The D.C. Series |
The following interview is part of a series The 90% ran about the experiences of Natives living in Washington, D.C. during and following the election of Donald Trump.
|
Mardella Sunshine Costanzo is a member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina and a first generation Italian-American (her mother is Lumbee and her father is from Italy). In her own words: My father is an Italian immigrant. He is a legal green card holder. I feel like I have to say that in the world we live in today. I’m a part of the first group of our family to be born here in the United States. I’m originally from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, born and raised. I’ve been an east coaster, so I’ve been up and down the east coast for the last several years.
This interview took place in 2017.
This interview took place in 2017.
The 90%: So, Mardella, what took you to DC?
MSC: Change took me to DC. I left Philadelphia and went to North Carolina to pursue my college education at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke. I was tired of being the only Indian person or always being mistaken for, you know, Puerto Rican because that’s mostly who I hung out with in high school, so just by association and the way that I look, you know, people would say, ‘Oh, you’re Puerto Rican,’ or ‘Oh, you’re just Italian.’ I was tired of defending the validity of who I was as an Indian and I wanted to be there and just engross myself in everything because growing up in Philadelphia my grandmother was awesome in teaching us how to be strong Native women, strong Native people, culturally relevant. Because we had a strong urban center, a lot of my culture comes from different tribes as well. You know, there’s Cree influence, there’s Lakota influence, you know, there are a number of influences, Anishinaabe. It goes all over because of the environment.
I wanted to be in my own tribal community and so I went there. I graduated with a bachelors in American Indian Studies and started working for education, the Office of Indian Education of Cumberland County, to work with urban Native youth and then after that I went back to my alma mater and I was working as an American Indian college recruiter for recruitment and retention of college students to help diversify the Native population at UNC-Pembroke. Then, I kind of hit this plateau because I didn’t know enough people! I was there for nine years almost and I still didn’t know enough people and I still didn’t have the right connections. Tribal communities can be very political, your family has to have the right connections. After nine years I will still an outsider.
The 90%: So what have you noticed about the DC Native community’s response during the campaign and during the election? Or even just your response as an individual person to the campaigns and the election?
MSC: A lot of Natives, you know, are ralliers and supporters and we know how to pull people together, not just to protest but to build people up.
I’ve been a federal contractor since I moved up here and I was working at the federal Administration for Native Americans as a contractor for Tribal Tech. I can’t speak on behalf of Tribal Tech or on behalf of the Administration for Native Americans (it falls under the Department of Health and Human Services, the Administration for Children and Families). ANA has been around for forty years. ANA awards grants to tribal communities. The thing that I love about ANA even though I don’t work there right now on a contract is that they award grants to federally recognized tribes, state recognized tribes, and to tribal-based organizations as well as the Pacific Islands and they cover this big spectrum with just this little bit of money that they get.
The day after the election occurred, and it still gives me goosebumps, you would have thought the White House had been bombed. It was the quietest I had ever seen that building be. From the security guards, you know, when you’re walking in, it was just such a solemn day. People were not engaging with each other in conversation. Some people you could tell that they were lacking sleep, some people looked like they had been crying in the morning, and all of a sudden this email chain went around — I forget the time, it was something like 1:00, 12:00, meet outside the building for a round dance. And at ANA we’ve always round danced for people’s birthdays or if somebody was leaving we would round dance and it would just be ANA. But because Indian Country is small, people would hear about it in other agencies or other offices that were Native and would participate. There were probably about, I would say a good 30-35 people out there. Somebody brought their sage and everyone was smudged and there was a prayer said for healing and we round danced, right there in front of the Mary Switzer Building. There’s one building that blocks the building from being across the street from the National Museum of the American which is across from the Capitol. Just being right there in that area and just feeling those vibes, and there were people who didn’t participate in the round dance and they were just there, there were people who stopped, and you know everybody (as a matter of fact, it was probably 12:00 or 12:30 because we got done and everybody started talking about their lunch plans.) When people had walked down there they had a solemn look on their face, they were sad, and you know they left and there was a little bit of cheerfulness in them. It wasn’t the remedy, it wasn’t the cure, but it helped. It’s kind of like having that cough drop when you’re sick and it’s just the perfect thing, or a cup of tea. It’s good for the moment but it’s not the fix-all that you need.
Then the conversation whispers really started happening, ‘Of course you can’t get rid of ANA, there’s too many things, you can’t rid of BIA, you can’t get rid of IHS, this is going to take too much work, he’s never going to have that kind of support.’ Little did we know the slew of executive orders that he’s been putting out, and then the conversation became, ‘Well, for ANA, the grants that we award, that money is allocated, it’s discretionary funding every year, so what happens if those allocations die? What happens if that decreases? Because we might award a five-year grant, but we don’t have that money up front. We’re getting it every year from Congress when they make those decisions, so what happens if that stops?’ We’re just literally just sitting here in our tribal community because we’re working for communities to provide them with the tools they need to have these successful projects. Some of them are to help homelessness, some of them are to help women and children who have been battered and abused, some of them are for culture and language revitalization, some of it is job preparation or creating jobs on reservations, so all of that could potentially just stop. Nobody wants that to happen.
I’ve always been a listener, my grandmother raised me to be seen not heard, and so I like to sit back and listen. Even when it was, ‘Is it going to be Bernie or is it going to be Hillary,’ and so many people were for Hillary and so many people were for Bernie. ‘But Bernie’s really going to help Natives,’ ‘No, Hillary’s really going to help Natives.’ You know, and that was such an interesting dialogue to see people who were unanimously Obama going back and forth in this Bernie and Hillary situation. And then when it was Hillary, it was like, ‘Alright, it’s got to be Hillary because it can’t be anyone else.’ Seeing that happen and unfold, and you know social media puts a lot of that stuff out there, but for a lot of professional Natives in DC you don’t put a lot of stuff out there or your page is private. You’re selective. But it was kind of like, people didn’t care. They were using their social media and their freedom of speech and supporting their candidates.
I left the ANA the first week in December and it was still these whispering conversations. I have some friends who still work there and just talking with them, they were like, you know, it’s a more direct conversation now but it’s still the reality of you never know what could be coming down the pipeline. It makes it scary for Indian Country.
The 90%: I feel you. I agree with you. It’s really scary.
MSC: It is, and I mean, you know I’m a member of a state recognized tribe. Somebody said, ‘Do you think those federal Indians will be fighting for us and campaigning for us the way you’re campaigning for them?’ Actually, yeah! Because guess what, if they get terminated, where do you think our HUD money is going? Where do you think the Boys and Girls Club of America in Indian Country, we have those buildings, we have those programs, where do you think that money is going? LIHEAP, how many of our elders are getting assistance on their electricity bills because they can’t afford to pay them in the winter or the extreme summer? All these Pell grants for education, so many Lumbee students, so many Native students in North Carolina get Pell grants. So while people may not be knocking down doors to help us get federal recognition, there are direct services that we are benefiting from that do affect us. So it is a state-recognized Native problem, whether or not we want to identify it.
The 90%: What do you see on the horizon for yourself given all the things that are happening politically? What do you see for yourself and what do you see for your DC community or for Indian Country as a whole? Where are we going from here?
MSC: For myself, I have had to really have some real brainstorming sessions about what exactly would I do if I wasn’t working in Indian Country. And all of that takes me back to school because everything that I have on my resume outside of just being able to work with youth or event plan, everything is working in Indian Country, working for Indian Country, and at that point it becomes how can I provide for myself? Because those funds may be pulled back. I’m not a federal employee, I’m a contractor, and right now I work for as a contractor. If that money gets pulled then I am out of a job.
Where things are going for DC? I think that people aren’t letting up on the fight. Everyone is up in arms right now, but six months from now will you still be lobbying? Will you still be calling your representatives? We can’t let up, whether it’s calling our representatives or whether it is continuing to educate. We have to continue to try and educate and not get mad at our brothers and our sisters if they are still supporting Trump. And also, support each other. You know, some people are going to be who they are, for better or worse they’re not going to change and that’s fine, but really supporting each other and understanding that we can have differences. Just because you want to be pro-life and I want to be pro-choice doesn’t mean we can’t agree that our new Head of Education is a kind of a jerk. And I think religion right now is a big argument I’ve been having with people — religion is not the reason to be a Republican. Just because you may think that it’s great that he is taking tax dollars away from abortion and I think that abortion really wasn’t getting those tax dollars anyways. We just have to continue to have that dialogue and not lose our momentum to stand up and fight. It’s exhausting, I think it’s going to be an exhausting four years.
My grandmother made the comment to me the other day, though probably not about politics and totally about her personal life, but she was like, ‘This has been a year that has aged me three years. Every year has been an easy year, but this year I feel like I aged three years. I can’t do this again.’ And I think the next four years are going to be just like that. These next four years might age us eight.
But we have to keep moving forward. And I think that there’s enough support in the world right now, just from what we’ve been seeing across our country. That women’s march, that was a phenomenal thing to see, really, not just the world but our country, the way that people just stood up together across the country. There were people in Nome, Alaska marching through their village in solidarity. Nobody may have known that if you didn’t have a friend on your Facebook page in Nome, Alaska, but it really creates a power in this time. And I’m not going to say that we can take the White House back — it doesn’t necessarily have to be a Democratic president, but we can provide better presidential candidates in four years or in two years. We need to really find those people, and it’s all of our responsibility to find those people in our communities and support them or to really start putting things out whether we’re politically active or not. We have that responsibility.
And in DC you can be really politically active or you can be chill, read the paper on the metro, but I think we all have that responsibility. We really need to be paying attention to who you are electing, because in two years a lot of people are going to be up for election, so really making those ballots count that usually get a lesser turnout. If your grandma’s not going to vote because she doesn’t want to drive over there, go pick her up and take her. Make a sick day out of it, or whatever. We have to do our part if we expect this change to come. We all have a part to do.
Last thing — we need to make sure that we’re taking care of ourselves and each other. Every year people start off the New Year, ‘I’m going to lose twenty pounds’ or ‘I’m going to go to yoga every day.’ That’s great, and I’ve made those resolutions and they’ve flopped or, well mostly they've flopped. We really need to make sure that we’re taking care of ourselves and that we’re taking care of each other because the news can be exhausting, and work can be exhausting. We really need to make sure that we take time to take care of ourselves. I think that’s going to be key in people staying energized to keep moving forward and fighting so that Trump is not our president for two consecutive terms. We have to be kind, we really have to remember to be kind to each other.
Sometimes, I think people forget that. They just want to get their point across. Somebody posted about the Women’s March and they said, ‘Less than a day in office and Trump got more fat women moving across the country than Michelle Obama did in eight years.’ So I was reading the comments on it and someone else had commented, ‘Um, I’m a big girl and I take offense at this. Until you’ve had to shop in the plus sized section or have a doctor tell you that you need to lose weight and you’ve been trying and it doesn’t happen, you really can’t understand how offensive this can be.’ And the poster commented back and apologized and I commented, ‘I agree, and I think it’s also important to remember that the women who marched were marching for so many reasons. The fact that we have a right to vote, the fact that we have a right to get an education, the fact that we have a right to have a voice, to have a job outside of the home or to call for help if we’re being abused, all of those rights came because women marched. You may think that you don’t agree with why they marched, but you should understand that they’re marching to preserve your rights.’ And then I got attacked. It was just like, ‘Freedom of speech, she can say what she wants!’ And I just kept saying, ‘We have to be kind to each other, and fat-shaming a group of women is not a way to be kind.’ So be kind. I’m not saying to take down your posts, I’m just saying rethink next time. Think, just because it’s different from me or my opinion doesn’t make it wrong. I’m very open to Republicans’ conversations. I say that to say, let’s take care of each other and be kind to each other.
The 90%: This is so good. It’s hopeful, it’s inspiring, it’s exciting. Thank you for sharing your thoughts and experiences!
MSC: Change took me to DC. I left Philadelphia and went to North Carolina to pursue my college education at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke. I was tired of being the only Indian person or always being mistaken for, you know, Puerto Rican because that’s mostly who I hung out with in high school, so just by association and the way that I look, you know, people would say, ‘Oh, you’re Puerto Rican,’ or ‘Oh, you’re just Italian.’ I was tired of defending the validity of who I was as an Indian and I wanted to be there and just engross myself in everything because growing up in Philadelphia my grandmother was awesome in teaching us how to be strong Native women, strong Native people, culturally relevant. Because we had a strong urban center, a lot of my culture comes from different tribes as well. You know, there’s Cree influence, there’s Lakota influence, you know, there are a number of influences, Anishinaabe. It goes all over because of the environment.
I wanted to be in my own tribal community and so I went there. I graduated with a bachelors in American Indian Studies and started working for education, the Office of Indian Education of Cumberland County, to work with urban Native youth and then after that I went back to my alma mater and I was working as an American Indian college recruiter for recruitment and retention of college students to help diversify the Native population at UNC-Pembroke. Then, I kind of hit this plateau because I didn’t know enough people! I was there for nine years almost and I still didn’t know enough people and I still didn’t have the right connections. Tribal communities can be very political, your family has to have the right connections. After nine years I will still an outsider.
The 90%: So what have you noticed about the DC Native community’s response during the campaign and during the election? Or even just your response as an individual person to the campaigns and the election?
MSC: A lot of Natives, you know, are ralliers and supporters and we know how to pull people together, not just to protest but to build people up.
I’ve been a federal contractor since I moved up here and I was working at the federal Administration for Native Americans as a contractor for Tribal Tech. I can’t speak on behalf of Tribal Tech or on behalf of the Administration for Native Americans (it falls under the Department of Health and Human Services, the Administration for Children and Families). ANA has been around for forty years. ANA awards grants to tribal communities. The thing that I love about ANA even though I don’t work there right now on a contract is that they award grants to federally recognized tribes, state recognized tribes, and to tribal-based organizations as well as the Pacific Islands and they cover this big spectrum with just this little bit of money that they get.
The day after the election occurred, and it still gives me goosebumps, you would have thought the White House had been bombed. It was the quietest I had ever seen that building be. From the security guards, you know, when you’re walking in, it was just such a solemn day. People were not engaging with each other in conversation. Some people you could tell that they were lacking sleep, some people looked like they had been crying in the morning, and all of a sudden this email chain went around — I forget the time, it was something like 1:00, 12:00, meet outside the building for a round dance. And at ANA we’ve always round danced for people’s birthdays or if somebody was leaving we would round dance and it would just be ANA. But because Indian Country is small, people would hear about it in other agencies or other offices that were Native and would participate. There were probably about, I would say a good 30-35 people out there. Somebody brought their sage and everyone was smudged and there was a prayer said for healing and we round danced, right there in front of the Mary Switzer Building. There’s one building that blocks the building from being across the street from the National Museum of the American which is across from the Capitol. Just being right there in that area and just feeling those vibes, and there were people who didn’t participate in the round dance and they were just there, there were people who stopped, and you know everybody (as a matter of fact, it was probably 12:00 or 12:30 because we got done and everybody started talking about their lunch plans.) When people had walked down there they had a solemn look on their face, they were sad, and you know they left and there was a little bit of cheerfulness in them. It wasn’t the remedy, it wasn’t the cure, but it helped. It’s kind of like having that cough drop when you’re sick and it’s just the perfect thing, or a cup of tea. It’s good for the moment but it’s not the fix-all that you need.
Then the conversation whispers really started happening, ‘Of course you can’t get rid of ANA, there’s too many things, you can’t rid of BIA, you can’t get rid of IHS, this is going to take too much work, he’s never going to have that kind of support.’ Little did we know the slew of executive orders that he’s been putting out, and then the conversation became, ‘Well, for ANA, the grants that we award, that money is allocated, it’s discretionary funding every year, so what happens if those allocations die? What happens if that decreases? Because we might award a five-year grant, but we don’t have that money up front. We’re getting it every year from Congress when they make those decisions, so what happens if that stops?’ We’re just literally just sitting here in our tribal community because we’re working for communities to provide them with the tools they need to have these successful projects. Some of them are to help homelessness, some of them are to help women and children who have been battered and abused, some of them are for culture and language revitalization, some of it is job preparation or creating jobs on reservations, so all of that could potentially just stop. Nobody wants that to happen.
I’ve always been a listener, my grandmother raised me to be seen not heard, and so I like to sit back and listen. Even when it was, ‘Is it going to be Bernie or is it going to be Hillary,’ and so many people were for Hillary and so many people were for Bernie. ‘But Bernie’s really going to help Natives,’ ‘No, Hillary’s really going to help Natives.’ You know, and that was such an interesting dialogue to see people who were unanimously Obama going back and forth in this Bernie and Hillary situation. And then when it was Hillary, it was like, ‘Alright, it’s got to be Hillary because it can’t be anyone else.’ Seeing that happen and unfold, and you know social media puts a lot of that stuff out there, but for a lot of professional Natives in DC you don’t put a lot of stuff out there or your page is private. You’re selective. But it was kind of like, people didn’t care. They were using their social media and their freedom of speech and supporting their candidates.
I left the ANA the first week in December and it was still these whispering conversations. I have some friends who still work there and just talking with them, they were like, you know, it’s a more direct conversation now but it’s still the reality of you never know what could be coming down the pipeline. It makes it scary for Indian Country.
The 90%: I feel you. I agree with you. It’s really scary.
MSC: It is, and I mean, you know I’m a member of a state recognized tribe. Somebody said, ‘Do you think those federal Indians will be fighting for us and campaigning for us the way you’re campaigning for them?’ Actually, yeah! Because guess what, if they get terminated, where do you think our HUD money is going? Where do you think the Boys and Girls Club of America in Indian Country, we have those buildings, we have those programs, where do you think that money is going? LIHEAP, how many of our elders are getting assistance on their electricity bills because they can’t afford to pay them in the winter or the extreme summer? All these Pell grants for education, so many Lumbee students, so many Native students in North Carolina get Pell grants. So while people may not be knocking down doors to help us get federal recognition, there are direct services that we are benefiting from that do affect us. So it is a state-recognized Native problem, whether or not we want to identify it.
The 90%: What do you see on the horizon for yourself given all the things that are happening politically? What do you see for yourself and what do you see for your DC community or for Indian Country as a whole? Where are we going from here?
MSC: For myself, I have had to really have some real brainstorming sessions about what exactly would I do if I wasn’t working in Indian Country. And all of that takes me back to school because everything that I have on my resume outside of just being able to work with youth or event plan, everything is working in Indian Country, working for Indian Country, and at that point it becomes how can I provide for myself? Because those funds may be pulled back. I’m not a federal employee, I’m a contractor, and right now I work for as a contractor. If that money gets pulled then I am out of a job.
Where things are going for DC? I think that people aren’t letting up on the fight. Everyone is up in arms right now, but six months from now will you still be lobbying? Will you still be calling your representatives? We can’t let up, whether it’s calling our representatives or whether it is continuing to educate. We have to continue to try and educate and not get mad at our brothers and our sisters if they are still supporting Trump. And also, support each other. You know, some people are going to be who they are, for better or worse they’re not going to change and that’s fine, but really supporting each other and understanding that we can have differences. Just because you want to be pro-life and I want to be pro-choice doesn’t mean we can’t agree that our new Head of Education is a kind of a jerk. And I think religion right now is a big argument I’ve been having with people — religion is not the reason to be a Republican. Just because you may think that it’s great that he is taking tax dollars away from abortion and I think that abortion really wasn’t getting those tax dollars anyways. We just have to continue to have that dialogue and not lose our momentum to stand up and fight. It’s exhausting, I think it’s going to be an exhausting four years.
My grandmother made the comment to me the other day, though probably not about politics and totally about her personal life, but she was like, ‘This has been a year that has aged me three years. Every year has been an easy year, but this year I feel like I aged three years. I can’t do this again.’ And I think the next four years are going to be just like that. These next four years might age us eight.
But we have to keep moving forward. And I think that there’s enough support in the world right now, just from what we’ve been seeing across our country. That women’s march, that was a phenomenal thing to see, really, not just the world but our country, the way that people just stood up together across the country. There were people in Nome, Alaska marching through their village in solidarity. Nobody may have known that if you didn’t have a friend on your Facebook page in Nome, Alaska, but it really creates a power in this time. And I’m not going to say that we can take the White House back — it doesn’t necessarily have to be a Democratic president, but we can provide better presidential candidates in four years or in two years. We need to really find those people, and it’s all of our responsibility to find those people in our communities and support them or to really start putting things out whether we’re politically active or not. We have that responsibility.
And in DC you can be really politically active or you can be chill, read the paper on the metro, but I think we all have that responsibility. We really need to be paying attention to who you are electing, because in two years a lot of people are going to be up for election, so really making those ballots count that usually get a lesser turnout. If your grandma’s not going to vote because she doesn’t want to drive over there, go pick her up and take her. Make a sick day out of it, or whatever. We have to do our part if we expect this change to come. We all have a part to do.
Last thing — we need to make sure that we’re taking care of ourselves and each other. Every year people start off the New Year, ‘I’m going to lose twenty pounds’ or ‘I’m going to go to yoga every day.’ That’s great, and I’ve made those resolutions and they’ve flopped or, well mostly they've flopped. We really need to make sure that we’re taking care of ourselves and that we’re taking care of each other because the news can be exhausting, and work can be exhausting. We really need to make sure that we take time to take care of ourselves. I think that’s going to be key in people staying energized to keep moving forward and fighting so that Trump is not our president for two consecutive terms. We have to be kind, we really have to remember to be kind to each other.
Sometimes, I think people forget that. They just want to get their point across. Somebody posted about the Women’s March and they said, ‘Less than a day in office and Trump got more fat women moving across the country than Michelle Obama did in eight years.’ So I was reading the comments on it and someone else had commented, ‘Um, I’m a big girl and I take offense at this. Until you’ve had to shop in the plus sized section or have a doctor tell you that you need to lose weight and you’ve been trying and it doesn’t happen, you really can’t understand how offensive this can be.’ And the poster commented back and apologized and I commented, ‘I agree, and I think it’s also important to remember that the women who marched were marching for so many reasons. The fact that we have a right to vote, the fact that we have a right to get an education, the fact that we have a right to have a voice, to have a job outside of the home or to call for help if we’re being abused, all of those rights came because women marched. You may think that you don’t agree with why they marched, but you should understand that they’re marching to preserve your rights.’ And then I got attacked. It was just like, ‘Freedom of speech, she can say what she wants!’ And I just kept saying, ‘We have to be kind to each other, and fat-shaming a group of women is not a way to be kind.’ So be kind. I’m not saying to take down your posts, I’m just saying rethink next time. Think, just because it’s different from me or my opinion doesn’t make it wrong. I’m very open to Republicans’ conversations. I say that to say, let’s take care of each other and be kind to each other.
The 90%: This is so good. It’s hopeful, it’s inspiring, it’s exciting. Thank you for sharing your thoughts and experiences!