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How do stories help us challenge, shape, and navigate our democracy? In this two-part series created with Voice of Witness, we’ll explore oral histories as powerful tools of resistance and belonging. In this first episode, host Maya Rupert sits down with Ashley Hemmers, a member of the Fort Mojave Indian Tribe, whose path winds from growing up on her reservation to attending Yale to returning home again. Now a tribal administrator, Ashley shares how storytelling is both a bridge to the past and a pathway to her tribe’s future.

This episode is created in partnership with Voice of Witness, an oral history nonprofit that advances human rights by amplifying the stories of people impacted by—and fighting against—injustice. To learn more, visit voiceofwitness.org.

You can read Ashley’s full story in the Voice of Witness book How We Go Home, along with the powerful oral histories of eleven other Indigenous narrators fighting for justice: https://voiceofwitness.org/books/how-we-go-home-voices-from-indigenous-north-america/

Transcript

SPEAKERS

Maya Rupert, Ashley Hemmers

Maya Rupert  01:16

Hello and welcome to Good Things. I’m your host. Maya Rupert, today, we’re diving into part one of our two part series about using storytelling as a tool for both resistance and belonging. Stories have the power to help us challenge, shape and navigate our democracy and the voices we choose to elevate really matter. That’s why I’m so honored. Our first guest is Ashley Hemmers, an enrolled member of The Fort Mojave Indian Tribe and The Tribal Administrator for her nation. She went from growing up on her reservation to graduating from Yale and then chose to return home to work with her tribe. It’s a journey she shared in an oral history with voice of witness, a nonprofit that amplifies stories of people impacted by and fighting against injustice. And as you’ll hear, that journey has given her a powerful perspective on bridging different worlds. That’s a lot of good things happening. Ashley, welcome to Good Things. So in preparation for this interview, I got to learn a lot about your story. And one of the things that really stood out to me is that you like to start off every day having breakfast with your grandma. And I thought that was just really beautiful and powerful. And if we can just sort of start off, how was that this morning?

 

Ashley Hemmers  02:40

Yeah, I mean, today was Friday. We had eggs and tortillas. It was awesome. She had her coffee. And it’s cooling down here in the desert, which is great, but it’s still at the 100 degree mark, but a cooler morning is definitely really good. So we were able to enjoy that this morning.

 

Maya Rupert  03:00

I love that, so I want to turn and talk a little bit about, if you wouldn’t mind sharing just what it was like growing up in Fort Mojave. Are there, like, any memories that you can share again that just sort of stick with you from your childhood?

 

Ashley Hemmers  03:15

Yeah, you know, I live less than a mile from the river, the Colorado River, my family home is there, so I remember things like walking to the river and that being totally normal and going swimming all day. And I remember having open skies. Obviously my work is today, breaking intergenerational cycles of poverty on my reservation, but also, I think about the opposite side of that, that we had more flexibility in in that we didn’t have this constant fear that, you know, someone was going to buy cheap land next to us and put up a right, you know, a distribution center or right a gas plan or a marijuana distribution center, or whatever it is, whatever it is, for whatever time. We didn’t have to think about that. And I think it’s a very important topic, because it’s throwing, you know, it’s throwing you directly under me, into a new environment that they wouldn’t have grown up with otherwise.

 

Maya Rupert  04:20

Right, I think that is such an interesting point that that I think that there’s a way we think about encroachment that maybe really does only call back to what it used to look like, and what you’re describing is it’s going to start looking different. And I think there’s, there’s a misalignment there that you’re right. I don’t hear people talking about it this way, but we need to us at shifts.

 

Ashley Hemmers  04:43

Yeah, and I think for us, like native people are living here presently too. I was born at the same time that you were probably born in, you know, like, it’s not like we’re these historic figments of, like, stay away from my land. But there. Is a reckoning that has to happen and a responsibility that has to happen. That doesn’t have to be an either or it could be. I do this because of this, right? But you can’t just omit the shared history and think that no one’s here, right?

 

Maya Rupert  05:16

I think there is a way that we can, we can talk about this that recognizes exactly the this is not either or. It’s not black and white. Any solution, it’s going to have to be sort of shades of gray. But I think that there are moments right where it’s we need to be able to take a stand against something right, like I’m thinking about, you know, in your oral history, you talk about when the Department of Interior and ecology had plans to dig trenches and dispose of nuclear waste at Ward Valley, and this was like back of the 90s, right?

 

Ashley Hemmers  05:51

In California.

 

Maya Rupert  05:53

Yes, and I want to, I want to read what you what you say. You hear these stories when you’re a kid of the longest walk or Sitting Bull of all these big phantom Indians. And here we were a group of Indians, our leaders, our chairmen, people we knew, standing up for something that we believed in, and our elders showing us that it was important to fight. Can you share a little bit of what that experience fighting for your land meant to you, and how do you feel that sort of connection with what you call, I love that these big phantom Indians, like, can you talk a little bit about that experience?

 

Ashley Hemmers  06:29

There was a purpose for erasure, and there is a purpose for continued erasure. And so oftentimes, when you think about, you know, native history, those are the depictions of us that we see leaders from just specific tribes, specific moments and specific slices or interjections of history, right? But people are fluid and a moving constant. You know, people who may not come from a desert like where I’m from, and may not understand that, even though it looks like there’s no houses, buildings or industry in those spaces, that there is an ecology, that there is a fragility about how these landscapes have held up Over time, and how critically important they are to not only the things that grow from them, but the people who thrive off of them. My people being one of them. Because remember, you know, federally recognized Indian tribes have a government to government relationship with the United States. Now that wasn’t because the United States was like, Oh yeah, they’re tribes, so they’re their own government that was hard fought, long absolutely and still going right. And so because of this act of erasure, we often have to tell folks we are a government of people. We are a nation of people with our own sovereignty that pre exists the United States. And so if we are going to think about the promise of America and what it could mean, then that means that the people who have been quieted or disenfranchised, unfortunately, have a little more stake in understanding these types of histories, because then it brings relevance to the other struggles that were present when a small group of people were electing to select Power due to their manifest destiny, ideals across A landscape built on the backs of others, using the resources of others and shampooing across the voices of others, and that is like a dynamic history. And for oral history, a very good story that people are interested in but are not told.

 

Maya Rupert  08:57

Are not told, and are not always comfortable with the reality of it, when they are told, right, we’re gonna take a quick break, but We’ll be right back with more on Good Things.

 

Maya Rupert  11:10

So another big part of your story that I want us to get to is your attending Yale, because I know that you know that was sort of in some ways, like such a different world from the way that you grew up. And there was, again, there’s a quote that you have when you’re talking about this and kind of noticing the difference between yourself and your peers. You say, my suite mates had come to Yale to find themselves to become adults. I knew what it was to be an adult. I’d been an adult for years. I’d seen what adulthood looked like. This was the first time I could be a kid. And by that, I mean I could study, I could study everything I wanted to, and it was free. Can you talk a little bit more about, like, what that culture shock was like and how those differences kind of showed up for you?

 

Ashley Hemmers  11:55

Yeah, sure. So when I, when I talk about being an adult, it’s because, you know, my community, especially in rural California, there is not a lot of economic capital here, because they’re working class towns, right? And so that means that not only my community, but communities surrounding mine were living at poverty levels that people around me couldn’t even imagine, right, right? And so when I went to Connecticut, it was the first time that I noticed, especially in the area, that the students are, that there wasn’t this conversation happening. And so it felt like a completely different place to me. I was like, Whoa, to get to school. One of my mentors here on the reservation, she opened a new credit card to help me get to get my flight over so that I could be there, she felt so strongly in education that she opened that credit card even though she had a family on her own. And, you know, help me to have a hotel room so I can check in the next day, close to the university, because I was going to Connecticut, 3000 miles away from my home by myself, and so I went on my own right my mom, my grandma, left me at the airport. I had $100 to my name, wow. And so, you know, I was like, Okay, what am I gonna do? I don’t know where this school is. I’m kind of like, I don’t want to seem like, not cool, or, um, just trying to, like, act tough. And so I was like, okay, I got it. I’m gonna take a taxi from my hotel to where I have to go, and then, you know, go from there. And so I told the cab driver, I’m like, Hey, like, you know, I live on the fifth floor. Like, I know it’s kind of a short ride, but I’ll give you, you know, 20 bucks if you’ll help me carry my things up, right? And he was like, yeah, no problem. And so we get out of, I get out of the taxi, and, like, I’m flooded by these volunteers that are like, Oh, welcome to Yale. Like, happy. I’m like, can we help you? Like, and they’re like, freshmen, help move in all this stuff, right? I’m still, like, kind of weirded out, because that just, you know, it’s different for me, right? Um, I was raised to pull my own way in my community. We just, we have different values. And I was like, No, I’m okay, we got it. You can help someone else. Like, because that’s a shared value in my community. Like, no, I’m good. Go ahead and right, help someone else. And so the cab driver, he walked me up the five flights of stairs, and I opened the door, and my suite mates and their families were there. And what really made it awkward was not that part, but was the part where it was like, Well, where are your parents? Right? And I was like, well, they’re working because, like, where I’m from, people can go to college by themselves, you know, they’re 18, they’re grown, those types of things. So that really kind of helped me think about, like, the cultural differences in that like, you know, I was in a place where these young people were afforded a lifestyle where they didn’t have to think about these things, right, and so I had to go back to those teachings of, you know, being grateful for the opportunity to see these things, and I’m going to use my time to do everything I can to make it worthwhile.

 

Maya Rupert  15:48

Do you feel like as your time went on to that shift when you maybe found people that you had more in common with, or were there pieces of it that helped you to feel comfortable in that setting.

 

Ashley Hemmers  16:01

It made me more strong and deliberate and intentional about being a Mojave woman. Instead of like trying to find my place, I just recognized that I was in a different space. And instead of aligning myself with the space to make the space feel comfortable with me. I just reminded the space that they invited me, right, and so they need to be comfortable with me. And so that’s a little bit, you know, that’s a little bit different than most stories, because a lot of other folks, you know, they do a lot more in terms of seeking out places where they feel comfortable. I was just like, Well, I’ve been uncomfortable my whole life, and so this might just be another piece of the pie, right? And I might as well practice now, because when I do what I want to do, which is help to lift up my people, it’s gonna be a whole lot of uncomfort.

 

Maya Rupert  17:07

Okay, hold tight, everyone. We’re gonna take one more quick break and we’ll be back with more Good Things.

 

Maya Rupert  18:54

You graduated, and in your oral history, you said, I remember being happy and feeling like I did something good, even though it was a bittersweet ending. I didn’t have any big goals. We were happy and we were away from all the bad stuff in my community, in my family, all the stuff that we had gone through. It kind of felt like my degree wasn’t just mine, like it was all of ours. Can you talk a little bit about that, like, about that sort of sense of this huge accomplishment belonging not just to you?

 

Ashley Hemmers  19:22

Yeah, I think that when I think of my degree, it really cements my understanding of my own family in terms of, like my grandma, she’s a survivor of termination and assimilation policy. So she was placed in internment for Indian children in camps. She was encamped and then sent to boarding school, and so, you know, in those places, they told her that being Mojave was not appropriate. Don’t speak your language, cut your hair, be disciplined. Do this. This is how you live. This is who you are. Like from the time that she was like five to seven. Could you imagine, like a five year old just being ripped from their family, no and sent to a camp and then sent to a boarding school? And so when I think about my degree, and it being a history degree in sovereign development, right? That really meant that I was able to give voice to the personal story that had been impacted by a few decision makers that decided that my community was a problem, right? And so when I share my degree, I share it with my grandma, who’s a survivor. I share it with her parents and her aunties and her uncles, who had to deal with the hurt of their children being stolen. I share it with my mom, who had dreams of being going to college and doing things instead, you know, because of poverty and because of the things that happened to our community to disenfranchise us. You know, had to find her own way out of a dark path to love a little girl, right? And I share it with my extended family, and they were all proud of me, just one person in our family, getting it to that place. It’s also, in my story, a real reclamation of our power to say, look, yeah, you see this degree of mine as providing me a lens of validation or validity when I give talks and you invite me to pretty spaces, because I got that little badge on me that says I can enter this room right, right, but I already had that right, and I have a group of people behind me. My own people who have been here are from here and will remain here.

 

Maya Rupert  22:00

Right, I love how you put that, because I think it it sort of it shows that the goal here was never you needed to leave your community to get this like you had the expertise that exists already in the community, the way that we privilege certain institutional knowledge and give it credence over what is literally like all of that you had before you went to Yale. It’s a really interesting point, and one that we need, I think, a lot of people to hear. So thank you for saying it so plainly. But it also, I think, makes it clear that for you, it wasn’t like, okay, and now you’re gonna decide to go home. Leaving was almost like the detour. The goal was always the community work, right?

 

Ashley Hemmers  22:45

Yeah, and trust and believe my mentors at Yale, oh, man, especially my my strongest mentor, and I love him to death. I consider him a part of my family. Oh, he was mad at me when I was like, I’m I’m going home, really, he was upset. He wanted me to stay. So I was in history, and one of the tracks was a law track, right? There’s a lot of natives that go into federal Indian law. It’s a very appropriate track. And for me, I started doing that, and I got accepted to a few places, and my mentor really wanted me to, you know, go to a specific place, and even set up a meeting during my senior year with like the dean, so that they could say, well, there are other options. You can defer. I could do this. You could do that, and I’m sitting there, like out of respect, entertaining and being respectful in that type of setting, knowing full well I’m going back home. Yeah, and he thought it was the worst decision. I was throwing my whole life away. I had built this whole thing up to throw it away. He looked at it as me giving it up, and I looked at it as me going home, and so he came back. Actually, Yale asked me to support a Service Corps project, or a volunteer led project that goes to communities like mine and other communities across the globe to volunteer. One of the pieces of the volunteer program was that alumni were going to talk to members of my community, you know, youth, high schoolers, about their experience, what they do getting into college, and you know how they became a lawyer, just like basically college talks, which I thought was, like, super helpful. And we’re walking to the Education Center, just me and my mentor, and you can see the mountains surrounding my home and the broad open sky. And it was in October, and it was beautiful weather, 90 degrees, and people knew me. They were saying, Hi, it was a different experience. And. He looked at me, he was like, You know what, kid, I get it. I was wrong. I get it. I see it now.

 

Maya Rupert  25:06

What an incredible full circle moment.

 

Ashley Hemmers  25:08

And I said, great, you know, like, because I think he did hold that space where he thought that I could have been so much more. And sometimes, when I talk to my own community members who are in college or other Native Americans who are in college, I remind them to listen internally about what is going to be most impactful for the time they have here for themselves and their people. And that might mean that you go to law school and you do these, all these big things in this other world, but it also might mean that you go home and you work in these spaces, right? And that is okay too.

 

Maya Rupert  25:47

Right, and you say something at the end of your oral history that I think actually makes this point so beautifully. You say, in my work, I’m trying to put together a common thread to hold community together, to rebuild community. I meet a lot of people who are looking for a past. I’m looking for a future. I want to get to what that future looks like for you, for your community, for our democracy. I know that’s a lot, but let’s start with for you, what does it feel like now you have your oral history out in the world. It’s making an impact. How does that feel? What has the response been like for you?

 

Ashley Hemmers  26:24

One of the things that has been helpful is when I do support those efforts to share oral history projects, I have met and engaged with a lot of native people who have had a very hard time reconnecting with their past and don’t understand what their place could be in for the future. And so that has been a really healthy experience from this project, but the one experience that scared me beyond measure was sharing my oral history with 20 Mojave High schoolers who found out that I was in a book and started a book club about how we go home. And I was like, oh my God. And my mentor here, the Mojave woman who opened that credit card, you know, she called me. She’s like, hey, Ash. Like, you know, our kids been reading how we go home. They just read your chapter. Like they want to know, like, I can, can you meet with them, right? And for a whole week, I was freaking out. I was like, Oh my God. I felt so vulnerable, open and exposed. Like, what are they gonna think? And so when I think about oral history, I had to, in a very real way, identify how I can be comfortable being as vulnerable as I could, especially with the stories that I wanted to share, not so that it could be like a pathway for people, not from my community, to go in and see what it’s like, but also so that maybe there’s another Native student who feels lonely on a college campus and comes from a reservation and wants to go back home and do their work. Then I really had to come to terms with that. And you know, sharing this work definitely tested my gangster, especially with those 20 kids.

 

Maya Rupert  28:30

It brings me to what I the final question I wanted to ask, and I wanted to close with a section that helps to start to wrap up your oral history. You say the benefits of working for your tribe far outweigh any other job that you can imagine. You’re a part of something that helps another little girl or boy keep building by being there, being different, it’s letting people know that it’s okay to be Indian, it’s okay to be educated, it’s okay to know how non tribal people live, and to help us use those best practices to help us live better. And that doesn’t mean that you’ve assimilated. It just means that you can speak someone else’s language and you can translate it to a world that doesn’t have quite as many interpreters, a world that doesn’t have quite as many people listening from the outside. And I was struck by this section. I love the way you say that, but specifically because it’s you working to reconcile different parts of your identity. It’s your tribal identity and being educated outside of that community. What has it been like to reconcile those parts of you? And how do you see yourself sort of belonging to both of those worlds?

 

Ashley Hemmers  29:40

I think that sometimes when we think about reconciliation, we think about it as part of a healing process. But quite frankly, I don’t want to be healed from that. It’s not what I’m healing from, right? And that’s why, when I talk. About the work that I do, I talk about tribal nation building and not tribal nation rebuilding, because only in a system that wants our active erasure or seeks our systemic demise do they put us in a place where they think things can stay the same and then we have to rebuild to that old place. I’m not reconciling two spaces of myself, because I am those things. It has been so refreshing in 2024 especially since July, where people have tried to put women of color into these spaces in the United States, specifically, one woman of color, in particular, very credentialed woman of color and say, Are you this, or are you that? Are you that, or are you I’m all of it, baby. And now what right? Because those are all pieces of me, because this is part of the broader American story. And if you can’t get those concepts, then maybe it’s not me who needs the reconciliation. Maybe it’s you, right. Maybe you need the mirror, right? And so when I think about the bridge, I know that the bridge isn’t just out. I know that the bridge can be in. And sometimes, if I’m feeling extra, you know, extra myself, then I remind people in my community, hey, we could close the bridge, right? We can participate in that, because we are a sovereign nation, and so we can think about, okay, if we want to participate and engage in that, we can, but we can also close off the bridge, and we need to be mindful of what type of closures we were putting in now sometimes, because, you know, we’re fighting towards assimilation for like, you know, just communities in general, like they want better for their families, and they see other people having better for their family so no, you don’t want to live on the rise. You don’t want to live in the hood. You don’t want to live in, you know, this type of place, right? What if our land just got better? Yeah. And so for me, when I think about bridging, I think about bridging in a very different way, in that the value that I see is in the fabric of the community that I support, and the bridges that I make are not so much so that people can get out, but so that you know, we have places to walk in between.

 

Maya Rupert  32:24

That is absolutely beautiful. Thank you for spending this time today. I really appreciate that.

 

Ashley Hemmers  32:31

Awesome, well, thank you so much for the conversation today. I really appreciate it.

 

Maya Rupert  32:36

Oh my gosh, yes.

 

CREDITS  32:42

Thanks for listening to good things. You can read Ashley’s full story in the voice of witness book, how we go home, along with the powerful oral histories of 11 other indigenous narrators fighting for justice. For more info about this storytelling project and others, including education resources and ways to take action. Visit voiceofwitness.org and subscribe to the newsletter. This episode is created in partnership with Voice Of Witness, an oral history nonprofit that advances human rights by amplifying the stories of people impacted by and fighting against injustice. To learn more. Visit voiceofwitness.org, I’m your host, Maya Rupert, this series is produced by Hannah Boomershine, and Lisa Phu our supervising producer is Muna Danish, mixing and Sound Design by Noah Smith. Steve Nelson is our SVP of weekly content. Executive Producers are Stephanie Wittels Wachs and Jessica Cordova Kramer. Help others find our show by leaving us a rating and writing a review. Thanks so much for listening. We’ll see you next week. Follow Good Things wherever you get your podcasts and listen ad free on Amazon music with your Prime membership.