By Helen Tinsley-Jones

Well worth checking out! Apple podcast All My Relations explores what it means to be an Indigenous person today. Hosted by Matika Wilbur (Tulalip and Swinomish) and Adrienne Keene (Cherokee Nation), each episode highlights different aspects of Native peoples’ experiences, telling important stories, infused with hard truths, love and humor, discussed by the hosts and their guests from throughout Indian Country. The hosts describe the goals of the podcast.

We want this space to be for everyone—for Native folks to laugh, to hear ourselves reflected, and give us a chance to think deeper about some of the biggest issues facing our communities, and for non-Native folks to listen and learn.

Here’s a sampling of their episodes:
• ThanksTaking or ThanksGiving?
• Healing the Land Is Healing Ourselves
• Protect Indigenous Women

I highly recommend the 59-minute “Native Appropriations” episode, which features the hosts’ sharing their outlooks and feelings about “the infamous white savior photographer Edward S. Curtis, and Halloween. . . and more.”

Of special interest to me was the list Matika Wilbur describes at the end of that episode. It is in response to the claim that is made by some non-Natives that dressing up like an Indian on Halloween is a way of honoring Indigenous people. Here’s the list.

If you wanted to honor Indians, you would actually honor them and there are real ways to do that—
you would change legislation so that every time our public spaces honor our country they all acknowledge also that they’re on indigenous land.

If you wanted to honor Indians you would show up to protect this Indigenous land that your presence is destroying by protesting, contributing, donating, signing petitions, canvassing, becoming an accomplice to thousands of natives that have dedicated their lives to protecting Indigenous land.

If you wanted to honor Indians, you would change the name.

If you wanted to honor Indians, you would participate in closing the achievement gap in education and ensure that more than 50% of Indians didn’t drop out of your school district.

If you wanted to honor Indians, you would buy from inspired natives not native- inspired [people].

If you wanted to honor Indians, you would consider doing something major and give the land back to an Indian [and] deed your property.

– You could contribute to the missing and murdered Indigenous women movement and volunteer, search, contribute and protect the thousands of Indigenous women that are going missing.

– You would teach your children the Indigenous history of the land you are occupying because everywhere in North America has an indigenous history, and the woke mind knows that history is brutal and that many individual lives were taken so you could settle that place.

– You would stop assimilating us.

– You would stop asking us to believe in your God.

– You would stop destroying the ecosystem. You’d help restore the habitats and animals that lived here—the salmon, the Buffalo, the sea turtles, the whales, the wolves. They also deserve to live.

If you wanted to honor Indians, you’d stop dressing up like us in Halloween. That’s how you could honor Indians.