Nautica are the air cittadini Cali never
monitored seen the on Kuwait deca no
nothing you have to run ticket I just
spoke to you in that what an indigenous
language in Mexico descended of the
Aztec empire I told you my name though
you can call me Adi I said that my
father and I are from Coahuila and that
my mother’s from Durango two states in
northern Mexico it is said that that our
people are born of the marriage between
Sun and Earth and that our souls are no
different between the people who have
already passed and the people who have
yet to come
that’s why history is so important to me
because I am no different from my
ancestors they live within me and I will
live within my progeny history though
has rarely been on my peoples side it’s
never really been about explaining what
happened in a war or in an election more
often than not history has been about
justifying what happened in our past so
that we can feel content with the
present history happens when an event is
decided that it’s important enough to be
written down in the country’s records
for some curious and accomplished
historian to later find the historian
then writes about it but he’s already
been influenced by a lifetime of
government-issued education and racial
propaganda biasing him against native
people making him think that we’re wild
lazy or uneducated and the texts that
he’s reading have already been written
in a European viewpoint making that
government look as clean and righteous
as possible the textbooks resulting from
that work later get edited and reviewed
by school boards filled with teachers
and parents administrators policymakers
who rarely have any academic background
in history and they’re done at a local
level state by state and country by
country and county by county so that
there’s rarely any influence from a wide
variety of ethnic backgrounds something
as simple as colonization should be
recognized in every history book but
this Canadian one describes the banning
of First Nations people from Canada as a
voluntary agreement between them and
European settlers because they needed
land to live on so much of what’s been
taking us is never actually recognized
in most books for example did you know
that indigenous people in the United
States didn’t have a right to practice
their religions until 1978 that’s 40
years ago though this rate wasn’t
actually protected very well until its
1994 amendments many of you most of you
were alive during a time when an
indigenous ceremony anywhere in this
country could have resulted in their
imprisonment in Mexico where I’m from
reservations and indigenous property
rights don’t really exist any historical
landmark is protected by the government
claimed and regulated so that I having
Gnawa ancestry have to pay seventy
Bissell’s to simply look at a piece of
my peoples history and read blatant lies
on the placards in regards to that I
want to get one thing straight then now
while people of the Aztec empire didn’t
do this I would avert your eyes if you
don’t like what now that’s physically
impossible cardiothoracic surgeons say
that the sternum is entirely too strong
for a simple stone knife to break
through it and the heart is protected by
layers and layers of muscular and
connective tissue so you really can’t
just stick your hand in a person’s chest
and rip their beating heart out but you
don’t know how much it hurts that this
is the first thing many of
you think of when you hear my ancestors
names some historians also claim that my
ancestors would skin their victims for
any myriad of reasons be at war or
sacrifice but let me throw a little
wrench of doubt into that the original
evidence from this claim came from the
text using the word it’s not a cheapo at
least flee because original translator
derived the words man to skin and action
from this word and because I assume
fewer none of you speak now what
I’m sure this makes sense to you but
native speakers of this language know
that this doesn’t make sense
under normal chromatic structures or
within our culture the more accurate
etymology of this word is stuck at the
XI wheats a WA and East Lee which create
the word meaning a plant begins to be
born it’s spring the word means the
season of spring this discovery was made
by a university professor in Puebla
named Janero Medina damos being of Gnawa
ancestor himself and the first language
speaker of now what he was able to see
the true meaning of this word when he
came across it from him I learned how
prevalent the issue of mistranslation is
in native history see when a historian
doesn’t have first language knowledge of
a language that they’re translating and
that includes cultural proficiency
mistakes will happen but when that
historian or translator already has
preconceived notions of the society that
they’re studying they might be willing
to believe their mistranslations even
once as bad as this one but for me to
have to tell you this here now at a
university TEDx talk is the problem it
is not okay for our children to have to
be re-educated after graduation school
is supposed to be the method by which we
create informed and productive citizens
not the tool with which we’re convinced
to falsities simply because we’re not
willing to look at our educational
systems and our textbooks with a
critical eye simply because we’re
content with the misinformation
we’ve been given after five hundred
years of colonization but my ancestors
fought too hard for my existence for me
to be content with the stories of
academia tells about them and this is
not just a K through 12 issue
universities need to be held accountable
to a class that I took on human rights
showed that movie that I just showed
depicting a stack heart removal what you
now know is anatomically impossible and
they treated it as fact the only class
here that is exclusively about Native
American history uses a fictional novel
to teach about the public by the
political and cultural relations between
First Nations french-canadian and
our country’s most elite universities
pride themselves on being a bastion of
knowledge on the cutting edge of
academics but they’re just as likely to
teach inaccuracies because indigenous
documents and oral histories aren’t
treated as legitimate sources of
knowledge because the indigenous ways of
documentation aren’t respected and
bluntly put because our intellect isn’t
respected we’re not included in the
writing of our own histories I want to
be clear I’m not saying that you have to
be native to understand or research or
write native history but I am saying
that if you do want to you can’t claim
to study native history without
listening to the voices of native people
and not just a one tribe and you have to
do so constantly because without native
voices what you claim to call a native
history is just a story it’s as good as
fiction but that fiction is the basis of
most public knowledge about our
ancestors and our traditions and though
we can
choose a past we can choose to diversify
our academic work today because the
longer that we ignore native history the
less accurate it will get and the harder
it will be to correct and though we
can’t truly know what happened to our
native people five hundred years ago or
even 100 years ago we can get closer to
the truth by listening to the
descendants of the people that were
there all of them including those of us
here at Duke though we make up less than
1% of the student population many of us
would be happy to talk to you recommend
a book or point you towards an article
that explains why certain words or
mascots make us uncomfortable many of us
have decided that it’s time for this
intellectual revolution and we need
allies around the world histories are
written by the victors native
populations everywhere China Russia
Australia are trying to reclaim their
histories we here in the Americas are
struggling to prove to our professors to
historians and scholars that their
stories might be wrong we’re trying to
survive to get an education and to raise
our children to value our histories I
hope that you can begin to listen to us
and value them to our grandparents our
great-great grandparents are in your
history books let us have a say in what
gets said about them finish my cake
that’s oka mati thank you for listening [Applause]
monitored seen the on Kuwait deca no
nothing you have to run ticket I just
spoke to you in that what an indigenous
language in Mexico descended of the
Aztec empire I told you my name though
you can call me Adi I said that my
father and I are from Coahuila and that
my mother’s from Durango two states in
northern Mexico it is said that that our
people are born of the marriage between
Sun and Earth and that our souls are no
different between the people who have
already passed and the people who have
yet to come
that’s why history is so important to me
because I am no different from my
ancestors they live within me and I will
live within my progeny history though
has rarely been on my peoples side it’s
never really been about explaining what
happened in a war or in an election more
often than not history has been about
justifying what happened in our past so
that we can feel content with the
present history happens when an event is
decided that it’s important enough to be
written down in the country’s records
for some curious and accomplished
historian to later find the historian
then writes about it but he’s already
been influenced by a lifetime of
government-issued education and racial
propaganda biasing him against native
people making him think that we’re wild
lazy or uneducated and the texts that
he’s reading have already been written
in a European viewpoint making that
government look as clean and righteous
as possible the textbooks resulting from
that work later get edited and reviewed
by school boards filled with teachers
and parents administrators policymakers
who rarely have any academic background
in history and they’re done at a local
level state by state and country by
country and county by county so that
there’s rarely any influence from a wide
variety of ethnic backgrounds something
as simple as colonization should be
recognized in every history book but
this Canadian one describes the banning
of First Nations people from Canada as a
voluntary agreement between them and
European settlers because they needed
land to live on so much of what’s been
taking us is never actually recognized
in most books for example did you know
that indigenous people in the United
States didn’t have a right to practice
their religions until 1978 that’s 40
years ago though this rate wasn’t
actually protected very well until its
1994 amendments many of you most of you
were alive during a time when an
indigenous ceremony anywhere in this
country could have resulted in their
imprisonment in Mexico where I’m from
reservations and indigenous property
rights don’t really exist any historical
landmark is protected by the government
claimed and regulated so that I having
Gnawa ancestry have to pay seventy
Bissell’s to simply look at a piece of
my peoples history and read blatant lies
on the placards in regards to that I
want to get one thing straight then now
while people of the Aztec empire didn’t
do this I would avert your eyes if you
don’t like what now that’s physically
impossible cardiothoracic surgeons say
that the sternum is entirely too strong
for a simple stone knife to break
through it and the heart is protected by
layers and layers of muscular and
connective tissue so you really can’t
just stick your hand in a person’s chest
and rip their beating heart out but you
don’t know how much it hurts that this
is the first thing many of
you think of when you hear my ancestors
names some historians also claim that my
ancestors would skin their victims for
any myriad of reasons be at war or
sacrifice but let me throw a little
wrench of doubt into that the original
evidence from this claim came from the
text using the word it’s not a cheapo at
least flee because original translator
derived the words man to skin and action
from this word and because I assume
fewer none of you speak now what
I’m sure this makes sense to you but
native speakers of this language know
that this doesn’t make sense
under normal chromatic structures or
within our culture the more accurate
etymology of this word is stuck at the
XI wheats a WA and East Lee which create
the word meaning a plant begins to be
born it’s spring the word means the
season of spring this discovery was made
by a university professor in Puebla
named Janero Medina damos being of Gnawa
ancestor himself and the first language
speaker of now what he was able to see
the true meaning of this word when he
came across it from him I learned how
prevalent the issue of mistranslation is
in native history see when a historian
doesn’t have first language knowledge of
a language that they’re translating and
that includes cultural proficiency
mistakes will happen but when that
historian or translator already has
preconceived notions of the society that
they’re studying they might be willing
to believe their mistranslations even
once as bad as this one but for me to
have to tell you this here now at a
university TEDx talk is the problem it
is not okay for our children to have to
be re-educated after graduation school
is supposed to be the method by which we
create informed and productive citizens
not the tool with which we’re convinced
to falsities simply because we’re not
willing to look at our educational
systems and our textbooks with a
critical eye simply because we’re
content with the misinformation
we’ve been given after five hundred
years of colonization but my ancestors
fought too hard for my existence for me
to be content with the stories of
academia tells about them and this is
not just a K through 12 issue
universities need to be held accountable
to a class that I took on human rights
showed that movie that I just showed
depicting a stack heart removal what you
now know is anatomically impossible and
they treated it as fact the only class
here that is exclusively about Native
American history uses a fictional novel
to teach about the public by the
political and cultural relations between
First Nations french-canadian and
our country’s most elite universities
pride themselves on being a bastion of
knowledge on the cutting edge of
academics but they’re just as likely to
teach inaccuracies because indigenous
documents and oral histories aren’t
treated as legitimate sources of
knowledge because the indigenous ways of
documentation aren’t respected and
bluntly put because our intellect isn’t
respected we’re not included in the
writing of our own histories I want to
be clear I’m not saying that you have to
be native to understand or research or
write native history but I am saying
that if you do want to you can’t claim
to study native history without
listening to the voices of native people
and not just a one tribe and you have to
do so constantly because without native
voices what you claim to call a native
history is just a story it’s as good as
fiction but that fiction is the basis of
most public knowledge about our
ancestors and our traditions and though
we can
choose a past we can choose to diversify
our academic work today because the
longer that we ignore native history the
less accurate it will get and the harder
it will be to correct and though we
can’t truly know what happened to our
native people five hundred years ago or
even 100 years ago we can get closer to
the truth by listening to the
descendants of the people that were
there all of them including those of us
here at Duke though we make up less than
1% of the student population many of us
would be happy to talk to you recommend
a book or point you towards an article
that explains why certain words or
mascots make us uncomfortable many of us
have decided that it’s time for this
intellectual revolution and we need
allies around the world histories are
written by the victors native
populations everywhere China Russia
Australia are trying to reclaim their
histories we here in the Americas are
struggling to prove to our professors to
historians and scholars that their
stories might be wrong we’re trying to
survive to get an education and to raise
our children to value our histories I
hope that you can begin to listen to us
and value them to our grandparents our
great-great grandparents are in your
history books let us have a say in what
gets said about them finish my cake
that’s oka mati thank you for listening [Applause]
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