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RB: So between the work that you were doing with the American Indian Movement and other Native American entities, and as the staffperson, did your identity as a Japanese American ever factor into it in terms of the people that you've worked with, the native indigenous communities themselves, relatability to certain issues of displacement?

MN: Well, yeah, I think it did. I think that the relationship, being a person who was not black, not white, and who often looked like, you know, an indigenous person. I think that helped. I mean... and sometimes, I'd get mistaken for them. And I have to confess that there were moments I felt, well, maybe I could pull a con job on this, you know, pretend I'm Hopi or Navajo. And somebody mentioned that, you know, my name was, could probably pass as a Hopi name. I didn't. But I think it was an important experience for me, because, in a number of ways. I mean, one is the way in which the issues for Native peoples are defined. They're both similar, but significantly different. In other words, native peoples are poor people. You know, they have, they're structurally oppressed. And, you know, the history, of course, you know, as part of one of the cornerstones of this nation. So there's that aspect of it. So they share, if that's the right term here, a kind of a collective history with the other people of color. But what makes it different, -- and Native peoples would be among the first to tell you -- is their status, that as sovereign people, and sovereign people, usually with governments, and the historical relationships that flow out of that. So when you're talking about Native peoples, it's not a sort of generic Native peoples. You know, you're Cherokee or Lakota, they're Apache, Wabanaki, et cetera, each with their own creation myth, each with their own political and social histories, usually with their own treaties, and that makes them different. So their struggle in that sense, is not for equality as such, but for sovereignty or self-determination. Because they've been around as discrete peoples before there were any other people on this continent, and they'll persist as they have always. I mean, some in diminished numbers, obviously. So that casts another dimension to the struggle.

So one of the discoveries that I have made for myself is in speaking of political coalitions of the poor in the press, you have to be, you know, you have to be mindful of that difference also. In other words, it's not being poor and oppressed, because that's a broad brush. Accurate, but in this sense, incomplete, and that was important to know. And, you know, it gives you also a sense of history about this nation and their history, too. I mean, indigenous peoples. I think there is such a historical sense in this country, and in this culture, you know, I don't know that we comprehend what it means to be part of a community that has lived on this particular stretch of land or identified with a particular stretch of land, not just for, you know, a couple of generations, but three hundred, four hundred, five hundred years going back. And I think we're just beginning, as non-indigenous peoples, to understand what that means, and also to begin to pay homage to whose land this is. And I don't think we've yet developed a political response appropriate, you know, to that discovery. In other words, I thought about structures that could develop, you know, maybe there should be a "Supreme Indian Court," for example, and why not have Native representation in Congress, or certainly at the state legislative levels? I mean, they do in Maine, for example. There are delegates, I think, one Passamaquoddy, one Penobscot, to the state legislature, why shouldn't that be larger? I mean, why shouldn't there be ten Navajos in the Arizona legislature? I mean, why shouldn't our political seamwork reflect something with accuracy and political reality? I mean, yes, the numbers are small, but so are farmers, so are residents of Wyoming, you know. So it's not just size, it's political realities and historical ones. So it makes you think a lot, frankly, I mean, at least for me, that it's not a single fit.

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