Amena Brown:
Hey, y'all. Welcome back to HER with Amena Brown. And y'all, as of the release of this episode, y'all know if you've been with me for these past several episodes since the podcast relaunched, we are always here in your... I was about to say in your inbox but in your podcast place, whatever your favorite podcast place is where you're listening to this, we are always in your podcast place on Tuesdays. And the Tuesday that this episode is releasing is November 3rd, which is Election Day. If you have not voted, November 3rd is your last chance. Okay? So make sure you do this. Voter suppression is happening all over the country. Some of you may be like, what is voter suppression? Voter suppression is things like when you get to your polling place and not all of the voting machines are working, voter suppression is what's happening when it is taking people 10 and 11 hours to be able to cast their vote. Voter suppression is happening when the locations where you can turn in your mail and ballot or where you can go in person to vote are being decreased.
Amena Brown:
All of those things are voter suppression, and that is intended to make us not vote. It's intended to make it harder for people to vote and in particular, to make it harder for marginalized people and People of Color to vote. So this is very important. Voter suppression is happening all over the country. So make sure that you do your research on polling places and for my people who are doing mail-in ballots, make sure you do the research about your county and state as far as what your options are of where to drop off your ballot or to cast your ballot in person. Here are a couple of tips, suggestions you could try if you are voting on Election Day. Try to vote at times where there may be less people or less of a line. If possible, prepare for the long haul. Voter suppression isn't right, it isn't fair. And we want to do everything we can to fight against it, this election and all of the elections to come.
Amena Brown:
However, some of us in the areas where we live, we will be dealing with voter suppression, which means you may not get in and out within 15 minutes or 20 minutes to cast your vote. So if possible, prepare for the long haul. Prepare as if it will take much longer than you think and do whatever that means for you. If you need to bring snacks, if you need to bring a chair, bring water, make sure you have your hand sanitizer, any Lysol or disinfectant, anything that you would need to be someplace for hours. If you have meds that you need to make sure you have those with you as well, and as always, wear a mask. I also want to give a special shout out and thank you to all of the poll workers all across the country. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And make sure when you go to vote, if you are voting in person that you thank your poll workers, it is a very long day for them as well. So shout out to all the poll workers, thank you so much for all of the work that you do.
Amena Brown:
Y'all I feel like now it is officially fall, and I know some of y'all are like, but girl it was officially fall in September, but I live in Atlanta, Georgia. And any of you that live in warmer climates, Atlanta does experience all four of the seasons, but it just takes us a little bit longer for it to feel like fall. We still have some days in October that feel like the summer. So by the time we get into November, it's really starting to get to a nice fall crisp in the air. It's getting cooler in the mornings, cooler at night, sometimes staying cooler through the whole day. We are notorious for getting cooler in the morning, cooler at night, and then still being 80 degrees. But by the time we get to this time, it's really getting into the fall vibes. And I have to admit y'all fall is my favorite time of year. I love all of the colors involved. I love all of the earth tones and shades of brown and gold and orange and red. It's just my thing. It's my vibe.
Amena Brown:
Let me tell you a few things that I love about fall, things that signal to me it's fall time. First of all, I love fall coffee drinks. I can't even for health reasons have fully caffeinated coffee. So I am always that person that's going to the coffee shop, ordering decaf. And then I can't have a lot of dairy either. So I used to be ordering decaf lattes with almond milk. But boy, I have discovered the joys of oat milk. And let me tell you, I have been changed. I know you pay an extra fee when you're trying to get oat milk at a coffee shop, but you know what, every time I've paid that extra dollar, I've never regretted it. That smooth taste that's happening to me. Shout out to oat milk as well. So I love to get involved in a salted caramel, a maple pecan type of situation. This is when I feel like I'm really getting into my fall bag right there, when I'm just getting involved in the drinks. And I love this time of year for that.
Amena Brown:
Also, I want to bring up something that is a little bit contentious, but I feel like this is a safe place. I feel like we've established some times together, you and I, where we can talk about this. I just want to bring this up. I want to talk about why there aren't more sweet potato pie lattes. I want to just discuss that because pumpkin pie is fine. Pumpkin pie, pumpkin spice, it's fine. But have you ever had a sweet potato pie? I mean, honestly, have you ever had a sweet potato pie? And if you've had one, have you not been like, this is better than a pumpkin pie. I mean, I'm not trying to start a fight, but I'm just trying to bring up like some facts. So I'm not saying that I avoid a pumpkin pie or pumpkin spice type of latte. I get involved in it because it's a fall thing, but I just feel like we're leaving some flavor on the table by not having a sweet potato pie latte. Can we work on this? Somebody? Please.
Amena Brown:
Also, another thing I love about fall is that it's my time to be outside with no mosquitoes and any of my people who also live in the South, you know that our summers are plagued with mosquitoes and I am the person that always gets bit by mosquitoes. It doesn't matter where I'm at. I sometimes get bit by mosquito inside the house where I didn't even make it outside. So the fall is a perfect time for me to be outside. And it's finally cooled off enough. I don't know where the mosquitoes go. I don't know if they go further South for the fall or something, how birds go to the South during the winter. I don't know if the mosquitoes hibernate and that's why you get so many mosquito bites in the summer. And it just helps them to stay warm or something when it gets to be fall. I don't know. I don't really care. I'm just glad that I see less of them or don't see them at all. It's great.
Amena Brown:
Also, the other thing I love about fall is Thanksgiving. And I'm going to talk about this more in some other episodes, but I do not love the racist histories of Thanksgiving. And in particular, the Thanksgiving narrative that we've been given here in America, that's not what I love at all. What I love is really the feast, the harvest meal that is Thanksgiving and what that has meant for me gathering with my family. So I have a nickname for Thanksgiving and I call it my cooker-palooza. Whenever Thanksgiving comes up, I take the whole week off and I basically spend the entire week cooking. And I love everything about it. Thanksgiving is the only time that I get a chance to really cook for a massive amount of people. And you actually have those people coming to your house. So you're not cooking all this food and don't have anywhere for it to go.
Amena Brown:
This year obviously things are going to be a little different and we are still in a pandemic. So it'll be figuring out, is there a safe way to gather for Thanksgiving as a family? How do we do that? But I'm going to tell y'all this. I'm the type of person that even before we began hosting Thanksgiving, because my husband and I, for most of the years we've been married, if not all of the years. Most of the years, we have hosted Thanksgiving in our home. And it's going to be really, really weird not to do that this year, but even the years that we did not host Thanksgiving at our home, I always believe in cooking some Thanksgiving food so you have it at show house. Because I feel like the big plus to Thanksgiving is the leftovers, is what you ate on Thursday but it's also having that same food that you can then make different iterations of Friday, Saturday, Sunday, so on.
Amena Brown:
So either way, whatever we make our plans to be, whether we gather with our families or not, it's going to be some Thanksgiving food in this house. And what is Thanksgiving food? Yes, it's candy yams, it's turkey, it's ham, it's macaroni and cheese. It's collard greens. It's cranberry sauce. And yes, people I like to use fresh cranberries to make my sauce. I actually love cranberry sauce so bad that I could just eat it by itself. Oh my gosh. So if you all want to have further conversations about Thanksgiving food, Thanksgiving recipe, tips, I'm here for that. You let me know. You can use the #askAmena. You can send me DMs, you can message me. I am here for you. I also want to know, are you team sweet potato or are you team pumpkin? Let's talk about it.
Amena Brown:
Y'all it's Election Day. And I feel like for a lot of us, this is a day that's going to require some self-care because I remember four years ago, I don't remember exactly what I was doing on Election Day, I just remember, I looked at the numbers for a while and I remember I was getting kind of sleepy and I was just like, Oh man, I'm going to miss this historic announcement of Hillary Clinton becoming president. And I was like, Oh, I'm sleepy, I'll watch the clips in the morning. And then woke up in the morning and was like, Oh no, this is happening totally differently. Wow. No. Okay. So because of that and because of how the last four years have been, I feel like when I talk to my friends and a lot of the people that are following me on socials, we are all feeling some stress and some tension leading up to Election Day. We made it to Election Day, but we still have the tensions and the stress of waiting to see how the votes come in.
Amena Brown:
So let's talk about some Election Day self care. And I'm going to tell you a few of the things that I'm going to try doing, and maybe you can think about what are some things you're going to do for yourself to care for yourself and your soul during this time there's going to be a lot of stress happening within. One of the things that I've been doing in general since the pandemic started is I have been doing a skincare routine. It's been going really fabulously. I tried to do some research so that I would know what order to do things in. And so is the skincare about keeping my skin hydrated and healthy? It is, but it's also just an opportunity to rub on my face and tell myself everything's okay. So obviously I use my cleanser, I wash my face. I have an exfoliant that I use once a week. Then I have another, more gentle exfoliant that I can use every day.
Amena Brown:
I'm a person who loves masks. I love a clay mask. So I get involved in that. And then I have like a moisturizing mask. I've got some little serums and stuff I put on the cotton balls and rub all over my face, got some moisturizers. So I'm working it out. That has been great self care for me. So I might just decide to do 10 or 12 masks on election day. My skin is going to be extra shiny, extra shiny. All right. Another thing I've been doing for self care is I've been watching Girlfriends on Netflix. Are y'all watching Girlfriends? I've been watching it. And I have been really enjoying it.
Amena Brown:
I think the timing of Girlfriends, I remember watching the first couple of seasons, but I don't know what happened in my life that I... There's a couple of shows like this, that I remember watching the beginning. And then I'm like, I went through some transition and didn't catch the rest of the show, the ending of the show. So this far, I have made it to season seven on Girlfriends. And it has been a wonderful palette cleanser. I've had some times I've woken up in the middle of the night, had a bad dream or something. And it's just been very soothing to watch Girlfriends. So, that's been one of my self-care things that I might do on Election Day.
Amena Brown:
Also, I have been getting into doing some deep breathing and meditation through the Shine app and I'll continue to shout out the Shine app because the Shine app is a meditation and wellness app that was founded by two women of color. I hope to have them both as a guest here, so we can all talk to them and hear their story. But if you have not checked out the Shine app, you really should, it's wonderful. I might do some yoga. I also feel like the stress of Election Day, it makes me want to think about learning the routine from Flashdance. I just feel like that moment where she's dancing, but she's also running in place, I feel like that's my election day energy. I also might try a new exercise. I don't know if you've heard of it called walk, run, jog. And basically what that exercise is, is you start out thinking you're going to run or jog and then you just walk. And I think I'm going to try that.
Amena Brown:
And another thing I might try is just a little stress cry, there's nothing wrong with it. There's nothing wrong with a stress cry. Stress has to come out of our body some way. Maybe it's through sweating. Maybe you yell. Maybe you've got to just shed some tears too, there's also such thing as a stress laugh. I find myself thinking of all sorts of inappropriate crass humor, and that's carrying me through too. So whether you need to stress cry or stress laugh or stress whisper, you do what your soul needs. In all seriousness, I hope Joe Biden is our next president. I hope Kamala Harris is our next vice president. And no matter who wins this election, we still have work to do. Our work in our communities doesn't stop. It continues, we continue to work for equity and justice and equal access for the disabled, for the LGBTQ community, for Black, Indigenous and communities of color and all of the ways that so many of our identities include all or some of these things.
Amena Brown:
We will continue to hold our elected officials accountable, national leaders and local leaders as well. So if you're listening to this on Election Day, drink some tea, have some wine if that's your thing, in moderation. Take a warm bath, listen to some good music that soothes your soul, do whatever you can to take care of yourself and let's do our best to care for each other too.
Amena Brown:
Today's interview is from The HER archives. I'm excited to welcome to our living room, Juliana Brown Eyes. The whole conversation is great. And one of my favorite parts was hearing Juliana's story and connecting with her on how much her work is informed by the women in her family that came before her. Check out our conversation and get ready to be inspired.
Amena Brown:
Really excited to talk with my guest today, filmmaker, musician, photographer, makeup artist, business woman, social media influencer, multitalented Indigenous Polynesian artist, Julianna Brown Eyes on the podcast today. Hey Juliana.
Juliana Brown Eyes:
Hi, thank you for that whole long list introduction.
Amena Brown:
And I probably missed a couple of things.
Juliana Brown Eyes:
I'm blushing.
Amena Brown:
Juliana is out here making the things. So I just thought that you would be such a great guest. So I'm just excited to talk to you about this. And I can't remember when it was I found you on Instagram, but I think one of the pluses for me of this podcast, Juliana, is I'm constantly looking for brilliant women of color. So every now and then I just get down a rabbit hole of finding all these brilliant women of color. And so sometimes I'll just go down a little rabbit hole of, let me see how many Latinas I can find. And I'll find a bunch of Latinas and follow them. And then I'll be like, I also want to find some Native women and I'll find them. And then of course, after you start following different women of color, then they have friends or they have other women of color they might be collaborating with. So then I'm like, Oh, who's that? Let me go follow her. So that has really been, even not just in finding people to interview on the podcast, but just finding people to learn from and be inspired by. So that's actually how I found you.
Juliana Brown Eyes:
Awesome. Yeah. Instagram is a great tool for that. I actually use Instagram in that way, in that capacity to reach out to a lot of Indigenous women that are working on a grassroots level in their communities. And so I did a series a while ago called the Rezaissance Woman Series. And basically it was when Indigenous women, I identified these women that were doing a lot of hard work in their communities, inspiring. And I wanted to highlight these women that were working that weren't getting any praise or recognition for the work that they were doing. And so it worked on a system of, if you were nominated, you needed to nominate three to five other different women. And so that became a lot of work because I ended up writing bios for each woman and I ended up taking photos of them and posting them on Instagram during Native American Heritage Month.
Juliana Brown Eyes:
And so I believe that's month of November and all month long, I was posting about 15 to 20 women a day and flooding people's, their Instagram feeds with all these brilliant women, people who were physicians or people who were drug addicts and overcame that and now they're giving talks. People that are gardeners, people that are artists and just all these brilliant women and it became something really beautiful because you have women nominating one another and they started creating this sisterhood of I support you and you support me and let's climb to the top together. And it was a photo series. And for right now, I took it back to because I cataloged all these women and I wanted to be able to create a video series now because I was like, okay, I did the photo series. So now I have a list of all these women and now I want to be able to go to them and create a video series now, because there's not a lot of attention or there's not a lot of coverage of Indigenous women in media at all.
Juliana Brown Eyes:
And growing up, I would have really liked to see someone who look like me, someone who came from a reservation, someone who was Indigenous, who had Indigenous teachings, someone who still spoke their language. And I want to see them on the big screen. I want to hear them on the radio. And so for me, that's my goal as a woman is to be able to give that platform to other women of color and it's a beautiful thing because I've been all over the world. Like you said, my tribe is, I come from the Oglala Lakota tribe, which is in South Dakota. And I was raised by these brilliant, beautiful bad-ass women with all this ancestral knowledge. And I know a lot about plants and the stars and my language, and that's embedded into who I am and how I carry myself and how I present myself as an artist and how I want to give back to the community in that way.
Juliana Brown Eyes:
But I'm also a Polynesian, I'm from the Tongan Pacific islands. The kingdom of Tonga, my father's father immigrated in the 70s to America and my grandmother who was Lakota Indigenous, she hitchhiked all the way from the reservation in South Dakota to San Francisco in the 70s at the hike of the Alcatraz movement. So the American Indian movement was really big. And a lot of young teenagers, my grandmother was 17 at the time, they took off and they want it to be a part of the Alcatraz occupation. And that was an extensive social justice movement. So really my roots and who I am is all born of that. My grandmother was an amazing woman. She took off, she went there and she met my grandfather and he was Tongan. He was a Pacific Islander and so that's how you get a Pacific Islander in the middle of America.
Juliana Brown Eyes:
And so I carry all of that with me and I make sure that I am able to bring visibility for all Indigenous people. It doesn't matter where you're from in the world. I believe personally, that we're all Indigenous to this land and to this earth and wherever you are in the world, you are the caretaker of the land that you're on because we think of the earth as grandmother earth. She is a living being, she needs to be taken care of and nurtured. And I try to convey that through a lot of my artwork. I do make up, I do videos, photos. I try to really stick to my teachings as a Lakota woman. A lot of my makeup looks, they're all based upon Lakota teachings about the star knowledge, about how we are spirits that come from the Milky Way. And we come here to this earth to create relationships with one another and love one another, be kind and courteous. And then when we're done here, when our work is done here, we return back to the stars and we are all one, we're all a part of one energy and it works like that in a cycle.
Juliana Brown Eyes:
And so those are the teachings that I grew up with. And I didn't realize that the rest of the world didn't think like that. And so like you had asked me a little bit about social justice and about the movement. So because I come from Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, a lot of your listeners might know about the Standing Rock movement. The Standing Rock movement was huge. It was the first time in U.S. history, the longest stand for water. And during that time, I believe it was August 2016, nobody knew about it. There was no media coverage. There was no photos or no news. It was simply and purely a grassroots movement. And it was only about water. So the Standing Rock movement is the Missouri River was being threatened because the Dakota Access Pipeline was wanting to put a pipeline through the river.
Juliana Brown Eyes:
Now, my people, the Oglala Lakota people, the great Sioux nation, there's a lot of tribes within the great Sioux nation, our water, we have treaty rights to the Missouri River. We have rights, as long as the grass shall grow and as long as the sun shines in the language of the U.S. government, we have rights to that water. And so for me, and for the rest of the community, especially the youth, we immediately assembled and organized and mobilized one another. And we all showed up and we stood for grandmother earth and we stood for our water and we stood for our people and our elders, the women and the children, and that is our drinking water. And we're caretakers of it. We need to continue to protect it. And so that movement was huge because it was the first time in American history that a private security team like TigerSwan was deployed in America to protect private interest. And the private interest was the oil company.
Juliana Brown Eyes:
So you have Indigenous communities. I come from the poorest reservation in America, which is Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. It's the poorest county in America. We were the last tribe to give up to the U.S. government. So basically we pretty much got the shitty end of the stick, if you think about it. And it's so recent for us, my grandmother she was put in a boarding school and her hair was cut and told not to speak her language. So that's so recent for us within the last 100 years, the colonization of my people. I have a lot of historical trauma within me because it's literally not even a couple of generations away to where my people, especially my grandmother, we were living with the earth and we were living with our prayers and in harmony with one another in our tribe. And then all of a sudden, the U.S. government came and they colonized us. They took us, they stripped everything away from us and took our way of life and dehumanized us.
Juliana Brown Eyes:
So a lot of that bleeds into the work that I do. And so if you've been following me on Instagram, I haven't really spoke about it, but in my stories, I've been traveling. I was in New Zealand. I was also in Brazil and I was working on doing post-production on a documentary series that I directed, and it's a five episode, each episode is one hour long. The water issue is not just in America, it's all over the world. And it has definitely hit the Indigenous people in Brazil. I spent some time with the Guarani tribe in Brazil, and it's these same companies. A lot of these oil companies have private interests within American government. And so we're up against huge corporations, when it's going to really take us as a community, all people of color to come together and work towards one goal. And that one goal is unity.
Juliana Brown Eyes:
And that's pretty much most of the work I've been doing within the last two years, but fast forward to today now I'm actually in school at the Institute of American Indian Arts. And it's the first of its kind, it's the only Indigenous institution that focus primarily on art and I'm majoring in the cinematic arts program. So even though I've been creating my own documentaries and doing my own things, I still wanted to take a step back and really learn from my community of Indigenous filmmakers and really look for people that I can work with and that I can trust, because I believe that it's really important to have the Indigenous voice in cinema because we've been portrayed... The Cowboys & Indians, we had Dances With Wolves, we've had Avatar. We've had all of these White male led stories where there's this White man savior who comes in and saves the day.
Juliana Brown Eyes:
And that's not necessarily, definitely not how it works in communities, because especially In Indigenous communities, we are matriarchal, we are totally ran by, what grandma's says, that's what goes. Women make the decisions in our tribe. And so I believe that we need to bring that within the world of cinema so that we can continue to inspire young women of color that you can do this. This is how it happened long time ago, and this is how we live. This is how we make decisions. And like I said, I've been here at school for this first semester. I was touring as a professional musician, a national touring art, for the last nine years. And I took a break from that because I was playing the bass and I was a vocalist in the band. And that gave me a platform to be able to speak on all these different issues, because I performed at different colleges like Dartmouth or Stanford. And I was able to take these teachings and present them to people in college and universities.
Juliana Brown Eyes:
So I did that for a while, but I needed to take a step back from my own health and my own wellbeing because being on the road that much, really did a number on my health. And so I was like, I can't do this forever. This is fun, this is great. And I was able to get a lot of people interested in the movements that are happening in America with Indigenous people. But I was like, how do I reach a broader audience? Let's take these issues globally. And so I've always been into film. I've directed our music videos that we had. And we had won a lot of awards with those. And I was like, first and foremost, I'm a writer. I write all the time. And so I've been doing a lot of screenwriting, a lot of writing really, because coming from... Like I told you, I come from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation and it's the poorest county in America. I grew up with nothing, I grew up in a house with just two bedrooms and I'm the oldest of five brothers and two sisters. And I'm a survivor.
Juliana Brown Eyes:
We didn't have running water. We didn't have all of the amenities, basic necessities, and to come from that as my background and to just really like, no, I want this, I want to be able to just rise above. It doesn't matter if I don't have the money to go to school, I'm going to find a way I'm going to make my own way. And so literally, I graduated valedictorian, I made sure I had straight A's in high school and I'd show up on time. And I was like, yeah, you know what? I don't have a computer. I don't have all the things that all these other students have maybe. And even at the time, my father, he was in prison. I was like, I don't have my father. My mother was struggling with drugs and alcohol at the time, I didn't have my mother. I was like, I can't die like this. I can't be stuck here like this. I just seen a future, not just for myself, but for my siblings.
Juliana Brown Eyes:
And I was like, if I don't do this now, and if I don't get out now, who's going to help them? Who's going to be the example for them? And so for me, I really use that as my driving force. Love was my driving force to be able to be something for my siblings and my community, my parents, and show them that it's possible. And so then I ended up getting the Bill Gates scholarship and the Horatio Alger scholarship, and I got a full ride and I was able to go to college and just focus all of my time on that. And then I took a break from school. And then I did music for about nine years and made it pretty big. And then I was like, you know what, I really need to focus on myself as a woman, get back to who I am, because I was really neglecting myself. People always idolize, Oh, it's the rock star life. You're living the dream and all that, but it gets really exhausting.
Juliana Brown Eyes:
And I wasn't creating how I was used to, I would create and paint draw and take photos, and I just didn't have time for any that. And so the moment I took a step back and I took some time and I did some post-production work in Brazil. And I really just prayed a lot especially to my ancestors, the women that came before me that really paved the path of a strong Indigenous woman. They survived massacres, they survived all of this stuff. And I was like, how am I going to waste that? All the time and blood and all of everything that they put in, just so that I could be here today. What am I going to do to give back for that, to my ancestors and to my community. So I got to keep going. So now, I've been working really hard. I take 21 credits at the Institute of American Indian Arts. I work 20 hours doing work study, and I got all these different projects going on.
Juliana Brown Eyes:
And then I will be also finishing my documentary this coming summer. So I'm pretty much booked all summer. I'm going to be filming back at home on my reservation, be filming elders and children, and just about the importance of water and how water is really the one connector that connects us all. We all need water. And that's all we were trying to say with the Standing Rock movement, but the government, they weren't understanding us on that simple level, that you're a human being and you need water. This is our water, and we've protected it for 1000s, millions of years. And we know how sacred it is.
Juliana Brown Eyes:
And if you think about it, we're born of water. We come from a woman, my grandmother, she delivered me, that's how in tune we are still with our teachings and our ways. My grandmother, she delivered me. And she always talks about being the first to touch my water. She said, she felt the water that I came from and that's that water that we carry inside of us as women. And we're able to bear children and give life. And we're the only human form that is able to navigate spirits from the spiritual realm to here and onto the physical realm. So that's like a big, huge responsibility that we carry as women. And that's why in Lakota culture, we're held as sacred women are sacred because we bring life to this earth. We bring spirits from the spirit world to here, to this physical realm. And it all starts with water.
Juliana Brown Eyes:
Think about it, water is one of the main conductors of energy. And we each have water. We carry water inside of us. What are we, 75% water. Think about all the negative and positive energy that we carry inside ourselves and we're able to conduct that energy between one another, on everyday basis, like, hello, Amena, how are you doing? Or if you're pissed off and angry one day, how do you control that energy that you carry within yourself? You're responsible for it. How are you going to change that into positivity and conduct it to people in the world? And so the documentary is solely based upon water and it gets really deep. There's a lot of people that won't be able to understand it on that level, because most people they'll tune out to a certain extent when she start talking about spirituality. But it really is. It comes down to that, whether you believe in a God or an afterlife or the spirit world or anything that comes after this one thing that we all believe in is that we need to wake up and take a shower and drink water.
Juliana Brown Eyes:
As living organisms and beings on this earth, we all need water, otherwise we'll die. So God or whatever, the being is water and we need to protect it. And we need to continue to teach people in the world that not a lot of us have access to clean drinking water. It's about equity. We all need that same access to water. And so all of my artwork, basically, I try to reflect that in my spirituality, but get it across in a modern type of setting, like with Instagram. Like Oh, you're scrolling by and you see, Oh, look, there's Juliana. She looks pretty. She's using all these products, but wait, there's a teaching behind it. What is she saying? And it's all based upon just love, love one another, just continue to help one another. And that's really what I've really try to focus a lot of my artwork on.
Amena Brown:
I feel two ways Juliana. One, is just personally having grown up in a family that was full of so many strong and spiritual women. I really identified in a lot of ways with just the way you described that relationship. And I think the power of water and the equity of water, you made so many really important points right there. I wanted to ask you, you used a phrase that I really love. You used the phrase, ancestral knowledge when you talked about your grandmother and these women who came before you, what about your early life or your experiences or exposure to those women inspired you to become a creative?
Juliana Brown Eyes:
So I believe that all Indigenous people are artists in whatever capacity. When they wake up every morning, a lot of Indigenous people, they do things habitually, a lot of Lakota women and men they would wake up, they would come out of their teepee and they would paint their horse. They would take their horse down to the river. Everything was habitual. And it had this sense of, it was an art to the way that they lived and even everything down to... so Lakota women, we were in charge of the teepee. We made the teepee, the men hunted the Buffalo. They would bring a Buffalo home. The women would tan and hide the Buffalo. And then we would paint our tepees. We would paint designs and make our homes because tepee means home in Lakota, we would make our homes beautiful and we would make it a home for our children and for whoever we were taking care of at that time.
Juliana Brown Eyes:
And so we were just like innately artists in everything that we did. We wore beadwork, we wore jewelry, we wore moccasins and everything had to be, there was a particular way that it was made and that was, we had designs and all these things and I believe that it really was passed down through generations because all of those traditional artworks, I know how to do all of them from porcupine quill work, we made a lot of jewelry out of porcupine hair and quills. We made a lot of beadwork out of glass beads or shells that we traded for over time. And we always made sure that everything was done in a respectful, spiritual manner. And so my mother she's an artist, every day she will wake up, in the springtime, she wakes up, she goes into her garden. She's the main green thumb in our community. She has this entire huge garden. And she allows kids to come in and pick whatever they want from the garden. Because she knows that a lot of children don't have their parents at home.
Juliana Brown Eyes:
She created a community garden on our reservation. And for me, that's art. She wakes up, she takes care of these plants and she harvest them and then she cans them and then she gives them away. It's about that transfer of energy. She put all of that hard work into it. And whether she was, maybe my mother was grieving or she had a hard day that day. And she put all of that energy into working that day, but through that she changed it into a positivity, a positive, and then she gave it away. She gave away chokecherry jam to a bunch of kids and they were happy. They took it home. They fed their grandmothers and grandpas and so it's that transfer of energy, like I said. And it's all through your art. And my mother she hand makes, she would saw clothes all the time and quilts, and she didn't know how to use, she still to this day, doesn't know how to use a sewing machine. Even though I was like, I'll buy you a sewing machine mom, it'll speed up the work faster, but she prefers to make everything by hand.
Juliana Brown Eyes:
And so my mother is a amazing artists and just growing up, seeing her make something out of nothing, completely nothing. I remember when Harry Potter came out and I was telling her about the world and she made me a wand. My mom made me a wand out of the stick and it looked awesome. And I just really believed that it was a wand. So all of that artwork and all of that energy work really is passed down through generations. And I can't really describe where it comes from or how every morning I wake up, I want to make something, I want to create something just to get it off of me and out of me and pass it along to somebody else.
Amena Brown:
One of the things I really love about just everything that you're sharing here is the power for you as a Lakota woman to create from your lens inspired by your culture, your context. I mean the power, hearing you talk about the documentary I'm like, please take my money now. Please take my money now I'm ready for this because I think there is so much power in each of us in the cultural context we come from that we tell our story, that our story is not being told through the lens of someone who enters that space as outsider or as observer, but that we get a chance to tell the layers and the richness of that. That's a lot of what I hear in what you're sharing about your experience growing up in your community, that there are so many layers of richness there.
Amena Brown:
So many layers of these multi-faceted experiences that you got to have as a child, that you got to watch the other adults and elders in your community do and participate in and how that informs the work that we make as creative people, that informs what we decide to do with what it is that we have. And I think that is so, so powerful. I wanted to ask you also, I know that part of your work... I'm in awe of people that can do what you do Juliana, which is do a lot of visual work, visual arts, photography, filmmaking. Those are all gifts that I do not have. I literally got words and that's what I have. I can talk, I can write. I'm like I got that. So whenever I get a chance to encounter other artists that have this gift to see things and to say, I can make something that people can see, can watch, can experience in those ways. I want to hear more from you also, what do you think is the power of photography as a medium? And why was that one of the types of medium that you chose for your work?
Juliana Brown Eyes:
So when I got the Gates scholarship and I got my refund check back, the thing that I did was I bought myself a camera.
Amena Brown:
What was that first camera?
Juliana Brown Eyes:
The camera that I bought was a Canon 60D. And in my community, there were no photographers and the schools, they would hire the people to come and take your photos for school pictures and all these things. And I just kept seeing all these beautiful because I'm very ingrained and deep into who I am is my culture. I powwow dance, I jingle dress dance at our powwows. I partake in all of my ceremonies and we have a lot of dances and songs. And I was just like, this is so beautiful. No one knows about it in the world. No one knows these teachings and no one's recording them. And for a long time, it was actually a cultural pushback because our community wanted to, and elders wanted to protect them, protect all of our ceremonies that we have.
Juliana Brown Eyes:
So there was this, let's not take photos, let's not take videos. My generation then has been this like, well, let's preserved them. Yes, let's protect them, but let's also preserve them because now we're getting into this era of media and all of our Indigenous youth, they're all on Facebook. They're on Instagram, they're all watching YouTube. And imagine if we can record them and almost make a digital encyclopedia. A lot of our elders are dying and they're taking all of that knowledge with them. And so I started photographing a lot of our elders. And at that time, I didn't have video capability or anything. And so I was just taking these photos of say, a white man who came in and took his photos and told his story he wanted to tell and then left and made a couple thousands off of my tribe. And I seen that done so many times and I was like, no, no, no more.
Juliana Brown Eyes:
Now we have the power. Now we have the lens. Now we have the camera, we have the power to tell our own story. We are in charge of our own narrative. Let's take back the narrative from white America. They've told our story for so many decades. Let's stop that right here and right now, and let's tell our own story. And so that's really why I got into photography. That's why I'm so passionate about it. And fast forward to now, I'm now into moving pictures, moving photography. I was like, what better way to tell a story that encapsulates all of my skills as an artist, from painting to writing to music, to all of that, is in film. I can utilize all of my skills that I've learned and I can now use it to make a documentary or make a feature film. And so that's really the point that I'm at as an artist now, it's really trying to hone in on and perfect it, so that way I can do our Indigenous communities justice.
Amena Brown:
Yeah. Oh, I love that. But I want to ask you, which I'm sure you have this opportunity many times, but I just want to ask you, because I'm curious to hear, what are the words you would say to young Indigenous women who may be younger than you, maybe around the age you remember you were, when you were a little girl watching your mom and your grandma and the different women in your community. What are the words you would say to the next generation of Indigenous women?
Juliana Brown Eyes:
I would say continue to pray, continue to learn about your ancestry and your culture. Don't take for granted the language and your ceremonies and the practices that the women who came before us have left for us, because that's really what's going to ground us. And that's what sets us apart from people who have lost that. There are people who want to fill that void within themselves. But if you think about it, you were born with it. And see, it took me a long time to realize that I was born with all of these cultural teachings and how rich I was in my culture. And it has never been about money or anything. I was already rich in culture. And so for young Indigenous women, just never forget that light and beauty that you carry inside you because there have been plenty of times where I thought that it was over, I thought that I had no purpose here. And I've been at rock bottom. I've been in abusive relationships, I've been through sexual abuse and mental abuse. I've been through all of it.
Juliana Brown Eyes:
And there were times where I literally thought that I didn't want to be here anymore. And suicide is one of the biggest statistics amongst Indigenous people. And the next statistic is the missing and murdered Indigenous women. There's a lot of women that are missing. And growing up, you either, you're looking at the statistics, what do I have to choose from? I either become a statistic and I become involved with drugs and alcohol, or I end up killing myself or I become missing. I was like, no, that's not what our elders left us with. That's not how we conduct ourselves. This is not what they gave their lives for. We need to remember what they did for us. We need to remember that light that we carry inside of us. And again, back to the ancestral knowledge, any woman armed with her spirituality and her ancestral knowledge is an unstoppable force.
Amena Brown:
Y'all, I hope you are inspired and riveted by what Juliana shared with us today. Since this interview, Juliana has continued to profile Indigenous women and tell Indigenous stories through her initiative Rezaissance, you can follow at Rezaissanceofficial, and you can get more information about Juliana's work at rezaissance.com. And as always, you can check out the show notes for all of the links and things that we talked about in this episode at amenabrown.com/herwithamena. For this week's give her a crown, I want to celebrate Deb Haaland, a Laguna Pueblo from New Mexico. And Sharice Davids a member of the Ho-Chunk nation from Kansas. These two women have been the first Native American women to serve in Congress.
Amena Brown:
This month is Native American Heritage Month, but around here, we celebrate Native and Indigenous heritage all year long. We celebrate the Native people who are not just in history, but they are still here and using their voices to continue building the future of their people. I want to give a crown to Congresswoman Deb Haaland and Congresswoman Sharice Davids for using their voices and leadership to continue to uplift and celebrate the story and heritage of their people and to serve their communities. To these two Congresswomen, we give them a crown.
Amena Brown:
HER with Amen Brown is produced by Matt Owen for Sol Graffiti Productions, as a part of the Seneca Women Podcast Network and partnership with iHeartRadio. Thanks for listening. And don't forget to subscribe, rate and review the podcast.