Speaker 1: From Futuro Media and PRX. It's Latino USA. I'm Maria
Speaker 1: in Josa today, a Native American reservation in Washington State
Speaker 1: where Latinos and Latinas are the majority of the population,
Speaker 1: and also the tensions that flew up because of that.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Latino USA. I'm Maria in Hoossa. In the
Speaker 1: late nineteen seventies, Guadalupe Marquez was living in Alto Jalisco, Mexico.
Speaker 1: Her husband was gone most of the year in the
Speaker 1: United States doing farm work.
Speaker 2: Mid Sevenia Cestawaki orso on River Mezes, Wuidalupe's husband would
Speaker 2: spend eight or nine months working hard to make a
Speaker 2: living to provide for his family across the border, and
Speaker 2: like thousands of other labor immigrants before and after him,
Speaker 2: he would then take time to go back to Mexico
Speaker 2: and visit his family.
Speaker 1: He'd stay for a month before leaving to the US again.
Speaker 1: But nine months after every visit, something big would happen,
Speaker 1: Whilalupe would end up giving birth to a new child.
Speaker 1: And not once or three times did this happen, It
Speaker 1: happened sixteen times, Yes, sixteen times.
Speaker 3: What is Amilia?
Speaker 1: That's why our family's so big? Wadalupe says, of course,
Speaker 1: sixteen kids. But finally, one day, Whadalupe decided enough was enough.
Speaker 1: She didn't want to keep raising her large family on
Speaker 1: her own. She wanted her husband to be a permanent
Speaker 1: part of their life too, not just as a visitor,
Speaker 1: and so she convinced her husband to take her with
Speaker 1: him to the United States for good. They ended up
Speaker 1: joining some relatives in Washington State. They rented a house
Speaker 1: in a tiny town surrounded by fruit orchards. Whidalupez daughter, Yesing,
Speaker 1: was five years old when they arrived. Her most vivid
Speaker 1: memory of that first house was finding these tiny little clues.
Speaker 4: And I remember in the closet of the house there
Speaker 4: was beads, like Native American beads. I just remember finding beads.
Speaker 4: For as long as we lived in that house, there
Speaker 4: was always beads in the closet.
Speaker 1: It took you, Senya years to realize what made this
Speaker 1: town Wapato different from the rest of the country.
Speaker 4: It wasn't really evident to us that we lived on
Speaker 4: a reservation. That wasn't something that we were conscious about.
Speaker 4: It was just something that we figured Indians lived here.
Speaker 1: But she was on a reservation. The Yakama Nation. Ten
Speaker 1: years ago, the Yakama Nation was home to about eleven
Speaker 1: thousand tribal members and three times as many Latinos and Latinas.
Speaker 1: Now this divine it has increased, with nearly four times
Speaker 1: as many Latinos and Latinas as there are tribal members
Speaker 1: outnumbered on their own land. I wanted to know what
Speaker 1: does that look and feel like. So in twenty fifteen,
Speaker 1: I spent about a week in the Yakuman Nation reporting
Speaker 1: along with my.
Speaker 5: Producer, I'm Rowan more Garrity.
Speaker 1: And today we're teaming up for a special edition all
Speaker 1: about the Yakuman Nation, a Native American reservation where Latinos
Speaker 1: are the majority. Now, just so you know, there are
Speaker 1: moments in our story where you're going to hear language
Speaker 1: around race that will be offensive to some listeners. So
Speaker 1: that's just a heads up. But before we go any further,
Speaker 1: I think it might be helpful to paint a picture
Speaker 1: of what the Yakama Nation is now. To get there,
Speaker 1: I drove about three hours east of Seattle, So Rowan
Speaker 1: tell us what does this area look like.
Speaker 5: So, first of all, the Yacma Nation is in eastern Washington,
Speaker 5: and it's pretty big, wide open country. The reservation lands
Speaker 5: cover more than two thousand square miles of plains in
Speaker 5: the lowlands and then forested mountains. Most people live in
Speaker 5: a cluster of towns along the Yakima River, so there's
Speaker 5: a big Latino population along with the tribe, and then
Speaker 5: there are also Filipinos and white people, so it's a
Speaker 5: real mix.
Speaker 1: Right after I got to Yakima, we met up with
Speaker 1: a woman who grew up right in the middle of
Speaker 1: all of this.
Speaker 3: I got two little ones. I got to get out
Speaker 3: of my car.
Speaker 6: Okay.
Speaker 5: That's Rena Marquees, Guadalupe's granddaughter and Yessenia's niece. Rena is
Speaker 5: twenty seven years old. Her father is Mexican and her
Speaker 5: mother is Yakima and Filipino, and she's got four kids
Speaker 5: of her own.
Speaker 7: She's totally well.
Speaker 3: Princess Medal Indian one.
Speaker 8: She loves to be barefoot, come back to me.
Speaker 1: Rena says there are a lot of people in her
Speaker 1: generation who are part Yakima and part Mexican, and she
Speaker 1: never saw a problem embracing both sides of her heritage.
Speaker 1: But back when she was a kid, she felt like
Speaker 1: there was a war between Native Americans and Latinos on
Speaker 1: the reservation.
Speaker 3: There were some Native men that would fight with my dad, so,
Speaker 3: you know, because it was Hispanic, just you know, go
Speaker 3: back to your own country. And then on the other side,
Speaker 3: I always heard, you know, dirty natives, drunks, bumps.
Speaker 1: And when you would hear those things, what was going
Speaker 1: on in your mind?
Speaker 3: I didn't understand it. There was just so much hate here,
Speaker 3: just hearing it on both sides, and it was like
Speaker 3: they just they really didn't like each other.
Speaker 5: And Rena says, this still goes on.
Speaker 3: One of my sons gets in trouble for fighting, and
Speaker 3: I'm like, why are you fighting kids.
Speaker 5: Rina's son, by the way, is in fourth grade.
Speaker 3: Well, he called me a dirty Indian. He gets in
Speaker 3: trouble for that. He's taking a look from nobody.
Speaker 1: Rita's kids are mixed like her. Her son's father is
Speaker 1: mostly Native.
Speaker 3: You know, I've told my kids, you know, you guys
Speaker 3: are Hispanic and you guys are Native. They'll make comments
Speaker 3: like we're not Mexican, we're Indians, and mom, like you're
Speaker 3: a Mexican. I don't know if they just don't think
Speaker 3: I look Native enough or something, but they always make
Speaker 3: little comments like that and they just laugh about it.
Speaker 5: Being Native isn't just about how you identify or what
Speaker 5: you look like. Tribes are officially sovereign nations, and there
Speaker 5: are specific rights that come with being a member of
Speaker 5: a tribe. You can vote in elections for the tribal government,
Speaker 5: you can visit parts of the reservation that aren't open
Speaker 5: to everyone, and you can receive a share of the
Speaker 5: tribal income that comes from things like the casino or
Speaker 5: the logging industry.
Speaker 1: But here on the Yakama Nation, I learned it's more
Speaker 1: complicated because a lot of the land is actually owned
Speaker 1: by white people.
Speaker 5: And the reason there are so many white people here
Speaker 5: is that it's a great place for making money from
Speaker 5: growing apples.
Speaker 1: All over the reservation. There are these huge warehouses, bigger
Speaker 1: warehouses than any I've ever seen, I think in my
Speaker 1: whole life, that are filled with apples.
Speaker 5: That's right, The Yakama Valley is the nation's apple capital.
Speaker 9: This is the biggest apple backing facility on Earth.
Speaker 5: That's mikey Hanks, he's my tour guide at Washington Fruit.
Speaker 5: It's this massive concrete warehouse filled with the whirring and
Speaker 5: clicking of all these giant machines. So you'll see here
Speaker 5: it's just kind of like a river of apples.
Speaker 9: The easiest way to get the apples out of the
Speaker 9: bind let's put the bin in water.
Speaker 5: About three and a half million apples go through here
Speaker 5: every day.
Speaker 1: Three and a half million apples are worth a lot
Speaker 1: of money. And to understand how white people came to
Speaker 1: own these fruit factories on native land, you have to
Speaker 1: go way back.
Speaker 10: So this is just a valley floor, and you could
Speaker 10: see there's a lot of areas in here that aren't
Speaker 10: owned by the acamanation.
Speaker 1: This is Matthew Tamaskin. He's a part of the tribal
Speaker 1: government and today he's showing us a huge map of
Speaker 1: the reservation on the wall at the Yakama Nation headquarters.
Speaker 1: The map is divided up into a big grid and
Speaker 1: some of the squares are yellow, others are pink and blue.
Speaker 10: So what you see is the yellow parcels. Those are
Speaker 10: tribal lands and they have numbers.
Speaker 5: In eighteen fifty five, the Yakma people signed a treaty
Speaker 5: with the federal government that created the reservation, and it
Speaker 5: set aside land where only the tribe could live. But
Speaker 5: the Feds didn't keep their word. Not long after that,
Speaker 5: Congress passed something called the Allotment Act, and basically what
Speaker 5: that did is it took land that belonged to the
Speaker 5: tribe and broke it into little pieces. The goal was
Speaker 5: to give those little pieces of land to individual tribal
Speaker 5: members as a way to get them to assimilate.
Speaker 10: So some of that was was they wanted us to
Speaker 10: be farmers. We're not farmers, we're gatherers.
Speaker 11: Now.
Speaker 1: Government's idea was that tribal members who agreed to move
Speaker 1: on to those individual allotments could become citizens of the
Speaker 1: United States, and any land that wasn't given out in
Speaker 1: allotments would be sold to non Indians. But by the
Speaker 1: turn of the century there were whole real estate offices
Speaker 1: here just specializing in selling reservation lands.
Speaker 10: The tribal members owned the land, but yet you know,
Speaker 10: you hear these stories of hey, chief, we'll give you
Speaker 10: a bottle of whiskey for that land, booms turned over,
Speaker 10: we lose it.
Speaker 1: When you think of a reservation, you probably think of
Speaker 1: land that's set aside just for Native people. But there
Speaker 1: are actually a bunch of reservations like the Yakiman Nation,
Speaker 1: where the majority population isn't Native American at all.
Speaker 5: Within fifty years of the Allotment Act, tribes all over
Speaker 5: the country lost ownership of more than two thirds of
Speaker 5: their land. The Accamanation has been trying to buy their
Speaker 5: land back ever since. But it's a lot easier to
Speaker 5: take a piece of land out of tribal control than
Speaker 5: it is to bring it back in.
Speaker 6: So that's how you start having what we call now
Speaker 6: a checkerboard reservation.
Speaker 5: That's sister Kathleen Ross. If you can imagine the checkerboard
Speaker 5: she's talking about. Let's say some squares are owned by
Speaker 5: the tribe, and a lot of other squares are owned
Speaker 5: by white farmers and growers, and that's made it harder
Speaker 5: for the tribe to control what happens on the reservation,
Speaker 5: even for something as basic as who lives here.
Speaker 1: That checkerboard has also enabled discrimination against Native Americans on
Speaker 1: their own lands.
Speaker 6: The settlers that came in that started the towns to
Speaker 6: support the agriculture that was starting up. People that started
Speaker 6: a restaurant would put up a sign that said no
Speaker 6: dogs here and no Indians.
Speaker 5: In the first part of the twentieth century, white settlers
Speaker 5: from all over the country moved onto the reservation to
Speaker 5: start farms and take advantage of a new federal irrigation project.
Speaker 10: They're creating these farms, but they didn't have workers. So
Speaker 10: prior to the Mexicans coming and being workers, we were
Speaker 10: the workers. Our elders were out there picking hops or
Speaker 10: harvesting grapes or harvesting apple. Those are harvesting peachers, what
Speaker 10: have you. We were that. We were their workforce, you know,
Speaker 10: cheap labor. That's where we were, just as ys today.
Speaker 7: And you see some of that work depicted on the
Speaker 7: murals here in Toponish.
Speaker 1: Ricardo Garcia has been an advocate in the Latino farm
Speaker 1: worker community for more than forty years. When you drive
Speaker 1: through downtown Toponish, one of the reservation's main towns, you
Speaker 1: see whole buildings painted with scenes of Native American families
Speaker 1: doing farm work.
Speaker 7: But they don't do that work anymore. The agricultural industry
Speaker 7: kept growing, and it continued to expand to the times
Speaker 7: when they needed to recruit workers from Texas.
Speaker 1: Families like Garcia started to come north for a few
Speaker 1: months out of the year, and gradually, he says, Mexicans
Speaker 1: and Mexican Americans started to replace Native Americans as the
Speaker 1: main workforce on the farms on the reservation.
Speaker 7: The Native American was a good worker, but they also
Speaker 7: celebrated the times when they would go fishing and they
Speaker 7: would take off, perhaps in the middle of a harvest,
Speaker 7: and the industry didn't like that very much, so they
Speaker 7: started to prefer and recruit and hire labor from Mexico
Speaker 7: as well as Texas.
Speaker 1: Right now, this is something that I learned by being
Speaker 1: on the reservation that there are certain seasonal activities that
Speaker 1: are really central to tribal life and identity, like fishing
Speaker 1: or foraging for roots and berries, and it happens on
Speaker 1: very sacred land, and so when it's time to do that,
Speaker 1: that's what you do.
Speaker 5: Yeah, And that shift to Mexican farm workers means that
Speaker 5: over time, more and more single men were coming here
Speaker 5: and putting down roots, and eventually their families came too.
Speaker 1: And it was the beginning of a demographic shift that
Speaker 1: would profoundly change the Yakma Valley. Latino settled in the
Speaker 1: reservations towns in large numbers, bringing their language and their
Speaker 1: culture with them, and with new neighbors they're came and
Speaker 1: new tensions coming up on Latino USA are Latinos. Pushing
Speaker 1: the Yakama people out.
Speaker 10: When I'm going out to launch with my friends is
Speaker 10: like we're gonna have Mexican, Mexican or Mexican. If you
Speaker 10: think about it, you know what does topplers have to offer?
Speaker 10: Are they the Mexican fact?
Speaker 5: Stay with us?
Speaker 1: Yes, Welcome back to Latino USA. I'm Maria Ino.
Speaker 5: Jossa and I'm rowin more Garrity.
Speaker 1: And today we're revisiting a special episode from twenty fifteen
Speaker 1: about the Yakama Nation in Washington State, a Native American
Speaker 1: reservation where Latinos have expanded to become the majority population. Now,
Speaker 1: when we left off, we were talking about how the
Speaker 1: reservation lands became dominated by farms, mostly owned by white
Speaker 1: folks and worked mostly by Mexicans and Mexican Americans.
Speaker 5: Today, agriculture in Yakoma County is an industry worth almost
Speaker 5: two billion dollars a year, and almost everyone we spoke
Speaker 5: to in the Latino community here has spent some time
Speaker 5: working in the fields. Yesenia Navarette Hunter, that's the woman
Speaker 5: who found the native beads in her house as a child.
Speaker 5: She says the hardest part of doing farm work was
Speaker 5: just trying to get enough sleep.
Speaker 4: My mom would have us get to bed, you know,
Speaker 4: at maybe eight or nine. And in the summertime, it
Speaker 4: was even harder because still light out and you're trying
Speaker 4: to sleep, but you know that in just a few
Speaker 4: hours you're going to get up again.
Speaker 1: During asparagus season, Yesenya says, the day started at two
Speaker 1: or three in the morning, and.
Speaker 4: We'd get ready and run out out to the cars
Speaker 4: because there were always several.
Speaker 1: Remember we're talking about a family with sixteen kids here.
Speaker 4: And the way that we pulled this off because how
Speaker 4: do you pick in the dark. So my dad would
Speaker 4: he would park his jeep facing the asparagus rose and
Speaker 4: leave the lights on, and so you pick as far
Speaker 4: as you can see, and then you come back, and
Speaker 4: then you pick as far as you can see, and
Speaker 4: about that time the sun's coming up, so you go
Speaker 4: back and you finish the rest of the rose.
Speaker 5: So what that means is that the kids would work
Speaker 5: five or six hour shifts in the fields and then
Speaker 5: they would rush home, shower off their morning work, and
Speaker 5: head to school.
Speaker 1: Yasenya's niece, Rina Madkez, had a different kind of childhood though.
Speaker 1: Remember Rena is the part native part Mexican woman that
Speaker 1: we heard from earlier. Growing up, Rena says she saw
Speaker 1: the worst of both of her parents.
Speaker 3: My mom left me in a hospital when I was firstborn.
Speaker 1: Both her mom and her dad drank heavily and used drugs,
Speaker 1: and her dad was in and out of jail.
Speaker 3: So my grandma got me out of the hospital and
Speaker 3: she would tell me stories that or your mom would
Speaker 3: come see you as a baby, and like my baby's age,
Speaker 3: the little one, she said, your mom would push you away.
Speaker 5: When she was seven, Rena moved in with her parents.
Speaker 5: They lived in one of the low income housing projects
Speaker 5: owned by the tribe. A lot of the adults there
Speaker 5: were unemployed and struggling with addiction, and from the time
Speaker 5: she was eight or nine, Rena was responsible for getting
Speaker 5: her little sister fed and dressed in the morning and
Speaker 5: then walking her to school. At the time, though, Rena
Speaker 5: says she and her siblings were just used to it all.
Speaker 3: There's a lot of stuff as a child. I don't
Speaker 3: really remember a lot of stuff that I've blocked out.
Speaker 1: There were a lot of kids in the projects like her,
Speaker 1: with mixed parents, mostly Mexican fathers and Native American mothers,
Speaker 1: but she still felt alienated at school. Most of the
Speaker 1: kids were one hundred percent Mexican.
Speaker 3: American around here, It's like his Phoenix almost the way
Speaker 3: that week, you know, they were almost like the white people,
Speaker 3: like they dis acted like better than everybody else.
Speaker 1: When Rena got into arguments with Mexican kids, she says,
Speaker 1: just being viewed as Native felt like an insult.
Speaker 3: I felt a lot of anger towards those people, and
Speaker 3: I was ashamed sometimes to be like some people would
Speaker 3: be like, oh, you don't look Native American, you look Mexican.
Speaker 3: But sometimes that made me happy, like knowing that I
Speaker 3: didn't look like a Native, because I knew how people
Speaker 3: looked at Natives.
Speaker 5: Things were tough at home too. Her mom wasn't around much,
Speaker 5: and her dad was abusive.
Speaker 3: My mom had already left the home, so he would
Speaker 3: fight me, like physically fight me, and I fought back
Speaker 3: because I didn't know any other way to survive.
Speaker 1: The last straw came when Rena was fourteen, and her
Speaker 1: father hit her so hard she went deaf in one ear.
Speaker 1: After that, Rena's little brother called their aunt to come
Speaker 1: pick them.
Speaker 3: Up, and so she came and told my dad, if
Speaker 3: you don't let me take her. I'm going to call
Speaker 3: the cops.
Speaker 1: She has, in fact, forgiven both of her parents, and
Speaker 1: she's up.
Speaker 5: Her life absolutely. Her mom even comes to stay with
Speaker 5: her at her house sometimes. Now, she was really able
Speaker 5: to turn the corner. She got through college, she's got
Speaker 5: a pretty good job now working as an auditor at
Speaker 5: the tribe's casino, and she's got kids of her own.
Speaker 3: You know, I was fortunate enough to be pulled out
Speaker 3: of my dad's home and see a different life. I
Speaker 3: think a lot of people. I just feel like some
Speaker 3: people don't ever see a way out of it.
Speaker 5: Now.
Speaker 1: Those tensions between her Mexican and her Native American communities
Speaker 1: were very real for Rena. But one person who says
Speaker 1: he's trying to remind them of what these two communities
Speaker 1: have in common is Matt Tumaskin. He's the legislative laison
Speaker 1: for the tribal government that we heard from earlier.
Speaker 5: And he's also a teacher at the tribal school. A
Speaker 5: couple of years ago, Matt was talking to his Native
Speaker 5: students and he wanted to see what they knew about
Speaker 5: Mexican culture. Justa heads up, you're about to hear some
Speaker 5: offensive language.
Speaker 10: When I say, Mexican, what do you think? So all
Speaker 10: of those those negative annotations came up, went back, you
Speaker 10: know this that whatever, solo's whatever. You know, there's just
Speaker 10: those stereotypes. But I started educating and I say, you
Speaker 10: know what, they're indigenous, just like Eve and me. They're
Speaker 10: from the south and we're from the north. We need
Speaker 10: to realize that that the border was created by the
Speaker 10: white people.
Speaker 1: A few weeks later, Matt brought an indigenous Mexican congresswoman
Speaker 1: to his class. At first, she spoke to the students
Speaker 1: in Spanish while someone translated, but then she switched to Puripicha,
Speaker 1: an indigenous language, and the interpreters sat down.
Speaker 10: And hip couldn't interpret it. So that's what I told him,
Speaker 10: was like, we speak English down there, they speak Spanish.
Speaker 10: They they're not Spanish, they're put Apache.
Speaker 1: And when you say that to the people, you know,
Speaker 1: there is a brotherhood between us, there's a sisterhood. And
Speaker 1: they say, yes, I believe it, or they say I
Speaker 1: don't think so.
Speaker 10: It's a little bit of both. They don't believe it yet,
Speaker 10: but yet you know, when they heard her, they knew
Speaker 10: the difference. So classroom full of students that I was
Speaker 10: teaching government at that time. It clicked, you know that,
Speaker 10: you know, they are indigenous.
Speaker 12: Just like us malec Yeah, Yankasas Marlvetx, Yeah, Yankasas.
Speaker 5: It's undeniable that Mexicans have transformed this area. The Hispanic
Speaker 5: population in Yakoma County, which includes the reservation, has quadrupled
Speaker 5: in the last generation, from about twenty five thousand to
Speaker 5: well over one hundred thousand today.
Speaker 1: And Matt says Latinos have become a convenient scapegoat for
Speaker 1: the spread of crime and drugs. Toponish and Wapato, the
Speaker 1: two main towns on this tribal land, have both had
Speaker 1: trouble with addiction and gang violence as the Latino community
Speaker 1: has grown, and a lot of Yakima people have absorbed
Speaker 1: mainstream stereotypes about Latinos.
Speaker 10: That's what we were told by the dominant societies. They're bad,
Speaker 10: They're no good. So that learned hatred is still there.
Speaker 10: So we need to come to a point where let's
Speaker 10: break that cycle.
Speaker 5: But even for Matt Tamaskin, it's not easy to see
Speaker 5: the towns where he grew up looking more and more
Speaker 5: like Mexico. In downtown. Top of it, the reservation's biggest town.
Speaker 5: There are Mexican businesses everywhere, restaurants, bakeries, music shops, car repair.
Speaker 10: When I'm going out to launch with my friends, is like,
Speaker 10: we're gonna have Mexican, Mexican or Mexican. If you think
Speaker 10: about it, you know what does Topiners have to offer?
Speaker 10: Are there than Mexican food.
Speaker 1: For some people, there's a feeling of a takeover on
Speaker 1: the reservation, a second wave of Mexican and Mexican American
Speaker 1: settlers taking the place of the white settlers who moved
Speaker 1: in one hundred years ago.
Speaker 5: Someone who hears a lot of that resentment bubbling up
Speaker 5: day to day is Carla Ernandez. Carla and her sister
Speaker 5: are manager at Western Gas, a gas station in Toponish,
Speaker 5: and outside there are these murals of Native American dancers.
Speaker 5: Inside it's a convenience store and a tac area where
Speaker 5: literally everything is in Spanish. Carla is from Hajalisco and
Speaker 5: she came to the US when she was fifteen.
Speaker 13: It was a gift for my fifteen birthday for Kinsenera.
Speaker 13: I always wanted to have a big party, but I
Speaker 13: knew we couldn't afford it, and my mom asked me
Speaker 13: if I wanted to come over and miss it with
Speaker 13: my family, with my grandma, and I just didn't go back.
Speaker 5: That first visit was to Arizona, but her father was
Speaker 5: a migrant worker in Topenish, so before long she ended
Speaker 5: up on the Yakoma Reservation, and she likes it.
Speaker 13: You get to know everybody, You see their kids grow older.
Speaker 13: I mean you used to feel comfortable, you used I
Speaker 13: mean even though they casted you, sometimes it still feels
Speaker 13: like home.
Speaker 1: The day Carla is talking about are a subset of
Speaker 1: her Native American customers. Regulars come in every afternoon to
Speaker 1: buy beer and to drink in a park nearby.
Speaker 13: Let's say that I don't want to sell alcohol to
Speaker 13: someone who's already intoxicated. Then the answer back to you
Speaker 13: and said you would back go back to your country.
Speaker 13: So that's when you feel more the resentment. If they
Speaker 13: don't get their way in anything, then they're added to changes.
Speaker 13: Then they start insulting you, and then they start making
Speaker 13: it a point for you to know that you're on
Speaker 13: their land.
Speaker 1: How often do you get insulted and told you shouldn't
Speaker 1: be around? Once a week, once a month.
Speaker 13: M I would say it happens once a day.
Speaker 1: The customers who drink and insult her are only a
Speaker 1: tiny fraction of the tribe, but they have shaped Carla's
Speaker 1: impression of the Yakama people, and a lot of Latinos
Speaker 1: here hold the same stereotypes about Native Americans and alcoholism.
Speaker 5: In the past, the tribal government has actually tried to
Speaker 5: make the reservation dry by stopping stores from selling alcohol altogether,
Speaker 5: but many of the stores wouldn't go along, and that's
Speaker 5: one of the problems with the Checkerboard reservation. There's no
Speaker 5: way for the Yakima to enforce tribal law on land
Speaker 5: they don't own, and.
Speaker 1: Not everybody who lives on the reservation wants to follow
Speaker 1: tribal law.
Speaker 13: This is a letter we got.
Speaker 1: The latest flare up came a few months ago when
Speaker 1: the tribes sent out a letter to all the shops
Speaker 1: and restaurants on the reservation.
Speaker 13: It says their Quickpick Quickpick has been identified as a
Speaker 13: business operating with this The.
Speaker 5: Letter says that non tribal businesses operating on Yakama Nation
Speaker 5: lands have to pay an annual two hundred dollars fee
Speaker 5: to the tribes, but most businesses haven't paid it so far.
Speaker 5: Carla says people worry that paying the licensing fee means
Speaker 5: they'll have to answer the tribal government for all kinds
Speaker 5: of things, and.
Speaker 13: If at any point they fail that you are not
Speaker 13: in compliance with their regulations, then they have the right
Speaker 13: to come and shut you down.
Speaker 1: In the Latin community, there is talk that all of
Speaker 1: this is some kind of retaliation against outsiders living on
Speaker 1: the reservation.
Speaker 13: I understand it from the perspective of a Mexican that
Speaker 13: still feels resentment from when Mobsuma and all that. You know,
Speaker 13: people come and in by your land, and people come
Speaker 13: and take stuff from you, and what do you get.
Speaker 13: They just kind of got pushed away. I mean, I
Speaker 13: do relate to them.
Speaker 1: But even if Mexican farm workers are the quote unquote
Speaker 1: colonizers here, the tribe does rely on them. For example,
Speaker 1: the tribe has been building its own farming business. Now
Speaker 1: they've got big apple orchards and a packing house just
Speaker 1: like the one we visited before.
Speaker 13: Even if they don't like the Mexicans who's working the land.
Speaker 13: You see all these signs looking for pickers during the
Speaker 13: harvest season. You don't see the accommodation going and applying
Speaker 13: for those shops. Even they have their own wreckage company
Speaker 13: for fruit and the warehouse, and who's working those businesses.
Speaker 13: Go to the casino, there is Mexicans working.
Speaker 5: There, or go at the end of the work debt,
Speaker 5: when everyone's done working in the field, you.
Speaker 13: Find ninety percent of the people who're spending their money
Speaker 13: there is still Mexicans. So it's kind of contradictory for
Speaker 13: them to say, get out of my land. But then
Speaker 13: they open the doors and they give you jobs and
Speaker 13: they take your money.
Speaker 5: So the Carla Mexicans are the engine of the reservation's economy.
Speaker 5: But for Matt damaskin the tribal liaison, it's a different story.
Speaker 10: There are special concessions that are set aside for the
Speaker 10: Mexican people when it wasn't for us. The balance being
Speaker 10: written in Spanish. When we go to events, you know,
Speaker 10: they have interpreters.
Speaker 5: The Yakama never got any of that. He says, instead,
Speaker 5: there were no special concessions for us.
Speaker 10: Our elders were beaten. Our elders. You know, you see
Speaker 10: me today, I have long hair. You know, they were
Speaker 10: forced to cut their hair, they were forced to speak
Speaker 10: English basically at gunpoint. I don't hate it It's just
Speaker 10: I see a disparity there. How do I get that
Speaker 10: special treatment too?
Speaker 1: Now, there are some things that you do get by
Speaker 1: being a member of a tribe. For the Yakima and
Speaker 1: for a lot of tribes all over the country. Those
Speaker 1: special rights and the privileges like, for example, healthcare or
Speaker 1: employment preferences for a tribal job, all of that depends
Speaker 1: on this one thing.
Speaker 3: Okay, So that's my tribal id.
Speaker 1: This is Rena Marquez again, and she's showing us her
Speaker 1: Yakama Nation enrollment card.
Speaker 3: It says Confederated Tribes and bands of the yakam Nation.
Speaker 3: It has my enrollment number, my Social Security number, birthdate, birthplace,
Speaker 3: my degree of Yakama blood. Yeah, I'm about thirty three
Speaker 3: percent Yakima.
Speaker 1: Why does the blood percentage the bloodline matter? And the
Speaker 1: fact that it's so specific.
Speaker 3: Because to be enrolled as a Yakama you have to
Speaker 3: be a quarter Yakima.
Speaker 5: This is called a blood quantum. Every tribe has different
Speaker 5: requirements for membership, and most of the time they're based
Speaker 5: on this very thing. Who your parents are or your
Speaker 5: grandparents and ancestors.
Speaker 1: Can you tell me how they drew your blood?
Speaker 3: At some point no, they take a family tree, so
Speaker 3: I actually have them for my kids.
Speaker 1: The way it works is that you have to prove
Speaker 1: to the tribal government that your native lineage can in
Speaker 1: fact be traced back to specific people.
Speaker 3: So like my kids's dad, the guy that was here
Speaker 3: when you guys pulled up, he's twenty four percent and
Speaker 3: I was thirty three percent. So when we had our
Speaker 3: kids together, they were twenty seven percent.
Speaker 5: Just enough to be in the tribe. Those area's two
Speaker 5: older children, they're both boys, but her daughters, Malika and Ariela,
Speaker 5: their father is Latino, so Rena says they're seventeen percent Yakima,
Speaker 5: not quite the quarter needed to be enrolled.
Speaker 1: And all of those numbers go out the window when
Speaker 1: it comes to actual relationships.
Speaker 10: You can't pick and choose who you love and who
Speaker 10: you don't love.
Speaker 5: That's Matt Tamaskin again, the government liaison for the Accamanation.
Speaker 10: So if my relative, my sister, my brother, my cousin,
Speaker 10: my niece, my nephew, they fall in love, you know,
Speaker 10: I can't tell them.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 1: If people live in the same towns and go to
Speaker 1: the same schools, it seems inevitable that some of them
Speaker 1: will end up starting families together, like Rena and her
Speaker 1: ex husband or like her own parents. Now most of
Speaker 1: us would see that as a good thing. You get
Speaker 1: to love who you love, right, But you could also
Speaker 1: see these love stories as a kind of existential threat
Speaker 1: to the tribe. Matt to Maskin says, sure, love happens,
Speaker 1: it's a wonderful thing, but.
Speaker 10: It's killing us, killing us. You know, I have nieces
Speaker 10: and nephews that you know their dad is from Mexico,
Speaker 10: and I love them, I love them to death. But
Speaker 10: yet what happens is their blood is diluted.
Speaker 5: Besides, it can be hard to figure out a family tree.
Speaker 5: Matt has one friend who spent forty nine years just
Speaker 5: trying to get her daughter enrolled.
Speaker 10: The Indians are the only race that have to prove
Speaker 10: they're Indians. You know, you can say you're Mexican, Your Mexican,
Speaker 10: that's it. Boom, there's a magic wand. But yet with us,
Speaker 10: we have to produce an enrollment card.
Speaker 5: A lot of people face pressure to marry within their culture,
Speaker 5: but Matt says, for the Yakima, it's different than it
Speaker 5: is for say Mormons or Cuban Americans. Keeping tabs on
Speaker 5: enrollment is part of what makes the Yakama Nation a
Speaker 5: tribe in the first place. That's how they can figure
Speaker 5: out who's eligible to vote in tribal elections or to
Speaker 5: visit sacred landmarks that aren't open to outsiders. It's how
Speaker 5: they figure out who can inherit land to.
Speaker 1: A lot of elders within the tribe. Is the best
Speaker 1: way to preserve Yakima culture, but even that has its
Speaker 1: obstacles for starters. There are only eleven thousand tribal members,
Speaker 1: and a lot of them are related.
Speaker 10: When when I was growing up, my dad was a
Speaker 10: tribal leader. So with my dad, you know, we would
Speaker 10: go places. You know, we'd go to how I was
Speaker 10: here and there, you know, just because he wanted to
Speaker 10: visit to people there. I would come up with, Hey,
Speaker 10: this is my new girlfriend. He goes, oh, hey, who's
Speaker 10: your parents?
Speaker 14: Oh?
Speaker 10: My parents? You know, he's talking to this to this
Speaker 10: girl because oh, my parents are so so it's like, oh,
Speaker 10: you're my niece. So that's what we're stuck with is,
Speaker 10: you know, either we're making babies with their own.
Speaker 1: Cousins, or or they're making babies with non tribal members
Speaker 1: who aren't Yakim up and that puts the tribe's very
Speaker 1: existence in jeopardy. Latino, USA, we dive deeper into blood quantum.
Speaker 8: I know they do refer to people who are not
Speaker 8: full blood, ads breeds or half breeds as if we
Speaker 8: were like you know, dogs or horses or some sort
Speaker 8: of stock.
Speaker 1: And we hear what teenagers on the reservation have to
Speaker 1: say about all this notes. Welcome back to Latino, USA.
Speaker 1: I'm Maria Ino Jossam.
Speaker 5: And I'm rowing more garrity. Now.
Speaker 1: When we left off, we were talking about something called
Speaker 1: blood quantum. How for many Native Americans, the exact amount
Speaker 1: of tribal blood that you have decides if you're in
Speaker 1: or if you're out, if you're part of a tribe
Speaker 1: or if you're not.
Speaker 5: And to learn more about blood quantum, we met with
Speaker 5: this guy.
Speaker 8: I'm Grayson Squaawks, thirty three years old. I grew up
Speaker 8: in top Nish, Washington.
Speaker 1: Grayson is an enrolled member of the Yakama Nation and
Speaker 1: he has a different idea of the direction the tribe
Speaker 1: should go in the future.
Speaker 5: Says, the tribes themselves always intermarried at least a little bit.
Speaker 8: You know, I have myself Cowlitz Nez Perce and Caulville.
Speaker 5: So let's say Grayson were to marry a Callville woman.
Speaker 8: My son would then be, you know, part Caulville and
Speaker 8: part Yakima, and he could potentially not be enrolled on either.
Speaker 5: In the past, he says, claiming your tribal identity wasn't
Speaker 5: so rigid. It was more about who you lived with,
Speaker 5: what you did, what you believed in.
Speaker 1: But in the nineteen thirties, the federal government began forcing
Speaker 1: tribes to use blood quantum, and so legally speaking, being
Speaker 1: recognized as Native American would hinge on proving exactly where
Speaker 1: your Indian blood came from.
Speaker 5: These days, there's almost a generational split within the Akama
Speaker 5: nation about the best way to deal with this. Today,
Speaker 5: when some elders see young people marrying outside the tribe.
Speaker 8: They're frightened of it because of their perspective of identity.
Speaker 8: I think comes down to the blood quantum.
Speaker 5: But there are a lot of younger people in the
Speaker 5: tribe like Grayson. Mixed couples are a sign that people
Speaker 5: are getting along.
Speaker 8: To me, I think blood quantum is something that should
Speaker 8: be removed.
Speaker 1: He says. The tribe's identity should be its own choice.
Speaker 1: And it could start something more like a citizenship program.
Speaker 8: Basically, you know, mimicking that of the American government, saying like,
Speaker 8: you know, if you're eighteen years of age, you can
Speaker 8: stand before counsel and say I have contributed culturally to
Speaker 8: the community by ABC and dee whatever.
Speaker 5: But he knows that's a hard conversation to have, he says,
Speaker 5: partly because some people try to uphold the kind of
Speaker 5: racial hierarchy within the tribe.
Speaker 1: Grayson says social status often goes along with your degree
Speaker 1: of Yakima blood. So for example, his father was full
Speaker 1: Yakima what people call four forts, but his mom is
Speaker 1: mixed with white and Yakima blood and she isn't enrolled.
Speaker 8: So clearly I am not full Yakima. But and there
Speaker 8: are like derogatory terms associated with that, Like I mean,
Speaker 8: I haven't necessarily had people call it to my face,
Speaker 8: but I know they do refer to people who are
Speaker 8: not full blood, ads breeds or half breeds as if
Speaker 8: we were like you know, dogs or horses or some
Speaker 8: sort of stock animal like where you can state your lineage.
Speaker 5: Grayson says, holding on to blood quantum is bound to
Speaker 5: backfire over time. After all, it only takes three generations
Speaker 5: to go from one hundred percent Yakama to kids that
Speaker 5: can't be part of the tribe at all. And that's
Speaker 5: what's actually happening in Grayson's own family. He married a
Speaker 5: white woman, and his one year old son, Remy, is
Speaker 5: only one fourth Yakima.
Speaker 8: And so if he makes the decision to not marry
Speaker 8: a Yakima woman, specifically a Yakima woman, their children will
Speaker 8: no longer federally be recognized as a Native American, even
Speaker 8: though he may be very immersed in the culture and
Speaker 8: consider himself a traditionalist, but federally he wouldn't be considered
Speaker 8: a Native American. And that's something that my wife and
Speaker 8: I actually have a very difficult time with. It's something
Speaker 8: that is just I kind of have to accept.
Speaker 5: What the federal government considers Native American. Isn't the last word.
Speaker 5: Life on the reservation is changing pretty quickly, and in
Speaker 5: a way everyone is engaged in a kind of soul searching. Yeah,
Speaker 5: so let me ask you this, then, is there a
Speaker 5: Mexican element to Yakima identity today if we're honest about
Speaker 5: the place and time.
Speaker 8: Yes, absolutely, I mean even older generations will halfheartedly like
Speaker 8: tribal cultural gatherings, there will be you know, discussions, you know,
Speaker 8: people joking about eating menudo at a traditional meal.
Speaker 5: And Grayson says, you do sometimes see Mexican food at
Speaker 5: family gatherings along with traditional native food like salmon and
Speaker 5: forage berries.
Speaker 1: Even the boundaries between people themselves can be pretty fluid.
Speaker 1: Sometimes people don't know who's what, who's Mexican, who's Yakima,
Speaker 1: who's both? And are the differences more important than what
Speaker 1: they have in common?
Speaker 4: If we look back far enough and not really that far,
Speaker 4: my indigenous roots are very similar to the indigenous roots
Speaker 4: of the Yakama nation.
Speaker 1: That's Yasenya Navarete Hunter, the Mexican American woman who we
Speaker 1: heard from earlier who talked about getting up early to
Speaker 1: do the farm work with her family. Now, what was
Speaker 1: unusual about meeting Yasenya was that she was clearly proud
Speaker 1: of her Latina roots, but she was also really proud
Speaker 1: of her Mexican indigenous roots. She listens to Herochro music.
Speaker 1: She was wearing her Camisa bordada, which is an indigenous
Speaker 1: shirt from Mexico. But she says, when it comes to
Speaker 1: the Yakama people and the Latinos in the valley.
Speaker 4: We see ourselves completely different, but we're much more alike
Speaker 4: in the desires that we have for our families and
Speaker 4: our mothers being so and our grandmother's being key to
Speaker 4: maintaining culture and ritual and tradition, and in needing to
Speaker 4: be grounded to the earth and to our language.
Speaker 1: What's going to happen on this reservation in the future
Speaker 1: all depends on the young people, and so we wanted
Speaker 1: to find out how the next generation of Yakama and
Speaker 1: Latino kids is grappling with these very same questions of identity.
Speaker 1: We went to a high school in a town called
Speaker 1: White swan, Oh.
Speaker 5: It's pretty remote and it's also the last majority Native
Speaker 5: town on the reservation. We stop buy a classroom where
Speaker 5: kids are learning the Yakama language ichieskin.
Speaker 13: Pa qua.
Speaker 5: Pa alkus. That word you just heard by It means
Speaker 5: forkhuck o us.
Speaker 15: They are muscles that they're not used to using when
Speaker 15: they're speaking English, and so I purposely pick some of
Speaker 15: those hard words because if they get those, everything else
Speaker 15: is easy.
Speaker 1: This language class is being taught by an ex cop
Speaker 1: named Hollyanna Littbull. She's one of about fifty people who
Speaker 1: are truly fluent in the language of Ichiskin. And the
Speaker 1: reason for that is simple. Most everyone else in the
Speaker 1: tribe never had the opportunity to learn it.
Speaker 5: Starting in the late eighteen hundreds, the federal government would
Speaker 5: actually send Native American children to boarding schools by force
Speaker 5: and an effort to get them to assimilate. Right through
Speaker 5: the nineteen seventies, kids were taken out of their homes
Speaker 5: and made to wear Western clothes and speak English.
Speaker 15: I'm first generation not boarding school raised. And one of
Speaker 15: the stories I told the.
Speaker 5: Schulitla that means students was.
Speaker 15: How I grew up speaking in the language was because
Speaker 15: my uncle, who lived down the road, told me these
Speaker 15: are very strict rules. You don't break these rules. Only
Speaker 15: allowed to speak in the house when it's just me,
Speaker 15: you and your auntie.
Speaker 1: The consequences could be severe. Sometimes families were broken up
Speaker 1: when kids were heard speaking their indigenous language.
Speaker 15: That's why some of us, some of the kids, they
Speaker 15: don't speak the language because the elders were protecting them.
Speaker 5: Now, she says, people are finally feeling secure enough to
Speaker 5: reclaim their language so they can talk with their elders.
Speaker 5: But for students like Kristin himsa her Yakama name is
Speaker 5: a Lahat. There's another reason too.
Speaker 11: So that me and my two cousins can have a
Speaker 11: conversation that nobody else can hear. Like the Spanish, they
Speaker 11: talk in their language, and sometimes it's about us and
Speaker 11: we don't like it, like we can tell but not
Speaker 11: what they're saying. So I'm actually happy we had those class.
Speaker 1: Even with feelings like that, we still got a sentence
Speaker 1: from a few people that this next generation is actually
Speaker 1: getting along just fine.
Speaker 16: One of my favorite things around here is Indian tacos.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's the principal. Joey Castilleja. He introduced us to
Speaker 1: a few of his tenth grade Latino students.
Speaker 5: I haven't had one taco. What's in India?
Speaker 16: Taco guys, It's.
Speaker 5: Like, literally it's so big.
Speaker 14: It's like, uh well yeah, like they're saying their vision
Speaker 14: of the sofa, but it's fried bread with them, you know,
Speaker 14: meet on top and basically taco salad. I guess.
Speaker 1: That last voice you heard is of Oscar Swatis. He
Speaker 1: and his friend spoke to us about what it's like
Speaker 1: to grow up Latino in the heart of the Yakama nation.
Speaker 5: Over the holidays, Oscar's family swaps food with Native American friends.
Speaker 14: My dad, you know, my mom will be making tamals
Speaker 14: and he gets like twelve reps him up and he's
Speaker 14: like Frank, Frank India. I mean my dad. I know
Speaker 14: it's a little bit of English, but whenever they see
Speaker 14: each other, you know they'll spend like thirty minutes it's
Speaker 14: trying to try to talk.
Speaker 5: But for Alejandro Dame, what brought them all together was sports,
Speaker 5: and her case, the middle school volleyball.
Speaker 17: Team, because in sports you have to bond, You have
Speaker 17: to somehow tolerate each other, and you forget why you
Speaker 17: don't like each other. You try to find a reason,
Speaker 17: but there's not really a reason why you guys weren't
Speaker 17: bonding all those years.
Speaker 5: Principal Joey Castieha told us about a special moment at
Speaker 5: last year's homecoming dance.
Speaker 16: And the homecoming dance started up just like every other
Speaker 16: homecoming dance in America, and I remember about halfway through
Speaker 16: there was a round dance, a Native American round dance.
Speaker 5: The dance. Round dances are a kind of traditional song
Speaker 5: usually played at family gatherings. You dance in a big circle.
Speaker 17: And you go around for the entire song, and as
Speaker 17: you're going, you're shaking everybody's hand.
Speaker 5: I about teared up.
Speaker 16: I don't know if you guys saw that. I choked
Speaker 16: up because everybody did the round dance and not a
Speaker 16: single adult had anything to do with that.
Speaker 1: That round dance was the talk of the school for days.
Speaker 1: The group of Latino students we met with also told
Speaker 1: us about that other part of high school culture dating.
Speaker 9: I personally like the American girls more.
Speaker 5: It's just a personal thing.
Speaker 1: But why, why why? I don't know, there's just something,
Speaker 1: I mean, there must be an intrigued what.
Speaker 9: They're really Sometimes they're really strong, they're really they've been
Speaker 9: through law.
Speaker 1: That's Danny Carrillo. He and the other Mexican teenage boys
Speaker 1: say they look up to their Native American classmates because
Speaker 1: they've had to rely on themselves a lot growing up,
Speaker 1: mainly because Native families have had to endure so much.
Speaker 14: And it's not like Hispanics.
Speaker 5: You know, we're prout here.
Speaker 14: Our parents tell us what they've been through, and the
Speaker 14: tell us, you know who we came here for for.
Speaker 14: You guys are kids, don't mess up.
Speaker 9: There's a girl that Oscar's going Hong Kong with She
Speaker 9: has one of the best personalities that I've seen ever.
Speaker 9: And she's funny.
Speaker 18: She has.
Speaker 9: Beautiful, very very beautiful, and she just thinks differently than me,
Speaker 9: and she thinks differently than all of us.
Speaker 5: All these kids are genuinely attached to their town, White Swan.
Speaker 14: This is my home. You know, I believe I'm Mexican first,
Speaker 14: American second, but this is my first home.
Speaker 1: For Oscar, even though he's Mexican. A lot of that
Speaker 1: connection has to do with the fact that White Swan
Speaker 1: is a majority Yakima town, a town on tribal.
Speaker 14: Land, and I'm proud of that. I'm proud to know
Speaker 14: that wake up every day on her reservation and I
Speaker 14: meet good people, and I never want to forget that.
Speaker 14: I mean, I know there's gonna be times where I'm
Speaker 14: gonna leave for school, but I mean, I want to
Speaker 14: get a house down here.
Speaker 5: I got a rough planed out.
Speaker 14: I want to get a house down here, and I
Speaker 14: want to raise my family down here. I want them
Speaker 14: to go to school here. Because I used someone to
Speaker 14: forget this place.
Speaker 1: Before we let the Yakima reservation, we paid a visit
Speaker 1: with Rina Marguiz. She's the mixed Yakima and Mexican woman
Speaker 1: that we've been speaking with throughout our program, and we
Speaker 1: went to her grandmother's house. That dog does not scare me.
Speaker 1: And then Rena sat down with her who was teaching
Speaker 1: her how to embroider or bor that just the way
Speaker 1: that my grandmother used to try to teach me. Rena
Speaker 1: really hopes that her kids will feel proud of being
Speaker 1: both Mexican and Yakima.
Speaker 3: But I also want them to to have the acceptance
Speaker 3: of one another, you know, the differences, and just not
Speaker 3: be like what I've I've known growing up and what
Speaker 3: I hear now. You know, I don't want to see
Speaker 3: my kids ever been that way.
Speaker 5: You might remember Rena's oldest son has been getting into
Speaker 5: fights with his classmates. Mexican kids have been calling him
Speaker 5: a dirty Indian. Still, Rena says she feels good about
Speaker 5: the little changes. She sees it as school.
Speaker 3: And they also do like a little power my boys'
Speaker 3: school where they'll celebrate the yacmanation. They have drummers that
Speaker 3: will come in and sing, and the kids can wear
Speaker 3: their regalia and dance in a little assembly. It's pretty cool, now,
Speaker 3: you know, I thought when I was growing up. We
Speaker 3: would have never thought, you know, I would see this
Speaker 3: for my kids.
Speaker 5: For her kids, Rena hopes it won't be so tricky
Speaker 5: to be both Mexican and Yakima, that more and more
Speaker 5: it will be normal. Two of her children are enrolled
Speaker 5: in the tribe. The other two don't qualify, but all
Speaker 5: of them love to dance.
Speaker 3: Tell me, mom, put on a power music you know.
Speaker 3: Do you guys want to hear some music? Yeah, like
Speaker 3: your brothers.
Speaker 11: Yea.
Speaker 3: What do you do when you hear that?
Speaker 1: With close to eleven thousand members, the Yakima Nation is
Speaker 1: among the larger tribes in the United States. But the
Speaker 1: hard truth is if the rules about blood quantum and
Speaker 1: membership don't change, and perhaps even if they do, the
Speaker 1: future of this tribe is uncertain.
Speaker 5: At the same time, something new is emerging on the reservation,
Speaker 5: a culture and a people that's Yakima and Mexican and
Speaker 5: American all at once.
Speaker 3: Good Dad not lacked I better than a tha.
Speaker 1: Rina's daughters don't have enough Yakima blood to be enrolled
Speaker 1: in the tribe, but that doesn't stop them from feeling
Speaker 1: something deep when they hear power on music. Even at
Speaker 1: such a young age. Maybe one day there Abulida will
Speaker 1: teach them how to make enchileas and bosolito. And we
Speaker 1: have some updates for you, dear listener, because since we
Speaker 1: aired this story in twenty fifteen, members of the Yakaman
Speaker 1: Nation have entered into a new battle for their land.
Speaker 1: In twenty eighteen, the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission issued
Speaker 1: a preliminary permit to build a hydropower facility. The Goldendale
Speaker 1: Energy Storage Project would generate clean energy for the Pacific
Speaker 1: Northwest and California. The facility, however, is located at Bushpoom,
Speaker 1: a sacred site for the Yakamanation. In twenty twenty two,
Speaker 1: seventeen tribal leaders from across Washington State sent a letter
Speaker 1: to the Governor Jay Insley. They asked him to reject
Speaker 1: the building permit, saying they were quote a violation of
Speaker 1: yakamanations in parent sovereignty and treaty reserved rights. However, the
Speaker 1: project has continued to clear regulatory hurdles, and in February
Speaker 1: twenty twenty four, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission recommended moving
Speaker 1: forward with the plans to build the facility. This episode
Speaker 1: was produced by Rowan Moore Garrity and Marlon Bishop. It
Speaker 1: was edited by Rita Hartman. It was mixed by Michael
Speaker 1: Simon Johnson with engineering support from J. J.
Speaker 11: Krubin.
Speaker 1: The Latin USA team also includes Julia Gruso, Jessica Ellis,
Speaker 1: Victoria Strada, Rinando Lanos Junior, Stephanie Lebau, Andrea Lopez Grusavo,
Speaker 1: Luis Luna, Jori mar Marquez, Marta Martinez, Nor Saudi, and
Speaker 1: Nancy Truquillo. Benilei Ramirez is our co executive producer along
Speaker 1: with myself and I'm your host. Join us again on
Speaker 1: our next episode. In the meantime, I'll see you on
Speaker 1: all of our social media, especially at lest gem. Yes
Speaker 1: Joe Latino USA is made possible in part by the
Speaker 1: Ford Foundation, working with visionaries on the front lines of
Speaker 1: social change worldwide, the John D.
Speaker 18: And Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the Heising Simons Foundation
Speaker 18: unlocking knowledge, opportunity and possibilities. More at hsfoundation dot org.
Speaker 5: Good Morning, YV Tech. Hold on quick announcement. We are
Speaker 5: resetting alarmed, so I'll keep myself muted when I'm not
Speaker 5: reading in case we get ambushed by a fire alarm.