This show came together kind of naturally. It all started a few weeks back, when I got an email from local musician J.T. Garfield. He’d wanted to let me know about an incident involving a friend of his, Nathan Phillips, a local Native American man. Phillips, according to Garfield, had just stopped by his house and recounted a story of having been taunted by drunken Eastern Michigan University students in “redface,” who, calling themselves “Hurons,” had told him to “go back to the fucking reservation.” Garfield asked that I consider writing something about the encounter, and offered to assist me in tracking down Phillips. Before Garfield and I could find Phillips, and determine where the confrontation took place, though, news of the altercation had already made it to Channel 7 in Detroit, and a protest was being planned for the EMU campus. So there really wasn’t a pressing need for me to make people aware of the allegations. With that said, though, it seemed as though Phillips should have more than the 20 seconds he got on Channel 7 to tell his story, so Garfield and I set out to find him and ask him to come on the radio show. And, once we’d tracked him down, the other pieces just started falling into place.
[If you missed the live broadcast, you can now hear the episode in its entirety on both iTunes and Soundcloud. Or, if you want, you can just scroll down to end of this post, where you’ll find it embedded.]
In addition to Phillips, Garfield said he’d come on the show with his new, as-yet-to-be-named band, and representatives from the Native American Student Organization (NASO) at EMU agreed to come on as well, and tell us about their meetings with University administrators in the wake of the incident noted above… Here’s Nathan, who some of you might recognize as the Native American man in the Skrillex video for the song Make It Bun Dem. [He mentioned this fact to me kind of out of the blue right before our interview began.]
[note: The above photo of Nathan was taken as part of our Six Pack Portrait Project by Ypsilanti photographer Chris Stranad. It was taken just after my interview with Nathan.]
If you’re unfamiliar with Nathan’s story, I’d encourage you to listen to him tell it… Also of interest is our discussion about Eastern Michigan University’s decision a few years ago to reintroduce their Native American mascot, the “Huron,” after having given it up over 20 years ago in favor of the less offensive “Eagle.” According to Nathan, and the students from EMU’s Native American Student Organization (NASO) who followed him on the show, the decision to bring back the Huron, whose face is now hidden beneath a secret flap on the University’s new band uniforms, was made for financial reasons. Rumor has it that an alumus of the University demanded that it be brought back, and refused to make a donation until such time that it had. Nathan, I think, summed it up pretty nicely when he said, “Money’s more important than a person’s dignity.” [The hidden Huron can be seen to the right.]
When we wrapped up with Nathan, we were joined by Michelle Lietz and Chris Sutton, of EMU’s Native American Student Organization. According to them, they’d met with University President Susan Martin two years ago, asking that she stop the reintroduction of the Huron logo, and warning what might happen if it came back, and yet another generation of EMU students began identifying with the nonexistent tribe. [Huron, according to Sutton and Lietz, if I recall our conversation correctly, means something like “bristly pig” in French, and was a name put on the Wyandot people. So, even if you buy the University’s argument that the mascot honors the Native Americans of this area, it does so with an insulting name that reflects a deep misunderstanding of who these men and women actually were.]
According to Lietz and Sutton [pictured below], President Martin was “very dismissive” when they spoke last week. She was initially interested in talking about how they could better educate the EMU community about Native American issues, they said, but then shut down when they brought up the possibility of getting rid of the Huron logo once and for all. According to Sutton, they told Martin, “We can’t educate the public until the logo is removed.” Until it’s gone, he he told her, people will continue to think that it’s OK. Michelle and Lietz went on to say that what happened to Nathan, was predictable, given the reintroduction of the offensive logo… and they were not surprised to hear that white EMU students were dressing up in “redface.”
My favorite part of the interview was toward the end when we started conspiring… thinking of ways to get the Huron logos off the band uniforms in a way that brings positive attention to their cause and helps them attract allies. We discussed appealing to individual members of the EMU marching band to remove the logos themselves, as some fans of the Cleveland Indians began doing last year as part of a coordinated “De-Chiefing” campaign. And, perhaps more impactful from a news coverage perspective, we discussed the possibility of calling together a small army of volunteers armed with stitch rippers to sit outside of President Martin’s office, and football games if necessary, offering to remove the logos from the band uniforms. [One of the reasons we’ve heard that the University administrators say they can’t get rid of the reintroduced logo is that it would cost too much money to have new band uniforms made. Well, if that’s the truth, why not remove the objection by publicly offering to remove the stitching?]
And, then, at about the 35-minute mark, we welcomed in legendary Detroit rock photographer Doug Coombe. We talked about how he, as a young record store employee, got his start shooting shows around Ann Arbor, and how it’s always been a struggle to balance the business side of photography with his desire to help creative people doing interesting things by documenting their activities. Coombe recounted some of his more memorable experiences, from having the Jesus Lizard’s David Yow swing a cinder block in his face, to the time he sustained an injury during a taping of A Prairie Home Companion that required surgery. If I had to do it all over again, I probably would have spent less time talking about my memories of David Yow’s balls, but, otherwise, I think it was a pretty solid outing. Here Doug is talking with me about how awesome it would be to get Lee Osler on the back of a flatbed truck, rolling around Ypsilanti playing Back to Ypsilanti… Or, on second thought, maybe this is Doug telling us about the time he was handcuffed and thrown into the back of a Ypsi PD squad car.
And, toward the end of the show, J.T. Garfield and Martha J. Schmitt stopped by to play some songs, take calls from listeners, and publicly announce a series of Sunday evening porch shows on Washington Street. It was really beautiful stuff… Here are J.T. and Martha responding to ideas for band names being offered by callers. [They ultimately decided against Smile Pile, opting instead for Farewell Phoenix.]
And there was a lot of other great stuff as well. Our friend Brigid Mooney dropped by to say hello, and make angry faces at us. Ypsilanti historian Matt Siegfried came by to give us yet another chapter of the People’s History of Ypsilanti. [This week, we discussed the land speculation boom of the 1820s.] And we played a few songs by our friend in Kenya, Dr. Peter Larson. And, as if that weren’t enough, my bandmate Dan called in to publicly chastise me for not completing the record cover design for the new Monkey Power Trio EP.
NOW, LISTEN FOR YOURSELF, AND EXPERIENCE THE MAGIC…
Thanks, as always, to AM 1700 for hosting the show, Brian Robb for running the board, and Kate de Fuccio for taking all of the photos seen here, with the exception of the one of Nathan Phillips, which was taken by Chris Stranad.
[If you like this episode, check out our archive of past shows at iTunes. And do please leave a review if you have the time, OK? It’s nice to know that people are listening, and, unless you call in, that’s pretty much the only way we know.]