05 Dr Twyla Baker To Us it Wasn't Discovered

Before that I come from a stem background um it’s a science technology engineering and mathematics and there’s this tendency to believe that those types of things did not exist prior to you know colonization and of course they existed here I we had our medicines we had our technology we had our architecture we built birth lodges with no nails you know we were inventors we were artists musicians we were all of these things and I think about the native contributions gosh and it’s not just like in recent memory or anything like that but all of these medicines all of these innovations with the natural world democracy all of this you know thought all of this stuff was contributed by native people and we didn’t necessarily get the acknowledgement not necessarily we did not get the acknowledgement that would have been given to a non-native person like III tend to think of like these places that got named like the Mount McKinley or whatever they all had names before they had identifiers before they were already named we had a name for them the fact that somebody comes and discovers a particular mountain or something and then puts his name on it does not make that all of a sudden there’s a mountain there you know these things have been recognized and acknowledged for generations so I think about all of that and how there’s kind of a resurgence of and a reclamation of that those identities and react knowledge mint and like I think about Harney Peak is now blackout peak and there’s there’s different spots in the United States there we being reclaimed so to speak with their traditional names and that’s important it is very important because it helps to tell people and it helps to inform our younger generations everyone not native not native that there was a history here prior to anybody setting foot from across the pond you know there was stories in history and life and cities and just everything that was all here already you know didn’t just suddenly appear out of nowhere so um we I mean that there’s that but then there’s also though in the modern context I think of like my friend John Harrington who was the first Native American astronaut I was just looking at his pictures of him doing work outside the Space Shuttle and things like that people like that making contributions to the academic realm to sports to art life in general just like any other any other individual we just happen to be such a small population so our impact may not be as loud as others but we’re still here we are still here there was a concept or concerted effort to remove us but it makes me so proud and so feel so strong the idea and the fact that we are still here we are still thriving we are working very hard to make our voices heard we are [Music] just living lives living our lives and doing so in the way that we want to reclaiming the sovereignty and trying to make things better in the past clearer and wider for the ones that come behind us