Season 1 - Episode 3

Good day, everyone. My name is Anthony Scott and I serve as chief for inclusion and belonging at Virginia Tech for our Student Affairs Division. And I want to welcome you to our episode. Today's episode of Foundations. Foundations is a podcast that we've put in place to help our students understand the entire context behind racial relationships and those of difference. So we're here today. We have two fabulous guests here. And these are people who I'm sure you'll find interesting. And what I would do is give them the opportunity to introduce themselves, and we will dive right in.So who who would care to start? 

I always open the floor with Miss Vicki Ferguson. I like to do it in the order of the operation of which we all appeared at this site. 

Okay. Well, let's start with Vicki.

All right. Well, my name is Victoria Persinger Ferguson. Most people call me Vicki after they meet me. So it's just more you know, it's a better way, I think, for us to to have a gathering of conversational minds. So my name is Vicki Ferguson, and I, I kind of have two things. It's who I am and what I do. So who I am is I'm an enrolled member of the Monacan Indian Nation of Virginia. And I'm a historical interpreter. So I do public history. And even when I'm not working, I will be at a reenactment, you know, still doing public history, still talking to the public, still teaching the public. So that's what I do. And I also here, at Virginia Tech, I am the director or the program director of the Solitude Fraction Houses. What I have to do or what I really want to do is to be able to use Solitude and Fraction as places where we can get a more diverse educational learning opportunity. And I believe that's really important. And as we talk today, you'll find out how I am a person who believes in having the ability to control your own stories or your own narratives and how you tell those stories. 

Thank you for joining us. 

Thank you.

Very nice. My name is Kiera Mosley Hobbs. I am founder and executive director of the More than a Fraction Foundation, and I am also a descendant of the people that was enslaved here at the site that you now know today is Virginia Tech University. I am this fifth generation from John Fraction, which is one of the main names that shows up and documentation of the Preston family in their history. And the Preston family is the family that owned all of this site when it was a plantation. And so that is who I am. What I do is wing it no. So, so what I do is what I'm doing right now and I'm only half joking about winging it because you really take you let your path go where the universe leads you. So what I'm doing right now is helping Virginia Tech kind of grapple with its history, of its plantation history, its history of the displacement and the removal of the Monacan nation in the little not just, you know, helping them be on the cutting edge and not just acknowledging it, because a lot of universities and sites that have history with slavery or the removal of indigenous people have already gotten to the point or to the phase where they do the acknowledgment. And so the acknowledgment has become the easy part. So what we're trying to do at Virginia Tech is the one thing that a lot of sites are asking themselves when they gather together in symposiums and conferences and things like that, which is the now what? And so we're trying to not only represent ourselves as descendants, and that would be like the Fraction and the McNorton family. But we're trying to use ourselves as almost living sacrifices of what the now what is. So we exposed ourselves to different programs, different movements, different activities within here at Virginia Tech. And we try to measure how we react to it. So it's almost like a self-inflicted trauma so that we can learn here what works and what doesn't work. And so it's almost like a living case study of the terms of and that's what we're doing here and that's what we're doing right now. Have this podcast interview again in ten years. It might be a different subject. Like I might be like, "I'm trying to take Virginia Tech down, you know, I don't know. Let's see how it goes, though. But so far, so good. 

Well, let's let's jump in with a question that was definitely on my mind when I think about history and when I talk to the students here on campus, we try to go back and provide context. So when I think about the two of you and walking across this campus, I, I wonder, what are you thinking? What's going on in your minds when you walk around this campus and you think about your ancestors? Because a lot of us, we we don't have the context that you have. We don't have names. We don't have all of this information. So what goes on in your minds and also in your hearts? 

Well, so I'll start because my main focus when I think about Tech is the land. So my ancestors were the stewards of the land. We took care of the land. We didn't overuse it. We moved. So it will you know, it would regenerate. 

And and I'm sorry, can I jump in? Because you said something. You said you're stewards. Weren't you the owners of the land? 

Not in the way that we see that today. Today, you know, you'll have an individual who will own lots of acres of land for themselves personally. But for us, it was so much of a communal way of living until we communally used the land. It gave us the natural resources we needed to survive. It gave us food, clothing, shelter, medicines and all those types of things. And so making sure that those items were always there for you was very important. So when we say ownership, and I'll probably get back to this later, that means you turn land into a commodity. To get back to the question of when I walk across this land, one thing I think about as well, my ancestors probably hunted in this place, you know, or, you know, not too far from here where the golf courses was a village site. And we have a lot of information about that based on the archeology that's been done there. But then I think about that as we saw more Europeans come here, more immigrants moving into this this region. One of the things that happened is that when the Monacan signed a treaty with England, we were given 2,200 acres of land. 2,200 acres of our own land for a whole nation. But James Preston was granted 100,000 acres for him and others. So I think about the disparity in that and then I think about how that played out over the over the years is as I look at our ancestors and the wealth that was not generated because England never gave us the land and how families who had 10,000 acres, 100,000 acres of land were able to generate a heck of a lot of wealth that was able to pay us down. So as I walk across the campus, I'll very often think about the land and how the land has changed and how we have not necessarily taken good care of the land. 

Thank you. 

That was the deep. Thank you. But it's so interesting that, like, the outlooks are different because when I go across the campus, honestly, when I look at the campus as a whole, it was supposed to pick all of this stuff, you know? I'm just looking at the massive size of it. So my experience here is more like flash back. You know, I'll look at the fireplace in the house and I'm thinking about, you know, an and sister putting their hand on the mantel to lean in, to clean it off and just knowing that they touched it.So it becomes very flash back because even as a descendant, as an African-American out introduction of our ancestors and enslavement is very object. We can only imagine them as they woke up. They worked. They were brutalized. They went to sleep.And then that cycle. So it's hard to think of them, even though we know that they're people. And it's very popular, to use the word, humanize the enslaved people. It's really hard to see what that looks like. 

You know, one time we talked about burials. Walking across the land. Yeah. Because we don't necessarily know where their heads are buried. Yeah. And it's probably even more so for you than me because we know where the the town was. Right. But for her, it's totally different.

So at this point, where we are now is you have no idea where people are buried here on campus. And we know what we would assume that that is the case, but we have no knowledge of that. Is that correct?

Right. Right. I mean, there's speculation and and the campus is so built up, they were there rules in archeology that if they were building these buildings at Virginia Tech, if they would have found bones, they were supposed to stop building. So you look at the campus of Virginia Tech, it's like it's absolutely no way they didn't find anything. And if you think about the racism and bias of the time, that if you find it and you go look at records and you find out this used to be a plantation, there's plenty of people in the area that would sweep it under the rug and say, oh, well, just keep building the building. So it's very possible that the people that were enslaved here is underneath your dorms or your classrooms or your halls and just we will never know.

And even for us, the Native American Great Protection Act was not always established. You know, so it's changed, you know, in the seventies and eighties in the way that we deal with those types of things. But when a lot of these buildings were built here, it's a long time ago.

Mm hmm. We as we sit in this room that we're in, we're in what's called Solitude house. And this, comparatively speaking, this is a small room as we compare it to what we live in today. But we have this fireplace.And can you describe this house 

This is the 1834 or the additions started in 1934. The one room cabin that was 1801 was first, and then it expanded to this section of the house. So this particular part of the house is really quite old, and they were started on that before the name Solitude was actually attached to the house. So we've got, you know, like another parlor and a dining room area. You know, the entrance for you're here right above us is another room, which was probably a bedroom. It was common to have bedrooms on top of the one room cabins.And we see how that's been extended up to be a full sized room today. So we're in the more of the space where communal activities would take place and then above us would be the bedroom activities for me and Karen may see this differently is I look at the back door and I wonder who's standing there openingthat door for everybody who comes in this house during this time period. And you think about all of the add ons, all of the add ons for a Solitude was supposed to be showing the wealth of Margaret Taylor Preston, that is that he's getting from now on his own enslaved people.

So it starts with the one room cabin. So it's ironic to be here now and I'm like, Oh, it's such a small room where this room was his flex for a minute. You know, all of the extension was a flex of his of that, you know, all of this wealth I'm getting from, you know, the free labor and look how much I can build into this house. And so-

And free land. 

Yeah. 

Remember all those thousands of acres of land that was granted to them was pretty much free land, free Indian land. So you've got free land for my people.You have free labor from her people. 

Wow. We're talking about free land and free labor. Let's talk about moving up in time just a little bit. We have the land grants that were taking place. Land was given to the state of Virginia to provide a university, which we're sitting at at Virginia Tech. And it's our mission to provide students who can give back to not only the commonwealth, but worldwide. So this is an institution that's built for the people of the Commonwealth to gain education. And back then it was primarily in the agricultural section and things like that. So when we talk about students coming here now and being educated, how how do you feel? What's been of discussion in your families and among your friends about Virginia Tech and our mission here to educate? And let me give you a little context about why I'm asking this question, because when we talk about the history of Virginia Tech in our in our all of our programs here, we start off with the corp. We talk about the development of the corp and how the corp was built here and how people went off to war. And we have a monument to the people who went out to war and lost their lives. But we don't go back further and talk about the enslaved and the stealing of the land. We don't talk about that. And now we have acknowledgments, as you alluded to earlier, we have those in that acknowledgments. But when we talk about people being educated here, what are your thoughts about that?

For me personally, because you mentioned land grant. So for me as a native person, I see a two parts to that. I see the land that was granted to the Europeans who came here as the first granting of the land. Unfortunately for the gentleman who lived here when he sold his property to the agricultural college, part of that was during the time period when the other land, the grant was happening. And that other land grant is is really dealing with approximately 11 million acres of Indian land being taken from 250 entities on the other side of the Mississippi so that it could be sold and that money could be funneled into the land grant universities. At first, Hampton was getting some of that here. Well, one third because this college got two thirds. And now I think it's Virginia State who is now the big came into the land grant status there.Again remember for me it's that land conversation looking at that land. But then I also think about I saw a picture of a it's a chief of a tribe, maybe in the 1930s or something. And he had signed away his land and he has his hand over his eyes.And you could just see in his body he was just, you know, just just demoralized almost, because he'd been forced to do that. And then I think about 250 entities went through that same thing at that time period. So the goal here is to enlighten people about that restorative justice. You know, we have to admit that it happens, but we also have to make sure that it doesn't happen again if we're going to get to the fourth step. So the one way perhaps that we can make sure these things don't happen again is the educational process. And sometimes that means tapping into people on a heart level so they understand and they become allies to make sure those types of things do not happen again.

For Virginia Tech, it is. There's so many details about the history of this site, which we really should just call Virginia Tech's history, that, you know, if you stop running away and it's probably goes for both sides, if you stop trying to run away from the fact that indigenous people were removed and then African people were brought in for slavery. There are other stories like, for example, if Virginia Tech wants to push the fact that its foundation is a military school and you want to acknowledge all the people who fought there were enslaved people here that ran away and joined the Union Army and fought in the Civil War, you know, so if I mean, so if you want to focus on military. Sure. But there is other stories that you can tell. And so one of of the things that I've been saying lately in terms of I'm often asked if things should be renamed off of the Preston's or, you know, the renaming of things. And right now, in my thoughts, I'm saying, It's not necessarily the removal of the person's right. It's it's the addition of everyone else. It wasn't the presence of the Prestons It was the omission of everyone else. So if you want to tell a military story, there are military stories. The problem is, is early history focused on the Confederate military story? And so if you're going to focus on that, then the only way you can include the enslaved people is if you fall into and try to use the rhetoric of the benevolent master and the happy slave, which is, you know, the black confederate, which. You know, is is that really is it very possible that some enslaved people fought for the Confederacy? Sure. All black families have that one Republican uncle or something where you're kind of like, well, what are you doing? You know. What do you mean that, you know, Mexican immigrants should go back where they came from? Did you not know that they're also talking about, you know, when they use that type of language. So we all have those. And so the same thing would apply back then. But is it the vast majority now? So the presence of enslaved people or Africans in the Confederacy and calling them Confederate soldiers kind of ignores the fact that if your slave master said, I'm going to fight with the Confederacy, you're coming with me. You're not in a position to be like, you know, I think I think I'm going to the Union. We'll meet you half way. You know, you don't have the opportunity to say that. So there's a presence there. And so, like, even if in the early history of Tech, they wanted to focus on the Confederacy, if they would have done that right, they still would have had to talk about the enslaved people. But it's when you look at history, there's such a concrete effort to avoid the subject of my history and Vicki's history that you can look at it now. It's a little it's a little sad if it's not comical to just completely try to run away from it. So the things that is going on now, it's going to take some courage to to deal with it now really from both sides of it, because if you are an African-American person, we avoid plantations. We avoid plantation houses and plantation sites. And so for order for us to be better about the way we tell the history, there is a requirement from, you know, European descendant powerhouses that still manage and own sites like this. And then there is a requirement of the descendants and African-Americans and black people in general and the African diaspora to come back to these spaces and, you know, retain some ownership and, you know, own your story and own that narrative and not really export or say they gave us an opportunity, but come in and demand it, take it and do it, whether they like it or not, especially in the age of the Internet, we don't really need permission anymore. You know, you can become a trend on TikTok or Facebook or Instagram or Twitter if you just talk about it the right way.

I know that I've I've heard and I've witnessed conversations when we talk about history. And I can only say that I believe that these statements were made out of ignorance. But I have heard people say, well, why didn't the native people fight back? And then in terms of those who were enslaved, it's a conversation of, well, I wouldn't have done that. I would have fought back. I would have gathered people to fight back. I don't I don't know if the statements are comical as as you were saying earlier, but there are people who who generally feel this way. They believe that people didn't resist. So when you hear that and you are direct descendants, what do you what do you feel? What do you think about? 

I think it is a defense mechanism to the trauma of thinking about the history, because what's the alternative? I would have been a slave and a really good one. Who's going to say that? No one is going to say that. So if you're going to talk about and take a position, all of us think we're going to be Nat Turner, because what's the alternative? Right. In order to address that history, you have you have to be able to process it in modern times. And we all like to think that we're the greatest. One thing that we all know about ourselves for sure is how right we are. Right? And that's kind of one of the issues that we have, you know, within this society politically and everything. The reason why we're moving to this fully individualistic society is because we are all sure that we're right individually. I'm pretty sure that I'm right individually. And so we lose the collectivism that, you know, the Monacans have the Tutelo have the indigenous people have even Indigenous Africans have their very community based cultures. And so in community based cultures, it's not about being right.It's not about what you can achieve. It's about the good of the society, it's about the good of the community. And so when you try to think individualistic, you can't relate to a people in a culture that's community based. And the only way to survive slavery is a community based culture. That's the only way to do it is a community based culture. And that becomes even stronger with the idea that your bloodline could be sold away at any time.So your community becomes who is with you in a close quarters, and that changes that all time. Narratives written by people who were enslaved themselves after emancipation, they often talk about how they look out for each other, learning how to read. There's a look at what somebody else is has, you know, the crayon in the book under the floorboard. It took a community based structure. So to look back at slavery in the 21st century lens where we've been taught, get your money, get your stuff, girl, look out for you, independent woman, blah, blah, blah. And everything is very individualistic. Then you look. You take that same viewpoint and you look back at slavery. You say, I wouldn't have been a slave. I would have fought back. I would have convinced other people to fight back. Because one thing I know for sure is that I'm right. And my position would have been right and I would have been convincing everyone else to fight with me because I know how to do it. I know what's best I can figure it out. Right? But if you look community base and to fight back, to run, to talk back means they might not whip you. They might whip your six year old son. Are you going to talk back? You're going to fight back. Okay. Go ahead and fight back. And I'll tell you, up around the tree, I'm a make you hug the tree. I'm a tie up your hands and your legs together and you can't move. I'm a whip you then I'm a whip your six year old son. And then I'm going to rape your mom in front of you. And then I might even buck break your husband. You going to fight back now in the war with community based? So you really got to think of it in that term of what was going on back then. So if you think about that, there was two choices for those communities. You either fight back by surviving because there was a concrete effort to break black people mentally and physically. If you survive that, you won. That's one mentality. If I can survive this, I win. Or it can be, I won't let you have my body and I'll jump into the sea. I don't look at either one of those and say, one is right and one is wrong. I recognize that it was only two choices and both of them took courage to make. Thank you. I think too, and when I hear you say that, I think about how the hierarchies have controlled what we've learned about the past.

Exactly. Which is one thing I said, how important I think it is for people to control their own stories, their own narratives, and speak truth to to their own histories. Because if you get the opportunity to learn all of that, then maybe you won't see that. Oh, I would have run away. Okay, there are some things you need to hear before you say you would have done that one way. Yeah, some really. So it even for us is as I see it sometimes because I've been doing public history for so long, how important it is to get that other side of the story out. So people go, Wow, I didn't know that. You know? And people are like, Oh, well, the native should have fought more or we should have done this or we should have done that. Once you go through that whole thing of of us culturally, you know how we're all share feed you, make sure you have water to drink, you know, and then you start dealing with the fact that how are you going to fight germs? Because European germs took out so many Native people. We're just coming through the COVID 19 issue. We know how these germs spread. Now, think about that with not knowing how germs spread, not realizing that they're spreading. And you will see where complete towns of people, just about true pandemics, 80 to 90% of the town is wiped out. Who how are you going to fight under those circumstances? You know, so you have to learn more of the true history. And then the other thing is sometimes we fought other groups of us. Okay. Right? Sometimes we thought other groups of us. So when I tell people the Iroquois, mainly the Seneca came down and wiped out hands of us, how can we fight against the Europeans?

We're fighting against ourselves. You know, and so and the Chickisaw and Choctaw had slaves. 

And Cherokees.

And Cherokee, so bringing us back to Solitude, that's why it's important to be able to have a place like this so we can have those conversations so people can go, you know what I think about that? I didn't know that.

And hopefully and I'll say this, hopefully that if we can get people to think about that, then people will show their humanity a little bit better. Just like we're African-American. But can you imagine being African-American and tracing your ancestry to slavery and finding out your ancestor was an overseer that was doing the dirty work of the slave master? Like, we're not ready for that.

It would be difficult to admit to that history and your family. Now when I talk to young people and we talk about how it was before all of this happened, and a lot of people just believe that Africans came here in 1619, that was the first time they ever set foot on this continent. And when you try to explain to them that that wasn't the truth, that Africans were traveling long before that, and Africans had relationships with Native people here in the Americas before Europeans. They came here. It's it's hard to get them to see this. But to your point, also, when you talk about the history, the true history, and that Native Americans were. Well, I don't like that term. Indigenous people were fighting among themselves, just like any other culture-- On any other continent. And people. Yeah, people take that and run with it and say, well, well, indigenous people had slaves as well and they, they, they hold this up as some banner of well maybe what we were doing. Yeah. An excuse.

But let me ask you this. We know this history now. We're in 2022. How do we get past this?

 We don't get past it. 

Explain that because America is founded on narcissism and its economy is based on bodies.And one of the embassy and narcissism built within the system of just asking them to acknowledge or grapple with history or tell or talk about the history, that gaslighting in your face or the denial of it. It's it's American culture has a lot of characteristics.That's narcissism. If if we kind of deal with the history of it and you realize that one of our foundations is narcissism, then there isn't a getting past. It is learning how to function within that narcissism, which means the utopia that we all want to get to probably can't be reached. Maybe not in this lifetime. I don't know. But narcissism is a huge thing because narcissism gives birth to American exceptionalism. And that's what we're told about the history. We don't understand what it was like back then. So to own slaves back then, which is, you know, the new language, they'll say you can't look at it with a 2022 lens back then because times were different, which is by saying you can't question it. And then its first currency is bodies. First one was the removal of the indigenous people. And so the first thing it did was remove the debt. It started its balance at zero by removing the Indigenous people and then it built its assets with unpaid labor, right? And because its currency is based on bodies and free labor, that's why we can't climb out of low wages. That's why just the concept in our basic economic understanding, we say there's always someone that should do low paying jobs because we're based off of a no wage labor society. And so every few centuries there becomes a new population that takes those jobs. First it was the indigenous people before the Africans. It was the indigenous people who took those low, low wage jobs. And then when they are eradicated from the disease and the germs that Vicki was just talking about, you bring in the Africans because they seem to be able to deal with it better. Right in the way you deal with bacteria, germs and viruses is exposure. So we're supposed to believe that people in West Africa had no exposure to Europeans, but yet we have the immune system to fight off the germs that is familiar with their immune system. But that's another conversation for another day. Right. You know, and so you bring the Africans over and then you build the economy, you build the wealth, everything. Virginia Tech's foundation of their wealth was the plantation. 

You know, I-You said, "How do we get past it"? I think the first thing for us is to heal from it because of the generational trauma that we have. Now, I'm not saying we're the only people with generational trauma. 

Vicki, if I could jump in. You're saying how do we heal?

How do we heal from it. 

It's-okay. But when I talk to young people, everyone says, well, I wasn't there. I didn't do that. I wasn't a part of this. I wasn't affected. I don't know my history. Like I told you, I can't go past my my grandparents. I don't as far as I can go. So can you explain the harm, the harm on the modern day people? What is that what does that look like?

What does that feel like? How do we feel from that? What is it? 

You know, sometimes people don't even know they have trauma when they have trauma. This is funny. Like sometimes you'll go through your your social media and you'll read this thing where it says, how many of y'all's grandmas did this or sent you to get a switch or how many of you okay. Right. So maybe you're raised to think that was that's cool. That's good. You should do that. "Spare the rod, spoil the child". That's traumatizing your children. Okay. And so we can't even it's sometimes we don't recognize it. We don't recognize that we still carry some of these trauma. But you have to be carrying it because you're passing it on to the next generation who think that it's not trauma because it's how grandmamma did it. It's how mama did it. I won't do it, you know. So I just say sometimes identifying it, you can't fix it unless you identify it, right? I mean, you know what I'm saying? So that's a good place to start dealing with. And part of the trauma is poverty. That's just part of the trauma that people live in. And when I say that, it's not just people of color who live in poverty, a lot of people live in poverty and it forms their biases. And there again, as she said before, you're looking at commodities. Some people get wealthy, some people get poor, but it's part of that. So there's a lot. And if we could figure out how to heal it all, we'd be fantastic. But I can say that one place I think we should start is looking at it healing, just like that person who says, Well, I wasn't enslaved.Well, do you count your blessings because you have the opportunity to do things that your grandparents didn't have? You know, did did you do that because somebody paved the road for us? 

Let me let me add to that before she...because what we're talking about when we're talking about addressing it or healing, first step of that is reconciliation. Right? Reconciliation requires admitting the history and then figuring out how those communities come together and decide how to move forward towards restitution. If you don't like the word reparations, reparations has become a dirty word. So reconciliation leads to restitution. And that doesn't always have to be money. But there's three levels of reconciliation. And when people say things like, I wasn't there, I didn't do it, they've confused the type of reconciliation we're talking about. So the first reconciliation and this isn't written anywhere, this is me doing this work all the time and writing stuff in a journal and just coming to aha moments that things come from God and all that stuff. The first reconciliation is individual reconciliation. Individual reconciliation is between two people. So if I do something to you, Anthony, and I need to correct that, then that's between me and Anthony. That's reconciliation and that's individual reconciliation, because I am the one who did it right. And that's the narrative that everyone is using. Then there is community or group based reconciliation. That is, when a community or group has done something. And that's a little bit harder because everybody doesn't think and act in a monolith. Right. So that that can be, for example, the Hatfields and McCoys, that old Western story of those two families at war. You know, one family might have to reconcile with the other. That would be a community or group reconciliation, because history tells us and even those families tell us those families were battling with each other. So it was an individual matter. So that would be a community based reconciliation. And that's hard because everybody in the Hatfields and McCoys are not going to agree with that. Reconciliation looks like then there's a cultural based reconciliation. When we're talking about the history of the removal of indigenous people in the history of slavery, we're talking about a cultural based reconciliation. That means the problem is not what happened in your lifetime. The problem is the culture that allowed that thing to happen and continues to allow other things to happen. That's when you get into the conversation or the language about the government needs to. Society needs to. When we talk about, you know, white supremacy systems, systematic change. It's because we're talking about a cultural reconciliation. And that's hard because the first thing you have to admit is that the culture is based on we go back to the narcissism of the doctrine of discovery. There's European, a Westernized standard that required the assimilation of me and Vicki's communities. Right. So we assimilate into this culture when we function without the world. But at the same time, there's a reason that she can say, I am a member of the Monacan nation because she can leave this European Westernized culture and go back to her own. There's a reason that we say, "African-American Vernacular English". There's a reason we say, "slang". There's a reason we joke around with concepts like the cookout and things like that, because there is a separate culture. We come in and out of the European Westernized culture.

Code switching. 

Exactly. That's the word for it, right? Be good at code switching. Yeah. If, if if you want to climb that ladder. Right. Right. So the reconciliation we're talking about is the cultural reconciliation. And the reconciliation is between the indigenous cultures, because we talk about indigenous people like we talk about Africans like Africa is not a continent and, you know, with different countries in it. So all Africans are not the same. So we're talking about reconciliation between the indigenous cultures. We're talking about reconciliation among the African diaspora, because it's not even just African-Americans at this point. And then we're talking about the reconciliation of what culture of reconciliation there. We're talking about European-Americans. And then that becomes complex in itself, because we're talking about Scots, Irish, English, German, French, right. And all of those are different cultures. And so when you think about that, it almost becomes impossible, but it's not if you address the culture. And so one of the things we're seeing the shift and I think people are starting to realize it because there's more language about the British monarchy being held responsible for colonization, a little bit more like why are we still letting them ride around in parades like they don't owe the world. And, you know, people are starting to question that culture now and it's going to move towards that cultural reconciliation. And so and I think one of the greatest examples about that is everybody rallying for Haiti like you guys made them pay you for their freedom. You owe them money in the fact that the whole world is like, you know, France, you need to pay back Haiti. That's a that's a cultural reconciliation. 

That's a really good example of that. When I think of this constant, this concept of restitution, what holds it back a lot of times is that someone has to give up something. And I think even when we talk about reparations, the mindset of most people who are against it is that who's going to pay for it or how it's going to be done. So I won't get into that at this point.But what I want to ask you this question. I want to pose you with sort of a scenario that I want you to contemplate. And and it's dealing with part of my work and the mission of this university and I want your opinion on it and I want your input. But if you were to have, let's say a student, let's say just any student and we'll identify the student as a white student who is graduating this May who has a huge job at Deloitte waiting for them. They're going to do great things. They're going to prosper there. Their plan is to work for Deloitte a couple of years, go to law school, get that, get some type of internship in D.C., apply to law school, become a lawyer. While they're in law school, they're there clerking on the Supreme Court. Well, they get an opportunity at the law school to clerk on the Supreme Court. This person is has a vision of doing great things. So when we talk about this discussion and this student is sitting in front of you and this student has no knowledge of anything that we've just talked about. Why is any of this important to this student? 

Because I said so. Is that a a good answer or no?

That's a great answer. But I don't know if the student will accept it.

Definitely would not accept it.

But seriously, I'm asking why?Because when we talk about context and I want people to really hear from you. Why you believe the history of your family. And this is what we're really talking about. We're not just talking about some abstract lesson here. We're talking about your family. Why is the history of your family important for this student to take away when he leaves, he or she leaves here on their journey? I think sometimes if we educate people properly, we can dispel some of the the biases that they have because they simply don't know.

I had a student who worked for congressmen, and it was what she did in the summers. What she wanted to do was was, was being in political science. And so she spent the summer working with us. And so I went over, you know, how she would answer questions, rules, laws, Racial Integrity Act of 1924. You know where you know how natives were just wiped off of the Virginia rolls, basically, you know, we don't exist anymore. And just teaching her laws that affected us as natives. She had no idea. And she'd go, Well, I didn't know that. And I'd say, So when you get a job in political science and you're working on some of these bills, try to remember this, you know, try to remember some of the things that you have learned from us. So hopefully it will help you to guide the way that you got the people that you're working for. And that was my goal. But in that particular case, it's one at a time. You know, I'm working with this person one at a time. I'm not trying to to change how they celebrate their their holidays at her house or anything like that. I'm just trying to use education as a way to unlock some knowledge for that person so that that person, as they move through life, can go, whoa, whoa, wait a minute. You know, and really kind of think about that.

And that's how I approach it, it at one at a time. How about you care about changing the way you approach it? Right. Because even in the way that you kind of introduce the scenario and the question, it was as if he had a choice and he had to give us permission to give the information that he can decide whether or not he will retain it, whether or not he agrees with it or whether or not he accepts it. But I'm hoping that in the direction, for example, that Virginia Tech is going to is that you don't really have the option of whether or not you're exposed to it.

So there is no going to that student and say, do you mind if I teach you about my history? And I think sometimes thinking that way, especially when it comes to African-American people in culture, of course, that comes from, you know, the training of the period of slavery where, you know, people have to give us things or we have to be given permission to certain things. So if I just expose and give the information and then asking for permission, you had to take this course in your freshman year. Some of the courses that you took it, Virginia Tech embedded it in their curriculum, like even the medicine, you know, medical school. I know the chair over there at one of the webinars he did, he was like, How can I really like embed this into what I'm doing so that if he is a pre-med student and there's a couple of courses he's taking, he's going to get the information in history because it's part of the curriculum. You can choose not to do the paper if you want and get that zero. But the way satisfactory academic progress works that you got to maintain that scholarship, you're going to do that paper. Now, you can reject the concept afterwards because even we do that, you know where you access if you wanted to read Macbeth, Tale of Two Cities, all of that British literature that was supposed to be classical literature that we don't really care about, where, you know, we had to do it. No, you had to do it. Assimilation. True. And you did it to just put it in the curriculum, put it in the culture. Wow. And then they'll get it. And then they have the right to reject it if they want to, because I've done the same thing and we just take it right. And so part of the shift in mentality is and part of the idea of diversity is like a holistic assimilation. It's the simulation into all of the different cultures, which is why we go back to the concept of cultural reconciliation, because if he doesn't have a choice, this isn't even a conversation. If it's in the curriculum, it's not even a conversation. And it's like I said earlier, you have to look at the hierarchies who control, right? They want you to learn or what we have, what we are taught exactly to be. Virginia Tech has a culture, a history, and they have a way of doing things that I think sometimes I don't know if we're asking those.

We serve the right question like we have we have all of these programs in place to bring more underserved, more under underrepresented and more marginalized students here to campus. I'll say I'll speak for myself now. I don't want them to assimilate. Right? I want them to bring their total selves here and I want to learn about them. But we've been in this practice for so long of telling students, okay, if you want to engineering degree, this is what you need to learn. If you want a business degree. This is what you need to learn. But I want to know, okay, from you, help me understand you more, because I think that's that that that exchange and that dialog is missing. We assume that we have the answer, but if you're talking to a native student who comes here and has his family has been in this in this region since time began, and this student, I believe that student can tell me something, can help me to understand how to better educate instead of me assume. Mhm. So when you look at your history with them it's complete context. What questions should I be asking you as an institution 

Now what? Because 'now what' means? There isn't one question and there isn't one answer and whatever you do is going to be organic and it's going to be ever changing. And that's hard for an institution like Virginia Tech, where it takes a lot of administrative work to change things. And if I say Virginia Tech under the noun, what it means you have to continue to learn about how to incorporate these different cultures, address the needs of the different students, and change your culture in pieces.So you probably should be looking at the way you're doing things every three years. I'm just going to pick a number out there. Then you're always asking yourself, Now what? There is no end. There is no checkbox, there is no point of which you say I arrived. You should always be asking yourself, Now what? And you know, even without the context of culture as an institution of postsecondary education, of higher education, that really should be the M.O. of Virginia Tech. Right? Because colleges and universities are in this weird place, they have to think about the students of the future coming in. So looking at kids in elementary middle school who eventually become Virginia Tech students and what will that generation need? What would that generation look like? Because if you have ten year olds right now, not just growing up with social media to talk about a time they ten they can make some creative stuff on tik-tok. Whereas I'm coming from the generation that introduced social media, so we had AOL chat rooms, Black Planet and MySpace, you know, and so we're kind of like the birth of social media, but our experience is different from the vine generation in the, in the Tik-Tok generation is different from the vine generation. So as an institution, you're now what becomes these kids right now in elementary and middle school? How does Virginia Tech need to look different? Because their needs are going to be different than the students you have in the room right here. Right. The other thing that institutional hierarchy has to look like my current students, what do they need? And it has to look like what are jobs going to look like ten years from now? Because your current students are not discerning the degree. For now, you're supposed to be preparing for the jobs of the future. The polls would be estimating what those are. So we ask the student, What do you need? 

That's what I was going to say. Everything. Everything is what now? And mine was. What do I need to give you to help make you successful? Because then I might feel like you care because caring, feeling like that person cares is a very important there. It's very important because they'll start to care more when you care more. What can I do to help make you successful? Because, you know, today we've got all of these different learning issues that that were concerns that we're dealing with with students. And we have to almost meet some of them one on one in order to make them successful.

Listen, if you guys aren't thinking about how COVID hit the high schoolers in the middle schoolers right now, that whole year and a half, anybody who was starting their first year of high school, high school is a huge transitional period into adulthood. You have an entire three or four year generation of students who that whole process has been interrupted. I think it's insane. We're not talking about it. They aren't they're not coming to tech the same. They are not coming to tech the same. Their transitional period was interrupted. They stayed in the house for a year. It's not normal. They were supposed to be at the mall. They were supposed to be hanging out with friends. They were supposed to be catching up. They were supposed to be getting some real life experiences, and they stayed in the house petrified, even if they don't want to admit it, because they were 15, 16, 17 at the time, stressed out self teaching because of online education. But so much you can get from know instructor from Zoom when you've never done it before. What parents that was stressed out with a society that was stressed out, that's a huge interruption to their development. That is that's a huge end to end. And everything is back to normal. Kids are back in high school. Everything is fine. And so for someone who works for a student, you really got to be thinking about like two years from now, what are them kids going to look like? And they will lie to you and they can tell you they fine because they don't know any better because that was their transitional period. They don't know what that was supposed to look like. They have no idea. You do.

Well, as I listen to that, I can't help but to compare that scenario to what we're talking about here with our history, because we kind of do the same thing with our history. We say, Well, we're past that, we're okay now instead of really dealing with it.

But what happens is we see the effects of it in many different ways that are negative. So what you're saying is we have a great opportunity right now to prepare for those students are coming that had to deal with this trauma, help support them and and give them the opportunity to thrive by helping them where they are instead of using an old model. I think what happens also in listening to that is I'm trying to convince students that race matters, that culture matters, differences matter, and it's hard to convince them of that because everything seems okay.I am at a place where I understand. No, it's not okay because this is going to affect you once you have the real opportunity to think about what's going on. 

Well, Kyra and Vicki, I really want to thank you for this time that you've given us here. It was so enlightening in many ways. But if you can, before we leave, just once again, just tell us where you are or you can even give us any social media contacts or anything that you would have our audience to take a look at to find out what you're doing. That would be greatly appreciated. 

So as the program coordinator for Solitude, I will be spending a lot more time here developing exhibits and looking for ways that we can use that past, as always, to use the past to illuminate the future, because it's really, really important. That's part of what we'll do here in the Solitude House, allow people to maybe see this from a different lens. And thank you for inviting us, both of us, to come and sit down and talk with you. Thank you.

I would recommend people check us out on www.morethanafraction.org. You know what I would say to the listeners is at the beginning of this podcast, I was talking about how Virginia Tech is really pioneering the now what for all of the different organizations and institutions trying to deal with their history, with the indigenous land in their past and their past associated with slavery and enslaving people. So I would really keep an eye out on the things that Virginia Tech is doing and really try to engage with those different projects or programs because everything everything that is currently being done is a test. So if you go and they get it wrong, the response from you that this was wrong is valuable data because what Virginia Tech is doing becomes a blueprint in data for other organizations and institutions right now. So like one of the things that Virginia Tech does realize in the work which is doing that, you know, if they want to include, you know, Solitude in the work that Vicki is doing here, that all freshmen have to come through in a program. One of the things we just realize is that for African-American students, you shouldn't just bring them in, point to the door and say, go in into a plantation house is traumatizing for them. So there is an awareness that at least those two populations have to be handled different. It has to be very gently done. It's not just about taking a tour. It's about mentally preparing those students to come into this space, to come into the house and get that education. And that was something really valuable that Virginia Tech learned recently that they're able to take into consideration. 

Well, again, thank you both very much. And I look forward to working with you and attending some of the work that you're doing.So with that said, everyone, I wish you a fabulous day and I look forward to our next time together.