ANNELIESE BRUNER: He said, "Well, you're the matriarch "of the family, the keeper of stories.

And I trust you to carry this legacy forward."

PAUL WATANABE: I wondered whether they could feel the same thing I did, that what happened to her and 120,000 others like her should not be repeated again.

LARRY SPOTTED CROW MANN: And as he spoke, time seemed to stand still.

I wanted to scream, laugh, cry, all at the same time.

There was this reverberation, crying out for justice.

THERESA OKOKON: Tonight's theme is "Reckoning and Repair."

Tonight's theme is "Reckoning and Repair."

And those words are intended to capture the arduous process of looking at wrongs from the past and recognizing that damage has already been done.

Tonight's storytellers are going to traverse that complex terrain.

They're going to be showing us the resiliency that it takes if we want to have any chance at, uh, rebuilding and repair.

(Larry speaking Algonquin) I just introduced myself in my Algonquin-Nipmuc language.

I am Larry Spotted Crow Mann, citizen of the Hassanamisco tribe.

And what role do you think that language plays in terms of people understanding, um, and having an awareness of Indigenous communities?

As my cousin Tall Pine used to say, "Language is the ecology of the land."

Language centers the ideology and the function of things, right?

So when we're saying things in our language, it has a whole new meaning, a whole new expression, a more intimate, personal connection.

What are some of the biggest challenges that you've faced in terms of educating people about, um, Indigenous histories?

That we're still here.

That Indigenous people are still here.

That's-that's the number one.

- Mm-hmm.

- And the second thing is that colonization and the genocide and all the harmful things that happened, it's not something of the past.

It's a continuation that we're dealing with today.

When you go into the tribal communities, when you look at the health disparities, when you look at the education disparities all across the board, Indigenous people are suffering at the top.

And so this is a consequence of-of, uh, the trauma of the historical genocide that happened here.

It was a cool fall day... ...in 1981.

There was a mist in the air.

And the ground was wet with brown and orange leaves scattered about as I walked up the steps to my junior high school in western Mass.

Now this serene and picturesque view of New England was the darkest period of my life.

You see, I'm what we call "first generation city."

I grew up in an urban neighborhood, but my mom and family grew up in the backwoods of Massachusetts, away from everybody.

The Nipmuc homelands was a vast area comprising almost two-thirds of Massachusetts, or roughly 4,000 square miles.

The entire homelands includes parts of New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Rhode island.

My family were fishermen, farmers, crafters, and laborers who used the land and their hard work to provide for them.

Their learning took place on the land and the oral stories that were passed down to them.

The word "school" itself had become a pejorative to them.

In the late 1800s, the American trope was "kill the Indian to save the man."

And during the boarding school era, the school's goal was to systematically erase culture, identity, and spirituality of Indigenous people and replace that with European values.

That's why, a hundred years later in my junior high school or high school, there was no mention of Native American people, unless it was relegated to the past or a sports team mascot.

I never heard of a Native person accomplish anything or doing anything positive in my class.

And many teachers had told me that Native people were extinct.

I felt like a hapless bystander who only stood to benefit from white proximity.

My happiest times were when I was with my grandfather in the country.

He was a quiet and reserved man who lived his life in the cabin, deep in the woods.

He had lived close to nature more than anybody I have ever known, and he was connected to all life around him.

And this backyard was no backyard at all, but actually miles of forest that actually connected up with another farm and pasture when you finally caught up to it.

My brothers and I, yeah, we used to love to walk those trails and find new paths and pick berries along the way.

That was the happiest time I was as a child.

Back at school in the city, the more I would try to fit in, the more differently I would be treated.

And there would always be that question, even from the teachers.

"What are you?"

And I'd be afraid to say because the jokes would always follow.

"Well, can you make it rain?"

"Can you walk on fire?"

Whether it was being bullied or physically attacked, I never knew what was gonna come next.

It was a deepful, painful time in my life.

And as a result, I found a way to cope with that-- or at least I thought I did-- and that was through alcohol.

And by the age of 16, I was drinking quite frequently.

Depression and alcohol was a d-- a way of life.

And things started going bad at home, so I was spending a lot of time in the streets.

And I was able to work just enough to keep my alcohol supply coming.

And right after high school, I joined the military, and did a lot more drinking.

By the age 22, I was in a rehab facility.

Now as a kid, I had watched many of my own relatives die at a young age, younger than I was, from alcohol.

And I seemed to be heading in the same way.

Then there was that one day that changed my life.

I was in that stale cot there in the rehab, and the TV was on, and I looked over, and of all things, it was a PBS documentary.

(scattered laughter) And they were talking about Christopher Columbus and the discovery of the "New World."

That piqued my interest.

And I listened in earnest.

And the narrator went on to talk about how alcohol was brought to the New World and it was weaponized against the Indigenous population to destroy their culture and steal their land.

And as he spoke, time seemed to stand still.

I had emotions rising up inside me that I could not fully articulate.

I wanted to scream, laugh, cry, all at the same time.

There was this reverberation, crying out for justice from my ancient voices that were within me.

And when I left that facility, I never drank again after that day.

That began my journey of sobriety and my mission to learning about everything I could.

And I immediately sought out my grandfather.

I had so many questions for him.

I wanted to know all about our culture.

Who took our land?

Where are all the things that were left out of the books?

And how do we get our land back?

And my grandfather told me the stories of his childhood.

He told me how they had to hunt and grow their own food and how they shared stories.

He told me how his relatives and uncles would carve bows, baskets and crafts and sell them to whites because they weren't allowed to work in white spaces.

There would be signs that would say: "No dogs or Indians allowed."

And I learned that we have over 60 Nipmuc ancestors who fought in the Civil War.

Fighting for a freedom that they did not have themselves.

And after the war, they were promised a pension.

But when they died, their spouses never received it.

And what's worse, their land was confiscated because they were considered wards of the state.

Now after coming out of this alcoholic fog and learning of such sorrow, it was quite overwhelming.

And that's when my grandfather talked to me about the healing medicine of the drum and the power it carries.

And we got together with our family.

We held awakening ceremonies with the drum.

And we did ceremony after ceremony.

The one thing I remember that my grandfather told me, he said, "Take this drum.

It's gonna heal you.

"It's gonna take you many places, and it's gonna help you out a lot."

And at the time, I did not see it, but my grandfather was so right.

Through the drum, and then later, my writing, it has taken me around the world to share the story of my people and our journey for close to over 35 years.

But the one thing my grandfather told me, he says, "Keep it going."

And above that, I'll always remember this one thing that I did with my grandfather.

That first time I got the chance to sing to him.

We were at my mom's house, and, uh, Grandpa had just finished his tea, and he was heading out to the backyard to sit under that cherry tree to smoke his pipe.

And I followed behind with drum in hand, and I began to sing, and I saw a smile on his face and a nod of approval.

(singing in Algonquin) (singing in Algonquin continues) Thank you.

(cheers and applause) BRUNER: My name's Anneliese Bruner.

I live in Washington D.C., where I've been for about 40 years now.

I work as a writer and editor.

I'm also a storyteller and essayist.

I'm originally from San Francisco, California, where my father and his mother relocated from Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Is telling a story on stage new for you?

Being on stage is not new for me.

I have danced on stage and told stories through movement.

I've sang on stage and told stories through song.

- Mm-hmm.

- But as far as speaking, yes, this would be new for me in terms of my storytelling arc.

What are you hoping that the audience might take away from your story tonight?

The importance of memory and how that can be manipulated by the media, for example, how that can be affected by what the curricula are in different school settings, how laws can be put into place that dictate what stories are told and how they're told.

During the winter of 1993, 1994, I was visiting my father in San Francisco, like I did every year since I had moved to Washington, D.C. in 1984.

But this year was different.

We're sitting around laughing and lying, and, uh, he summoned me to his room.

He said, "Liese, I have something to give you."

So, I sat down while he went to his papers and pulled out an oversized manila envelope.

Out of it, he took a little red book, cloth-covered, very small, and on the cover it said, "Events of the Tulsa Disaster by Mrs. Mary E. Jones Parrish."

"That was your great-grandmother," he said.

Shocked silence from me.

I had never seen her name nor heard her name before.

"I want you to see if you can do something with this book."

"Like what?"

I was baffled.

He said, "Well, you're the matriarch of the family."

Another bombshell for me.

(audience laughs) I was only 35 years old and nobody had died.

I was like, "What is he talking about?"

But he said, "I think that you are the one "who is the keeper of stories in our family, and I trust you to carry this legacy forward."

I was shocked.

I hadn't heard of the story before, but I learned at that moment that, over a period of about 20 hours and under the pretext of avenging the alleged attack by a Black teenager on a white teenager, a mob assembled.

The police deputized and armed white Tulsans.

The Oklahoma National Guard was deployed to round up Black Tulsans.

Detention camps were up and running.

Skies were filled with planes dropping turpentine bombs on a 35-square, uh, block neighborhood.

White women had a chance to go home.

They knew the attack was coming, gather their shopping bags, and go and loot the well-appointed homes in the Greenwood District.

As though it were a real fire sale.

It was executed with military precision, well-planned.

How did I not know this?

Why had he never said anything?

Fast forward to January, uh, six, 2021.

I was sitting on my couch in my home office.

Since that time, when I got the book, I had become a writer and editor and I had a movie script in the back of my mind.

I had started it, but it lay fallow.

My dad had since passed away.

And a few months before he died, he said, "Liese, do you still have that book?"

I said, "Yes, Dad, I still have the book."

I reassured him.

I don't think he grasped how important that was to me.

It was a family treasure, and I considered it such, and I was going to do something with it, the way he asked.

As I sat on the couch...

...I was thinking about something else my dad left me.

I have a disease condition called lymphedema that causes my legs to swell, and every day I have to sit and use a pneumatic pump to drain excess fluid off my legs.

And that's why I was sitting there that day looking at Twitter.

Lo and behold, the Capitol was being overrun.

In my mind, which went directly back to Tulsa a hundred years before, the situation was very alike.

An angry mob, people who were disgruntled, and they were going to resort to violence.

I was compelled by what was happening to write an article for The Washington Post likening the two events.

In my mind, they were very similar.

That same year, 2021, we republished my great-grandmother's book under the title The Nation Must Awake.

To promote the book, I had done lots of interviews, lots of panels, but I had never been to Tulsa, then or before.

So, as part of the promotion process, went to Tulsa and stood on the very street before 103 Greenwood Avenue, where my great-grandmother and my small grandmother of seven lived at the time of the massacre.

In her book, she describes how she looked out the window and thought to herself, "I'd rather die by gunshot than to burn up in these buildings," because the whole row was on fire.

They ran into the street, her grasping her seven-year-old's hand, and a man shouted out, "Get out of the street immediately, or you'll both be killed!"

She turned north and ran to freedom to save her life.

In that moment, reading that account, I thought to myself, "Were it not for her actions at that moment in time, I wouldn't be here."

My complete existence would have been erased.

And now, within schools, there are efforts to erase Black history, to erase this particular story and other stories, including the stories of 109-year-old survivors who are still fighting for reparations.

They're before the Oklahoma Supreme Court right now.

I think that Mary Parrish, her story, the story of Black Wall Street, deserve to be remembered, cherished, honored, and uplifted.

Thank you.

(applause) WATANABE: I'm Paul Watanabe.

I'm from Utah.

You think of Utah as being white and Mormon.

I'm neither of them, but I grew up in Utah after my family ended up in Utah after the World War II internment camps.

I've been a professor at University of Massachusetts, Boston for almost 45 years.

What drives your passion for teaching and educating?

WATANABE: When I went to college in the '60s and '70s, the turmoil around the war in Vietnam and about Civil Rights and so forth made me clear that universities were a place where I saw many college professors who used it as a base, that they used it not to hide away from the ills of society, but to get involved in them.

And they saw students drawn to them and so forth.

I thought, this is a place I want to be.

I want to be a place where the action is.

And when you reflect back on your career, what do you hope is your legacy?

How do you hope to be remembered?

Well, I saw my parents, who were in some respects silenced during World War II, and subsequently afterwards, that they were not allowed to be able to speak their own minds about what was happening to them.

And this is something I think prevailed against not only them, but other people like them, and not only Japanese Americans during the internment period, but other people of color in the United States in various ways.

And I decided that, that I would not be one who sits by idly and lets this happen, that I was going to be the voice that they could not be.

So I'm sitting in my home in Weymouth, Massachusetts, and the phone rings.

And I know it's an emergency because it's the landline that's ringing, because the only people who know my landline are the people back in Utah, where I grew up.

And that's where my mother lives, who's an elderly woman.

And it's from my niece who tells me that my mother isn't doing very well, and I should probably come home and talk, visit with her.

So I get on the plane and fly into Utah to visit my mother.

And I'm thinking about my mother in terms of the thing that we all think about if we're Japanese Americans, and that's the internment period, the period we were incarcerated by our own government.

And I think about my mother's experience there, and I want to seek some reconciliation and reckoning with that.

And I figured that this might be the last time I have an opportunity to do so.

So I visit with my mother.

And my mother is an interesting person.

She was born in the United States of America, because her family happened to be farming in the United States, in Idaho at the time.

And thus her name is Ida Watanabe.

If she was born in Tennessee, it'd be something like Tennessee Watanabe, but fortunately, she was born in Idaho, so her name is Ida Watanabe.

And although she was born in-in-in Idaho, she's the only one in her family or any family, any immediate family that I know of that's a United States citizen.

All of them went back to Japan at the age of three.

And she was raised in Japan, went to school in Japan, and she got an education.

She got a high school education, which is something for a young woman to get in Japan in 1920s and '30s, and she had gotten a job at Mitsubishi after getting her degrees in Japan.

It was then to come to the United States, fatefully, in 1941 of all years.

And she came in the spring of 1941 to marry my father, who was already here in the United States, but he wasn't an American citizen.

And so my brother was born five days before Pearl Harbor on December 2nd, 1941.

So here was a family at the fateful time of Pearl Harbor when the United States, a couple months later, with Executive Order 9066, signed by Franklin Roosevelt, called for the internment and the removal of all people of Japanese descent, aliens and non-aliens alike.

They didn't even dare call them citizens on the posters.

They didn't have the guts to call them citizens.

They were throwing citizens into camps as well.

120,000 of them thrown in concentration camps, in America's concentration camps.

And my family was first sent to the Santa Anita racetrack to live in horse stalls because they had to live in some place where living things had lived before while their camps were being finished.

Now, my mother, she was not somebody who I thought of as a great rabblerouser.

And so when I went home, I thought the reckoning would be that we would thank her for being such a wonderful mother, raising myself and my two brothers and our children, we turned out quite well.

We went to school, we went to college, we got degrees and so forth, quite successful.

And she seemed to have a good life in the sense that she was lauded by many people, being such a wonderful mother and raising such a wonderful family.

But it became clear to me that that was not enough for her.

I think she saw an opportunity to be something more than just somebody who took care of her family.

At some point along the way, near her death, she turned to me one day and she said, "You know, Paul, I hate the United States."

What she hated about the United States is what it had done to her.

It had sort of forced her, this young woman who had choices and hopefully had choices about her life and possibilities of being something other than what she became.

She ended up cleaning people's houses and working in the cafeteria at the university I went to, University of Utah, and this is what her life ended up being.

And during the war, many people, many Japanese Americans sort of justified their position by taking attitude of so-called shikata ga nai, which in Japanese means "it can't be helped."

And then in another way, they sort of rationalized their position of giving up their own hopes for their children by saying, kodomo no tame ni, which means "for the sake of the children."

And I always hated that term because I think it robbed her of her wellbeing in order to try to protect our wellbeing.

And so subsequently to that, a loyalty oath essentially was passed.

So the United States made a decision in the second year that it needed to have more soldiers to fight for it.

So it decided to draft young men from the camps themselves.

And so they had to have some basis for it.

So they asked these two questions, amongst other questions in the loyalty oath, number one is: are you willing to fight for the United States of America in its armed forces?

Or the women were asked, are you willing to serve in the Women's Army Corps?

And secondly, they asked, were you willing to forswear allegiance to the Emperor of Japan and give unqualified allegiance to the United States of America?

Clearly, the right answer was to say yes, yes, that I will in fact be loyal to the United States and be willing to serve in the military.

But she said no, no.

6,000 or so people said "no, no" to this question.

My mother was one of a handful of women who said no, no.

I think what she was is a young 20-year-old woman who said screw you to the government of the United States of America that had sent her and her family into this camp, this situation.

She took some agency, and she said, "I'm not going to stand for this and I'm going to say 'no, no.'"

And she paid for it.

Her family paid for it.

If you said no, no, you're place under scrutiny.

The FBI investigated you, and people looked at you, and the Attorney General came in and looked at you and they determined that she was a security threat, this 20-year-old woman and her young child and her husband were security threats to the United States and therefore had to be segregated.

And they were moved to Tule Lake, which is the most serious camp of all, where the most serious threats to the American security were placed.

And she made a decision at that time, that my father said he was going to seek repatriation back to Japan.

And to do so, she had to renounce her citizenship because she was an American citizen.

Because the government will never take your citizenship away, generally speaking.

It's something that you do the most heinous crime of all, and yet you still retain your citizenship.

So she was forcibly asked to renounce her citizenship, which she did.

At the end of the war, however, when she heard back finally from people in Japan, they said, "Don't come, there's nothing to come to."

They lived in Nagoya, Japan, which had been firebombed like other parts of the area, and there was nothing to come to.

And they said, don't come back.

So she stayed in the United States and stayed at Tule Lake and got out of Tule Lake in the spring of 1946.

Partially, my reckoning with this was to go to Manzanar itself.

And the first time I did so, I took some students from one of the classes which I teach.

I teach two classes on the internment.

I took students from my research class to go with me.

And I didn't ever visit the camp with my mother.

And I always felt a little guilty that I didn't take her, but I took students and I realized why I had taken students.

Then in some ways, I wondered whether they could feel the same thing I did.

That what happened to her and 120,000 others like her should not be repeated again.

And the students, they're about 20 years old, I recognize about the same age as my mother when she first came to the United States.

And they're students, like you might imagine, filled with promise, thinking about what they're going to do with their degrees and their careers and their lives.

And yes, being fine parents is part of this, but it's not the whole of their existence.

They want to be more than that.

And I realized that they understood what my mother stood for, that my mother did not want what happened to her to ever happen again to any other mothers or any children that they ever had.

And that my students understood this, that they had to carry on the message of my mother, that they had to recognize this experience and realize that it should never happen again to any other future generation.

And I understood immediately the new meaning of the term kodomo no tame ni, "for the sake of the children."

It was for the sake of the children that I was taking these students now to carry on my mother's message.

Thank you very much.

(applause) ♪