WE, THE ORIGINAL STORYTELLERS By Princess Daazhraii Johnson (Neets’aii Gwich’in)

The lens was pointed at us

We had no say in what was captured

Constantly contorting to suit a foreign gaze

We became the romantic façade of American genocide

Stoic, unsmiling, a relic of the past

They presumed our extinction

Instead, we continued to sing

Even as we were torn from our homelands

Even as our children were stolen

We prayed in our language

We carried seeds and stories and medicine

And one day, we picked up the lens

To the horror of the Colonizer

We leaped from the old tintype

We, in fact, still persisted

Three-dimensional and in a rainbow of colors

Smiling deep and laughing hard

We found healing in telling our true histories

In determining how we wanted to be seen

In seeking justice

In protecting lands and waters and our own children

Projecting into existence the vision

We hold for an Indigenous Future

We, the original storytellers of these lands

It is 1980 in Anchorage, Alaska. I am eight years old and attending Mountain View Elementary School. My mother has sent me to school in two long braids. I’m an incredibly shy child. I have yet to find my voice. On the playground, a blond boy and his friend chase me. Instinctively, I run. Am I being included in a game of tag I didn’t sign up for? While they laugh, it dawns on me that I am not a participant in a game of tag; instead, I am an object—their target. A terror pulses through me. The boy grabs my braids like the reins on a horse and makes a whooping-like cry, the supposed war cry we all recognize from the old Westerns that afflict screens around the world. The sense of shame and humiliation I feel has no language. It permeates my sense of well-being, my self-worth. If this is how I am visible to the world, I’d rather remain invisible. There is no one here to come to my aid, to right the wrong, to educate, to be a good ally or good human being. This interaction is an emanation of the consumption of racist and stereotypical images that are deeply engrained in the American psyche. From earliest paintings, written descriptions, policy, law, dime novels, songs, films, and television. The intentional dehumanization of the Indigenous Peoples is at the core of the issues we face, and the violence enacted on us and the land is intertwined.

It would take decades for me to learn the true history of what my family and ancestors had experienced through the colonization and assimilationist policies of the US government aimed at destroying our cultural identities. My first insight came from a conversation around Dinjii Zhuh K’yaa—our Gwich’in language. I was about thirteen years old, and I had grown up listening to my mother and aunties and other relatives all fluently speaking the language, though they never made any effort to teach us. At that time, I was also questioning life and my own identity and struggling to figure out where I fit in. Not understanding the language was making me feel left out of my own culture. So, I asked my mom, “Mom, why didn’t you ever teach us?” She paused and then dropped this shocking response: “Well, I was sent to boarding school when I was five years old, and I was hit by the matrons when I spoke Gwich’in. So, I thought if you kids were going to be successful in a white man’s world, then you had to speak English.”

I still cry when I tell this story because I see clearly my beautiful mother at the age of five, anchored in her language and culture and being punished for being born Native—the trauma we have all endured. I cry not just for my mother and my generation, but for the thousands of Indigenous children stolen the world over and especially for the ones who never made it back home. The years of forced sterilization of our women, stolen lands, our bodies used as medical experiments, the contamination of waters and lands, our babies taken away at birth… These injustices linger as they continue to persist into our present-day experience. I would spend much of my teen years processing the anger and rage of experiencing and seeing firsthand the injustices imposed upon us, all aimed at tearing us away from our homelands to get to oil, timber, and minerals and simultaneously at dehumanizing us.

In less than a century, they managed to deplete and endanger our fisheries, waters, timber, and wildlife, all of which we had been in respectful relationships with for thousands of years. Through my late teens and early twenties, I found myself time and again using poetry, dance, theatre, and storytelling as a vital form of self-expression and healing. I realized that storytelling was an essential way in which my grandmother and mother communicated with me when I was growing up. My mother thrived in using our rich oral storytelling tradition as a tool to relay our values and spark my imagination. She also shared with me her love for stories from around the world. I had other powerful influences to help me to understand the underpinnings and roots of our own caste system in America, particularly the spoken word poetry scene of the Nineties in Washington, DC, which instilled a desire in me to learn more than I was learning in college. Ultimately, this search for justice led me down the path of becoming an artist, and I began pairing poetry with moving images. I didn’t know how, but I knew at some point I would create media to help empower us as Indigenous Peoples.

With all the new learnings came the slow spiritual understandings that would make a pathway for healing possible, for reclaiming a sense of wellness, worth, belonging, and self-love. It continues to be an everyday practice. In this way, all of us are survivors. Only with looking back through world history and with learning about the foundation of current unjust and violent systems built upon faulty ideologies like the Doctrine of Discovery, Manifest Destiny, and the delusional thinking that humans are not inextricably connected to our Mother Earth and all its inhabitants do we collectively create a better path forward. It is also our birthright to feel joy, to bring back ceremony, and to create new ones as well. To celebrate our deep connection to one another, the land, and animals, to do what we can to be and remain true human beings.

I’ve been blessed to work with incredible creatives from a myriad of different backgrounds and to benefit from programs created through the Sundance Institute, PEN Emerging Voices, Reciprocity Project, and Netflix/Illuminative Producers Program. I bring my own experience as someone with mixed ancestry (belonging to both my Gwich’in culture and my Ashkenazi Jewish culture), of being raised in a one-parent household, and of living a very transient childhood in Alaska. However, my path has been very circuitous, continuously unfolding at its own pace and surprising me with dips, turns, and meanders.

One of the largest and most impactful ongoing creative projects I have the great honor of contributing to is the PBS Kids show Molly of Denali. With a group of thoughtful and talented Alaska Native advisors, we entered the exciting world of animation grounded in prayer and determined to share out our Alaska Native values and a view into history from our perspective. For all of us involved, the series has been a healing balm, a restorative vessel of stories that give us the space to showcase our humor, joy, and ingenuity. In the show, we model how humans can be in better relation to one another, our plant and animal relatives, and the waters and lands on which we depend. Non-Native parents have reached out to tell me that their children have started thanking the plants and learning our Native songs and dances, and Native parents tell me their child has become much more interested and prouder of their Native heritage since the show came out. One little girl saw the premiere and then ran home and started rummaging through her closet to pull out her qaspeq (like the red garment Molly wears on the show) and announced she wanted to wear it to school like Molly! These are the sort of value-laden ways of receiving story that all of us prayed for. To see our children recognizing themselves on-screen and to feel a sense of “Yes, that is me and my community and we are amazing!” is everything.

Building healthy communities rooted in shared understanding and Indigenous values is critical as we humans navigate this state of climate emergency. Not only is the act of storytelling paramount to elevating the issues we are facing, but the stories also help us lean into and express our grief, hope, concerns, and visions for what the future may look like. What might we learn if we only listened? In our traditional stories, we knew how to speak the same language as the plants and animals. We knew how to time travel and how to live with the utmost respect for one another. Through listening, we restore relationships. And if we find that stillness, that peace deep within, we might even be gifted with a story to tell. As I write this, the łuk choo (king salmon) are finding their way up the Yukon River, but their numbers are dwindling, and we are unable to set our nets. Our fate is linked to them and these lands and waters we depend upon. How might storytelling help our world realize that we are all connected and that we must transition off fossil fuels? There is still so much to celebrate in this beautiful world, and there is so much we can do to be better children to our Mother Earth.

I’ll share a dream I had years ago. I was on a path that spiraled down into the earth. I was so curious and reached a point where the light cut off and there was nothing but darkness. I wanted to go farther, but I couldn’t see. Suddenly, a large being—an ancestor—was before me. They were genderless, powerful, and beautiful. They were seated, but I could tell they would be maybe eight feet tall if standing. And they were humorous! They were laughing and teasing me about going farther down the path. So as not to be seen as being afraid, I stepped into the darkness. Immediately, I felt like I was being swept up in a large wave. I was spun and tossed around and around and then found myself spit out at the feet of the ancestor. It was so hard for me to stand up, and I asked them why. They smiled with kindness and compassion and replied, This is what it feels like when Creator checks in on you. When I’m feeling particularly alone or lonely, I remember this dream and remind myself that there are both seen and unseen forces who love us and want to see us reach our full potential. But also, falling down is a part of our journey! I aspire to bring this sort of loving encouragement to myself and others in the healing work we all engage in.

These thoughts I’m sharing here with you are at the heart of what moves me to act. To tell stories and to continue to seek knowledge. My work is linked always to the young Gwich’in girl who yearned to live in a world where she was seen and respected with love, kindness, compassion, and understanding. I hope these words are of encouragement to you. As we strive to be seen as fully human, for better representation, more sovereignty, freedom of expression, and protection of our lands and waters, we see that indeed our work is intersectional and guided by the strongest force in our universe: LOVE. Let us act from this place and let us breathe life into the most radical future we can imagine for our future generations.