00:00:03
Speaker 1: Gillete GOWNIHISTI di ga del quant. I'm learning how to speak Cherokee. Learning Cherokee is humbling. Recently, one of our Cherokee speakers told me that I speak as well as her granddaughter speaks English. Her granddaughter is five years old. That might sound like an insult, but I totally took it as a compliment. What she means she gets suggested what I'm saying, even if it's not correct. But today I'm not in Oklahoma learning Cherokee. I'm in the studio in La working on this podcast. If I was back home, I would be spending most of my time talking with fluent speakers and other second language learners like me. We'd be conjugating verbs, cooking wish making up stories. We tease each other and try and get in a jattie, which is basically the Cherokee equivalent of That's what she said. The time I get to spend learning my language is irreplaceable. But after just a couple weeks away, it's scary how rusty I feel already. There are a few Cherokee phrases that I want to use in this podcast. So I called John Ross, who you might remember from the last episode. John is a citizen of Cherokee Nation and works in Our Tribes Translation Department. I often visit with him in Cherokee. On this call, John patiently listens and corrects me like he always does. Oklaholm a og jelk ogaja cla c yoga jail, And that one in English means Oklahoma says that our, our Cherokee land is no longer ours. Ski souls horse do ski gey SKay. My editor was on the phone with us, and she asked us what we were saying. Oh, I say, uh ski all, which means.
00:02:02
Speaker 2: Like is that good? That's good.
00:02:10
Speaker 1: I was surprised I got it right. But the next phrase I kind of bombed. Squeeze ju lenard gohoo's anioea amayi ni uni too stuna and uh English, that's supposed to mean like the US has promised any and people a lot of different things. Uh squeeze ju leanard uni daoga, So like they broke a lot of the promises. And I don't know if that's the right word to use their like uni daoga.
00:02:43
Speaker 2: Dioga, that's a wrong, wrong word to use their It's like they broke all the treaties.
00:02:52
Speaker 1: Do doniyos all right, all right, squeeze j go hoo'st anyoiya ama yid uni to uni to east tuna. Squeeze ja donios tana.
00:03:15
Speaker 2: Yes, that's that's right.
00:03:18
Speaker 1: I got his corrections, and then I tried the whole thing and stumbled through saying. The US has promised Indians a lot of different things. A lot of those promises have been broken. Speakers like John are really patient with me when I just can't get a word right. I'm grateful because there's no way I would be able to learn my language without speakers who are willing to teach me. Kay skizda Lis, I'm here to help you. I'm learning Cherokee because it's endangered, and that's no coincidence. It's the result of more than a century of US policy. Earlier in this series, we told you this story of allotment, how the US divided up Native territory in Oklahoma and then opened it up to white settlers. The whole process was meant to take our land, but through it we lost so much more, and over one hundred years later, we are still living with the consequences. Today, Cherokee Nation is struggling to save our language from going extinct, and we're fighting to save our water and air from toxic Ruin this episode, I'm going to tell you these stories. These aren't stories that you'll recognize from the Murphy case. They weren't part of any of the briefs or the oral arguments. But there are some of the reasons why this case matters. Right now. We're asking the Supreme Court to affirm our treaty rights and to uphold the promises that were made to us, because we know what happens when those promises are broken. You're listening to This Land, a podcast about broken promises, tribal land, and murder. This year, the Supreme Court was supposed to decide whether half the land in Oklahoma is Indian Country, but in a shocking twist, they postponed their decision until next year. The fate of this land still hangs in the balance. From Cricket Media, I'm your host Rebecca N. Eagle, citizen of Cherokee Nation. Before allotment, Cherokee Nation ran its own schools. Our public school system was bilingual and classes were taught in both Cherokee and English.
00:05:47
Speaker 2: Lena Scanaga Lena soon Desk blasted down North Laska. When they got here after the trail, the tears Cherokees built over one hundred schools in Churkey Nation. They became the finest schools with the west of Mississippi River.
00:06:05
Speaker 1: Cherokee students had a higher literacy rate than their white neighbors. But in eighteen ninety eight, in the lead up to Oklahoma statehood, Congress passed the Curtis Act and abolished tribal schools.
00:06:18
Speaker 2: I need you electric goh's uh skanana doing death squashta. They closed all our schools. And when those were closed, which we just lost.
00:06:28
Speaker 1: That on at your own neck, the government came in and took control overnight. The very schools our tribe had built went from teaching the Cherokee language to punishing the students who dared to speak it. Cherokee was John's first language when he started school. He didn't speak English.
00:06:52
Speaker 2: Gone, I'll say your own nags to one Instagram. What I remember is you had to be able to speak to English. When I first started, the teachers would tell you something and you know you didn't know. And there were several us in that classroom that were the same way. We didn't speak English.
00:07:16
Speaker 1: Oklahoma's public schools started pushing English only education in the early nineteen hundreds, but well into the nineteen seventies, public school teachers punished Native kids for speaking their language.
00:07:30
Speaker 2: No uh, spelling dick pahonyak jed and if you didn't know how to spell, they give you a paddling. If you didn't know how to spell uh, depending on how many you missed, that's how many licks you got. That's how we were treated. You know, we didn't know how to speak English, so everyone who was cold just be you know, we were silent, didn't say nothing.
00:07:59
Speaker 1: Parents who were punish for speaking Cherokee didn't want their kids to go through the same thing, so they spoke English at home. Today, the youngest fluent Cherokee speaker is thirty.
00:08:10
Speaker 2: Eight, skinning sin. Who got a new one is John then Hanai Salui would want to skinder Gostanisa. A lot of Churkey speakers still left. But I never realized that it will be like this. You know, there's uh. We've lost a lot of them.
00:08:30
Speaker 1: Today, they are an estimated two thousand Cherokee speakers in Oklahoma. Most are John's age over sixty.
00:08:38
Speaker 2: I want no Kisla got forty five speakers that we lose in a month. You know. That's that's the ones I know, just you know the ones I know from being a young man and some kin folks, So four or five a month that we.
00:09:02
Speaker 1: Lose unless we do something about it. And soon Cherokee will no longer be spoken after the year twenty fifty by anyone.
00:09:12
Speaker 2: Hush the one he's gun Guys, you still geheg know it's good, dog Yo said. We're gonna lose everything if we don't have our Cherokee. We'll lose everything.
00:09:24
Speaker 1: If we lose our language, we lose our culture, our identity, we lose what it means to be Cherokee.
00:09:33
Speaker 2: Jeege Hanta diego west go hoost jos John no wood je leg he's a West Slot chant. Like the medicine man. When he goes out to gather medicines, he'll pray in Cherokee. And when he ministers the medicine, he's got a song in Cherokee that he sings.
00:10:00
Speaker 1: If you can't speak Cherokee, you can't practice Cherokee medicine.
00:10:07
Speaker 2: And as you said, there contina to go well, to go well, tell skin no anywhere tell skin no wood. That's what they used to say. If you don't know the language, you know, the medicines will not work. My great grandpa also was a medicine man on my mom's side, and he knew a lot of uh you know, his his writings in Cherokee, and uh you know, that's that's what he used. You gotta have Turkey to do the medicine work. And if we don't have that, we're going to lose our culture and medicine and and everything that we know because everything comes from our language.
00:10:56
Speaker 1: It's hard to describe how different Cherokee is from English. I took Spanish when I was in school, and learning Spanish was mostly learning the Spanish word for the English thing I wanted to say. I could take the map of English that I had in my brain and replace pieces of it with Spanish. Cherokee doesn't work that way. To learn Cherokee, I'm building a completely new map. Most Cherokee words you just can't say in English. I asked John to give me an example of a word that doesn't translate, but instead of giving me just a word, John told me the difference between Cherokee and English is his entire worldview.
00:11:36
Speaker 2: Look how I feel. I really can't express in English how I want to say things like I can in Cherokee. That's, you know, just the way I feel. I don't know how. Sometimes it's you just you know, you just you just don't say anything you can express yourself. And that's that's the hardest part for me, because sometimes I'll I'll be thinking in churchy, how do I say that? How do I say that? And plant plunge you jegotto jela gheind you go, waste go? Who's your own? Neg skuku tell you own.
00:12:23
Speaker 1: I can't imagine what it feels like for speakers like John to be born into a Cherokee world, and then as you grow old, fewer and fewer people understand you. It must be so lonely. Our elders hold our knowledge, they hold our culture, and they hold it in a language that young people don't understand, so we can't pass it on. No one wants to believe that one day we're going to lose our language. I can't believe it, but undeniably that's the direction it's going. We have one generation to reverse a century of US policy.
00:13:08
Speaker 2: Skin it's the nurse destination to Nica Yoga dos rule in Turkeys lost a lot of things, not only the land allotted, but they all sort of lost some of the things that they used to do.
00:13:25
Speaker 1: Usually when people think of what Native Americans lost, they think of land, but that's just what white people gained. What we lost is so much more. And now we're in danger of losing something else crucial to our survival.
00:13:42
Speaker 3: And so for me, this is home and I don't want to leave it. But I also want to be able to breathe, and I also want to be able to drink clean water.
00:13:52
Speaker 1: I'll tell you that story next. Like any small Cherokee communities, the one where Pam Kingfisher lives is built around a creek.
00:14:05
Speaker 4: Spring Creek is just beloved by everyone. It still has deep blue holes and it's just as cold as.
00:14:11
Speaker 2: It can be.
00:14:11
Speaker 4: It is spring fed. I live just over the hill, but we all swim in it. You know. People have raised their families and all of our kids on Spring Creek, so it really means a lot to everyone.
00:14:23
Speaker 1: Last summer, Pam, a citizen of Cherokee Nation, got some alarming news. Simmons Foods, a poultry farming business, was threatening Spring Creek and.
00:14:34
Speaker 4: They had put out a notice that they had heard there were going to be six houses built right on Spring Creek, right on the creek, on the flatland, in the farm just below the Oaks missions.
00:14:47
Speaker 1: She's talking about chicken houses, six industrial chicken houses.
00:14:53
Speaker 4: You know, we've all lived with chicken farmers, so that's been a part of our scenery for a long time. And now their house are sixty by six hundred, and they'll hold fifty thousand chickens, and it's just a whole new world.
00:15:06
Speaker 1: Fifty thousand chickens per house, meaning three hundred thousand chickens right on the creek. Pam and other residents started organizing to stop the chicken houses from being.
00:15:19
Speaker 4: Built, and so I started a Facebook page that night and started populating it and telling people what was going on.
00:15:27
Speaker 1: Pam lives in a small community called Terracita, but she soon found out that Spring Creek wasn't the only place facing an influx of chicken houses. Simmons Foods is headquartered in northwestern Arkansas, a forty five minute drive from where Pam lives. Simmons just put a big new processing plant near Gentry, right over the state line. The birds can only travel about an hour by truck from where they're raised to the slaughterhouses. So now Simmons is putting as many chicken houses as a can along a highway that leads to Gentry Highway for twelve. It's smack dab in the middle of Cherokee Nation. We reached out to Simmons to see if they had a response to the complaints we heard from residents that the chicken houses were harming their quality of life and the environment. Simmons PR director sent us back a three page pdf published by the University of Georgia Cooperative Extension Program titled Nuisance Myths and Poultry Farming. Interestingly, the pdf did incide any research or sources for its information. Under myth number two, poultry farms smell, the report claims that modern houses don't. I'm no scientists, but I've been around modern chicken houses in northeast Oklahoma and the stench is horrid. Brandy Wheeler lives near Highway for twelve in Leech, Oklahoma.
00:16:54
Speaker 3: We didn't grow up like this. I didn't grow up like this, and it's it's devastating.
00:17:01
Speaker 1: Today when you drive around Leech, chicken housers are growing up on every free piece of land. Brandy, a citizen of Cherokee, Nician, has lived here all her life. One of her favorite memories from childhood is the smell of honeysuckle in the spring.
00:17:17
Speaker 3: Oh my gosh, I always love that smell. It smells like life and beauty and new you know, you know, everything's blooming.
00:17:28
Speaker 1: But now when she drives around her hometown, all she smells is chicken manure.
00:17:35
Speaker 3: And now you've got to close your vance and roll up your windows and hold your breath. So it's it's sad.
00:17:47
Speaker 1: My producer, Gabrielle, and I met Brandy in front of the local elementary school. We hopped in her suv to get the lay of the land.
00:17:55
Speaker 3: We can count right here what's in this square mile, so you can get your calculator out and you can just ad.
00:18:02
Speaker 1: We pass a cluster of houses, so there's six right there. Then we turn left off the main highway and we're gonna go on this road.
00:18:10
Speaker 3: This is five sixty road. This right here is a predominantly Native American. So there's another six right here. Then there's these are the some more of the newer houses. There's six more right here, and this is all within a mile. There's another six down there, the red ones. Those set a little bit farther off, but you can see it's king.
00:18:39
Speaker 1: We come to an overpass over Highway four twelve. We're high enough we can see for miles, and in every direction are brand new chicken houses. The smell is overwhelming, the stench is harsh, chemicals mixed with foul at the same time. By this point in the tour, I've lost count of how many we had passed, but Brandy knows forty.
00:19:04
Speaker 3: Two houses within less than a mile. Those are industrial sized houses.
00:19:12
Speaker 1: How much litter is that? And what are they going to do with it?
00:19:15
Speaker 3: And where's it gonna go?
00:19:18
Speaker 1: When Brandy says litter, what she means is chicken and calculating the amount of chicken poop being dumped in Cherokee Nation is where this math gets even more alarming. Over two hundred new chicken houses have gone up in northeastern Oklahoma in the past two years. The chicken houses and Cherokee Nation now produce over one hundred and forty thousand tons of chicken poop a year. And that's just the amount farmers are reporting to the state. And it's not entirely clear yet what impact all that litter has on the health of residents.
00:19:49
Speaker 3: Whenever they're cleaning those houses out, you can literally see it looks like smoke coming out, but it's the dust, and it'll take your breath away.
00:20:03
Speaker 1: The chicken poop doesn't stay in the houses to get rid of it, The farmers spread it out over fields as fertilizer, putting even more of it into the air. Some days, the smell is so bad the local elementary school has to cancel recess, so.
00:20:19
Speaker 4: The little kids at Leech can't go out on certain days. But that's because all their neighbors are spreading litter.
00:20:26
Speaker 1: The stink is unforgettable.
00:20:29
Speaker 4: I don't know how to describe the that smell factor and perfume and all that, but it's a real high ammonia smell and harsh on the nose.
00:20:39
Speaker 1: According to the EPA, ammonia from animal waste can cause respiratory problems and even lung disease, so residents are worried about health problems, including Brandy's family. My husband calls like crazy.
00:20:53
Speaker 3: My grandma is eighty five years old and because of it, it's really caused a lot of problems for her.
00:21:00
Speaker 1: But the EPA hasn't figured out how to regulate air pollution from chicken farms. Basically, scientists no chicken poop is toxic to breathe, but they haven't even figured out how much litter industrial farms are putting into the air, let alone, what amount is harmful to residents. In one rural county in Maryland, chickens outnumber people one hundred to one. One study showed that rates of asthma there are nearly twice the state average. Another study showed elevated rates of lung cancer. The chicken poop is getting into the water too, so we.
00:21:39
Speaker 4: Really are concerned about runoff.
00:21:42
Speaker 1: It comes from the chicken farms, and it's causing algae blooms in local streams and rivers. If you've lived in this part of Oklahoma for a while, you've seen the rivers and creeks get greener every year. I've heard people call it mountain dew. Water. Animal poop is used as fertilized because it's high in nitrates and phosphates, but when those same nutrients end up in waterways and high amounts, it causes the algae to grow out of control. This sets off a chain of events that includes fish and other marine life dying and produces that green, murky water. It doesn't just mean we can't use the water for fishing or swimming. It also means we can't use the water for religious ceremonies either.
00:22:25
Speaker 4: That is how we pray. They don't understand we're not just going down to picnic.
00:22:29
Speaker 1: We're going to water. We're going to prey.
00:22:31
Speaker 4: That is a ceremony, an ancient ceremony, going to water, and that water must be clean.
00:22:38
Speaker 1: But it's not not anymore. And that's a problem because creeks are a central part of Cherokee communities.
00:22:47
Speaker 3: There's nobody that does not go to a creek. We don't use rivers or lakes, so we're creek people. We like to be able to fish. We like crowteds, we like watercress, wild onions. These are native for us. And nobody wants to swim in a creek that has chicken litter running off in it.
00:23:11
Speaker 1: Chicken houses are threatening our way of life. So Cherokee residents around Leech and other towns are organizing in an attempt to defend their water and air.
00:23:21
Speaker 3: I showed it up to one of the first meetings, and it was in pigs and there were probably only a handful of people. The next meeting we had, I packed it. I drove down every dirt road from here all the way in Callcord up towards Locusts, and that church did not have a place to sit.
00:23:46
Speaker 1: Residents went the state to tell farmers how to safely dispose of all that chicken poop. They also went the state to set a minimum distance that has to be between a chicken house and a home, church or school, because right now houses are going up across the street from people's homes. Imagine putting your kit to bed or eating dinner and smelling that unavoidable stench. Things are so grim. Some people are moving away.
00:24:16
Speaker 4: Probably ten people that I met in July at our first meetings have their land up for sale or it already sold. So people are leaving if they can.
00:24:29
Speaker 1: But Pam Kingfisher is standing her ground.
00:24:33
Speaker 4: The agencies need to understand in Simmons, and these farmers need to understand that most of us aren't going anywhere. I'm going to die and be buried right there on that land, and I'm not gonna stop. Do I like to lobby, No, But I've been asked and I'm going to take that podium and make sure that the kids that come to our meetings, the kids at Leach School and at Oak School, have someone speaking up.
00:24:58
Speaker 1: For Pam and Brandy. Their connection to the land runs deeper than real estate. It's more than just an investment. It's more than even just a home. It's part of their identity. The land holds the history of their tribe and the history.
00:25:14
Speaker 3: Of their families. The land I grew up on is the land my kids are growing up on. And it's the land my dad grew up on. It's the land my grandpa and grandmother worked so hard for. My great grandmother used to live right down there by Leech School, so one hundred years and that.
00:25:40
Speaker 1: Amazing, and I just it's it makes me sad because I would never want to leave that. Sovereignty is the foundation for Native rights. It's a basic concept, the right to govern ourselves on our land. Without it, we don't have the power to protect our water, our air, our language, and ultimately our way of life.
00:26:08
Speaker 2: Ni yo hiya un go, who's eliasti skina? You know, every tribe has sovereignty, and we have sovereignty, and this is not given to us. It's within us.
00:26:31
Speaker 1: We're used to thinking about the history of the United States as a story of progress, that our country has continued to strive closer and closer to its founding promise justice and liberty for all. But that narrative is hard to square with Native history. My tribe had more land, more rights, and more autonomy in eighteen ninety than it does today.
00:26:58
Speaker 2: Skanona to do Nuketon, Darlin, Eagan, you get done, they leaves the Egan In the treaties, we've lost a lot because once you agree on a treaty, that's not given you rights. You've already had those rights. It's taken away rights. So we've lost a lot of rights that we had before.
00:27:20
Speaker 1: And now in twenty nineteen, all the tribes are asking the Supreme Court to do is respect our rights.
00:27:28
Speaker 2: What's in the uh Egen skin on and you get done. They leaved as skinning in got do toy no Oklahoma. In the treaties, those territories are still ours. And you know that's that's basically what we're you know, asking the federal the Supreme Court to honor their treaties and they're our rights. You don't huh he didst look a loonat so you got in gusting home. Sometimes when we go to Supreme Court, we don't get what we expect, and you know they they don't rule for us. But there's the other choice that we have. We have to go there and just we hope for the best.
00:28:28
Speaker 1: We won't know the outcome of Carpenter versus Murphy until next term, possibly a whole year from now. But while we're waiting to hear what happens in this case, there is another one working its way through the federal court system, one with even bigger sticks. It's part of an orchestrated effort to dismantle a law called the Indian Child Welfare Act. They're going after our children, you know. And if they can take our children, what can't they take? The people leading this attack want nothing less than to dismantle all a federal Indian law. You might be asking who are they and why are they coming for tribes? Next time on this land this episode, I want to give us special thanks for our Cherokee listeners. Gajilek ahunig A chug luust joannagod Aiwonisaguay Doyu Jeni c Delex dead Quin Tlasi kot g giwoni Ski do Lize Geheski Novski Olsnigwis Sargano. This Land is written and hosted by me Rebecca Nagel, citizen of Cherokee Nation, from Cricket Media. Mukta Mohan and Tanya Soominator are the executive producers from neon Hummedia. Gabriel Lewis is our producer, Catherine Saint Louis is our editor, and Jonathan Hirsch and Victrm Patel are the executive producers. Sound design and mixing by Vanessa Lowe. Natalie Wren is our researcher. Laura Bullard is our fact checker. Our theme song is composed by Jared Tate, citizen of Chickasaw Nation. Additional music from Blue Dot Sessions podcast art by Kelly Gonzalez, citizen of Cherokee Nation. Additional production support from fire Thief Productions including Nathan Young, citizen of Delaware Tribe of Indians and Cherokee Nation, Jeremy Charles, citizen of Cherokee Nation, Shane Brown, citizen of Cherokee Nation, and Melissa Lukenbo Special thanks to Graham Lee Brewer, citizen of Cherokee Nation and Kara Hart and thanks to John Ross, citizen of Cherokee Nation, for translation.
Speaker 1: Gillete GOWNIHISTI di ga del quant. I'm learning how to speak Cherokee. Learning Cherokee is humbling. Recently, one of our Cherokee speakers told me that I speak as well as her granddaughter speaks English. Her granddaughter is five years old. That might sound like an insult, but I totally took it as a compliment. What she means she gets suggested what I'm saying, even if it's not correct. But today I'm not in Oklahoma learning Cherokee. I'm in the studio in La working on this podcast. If I was back home, I would be spending most of my time talking with fluent speakers and other second language learners like me. We'd be conjugating verbs, cooking wish making up stories. We tease each other and try and get in a jattie, which is basically the Cherokee equivalent of That's what she said. The time I get to spend learning my language is irreplaceable. But after just a couple weeks away, it's scary how rusty I feel already. There are a few Cherokee phrases that I want to use in this podcast. So I called John Ross, who you might remember from the last episode. John is a citizen of Cherokee Nation and works in Our Tribes Translation Department. I often visit with him in Cherokee. On this call, John patiently listens and corrects me like he always does. Oklaholm a og jelk ogaja cla c yoga jail, And that one in English means Oklahoma says that our, our Cherokee land is no longer ours. Ski souls horse do ski gey SKay. My editor was on the phone with us, and she asked us what we were saying. Oh, I say, uh ski all, which means.
00:02:02
Speaker 2: Like is that good? That's good.
00:02:10
Speaker 1: I was surprised I got it right. But the next phrase I kind of bombed. Squeeze ju lenard gohoo's anioea amayi ni uni too stuna and uh English, that's supposed to mean like the US has promised any and people a lot of different things. Uh squeeze ju leanard uni daoga, So like they broke a lot of the promises. And I don't know if that's the right word to use their like uni daoga.
00:02:43
Speaker 2: Dioga, that's a wrong, wrong word to use their It's like they broke all the treaties.
00:02:52
Speaker 1: Do doniyos all right, all right, squeeze j go hoo'st anyoiya ama yid uni to uni to east tuna. Squeeze ja donios tana.
00:03:15
Speaker 2: Yes, that's that's right.
00:03:18
Speaker 1: I got his corrections, and then I tried the whole thing and stumbled through saying. The US has promised Indians a lot of different things. A lot of those promises have been broken. Speakers like John are really patient with me when I just can't get a word right. I'm grateful because there's no way I would be able to learn my language without speakers who are willing to teach me. Kay skizda Lis, I'm here to help you. I'm learning Cherokee because it's endangered, and that's no coincidence. It's the result of more than a century of US policy. Earlier in this series, we told you this story of allotment, how the US divided up Native territory in Oklahoma and then opened it up to white settlers. The whole process was meant to take our land, but through it we lost so much more, and over one hundred years later, we are still living with the consequences. Today, Cherokee Nation is struggling to save our language from going extinct, and we're fighting to save our water and air from toxic Ruin this episode, I'm going to tell you these stories. These aren't stories that you'll recognize from the Murphy case. They weren't part of any of the briefs or the oral arguments. But there are some of the reasons why this case matters. Right now. We're asking the Supreme Court to affirm our treaty rights and to uphold the promises that were made to us, because we know what happens when those promises are broken. You're listening to This Land, a podcast about broken promises, tribal land, and murder. This year, the Supreme Court was supposed to decide whether half the land in Oklahoma is Indian Country, but in a shocking twist, they postponed their decision until next year. The fate of this land still hangs in the balance. From Cricket Media, I'm your host Rebecca N. Eagle, citizen of Cherokee Nation. Before allotment, Cherokee Nation ran its own schools. Our public school system was bilingual and classes were taught in both Cherokee and English.
00:05:47
Speaker 2: Lena Scanaga Lena soon Desk blasted down North Laska. When they got here after the trail, the tears Cherokees built over one hundred schools in Churkey Nation. They became the finest schools with the west of Mississippi River.
00:06:05
Speaker 1: Cherokee students had a higher literacy rate than their white neighbors. But in eighteen ninety eight, in the lead up to Oklahoma statehood, Congress passed the Curtis Act and abolished tribal schools.
00:06:18
Speaker 2: I need you electric goh's uh skanana doing death squashta. They closed all our schools. And when those were closed, which we just lost.
00:06:28
Speaker 1: That on at your own neck, the government came in and took control overnight. The very schools our tribe had built went from teaching the Cherokee language to punishing the students who dared to speak it. Cherokee was John's first language when he started school. He didn't speak English.
00:06:52
Speaker 2: Gone, I'll say your own nags to one Instagram. What I remember is you had to be able to speak to English. When I first started, the teachers would tell you something and you know you didn't know. And there were several us in that classroom that were the same way. We didn't speak English.
00:07:16
Speaker 1: Oklahoma's public schools started pushing English only education in the early nineteen hundreds, but well into the nineteen seventies, public school teachers punished Native kids for speaking their language.
00:07:30
Speaker 2: No uh, spelling dick pahonyak jed and if you didn't know how to spell, they give you a paddling. If you didn't know how to spell uh, depending on how many you missed, that's how many licks you got. That's how we were treated. You know, we didn't know how to speak English, so everyone who was cold just be you know, we were silent, didn't say nothing.
00:07:59
Speaker 1: Parents who were punish for speaking Cherokee didn't want their kids to go through the same thing, so they spoke English at home. Today, the youngest fluent Cherokee speaker is thirty.
00:08:10
Speaker 2: Eight, skinning sin. Who got a new one is John then Hanai Salui would want to skinder Gostanisa. A lot of Churkey speakers still left. But I never realized that it will be like this. You know, there's uh. We've lost a lot of them.
00:08:30
Speaker 1: Today, they are an estimated two thousand Cherokee speakers in Oklahoma. Most are John's age over sixty.
00:08:38
Speaker 2: I want no Kisla got forty five speakers that we lose in a month. You know. That's that's the ones I know, just you know the ones I know from being a young man and some kin folks, So four or five a month that we.
00:09:02
Speaker 1: Lose unless we do something about it. And soon Cherokee will no longer be spoken after the year twenty fifty by anyone.
00:09:12
Speaker 2: Hush the one he's gun Guys, you still geheg know it's good, dog Yo said. We're gonna lose everything if we don't have our Cherokee. We'll lose everything.
00:09:24
Speaker 1: If we lose our language, we lose our culture, our identity, we lose what it means to be Cherokee.
00:09:33
Speaker 2: Jeege Hanta diego west go hoost jos John no wood je leg he's a West Slot chant. Like the medicine man. When he goes out to gather medicines, he'll pray in Cherokee. And when he ministers the medicine, he's got a song in Cherokee that he sings.
00:10:00
Speaker 1: If you can't speak Cherokee, you can't practice Cherokee medicine.
00:10:07
Speaker 2: And as you said, there contina to go well, to go well, tell skin no anywhere tell skin no wood. That's what they used to say. If you don't know the language, you know, the medicines will not work. My great grandpa also was a medicine man on my mom's side, and he knew a lot of uh you know, his his writings in Cherokee, and uh you know, that's that's what he used. You gotta have Turkey to do the medicine work. And if we don't have that, we're going to lose our culture and medicine and and everything that we know because everything comes from our language.
00:10:56
Speaker 1: It's hard to describe how different Cherokee is from English. I took Spanish when I was in school, and learning Spanish was mostly learning the Spanish word for the English thing I wanted to say. I could take the map of English that I had in my brain and replace pieces of it with Spanish. Cherokee doesn't work that way. To learn Cherokee, I'm building a completely new map. Most Cherokee words you just can't say in English. I asked John to give me an example of a word that doesn't translate, but instead of giving me just a word, John told me the difference between Cherokee and English is his entire worldview.
00:11:36
Speaker 2: Look how I feel. I really can't express in English how I want to say things like I can in Cherokee. That's, you know, just the way I feel. I don't know how. Sometimes it's you just you know, you just you just don't say anything you can express yourself. And that's that's the hardest part for me, because sometimes I'll I'll be thinking in churchy, how do I say that? How do I say that? And plant plunge you jegotto jela gheind you go, waste go? Who's your own? Neg skuku tell you own.
00:12:23
Speaker 1: I can't imagine what it feels like for speakers like John to be born into a Cherokee world, and then as you grow old, fewer and fewer people understand you. It must be so lonely. Our elders hold our knowledge, they hold our culture, and they hold it in a language that young people don't understand, so we can't pass it on. No one wants to believe that one day we're going to lose our language. I can't believe it, but undeniably that's the direction it's going. We have one generation to reverse a century of US policy.
00:13:08
Speaker 2: Skin it's the nurse destination to Nica Yoga dos rule in Turkeys lost a lot of things, not only the land allotted, but they all sort of lost some of the things that they used to do.
00:13:25
Speaker 1: Usually when people think of what Native Americans lost, they think of land, but that's just what white people gained. What we lost is so much more. And now we're in danger of losing something else crucial to our survival.
00:13:42
Speaker 3: And so for me, this is home and I don't want to leave it. But I also want to be able to breathe, and I also want to be able to drink clean water.
00:13:52
Speaker 1: I'll tell you that story next. Like any small Cherokee communities, the one where Pam Kingfisher lives is built around a creek.
00:14:05
Speaker 4: Spring Creek is just beloved by everyone. It still has deep blue holes and it's just as cold as.
00:14:11
Speaker 2: It can be.
00:14:11
Speaker 4: It is spring fed. I live just over the hill, but we all swim in it. You know. People have raised their families and all of our kids on Spring Creek, so it really means a lot to everyone.
00:14:23
Speaker 1: Last summer, Pam, a citizen of Cherokee Nation, got some alarming news. Simmons Foods, a poultry farming business, was threatening Spring Creek and.
00:14:34
Speaker 4: They had put out a notice that they had heard there were going to be six houses built right on Spring Creek, right on the creek, on the flatland, in the farm just below the Oaks missions.
00:14:47
Speaker 1: She's talking about chicken houses, six industrial chicken houses.
00:14:53
Speaker 4: You know, we've all lived with chicken farmers, so that's been a part of our scenery for a long time. And now their house are sixty by six hundred, and they'll hold fifty thousand chickens, and it's just a whole new world.
00:15:06
Speaker 1: Fifty thousand chickens per house, meaning three hundred thousand chickens right on the creek. Pam and other residents started organizing to stop the chicken houses from being.
00:15:19
Speaker 4: Built, and so I started a Facebook page that night and started populating it and telling people what was going on.
00:15:27
Speaker 1: Pam lives in a small community called Terracita, but she soon found out that Spring Creek wasn't the only place facing an influx of chicken houses. Simmons Foods is headquartered in northwestern Arkansas, a forty five minute drive from where Pam lives. Simmons just put a big new processing plant near Gentry, right over the state line. The birds can only travel about an hour by truck from where they're raised to the slaughterhouses. So now Simmons is putting as many chicken houses as a can along a highway that leads to Gentry Highway for twelve. It's smack dab in the middle of Cherokee Nation. We reached out to Simmons to see if they had a response to the complaints we heard from residents that the chicken houses were harming their quality of life and the environment. Simmons PR director sent us back a three page pdf published by the University of Georgia Cooperative Extension Program titled Nuisance Myths and Poultry Farming. Interestingly, the pdf did incide any research or sources for its information. Under myth number two, poultry farms smell, the report claims that modern houses don't. I'm no scientists, but I've been around modern chicken houses in northeast Oklahoma and the stench is horrid. Brandy Wheeler lives near Highway for twelve in Leech, Oklahoma.
00:16:54
Speaker 3: We didn't grow up like this. I didn't grow up like this, and it's it's devastating.
00:17:01
Speaker 1: Today when you drive around Leech, chicken housers are growing up on every free piece of land. Brandy, a citizen of Cherokee, Nician, has lived here all her life. One of her favorite memories from childhood is the smell of honeysuckle in the spring.
00:17:17
Speaker 3: Oh my gosh, I always love that smell. It smells like life and beauty and new you know, you know, everything's blooming.
00:17:28
Speaker 1: But now when she drives around her hometown, all she smells is chicken manure.
00:17:35
Speaker 3: And now you've got to close your vance and roll up your windows and hold your breath. So it's it's sad.
00:17:47
Speaker 1: My producer, Gabrielle, and I met Brandy in front of the local elementary school. We hopped in her suv to get the lay of the land.
00:17:55
Speaker 3: We can count right here what's in this square mile, so you can get your calculator out and you can just ad.
00:18:02
Speaker 1: We pass a cluster of houses, so there's six right there. Then we turn left off the main highway and we're gonna go on this road.
00:18:10
Speaker 3: This is five sixty road. This right here is a predominantly Native American. So there's another six right here. Then there's these are the some more of the newer houses. There's six more right here, and this is all within a mile. There's another six down there, the red ones. Those set a little bit farther off, but you can see it's king.
00:18:39
Speaker 1: We come to an overpass over Highway four twelve. We're high enough we can see for miles, and in every direction are brand new chicken houses. The smell is overwhelming, the stench is harsh, chemicals mixed with foul at the same time. By this point in the tour, I've lost count of how many we had passed, but Brandy knows forty.
00:19:04
Speaker 3: Two houses within less than a mile. Those are industrial sized houses.
00:19:12
Speaker 1: How much litter is that? And what are they going to do with it?
00:19:15
Speaker 3: And where's it gonna go?
00:19:18
Speaker 1: When Brandy says litter, what she means is chicken and calculating the amount of chicken poop being dumped in Cherokee Nation is where this math gets even more alarming. Over two hundred new chicken houses have gone up in northeastern Oklahoma in the past two years. The chicken houses and Cherokee Nation now produce over one hundred and forty thousand tons of chicken poop a year. And that's just the amount farmers are reporting to the state. And it's not entirely clear yet what impact all that litter has on the health of residents.
00:19:49
Speaker 3: Whenever they're cleaning those houses out, you can literally see it looks like smoke coming out, but it's the dust, and it'll take your breath away.
00:20:03
Speaker 1: The chicken poop doesn't stay in the houses to get rid of it, The farmers spread it out over fields as fertilizer, putting even more of it into the air. Some days, the smell is so bad the local elementary school has to cancel recess, so.
00:20:19
Speaker 4: The little kids at Leech can't go out on certain days. But that's because all their neighbors are spreading litter.
00:20:26
Speaker 1: The stink is unforgettable.
00:20:29
Speaker 4: I don't know how to describe the that smell factor and perfume and all that, but it's a real high ammonia smell and harsh on the nose.
00:20:39
Speaker 1: According to the EPA, ammonia from animal waste can cause respiratory problems and even lung disease, so residents are worried about health problems, including Brandy's family. My husband calls like crazy.
00:20:53
Speaker 3: My grandma is eighty five years old and because of it, it's really caused a lot of problems for her.
00:21:00
Speaker 1: But the EPA hasn't figured out how to regulate air pollution from chicken farms. Basically, scientists no chicken poop is toxic to breathe, but they haven't even figured out how much litter industrial farms are putting into the air, let alone, what amount is harmful to residents. In one rural county in Maryland, chickens outnumber people one hundred to one. One study showed that rates of asthma there are nearly twice the state average. Another study showed elevated rates of lung cancer. The chicken poop is getting into the water too, so we.
00:21:39
Speaker 4: Really are concerned about runoff.
00:21:42
Speaker 1: It comes from the chicken farms, and it's causing algae blooms in local streams and rivers. If you've lived in this part of Oklahoma for a while, you've seen the rivers and creeks get greener every year. I've heard people call it mountain dew. Water. Animal poop is used as fertilized because it's high in nitrates and phosphates, but when those same nutrients end up in waterways and high amounts, it causes the algae to grow out of control. This sets off a chain of events that includes fish and other marine life dying and produces that green, murky water. It doesn't just mean we can't use the water for fishing or swimming. It also means we can't use the water for religious ceremonies either.
00:22:25
Speaker 4: That is how we pray. They don't understand we're not just going down to picnic.
00:22:29
Speaker 1: We're going to water. We're going to prey.
00:22:31
Speaker 4: That is a ceremony, an ancient ceremony, going to water, and that water must be clean.
00:22:38
Speaker 1: But it's not not anymore. And that's a problem because creeks are a central part of Cherokee communities.
00:22:47
Speaker 3: There's nobody that does not go to a creek. We don't use rivers or lakes, so we're creek people. We like to be able to fish. We like crowteds, we like watercress, wild onions. These are native for us. And nobody wants to swim in a creek that has chicken litter running off in it.
00:23:11
Speaker 1: Chicken houses are threatening our way of life. So Cherokee residents around Leech and other towns are organizing in an attempt to defend their water and air.
00:23:21
Speaker 3: I showed it up to one of the first meetings, and it was in pigs and there were probably only a handful of people. The next meeting we had, I packed it. I drove down every dirt road from here all the way in Callcord up towards Locusts, and that church did not have a place to sit.
00:23:46
Speaker 1: Residents went the state to tell farmers how to safely dispose of all that chicken poop. They also went the state to set a minimum distance that has to be between a chicken house and a home, church or school, because right now houses are going up across the street from people's homes. Imagine putting your kit to bed or eating dinner and smelling that unavoidable stench. Things are so grim. Some people are moving away.
00:24:16
Speaker 4: Probably ten people that I met in July at our first meetings have their land up for sale or it already sold. So people are leaving if they can.
00:24:29
Speaker 1: But Pam Kingfisher is standing her ground.
00:24:33
Speaker 4: The agencies need to understand in Simmons, and these farmers need to understand that most of us aren't going anywhere. I'm going to die and be buried right there on that land, and I'm not gonna stop. Do I like to lobby, No, But I've been asked and I'm going to take that podium and make sure that the kids that come to our meetings, the kids at Leach School and at Oak School, have someone speaking up.
00:24:58
Speaker 1: For Pam and Brandy. Their connection to the land runs deeper than real estate. It's more than just an investment. It's more than even just a home. It's part of their identity. The land holds the history of their tribe and the history.
00:25:14
Speaker 3: Of their families. The land I grew up on is the land my kids are growing up on. And it's the land my dad grew up on. It's the land my grandpa and grandmother worked so hard for. My great grandmother used to live right down there by Leech School, so one hundred years and that.
00:25:40
Speaker 1: Amazing, and I just it's it makes me sad because I would never want to leave that. Sovereignty is the foundation for Native rights. It's a basic concept, the right to govern ourselves on our land. Without it, we don't have the power to protect our water, our air, our language, and ultimately our way of life.
00:26:08
Speaker 2: Ni yo hiya un go, who's eliasti skina? You know, every tribe has sovereignty, and we have sovereignty, and this is not given to us. It's within us.
00:26:31
Speaker 1: We're used to thinking about the history of the United States as a story of progress, that our country has continued to strive closer and closer to its founding promise justice and liberty for all. But that narrative is hard to square with Native history. My tribe had more land, more rights, and more autonomy in eighteen ninety than it does today.
00:26:58
Speaker 2: Skanona to do Nuketon, Darlin, Eagan, you get done, they leaves the Egan In the treaties, we've lost a lot because once you agree on a treaty, that's not given you rights. You've already had those rights. It's taken away rights. So we've lost a lot of rights that we had before.
00:27:20
Speaker 1: And now in twenty nineteen, all the tribes are asking the Supreme Court to do is respect our rights.
00:27:28
Speaker 2: What's in the uh Egen skin on and you get done. They leaved as skinning in got do toy no Oklahoma. In the treaties, those territories are still ours. And you know that's that's basically what we're you know, asking the federal the Supreme Court to honor their treaties and they're our rights. You don't huh he didst look a loonat so you got in gusting home. Sometimes when we go to Supreme Court, we don't get what we expect, and you know they they don't rule for us. But there's the other choice that we have. We have to go there and just we hope for the best.
00:28:28
Speaker 1: We won't know the outcome of Carpenter versus Murphy until next term, possibly a whole year from now. But while we're waiting to hear what happens in this case, there is another one working its way through the federal court system, one with even bigger sticks. It's part of an orchestrated effort to dismantle a law called the Indian Child Welfare Act. They're going after our children, you know. And if they can take our children, what can't they take? The people leading this attack want nothing less than to dismantle all a federal Indian law. You might be asking who are they and why are they coming for tribes? Next time on this land this episode, I want to give us special thanks for our Cherokee listeners. Gajilek ahunig A chug luust joannagod Aiwonisaguay Doyu Jeni c Delex dead Quin Tlasi kot g giwoni Ski do Lize Geheski Novski Olsnigwis Sargano. This Land is written and hosted by me Rebecca Nagel, citizen of Cherokee Nation, from Cricket Media. Mukta Mohan and Tanya Soominator are the executive producers from neon Hummedia. Gabriel Lewis is our producer, Catherine Saint Louis is our editor, and Jonathan Hirsch and Victrm Patel are the executive producers. Sound design and mixing by Vanessa Lowe. Natalie Wren is our researcher. Laura Bullard is our fact checker. Our theme song is composed by Jared Tate, citizen of Chickasaw Nation. Additional music from Blue Dot Sessions podcast art by Kelly Gonzalez, citizen of Cherokee Nation. Additional production support from fire Thief Productions including Nathan Young, citizen of Delaware Tribe of Indians and Cherokee Nation, Jeremy Charles, citizen of Cherokee Nation, Shane Brown, citizen of Cherokee Nation, and Melissa Lukenbo Special thanks to Graham Lee Brewer, citizen of Cherokee Nation and Kara Hart and thanks to John Ross, citizen of Cherokee Nation, for translation.
