, the Distinguished Fellow in Native American studies? What does that mean?
David Shane Lowry:
Honestly, I know what it is in title and I know what a few of us here at MIT talk about it should be but I'm still trying to discover what it means to MIT writ large. I came into this position following a brilliant historian, Craig Wilder, who was empathetic to the needs and the political and intellectual needs of Indigenous people at MIT over the last few years. He teaches in history at MIT and he got the support to hire for MIT, to hire someone, which became my role. Someone to pick up from where he left off, in terms of supporting Indigenous studies here at MIT. He actually taught a course, 21H.283, Indigenous History of MIT in the spring of was that 21. And that summer is when he kind of put the call out for people to apply for this position.
David Shane Lowry:
As I applied for this position, as I came into it, I'm sort of following in his footsteps but in the first couple months that I was at MIT, he and I kind of, we kind of tussled a little bit, not in a bad way, in a good way. His specialty is Black identity and the history of slavery and he wrote a very brilliant book called Ebony and Ivy, which is about the roots of the Ivy League schools and the universities across the board and slavery. I'm coming in as a scholar of race also, but of American Indian sort of realities as they intersect with other communities. White, Black, for the most part. As we sort of got into the conversation about what the position should be, he would often ask me, this is back in October, November, "How do our two projects differ?"
David Shane Lowry:
And I said, "Well, one of the differences in our projects is that people assume that when we talk about slavery, that we're beginning to talk about the history of African people in the United States. What they don't realize is that when Native people are talked about oftentimes, it's only within the context of land loss," stolen American Indian land and removal and termination of Indian tribes. But as we started to kind of talk about it, I was like, "One of the things that I want to emphasize this year is that we also need to be included as American Indian people in this history of slavery."
David Shane Lowry:
All of New England began with the enslavement of people all through New England being sent into the Caribbean and into South America and the late, I argue it's in late 1500s, early 1600s. When you get to 1619, which is generally when people argue that shadow slavery started, you still had American Indian people who were being enslaved. Charleston at one point, Charleston, South Carolina, actually it was exporting more American Indian people than it was importing African people all the way up into the 1760s, if I'm not mistaken with that date.
David Shane Lowry:
It gets back to my position, my position here at MIT is very much to have this really new type of conversation about American Indian life as it's been altered by colonial processes, both through slavery and through stolen Indian land. But also since we're here at MIT through a process that I call technological colonialism, which is basically from 1860 on, 1862 on, which is when the Morrill Act of 1862 was written and sort of enforced, you began to see the emergence of universities. And especially in this case, a technological university that is MIT, that to build its wealth and its reputation, it actually took advantage of the fact that everything that was stolen from American Indian people, including our lives, including our land, including our resources, minerals, et cetera, were the ingredients or the capital to fund emerging technological scientific endeavors. From the railroad, to emerging what I would call, emerging computer science, to the politics of the economics, where our third president Francis Walker wrote a book called The Indian Question, actually was a major proponent of a bimetal economy, which was based on silver and gold.
David Shane Lowry:
And my question is, where was that gold and that silver going to come from? It came from the extraction of those minerals from stolen Indian land. This conversation gets really big, it's about the national, perhaps global discourse or conversation around removed bodies, stolen bodies, assassinated bodies, stolen land, stolen property, stolen minerals but it very quickly gets into a conversation about what MIT is and what it was formed to be in the 1800s.
Leah:
That is a huge conversation. It sounds like that's a lot of work and a lot of open minds need to be had and open lines of communication. Do you feel like MIT is really receptive to hearing that or to having those conversations?
David Shane Lowry:
Yeah. That's a tough question. I'll tell you, well, I'll answer it in terms of the letters I've written to people around MIT. I've had the privilege of at least having the ear of the provost, the chancellor, the president of MIT and in one of the letters that I wrote, which was to several people, not just them, I stated that one of the things that we're dealing with at MIT as we prepare to start relationships between the institute which is MIT and American Indian communities, both locally and across the United States and in Canada, what we're getting into is a conversation about the miseducation of people who have power at MIT.
David Shane Lowry:
For example, an example that I gave in my letter, there's several faculty members who are very influential at MIT, who are educated at universities like the University of Illinois. When they were coming up in college, they would go to a basketball game and they would see a white guy on the basketball court in faux leather and a head dress, dancing. He was called Chief Illiniwek or whatever, I think that was his name. But basically they came up in that. They came up in an educational ecosystem, if you will, where American Indian or Indigenous people were dehumanized. We weren't professors, we weren't fellow scholars. We were that person that wasn't really a person in terms of identity on the floor that was mocking, that was celebrating, that was, shall we say, parading the effects of genocide, which in that particular situation, if you're talking about a basketball game at the University of Illinois, maybe just a dance and a song that is an entertainment for the crowd in the arena.
David Shane Lowry:
But for me, I think we had to consider a conversation that is much more purposeful. That is, when you have people that from the early age, from kindergarten to middle school to high school to college, are always taught that American Indian people don't have relevance in your everyday life and beyond that, that they don't have the ability or the permission to make claims on the world that you exist in, which is a colonized world, then you get into situations where you're kind of leaders of various disciplines and professions and you continue to think that way. When people appeal to you and say, "Hey, American Indian people need a voice." Well, you've been trained for 20, 30, maybe even 50 or 60 years, not to allow yourself to give Indigenous people voices.
David Shane Lowry:
When you ask the question, are they receptive? Are they hearing? I feel like oftentimes I'm in a constant state of remediation, not for me, but for everybody else. I'm having to constantly see where people are, what they need, what gaps they need filled intellectually and then begin to fill them. A lot of the projects that I'm doing, I'm hosting a few conferences over the next month. A lot of the work that I'm doing is literally basic remediation, teaching you who Native people are, teaching you why you as an institute and as a person in science and technology should be responsible to healthcare needs, needs that are kind of metaphysical and spiritual and those sorts of things. Like you say, it's a big conversation. And a big chunk of that conversation is literally building from the ground up, the intellectual tools that people need to actually begin to form relationships with Indigenous people.
Daniel:
David, this is something that I work in the philanthropic sector and it's something that exists here too. A lot of my time and others' time, Black, Indigenous, people of color, we spend a lot of time just working within the system of philanthropy to say, "Hey, how can we support everyone? How does equity play out through the philanthropic sector?" I can identify with your work in the educational system and what it means to educate quote unquote, people in positions of power. And then what it means for all of us to be successful.
Daniel:
And sometimes the number of conversations that you have to have with somebody before they start to open up, maybe start to get it and say, "Hey, maybe there really is an issue here." And that's something too, that people can dive into a little bit more. Thank you for the work that you're doing within the educational system and certainly at MIT in the role that an institution such as that one can play in being a potential leader for these types of conversations. I also want to say, I just noticed you got a dope bow tie on, so that looks good.
David Shane Lowry:
Appreciate it. Appreciate it. My message is, wherever I go, whether it was, I lived in Southern California for a bit, whether I'm in Southern California, Boston, anywhere I go, I want everybody to be bow tie wearers. I'm evangelic for bow tie wearing ministry, if you will.
Daniel:
I don't know about the Yankees hat but to each their own. The bow tie, there's commonality there.
David Shane Lowry:
I got compliments for this outfit.
Leah:
I was wondering how you do on the T with your Yankee's hat.
David Shane Lowry:
I get literally it's 50/50. I get people who look at me and go, "Mm." And then I get half, another 50% of people are like, "Hey, you go. You go with that hat. Good job."
Leah:
Exactly.
Daniel:
I'm a Minnesota Twins fan so I'm not involved in that kind of rivalry. Mine's kind of, why do the Yankees keep beating the Twins in the playoffs? I'm getting sick and tired of that. But I digress.
David Shane Lowry:
I lived in St. Louis when the Twins beat, I believe, did they beat the Cardinals in the World Series.
Daniel:
In 87.
David Shane Lowry:
Yeah. I was living there and I remember the kids, which I was a sort-of Cardinals fan, but the kids were mad. They were like, "Ooh, the Twins are evil." I remember that.
Leah:
Oh, wow.
Daniel:
Nobody says that anymore.
Daniel:
I was curious, it was maybe six months or so that I learned about the Morrill Act. And that's something that you talked about in the beginning, in conversation here and you talked about it maybe at a little higher level. I'm wondering if you could take it down to MIT and could you talk with us a little bit about how MIT benefited from the Morrill Act?
David Shane Lowry:
Yeah. In 1862, the Morrill Act was enforced, it became law. And basically there was this dream following, I don't know if you all have ever heard of the term manifest destiny. Well manifest destiny was a theory in ideology that basically allowed everybody who was a settler in the United States, who was not Indigenous, and these were across racial lines, to feel that America was for them. In 1862 the manifest destiny became a reality, a real policy when there were basically funds taken from stolen Indian land, from the removal of Native people from those lands. This was in Michigan and Minnesota and Missouri and California, all across the United States and that stolen land was used as seed capital for the creation of land grant universities.
David Shane Lowry:
MIT's a land grant, UMass Amherst is the other. There's two land grant universities in Massachusetts, UMass and MIT. But if you go to every state, there's private schools but mostly public schools are land grants. In New York, Cornell is one of them. But then in Michigan, it's Michigan State, Ohio State is a land grant and North Carolina State, University of California Berkeley and you go across the United States, there's all these land grants everywhere.
David Shane Lowry:
The dream of the land grant sort of policy was for education to really take off and begin to fulfill the needs of Americans who were settling the land. It encouraged this idea of training farmers, training people who would develop land. Here at MIT, we didn't train farmers in the late 1800s. What we did was to get into the Morrill Act sort of ethos or the atmosphere or the ecosystem of the Morrill Act, we started a school of architecture. Which that school of architecture is still very formidable. It still exists. And you may say, "Well, how does architecture fit into the realm of agriculture and sort of cultivating the land?" Well, there's this idea that if you steal Indigenous land, you don't only want to kind of capitalize on it by kind of receiving food and sort of profits from it. You really want to redesign it so that you kind of evacuate, you erase Indigenous ownership of land.
David Shane Lowry:
Some of the most brilliant architecture that happened out of MIT was, again, these weren't just White students. Some of them were African American students also in the late 1800s into the early 1900s. They were being trained at MIT and they were going into the Deep South and into the West and they were really in a very interesting way, designing communities, townships, cities and even new universities. By the time 1890 came along, there was a second version of the Morrill Act. Some students from MIT who had become very famous, one of them, his name is Robert Taylor, he was designing historically Black colleges and universities down South, having been trained at MIT. If you look into kind of this swath, this widespread emergence of higher education in the United States, literally every corner of higher education up until today has been in some way, if not still to today, seeded by Morrill Act money.
David Shane Lowry:
Now what the irony of this is, there's a lot of universities that don't even acknowledge the fact that their seed money for their universities was kind of is rooted in or born in Indian genocide. And what I find extra fascinating is the fact that when you begin to talk to people about these sorts of topics, especially at universities that there's other marginalized people there. North Carolina A&T is a historical Black college in North Carolina, when I've asked them before, "Why don't you acknowledge the fact that your 1890 Morrill Act school was born in Indian genocide?" They kind of say, "Well, we're all suffering together as people of color." And I'm like, "Mm, okay." But as an institution, even though we are suffering together, you need to officially acknowledge the fact that your institution was literally born out of the Act of 1862, but more specifically, 1890, the Morrill Act of 1890.
David Shane Lowry:
Now, what is interesting also is that MIT, according to the state of Massachusetts this spring, will continue to receive money from the Morrill Act of 1862. It won't be millions of dollars. I don't think it'll even be hundreds of thousands of dollars but it will be money that is noticeable, that will be coming into MIT. And the state of Massachusetts states that there will be a lump sum that is repayment for, I think, 20 years of missing Morrill Act money. And then payments will continue to come in from the Morrill Act of 1862 in perpetuity. MIT will continue in the next, I think, 20 or 30 years to receive money from the Morrill Act of 1862.
David Shane Lowry:
I've been very open in kind of my sort of statements to MIT and to people outside of MIT, MIT will be getting blood money. The reaction to that should be economic. We should want to take that money and do something that is Indigenous with it. But the response, I think, more than that should be a moral response. What does it mean for us as a community of higher education to be receiving blood money? And how should that impact what we do and how we do it in terms of our relationship to communities outside of our university or inside our university too? How do we treat Indigenous students at MIT? How do we create perhaps programs of Indigenous studies at MIT? And then how do we take the force of MIT, the strength of it and begin to offer it or give it or kind of utilize for the empowerment of people that we haven't empowered before, in particular, Indigenous communities in the United States?
Daniel:
David, I went to Iowa State, that's where I did my undergrad. And I found out through my research as part of the Morrill Act, that Iowa State University was a land grab university as well. And when I went there, I remember I received in state tuition and there was a noticeable difference between out of state tuition and in state tuition. And I received in state tuition because I'm a descendant of Dakota people and because Dakota people had been in what is then the state of Iowa, Iowa State University dropped my tuition rate down to the in state tuition. They considered me an in state tuition student or an in state student.
Daniel:
And I'm wondering now, if that was the reason why, because they addressed part of that, the Morrill Act for students. This was 20 years ago but you're making me think, I should go back and do my research to ask why that was something that Iowa State even did as a quote unquote benefit but wondering how much further could we go with what Iowa State received and how the descendants of Native people from 1862, how can some of that be addressed nowadays?
David Shane Lowry:
I want to respond to you asked me the question in terms of kind of breaking it down and kind of bringing it down to the level of what did the Morrill Act do at MIT? I've often emphasized and I'll emphasize it here, there are people and even policies that we can blame. We can say, "Hey, the Morrill Act of 1862 was evil and it created higher education in the wake of genocide." Francis Walker, who's the third president of MIT, he wrote a book called The Indian Question. He helped design and kind of enforced the reservation system for American Indians across the United States. Even though it is argued, he didn't create reservation. That was probably Andrew Jackson back during the Indian removal, during the Trail of Tears. But I kind of oftentimes bring it to the everyday business of MIT.
David Shane Lowry:
When you begin to see MIT proliferate, as it becomes multiple disciplines, architecture, civil engineering, what used to be called mining engineering but is now material science and engineering. When you begin to look at the origins of all these disciplines, you find out that these early faculty members in these disciplines and early students who were being trained in these disciplines, they literally were invested in the educational business of taking advantage of stolen land and this disenfranchised Indigenous peoples.
David Shane Lowry:
The first woman who graduated from MIT, Ellen Swallow Richards, she's famous because she also became the first, I think, female faculty member MIT in mining engineering. Well, she became famous because she and her husband who was also a faculty member, went to the northern peninsula of Michigan. They went, I believe into southern Canada. And I think they traveled also over into Minnesota and into California and they actually began to consult or serve as a consultant for mining industries to help them know how to more efficiently, and that was always a term that was used back then, the late 1800s. We want efficiency. To efficiently remove minerals from Indigenous lands that were recently stolen.
David Shane Lowry:
Literally when you go into all these disciplines, I often say, when you look into computer science, computer science is oftentimes visualized as this very new sort of post 1950 sort of discipline where people began to code. Well no, you can't look at it that way because where Google and Apple and all these big Silicon Valley companies have their servers are actually, those servers and those kind of houses that kind of that hold the servers are embedded in land that has been under constant tension after the Morrill Act of 1862 and other policies of Indian land stealing.
David Shane Lowry:
You can go to land in New Mexico, Arizona. There's a brilliant scholar here and I forget his name, please forgive me, but he's here in STS and anthropology. He's doing work on this right now but if you go down to the Southwest, Mexico, Arizona and other areas down there in the southwestern United States, you'll see that basically these are places that have been abused and kind of misappropriated and taken advantage of by archeologists and all other kinds of scholars from different disciplines. And now, since the land is seen as just good enough to kind of put in infrastructure for the worldwide web or for virtual reality, now you have these servers of these companies sitting in land that has been stolen historically but continues to be in states of theft.
David Shane Lowry:
And I made a comment one time and I actually wrote this into a recent article that we often imagine the cloud. These servers hold the cloud. We save our pictures, our videos, everything that's precious to us digitally, we save them in the cloud. I made an argument, I said, "What if we don't think about the cloud as this kind of ambiguous sort of digital reality? What if we think about it in terms of it being the residue of the land and the bodies that were stolen from us as Indigenous people?" Literally you have servers, you have these corporate sort of artificially intelligent centers that are built into and on top of the graves of Indigenous people without the permission of Indigenous people. If you think about that is where everything that is digital is being saved, can we begin to actually critique the cloud as something that we progressively and in an everyday way use to make our lives normal and fast and powerful?
David Shane Lowry:
And I hope that makes sense because I've just started making an argument this year, but I'm starting to say it more because I think we need to really connect the things that are related to the Morrill Act of 1862 and particularly the death of land, with the conditions and the processes within which we as everyday citizens, not just people at MIT or in Minnesota, whatever, but we as everyday American and people across the world, the processes that we use to kind of live our everyday lives. And if we bring an idea like the cloud from the abstract into that kind of ongoing conversation about genocide, it makes it much more palpable.
Leah:
Academia and all of this work downstream, all the ripple effects and as you said, built on the graves of Native people, on stolen land, it seems like an acknowledgement would be kind of a basic thing to do and a starting point. And I know you mentioned UNC, that mentioned that we all have problems, that is hard for me to really wrap my head around. In order for any sort of healing to happen, you have to acknowledge the incredible debt that academia and all of that owes to Native people. And so how do you even begin having hope for a conversation for any sort of, I doubt there'd be resolution but any sort of movement without acknowledgement?
David Shane Lowry:
Right, right, right. Coming from the discipline of anthropology, I kind of think archeologically just because I was trained in some of that. And anytime, whether you're in any science where you're digging into the earth, you realize there are layers. And you can't get to the bottom layers, you can't see in depth until you kind of dig through the superficial, what's just on top. And I believe that we have a generation of students now who are beginning to understand that their education can't be top heavy or can't be superficial. It can't be just here on the surface. You have to constantly be able to dig down and kind of root out if you will, the conditions within which your education sort of exists.
David Shane Lowry:
I think about that nowadays, when people are quitting work for their own reasons, they're like, "Hey, I'm not going to work 9:00 to 5:00 in an office." Because they realize that, after series like the Madman, I don't know if you ever watched that, Madman was a wonderful series on AMC. You begin to see, going to the office and going to a 9:00 to 5:00 and looking out windows is a very kind of, it's a very crafted corporate reality. Who said that we need to do this? But if you talk to people where I'm from, Native people, they're like, "You need the job." And I always ask them, "Why do you need the job?" Well, you need to have some sense of stability. I said, "You're not asking us to get a job, you're asking us for stability."
David Shane Lowry:
And I believe if you take that kind of corporate kind of economic lingo about stability and taking a higher education, students today and they're asking me and they're asking other faculty that I talk to, they're asking, "When I learn this, when I learn anthropology, when I learn history, when I learn computer science, when I learn how to be a civil engineer, what about this is stable? What about this allows me to be the most humane person, the most humane scholar, the most humane engineer, if you will, that I can be?" And I believe it's these conversations that perpetually dig just underneath the superficial and allow us to see how what we do has impacted and continues to impact the same marginalized communities, Indigenous folks. Allows students across the board, no matter who they are, Native or non-Native, to feel comfortable in the work, in the education they get, in the work that they do and their role as professionals or whatever the term is you want to use coming up. That's where the hope is.
David Shane Lowry:
And people usually say to us, "Well, as young people you're the hope." Well, I also have hope in the young people. But interestingly, as Indigenous people, we have to be very purposeful in how we say that. We have hope that young people see things and they'll continue to speak out and basically articulating what their needs are but that they'll actually reach back and talk to the elders. The people who have been in this fight for 50, 60, 80, a 100 years and that have been waiting for this opportunity for their dreams of decolonization, if you will, to become real.
David Shane Lowry:
And I think is, at this point we're having this conversation at MIT and other institutions, where young people were saying, "Yes, we want to be part of this. This is what we need," that we then begin to have those intergenerational conversations that actually make things very complete. And I always say that, young people, we should empower them but as Indigenous people, we're always going to our elders because they just carry so much wisdom with them and they've been having the same ideas for generations but they just, they haven't had the audience or the platform to really put them out there.
Leah:
Yeah. Looking back, always looking and asking back and also asking forward. We're just on this timeline where we have this responsibility. I hear some cultural influences coming through. What is this cultural wisdom that you are operating from? What are those values that you have, especially cultural values that you have? You talk about being an anthropologist and having that archeologist mindset as well. That's not the entire story. Can you talk a bit to the cultural influences that you also have, that wisdom that informs your work?
David Shane Lowry:
Yeah. Very quickly and I'll kind of skate through this because it's a deep story. It's a long story but I grew up reading a book that my grandfather self published in the 1950s. It's called the Lumbee Community or something but I still have copies of it. But he didn't graduate from college but he learned how to write. And he self published a book. My dad actually remembers going with him to pick up the books when he was young and he distributed these books because he wanted people to understand that storytelling and narrating our world as it intersects with everything else is the most powerful form of empowerment, if that makes sense. The most powerful. It's just empower.
Leah:
It's empowering.
David Shane Lowry:
It was in that moment when I, as a youngster in the nineties or the eighties actually, began to read his text. I realized that every time I would cite him or every time I would continue to build on his knowledge, there were certain people inside our community as Indigenous people, we know this, inside the community that would kind of pull you in and say, "Ah, don't step outside the boundaries too much. You're a little mouthy, you talk too much." And then there were people outside the community that were saying the same things, "Ah, you sure you know what you're talking about? Okay. Do you really know who you are?" But I think in that conversation, in that permission that my grandfather gave me to both read about us and also, oh, as he did, write and create narratives and tell a story, that is where ultimately I was empowered.
David Shane Lowry:
And actually it's funny because the first book I'm writing, which is with Nebraska Press, it's called Lumbee Pipelines and it's based on just this 10 year project that I've been on, where I've been studying and working with Native people in North Carolina and the Lumbee community in particular. And that book is really about me stepping into homes with people that are very fragile and they're saying, "Are you going to write about me in a certain way? Are you going to embarrass me? Why should I tell you my story?" Really, the book comes out of a struggle to get people to tell those stories and let me kind of share them.
David Shane Lowry:
But a second book that I'm working on is called Black Jesus, which is an ethnography of Michael Jordan. It actually began in 93 when, as the news media told us, Michael Jordan's father was murdered in North Carolina in the Lumbee community. And there's a Lumbee guy and an African American guy who are in prison right now for murdering Michael Jordan's father. Well, that book stems out of a different perspective. It's not that people have given me or have kind of debated with my ability to kind of tell the story and they've been scared. More so, it's been the community back in North Carolina always telling me, "David, are you going to write that story? Are you going to tell the story of Michael Jordan? Are you going to begin to talk about what really happened and what didn't happen?" And more so I have people outside the Lumbee community and inside who are all for me writing this new type of story because I'm essentially critiquing in a lot of ways, a powerful kind of God-like figure, Michael Jordan, and beginning to kind of articulate how he has influenced our life.
David Shane Lowry:
I bring those two kind of sets of relationships in terms of my permission to tell stories together, because the most difficult thing to teach a young person and an old person too, some old people are still dealing with it, is that we have permission to talk, that we have permission to change how things are talked about, that we have permission to create new theoretical and epistemological we ways of seeing the world. And again, it goes back to the Declaration of Independence when the forefathers of America were calling us savages, merciless Indian savages. And it goes into the history of public education in America, where my father literally was told that he didn't spell his name correctly and we never saw ourselves in history books.
David Shane Lowry:
I'm sitting here in 20, what are we in 2022 now? And I'm saying to myself, "I can write these books. I can tell these stories," but literally I still feel the pressures, those pressures that my grandfather felt, that people that are much older than my grandfather felt, not to even say who we are, not to speak our truth, not to say, not to tell the story that we know. And if you say, "What kind of cultural realm do I speak out of?" I kind of want to kind of turn that and say, "What kind of realm of power do I speak out of?"
David Shane Lowry:
I'm empowered within the context of knowing that when I do begin to articulate, write and describe, I'm writing and describing and telling stories for people who for generations have not been able to. And people may disagree with what I'm saying and they'll probably tell me they do but at the end of the day, the people where I come from and the people in other Native Indigenous communities and the people in other marginalized communities, more generally will be very happy that I tell the stories because we've all to some degree felt those pressures, not to talk and not to speak and not to be who we are.
Daniel:
And in some ways we know if we don't tell our stories, others are going to and that hasn't worked out really well.
Leah:
Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for sharing. I know with the history of it being literally dangerous to tell our stories, being able to now feels there's resistance because it's resistance, if that makes sense. I'm happy to explain if it doesn't. That's really exciting. I had to think about it for a second. It feels like resistance because it is resistance.
David Shane Lowry:
Well, the thing is, I'm being coy but I'm being very truthful when I say this, do you notice how when we talk about these things and as we're kind of articulating where we're at and how we are speaking in this moment, we're creating new language. Our minds are steadily trying to process out of what I would consider to be colonial ways of describing what we do. And we're trying to grapple with what we are trying to do, what we are doing. And I believe what you were just doing, I think is part of that. It's like, okay, how am I articulating it?
Leah:
Yeah. And there's this parallel and it's something that I'm working through. There's this parallel ancestral trauma and that ancestral DNA of danger. Telling your story equals danger, using your language equals danger so we're constantly working those things out at the same time, building language, working through ancestral trauma and trying to do this when institutions of higher learning don't want to hear it. How does it work?
David Shane Lowry:
And can I tell you a quick story for 30 seconds? Every morning my wife gets a phone call from my niece, Gabriela. And Gabriela calls her, "Hey, Aunt Coco," and that's what she calls her. Her name's Nicole they call her Coco and she's like, "Hey, good morning. I'm going to school." And my wife will affirm her. She'll say, "You're the best. You're smart. You're beautiful." And you get kind of emotional when you hear, well, I don't get emotional every morning because I'm sleeping. But articulating what that means to affirm, I think it comes out of, and my wife and I talk about this a lot and excuse me if I get a little teary eyed.
David Shane Lowry:
It comes out of this idea that the more work that we do as a couple, as a family professionally to try to get into certain spaces, to do the work that we should be able to do, we realize that all the forces of America, all the forces of colonialism, however you want to articulate what colonialism is, are turned against. It's been turned against us. It's been turned against Gabriela. And we're the ones that are sitting here, like my grandfather did with his book, even though he didn't know I was reading it, affirming and giving permission, not only to read a story that we've written, to kind of share it with each other, but to put it into the world and to literally attempt to change the opinions and the perspectives of everybody. That is the essence. And when my wife does that every morning with Gabriela or we call her Gabby but she does it every morning, that is what she's doing. Even though I don't think she describes it that way but that's how I see it. But she does it on purpose. She's like, I affirm her because I have to.
Leah:
That's beautiful. It takes repetition. It takes talking, even though you don't know how it's being received. But being sincere in that speaking the words, speaking the truth and affirming, I think that's really beautiful. It's so much, it seems so daunting. I'm just really glad that you are at MIT. You're doing this work, having these conversations and I hope that we can continue this because I feel like it's just a little scratch of the surface. I know I have some other questions here to ask but I think this is a really great starting point.
David Shane Lowry:
Yeah. And ultimately what we're doing is creating space. Whether it's at MIT or somewhere else, giving people the permission to create in what I call institutionalized spaces for speaking these realities and for learning from them and creating new things out of them, is what we're attempting to do.
Leah:
Yeah. I know from my experience at MIT and not seeing that space, it's definitely motivation to do it in whatever way I can, however I can. Whether it's radio.
David Shane Lowry:
Which we just had you in class the other day and it was a beautiful conversation.
Leah:
That was so fun.
David Shane Lowry:
Yeah. At the end of the day, the look of everybody coming in and usually it's over Zoom, the look of everybody is like, wow, this is interesting. And the captivation, because we, as Indigenous people have now have at least in this particular way, have that space to speak, kind of evoke and press and push on the nerve of MIT. It's just overwhelming. People are like, oh wow.
Leah:
Yeah. And I feel like it's a muscle that we're strengthening because at first it's scary and used to be dangerous with threats of violence. Now that there's less.
David Shane Lowry:
But I will say this, I was threatened. I got an email that I gave to the police at MIT where somebody threatened my life.
Leah:
Geez.
David Shane Lowry:
And I want to say that here because I think that I'm not trying to hide it but I also don't want to forget it because from the very first moments that I stepped into this role, when people found out about it, I received a death threat. And if you want to think that the civil rights movement, that the human rights movement, that struggles for justice, the American Indian movement are somewhere in the past, no, they're not. Absolutely not. They're right here.
Leah:
Yep. Miigwech, David. I really appreciate you taking time to chat with us. Really incredible and I hope to talk more soon. There's so much to talk about.
David Shane Lowry:
And I get that statement from even faculty and my team when we begin talking, there's so much to talk about. That's what we need to do.
Daniel:
Well David, thank you for your time this afternoon. I've appreciated getting to talk with you a little bit, hearing a little bit about your story. Thank you for the work that you're doing. Be safe and be well, man.
David Shane Lowry:
Yeah. I appreciate it. Thank you for your time, energy, for your ancestors that allowed you to be here, for your community. No, I appreciate it.
Leah:
All right. David Shane Lowry, what a great person to talk to. Again, David Shane Lowry is the distinguished fellow in Native American studies at MIT. Perfect person for the position. You can really hear his motivation and passion for the work.
Daniel:
Yeah. Which he talked about doing this kind of work allows him to be the most humane person, scholar, engineer and the conversations that he has, allowing him to dig just underneath the superficial to really talk about what's going on because we can be really good about being in that superficial space and having that direct conversation and really talking about what's going on, allows us to discuss any actions that we can take. How do we redress whatever historical events have happened to make things better or right or however? And he talks about having these conversations now, gives him hope for future generations and what they may build, how they may build upon either his work or just the work that the university or the institute maybe I should say, is going through.
Daniel:
He's got the hope that young people see things and they'll continue to speak out and articulate what their needs are and in doing so and even the younger generation talking about what their needs are, how they talk with elders is an important part of that conversation so that they can understand, so that younger people have the context that David has and that the elders have about where we've been so that the youngsters I'll say, can talk about, can shape the future.
Daniel:
We are talking with so many great people and we want to say that your input matters too. Do you know someone who's working on systems change or centering Indigenous values? Or do you have a topic or interview suggestion? If so, then email wisdomcontinuum@gmail.com.
Leah:
Yes. And I promise to check the email. Find Wisdom Continuum online at wisdomcontinuum.com and on social media on Instagram and Twitter @wisdomcontinuum. Thank you to Wisdom Continuum consulting producer, Multitude and Miigwech to Manda Lillie for the production help. I'm Leah.
Daniel:
I'm Daniel. This is Wisdom Continuum.
