The Land is Everything: Voting Rights vs Tribal Sovereignty with Dr. Maurice Crandall

[Opening strum of Theme Music]

[00:00:00] Dr. Maurice Crandall: Are Pueblo people citizens? What is their political status? If you’re a citizen, then you should be able to vote. 

Well, okay, if they vote and if they are automatically citizens, what does that mean about their land holdings? Because Indigenous people, they mainly live on Indigenous lands that are, that are understood to be protected lands that can’t be bought or sold.

But once you make that step to citizenship, you don’t have that same protected status. You couldn’t be both, you know, citizen of a tribal nation and citizen of the United States. 

[00:00:38] Charlotte (VO): Hi folks, this is Encounter Culture, a podcast from the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs. I’m Charlotte Jusinski.

Stephanie (VO):  And I’m Stephanie Padilla. 

[00:00:47] Charlotte (VO): This season we’re sharing the story of Miguel Trujillo, an unsung hero of voting rights activism for Native Americans in New Mexico.

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[00:01:00] Charlotte (VO): To celebrate this season’s collaboration, we’d like to thank you for being part of our listening community at Encounter Culture.

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[00:02:01] Stephanie (VO): In this episode, Charlotte and I dig into the complexities of tribal sovereignty, systems of government and citizenship. We chat with Dr. Maurice Crandall, who is the author of These People have Always Been a Republic.

[00:02:14] Charlotte (VO): We recommend listening to season four in order, so if you haven’t already, listen to episodes one and two and then we’ll meet you right back here.

[Hopi percussive music fades in.]

[00:02:22] Maurice: Hello, my name is Maurice Crandall and I am a Yavapai-Apache from the Yavapai-Apache Nation of Camp Verde, Arizona.

I’m an associate professor of history at Arizona State University, and I’m a historian of, broadly speaking, the Indigenous peoples of what we would consider the U.S.-Mexico border region. 

[00:02:42] Stephanie (VO): We asked Maurice to share a bit of his origin story and what led him to his work as a historian.

[00:02:51] Maurice: Well, I mean, I think like a lot of Native people, I grew up in a family where there’s lots of storytelling, and in particular, I was really close to my grandparents. And my grandfather was from that World War II generation. You know, went to a boarding school, then had that experience of being one of the few Native soldiers in his unit in the Marine Corps, and really looked up to him and just did a lot of asking questions and listening to his stories.

And that got me interested in sort of storytelling more broadly. I always had an interest in history. I think that, you know, Native people are very sort of history minded people. 

I didn’t necessarily plan on being an academic historian until a little bit later. Probably I would’ve ended up more as a public school teacher, but because I had a tribal scholarship and could continue on with my studies, I got a master’s degree and then I got a PhD and kind of fell into being an academic historian.

I worked in public education and then I worked in the public history realm. I worked at the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center for a couple of years and worked, you know, alongside, essentially an all Pueblo team. And that naturally sort of like strengthened my own interests in Pueblo people and which kind of dovetails into Miguel Trujillo and all of that history there.

[00:04:12] Stephanie: You wrote an entire book about Native people and democracies and where we are now in terms of voting and how our history has been a little bit misconstrued, I think, by many people in the academic world. I’m just curious about what sparked your passion for that topic.

[00:04:32] Maurice:  Again, maybe an experience that’s common to a lot of Native people in that I always had family members who were on tribal council. You know, my grandfather was tribal chair. My mom was tribal chair. My aunties, you know, have been on council and so I’ve always been around Indigenous politics, which are some of the most contentious. The communities are really small and everybody’s running against everyone else, and we all, both like, love and hate each other because of whoever’s running for election or reelection and people getting booted off council.

I mean, it’s just, it’s really, there’s lots of drama, but I was always around that and so I was interested in tribal politics and some of my early memories are going to council meetings as a little kid, and sort of just being told to, you know, like, go sit in the corner or go occupy yourself for a while. And then getting older, starting to think about where that comes from. 

You know, like tribes that have, like, an Indian Reorganization Act constitution, for the most part, I mean, that’s not Indigenous. I mean, that’s not traditional in any sense. That’s an imposed system. And so when you have a council and a president, or a chair and a vice chair and then a tribal court and all of that, I mean, that’s a three branch model based on the United States model of government. 

[00:05:46] Charlotte (VO): The Wheeler-Howard Act, also known as the Indian Reorganization Act, is sometimes called the Indian New Deal because it dramatically changed the way many tribes governed themselves. They were encouraged to pass constitutions and adopt electoral style governance. 

[00:05:59] Stephanie (VO): But this wasn’t always the way tribes had traditionally organized or made decisions.

[00:06:04] Maurice: And so getting older, being more interested in that and where those structures come from and what their historical roots are, and then how that compares to traditional or more Indigenous forms of governance and democracy. I started connecting those dots and just seeing, okay, so where, where are we today and why are we here?

[00:06:23] Stephanie (VO): The story we are sharing is about Trujillo v Garley in New Mexico, but Miguel Trujillo wasn’t the only one demanding voting rights for Native Americans.

[00:06:33] Maurice: In 1948, when the Trujillo case, when Trujillo v Garley was being tried, in Arizona, there was a simultaneous case that involved a Yavapai man by the name of Frank Harrison.

Frank Harrison, who was a Fort McDowell Yavapai, and he was a US. Marine Corps veteran, World War II veteran, came back to his community, saw the struggles and the second class status of Indigenous people there. And along with the tribal chairman at the time, a guy by the name of Harry Austin, they went and tried to register to vote and were denied because they were considered wards of the federal government and they challenged that in court. And it was decided by the Arizona Supreme Court, actually in this case, that prohibition of their right to vote was not legal. 

But those two cases are decided right within weeks of each other. And you know, Felix Cohen is the attorney for Miguel Trujillo, and the father of federal Indian law, but a lot of the same organizations are behind both cases, and they have similar backing, and they’re decided right at the same time. And so New Mexico and Arizona, which, ironically or not ironically, are some of the last places to allow Native peoples to vote because, what, they have large Indigenous populations and they’re afraid of the potential voting block of Native peoples. So Native people receive the right to vote in Arizona and New Mexico basically at the same time. 

And I am Yavapai. So I heard stories about Frank Harrison, that being a natural parallel to Miguel Trujillo, going through my academic training and deciding on research projects, it just seemed like sort of a natural thing to look into that Indigenous democracy engagement with voting. It came from my own personal interest and experience in tribal politics. 

[00:08:21] Charlotte: Backing up a little bit, you mentioned how you first started connecting the dots between traditional Indigenous forms of governance and the imposed American democracy, for lack of a better term. 

Maurice:  That works. 

Charlotte: Okay, great. So what are the dots between the two and how do they relate to each other?

[00:08:37] Maurice: I mean, I think broadly speaking, if we’re gonna define American style democracy, western democracy, even, maybe it’s a term that works as well. It’s the idea of majority rule and the voice of the majority carries the day as it were.

And, and I mean, that’s being questioned right now, right, obviously. What does that even mean? And I think that that’s sort of the basis for western style democracy. 

When you compare that though with Indigenous democracy, what I would call, you know, like Indian democracy, it’s not based upon the will of the majority. 

Indigenous democracy operates under the concept of consensus, which in practical terms often means everyone needs to agree. And that’s why historically when Indigenous peoples discussed an idea or a decision that needed to be made on a community level or even beyond that, they would literally sit until there was consensus. And that can take days, weeks, or maybe a decision won’t be made because you can’t get a consensus. 

It’s funny when you, when you read the accounts of non-Indigenous observers who go to some sort of council and listen as an important discussion is taking place. And they just can’t, they can’t sit that long. And sometimes these meetings go on all night and, and they’re discussing the topic hours and hours and hours, and then they stop and they say, “Okay, we’re gonna reconvene tomorrow or next time we meet.” 

And it’s funny, you know, we talk about a filibuster or somebody getting up, it’s a political stunt in Western democracy to stand up and talk for hours, whereas, in Indigenous democratic councils, it’s the norm.

[00:10:18] You might sit for days on end debating something, talking about it. Everyone says their piece, and then ultimately when there’s a consensus, people can take a decision and it’s not the will of any one person. It’s a community decision. 

And sometimes we know from our history that if someone couldn’t be in agreement, the answer was that they didn’t go. It’s sort of like recusing yourself. If you can’t be in agreement, then you wouldn’t go to the meeting. Then the consensus could be carried forward. 

That’s sort of a long-winded comparison, but I think that that’s at the heart of it. It’s that idea of the majority rule and votes and a vote tally versus the consensus of a community and reaching a decision on which everyone can agree and everyone feels good about. But that’s a process that takes a long time. Sometimes community consensus could be reached fairly quickly, but then other times it would take a lot of discussion and hearing everyone out.

[00:11:15] Charlotte: What would the response then be to someone, they might look at that model and say, “Well, that’s so inefficient.” Or, you know, “How could that possibly work?”

[00:11:23] Maurice: I mean, you could, you could say a lot of things in response to that. Why do we place such value on efficiency and speed? Why does everything need to be done quickly?

Why, if a decision isn’t reached today or this week, or this month, or even this session of whatever legislative body is meeting, why is that a bad thing? In an Indigenous community, maybe we’re not operating under such strict time constraints where a decision doesn’t have to be made today. 

There are certainly emergencies and when something comes up that demands immediate attention, then I think that the speed with which consensus is reached and decisions are made, we’ll match the level of need and of emergency, but I don’t think that Native peoples historically, were operating under any conception of efficiency or speed in the same way that Western style governments historically have and do. 

Although are they efficient? I don’t think they’re any more efficient than Indigenous governments historically were. In fact, I think they’re probably less so because they don’t have consensus and you have so much infighting. So that’s one response that I would give. 

The other that I would give is, I think that the time sometimes required to take a decision within Indigenous style democracy is worth it because you reach a decision that has more consensus and a wider base of support because everyone is heard. 

In Indigenous councils, the idea isn’t necessarily that, that you have a representative who’s been elected or whatever it might be. It’s that you have all these people who have a stake in the community and they collectively discuss these important decisions, instead of one or two people that are elected to represent all the people.

I mean, that’s a Western conception as well. 

[00:13:26] Stephanie: That’s one of my main questions is, growing up in Isleta, we’re always told we have the traditional side of things, where it’s the medicine men and the traditional ceremony, and people who discuss when and how those things are going to happen. But then we also have the governor and the lieutenant governors and the council.

How would you identify those with your expertise? Would you say that the council is more of the traditional government that was represented years and years ago, or would you say that’s more of an influence from our Western democracy? 

[00:14:05] Maurice: So if we’re just gonna take the Pueblos as a model, for example, I mean the system differs from one to the other in some ways, not always significant, but sometimes.

But generally speaking, you’re gonna have a governor and a lieutenant governor and a council. That is purely a Spanish imposition. I mean, the roots of that go back to Spanish colonial times. 

When Spain comes to New Mexico in the 16th century and they come to colonize permanently in 1598. You know, Juan de Oñate comes to New Mexico in 1598, and the idea is like we’re setting up permanent settlements here. We’re colonizing this place. We’re going to take advantage of its wealth, which is, you know, they’re hoping mineral wealth, but then it becomes agricultural wealth, and then the labor wealth of the Indigenous Peoples themselves, they’re met by traditional councils of elders, medicine people, clan leaders, community leaders that traditionally would have been the governing bodies of those communities.

And you can read these documents and the Spaniards say, “You know, like, we’re met by 50 people. Who’s in charge?” And that, that’s always the question. Who’s the one guy that is in charge of all of this? And they wanna be able to identify one person. And, you know, maybe you could say, like, traditionally there’s a kasiki, who might be sort of the titular head of the community in some ways, but, political power is sort of, it’s shared throughout those community leaders. 

Spaniards want one person to identify. That’s the whole reason for having a governor and a lieutenant governor. It’s so that you have a visible one person, couple people that you deal with about governance and community issues. They don’t wanna deal with a council of elders. They don’t want to sit in meetings where they have to listen to 50 people all give their opinion on a topic. They want to just talk to one guy. 

That system is Spain’s system all throughout its colonial holdings. They do the same thing in South America, Central America. I mean, they have, and the words sort of change, and the titles might differ a little bit, but generally speaking, they want to have one guy… And it’s always a guy, I mean, it’s a man because Spain is patriarchal, and so the people who have power are men, but they might allow the community to continue to do things in that way. I mean, you can have your traditional councils and discuss these things for days and hours, but in the end, we want the one guy to come to us and we want to talk to him and just hear from him.

And so that’s kind of at the root of this system. And you see it in different incarnations in various places. And I write about that. I mean, among Tohono O’odhams in Southern Arizona and what’s now Northern Sonora, there’s the same system. I mean, they have governors and other offices that are very similar.

And I think colonizers in general do this. They’re not about tailoring to each community’s needs and the character of that community. They just want to impose a one-size-fits-all. 

Spain does that. Mexico does that. The United States absolutely still does that, right? You just want one thing that suits everybody. I call it, a one-size-fits-all solution to Indian Affairs, and that’s the route that the United States has taken. But Spain did that. Colonizers do that. That’s just what they do. 

[00:17:29] Stephanie: I wanna get a little bit into how voting, then, as we would consider it now in democracy in the Western way, wasn’t necessarily something that Indigenous people of America or anywhere else that people were colonized want or wanted. Can you talk a little bit about that?

[00:17:48] Maurice: Yeah. That idea of voting and casting a ballot or raising your hand, I mean, that doesn’t, generally speaking, that doesn’t exist within a lot of Indigenous communities. But that idea that, you know, obviously there’s no ballots where you choose your candidate and fold up your paper and put it in. I mean, that doesn’t exist. There’s no hanging chads historically in Indigenous communities. 

So Spaniards introduced that idea, but I wanna stress too, that Spain is not a democracy in the colonial era. There’s a king and or queen or both, and positions held by nobles or people of high birth and then political appointees. But where you do see democracy in Spanish colonial times is on the local level. And in Spanish communities, you’re going to have a local governing town council where you have a council with aldermen who are regidores, and then you have either an alcalde or a gobernador 

You have these various offices and, generally speaking, they’re democratically elected, and then the council typically elects its gobernador, or alcalde, or whatever it might be. So on the local level is where you have democracy within colonial Spain, and that’s where they seek to impose a system upon Indigenous communities to have locally elected councils with then a person at the head who, in the case of the Pueblos is a governor and then a lieutenant governor, sort of like the second in command.

When that system is brought to the Pueblos, again, this is a one-size-fits-all, but Spain does allow for variation from one community to the other in terms of how that electoral process takes place.

And given that sort of leeway, as it were, or freedom to decide how that electoral process takes place, what you have at the Pueblos is the emergence of a hybridized system in which you do have a council and you do have a governor and a lieutenant governor and various other offices. But that on the community level, the community itself decides what the process is.

And so in a lot of communities they say, well, we’ve gotta have a governor and a lieutenant governor and these other offices then we are just gonna have the society heads choose, or we’re going to have the summer and winter chief when there’s a dual society.  A lot of the Tewa Pueblos, for example, have a dual society where it’s a summer and winter chief and the heads of the summer and winter people, and those leaders choose the governing officers. And then it’s presented to the council, which is comprised of heads of the various societies within the Pueblo and the various medicine societies. And then they discuss, and that’s sort of where the democratic process comes in. But it’s, again, it’s an Indigenous consensus built democratic process.

What I research and write about is how that sort of hybridized system emerges, and it’s really born of the fact that Spain doesn’t micromanage to that extreme in terms of how leadership is selected. 

So you have the emergence of community variation on how leadership is chosen. And in some communities you have the development of more, what we would call western style democracy, that over time, yeah, they do have an electoral process where people sort of cast a vote in a way, although it’s not ballot based, and it still remains this way today.

Those secular officers of governor and lieutenant governor and the other Spanish offices are chosen by traditional leadership, whether they’re the heads of the medicine societies or the, what we would call the principales or the elders of that community. And they’re the ones doing this like, and that’s still that way today in a lot of those communities.

You don’t have elections, as we would call them, or as you know, western style elections. 

[00:21:44] Stephanie (VO): In Isleta Pueblo, we do cast a ballot for our governor and lieutenant governors. So it’s really interesting and fun to learn that it wasn’t always this way.

[Music swells]

Stephanie: So can we talk a bit more specifically about America, and maybe I wanna give the side a voice who was against voting in the 1940s. Because when Miguel Trujillo brought this case, a lot of people were ready. A lot of people had fought in the war. They thought, you know, why can’t I vote in a country that I fought for?

But there were also a lot of people who were not so excited about the thought of voting. 

[00:22:27] Maurice: Yeah, that’s a, that’s a great point and a good question. It’s sort of taken as a truism that people want civil rights, and when we think about civil rights struggles, we often assume that, you know, history is progressive, that over time, people fight for their rights and eventually win them through a process of community mobilization and protest or cases brought to court. 

The history of civil rights is often framed in that way where ethnic or whatever type of minority group has to struggle and fight for its rights.

That model works in some cases, but it doesn’t necessarily work for Indigenous people. It shouldn’t be taken as a given that Native people fought for their rights and won their rights in the mid-20th century, like other ethnic minority groups, after a long struggle. And some did. And some were involved in that type of civil rights struggle.

But like you said, there is a considerable group of Indigenous people who aren’t in favor of that, and they’re not fighting for the right to vote in that way. And that really has historical roots in the 19th century and the early 20th century. And you see that development, particularly in New Mexico with the Pueblos.

[00:23:47] Charlotte (VO): At that time, there was an influx of white settlers to New Mexico, where there was already an established Hispano community.  

[00:23:54] Stephanie (VO): With the defeat of its army and the fall of the Capitol, Mexico City, in September, 1847, the Mexican government surrendered to the United States and entered into negotiations to end the war.

[00:24:04] Charlotte (VO): The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which brought an official end to the Mexican-American War, was signed on February 2nd, 1848.

[Music swells]

[00:24:20] Maurice: Oh, the United States has this obsession with what we might call, gosh, I don’t know what’s a good way to put this, like levels of civilization where you are on this civilization scale. White Anglo-Americans are at the top, and then below them you have, you know, these tiers and Indigenous people fall in these tiers somewhere.

Well, Pueblo peoples are in an interesting place because, oh, you know, Native peoples are supposed to be nomadic, right? They live in teepees and, and just sort of go wherever and that’s, I mean, that’s the popular conception. 

Pueblo peoples live in permanent fixed communities and have since time immemorial, they have these, you know, multi-story, apartment block dwelling places. They have systems of governance in place that include governors, lieutenant governors, councils, they have all these things. Well, you know, then that means that they’re sort of higher up on the civilization scale. So does that mean that they are ready for citizenship, automatically, right away?

And that becomes a really pressing question for American authorities in the late 1840s and after. Are Pueblo people citizens? What is their political status? And if they are citizens, then what’s the sort of gold standard of citizenship? Voting. 

If you’re a citizen, then you should be able to vote. And so then the vote becomes the measure.

And you have a series of elections in the 1840s, ‘50s, and after where both sides of political debates in New Mexico, Democrats, Republicans, those in favor of statehood, those who want New Mexico to remain a territory, they try to enlist Pueblo peoples to vote for their cause.

I mean, they go to their communities and they try to bring them out to the polls and get them to vote. And their argument is, well, they’re citizens because of the treaty and because of their political status under Mexican law. That then transfers to the U.S. system. 

But then you have Pueblo peoples and also those who are meant to oversee Indian affairs like the Pueblo Indian agent and the superintendent of Indian Affairs for New Mexico. Those people who say, well, okay, if they vote and if they are automatically citizens, what does that mean about their land holdings? 

Because Indigenous people who live in other parts of what’s then the United States, they mainly live on Indigenous lands that are understood to be protected lands, reservations that can’t be bought or sold. But once you make that step to citizenship, you don’t have that same protected status and your land holdings aren’t viewed in the same way as reservation lands. 

At least in that time, you couldn’t be both. There was no dual citizenship in those days. You couldn’t be a member of a tribal nation and a citizen of the United States, and so that’s where the problem lies.

Early law in the territory of New Mexico, beginning in the 1840s and after, it says Pueblo, peoples hold their lands with titles. Because Spain and Mexico had issued land grants to Pueblo communities, so they had titles to those lands. And so the United States says, okay, so you have title to your land. You are on the path to citizenship, or already there, your lands aren’t the same as tribal, communally held lands, reservation lands. You can buy and sell those lands. 

And once that happens, you get outside speculators who come in and they’re trying to buy up any Pueblo land they can because a lot of the Pueblo lands are the most fertile, they’re along the waterways, and so they’re finding any person that they can just give some money to get ’em to sign a paper. Oftentimes they don’t know what’s going on, they’re just, “Sign this, here’s some money. Okay, whatever.” 

And then these outsiders say, “Well, we have your land. You know, we bought it because you’re able to buy and sell that land because you are citizens of the United States.” 

But I think that there were some people who truly hoped or thought that they had the best interests of Indigenous peoples in New Mexico at heart, and they were trying to protect those communities from complete destruction.

But they sort of came up with this idea. They formulated this idea that the way to keep that sort of land grab and the complete loss of Pueblo lands, which then would mean the loss of culture, the loss of community, ‘cause the land is everything. And if you lose that land, what do you have? 

But the way to prevent that from happening is to tell Pueblo people explicitly: Don’t vote.

Don’t vote. Because if you don’t vote, then you’re not a citizen. Your lands can be protected under federal law, which are a series of acts called the Non-Intercourse Acts. They’re closed to sale. You can’t buy or sell them. You can’t have squatters move onto those lands. A whole series of things that, are protected against.

But the idea is by not voting, you protect that sort of special status as Indigenous people, which applies to other Indigenous groups around the United States. But again, it’s, like I said, it was problematic because Pueblo people as well, they’re more civilized than the other groups. At least that was the perception.

You know, they have all of these things. They’ve been Catholic, you know, nominally Catholic for all these years. They have all of these markers of civilization, so they’re citizens. But by taking on citizenship and voting in particular, you lose protections that you have under federal law and federal Indian policy.

And so Pueblo peoples, generally speaking from the 1850s well into the 20th century and into the 1940s and even today, a lot of Indigenous people in New Mexico and elsewhere say, “We don’t do that.” They’re like, that vote isn’t – that’s not for us. We see to our own communities. 

And you could make that argument like, we’re sovereign communities. We should be interested in our own community affairs, not in the colonial nation state. Why should we be taking part in those? What’s most important is right here.

[00:30:23] Stephanie: That’s a really great explanation and a great way of putting it. I think a lot of times, especially in my generation, we don’t really think about the history because it’s unfortunately, as we all know, not taught very well. So I think it’s really good to understand why some of our people were not for voting and still are not for voting. 

Pablo Abeita, who was a governor of Isleta, once said, “The day my people vote, I hope to be six feet under,” or something like that. 

And when I first, when I first saw that quote, I thought, oh my gosh, why? And I’ve learned so much between now and a few months ago that now I get it.

[00:31:00] Charlotte (VO): Stephanie, that’s some strong language from a tribal leader. Is this a prevailing opinion across tribes?

[00:31:05] Stephanie (VO): No, Charlotte, not at all. As we know, there’s 574 federally recognized tribes in the United States, and Native people don’t all think alike. In fact, in a later episode we’re going to talk about Native led efforts to not only get out the vote, but actively fight voter suppression that is still happening today. 

[00:31:25] Charlotte (VO): So Dr. Crandall is just bringing in more layers to this conversation. 

[00:31:28] Stephanie (VO): Exactly. It isn’t just about fighting for federal voting rights without understanding more of the context. 

[00:31:37] Maurice: For some people this might be sort of a sacrilege. I don’t think that we should just take it as a given that voting is the be-all, end-all in terms of political participation or our own responsibility as political beings, as it were. 

There are other ways, and I think that is, it’s still a valid argument to say, “I don’t want to vote in whatever state, municipal, or national elections.” For Indigenous people, I think it is valid to say, “All of that stuff is the colonizers, all of those institutions are the colonizers’ institutions. My ultimate citizenship or my political interest and allegiance rests with my community, and I’m going to focus it here.”

I think that’s an important point to understand, and that’s not to say that I would discourage anyone from voting in elections or participating in the body politic, but I think that we need to accept both arguments as valid and that those in Indigenous people who today still see voting as an imposition and not as a civil right to be, you know, protected and won, that that’s a valid argument. But then on the other side, if there are people who ultimately see benefits from pursuing political action through those channels of governance outside of Indigenous communities, they can do that as well. 

But that the ultimate goal should be sovereignty. It should be Indigenous liberation. It should be Indigenous communities truly being autonomous and governing themselves in the way that they see fit.

[Music swells]

[00:33:18] Stephanie: Next time on Encounter Culture…

[00:33:20] Dr. Porter Swentzell: We might sit in our modern day seats and not quite see it quite in the same way. But for a lot of peoples in the early 1900s, you know, citizenship meant giving up your citizenship to your nation, creating the situation where your nation could be destroyed.

[Season Outro. Theme music fades in.]

Charlotte (VO): Encounter Culture is a production of the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs. This season was produced in collaboration with the New Mexico History Museum with a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. 

Stephanie (VO): We are especially grateful to the family of Miguel and Ruchanda Trujillo, and to the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center.

Charlotte (VO): Our show’s producer is Andrea Klunder at The Creative Impostor Studios. 

Stephanie (VO): Season 4 is produced and edited by Alex Riegler, Monica Braine, and Andrea Klunder. 

Charlotte (VO): Our recording engineer is Kabby at Kabby Sound Studios in Santa Fe. 

Stephanie (VO): Post-production audio by Edwin R. Ruiz. 

Charlotte (VO): Show notes by Lisa Widder and social media design by Caitlin Sunderland.

Stephanie (VO): Our executive producer is Daniel Zillmann. 

Charlotte (VO): Thank you to New Mexico artists El Brujo, D’Santi Nava for our theme music. And to Clark Tenakhongva, Gary Stroutsos, and Matthew Nelson for the incredible Hopi music featured throughout all six episodes of this season. Their new album is set to release in August 2023, and will be available for purchase on Bandcamp and at ongtupqa.com. We’ve included the links for you in the show notes.

Stephanie (VO): For a full transcript and show notes, visit podcast.nmculture.org or click the link in the episode description in your listening app. 

Charlotte (VO): I’m your host, Charlotte Jusinski. 

Stephanie (VO): And I’m your co-host, Stephanie Padilla.

Charlotte (VO): The Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs is your hub for the state’s exceptional museums, historic sites, and cultural institutions. 

Stephanie (VO): From Native treasures to space exploration, world class folk art to awesome dinosaurs, we celebrate the essence of New Mexico every day. 

Charlotte (VO): Remember to head to podcast.nmculture.org/giveaway to enter to win four culture passes and a subscription to El Palacio. Enter before August 31st, 2023. Thanks for listening.

[Theme music fades out.]