Tai Edwards and Charlee Huffman Let the Land Tell the Story

Kate Carpenter 0:00
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.

Tai Edwards 1:02
I'm Tai Edwards, JCCC History Professor, Director of the Kansas Studies Institute.

Charlee Huffman 1:07
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,

Tai Edwards 1:25
And I'm not native. Let's make sure that's clear.

Charlee Huffman 1:28
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.

Tai Edwards 1:51
And Charlee and I like to say neither one of us is speaking on behalf of our nations.

Charlee Huffman 1:56
That is very important.

Tai Edwards 1:57
I represent only myself.

Charlee Huffman 2:00
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.

Kate Carpenter 2:12
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,

Tai Edwards 2:24
Charlee?

Charlee Huffman 2:26
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.

Tai Edwards 2:37
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.

Charlee Huffman 3:23
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.

Kate Carpenter 3:51
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.

Tai Edwards 4:01
Charlee. Do you want to go first? Do you want me to go first?

Charlee Huffman 4:04
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.

Tai Edwards 4:23
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.

Kate Carpenter 6:12
Charlee, what were your goals for the book?

Charlee Huffman 6:14
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.

Tai Edwards 6:33
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.

Kate Carpenter 7:04
What was your process for working on this book together? How how and when did you work?

Tai Edwards 7:09
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.

Charlee Huffman 8:10
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.

Tai Edwards 9:35
I have.

Charlee Huffman 9:36
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.

Tai Edwards 9:52
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

Charlee Huffman 10:50
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--

Tai Edwards 11:07
You became proficient.

Charlee Huffman 11:09
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,

Tai Edwards 11:33
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.

Tai Edwards 12:57
Yeah, that's fair.

Charlee Huffman 12:58
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.

Tai Edwards 13:20
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.

Charlee Huffman 14:34
I did threaten though.

Kate Carpenter 14:37
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?

Charlee Huffman 15:09
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.

Tai Edwards 15:33
Well, yeah, go ahead, Charlee.

Charlee Huffman 15:35
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.

Tai Edwards 15:53
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.

Charlee Huffman 16:17
Yes.

Tai Edwards 16:17
So we wanted it to make sense in an order, but as 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 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.

Charlee Huffman 16:17
Tai's right, Kate. You know, we, people read books differently. You know, and and I know a lot of people don't know this, but it's okay to not finish a book. It's okay to only read part of a book. There's a lot of, you know, I think a lot of people don't like reading because the, you know, there's certain mythologies around reading that just aren't true. Like Tai said before, you don't have to pick up a book and start at the beginning and read it through to the end, you can actually, you know, oh my gosh, you can actually read the ending of the book, decide if you like how it ends, and then go back and and read it and see if you know you're wasting your time. And you know that may horrify some people, but I think you know if that's what you want to do, it's okay. You know, I hope that people enjoy this book, you 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.

Kate Carpenter 19:58
How did you decide what and who would be included in the book?

Tai Edwards 20:03
I love the way Charlee says this. So Charlee, this is, she conveys in a way I couldn't articulate, but it's accurate.

Charlee Huffman 20:09
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.

Tai Edwards 20:50
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.

Charlee Huffman 21:33
I just closed my eyes.

Tai Edwards 21:35
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.

Charlee Huffman 23:27
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. We're gonna, we're gonna listen. We're gonna do our best anyway.

Tai Edwards 24:00
That was another thing that happened in the 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 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 that we didn't intend, but again, it's an it's an interwoven story that you just can't ignore. I mean, it it just reveals itself.

Charlee Huffman 26:16
Kate, it's like when you make a poem, you know, you you're putting it together, and you realize that the word that you've chosen actually has two meanings, and it's a fantastic double entendre. And if you put it with the right meter and you stick it next to this other word, everything goes together. And it actually is about that thing that you're upset about. But nobody actually knows except the people who need to know. You know. And you know, it's a, it turns out that it goes with that other poem that you were writing, and pretty soon you have a crown sonnet.

Tai Edwards 27:08
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.

Charlee Huffman 27:18
Well, there's a big file, you know. There's the pamphlet. There's the pamphlet.

Tai Edwards 27:23
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

Kate Carpenter 27:53
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?

Tai Edwards 27:56
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.

Charlee Huffman 30:28
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.

Tai Edwards 30:41
But yeah, they've been wonderful partners through all of it.

Charlee Huffman 30:44
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.

Tai Edwards 31:19
Plus, I don't want a hardcover. It's very hard to use.

Charlee Huffman 31:22
Tai, they can use it as a doorstop.

Tai Edwards 31:24
Right. That's not what I'm using this for.

Charlee Huffman 31:26
If if they don't like it.

Kate Carpenter 31:29
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?

Charlee Huffman 31:40
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.

Tai Edwards 33:22
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.

Kate Carpenter 34:16
With contributors from so many different backgrounds. What was your approach to editing their submissions?

Tai Edwards 34:24
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.

Charlee Huffman 35:36
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.

Tai Edwards 35:57
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?

Kate Carpenter 36:19
Did working on this book together change the way you think about writing?

Tai Edwards 36:22
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.

Charlee Huffman 36:46
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.

Kate Carpenter 37:43
Was there anyone that you turned to for feedback on the project?

Tai Edwards 37:47
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.

Charlee Huffman 39:31
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.

Tai Edwards 41:06
I agree.

Charlee Huffman 41:08
I only put the A-sides out.

Tai Edwards 41:11
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.

Charlee Huffman 43:02
Yes. Ah, Tai, I was just gonna say that. Yes.

Tai Edwards 43:06
Yeah. We have

Charlee Huffman 43:07
And many times? I mean,

Tai Edwards 43:09
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.

Kate Carpenter 43:31
I'd like to ask you both what what's the most influential writing advice you've ever received?

Charlee Huffman 43:36
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.

Tai Edwards 44:11
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.

Kate Carpenter 45:40
Is there a book that you've read recently that you would recommend to someone, or that you've recommended recently?

Tai Edwards 45:44
This might sound boring, but it's an amazing book: 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.

Charlee Huffman 46:20
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 Sweetgrass, Robin Wall-Kimmerer. I don't, I don't know for Drafting the Past. I, I don't know if that's, but if they want--

Kate Carpenter 46:46
I think everyone should read widely.

Charlee Huffman 46:53
There you go. There you go.

Tai Edwards 47:00
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.

Charlee Huffman 47:11
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.

Kate Carpenter 49:01
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?

Tai Edwards 49:06
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.

Charlee Huffman 49:15
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.

Kate Carpenter 51:02
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.

Kate Carpenter 51:14
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 draftingtheast.com to subscribe to the newsletter. We are just a few weeks away from the launch of our expansion with book reviews and other awesome content. You won't want to miss it, so subscribe now. And until next time, remember that friends don't let friends write boring history.