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In this episode, Kate spoke with Tai S. Edwards and Charlee Huffman, writers and editors of a new book, Shokhi: A Kanza Relative, A Monument, and Rematriation. This book is a little different from others that have appeared on the show: it tells the story of how a group of people, include Kaw Nation citizens, historians, artists, activists, and others worked together to bring a grandfather rock, In‘zhúje‘waxóbe, back to the Kanza people with whom they had a centuries-long relationship. The boulder had been appropriated as a memorial to the founders of Lawrence, Kansas, and the land on which it stood bore witness to many intersecting narratives of people and place. The book, is part history, part artistic expression, and part handbook for this kind of restorative work.

Tai and Charlee discussed their collaborative process, incorporating disability accommodation into the heart of their work, and how they let the land lead them in telling a history with many voices.

Tai S. Edwards is professor of history and director of the Kansas Studies Institute at Johnson County Community College. She is the author of Osage Women and Empire: Gender and Power and co-editor of Lyda Conley and the Fight to Preserve Huron Indian Cemetery, also published by Kansas. c. huffman is a Kaw Nation Citizen with an MFA and an MDiv who sits at the intersection of privilege, dis/ability and Indigeneity; a place where poetry and theology dance. Her writing has appeared in The Ending Hasn’t Happened Yet, a poetry anthology edited by Hannah Soyer.

Note: Links to bookshop.org are affiliate links.

Mentioned in this Episode:

• Shokhi: A Kanza Relative, a Monument, and Rematriation
• Poet Marilyn Haeker
• Michael Grow, US Presidents and Latin American Interventions: Pursuing Regime Change in the Cold War
• Ursula K. Le Guin, Earthsea series
• Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
• Doorkeeper of the Heart
• Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants
• Ilona Andrews, This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me

This is Drafting the Past, a podcast about how

historians write history. I'm your host, Kate Carpenter. The

book we're talking about in this episode is a little bit

different. Through a multitude of voices, it tells the story of

how a group of people, including colonization citizens,

historians, artists, activists, and others, worked together to

bring a grandfather rock, In‘zhúje‘waxóbe, back to the

Kanza people with whom they had a centuries-long relationship.

The boulder had been appropriated as a memorial to

the founders of Lawrence, Kansas, and the land on which it

stood bore witness to many intersecting narratives of

people and place. The book, titled Shokhi: A Kanza Relative,

A Monument, and Rematriation, is part history, part artistic

expression, and part handbook for this kind of restorative

work. To learn more about the collaborative process and

publishing challenges that brought this book together, I

spoke with two of its editors and authors, Tai Edwards and

Charlee Huffman. I'll let them introduce themselves.

I'm Tai Edwards, JCCC History Professor, Director of the

Kansas Studies Institute.

Hawé zhazhé wita che Charlee Huffman. I'm a

Kaw Nation citizen and poet and a theologian. I write at the

intersection of indigeneity and disability,

And I'm not native. Let's make sure that's clear.

I should also clarify. I should also clarify

that as a as a Kaw Nation citizen, I'm ishtághe masíⁿha,

and so I'm a mixed blood person, and that's important to my work.

I'm also a returning native, so someone who has returned late in

life to my language and my culture and my family.

And Charlee and I like to say neither one of us is

speaking on behalf of our nations.

That is very important.

I represent only myself.

Yeah, absolutely. So any mistakes I

make, I humbly beg forgiveness for, and anything I get right, I

cannot take credit for. That's only due to things that other

people have taught me.

Well, thank you both so much for joining me on

Drafting the Past. I'm excited to have you here and to talk

about the new book. I wonder though if we could start by

having you each tell me a little bit about how you think of your

career as a writer,

Charlee?

I absolutely think of myself as a poet and a

writer. I cannot, Kate, say that I think of myself as ever having

had a career.

So I'm an academic, right? So I'm a history

professor. So writing is part of our job. However, I am a little

unusual in that my bachelor's degree is in business before I

went on to get a master's and a doctorate in history, and I did

have a little bit of trouble convincing graduate programs

that I was a worthwhile candidate. And I've always

wondered if writing was part of that. But yeah, I think you

practice and you learn how to do it. And I had good teachers. And

for me, the most important thing when I think about writing for

me, I teach at a community college, so I have a wide swath

of students in my classes. And whenever I'm struggling with

writing, I think about what would make this clearest for my

students. So I think a lot about writing in terms of student

accessibility.

That's important, what Tai said about

having good teachers. As a writer that has been very

important to me. I was fortunate enough to study under Marilyn

Hacker, the poet, and other writers, but her in particular.

I think finding someone who you admire, whose work is important

to you, and who's kind and helps you.

This book, in many ways, is is unlike any other

that I have talked to someone about on the show. How do you

describe it to people? Let's start there.

Charlee. Do you want to go first? Do you want me to go

first?

Well, I I don't describe it to them too much,

you know, except to say it has you know poetry and pictures and

good stories in it, and it's about the rock. And I ask them

to read it, and that's about it. You know, mostly mostly Kate, I

ask people. You know, I hope that they'll read it.

So the way I talk about it is one of the things we

said in the introduction to the book, and that help- it helps,

of course, to write. In my case, it helps to write to figure out

what it is I'm saying. So I've listened on other podcasts of

yours, Kate, where people talk about do they know the argument

or the point before they start writing, or or after they start

writing, and for me, I like to write what we know, write what

the evidence is telling us, and then that helps me work out what

it means, and then you edit from there. One of the things we say

in the book is this book chronicles the winding and

incomplete path a group of people took to confront theft,

appropriation, erasure. And our ongoing colonial history, and

the way we did that, we also say elsewhere in the text we kind of

have two main goals. One was to document the rematriation as it

was taking place, so a lot of the text is primary source. And

then the second goal is to start to analyze and examine what that

all means. So I feel like those are our two things, and then we

intentionally wanted it to be a multimedia text, and and we also

knew that we had a lot of voices we were going to eventually want

to include that might not be people that spend a lot of their

time writing, that don't have experience writing, or might be

too shy or humble to want to be included, and so, and I think

anyone who's herded cats of writing, even for professionals

who do it, know that this is can spend a lot of time waiting. So

that's why we used oral history so much. Is I could interview

somebody and have a conversation with them, and we could then get

their voice in the text, but some people, of course, are

artists, so they are going to communicate with art. Then you

know, some academics are going to do sort of traditional

academic analysis, and then of course Charlee is going to do

poetry.

Charlee, what were your goals for the book?

You know, early on, Tai and I worked on a

curriculum, and we talked about land telling the story and

place-based history, and I think that's something that we hoped

this book would give a glimpse of.

I agree. I do know some of our contributors also

talked about wanting this to be able to be something, and model

might be the wrong word, but for other indigenous communities,

and I would argue even broader communities that are dealing

with some sort of problematic, tragic, traumatic, violent

history, how do we address that? And so we are hoping that it

could be something that might be a reference, right, for people

to okay. Here's how one place did this, one community.

What was your process for working on this book together?

How how and when did you work?

I think one thing we should say is we were on two grant

projects, so I think that is important in understanding how

this comes together. So one was a teeny grant, which I like to

joke most people were paid in hugs and a handshake, you know,

like really small grants, and that grant's purpose was to

raise awareness in Lawrence of the sacred boulder,

In‘zhúje‘waxóbe, to Kaw Nation that had been used in Lawrence

as a as a monument to the city's founders for almost a century.

So, like the first grant's goal was to raise awareness, and

Charlee and I ended up both being on that project. And

Charlee, I can't remember if we were if we volunteered or were

voluntold that one of the things that grant wanted was

educational resources. So if you know community teachers or

anyone wanted to use this in class, which I have used in with

my students, could someone create that? And so Charlee,

that was the first time Charlee and I worked solely toge-- just

you know just the two of us, and I think it just worked really

well immediately. And that's when we knew, okay, if there's

more to do here, we know now how we can do it.

Kate, it's it's like working together with with

anyone. You know, you listen to what their needs are. How do you

do it? You accommodate them. So, if you need to move a meeting

because you're not feeling well, you move the meeting. If you

need to lay down and do it, you know, in the dark, that's how

you do it. You know, Tai did a lot of the typing. You know, on

the parts of the book that we wrote together that were not

poetry, Tai did, you know, the vast majority of the typing.

Yeah, because you know, I I couldn't. So you know, I

couldn't stare at a screen that long. So you know, we would talk

it through. You know, or conceptually, you know, we would

outline things while her children were at baseball games

because there's, you know, you you do what you can with the

resources that you can. And Tai and I, I think you know, it's

fair to say that we both come from activist backgrounds, and

you know, when you're given resources to do something, you

know. You can either, you know, crank out a pamphlet, or you

can, you know, really do your best. And I, I like to think

we've done our best.

I have.

I have. We certainly took our dogs on a lot

of walks and a lot of talks. You know that that's another way we

did it, Kate. We walked the dogs a lot, and you know talked it

through, and then just did it.

Yeah, I mean, I think for me. So if we want to

talk technically, Charlee and I live in different states, and so

we did. I mean, almost all of our work on Zoom, and I believe,

so, I've done a lot of collaborative projects, and I I

believe Google Docs is one of the easiest, Google Drive is one

of the easiest for collaborating over distance, which, and it's

the most user friendly to non sort of office suite people,

right? Like if it's just to the public, so we would put

everything in Google Drive, and then we could both be in files

at the same time, editing them at the same time, seeing them at

the same time. Something Charlee taught me a lot about, because I

never do this in my own writing, is reading aloud a lot. So we

would write something, and then Charlee and I would read it

aloud, and we'd like take turns every paragraph to see if we

liked it or if it made sense. So Charlee, of course, wrote a lot

of poetry for the book, and and we didn't do that part together.

So Charlee would either email me or text me her poems

because the Google Docs is something that

Tai taught me about, and she would actually often Kate, we

would get on the computer together, and she would have to

walk me through. She'd say, "Okay, this is where it is in

the computer. You're going to click here and here and here.

Yeah, and she would have to do that every time. But--

You became proficient.

I got better. It's true. I got better. But she

was very patient with me on the the technical side of things.

But we did. There was a lot about the writing that we did do

together, and we did, you know, for some of the the pieces, you

know, the intro, the conclusion in particular, we wrote that

together,

and those took a lot of editing. They were they

were harder for us to do, but yeah. So like when Charlee would

send me her poems, I would be petrified that I was going to

lose them. So when she would text them to me, I would text

them to my email, and then I would back them all up. I think

in two places in Dropbox and Google Drive because I was just

you know I didn't want to lose them. But when I say we were on

Zoom, I mean like every Zoom meeting we did, we intentionally

planned as hours long, and it would just depend on what we

were doing or what the stamina was like. And I don't know how

you are, Charlee, but I can't be a person who writes like an hour

a day in between other things. Like I feel like for me, I have

to descend into what I'm doing and then remember what I'm doing

and immerse in it again and then do it and then come up. So like

I need to do it during the workday. I can't do it when my

kids are here. Like I gotta, I have to focus. So I organize my

teaching schedule at work so that I teach on certain days,

and then there's work days that I don't teach so that I can do

the work that requires more of my deep thinking. But it allowed

me and the early establishment of a tight knit relationship

allowed me to be able to lay down, kick my feet up, have my

head on a pillow, and talk my way through some of this stuff

in a way that you wouldn't be able to with a writing partner

that you didn't trust.

Yeah, that's fair.

And we weren't, you know, when Tai says we were

voluntold, you know we weren't just voluntold by by anyone. We,

you know, Curtis Kekahbah was on this project, and he told us

both to you know walk together, and you know that's been

something that I have listened to.

So I like to joke that there's no class in

graduate school called How to Be a Good Ally, and Charlee has

taught me that it's not about being an ally; it's about being

a co-conspirator. So something I've learned even before I

worked with Charlee, but then certainly more since I've worked

on this project, is you have to figure out how to be a good

partner. And in my case, I have an enormous amount of privilege,

so my job is well is really well funded and stable. I have access

to the technologies that Charlee and I need to use. I have the

time and the ability to do this, and so my goal is to leverage

for all of these goals. And so Curtis talked to both of us

about how to do that, and you know, relationships are the key

and listening. But also, Charlee and I know that we have a goal

we're trying to reach, right? So I want to make sure if we've got

deadlines or those kinds of things, we meet them because

this work really is important and it needs to be out there. So

that's how we've we've worked. In addition to joking and

teasing one another and becoming friends too, and a lot of poems

on the back of a lot of napkins. You didn't ever send me a

picture that I had to manually type. I will say, you've always

sent me actual text.

I did threaten though.

One thing I enjoyed so much about reading this book

and that I found so interesting is that I I came to think of it

as a collage. That there are different voices, different

genres in the chapters, different ways of knowing, and

you haven't tried to blend them together. Instead, they're sort

of assembled and layered, which allows many people to speak.

Many perspectives. I imagine, though, that had its challenges

in bringing together a complete book. How did you think about

putting together all the parts of this book?

Just like I, I'm really grateful that you

said that, Kate. That makes me really smile. Just like that,

like a collage, like a scrapbook. Putting it together

was not the simplest way, you know. I remember a lot of

rearranging going on. Tai can probably tell you more about

that.

Well, yeah, go ahead, Charlee.

Yeah, but you know that that is what we wanted

to do, and there were some chap, there, you know, there's some

chapters in particular that we wanted that feeling for, but the

book in general, you know, that was the essence of what we

wanted to convey: is that this is a a collective memory.

I mean, I think that we thought about it on kind

of different levels. Like, on the one hand, we know that

there's probably going to be two main types of readers: the ones

who read it from front to back, and the ones who cherry pick or

come in and out of things and don't read them in order, which

is fine. I mean, anthologies. I personally almost never read in

order, right? I'm coming usually for something, and then I read

that first, and then I start to realize, oh, I need to read the

other things that are in here.

Tai's right, Kate. You know, we, people read

Yes.

So we wanted it to make sense in an order, but as

books differently. You know, and and I know a lot of people

you probably noticed, it's not in chronological order. I don't

know if we even could have put it in chronological order based

on the way the stories are told. And in fact, and this is

something we should think about too. It's it's uniquely

structured in that it was really important to Charlee if it was

possible with our publishers. So University Press of Kansas has

been a wonderful collaborator in the weird things we've wanted to

do, so we wanted, Charlee really wanted marginalia. She wanted a

book where there was main text on the page, but then we could

have callouts in the margins in certain relevant places. And you

know that seems like a stretch, but and it's really fun the way

we do it. And even in chapters that were written by people who

hadn't wanted or hadn't realized we were going to do that or

didn't ask for that, it was really easy to find ways to to

make the margin some content that you could add. We also

thought about the appendix, for example. The appendices is the

only chronological part of the text. Part we we actually feel

like maybe the appendix has its own argument. Not that it's

necessarily separate from the rest, but I mean, the appendices

are all primary sources, right? Someone could just read the

appendices and honestly get an interesting version of this

story, and it's also multi-voice. We wanted to use,

of course, Kanzi Ie, Kanza language. You know, for a while

we have it divided into parts, right? As you maybe saw when you

looked at it, there's sort of three main parts, and they do go

together in a very specific way, even if it might take a read or

two to see that. And that's why we ended up, we hadn't

originally planned to write text that introduced each part, but

we realized that might help people sense how that that

collection goes together. We used Easter eggs, for example.

The color that's on, so this is a full color book for folks that

haven't seen it, which is unbelievable. Part of that is

because the second part of the project, so we were on two grant

projects, and the second grant project was funded by the Mellon

Foundation. So part of the text is funded by Mellon's grant,

which is part of the way we could afford to do this. So

it's okay. You know, I hope that people enjoy this book, you

there's over 200 color images, for example, in the book, which

was its own challenge. We think that the images, like, so, the

images are intentionally placed and support the content they're

next to. But also, if you went, we believe that if you went

through and only looked at the images, there would be also an

argument you would see there. So we thought about it in these

different sorts of ways.

know, in a good way. I hope that it communicates this story in a

good way because we've tried to communicate it in a lot of ways.

How did you decide what and who would be included

in the book?

I love the way Charlee says this. So Charlee, this is, she

conveys in a way I couldn't articulate, but it's accurate.

I believed that those those stories revealed

themselves. You know, there were there were people that we asked

that you know didn't have time. There were people that really

wanted to, you know, said, "Hey, I got to tell you this, you

know. Did you know?" You know, I'm sorry. I'm sure we missed

some stories. You know, I'm sure they're good ones. I hope those

people get to tell those stories. I'm sure they will, but

we told the stories that revealed themselves to us, and

I'm really grateful that we got to tell as many as we did.

When we wrote the book proposal, I think we knew

kind of the academic chapters, like those folks had

specifically said, "Hey, I'd like to write about this, right?

Which included me. Charlee, we knew Charlee wanted to write

poetry and was already doing it. We knew we wanted to do oral

histories, so I think we at least initially wrote, Oh, we

want an oral history interview these people that are part of

the grant because you know they were working on it. And then,

like Charlee said, then other things revealed themselves as we

went along, so we were at one of the Mellon Foundation workshops,

and Charlee was there on Zoom, and I'm physically there. I

mean, I feel bad for her. I was like, you know, the horrible way

you walk a laptop around an event and someone gets carsick

or whatever.

I just closed my eyes.

Yeah. So we were just going around the circle,

and there were community members there too. So some of them I

knew, and some of them I didn't know, and they were just sharing

things about their connection to In‘zhúje‘waxóbe and the story.

And I remember one of them, Tommy Sherwood, Charlee. I

texted you like while we're, and I was like, I have to interview

Tommy, like the way he just talked about. And I didn't know

him, but some of the other people on the grant knew him. So

back to Charlee's point about land telling the story being one

of the goals for the text, where the spot where In‘zhúje‘waxóbe

was as a monument in Lawrence is, so when we talk about land

telling the story, we really focused on that piece of land.

And in Lawrence's history, so this is by the way Lawrence,

Kansas. In Lawrence's history, that same spot also used to be

the Douglas County Jail, and it was also the spot where three

black men were lynched in the 1880s. And so, there had been

another project going on in our community to memorialize the

lynching victims and raise awareness of that story and tell

that story and erect signage in town to educate people about

that, and so as a historian, one of the things I find, and again

as a teacher, I mean I find all of this really fascinating is

when land is telling the story, you inevitably don't leave out

people that you usually leave out, right? So a lot of our

history is very segmented. You talk about quote unquote one

population, but those folks were living with other people, right?

They were engaging with more members of their community. So

when you tell the story of In‘zhúje‘waxóbe to us and the

rematriation, the story of lynching in Lawrence happens

next to that, right? So that's an overlapping history, and so

it's just really exciting to have these stories intersect in

the text the way they actually intersected in life.

And we did. We were able to to interview Ursula

Minor and Tommy Sherwood. Tommy and I went on to make a poem

together. It's not actually in the book, it's a bonus track,

Kate. But you know, Tai's right, when when land is telling the

story. It's not up to you know. It's not. It's not that that

saying, what is that? You know, he who wields the power, or he

who wields the pen, wields the power. You know what I mean.

That was another thing that happened in the

We're gonna, we're gonna listen. We're gonna do our best anyway.

project too. Is there were lots of community events, and so

again, that Mellon workshop where we met Tommy is one of

them. But there was a there were art events, so for artists to

come together to make art related to this story. So we

wanted to include some of that, and like like Charlee was

saying, one of the things I went and did then is interviewed one

of the artists, and she I hadn't remembered this because again,

this ends up going on for years. So In‘zhúje‘waxóbe, the Sacred

Red Rock, used to live at the junction of a creek and a river

that's west of Lawrence, and so there were multiple float trips

down the Kansas River that we took to go to that spot, and I

had forgotten that one of the people at one of the float trips

was one of the people who ended up being one of the artists at

one of these events, and so her art was what we were going to

include in the book, Lisa Grossman. But she actually flew

the drone that went up on our first float trip to. Filmed that

junction of those two waterways. So when we asked her if she

wanted to include her art, if she wanted to write something

with it, she like was really excited to do that. And then

that was really nice because she got to tell this other side of

the story that we hadn't included, right? Which were the

volunteers who help keep the river clean and help take people

on float trips, and so there's a big volunteer group that does

that. Friends of the Kaw River, and so she got to tell that side

of the story, which were people that were represented at our

very first meeting on this work, right? So again, like Charlee

said, they just revealed themselves. We had, there were

events that were with Haskell Indian Nations University, which

is here in Lawrence, which is a federal tribal college, but it

started as a federal Indian boarding school in Lawrence. So,

of course, you had to tell some stories about Haskell in here

because so much of Lawrence's Indigenous history is really

to this other word, everything goes together.

tied to Haskell and both the the student success and the

colonialism and violence that goes along with that. But

Haskell students made art when they were learning about this,

right? And and they had some artists lead them in that, and

so we ended up including some of the Haskell student art. And one

of the Haskell students is a Kaw Nation citizen, and her, I

think, great grandfather is discussed by another Kaw citizen

in another chapter. You know, so you end up having these overlaps

And it actually is about that thing that you're upset about.

that we didn't intend, but again, it's an it's an

But nobody actually knows except the people who need to know. You

interwoven story that you just can't ignore. I mean, it it just

know. And you know, it's a, it turns out that it goes with that

reveals itself.

other poem that you were writing, and pretty soon you

have a crown sonnet.

I will say, Charlee, if we think about the

text, the only thing I can think about that we sizeably left out

were you wrote many more poems than we ended up including.

That's that's the only thing I'm like.

Well, there's a big file, you know. There's the

pamphlet. There's the pamphlet.

And that was to your discretion, Charlee. You

know, you really decided which ones you wanted to include.

Pretty much everything else we did is in there. It makes me

curious about the practical parts of publishing this book.

I'm especially astonished and impressed that the press was so

enthusiastic about working with these these challenges, but

dealing with different types of formatting, full color images,

getting permissions for all these images, using multiple

languages. How did that all work? Did you have any pushback

from the press? I would say part of this is so I published my

first

It makes me curious about the practical

parts of publishing this book. I'm especially astonished and

impressed that the press was so enthusiastic about working with

these these challenges, but dealing with different types of

formatting, full color images, getting permissions for all

these images, using multiple languages. How did that all

work? Did you have any pushback from the press?

I would say part of this is so I published my first

book, which was just you know individually authored with them,

and I had a really really really positive experience. But I also

live where the press is located, and there was a point where the

board of regents and the, I'm sorry, the governing board body

of the press was considering closing it, and this was like

kind of coming out of the pandemic, and I literally was

like, "I will lose nothing else, nothing else. I've lost enough."

I mean, we lost Curtis in the pandemic. We lost a lot of time

that we could have been doing, not to mention what it did to my

children and my community. And I was just like, "Not today." And

so I ended up working, again the activist background. So I ended

up getting together with some of the other authors I know, and we

like ran a campaign basically to save the press and say what how

vital and valuable it is, and it worked. There were some losses,

of course, but the press survives, and and I think is

succeeding. And I had just been really fortunate to have worked

with on my own book, and then in that process, a lot of the

people that worked at the press, so I knew them really well. So

when we were thinking about wanting to do this, something

I've learned, and maybe other people have different

experiences with this, but if you have a subject matter you're

publishing, and this is from an academic context, and it is

directly tied to a specific press's location or community,

that press is going to care way more about promoting and getting

it right than some other press that may seem "quote unquote"

more prestigious but doesn't have any direct ties to that

story. This press is in the place where this happened. They

know this story, and they are well connected in the local

area, with people who are going to want to hear this story, so I

feel like all of those things come together to make. And

again, I've collaborated with them before, so you know who to

call. You know, you know how to be like, "Hey, maybe I'm saying

something crazy, but this is what we want to do. Is it

possible?" And I mean, they did great things. Like they had me

go to an exhibit, an exhibit of like the best academic press

designed books for a year, and so I went. They told me to go to

that, and I went to it, and they went with me, by the way, we met

there, and then the whole point was to like look through all of

these books and see how they're designed and see if any of this

is what you want, which allowed me--I'm not a design person. I

don't think artistically, so it was a great way for me to see,

oh, that you can do this. Okay, here's something you can do.

This is what it can look like. Oh, here's what I definitely

don't want. Here's what I do want. Yeah.

And that's when, Kate, they knew that I

wasn't an absolute off my rocker kind of person because we found

other books that did what we wanted to do by academic

presses, so it could be done.

But yeah, they've been wonderful partners through

all of it.

They really have. They really have, and they

have done their very best to do it the way we've we've wanted it

done. And any time that it hasn't been, you know, exactly

the way we've wanted it, it hasn't been because of pushback

from them. It's been because of other things. I mean, you know,

Kate. I don't--there's a lot of people going through stuff right

now. So, not getting a hardcover on your book isn't exactly the

the end of the world, considering what's going on out

there.

Plus, I don't want a hardcover. It's very hard to

use.

Tai, they can use it as a doorstop.

Right. That's not what I'm using this for.

If if they don't like it.

How long did it take to bring this book

together? I know that both of you had other things going on.

Pandemic. You know, many many components. How how did you make

room for it in your lives?

Okay. So how long? 30,000 years ago. You got

you got to read the book for that answer. No, it's it's been

a long time in the making, you know. And and you could you

could say easily, you know, 100 years ago when this rock was

removed from where he was living in that river, you know, because

not only did he have a relationship with qua people, he

had a relationship with that river. You know what I mean? And

I, I think that's something maybe we forget about. But you

know, things are in relationship not just with the human beings,

but also in the absence of the human beings, you know, you

could say 100 years ago. You could also say, you know, seven

years ago. You could say any any time in between. I know that Tai

and I have been working on this pretty much as long as we've

known each other. You know, it's been, it's been slow, you know.

It's been a good pace. There have been moments where it's

been a little more hectic, you know. She's right. Deadlines

happen. I have been inured from a lot of that. I'm very grateful

to her for keeping me safe. You know, she'll say, "Just send me

the poems," and you know, it took a long time because it, you

know, the story took a long time to unfold. You know,

rematriation is not something that happens overnight. It's not

something that you win in a court decision, right? It's

about building relationships and education.

Yeah, I mean, it is funny to think about how long

did this take? Because, like you said, there's somebody who

writes in the book who was working on this in the '90s, and

it took decades. There's people in the book that talk about the

grains of sand that make up In‘zhúje‘waxóbe are 1.7 billion

years old. I don't even know that time frame, the the two

grant projects that led up to this, the first one started in

2019. Charlee and I started working together, I think in

2020, and then we did submit the book proposal in 2022. I just

looked that up. Although I would say, in terms of the pace, I

feel like the pace was the exact right pace in terms of Charlee

and I's work. I didn't feel like it was too rushed, and I didn't

feel like it was too slow. You know how some projects can lag,

and then you forget kind of what you're doing. I didn't feel like

that happened here, so it was the right amount of time. Though

there were some flurries at the point of dead deadlines, but

that had to happen. I liked I liked it. Things got done.

With contributors from so many

different backgrounds. What was your approach to editing their

submissions?

Well, it depends on which person and chapter you're

talking about. So, for oral history, I've done a lot of oral

history projects, including for other books and for other

projects. And I believe a lot in ethical oral history. So, we had

a form they would sign first. I would send them questions in

advance so they could think about it. Then I would

transcribe it. In some ways, I would clean it up a little bit,

and then I would send it to them and first ask them to read it.

Then ask, "Is there anything that like we factually got

wrong? You know, we need to fix. And then, "Is there anything

they don't want in?" The text, you know, is there stuff they're

uncomfortable with making that public? So we did that, and I

think that went well. Again, a lot of the people we were

talking to had spoken about this, and in some cases,

publicly spoken about these same topics. But you know, different

people want different levels of prep. You know, some people

wanted to meet and talk about what we were going to talk

about. You know, some people prepared more than others. Some

were conversations with multiple people. You know, I have

multiple oral histories in here that are with you know three

people. So we we did that. So that I would say had relatively

minimal editing. Some of the scholarship, you know, that was

really just get it transcribed accurately.

I was gonna say we really tried to edit people

as little as possible as far as oral histories went, and and

even with scholarship, I think it was about getting things

factual, making sure things stayed in the the realm of the

facts.

Yeah, or are there ways we need to be careful about

non-native people portraying kinds of worldview when they

number one don't have cons of worldview, but number two might

be relying on sources that were also from a Euro-American

perspective or those kinds of things. But I mean, for the most

part, the editing was Charlee and I really editing the things

we wrote, thinking about is that clear? Have we said enough?

Did working on this book together change the

way you think about writing?

I don't think so. I feel like Charlee and I were

pretty confident writers before this, and pretty experienced

writers. But again, a lot of the chapters aren't written by us,

so I mean, I think we do most of them. But I did have to think

about making sure I was direct and clear because I wrote the

longest chapter in the book, of course. The most long-winded

chapter is mine.

But you did a good job. Well, I hope that's

why it had to be the longest one. You know, Kate, I think

writing can, you know, writing can be incredibly lonely, but we

also, you know, depending on the kind of writer you are, we often

are in you know writing workshops together. Shout out to

the writers group, you know, that I wrote with off and on

during the pandemic. Crip Collective, amazing group of

women, primarily, you know, who would meet periodically, and so

it can also be a collective activity, right? You know, and I

think a lot of writers know that, right? That's why we have

writers' workshops, you know, and and still you're doing it

alone. I don't think it changed too much how I think about it,

except in that I think more about how to tell a story

collectively.

Was there anyone that you turned to for feedback

on the project?

So we were really fortunate that one of the people working on the

grant was Natalie Parker, who's also a fiction writer. And so I

remember we would joke about she saw our book contract. You know,

academic presses are totally different than commercial

fiction, so you know she was like, "What? We're like, "Yeah,

this is no one's making any money here. But she, of course,

knows how to tell a story, and so one of the things that was

really helpful to us is one of the challenges of our text

because it's multi-voice is repetitiveness, and so we really

worked to try to eliminate some of that. That's why there's so

much in our book that says, "See chapter 13, see chapter 27. Back

to that interweaving, right? Like, remember when you read

that? We're talking about that thing again. So there's a lot of

that in the book, and she helped us a lot with just getting that

structure so it's less repetitive and more in the

correct order. She helped us a lot with that. We also had

Pauline Sharp, who's one of the contributors to the text, a Kaw

Nation member, and and writes one of the best chapters in the

text too. Read it to help us think about does it makes. And I

think she's one of the few people that actually read it.

Natalie did too, but like from the beginning to the end, right?

Like okay, I've read this in the order, and I see what you're

doing, and I know why you did it. But yeah, then just it's

mostly me and Charlee thinking about the order. We moved a lot

of things around. We wanted the poems to be closest to the

things they're talking about, so we got feedback from them. But

we also got feedback from our reviewers, right? So this is a

peer edited text, so we got really good feedback from the

peer reviewers, probably most notably Tink Tinker, who's an

Osage Nation citizen. And of course, not only was he giving

us good feedback, but he was teaching us. That was also

wonderful, which is why we end up like quoting him, because

then Charlee would talk to him about what we were working on,

and it was great.

It's a little harder to get feedback on

poetry. We were lucky to have a a reviewer, Hannah Sawyer, who

is herself a poet. I also got feedback from my therapist, who

is a writer, and one of the reasons I picked her, you know,

because poetry and telling a story through poetry is a. You

know, a different kind of process, right? Because we're

we're communicating through an image, much like you would if

you were painting or making music, or right through

metaphor. So the process is not as straightforward. And

sometimes, if you ask someone for feedback with your cute

little mud pie of a poem, and they look at you and say, "I do

not get it at all." And you think, "Well, yeah, that's what

I thought," and you know, and that's okay. You know, as a as a

poet, I don't think that's necessarily bad. You know, you

think about your favorite pop song, and people don't agree on

the meaning of you know the song Mr. Tambourine, you know the

Tambourine Man song, you know who knows what it means? Do we

really care? We'd love it. Terrific song. So who do you go

to for feedback on your poetry before you put it out there in

the world? Once it's out there in the world, I mean, you know,

all bets are off. You got to be confident. I think T, that's why

I was so selective.

I agree.

I only put the A-sides out.

Well, and something people will notice is Charlee

also uses redaction in some of her poems, so that was also

intentional and something we thought about. You know, she

would write a poem, and most of it would be relevant to the

public, but not all of it. So we used redaction visibly, right?

Redacting it so that people could see some of the text is

just not for the public. Real quick, though, about practical

challenges, I do want to say a couple of things. Having 200

colored images in an academic text is a slog I have not yet

recovered from. I did have Natalie Parker's help on

securing permissions for some of them, but you know, just making

sure that you had permissions, writing the captions, writing

the alt text. We did not use AI to do any of that. The only I

think there's only two places where AI is used in the text,

and I cited them both as all ethical communicators should,

which is where I tried to enhance the image quality of

some old family photos, but I think we only lost two of the

images that we originally wanted in the text to to that process,

and you know the spreadsheets that it took to get there, you

know weeks of working on those. So the images was a real lift,

but you got to have them. One of the things one of our reviewers

said of our book was, "Don't let them take even one image,

because you know most academic texts have maybe none, right, or

two maps. And so we were trying to do something different. And

then the index was its own beast. I mean, I feel like I

could have spent a year on the index. I mean, I could have

spent a lot more time on the index. Partially, in fact, I was

talking to another colleague, and he was like, "What do you

mean? Don't you just look up all of the proper nouns and place

names, and then you make your index? And I'm like, "No, I have

to have like where's all the places colonialism is discussed,

even when people don't use the word colonialism, or you know we

have love in the index.

Yes. Ah, Tai, I was just gonna say that. Yes.

Yeah. We have

And many times? I mean,

Yeah. And there was even some stuff that later I was

like, I forgot to put that in the index. For example,

earthworms. So earthworms are in the book twice, but they do not

appear in the index. I don't think. So you know the way this

story is told is just not. It's not maybe this the way that many

people would expect history to be told. So building the index

was very challenging.

I'd like to ask you both what what's the most

influential writing advice you've ever received?

Keep writing, absolutely. Eighth grade, I had

an English teacher. He was absolutely terrific, and I

showed him poetry that was both overwritten and overwrought. And

he was so kind, Kate. He read it, and he said, "Keep writing."

I do not have those poems. Much like Gerard Manley Hopkins, I

probably burnt them in a fit of pique, but you know, and good

for the world, you know, definitely. But I did continue

to write.

I think for me, it took me a while to learn how to

find the way I want to write in graduate school. The historian

Jennifer Weber taught one of my courses, and she had also a

background before she was a historian. She had a background

in journalism, and you know, journalists are much more- they,

they're not using words that don't need to be in there.

They're getting to the point, right? And I liked that because

I think I had thought that there were certain styles of writing

we should all aspire to, and I'm direct in life, and I want to be

direct in my text, and so that I think gave me the permission and

maybe the tools to write more the way I'm actually thinking

and saying these things. Learning how to put that on the

page, and I I will say I think about this a lot because so many

of my students are not learning how to write; they're using AI

tools. And other things, and the voice on an AI tool is just cry.

I mean, it's not good, and I worry that they're thinking that

that's a standard they should aspire to in writing, but it

also isn't. When I teach, I don't use a textbook. I use

sources written by lots of different people. So some are

secondary, some are primaries. You know, some are diaries, some

are news articles, right? Like they have all kinds of different

voices, and I love that. My students are never seeing only

one type of writing, but I think they might think that good

writing is just the type they're seeing a tool produce, and it

isn't. And how boring! So I think about that today too.

Is there a book that you've read recently that

you would recommend to someone, or that you've recommended

recently?

This might sound boring, but it's an amazing

U.S. Presidents and Latin American Interventions: Pursuing

Regime Change in the Cold War by Michael Grow. I love this book.

Again, as a teacher, it's just to the point. He's not messing

around. Again, I'm a, I focus on colonialism in my work, and so

this book is about that. But it's so applicable. I started

reading it right after the Venezuelan president was

arrested, and you know, of course, I knew some of the

things in it. But I really enjoy the way he gets to his argument

and the way he does it without going on and on. Really love

that book.

Tai is always a heavy hitter, man. I don't know,

Kate. I'm working my way through the second one in the Earthsea

series, Ursula K. Le Guin, and I just so happened to have

recommended The Dispossessed to someone, which is a favorite. I

have recommended Rabia Al-Basra, Doorkeeper of the Heart, her

poetry, which I think is phenomenal. Also, Braiding

I think everyone should read widely.

Sweetgrass, Robin Wall-Kimmerer. I don't, I don't know for

There you go. There you go.

Drafting the Past. I, I don't know if that's, but if they

want--

Well, if we want a fun read, yeah. So one I

recommended recently is "This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me" by

Ilona Andrews. I really enjoyed that. It's a fun summer read.

They're not drafting any real pasts, but they're drafting some

imaginary pasts.

Well, and here's here's the thing, right?

When we think about the past, and you think about somebody

like Rabia Al-basra, right, and and the poetry that she's

writing, or or Robin Wall-Kimmerer, you know we are

we are talking about the past, and you know some of these

things like Rabia is in translation, and so we're

talking about work that is in translation, and we didn't use

too much Kanza Ie in the book, but but where we did it was

incredibly intentional, and even our use of English, and Tai can,

Tai can attest to this because you know I I spoke German before

I spoke English as a little kid, and then I grew up speaking

both. And my mom was in the military, so I spoke some

Turkish, and you know we kind of bebopped around, but even

English is a translation of itself when you start

implementing ideas of worldview, and when you really start

thinking about what you want to express about not only yourself

but your perspective and what you want to say. So you know, in

the book, when we talk about In‘zhúje‘waxóbe as a

grandfather, or as him, or even as she, or as Mekhoge, these are

incredibly pivotal relational statements, and it doesn't

matter if they're in English or Kanza Ie, or if you know

somebody gets the idea to translate it into German one

day. It's the intention behind the words, and if we all

listened a little more to each other and took the time, you

know, that'd be a good thing.

Before I let you both go, is there anything else

about the project that I haven't asked you that you'd like to

add?

Oh well, why don't you talk talk specifically,

Charlee, about thinking about disability accommodation in

this? Because we've talked around it, but I don't think

you've talked about it directly.

Okay, so first of all, Kate, I have been

disabled. I've had migraines since I'm 15 years old, and I

have been asking for years and years and years, decades even

since computers became a thing. I've said, "Hey, can we do stuff

like this online? Because it would be real cool. Because then

I could be in a dark bedroom or with my sunglasses on, or you

know, and if I felt well enough, I could dial in, you know. And

everybody has always told me, "No, we can't do that. And then

the pandemic happened and shut everything down. And you know,

when the economy shuts down, people get real creative. So

quick, and all of a sudden, it became possible to do things

over the computer, and disability accommodation, quote

unquote, became normative, right? And so that word

normative to me is a real false flag because disability

accommodation isn't anything more than treating people like

human beings, including people in society in a good way. Why

wouldn't you do it so that people can participate, all

people? And Tai, you know this project, and Tai. You know have

always made sure that, for what it's worth, my opinion has

mattered, and I've been able to participate. You know, whether I

was feeling good or not, whether I could type it or not, they've

made sure that I've been able to have my voice heard, and I'm

grateful.

Well, Charlee Huffman and Tai Edwards, thank

you so much for your work of putting this book together, of

sharing these stories, and thank you for joining me on Drafting

the Past to talk about the process.

Thanks for joining us for this episode of Drafting the Past.

You can find a link to Shokhi: A Kanza Relative, A Monument, and

Rematriation in the show notes, along with links to everything

else mentioned in this episode. If you haven't already, head to

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don't let friends write boring history.