Indigenous Voices In American History With Shelly Lowe

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Welcome to what’s your why? I am your host, Emy Digrappa. What’s your why is supported and produced by Wyoming Humanities. This show delves into the human experience through our diverse DNA, using storytelling to highlight culture, community, history, literature and art. You can learn more about us@thinkwide.org that’s thinkwy.org.         

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and don’t forget to follow us so that you never miss a show.         

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My special guests today, Shelly Lowe, chairwoman of Wyoming Humanities. She is a citizen of the Navajo Nation and the first Native American to chair Wyoming Humanities, which we’ll call NE from now on. She grew up on the Navajo reservation in Granado, Arizona. Chair Lowe has a history of scholarship in the field of native American studies from working as executive director at Harvard University in native American programming and assistant dean and director of the Native Wyoming Humanities center at Yale University. And my other special guest is our very own Wyoming Humanities executive director, Shawn Reese.         

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Shawn has an extensive background and a long tenure working with Wyoming Humanities before he became director of Wyoming Humanities. And he is very passionate about what he is doing for our organization today. Thanks, Shawn. So welcome to both of you. And in this conversation, especially with Shelly Lowe, I was so fascinated and honored that you’re the first native American to be chairing the NEH and the humanities become my love and passion working for Wyoming Humanities.         

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And so I want to hear your story and your journey. So my first question to you is, tell me about your family and tell me about growing up on the reservation in Arizona. Okay, well, thank you, Emy. So delighted to be here. Yat esh e shelley lo yanashe pelegana nishlin anastasia tachini basheshim bilaganand dasha che dotrabah dashanale lokante nasha do washindon deschigan.         

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My name is s

Shelly Lowe. I am Navajo. I’m from Ganado, Arizona. I now live in Washington, DC, and I work as a chair of National Endowment for the Humanities. But I grew up in northeast Arizona on the Navajo reservation, and I was surrounded by family.         

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I grew up with my mother’s side of the family. My mother’s white. My father is Navajo, but all of my aunts and uncles attended the same schools I did, all graduated the same high school I did. All knew everybody, all the parents of my friends. I tell people, couldn’t really do anything because if you did something bad, they would tell your grandparents because everybody knew who my family was.         

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Everybody knew kind of how to, how to make sure that I was behaving right. It was beautiful. I grew up playing in a lot of dirt. We actually just had this conversation with the resident artist here at the moment. You know, that was our pastime, being outside and, you know, just running around, playing with my cousins, but also really being immersed both, you know, surrounded in the Navajo culture, in school, at church, just in the community, and really kind of having a really nice.         

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I would say it was nice and calm. No cell phones, no electronics, hardly. But the one thing that I didn’t realize until it was about time for me to graduate high school, I grew up in Ganado and I grew up in Arizona, but I didn’t really have that understanding because it’s kind of like today I turned the tv on to watch the local news, and the news is from Montana, and I was like, well, how am I supposed to know what’s going on here in Cody, Wyoming, if your news is from Montana? When I grew up, all of our news, our radio, our newspaper, everything came from New Mexico. We did all of our grocery shopping in New Mexico.         

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So I grew up much more kind of understanding New Mexico, but having an Arizona residency, an Arizona address. So it was a kind of a strange way of kind of being on the reservation, but you’re just kind of in between these two states, and you’re just kind of, you know, living and having fun and really kind of just being surrounded by culture and family. And I think that was the bigger part of my childhood. Oh, my gosh. I didn’t know that about you because my dad was born in New Mexico, so I have a big New Mexican heritage.         

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Yes. Right. Well, you know, I was born in New Mexico. We did all our shopping in New Mexico. Oh, my gosh.         

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That is Gallup, New Mexico. Oh, wow. That’s great. That’s great to hear. And I love hearing, you know, that you played in the dirt.         

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Yes. A lot. A lot. Yeah. And I think, you know, I miss that today.         

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In our youth today and our little people, there’s not enough playing in the dirt. I think going outside. Go outside? Yes. Yeah.         

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Yeah. We were outside all day. I know. I don’t even think half the time my mom knew where we were because we were all over the place. I was either at one grandparents house, the other grandparents house, cousin’s house, friends house.         

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Yeah, I know that. But there was nowhere else to go, so. Yeah, that’s fun. Well, I want to ask you what and who. Who inspired you to go on to higher education after you graduated from high school?         

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You know, I have actually kind of a sad story about that. You know, I grew up in Navajo. We were always taught education was the road. Right? Education is the ladder.         

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You go and get educated, and then you can come back and you can bring your skills and the knowledge that you gain back to the community. But nobody ever talked to me about college. It was a really strange kind of experience to be told constantly that education is the way to go. But nobody ever said, this is what it means to go to college. This is how you go to college.         

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My parents divorced when I started high school or my freshman year of high school. So there was kind of also that kind of, you know, sometimes people don’t handle divorce very well or, you know, there’s other things that are priorities for parents, especially when you’re going through difficult situations like that. And I spent a lot of time kind of in between my mom and my dad. And then I ended up with my grandparents, living with my grandparents. And it got to the point where my grandparents, my mother’s parents are so on my white side, were retiring after 30 plus years teaching in the school system.         

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And I was a junior in high school. Well, they were going to leave at the end of that year. So it was kind of like, what am I going to do? How am I going to finish senior year? So we petitioned and asked for me to be able to graduate high school after my junior year.         

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So I told my mom this. My mom had left the reservation, and she said, well, what are you going to do? And I said, I guess I’ll go to college. And she said, how are you going to pay for it? And I said, I don’t know.         

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I tried to get a scholarship. So that was kind of the extent of my mom talking to me about college. But it turned out I took the act and I scored very well. And a counselor in my high school saw my score and knew about a scholarship in the state of Arizona. And you had to have a certain act or SAT score to apply.         

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So she was very excited, and she sat me down and said, I want you to apply for this scholarship. And I said, okay, this happens a lot to me as I go through my college career. I want you to apply for this scholarship. Okay. And she told me what it was, and it’s for students in the state of Arizona.         

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It’s a full ride all four years. You have to go in state, and it’s for Arizona high school students. And I had to do an interview, so I did the application, and they called me in for an interview, and we sat down for a couple days to try to learn Arizona facts because, like I said, I knew all about New Mexico. I didn’t know a whole lot about Arizona. And here it was, this Arizona focused scholarship.         

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So I got down to this. I had to go to Phoenix, and I did this interview, and nobody asked me anything about Arizona. And I was like, well, what do we spend all that time thinking about Arizona for? Well, I got the scholarship. So that, you know, that kind of propelled me into this track of going into college.         

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And once I got the scholarship, I had current scholars with the scholarship calling me. I had universities calling me. All of a sudden, everybody was talking to me about college. But it wasn’t until I took the act, I got that score, and a counselor said, guess what? You need to apply for this scholarship.         

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That was the extent of my conversations about going to college. Oh, my gosh. You really had a lot of self-determination. I was a pretty independent person. Yes.         

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At that age. Mm hmm. That’s amazing. And then from there, why education? So when I went, so I got into the three universities in Arizona, the state universities, and I chose to go to the University of Arizona in Tucson.         

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And I had never been to the campus before. Right. I had been to Phoenix maybe a couple of times, maybe a handful of times. I was much more familiar with Flagstaff at Northern Arizona University, but I decided to go to the University of Arizona. Everybody kept saying, you know, that’s where these students with this scholarship go.         

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It’s the better school in Arizona. You need to go to University of Arizona. And I got there, and I hated it. It was hot. I had never lived in an environment that was that hot.         

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I’d never lived in the desert like that before. I had never been around so many. There were thousands of students at that university. It was large. Not anything near what the community I grew up in.         

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They wore hardly any clothes, which really freaked me out. I was like, I don’t know what’s going on here. And I really struggled that first year and struggled because it was such a shock to me. It was such a different environment, such a different community. Conversations were different.         

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What people were talking about was different. But not only that, I had so many people telling me, well, you know, you only got here because you’re native. You only got in because you’re native, and you only got the scholarship because you’re native and you’re going to drop out. All native students drop out. And I had students telling me that.         

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I had staff telling me. I even had faculty members telling me, you know, native students don’t graduate, you’re just going to drop out. And that was really hard. I’d never heard people kind of really say to you before, like, you’re not going to do it. You can’t do it.         

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I was always told, go get your education. You know, even though nobody talked to me about college. So I really struggled that first year, and I had to kind of assess and think what’s going on, right. I’m very capable. I got this really prestigious scholarship.         

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I should be able to do this. And I went back and I really got focused, and I decided that this isn’t right. Why am I having such a hard time? And I started to notice and pay attention and do some of the research, and it was, you know, that was showing up in the research. Native students were not graduating college.         

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They were really struggling. So that became my goal. What is going on here and how do we fix it? Right. Absolutely.         

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Now that you are chair at the NEH, which is all about critical thinking and education and, you know, of course, storytelling and just the heart of the why of why we do what we do. What are the special initiatives that you’re working on that you would like to see progress and succeeded at the national level? Well, when I came into the position, I had had six years on the national council, so I had time to really get a good sense of what Neh was funding. Right? What kind of applications were coming in, what was being recommended for funding, what wasn’t being recommended for funding.         

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And so when I was confirmed for the job and I started, you know, I had to do a lot of interviews, and I got a lot of, like, what’s your vision for the agency? And the first time I was asked that, I was like, I didn’t know I was supposed to have a vision for the agency. I don’t know. And, you know, you always think, oh, you have to have some grand idea, some grand vision. And I said, you know, I don’t know that I have a grand vision, but I just want to fund all of those organizations that we haven’t been funding.         

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And especially, you know, I would go through our books about who would be funded, who wouldn’t be funded, and I’d see community colleges, tribal colleges, tribal communities, small museums, very rural places not being recommended. Those projects were not being recommended. And we were funding great things, of course. But, you know, I wanted to say, why? How do we figure out how to fund all of these organizations?         

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I was at a conference once where a, one of the staff members was, this was, you know, when I was on the council, she was presenting about our funding lines. And he said, I don’t know why you keep coming to talk to us. You don’t fund small organizations. And I was like, you know, I’ve seen the lists of our funding. I kind of agree with him.         

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And so that was what I wanted to do. And thankfully, when I came in, the Wyoming Humanities administration had kind of their priorities that they wanted to advance in the administration. You know, equity for all. Of course, democracy. Really thinking about things that I said, those are the things that I have been very interested in.         

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And yes, this is what we want to do. So coming in, we had a really nice conversation with the staff, and I do have to applaud the staff and the directors of our programs because they are very much keeping aware of what’s going on in the field. They know what’s going on. When I came in and I said, I want to do this, they saw, you know, many of them said, yeah, you’re right, we haven’t been doing that. And they said, you know, our grant lines aren’t really set up well to fund smaller organizations.         

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So we were able to create American tapestry, the American Tapestry initiative that will allow us to really think about key areas, equity, democracy. Right. And then, of course, our changing climate, but being able to create some brand new grant programs that allow us to really encourage smaller organizations to apply. So these are smaller grant total funds that are more manageable for these organizations to one apply to, but to make use of and report on. But also, you know, things that didn’t take multiple years, like they were shorter grant lines, they were just easier, and they were hopefully fitting the needs of these small organizations.         

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And I’m happy to say that we’ve had quite a bit of a great response to these new applications or these new grant lines that we’ve been able to develop. But I said, you know, this is great. This is one thing we’ve been able to do. But there are a couple other things that I was really excited about that I said, this is exactly what we need to do, and this is exactly where we have the strength to be able to do this work. And the very first, I came in very clear saying shortly after I came in, the first federal Indian boarding school initiative report was released.         

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And, you know, I, one of the reasons I said I would interview for the job was because I had seen Deb Holland become secretary of the interior. And I was like, you know what? If I get this job, I get to work with her. And I think that that’s pretty cool. So I said, we have to be able to support this work.         

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This is exactly what we do in the humanities. It’s about telling our history. It’s about knowing what our archives and our materials are, and it’s about being able to educate other individuals about it. So we are partnering with the interior on this initiative, and we’ve been able to help digitize the federal records pertaining to boarding schools. But, you know, we’ve been able to move this forward and help to fund the oral history project that has now started with the Native American Board and school healing Coalition.         

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And this, to me, is extremely important work, something we have never done as a country. We’ve watched Canada do it, we’ve watched Australia do it, but we haven’t ever done it. And it’s extremely difficult. You know, I’ve been in communities when they’ve done their listening sessions with Secretary Holland and Assistant Secretary Nuland. I’ve been there as individuals have kind of thought about this in their own tribal communities and heard them say to, you know, basically to the interior, you come and you listen to us and you leave.         

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And now what? What are you going to do after that? And I said, you know, we could do something. We could come back and say, yes, we are the federal government. We are still here to help you move through this very difficult process and this difficult history that we all have to tell.         

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So we’ve been moving that forward, and it’s just the start, right? This is a long process. This is going to be years. And I really want to ensure that the federal government, including any agencies that we’re working very closely with, that we continue to move this forward because it is such an important history, and it’s a history that I still have people come up to me and say, I didn’t know that this happened in the United States. I understand because I have, you know, we didn’t tell that history.         

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Right? We haven’t never presented it. But if we’re going to do it, we need to do it in the right way. We need to do it with the right resources, and we need to have the right people evolve. So, neh, I hope, will continue this work and we’ll see this as the years progress.         

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The second part of that is to support the Pacific islands. So I had had the opportunity over the years, particularly working with indigenous students in higher ed, to meet our indigenous Pacific Islander students who, and to learn that we have Pacific island jurisdictions in the United States who don’t have the right to vote in the United States but are part of the United States. And it was such a, like what? How come nobody ever told me this? This is my question all the time.         

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How come I never learned this? But then to understand how they are very similar to native tribal communities in the United States, right. They’re trying to maintain their cultures or trying to maintain their languages, and there are so many things that are really pushing against them and they get so little support from the federal government. So I said, you know, we have so many opportunities to be able to support that work. So we’ve created the Pacific Island Cultural Initiative, and our Pacific island jurisdictional councils have signed an agreement in MoU to work together to really build capacity and to, to really strengthen their humanities programming and their humanities networking in the area.         

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So we’ve been really excited to be able to move that forward. That’s a multi year project. And, you know, it’s, I think a lot of it is about bringing those hidden stories forward, that history that we all haven’t learned, and making people understand that this is a part of what America is, right. It’s part of what makes America great and beautiful, and we all need to know that. So now in this part of the interview, I want Shawn to brag about Wyoming Humanities and what great humanities work we do.         

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So this is our opportunity with you, Chair Lowe. Yeah. Thanks, Emy. And so happy you’re here. I understand this is the second to last state you haven’t visited.         

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That’s correct. Both in my personal and professional life. So I haven’t hit 49 states in the job yet. Well, we’re very excited to have you here. It’s a special place, as you can tell.         

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It’s, you know, fun fact, Wyoming has two escalators in the state. We have more antelope than we have people. I think I heard that we drive the most of any other state. So for me to drive to Cody, five and a half hour trip, it’s nothing. That’s just what you do.         

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We’re very spread apart. We have a very interesting history, and our opportunity is to bring more of the stories into that history than have been told before. And what we also see, particularly after Covid. And just with the national tenor of things going on, our community profiles are changing and there’s new people moving in. So it’s a great opportunity for us to be able to bring people together through storytelling and sharing of ideas.         

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And sometimes that involves teaching people how to speak civilly with one another. It’s kind of a lost art and science of democracy, which is to be able to speak civilly together. So one of the really cool things that we are doing right now is an opportunity that you’ve provided the state councils, which is a program called United we stand. And maybe you’d want to talk a little. Do you want to tee up where that program came from?         

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And then I can share with you what we’ve been doing? Sure. So in September of 2022, I had been on the job for about eight months, and the Wyoming Humanities administration hosted the United we stand summit. And it brought together federal agencies, it brought together local leaders in state, state leaders, and individuals who came together to talk about how do we as a nation confront the violence that we were seeing, particularly hate motivated violence. And it was an extremely emotional, powerful, bipartisan summit.         

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And we came out of that trying to each federal agency define and identify ways that we could do our work to support combating hate motivated violence. And so I love our state councils and jurisdictional councils. And anytime that we have the opportunity to do something at the national level, I always say, well, let’s ask our state councils if they want to be a part of it. And so we opened up the opportunity for each state council to propose a project under united we stand, things that they could do in their state to do exactly that, to talk about ways to confront this hate motivated violence, to bring about understanding, openness, right, to bring people together. And we were proud to say all 56 of our state and jurisdictional councils applied for programming and all got funded to do something.         

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So I’m very excited to hear what Wyoming has done. So we took a look at what was happening in our communities and thought, you know, what are the ways in which we can curb violence? How can we increase welcoming of the stranger? How can we just get our communities to talk in a civil manner in a better way? So we found this organization called living room conversations and living room conversations.         

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Their mission is to bring people together and have a conversation around a challenging topic, but teaching people how to do that, how to increase the listening, how to find empathy with people that you may not agree with. And this organization has all sorts of different topics that they’ve had built discussion guides around belonging, tribalism in our communities, how to talk about politics in a very divided atmosphere. So we used our NEH united we stand funding to train facilitators in communities around the state in this art and science of living room conversations. We provided them with funding for food and beverage, because often that is something that brings people together to be able to break bread, particularly with our tribal communities. And then they were to choose a topic such as belonging, or welcoming the stranger, or things that are consistent with the united we stand purposes.         

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And then after those conversations, where they invite in different generations, different people, the goal was to find a mix of people, a mix of perspectives, a mix of backgrounds, to have conversations that are otherwise very challenging. And then, in addition to providing funding for those conversations, we said, whatever comes out of these conversations, if you see a community improvement project, we will provide funding for that project to come to fruition. So we’ve called this discuss and construct, having conversations around challenging topics, and then constructing solutions in the community. And to give you a few examples of the cool things that have happened in Sheridan, Wyoming, they chose the topic about belonging. And there happens to be a girls school in Sheridan.         

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And one of the stories I recall is there was a young woman who was graduating or leaving that girls school, and she was going to regular public school, and she was very nervous about it. She didn’t know people in the school system. She was scared. They had this community conversation about belonging, and they target it to young people. And in that conversation, she met other people, like-minded people that she was able to become friends with.         

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And then as a result of that conversation, they developed an entire youth summit around the topic of belonging. And that’s, if you think about that age group, belonging or not belonging is one of those things that really can affect one’s trajectory of one’s life. One other example, our idea is, wouldn’t it be cool if every county library had a facilitator who could host challenging conversations? So, in addition to going to the library to check out a book, you’d be able to check out someone who could mediate difficult conversations in a. In a very structured and thoughtful way.         

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So the library in Casper, Natrona County Public Library, they hosted a couple living room conversations. They were so successful in bringing different people together and working through issues that they used their construction dollars to purchase a moving living room set, that they move around different places in downtown. I think their plan is to take it to the mall so they can have more impromptu living room conversations. So it’s really, for us, it’s about finding the redefining the art and science of civil conversations. And I think to be able to better share stories and ideas and listen is fundamental to not only who we are as an organization, but to being able to combat hate and violence and polarization in our communities.         

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We’re very excited about that. We’ve also. A lot of our emphasis has been under this umbrella that we’re calling native narratives. And the stories and ideas that we’re traditionally exposed to don’t always include our sovereign friends and communities. And here in Wyoming, we have a unique situation where we have two tribes on one reservation, eastern Shoshone and northern Arapaho.         

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But there were many other tribes here. So we’ve been doing a lot with Plains Indian sign language, which was a really cool, universal language that is easily picked up by anyone. But it’s a dying language, like so many other dying languages. So been working with a former board member of ours, Willie LeClaire, who passed away to record these conversations or putting together a travel app of stories of places of significance to the eastern Shoshone, told in sign language and told in pictures and stories. I think it’s a really beautiful project.         

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We’re also. We feel very strongly that state of Wyoming passed this important legislation, the Indian Education for all Act. The intention is to be able to teach native government, history, storytelling, science in schools across the state. One of the limiting factors is that teachers may not know who to reach out to on the reservation to come to their school. And those people, those elders or scholars on the reservation, they need funding to be able to travel to these schools.         

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So we’re setting up, and Emy’s been very involved in this, a database of native scholars and experts who are willing to help not only schools, but museums if they have questions about their exhibits or libraries, if they want presentations, people who are willing to share their indigenous knowledge and providing them the funding to do so, because indigenous knowledge should not just be given, it has value, and it should be respected by compensation. So those are a couple of things I’m really excited about right now. I’ll tell you what I’m excited about, storytelling, because that’s what I do as executive producer, is produce two podcasts, what’s your why? And winds of change. And I think that is what we’re doing as people in passing on our culture, our heritage.         

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Its community building is through storytelling. So thank you both for being my guests, and, yeah, thank you, Shelly Lowe. For sharing your stories. Yes, thank you. It’s so exciting to be here to see all of the great humanities work being done in the state.         

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Thank you so much. Yeah, thank you.         

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Thank you for joining us for this episode of what’s your why brought to you by Wyoming Humanities with support from Wyoming Humanities foundation and generous supporters like you. To learn more, go to thinkwide.org, subscribe and never miss a show.